Outrage by John Sandford Read Free Book Online Page A

airline databases, and I’ve got all the car rental companies.”
    “All right, we’ll get a laptop and you can take a look,” Twist said. “If she’s anywhere close by, we’ll see what we can do.”
    They talked for a while longer, then Cruz came in, yawned, scratched his chest, and said, “That nap sucked. What are we doing?”
    “Going shopping,” Twist said.
    —
    Twist and Cruz went out to get a computer, pizzas, and Pepsi, and Odin and Shay moved into the middle room, where they could hear Fenfang if she woke.
    Odin continued digging through the newly opened flash drive, and Shay went through West’s briefcase. Before they’d attacked the Singular prison, they’d left anything that Singular might find useful—phones, laptops, iPads, wallets—in the getaway cars, in case they should be captured.
    Shay opened West’s wallet, and the first thing she saw was his driver’s license. His intelligent brown eyes looked straight at her, just as they had in their first meeting at her foster parents’ house, back when the future seemed so simple. Finish school, go to college, get a job….She’d liked West, though she hadn’t wanted to at the time.
    The rest of the wallet was routine—credit cards, membership cards to a couple of San Francisco museums, and a key card. Shay tossed it over to Odin, who examined it and said, “Not been used much. Probably for a parking structure. Could be for an office door, but that’s unlikely. Could be useful. I’ll keep it.”
    Shay nodded; if there was one thing Odin knew how to manipulate to spectacular effect, it was a key card. It was how he’d helped Storm break into the Singular lab—the raid that had started this whole thing. Shay said, “You know, if you hadn’t had Mom’s cards…”
    “I’ve thought all about that. If I hadn’t had the cards, we wouldn’t be here—but we need to be here. Here is the right place to be.”
    They’d been in elementary school when their mother, a young scientist, went to work at a laboratory in Eugene, Oregon. Something related to Parkinson’s research, she’d told her family, a brain disease that made people lose control of their bodies. What had interested young Odin more was the security fence around the lab. The gates opened with key cards that changed every month. He had collected his mother’s discarded cards, had learned how they worked, and had discovered the algorithm by which the codes got updated.
    At the time, it had been simple nerd curiosity, but years later, after their mother had died, and Odin had joined a radical animal rights group, it became crucial. The radicals had used his knowledge to break into that laboratory in Eugene—a Singular laboratory as it turned out. And what they found there led to the widening conflict.
    Shay looked at West’s briefcase and sighed. “Sometimes I wonder if Mom really wanted to be a mom. It seems like Dad took care of us most of the time, until he died, and after that, it was Grandma. Mom was always so preoccupied with her work.”
    “She loved us, but she loved the work, too,” Odin said, clicking through screen after screen of research text. “Dad wasn’t as deep into his job, so he made more time for us.”
    Shay’s expression said she didn’t entirely buy it. “You think she cooperated with Singular?”
    Now Odin looked up. “From what I’ve been able to get from the records, it looks like Singular really was doing a lot of nerve and brain research aimed at helping crippled people. You know, funded by the military and the government. That’s what she was doing—that’s why she was working in an animal lab. From what I’ve read, it seems like Singular began to swerve away from that about the time she died.”
    Shay scratched her forehead, then asked the question: “Do you think Singular was involved? In her death?”
    “I don’t know,” Odin said, “but I’ve thought about it a lot. I mean, I can’t help wondering what that whole trip was