Uncaged (31 page)

“You drive, right?”

Shay nodded. “Yes. My foster parents made us get our licenses the second we turned sixteen. That way, we could take turns driving all night to these climbs they wanted to go to. We’d drive to Idaho and back on the weekend.”

“Okay. You’ll drive my car to South Coast Plaza, and Cade’ll follow behind on Sean’s Ducati to make certain no one’s tracking you.”

“Makes sense.” Cade showed no discernible reaction to the part about driving a customized sixty-thousand-dollar motorcycle instead of, say, taking the bus.

“Wait,” said Shay with a suspicious squint at Cade. “Are you sure you know how to drive one of those things?”

Twist broke in: “We mentioned that Cade grew up a snotty rich kid, didn’t we?”

Cade rolled his eyes.

“More fun facts about young Mr. Holt,” said Twist. “Holt Sr.
kept a fleet of Italian cars and bikes that would make a Saudi prince weep.”

Cade shrugged.

“I believe you stole your first cycle from the collection when you were thirteen, am I remembering that right?”

Cade said, “Twist, man, it’s too early in the morning.…”

“You’re right, this is serious,” Twist said. “You watch her like you’ve never watched a girl before.”

Cade met Shay’s eyes. “I’ll watch her.”

They watched each other. For the next hour, Shay kept checking the rearview mirror and shuddering. Everyone drove too fast, speed limits apparently being optional on California freeways, and over and over, the boy in the tiger-striped helmet would slide through gaps between the speeding cars.

Twice, Shay shouted into the mirror, “Don’t do that!” and X, sitting upright in the passenger seat, whirled around, wondering what he’d done wrong. “Not you, boy, sorry,” she’d say, and reach over to stroke his neck. Periodically, Cade would roar up beside her, hovering at eighty miles an hour, then peel off and lose himself in another lane.

The Range Rover’s GPS got her to the right exit ramp, and from there, Shay hardly needed guidance. She just fell into the parade of vehicles aimed at the area’s most luxurious shopping center.

They had a plan for where she should park if Cade wasn’t behind her when she arrived, but he was, and so she turned into the first lot and found a space. Cade parked nearby, unstrapped his computer bag from the back of the bike, and walked over. Shay rolled down the window.

“No sign of tails,” he said.

“You shouldn’t drive so fast.”

“Says the girl who jumps off buildings. Moving right along, I got you something. Don’t tell Twist,” he said, and handed her a turquoise jewelry box with a white silk ribbon from Tiffany & Co.

Shay squinted at him. “Open, please,” he said.

She untied the ribbon and lifted off the cover, and smiled curiously as she picked out a laminated card on a loop of chain featuring a shot of X under the heading
OFFICIAL GUIDE DOG IN TRAINING FOR THE AMERICAN GUIDE DOG ASSOCIATION
.

“What’s this for?”

“You wanna take him into the mall, right?”

“So you made him a fake ID?”

“I didn’t have time to sew him a fake guide dog vest.”

“What a great idea … I think.”

“Put it around his neck, and let’s find out.”

But they didn’t have to.

There were plenty of open Internet connections outside the shopping center, and so they decided not to press their luck with the dog. Instead, they sat on a bench outside a Barnes & Noble, and Shay sent a query to BlackWallpaper.

You there, BlackWallpaper? The dog and I went into hiding last night, so there’s no point going back to the hotel and hurting any more kids
.

They watched the screen for a reply, looking away only to politely tell at least a dozen dog lovers that they were sorry, no one could pet the dog when he was “in training.”

Ten minutes in, they refreshed the screen, and West was live:

Same name, G+
.

They went to Google+, and found another note:

You can’t edit Facebook, all you can do is delete big blocks. You can edit this. The company may know BlackWallpaper, so I’ll bring them here. Go to GandyDancer on Google+ and we can talk there. As soon as you acknowledge, I’ll destroy this message
.

“Do you really trust this guy?” Cade asked, watching the screen.

“Enough to talk,” Shay said. “Maybe we should move to another location in case he can’t be trusted and they’ve got a way to track us that we don’t understand yet.”

“Right.” They acknowledged West’s message with:

OK. Privacy concern on my end, back in ten minutes
.

Cade decided they should leave the shopping center entirely, on the ultra-paranoid chance that West had figured out the bookstore’s IP address and was sending in a fresh band of thugs. Shay and X got back in the Range Rover and Cade on the Ducati and they picked a coffee shop six blocks farther south.

The Wi-Fi was strong in the parking lot, and Shay opened the computer on the front seat to find West waiting. Cade got in back and followed the conversation over her shoulder.…

[WEST] You there? I’m confused. What do you mean–hurt any more kids?

[SHAY] C’mon
.

[WEST] I really don’t know what you’re talking about
.

[SHAY] Eight or nine guys with weighted gloves, punching out a bunch of teenagers who have NOTHING to do with any of this, and shooting tranquilizer darts at the dog? Six kids went to the hospital
.

[WEST] I swear I didn’t know. Are you all right?

[SHAY] Where’s Odin?

[WEST] I assumed he was with you or the group he’s running with
.

[SHAY] How could he be? You guys kidnapped him at the beach
.

[WEST] Shay … we’re not holding your brother against his will
.

[SHAY] You guys shoved him into that van
.

[WEST] The van was driven by a couple of my colleagues who had to handle things on their own when Cherry and I left–thanks again for pulling the card. Our instructions were to locate Odin Remby and question him about things he stole from us. We hoped to convince him to help us find the senior members of Storm in exchange for legal immunity. Whether that discussion took place in the van for privacy’s sake, I can’t say, because I was down. If there had been cause to hold him, the police would have been brought in
.

[SHAY] Odin would have contacted me by now. To let me know he’s all right
.

[WEST] That concerns me. But your brother is involved with some very dangerous people
.

[SHAY] So are you. You work for a company that tortures people and animals
.

[WEST] Shay, we aren’t the only medical company that works with animals. Many government-funded labs work with animals. And we don’t work with people
.

[SHAY] Now you’re lying. I’m going
.

[WEST] Wait. You’ve lost me again. You still there?

[SHAY] I’m sending a file
.

Shay found a file with a screen grab taken from File 12 and sent it.

They waited a moment, then:

[WEST] A photo of an Asian guy with a bowl on his head? What’s the relevance?

[SHAY] Look closer. It’s not a bowl, it’s some kind of electronic plate,
just like with the monkeys at the lab. This is from Dr. Janes’s research. A screen grab from a pretty freaky video in Folder 7, File 12
.

[WEST] Jesus, Shay, are you saying you have the stolen thumb drives?

[SHAY] Tell your boss I’m putting the video on the Web if my brother doesn’t contact me in the next 24 hours. I want Odin to take photos of himself standing on the federal courthouse steps by himself and then call me, to prove to me he’s free. If you do this, I will leave the drives for you at a place that’s safe for both of us, and I will walk away. You know that I’m not an animal rights radical. I will do this. All I want: Odin for the thumb drives
.

[WEST] You need to walk away right now. If you try to smear Singular with whatever it is I’ve been looking at here, you’ll go to jail too. Those thumb drives were stolen in a violent attack on a legitimate laboratory
.

[SHAY] Not by me, and I can prove it. Tell your boss that I’ve seen File 17 too. Disgusting
.

[WEST] Don’t do anything until I get back to you. I’ll talk to the people I work with, see if they have a handle on where your brother and the rest of Storm are right now, find a way to assure you that wherever Odin is, it’s not with us
.

[SHAY] So you’ll give them my message now
.

[WEST] Today. Right now. I’m going to edit this message and transfer it to BlackWallpaper. Watch both that site and this one for contacts. Don’t tell anyone else about GandyDancer
.

[SHAY] The 24-hour clock starts when I say bye
.

[WEST] Be careful
.

[SHAY] Bye
.

The Star Hideout Motel was two long blocks from the beach in Oceanside, a tough, sprawling town roughly halfway between the Twist Hotel in Hollywood and the Mexican border.

Oceanside was known for servicing the huge U.S. Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton. Oceanside motels were not expensive, and the Star Hideout had never been a hideout for stars, though now, unknowingly, it had become the hideout for the four fugitive members of Storm.

The group had moved there after Odin disappeared, afraid that he’d give up their hideout in Hollywood. They’d deliberately chosen it at random—none of them had any connection to the place—and because of the town’s easy access to major highways north, south, and east. Their presence would be lost, they hoped, among the hundreds of short-term visitors associated with the marine base.

The Star Hideout was standard old motel: it smelled like
yesterday’s French fries and damp carpets. A fat white man who shaved every third day was usually at the front desk reading a newspaper, always in the same slightly yellowed V-necked white T-shirt that showed matted gray chest hair in the V. When he wasn’t there, his wife was—a thin, nervous woman with goggle eyes who looked like an ostrich. They lived in the back.

Although the motel was two stories tall, there was no elevator. Instead, there were three sets of stairs—one at each end of the building, and one going up from the lobby. Ethan, James, and Danny shared two interconnected rooms on the first floor. Rachel had taken the smallest room in the motel, a tiny cube at the far north end of the second floor.

At the front of the motel was a circular drive. In the oval formed by the driveway, the owners had planted a jungle of short palms—not because they looked exotic, but because they were low maintenance.

That decision had caused the FBI some difficulties, because they couldn’t see into the lobby. They’d seen all four of the Storm members individually, when they went to breakfast, but not all at once, or in the same place.

Storm had been spotted by two of Harmon’s agents, who’d finally nailed down a phone call. The Singular people had determined that the Storm members were in two first-floor rooms, but Sync had vetoed a raid. For one thing, half their operators were laid up from the aborted raid at the Twist Hotel. For another, the motel was full of marines, and if trouble started, they might well be on the wrong end of it, or might not be able to get out before the police arrived.

Better to do it straight up, he’d told Harmon. They’d called the FBI, which had a complaint from the U.S. attorney’s office in Eugene.

Harmon drove down from Los Angeles to watch the raid. Before he left L.A., he’d gotten together a handful of DARPA thumb drives filled with encrypted but harmless research files.

Neither the Singular operators nor the FBI agents had told the motel owners that a raid might be coming because they might give it away, so the motel owners hadn’t told them that the young woman who’d arrived with Storm had taken a different room, a third one.

Harmon was there with his two agents who’d spotted the phone calls. They were all, including the FBI, based across the street at Mary’s Marina Motel.

“We won’t get anything more,” the lead FBI agent told Harmon. The agent’s name was Recca. “We could get a warrant for a bug, but that would take time. We can take them right now, based on the Eugene warrant and our visual ID.”

Harmon nodded. “It’s your call. We’re just here to help. From our perspective, the key is getting back those thumb drives—there’s a lot of high-cost research in there. Not having access to it would cost us a fortune and a half.”

“Okay. I’m sending the team in.”

“Take it easy,” Harmon said. “Don’t get any of your guys hurt.”

“We’re taking all the precautions—armor, the whole works,” Recca said. “We’ll go in with a key, so they won’t know we’re coming until we’re on top of them.”