Uncaged (32 page)

Rachel would have been caught if she hadn’t gone back to her room. She’d grown increasingly tired of the three men, and increasingly frightened of the people she imagined were pursuing them.

Odin had simply disappeared. He’d been running up the highway behind her at the whale beach, and then … he was gone. She hadn’t seen where, but he’d never turned up, and his sister had said he’d been kidnapped. Rachel tended to believe that, but wasn’t absolutely certain of it. Everything was so confused.

If he’d been taken by Singular, then Singular probably knew everything: their real names, their histories, where and how they hid, phone numbers, where they got their money.

Everything.

Ethan called her paranoid. He’d never liked Odin, though he’d found him useful. He also thought him weak, and thought he’d probably just freaked and run.

The three men—now behaving like the college boys they should have been—had spent the last few days playing video games, watching movies, and, when they were not doing that, arguing about what they should do next.

Since the computer geek’s disappearance, the effort to crack the lab files had stopped: they could no more decrypt a file than throw a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball.

They had only one van, and James and Danny thought they should leave for somewhere else entirely—New Orleans had been mentioned. Wait for things to cool off and maybe find another computer guy to work on the thumb drives. Ethan and Rachel wanted
to stay in California, or at least the Southwest. Nothing had been decided, and now the three men were sprawled on the bed and floor of one of the rooms on the first floor, watching
Iron Man 2
, hooting at the explosions, eating vegan BBQ corn chips, and swilling Red Bull.

Rachel had gotten disgusted and walked out and headed up the stairs to her room. She had just gotten there when she glanced out the window and saw a man across the street in what looked like a fat suit … carrying a gun, and wearing a black helmet.

An entry team: she’d seen them on the nightly news, all armored, hitting the houses of dope dealers and terrorists. She had no doubt what was about to happen.

She said, “Oh, shit,” and with no thought for the three men—they were done, there was no way out for them—she grabbed her laptop and charging cord, jammed them in her backpack, looked around wildly for anything else she couldn’t leave. Odin’s pack and laptop. And the hard drive: Odin had taken the hard drive out of Lawrence Janes’s office computer and rigged it so he could control it from his own laptop. She picked it up, shoved it in her purse.

That took ten seconds.

At the door, she paused for another second, frightened, but thought that if they were already there, she was done anyway. She opened it, and the hallway was empty. She ran down the back stairs, then peeked around the corner at the front of the motel just in time to see four armored men in dark jackets jogging up the driveway, and more men across the street in dark blue FBI jackets.

Four SWAT men
, she thought,
one for each of us
.

The men disappeared into the motel, and then … nothing. She heard nothing at all: no screaming, no orders.

She turned and ran to the back of the motel, scrambled over a wooden fence to the property behind it—a Korean barbecue
restaurant—and then around the restaurant and across the street, where a bus had just pulled to the curb.

Ten seconds later she was on the bus. She paid and took a seat at the back, rode it for five blocks, trying to think.

Trying to think …

She had her money, her fake ID, her iPad and laptop and cell phone, though the phone would have to go. She took it out of her purse, opened the back, and pulled out the battery. She’d throw it in a trash can as soon as she could.

She had no clothes, no makeup, but she could get those at any mall. They’d been living on cash, and she’d carried most of it for the group: she had almost three thousand dollars with her.

She rode the bus for three or four minutes, then realized that she was approaching the Oceanside Transit Center. There, she looked for the first train leaving, she didn’t care which. The first one appeared to be a Sprinter. She took a minute to look at the system map, saw that it went to Cal State–San Marcos, and bought a ticket.

If she could make it there …

Once on the campus, how would they be able to find a particular girl whose description was “dark hair, wearing a backpack”?

Answer: with great difficulty.

At San Marcos, she thought, she’d have time to figure out her next move.

The first FBI man looked like a tourist, in cargo shorts and a T-shirt and flip-flops. He said, “Hey, there,” to the fat man at the desk, and
the man nodded, and the FBI agent cheerfully pulled out his ID and explained the situation.

“I had no idea,” the fat man said.

The agent got keys to the rooms, checked the hallway for their precise location, then used a walkie-talkie to call in the entry team.

The entry team crossed the street, followed by four FBI agents in black nylon jackets and then the three men from Singular, who stayed well back. Two tourists and their four-year-old kid, who had walked in behind the first man, were told to sit in the lobby until they could be cleared.

Two minutes after the entry team moved into the motel, and one minute after Rachel climbed the fence in back, and five seconds after she got on the bus, the key man slipped the room key into the lock, nodded to the door man, turned the key, and heard it click.

The door man turned the knob and banged the door open, and then they were inside, the four of them all in black with shotguns, right on top of the three men who’d been watching the bang-bang on
Iron Man 2
and suddenly were overwhelmed by the men in armor with guns, for-real guns, who were screaming, “Lay down, lay down.… Show me your hands, your hands.…”

And Ethan screamed, “No, no, no …”

The agents handcuffed them, sat them on the beds, the lead agent, Recca, shouting, “Where’s Rachel, where’s Rachel?”

Ethan said, “Don’t know, she was just here.”

James said, “Maybe she went for another coffee.…”

Two of the agents hustled out of the room and down to the front desk, and one asked the fat man, “Do you have a coffee place … a room?”

The fat man pointed at a coffee urn on a side table, with Styrofoam cups.

The fed said, “The girl who was with them. Did she have another room?”

“What girl? There are a bunch of girls here,” the fat man said, looking frightened.

The fed said, “I’ll be right back.”

He ran back to the room and said to Recca, “I need the mug shot of the girl.”

Recca gave him an eight-by-ten color photo, and the agent ran back to the front desk and showed it to the fat man.

“I’ve seen her,” he said. “I gotta call my wife. She’ll know the room.”

Instead, the agent ran the man back to his living quarters. His wife looked at the photo, frowned, and said, “Two-forty. She’s in two-forty.”

The agent got the key from the front desk, got the entry team. At just about the time Rachel climbed aboard the Sprinter train, the feds went through her door and found a few pieces of clothing and a modest collection of cosmetics around the bathroom sink—and a window that looked out at the street they’d just crossed to raid the motel.

“She’s running,” Recca said. “I think she looked out the window and saw us coming. We need to get to the cab companies, the bus lines.…”

“She could be on foot, or maybe she
is
getting coffee,” the agent said. “Maybe we ought to cruise a few blocks around, see if we can spot her.”

“Do it,” Recca said. “Don’t take too long. If you don’t find her, get on the cab companies.”

Between the bunch of them, they came up with a search plan, but by then it was too late. Rachel was halfway to San Marcos before they made the first call to a cab company. And she’d never taken a cab.

Putting together the search for Rachel had taken time. When Recca got back to the first floor, he found the three Storm men still sitting on the bed. They’d asked for lawyers and shut up.

Harmon and the other two Singular agents were in the room next door with another of the FBI agents, looking at a laptop. Recca went over and asked, “What’s this?”

“Just checking the thumb drives to make sure you got the right ones,” Harmon said. He gestured at a line of drives sitting on top of a desk. “We brought Lanny along so you’d know everything is on the up-and-up. These are the thumb drives.”

“You’re sure?”

“Nearly. They were encrypted. We’re just putting in the encryption codes, and as soon as they start to decrypt, then we’ll know for sure,” Harmon said.

“We have to take those with us,” Recca said. “Somebody higher up will have to release them to you.”

“We knew that,” Harmon said. He pulled a thumb drive out of the USB slot on the laptop and said, “That’s the last of them. We’re done. You can have them.”

The feds gathered up the drives, sealed them in an evidence bag.

Outside the room, Recca said to the other agent, “Don’t ever do that again. Don’t let civilians handle the evidence.”

The agent nodded. “Sorry about that. I was right there. And we’d been talking about checking them.”

“Yeah, no harm done,” Recca said. “Just don’t do it again.”

Inside the room, after the door was closed, Harmon dug in his pockets and pulled out the thumb drives.

“Slick,” said one of the Singular operators. “I was watching and I never saw you make a switch.”

“Just old magic show stuff,” Harmon said. He got on his phone, and when Sync picked up, he said, “It’s done. We’re gold.”

Sync said, “Aw, sweetheart.”

As he said
sweetheart
, Shay was on Google+ with West, typing
Bye
.

West was at his apartment a few miles from Singular headquarters. When he got off-line with Shay, he called Harmon’s office and was told by the group secretary that Harmon was not in, and wouldn’t be until evening. “Gotta put me through to his cell,” West said.

“Can’t. He’s involved in something … complicated.”

“It’s pretty critical.”

“If it’s critical enough, go upstairs,” she said. “Call Sync.”

One thing about Singular, West thought, was very different from the military: it was efficient, and everybody, right down to the secretaries and the janitors, knew how to make decisions. He called Sync’s secretary. “I need to see the man,” he told her. “I tried to call Harmon, but he’s out of town.”

Sync’s secretary said, “He’s really stacked up. If it’s critical, I can squeeze you in between a couple of appointments.”

“Tell him it’s so critical that I’m making a note of the time right now, so there are no questions later about when I called.”

She said, “Just a minute,” and West heard her put the phone down on the desk. A minute later, she came back and said, “He’ll be available for five or six minutes, right on the hour. Get here at five minutes of.”

“Thanks. See you then.”

Elementary ass covering was what it was, West admitted to himself. He spent a minute editing the GandyDancer text and inserting it into BlackWallpaper. He kicked back at his desk and thought about what Shay Remby had told him.

West had been hired as an investigator-researcher, doing corporate intelligence work. He looked at other companies doing biomechanical research—the cynical might call it corporate espionage—and also investigated the frequent attempts of hackers to break into the Singular databases. He had a vested interest in this company. When they had hired him, they’d told him they wanted him both as an investigator and as a research subject—and replaced his clunky army-grade prostheses with million-dollar robotic legs, the ultimate fringe benefit.

But as an investigator, he was a naturally curious man, and a man who, without even thinking about it, could soak up information from others. Like the people he worked with. He was aware that Sync ran several different groups of what might be called security personnel—just as the military did. Harmon’s team, which included himself and Cherry and a dozen more men and women, were essentially detectives and researchers.

Others were like security guards, providing physical security for the offices and labs.

And over the months he’d been with the company, he’d become
aware of another group, one that was almost invisible, run by Thorne. He didn’t know exactly what they did, but they had a paramilitary feel—guys with guns who weren’t afraid to use them. He’d known the type in Afghanistan, knew how they behaved, what they looked like. From time to time, he’d seen people like that around the building.

He didn’t know where they were based, but it wasn’t at Singular headquarters. If there actually had been a raid on that hotel, as Shay had said, if people had been hurt, then it was probably that group. If Odin had been snatched off the beach and taken away, again, it would be that group.

If West had found Odin, he would have done about what he’d told Shay he would: given the kid a hard time and probably, at the end of the interview, called the local police or even the FBI. He would have identified Odin as one of the raiders who wrecked the Oregon lab, and then he would have let the law take over.

Now West found himself conflicted. He’d been looking at life as a badly crippled human being. Singular had given him that life back. In some ways, his new legs were better than the originals, though he would have preferred the old ones, of course.

He would, he thought, risk his life for the company, if that for some reason should become necessary.

He wouldn’t kill for it.

He broke out of the pensive state and checked his watch: time to go. He printed out the conversation with Shay, including the screen grab of the man with the wired-up brain. He folded the papers once, and walked down to his car.