Uncaged (8 page)

Shay went out to a coffee shop an hour later and used its wireless to leave a long note on Facebook recounting the conversation, and the fact that Odin’s call the night he’d run had been found, but hadn’t been monitored—they didn’t know what Odin had said. He shouldn’t use his cell to contact her again. As soon as they could coordinate it, they needed to switch to prepaid phones with new, anonymous numbers.

She didn’t hear back for thirteen days.

The text came in while she was twirling soft-serve yogurt into a cup. It was her third day on her first summer job, and the use of cell phones was strictly forbidden. She slid the phone onto the stainless-steel counter, behind a bin of waffle cones.

[ODIN] What if you and I saw the same gray whale from two different countries? It’s possible. They’re migrating north now and I saw four when we were in Baja
.

She reached around the cones and punched in a reply:

[SHAY] WRU@

[ODIN] Secret mission. This morning, we drove by a canyon that’s pretty grand
.

“Miss, I’m in a hurry,” a customer yelled at Shay’s back. She turned and handed the man the cup of tilting yogurt, then went back to texting.

[SHAY] Grand Canyon?

[ODIN] Can’t say, but I will tell you I got carded at a tavern last night and my card worked!

[SHAY] You’re hanging out in bars?

The yogurt customer came back angry. “Hey, you forgot my sprinkles!”

[ODIN] For the work. Gotta go. Bye. And don’t forget to tell everyone: Meat is murder
.

Shay hadn’t known what to think: he’d texted from his old number. She’d told him the phone was unsafe, but he’d used it anyway. She felt a jab on the shoulder.

“Are you texting?” It was the shift supervisor, a prickly girl a year ahead of her at school. “You realize you forgot his topping?”

Shay said she was sorry and that she hoped it wouldn’t cost her the job, but she had a family emergency and had to run. She did, straight to a public library three blocks away. All the computers were occupied and she had to wait for five minutes, but when she finally got on, she found a message waiting for her on Facebook.

That text was a lame attempt to mislead them. We just left Arizona, but none of the people there know we’re gone. That should screw up their investigation, for a while, anyway. We’re working with a group in Hollywood now. I’m a little worried: there are things going on that I don’t understand. Watch yourself. Ignorance is your best bet. Stay away from those two Singular guys. They are NOT cops of any kind
.

Singular guys?

Did that mean West and Cherry worked for the lab’s owner? That they weren’t any kind of law officers? She understood a few other things, reading between the lines. Odin had never been good at social relationships, at understanding ordinary human traits like treachery, jealousy, and deceit. If he was in that kind of trouble, he wouldn’t get out on his own.

The next day, Shay went out the door in her work uniform, lurked outside Clarence and Mary’s house until she saw them leave, then went back and let herself in. She took the best stuff from a pile of camping gear kept in the basement and hit the kitchen for ramen noodles, peanut butter, and crackers, plus a few bottles of water.

She retrieved her carefully hoarded stash of cash—a lot of school lunches not eaten. Less the money for a bus, she’d have seventy-five dollars when she got to Hollywood. Her roommate had stashed another sixty. Shay knew where it was and was tempted to take that too, but the roommate had plenty of problems of her own.

When she’d packed, she got down on her knees, reached under the box spring of her bed, found the fist-sized hole, and took out the knife in its worn leather sheath. It had a clip on the back, and when she slipped it under the waistband at the back of her jeans, it was invisible. Fine for walking, not so much when riding on the bus; on the bus, she’d move it to her hoodie.

On the way downtown, she stopped and sent a Facebook message to Odin: she was on her way to L.A. Shay made the bus with ten minutes to spare.

Hollywood.

Harmon rolled into the Singular parking lot and dumped the dusty Mercedes ML550 in a reserved parking spot that wasn’t reserved for him; he had a reserved spot, but just didn’t care. The truck was equipped with the off-road package, with brush bars front and back and a winch. A Day-Glo orange circle, four feet across, was hand-painted on the roof, the better to be seen by search planes should Harmon get hung up in the desert.

Nobody would mess with the truck, in its misappropriated parking spot, because anyone at Singular who was important enough to have a reserved spot would recognize the truck as belonging to Harmon. Nobody messed with Harmon.

A tall man who dressed in jeans and cowboy boots, Harmon had a desert-weathered face and a streak of brilliant white teeth when he smiled, which he did, and often. He wore aviator glasses with mirrored lenses. People who’d known him for years had never seen his eyes.

Around the company, it was understood that he’d been a Special
Forces sergeant in Afghanistan and had served with Sync, who had been with the Central Intelligence Agency. Not much was known about their relationship, except that it was close.

It was also known that Harmon spent much of his free time in Arizona and New Mexico, scouting the desert for Indian archaeological sites, which he would document with photographs and then report to the relevant university or state archaeological departments. Why he did that was not known.

Inside the Singular building, a pleasant-looking woman in a security guard’s uniform checked him through the glass doors at the end of the lobby. Harmon gave her one of his smiles and said, “Thank you, Melissa,” and she said, “You’re welcome, Mr. Harmon.”

Melissa was in disguise. Her uniform looked like a standard security guard’s, but she was no rent-a-cop: she’d spent four years as a Secret Service agent on the presidential protection detail. She had a long alcove below the countertop that contained both a .40-caliber Beretta handgun and a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun. Should a visitor prove seriously unwelcome, she was more than prepared to deal with it.

Harmon walked past the elevators to the stairs and took them, two at a time, to the fifteenth floor. There were a few people on the security detail who could have done that without breathing hard—but they had prosthetic legs. Harmon was working with original equipment and he was forty-five years old. By the time he got to fifteen, his heart was pounding hard, but he’d made it without slowing down.

He went through the door at the top of the stairs and down the
hallway, getting his breathing under control, then through the door into Sync’s outer office. Sync’s secretary nodded at him, pushed an intercom button, and said, “Harmon’s here.”

Two seconds later, Sync’s office door popped open and Sync, with shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow and tie loose around his neck, said, “You’re sweating through your shirt.”

Harmon sniffed an armpit, shrugged, and followed him inside.

Sync’s office was an austere glass box overlooking a man-made pond that shone dull gray in the California sun. Beyond the pond was a view toward the Pacific Ocean.

Sync took a seat behind his chrome desk, and Harmon settled into a chair opposite. At ease with the man who made everyone else around him jump, he swung his black lizard-skin boots up on the desktop and scanned its spare contents: one epically encrypted laptop, one hardwired phone, one Rubik’s Cube, and one twenty-ounce bottle of the green slime Sync ingested like a chain-smoker.

Harmon, Singular’s intelligence chief, didn’t believe in nutritional elixirs or dietary deprivations. He liked his meat bloody, his potatoes fried, and his tequila with two licks of salt. What he believed was this: the edge was entirely mental. Name the time and manner of the contest, and he’d be the last man standing.

Sync said, “Tell me, but make it short.”

“Still looking,” Harmon said. “They’re not making it easy.”

Sync said, “It hurt when they hit us on YouTube, but if they crack those thumb drives, it’ll be much worse.”

“I know, I know, the baby monkey film,” Harmon said. “Didn’t like seeing that shit myself. But finding these kids is hard stuff. They don’t have a base, they don’t have a real organization, they
apparently only use a credit card when they’re leaving wherever they are … they know how to do this. They’re just crazy, they’re not stupid.”

They talked for a couple of minutes until Sync’s desk phone rang. He picked it up, listened for a moment, said, “Okay, I’ll be there,” and hung up. After another swig from his bottle, he looked at Harmon and said, “You know who Gerald Armie is?”

“I’ve heard of him, never seen him.”

“He’s five minutes out,” Sync said. “Micah’s about to reel him in and Jimmie’ll be there. We could get five minutes with Micah now, to talk about the hunt.”

“Okay with me,” Harmon said.

Sync rolled his shirtsleeves down and pulled on a suit coat and tightened his necktie. As they walked out of Sync’s office, Sync told his secretary to hold everything until he got back, and they took the stairs up one floor, to the top. Micah Cartwell was Singular’s CEO; Imogene “Jimmie” Stewart, the company’s chief in-house counsel.

Gerald Armie was the billionaire owner of a national chain of supermarkets headquartered in Oklahoma.

On sixteen, they walked down the hall to Cartwell’s office. Classical music played faintly from speakers set along the hall, adding not only a touch of elegance to the floor but also obscuring what one person might say to another farther down the hall; conversations would not be easily overheard.

The furnishings on Sync’s floor were expensive and well chosen, but basically functional. On the top floor, everything was richer.
Instead of wall-to-wall carpet, there were chestnut floors covered with handsome Turkish carpets, tasteful pieces of furniture in walnut, and English and Japanese antiques scattered here and there.

Stewart, the attorney, emerged from the next door down as they got to Cartwell’s office. She was a tall, thin woman of forty who ran triathlons and wore hawkish black glasses, but then went soft with gauzy knee-length dresses. She nodded and said, “Gentlemen.”

“I’m not entirely sure of that,” Harmon said.

Stewart smiled and said, “I’m not either, Harmon, but I thought I’d give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Sync asked, “Will Armie buy in?”

Stewart said, “I’d be shocked if he didn’t, after the research that we’ve done. He does not want to go away.”

Stewart led the way in. Cartwell’s outer office was large and quiet, with soft gray wallpaper dotted with California impressionist paintings of the seacoast and mountains; the air was touched with the scent of pine. Two secretaries sat out in the open, both looking at computer screens; an executive assistant worked in her own small office at the far end, behind a glass window, and got up to meet them and take them to the inner sanctum.

Micah Cartwell was seated at a long table cluttered with paper, a few family keepsakes, and a big computer screen. Six more screens were sunk in the wall behind him, showing worldwide stock market activity and news feeds from the United States, Europe, and Asia. All had been muted.

When they came in, Cartwell stood and said, “Hey, team,” then looked at his watch. “Armie’s at the outer gate, we’ve only got five or six minutes.”

“We won’t need more than that,” Sync said. “We haven’t found the thumb drives or the dog, but Harmon’s got some lines on the group that has them.”

Cartwell said, “Let’s sit down,” and gestured to a group of couches and chairs near a window looking out on the Pacific. The day was clear, and they could see a rusty freighter headed toward San Francisco. When they were seated, Cartwell asked Harmon, “What kind of lines?”

“They’re careful, but we found out that one of the people with them is a kid named Danny Davidson, just out of high school. We got lucky two days ago and found a charge slip on one of his parent’s Visa cards for a prepaid phone he bought at a Best Buy. It specified the time of purchase, and from that, we were able to get to the phone, and the number. It’s a cheap throwaway phone, not a smartphone, and doesn’t have a GPS signal—the best we can do is track which cell tower his call originates at. They’re in Southern California at the moment, in the Los Angeles area, moving between L.A. and San Diego. They’ve made occasional jumps as far away as Albuquerque, Phoenix, and down to Baja. They move every few days. The problem is, every cell tower will cover several hundred thousand people down there, because the population is so dense. When the kid makes a call, our team heads to the area, but there are so many people around that they’re impossible to spot, and they may even be long gone.”

“Are you tracking who gets the calls?” Cartwell asked.

“Of course. But he doesn’t make many, and most of them are to friends up in Oregon, or his family, which doesn’t help. We are building some predictive models.”