Uncaged (30 page)

Sean took them through it with the unthinking nonchalance of a man who’d been rich for a while. He was of average height or a little shorter than that, and handsome: a movie star, in fact, with blond hair combed straight back, blue eyes, a square chin, too-perfect teeth. Shay recognized him from movies she’d seen on TV—real, theater-style movies, not TV movies—in which Sean usually played a bad guy, or the lead star’s sidekick. He got killed a lot.

He and Twist spent a minute or so catching up as they walked through the house. To Shay, Sean said, “I know you. You’re the girl who came down the building.” He took her hand, and turning to Twist, he said, “That
was
you.”

“Yeah, that was us,” Twist said.

Sean nodded at Shay, impressed. “That also makes you the masked girl in the artsy-fartsy poster too, huh?”

Shay felt herself flush at the attention: he was
so
good-looking. At the same time, it made her angry. She said to Twist, “I guess we know why they hit the hotel—my picture is everywhere, and everyone knows you did it.”

Twist grimaced. “Yeah … yeah.”

Sean got serious: “This is real trouble?”

“We haven’t done anything—but we’ve got a bad-ass corporation after us,” Twist said. “We’re gonna talk to the feds and so on, but for the time being, we need to lie low.”

Sean nodded. “Not that you should trust the feds any farther than you could spit a rat.”

“There’s that,” Twist said.

“Well, you know what I think,” Sean said. He gestured toward the front room. “Stay as long as you want.… Well, stay as long as you want until December, anyway. My mother will be here from December through March.”

He and Twist talked for a few minutes about the art world, and about film, and then Sean looked at his watch and said, “I’ve got to get out to Burbank. So you’re good?”

“We’re good,” Twist said. “Thanks again.”

When he was gone, Shay asked Twist, “How do you know him? How’d you get to be friends?”

“Art world stuff,” Twist said. They were in the library, and Twist was looking at the cigarette lighters. “We connected over politics, this and that.”

“He’s shorter than he looks in the movies,” Cade said. “He’s Irish, huh? How’d he get here?”

“Not Irish. Not Sean. His real name is Bill. Not William—just Bill. He sounds Irish. He picked up the accent in acting school and decided it was his thing. He’s Culver City High, Pasadena
Community College. Like that. He’s a pretty good actor. And he has a good eye for art.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Cade said, looking out a bay window at the ocean. “This is my idea of a hideout. If we could get some pizza in here …”

Twist walked into the compact kitchen, opened the freezer door on the refrigerator, and looked inside. “You want pepperoni? Or you wanna go vegetarian?”

They went for the pepperoni, and while it cooked, they probed the house, X staying beside Shay. There was an ocean-facing bedroom with a private bath for each of them, crisp white sheets that a housekeeper normally laundered—Twist told Sean he’d pay her normal salary for her to stay away—and French doors that opened onto balconies with eight-million-dollar views.

Shay dumped her backpack on the four-poster bed in the middle room and was drawn immediately to the balcony by the crashing waves. They were invisible in the dark, but the noise of them came at her like rolling thunder.

Leaning against the teak railing, she closed her eyes and let the roar and reverse take the edge off her worry. When she opened them again, she saw X sitting with his nose through the railing and his eyes closed, as hers had been, sucking in the new odors of the seascape. The spell was broken when Cade yelled, “Pizza!”

She headed back downstairs to the kitchen, X at her heels. Twist was pulling three bottles of Pepsi out of the refrigerator, and Cade was setting up his laptop on a small drop-down desk.

“Are we safe to use it here?” Shay asked over Cade’s shoulder.

“For general browsing, yes, but I wouldn’t make contact with
anyone on email or Facebook. We should use open systems, up in the city, for that. We’ve got to be careful.”

“We’ve got to be crazy paranoid,” Twist said. “Let’s go to higher ground and discuss.”

Cade lowered his voice. “You think this place is bugged?”

Twist cracked a smile. “No, dummy. I want to eat my supper under the stars. C’mon.”

They went out a side door on the second floor and climbed the circular staircase to the rooftop patio. From three pillowy loungers they dragged to the patio’s front edge, they could see ships’ lights out on the water, headed into the Port of Long Beach, and a constant string of passenger jets taking off and landing at Los Angeles International.

The shoreline ran directly east and west from where they were, then curled around to the bluffs of Santa Monica and the carnival rides on the Santa Monica Pier. They passed on lighting the patio’s tiki candles, preferring to look up at the clear night sky and stars that seemed much closer and sharper than they ever had in Hollywood.

Shay picked the pepperoni off her pizza, fed it to X, and asked, “What do we do first?”

Twist said, “Two things. In the morning, I’m going to contact a friend in the LAPD, a very discreet friend. I’ll tell her a bit about the attack on the hotel, see what she can find out about Singular that Cade hasn’t been able to find on the Web. Also ask her to find out what police in Eugene know about the raid, about the kids on the run, whether they know any names. Then we’ll know if the cops are really looking for Odin.

“Meanwhile, Shay, you reach out to West. Tell him we’re out of the hotel, we’ve got a new hiding place—the dog too—so there’s no point in sending the goon squad back in.”

“We can’t send it from here,” Cade said. “We go up the coast, or maybe south somewhere.…”

“Orange County,” Twist said. “You could get online at South Coast Plaza.”

Cade said, “Yeah, that’d be good.”

Twist said to Shay, “That’s a ginormous shopping mall down there. Tens of thousands of people going through every day. Even if they knew you were there, they couldn’t find you.”

“Fine, wherever,” Shay said. “I need to talk to West as soon as I can.”

“Hand me another slice,” Twist said to Cade. When he got it, he said, “I think we tell them almost the truth. That your brother cracked the files. We don’t say ‘one file,’ or that we can’t crack the others. If they give us your brother back, we give them the drives, wash our hands, and walk away. Tell them that we’re not interested in their lab, even if Odin is—and we’ve got the files, not Odin.”

Cade said, “We should give them a deadline for producing Odin. Tell them that if he doesn’t show up, we post the files on the Web one by one.”

“We’ll need to specify a way for Odin to get in touch with us,” Shay said.

Twist said, “Here’s what I learned from watching movies. The big problem is the swap—the money for the kidnap victim, the drives for Odin, or whatever. We show up in some dark place, and they just grab us.”

“I must have watched better movies,” Shay said. “We say we want to see him on the steps of the federal courthouse, by himself,
taking a picture of himself with his own cell phone, so we know he’s free. If that doesn’t happen, we’ll assume he’s still being held captive.”

“Still not a hundred percent,” Cade said. “Somebody could be across the street with a rifle.…”

“That’s a fantasy,” Twist said. “They’re not going to shoot him down in the middle of L.A.”

“And I think it should all be on me,” Shay said. “I think the message should say ‘I will do this’ and ‘I will do that.’ To make it look like I’m strictly on my own again.”

Cade and Twist both thought for a moment, then they simultaneously nodded. “That’s probably the best way to go,” Twist said.

“You tell them that you’re not in the hotel, and not going back until this is all over with—gotta remember that,” Cade said.

They wound up writing a script for it. When they were satisfied, Twist asked Shay, “You’re really good in math, right?”

“Yes.”

“All kinds of math?”

“All kinds of math at my level—not all kinds of math,” she said.

“What about probability?”

“Probability is not so hard. I know probability,” Shay said.

“What are the chances they’ll buy all this?” Twist asked.

“Twist, that’s not how …” She was going to say that’s not how probability works—you need at least a few numbers, you need an understanding of the situation, which they didn’t have. She trailed off, and looked up at the stars, and nobody said anything for a moment, and then she said, “Not fifty-fifty. They might be
scared
to give him up. They’ve done so many crimes.”

Twist nodded as he stood up, stretched, leaned on his cane. “It’s nearly two. We need to get some sleep.”

“Wait a sec,” Cade said, staring out over the ocean. “I’ve been thinking—about what they’re doing. The name
Singular
. The dog with the implants, the guys with the robot legs. They’re trying to get to the
Singularity
—”

Twist: “Where’s that?”

“It’s not a place, it’s an idea about how men and machines are going to merge in the future. There’s a lot of geek talk about it,” Cade said.

“Of course there is—that’s what geeks talk about,” Twist said. “That’s all Arnold Schwarzenegger makes movies about …”

“Shut up, Twist,” Shay said. “Cade—tell us.”

Cade said, “It’s complicated, but one piece of it is that some people, even some scientists, think there’ll come a point where you can download people’s minds into a computer. Like a huge thumb drive. If you could do that, and if your robotics were really good, you could build an artificial man with the brain of a real, living person. That means … well, you could replicate the brain whenever you needed to. And that means you could live forever.”

Twist: “Really?”

“No reason you couldn’t live forever, if you had the technology,” Cade said. “I think these guys are not only researching the Singularity, I think they’re trying to get there. They’ll have to figure out how to splice brains to storage units to do that. I bet they’d kill a lot of brains doing the research.”

“Jesus.” Twist dropped back into his chair. It was a whacked-out theory, but it fit the evidence they had so far.…

They sat in silence for a few moments while, down below, an occasional walker went by on the beach. One called up to them, “Insomnia bites, huh?” and then ambled on, not needing a response.

Finally Twist said, “Immortality. I’ll tell you what, there are lots
of people in this world, rich and powerful people, who’d be first in line. Who’d do anything to get there. Billionaires, politicians, generals, cops. We could be in deep trouble, folks. Deep trouble.”

Shay: “No one who helped take Odin will live forever. I guarantee you that.”

Dogfight.

Shay jerked awake before seven and rolled to her feet, shocked out of bed by the barking. She’d left the French doors open overnight, and now found X on the balcony, going bark for bark with a sea lion on the beach below.

“Okay, this is weird,” she muttered. Sea air swept in: the smell of salt and seaweed. X looked up at her, as though he expected to be congratulated for defending the balcony. Down below, a shiny black male glared up at them while a harem of tawny females sunned themselves on a rocky outcropping. Marking territory?

X had actually shown restraint, she thought: with his robo-charged hind legs, he might have leapt off the deck and attacked the sea lion, and that wouldn’t have ended well. She’d have to keep the doors shut when she slept; she was still learning what it meant to own this dog.…

Shay stretched and yawned and X licked her hand. “Play nice,”
she said. She shut the doors and headed for the shower. She hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep, but things were finally moving. She felt alert and anxious to get down to Orange County to contact West.

Into the shower, out of it, dressed in eight minutes. Twist was already downstairs, drinking coffee.

When Shay came in, he said, “Hey” and “I’m talking to Catherine and Lou.” He was on one of the clean phones and he pressed the
SPEAKER
button, and Catherine came up. “Things will be fine until they notice that you’re gone. We need to see your face here. Lou and I can do everything, but we need your authority.”

“I didn’t know I had any authority,” Twist said.

“Please—stop with the false modesty. We’re sitting on a volcano of street kids, and you’re the cork. When will you be back?”

“Tell you what,” Twist said. “I’ll sneak back when I can to show my face. Any trouble?”

“No. Dum spent the whole night working the streets and the buildings for a mile around, and he couldn’t find anything.”

“How’s Dee?” Shay asked.

“On drugs,” Lou said. “He has huge black eyes. His nose is in a splint. They were worried that it would mess up his chops, how his trumpet sounds. But now they think he’ll be okay. Won’t know for sure until he heals.”

“Jeez, I might have wrecked his career,” Shay moaned.

Twist shook his head. “Guy’s got a nose like Play-Doh. Docs have patty-caked it back into shape before, believe me.”

They talked for a couple more minutes about hotel operations and moving money to pay for food. Shay watched Twist, who was clearly glad to be reconnected with the hotel, even if only by phone.
He was wearing a faded Pearl Jam T-shirt, jeans, and his motorcycle boots. When Twist clicked off the phone, she said, “I still feel bad about all the people that got hurt. If it weren’t for me and X …”

Twist, looking past her, said, “Morning, sunshine.”

Cade dragged up to the breakfast counter like a zombie, albeit one with a ripped bare chest, trendy surf shorts, and a rakish case of bed head.

“I don’t need this time of day,” he said. To Shay: “I heard the dog come down in the night. I gave him some fresh water, but he still won’t take treats from anyone except you.”

Twist handed Cade a mug and a box of sugar.

“Thanks, man,” Cade said, and made himself what looked to Shay like a cup of sugar with a spoonful of coffee. Twist took a set of keys out of his pocket and jingled them at Shay.