Outrage (17 page)

“So you got guns, too?”

Danny shrugged. “Everybody did. If you go out and shoot every once in a while, then maybe you're telling somebody not to come after you, because you're a shooter. Even if you aren't.”

He held up a finger, then walked over to the fence posts with the chicken wire, clipped the target on it, walked back, and took three pistols and two sets of shooter's earmuffs out of the bag.

One of the guns was a short silver revolver with wooden grips; another was a small but chunky piece of dark blue machinery; the third was a nearly featureless gray weapon that might have been made of plastic.

“A Smith and Wesson revolver, a Beretta automatic made for concealed carry, and a Glock, also an automatic, which a lot of police departments use. How much do you know about handguns?”

“What Cruz showed me.”

“Well…” Danny looked helplessly at the guns. “I can show you how they load, but I'm a crappy shot. Can't help you with that—you'll just have to practice.”

They loaded up the guns, and Shay started shooting. She persisted for an hour, hitting the target more often than not, until Cade showed up on one of Danny's trail bikes. He wasn't smiling, but Shay could see he was pumped about something. She clicked the safety on the Beretta and took off her earmuffs.

“We got a message from the Singular guy,” he said. “He thinks he knows where they're keeping the lab rats.”

Danny said, “Human beings, man.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Cade. “Come on. This is it. We're moving.”

Cade roared off, and Danny and Shay hurriedly picked up the empty ammo shells and tossed them back into his bag, and then Danny took a small, flat suede holster out of his bag, put the little Beretta into it, and said, “C'mere.”

Shay walked over, and Danny tucked the holster beneath the waistband of her jeans. A metal clip held the holster secure, with the grip extending above her waistband. Shay could reach back and pull the gun free in an instant. When it was in the holster, it was comfortable enough, and no more obvious than the knife she usually carried at the small of her back.

“You're gonna let me use it?” Shay asked.

“I'm giving it to you. But remember—it's only good for one thing, and that's killing somebody. I'm gonna pray you never use it.”

“You pray?”

Danny smiled. “I mumble a lot and hope somebody's listening.”

Shay smiled back and touched his cheek. “You have a good heart, Danny.”

When Shay and Danny got back to the house, the rest of the group was looking at GandyDancer on Odin's laptop. Twist stepped back and let Shay in.

The note was simple enough:

I looked at the picture and I'm sorry about your friend. I worry about telling you this—you have to be careful, because something doesn't feel quite right—but after the corporation evacuated that holding place, they rented another that seems to fit the same requirements. I believe they moved the operation there. (I'm being careful with identifying words, you should do the same.) I don't want to put the address here, where it could be caught by a search program. I have a good phone now. Call me. Or not.

Beneath that was a phone number.

Shay glanced around for Danny's satphone, brought it back over to the computer, and started punching in the number.

“Wait,” said Cruz.

Shay eyed him impatiently. “We gotta call,” she said. “This is happening right now, this prison, these people, their suffering.”

“My cousin,” said Fenfang.

Cruz said, “Why would this guy talk to us now? He's got to be high up if he knows this—so he must have known what was going on with the experiments. And he suddenly decides he doesn't like it?”

“Could be another sign that they're starting to crack,” said Twist. “The guy is trying to bail out before the cops show.”

Cruz was still hesitant. “And it could be a trap to lure us in.”

Shay finished dialing the number. “We won't know if we don't call.”

The man at Singular answered on the first ring and asked, without saying hello or anything else, “Do you have a pencil and paper?”

Shay said, “Yes,” and reached for a pen.

The man said, “A satphone. Good idea. I'm going to spell names and address numbers. Individual letters and numbers can't be searched so easily.”

Shay said, “Okay.”

The man said, “The new facility is in the town of
S-T-O-C-K-T-O-N
in
C-A
on
C-H-A-M-B-E-R-S
Avenue at
1-5-4-7
. I don't like the way I got this information. It was mentioned to me in passing. When I went looking for the address, I found it too easily. So you have to take extreme care.”

“Any specifics about the threat?” Twist asked over Shay's shoulder.

“Only that the people protecting the facility are professionals. They will be looking for you and they will be prepared.”

Shay said, “Okay. We might want to talk to you about that some more.”

The man said, “That address. I don't think you should Google it until you get somewhere far from where you're hiding, because the company has a direct connection to the National Sunshine Association through that woman you spoke to a couple days ago, at her house. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” Shay said again.

“I will keep this phone but can't guarantee that I'll answer it. I have your satphone number now. Can I call it anytime?”

“Yes.”

“Good luck.”

“Hey—how'd you know it was a satphone?”

“I can hear the echo. Good-bye.”

And he was gone.

They all looked at each other, weighing what to believe, except for Fenfang, who clapped her hands together and asked, “Can we go today?”

They wrangled over their next move, but they already knew all the arguments, had gone over them endlessly. Fenfang and Odin were adamant that they had to investigate the Stockton building, and do it immediately. Twist, Shay, and Cade mostly agreed. They thought they had to be cautious, but believed that their source was telling the truth. “He even warned us that there might be something flaky about his information,” Twist said.

Cruz still sensed a trap: “All the better to reel us in.”

Fenfang had heard enough pessimism.

“It is risk we must take,” she said, her face gone angry. “When they start to feel threatened, they will get rid of prisoners. Then they will start up somewhere else. Maybe move everything to North Korea. Liko, Robert, the others—they will be gone. Dead.”

Shay called the vote. “I'm ready to go take a look at the place, and if we see any sign of human experiments, we bring in the cops. Who's with me?”

Fenfang and Odin, then Twist, Cade, and Danny, raised their hands. Cruz was the lone holdout, but reluctantly raised his plastic cast to make it unanimous. “A
careful
look.”

“So we start with Google,” said Odin.

“He warned us against—” Cruz began.

“Against Googling the address,” Odin said. “We don't do that. We Google San Francisco, which probably gets several million hits a day. Then we scroll over to Stockton, and zoom in until we find the street, and then do a street-view scan until we find the address. We never actually enter
Stockton,
or the street, or the address, into the search field.”

“Oughta work,” Cade said. “Google was doing more than six billion searches a day, last time I looked. You want to monitor that, you'd need to look for some pretty specific terms.”

They found the target address after ten minutes of scanning Google Maps on Danny's oversized desktop screen. It was in an area of manufacturing companies and warehouses, north and west of the city airport. There were residential areas both north and south of the building, and open farm fields to the east.

The target building, which looked like it had been clicked together with huge gray Lego blocks, was set close to the surrounding roads and was wrapped in shallow parking lots. The parking strips, in turn, were surrounded by a fence: on three sides, a five-foot-high barrier of upright steel rods with powered gates at the ends; on the fourth, a chain-link fence, probably eight feet high, with a big sliding double gate at one corner. The back of the building showed seven loading docks and two standard entrance doors at parking-lot level.

There was a main door at the front of the building, and two smaller entries a few yards left and right of the main entrance. Two sides of the building had a small, unmarked door, probably emergency exits. There were a half-dozen light poles on all four sides, lighting the parking lots.

Cruz said, “Like the place in Sacramento, but flat, instead of tall. With those parking lots all around it, there's no way to sneak up on this one.”

“In Sacramento, they weren't ready for an attack,” Twist said. “Now their security will be better. That's one thing we need to look for: security people and cameras.”

“Yeah, except Cruz is right—I don't see any obvious weak points,” Odin said. “If you come in at night, you have to cross those empty parking lots. They're all lit up…and then, even if you got across, where would you go?”

“Could go up,” Shay said. She tapped the roof in the overhead shot. “If we could get up, we could all hide on the roof….”

“One thing you have to be careful of is that old hammer-and-nail thing,” Twist said to her. “You know, your only tool is a hammer, so everything looks like a nail. You, Shay, can climb, so you think about climbing everything. But what would we do up there? I can see a lot of what look like ventilation ducts, but I don't see access to the interior.”

“Well, if I could get up there—”

“But you can't get up there,” Odin said. “Not unless you came in by parachute, and then what would you do?”

“I don't know,” Shay admitted as she studied the mostly empty rooftop. “Put on my invisibility cloak?”

“Let's give up the bullshit and figure out what we
can
do,” Odin said.

When the others broke for lunch, Shay pulled up a view of the surrounding area, eyeballed it for a while, then called Twist over. “I found a nail.”

“What?”

She pulled back the satellite view and touched the roof of a building across a highway from the target building. “Look at the roof on this building.”

Twist looked. “There's nothing there. It's emptier than the roof on the Singular building.”

“Right. There's no access to the roof from inside the building. No way somebody's going to find you by accident. Now look at this.”

She went to the street view and scanned it around to the side of the building. “See this…what would you call it? A hut?” A small auxiliary building, a perfect cube, hung on the side of the larger one.

“Yeah, I'd call it a hut.”

She touched a door going into the hut. “Check out the door. It looks like a standard door, which means it's probably around six feet, eight inches tall—call it seven feet. The distance from the top of the door to the roof is only about half as high as the door. So the roof is ten feet up. If I stood on Cruz's shoulders, or Cade's, I could climb up there. Then it's about another six feet to the roof of the bigger building. I could do that in one second. From up there, we could watch the building across the street. Heck, we could probably put a tent up there, and if we put it in the middle of the roof, nobody would see us. We could watch the Singular building day and night.”

“Probably only have to do the night,” Twist said. “That's when we saw delivery trucks at the Sacramento building. But this other building could have some decent security of its own.”

“Nope, and here's proof.” She scanned around to the front of the building, where a huge sign said
UNCLAIMED FREIGHT AUCTION.
She tapped a long string of graffiti below the tattered sign. “The writers feel safe enough to do this on the front of the building. That tells me no one's paying much attention to the property. Or even much cares.”

Odin and Fenfang drifted over. “What have you got?” Odin asked.

Shay explained, and Odin nodded. “That's something I can get behind. Look, there's this subdivision.” He touched the screen. “If you had to run, it's a few hundred yards. The houses look like they're about ten feet apart, and everyone's idea of landscaping is jungle-style. Once you got in there, nobody could find you. If you had to run the other way, there's this bunch of houses to the south….”

The rest of the group had come over to look.

“Lots of cars parked on the street—which means we could have a backup car thirty seconds away, if we needed it,” Shay said. “We could reach it with the walkie-talkies.”

“We don't know how old the Google pictures are,” Cade said. “We'll have to see it for real to decide.”

Odin said, “We should go tomorrow morning.”

“Not you,” Shay said. “They know your face too well. And not Fenfang—we need her safe. She's our final proof, if we really need it.” She shook her head at Twist. “I don't think you, either. You're pretty recognizable, and you have trouble running.”

“I'm going, but I don't have to climb,” Twist said. “I'd be the emergency backup. And I'll monitor the satphone—in case the guy calls back.”

“Cade, Cruz, me, and you,” Shay said. “I've got to go so I can check out the climb.”

“Probably don't really need to climb,” Danny said. “I've got an aluminum folding ladder, weighs twenty pounds, unfolds to eight feet. You could run over behind that little building, throw the ladder up, pull it up after you, climb to the top roof. You wouldn't have to go up there alone—you could have somebody with you.”

“That'll be me,” Cruz said.

“Get the ladder,” Twist said. “We'll do some practice here on the front deck.”

“I'll still take rope,” Shay said. “We could tie it around a vent on the opposite side of the building, so if somebody did see us, we could run across the roof and slide down the rope and take off.”

Twist nodded. “So—we go tomorrow morning. Check it out, and when it gets dark, if everything looks right, we'll put two people on the roof.”

They spent the afternoon shopping for supplies and the evening talking about all the possibilities, until Odin said, “You know what? We're talking in circles. I'm gonna go work on the Mindkill cache.”

“Where you at with that?” Twist asked.

“We're working out all the formatting, and all the pieces we have so far. We want to be able to bring it up in an instant,” Odin replied.

Cade said, “We're also prepping a message to all the sites that took us seriously the first time, asking them to mirror us. With any luck, Mindkill will show up on a couple of hundred sites all over the country. Singular would have a helluva time bringing it all down….There's a lot of busywork.”

“Alternatively, we could just mellow out, since it's closing in on midnight,” Danny said.

“I ain't smokin' nothin',” said Twist.

“Then I'll get you a root beer,” Danny said. “But really, I was thinking about some old Seattle sounds….”

He brought up an eighties album from Pearl Jam, and Twist said, “Excellent.”

Things didn't mellow out right away: they still couldn't tear themselves away from the talk-and-more-talk. Danny shook his head and said, “I'm gonna have to drop the bomb.” A Willie Nelson album came up, and the computer speakers began kicking out
really old
songs, slow ones, beginning with “Stardust.”

Danny came up behind Shay and put his arm around her waist and said, “Dance.”

Shay pulled back. “What?”

“We're gonna dance. We need to dance.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” Shay said.

“I'm not,” Danny said. He pulled her into the middle of the living room floor, swung her around, and Shay muttered, “This is weird.”

And they slow-danced. Shay probably wouldn't have admitted it, but it felt good the way her planning brain faded into some other place as she swayed to the music.

Odin said to Fenfang, “C'mon.”

Fenfang blushed and said, “I am a nerd. I do not know how.”

Cade smiled and stepped toward her. “One thing you learn in private school is how to dance to old-fart music. C'mon, I'll show you.”