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  Thorne: “How can we trust them? Odin Remby’s an animal rights maniac, and he has some pretty heavy computer skills. If he has the chance to get more videos out there, he’ll do it. He’s a hard case: didn’t even crack under the waterboarding.”

  Cartwell broke in, impatient: “We don’t trust them, not a goddamn inch. We talk if we can, we negotiate if we can. We promise them everything they ask for, and we get the drives, and then we get rid of them.”

  This was why they’d rented the room with the Boeing credit card: so nobody, ever, could put them here, together, talking about murder.

  After a moment of silence, Harmon said, “That might be problematic.”

  Cartwell snapped: “You going soft on us, Harmon? Like West did?”

  Harmon had been a Special Forces sergeant in Afghanistan. There was nothing soft about him, and the comment burned. West had been a good man, a soldier who lost his legs in the same crappy war.

  “I’m not soft on anybody,” Harmon said. “But killing people—a whole group of people—is not easy to pass off in this country. If it’s not done all at once, the survivors will be screaming bloody murder to the press. You might have noticed, they’ve got some media skills, too. The artist does. On the other hand, if you kill them all at once, we’re talking about a massacre. That tends to catch the eye.”

  Cartwell waved a hand at him. “You guys get paid to sort these things out. We almost got our ship sunk this morning. This group—the enemy—they’re dangerous. We can’t leave them out there.”

  Sync said, “I agree they’ve got to go. It’ll take some staging, but we can work it out. A van goes into a canyon, the artist maybe overdoses….It can be done.”

  Thorne nodded. “First we’ve got to find them.”

  Harmon started to speak, “I’m not so—” but Sync cut him off: “About those flash drives, the copies that Odin Remby made. The originals were DARPA specials, which is about the only thing Janes got right. They have two levels of encryption—Remby got lucky with one level when he found the decryption software on Janes’s office computer. The second level he broke with…well, he somehow worked through Janes’s personal password.

  “But the files are embedded in software that only allows one copy. So, if we get the copies they have, there won’t be any more of them. That threat would be over. Janes said that at least three of the flash drives had been copied once, so those are already dead.”

  “That helps,” Cartwell said.

  Sync continued, “There’s a possibility, a remote possibility, that they’ll contact Janes to try to break the other passwords if they can’t do it themselves. We can’t put full-time surveillance on Janes’s house, because of where he lives—it’d be noticed by the neighbors and there’d be questions. But if the Rembys go there, we’ve set up a little surprise for them.”

  They talked about that, and Cartwell asked, “What about this Chinese girl? If anybody outside the company stuck her head in an X-ray machine, we’d have a problem. If the Chinese government ever found out that the Koreans had kidnapped Chinese citizens and used them as lab subjects…the problem might be unstoppable.”

  Sync said, “I’ve been working on that. We’ve got no direct control over her, so my thought is, we build a backtrail for her. One that doesn’t involve us. We’ve got her Chinese passport. We fly it into Canada with a look-alike, with an appointment with a neurosurgeon. Then she tries to walk it across the border to the U.S., without the right documents. They turn her around and she disappears. Maybe leaves some personal stuff in a Canadian hotel room. If she turns up here, it’ll look like she crossed the border illegally—”

  “The point being?” Cartwell asked.

  “The point being that we didn’t have her and never did. She’ll have a trail that the cops can follow. If she turns up with the Rembys or this Twist character, and they try to connect her to us, we’ll have evidence that they hooked up long after Sacramento. That we had nothing to do with the shit in her head.”

  Cartwell peered at him and scraped his top teeth over his lower lip a few times, a nervous tic. Then he said, “That’s not optimal, but it’s better than anything else I’ve heard. Get that going.”

  “I already have,” Sync said. “A Chinese woman will fly into Vancouver tomorrow morning with the girl’s passport. If you need to veto it, you’ve got about”—he checked his watch—“two hours. She should be heading for the Hong Kong airport about now.”

  Cartwell nodded. “Good. Go with it.” He turned to Harmon. “What are we doing to locate them?”

  “We’re looking for West’s Jeep. We’re looking at the phone numbers we know, but they’re staying off the phones. And we’re doing all the other routine checks for credit cards and Internet accounts that they’re known to use. The problem is, we don’t know which way they went. I figure they either headed back to Los Angeles, where they’ve got support, or they just took off. If they just took off, it’s most likely they headed for Nevada. It would be a logical move for them, if they thought the police were looking for them, to get across a state line or two.”

  “You think it’s possible that they headed back to Oregon?” Thorne asked.

  “Possible, but less likely,” Harmon said. “Our early research showed that the Rembys didn’t have the kind of personal connections that would provide them with hideouts, other than Odin Remby’s connection to Storm. Most of the group’s members are now in jail, except for Rachel Wharton, and she hasn’t gone back to Oregon. No, I think they went east or south. I’ve got guys watching the Twist Hotel, and depending on what we decide here, I could send some men to Nevada or wherever else they might turn up. Right now, my guys are mostly looking at computer screens.”

  Cartwell: “Computer screens. What about this website they set up, Mindkill?”

  “We blocked it,” said Sync. “They can get it back up, but they haven’t, yet. Our problem is, they ran it through a Swedish Web provider that mostly supports pirate sites. The provider has very tight controls. We don’t have the technical ability or the political clout to eliminate the site altogether. But we can keep messing with it.”

  Cartwell said, “Okay. We’ve sealed off the Sacramento problem, we’re distancing ourselves from the missing experimental subject, we’re hunting down the Rembys. Now, what are we going to do about the other experimental subjects? We need a secure facility.”

  They’d been standing up as they talked, and now they moved to the chairs, and Cartwell and Sync picked up sandwiches. Sync said, “There are a whole lot of conflicting requirements when you start talking about a dedicated holding facility. First of all, you need anonymity. There are a couple of different ways you can go with that….”

  They talked about it as the sun went down, running the company, and the search, from their encrypted cell phones. Since the holding facility would function as a disguised prison, and would require armed guards to move the experimental subjects when needed, Cartwell delegated the search for a new facility to Thorne, who would run it, with oversight from Sync. Sync suggested that Thorne look closely at Stockton, California, a large but nearly bankrupt city with a tiny police force. Stockton was convenient to Singular’s San Francisco–area headquarters, as well as the Sacramento research center.

  They were still talking about it when Cartwell’s phone buzzed. He looked at the screen of his secure phone and frowned: the number was unknown. That just didn’t happen. He hesitated, then punched answer. “Hello.”

  A woman’s voice, weak, thready, tentative. “This is Charlotte. Help me. Help me.”

  Cartwell said, “Who is this?”

  He listened for another twenty seconds, heard commotion on the other end, and then the connection broke off.

  Cartwell said, “Jesus,” and stared at the phone.

  Sync: “What?”

  Cartwell looked at the others. “She said she was Charlotte Dash. Dash has this number—but it wasn’t her. She sounded foreign.”

  Sync blurted, “It’s the
Chinese girl! She was implanted with the Dash persona. We know some of it took; the whole reason we brought her here was to try to figure out how much.”

  “But she’s—”

  Harmon: “With the Rembys. Could the implanted personality have enough control to call us? Or is that crazy?”

  Cartwell said, “It’s somewhat crazy, but not entirely. We’ve had hints of things like this. Oh, Christ, she said something about her bones….”

  Harmon said, “Give it to us, word for word. Best you can.”

  “She was so damn hard to understand. She said she was Charlotte, but she sounded…Mandarin,” Cartwell said. “But she would…wouldn’t she?”

  Sync nodded. “Language and accent are separate….”

  “Then she said ‘Help’ or ‘Help me,’ ” Cartwell said. “She said that a couple of times. And then something about…her bones? The bones? Something like that.”

  “Bones,” Thorne repeated. “Could that be code for something?”

  Cartwell cocked his head. “Code? I don’t know, maybe. Nothing I know about. But we know the girl has seizures—maybe she’s hurt.”

  Sync pressed his hands together. “This could be a break.”

  Cartwell was less certain. “If it really was this escapee…can we figure out where she was calling from?”

  Harmon said, “Give me ten minutes.” He took Cartwell’s phone and walked into the bedroom, pulling a laptop from his briefcase.

  Cartwell turned to Sync. “Should I call Charlotte?”

  “You know her better than I do,” Sync said. “If she knew there was a Dash double out there, how would she react?”

  Cartwell rubbed the side of his face, thinking, then said, “I don’t know. She’s got half a billion dollars with us so far, and she’s already had two rounds of chemo, so she knows we’re working on her as a priority. But the reality of what that means—”

  “Is she stable?” Sync asked. “Mentally stable?”

  “She’s got a lot going on. The cancer, the stink from her husband’s hedge fund, and trying to work out his estate…” He did the lip-scraping thing again, then: “Maybe we’ll let it go for now. Admitting we lost the girl won’t inspire a lot of confidence.”

  They were still talking about it when Harmon came in from the bedroom and handed Cartwell his phone back. “She’s in Reno,” he said. “The Bones Motel and Casino. Some kind of low-rent place on the edge of town.”

  Sync: “The Bones?”

  “Like in ‘rolling the bones’—rolling the dice,” Harmon said.

  Thorne punched the air with his fist, then looked past Sync and Harmon at Cartwell. “Give me the jet, Micah, I can have a team there in two hours.”

  “You’ve got it,” Cartwell said. “Let’s get this done.”

  “We will,” Thorne said, and walked away, already on his phone.

  3

  The seizure on the bathroom floor lasted ninety seconds, with Twist holding Fenfang’s wire-plaited head in his lap and twice taking a bony elbow to the windpipe: like getting hit with a fire poker. Both jabs hurt, and when she finally went still and her eyelids fluttered, he croaked, “What’d you tell Singular? Are they coming?”

  “I…What?” she said. Her eyes were cloudy, dazed. “How am I here?”

  Odin, crouched to one side of her with the spit-soaked washcloth, looked back and forth between Twist and his sister, who’d held down the young woman’s legs, and said, “She didn’t make the call, okay? It’s not her fault.”

  Shay said, “Hey! Odin! Singular murdered our friend. They tortured you, and you almost died. I don’t want to hear any crap about whose fault is whose. If she’s on their side, we’re gonna drop her in a ditch and keep going.”

  “I am on your side,” she said softly.

  Shay glared at the Chinese girl and held out her recovered knife. “Yeah? Who used my phone? Who tried to stab me?”

  Cade and Cruz came crashing through the door, called back by Shay during the seizure. Fenfang struggled with her question and said, “I do not know about a knife. I would not hurt you; it is my promise. This must be Charlotte. I am Fenfang.”

  Odin, his face reddening, tried again. “It’s like when that beaten-down Asian guy on File 12 says he’s Robert G. Morris of St. Louis—that’s who he is. Whether he exists as himself anymore, or they killed those memories, we don’t know. One thing we do know”—he touched the center of the young woman’s forehead—“Fenfang from Dandong is still here.”

  Fenfang clasped his hand in gratitude. “Yes,” she said.

  Twist said, “All right. But…who is Charlotte?”

  Fenfang turned toward him. “I do not know. I know Charlotte. I know some things about her, but they are more facts than memories. Names…and many numbers…she is one hundred thirty-six pounds, her house is 524. I know her house security codes, her business security codes; she has passwords, she has telephone numbers.”

  Odin took Shay’s phone out of her hands, found the last outgoing call, and showed it to Fenfang: “You know this number?”

  She squinted at it and said, “I know the name with it: Cartwell.”

  Twist said, “Cartwell is Singular’s CEO. She went right to the top.” Cade glanced at the door and said, “We gotta get out of here.”

  “Yes, but not in two minutes,” Cruz said. “We have a little time before he could do anything.”

  Twist said, “If she’s got all these security measures, if she’s talking to Cartwell, she’s probably one of Singular’s backers.”

  “I do not know this Cartwell, only the number,” Fenfang said. “I know another important number has the name White. Another important number is Jackson. I know eight of these numbers with names.”

  Cade opened his laptop. “Fenfang, give me those phone numbers.”

  She was getting some strength back and pushed herself up on her elbows and rattled off a string of eight phone numbers. Cade typed them, and Odin went to stand over his shoulder. Odin asked, “Where are you?”

  “Twenty-two Hornet,” Cade said.

  Odin patted his shoulder. “Okay.”

  A minute later, as Twist and Shay got Fenfang to her feet, Cade said, “That White number? That’s the office phone for Harry White, the U.S. Senate majority leader.”

  “Shit,” Twist said.

  “Got her,” Cade said. “Charlotte Coulter Dash…”

  “Holy cats,” Twist said. “Senator Dash?”

  “Yup,” said Cade, who was already skimming her Wiki page. “Charlotte Coulter Dash is the senior U.S. senator from New Mexico. Second-term Democrat, age forty-eight. Her husband, Huck Dash, ran a hedge fund called Hondo Investments until last December, when he croaked. Dude was like the forty-ninth-richest human on the planet. Says she’s a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; there’s a photo of her on Fox News.”

  Twist slapped his forehead. “She’s in charge of our spies.”

  “Merry Christmas and happy birthday,” Cruz said. “Now let’s get out of here before the FBI arrives.” He surveyed the room. “If you guys pack, I’ll wipe everything down.”

  Fenfang: “Wipe?”

  “Fingerprints,” he said. He turned to Shay and asked, “Where’s the phone she used?”

  “It’s the one I bought this morning,” Shay said.

  Cruz took it from her, got the steel bolt cutters, and used them to snap it in half. The others watched, caught a little off guard by the destruction, though X, standing next to Cruz, seemed completely calm about it. Cruz said, “We won’t make the mistake of using it again.”

  “Where we going?” Odin asked.

  Twist was already on the iPad, looking at maps. “Las Vegas. We can be there in seven hours.”

  “Why Vegas?” Cade asked as he began gathering up computer gear.

  “Because it’s big and it’s full of tourists coming and going and it has about a million motels,” said Twist. “Plus, it’s only about four hours from L.A., where we’ve got help if we ne
ed it.”

  “Maybe we should dump the Jeep,” Cade said. “West’s plates could give us away.”

  “I’d like to keep it if we can,” said Shay, and Twist heard the slight choke in her voice. “It’s got some capabilities you don’t have in a Camry. No offense, Toyota.”

  Cruz caught Shay’s eye and spoke to her directly: “Plates won’t be a problem. I’ll take care of it.”

  They were ready to go in ten minutes. Cruz, the tattooed, muscular ex–gang member, sounding like a mom—“Don’t touch that. Don’t touch that, Jesucristo, don’t touch that!”—and wiping behind them.

  “Fenfang’s awfully visible,” Odin said. The Chinese girl was watching them all from the bed, still barefoot and wrapped in the dead-gray hospital smock.

  “Wig shop,” Shay said. “I’ll go in; her head’s about the same size as mine. Then we’ll stop at a mall—I saw one on my way here. Anybody needs anything, we can get it there.”

  “I’ll need to swing by the airport,” said Cruz.

  Shay tilted her head at him, but Twist understood the purpose right away and answered: “Plates.” Cruz nodded and Twist said, “Okay, then, who’s driving what?”

  Cruz, X, and Shay took the Jeep, headed for Reno-Tahoe International, while the others, in the sedan and the pickup, drove to the mall.

  —

  The second level of the airport garage was long-term parking; Shay cruised it until they spotted another Jeep Rubicon, but Cruz said, “Keep going.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it has Nevada plates. If we look, we’ll find one from California.”

  “Why California?”

  “Because we’ve got California plates,” he said. “If we stick with the same state, it’ll take the owner of the other car longer to notice the change.”