Outrage by John Sandford Read Free Book Online

she went through, Cruz was asleep on the couch. She could faintly hear men’s voices from the other end room, knocked quietly on that door, and heard Odin say, “Yeah?”
    She pushed through, nodded at Twist, and sat next to her brother on the bed. “Where’s the password block?”
    Odin touched a couple of keys, and it came up. She typed in the words that had appeared in the boxes in her mind; the flash drive opened up.
    Odin said, “I got the first part of that….”
    Shay said, “Willamette Valley—spelled backward.”
    Odin nodded. “Should have thought of that.” The man who’d thought up the passwords lived in the Willamette Valley, in Oregon, as had Odin and Shay.
    Twist, who’d been sewing a button back on his sport coat, cut the thread with his teeth and said, “Willamette Valley, spelled backward. That’s so obvious, we all should have thought of it.”
    “I know,” Odin said. “I’ve been sort of preoccupied—”
    “I was joking, Odin,” Twist said.
    “Oh.” Odin was mystified: didn’t see the joke.
    Twist shook his head. “You know, you guys really do scare the shit out of me sometimes.”
    Shay said, “Whatever. Let’s see what’s on the drive—”
    Odin clicked a few keys, got a list: 1,124 files.
    “Gonna take a while,” Odin said. He began clicking through the files and found experimental reports, some only a paragraph long, others several pages long, all in dense scientific language—some pure chemistry, others on cellular biology, more on electrochemical reactions. None of it comprehensible to the three of them.
    “Gotta be important—but we’d have to get specialists to look at it,” Odin said. “Tell you what, I’ll go through these, see if there’s anything here that’s a plain-language report. When we go public, we could dump these on the Mindkill site and crowd-source the interpretation. If we could get enough people interested, we could probably pull together a good interpretation in a few days.”
    “That’s all fine, except…maybe we don’t want people to know the details?” Twist said. “If we put too much of this research out there, are we inviting somebody else to pick up where Singular left off?”
    Shay exchanged a look with Odin, and they both nodded. “That is a problem. I never thought of it quite like that,” Odin said.
    “We need a few people we can trust to go through it,” Shay said. “I don’t know where we’d find them, though.”
    “Maybe it’s for later,” Twist said. “We don’t need the research data right now. We need something that screams at people, that you’d see on YouTube and the television networks—like when Shay rappelled down that building, like when we hijacked the Hollywood sign. This research—this will hang them in the end, but right now we’re looking for photos and video that’ll go viral overnight.”
    Odin nodded. “Here’s another problem: I’m not operating at full strength—I need to get my computer back. My girlfriend…well, my ex, anyway…Rachel probably has it. When everything was getting crazy, I was afraid we’d get separated, so I put a program on her computer that will let me pinpoint her, if she’s using it. If I can get back on the Net, I think I could find her.”
    “We could wait to use Cade’s computer, or we could go out and get any kind of computer you need—” Twist began.
    Odin shook his head. “Mine’s got years of software on it. Tools. That software’s a major resource. The problem is, Singular could be watching Rachel, waiting for me to get in touch. It’s a risk.”
    “And you’re not sure she even has your computer?”
    “Well, we know she didn’t get picked up by the feds, and if she’s running, she would have taken it. I really need the software.”
    “By software, you mean hacker stuff,” Twist said.
    “Tools. We’ll have invisible access to lots of powerful databases. Like, if Singular is tracking us and flies its people to Vegas…I’ve got the