“Kids,” Dad said, shaking his head.
Lisa was scribbling in her notebook. “Were there any adults involved?”
“You mean, like, over-eighteen adults?” Alix shook her head. “I don’t think so. They were all young.”
“A bunch of kids,” Dad muttered again. “Just a bunch of crazy kids.”
Lisa was waving in another Williams & Crowe agent to review the details again with Alix. Lisa dug into Alix’s story with an intensity of focus that made it feel more like an interrogation, but Alix didn’t complain. After all the trouble she’d created for everyone, and Lisa in particular, she had the feeling she owed Death Barbie some meek obedience.
She showed Lisa the USB drive. The woman took it with two fingers, regarding it with a revulsion that Alix would normally have reserved for a cockroach found deep-fried in a plate of french fries. “We’ll have it analyzed,” she said.
“Did they hurt you?” Dad asked.
“Not really. Just when I yanked Moses against the cage. But I hurt him a lot more than he hurt me. I think I chipped his tooth.” As she said it, she realized that it might sound like she was bragging, but Lisa and Dad and the other agent were all grinning. Alix grinned, too. Screw him. He deserved it.
“And they kept you in a cage for how long?” Lisa asked, still writing furiously.
“I don’t know. I slept.” Alix realized she didn’t even know what day it was.
“A cage,” Dad fumed. He was looking angrier and angrier. Alix didn’t think she’d ever seen him so angry.
“What are you going to do?” she asked him.
Her father exchanged a look with Lisa. “You say it was in a warehouse?” he said.
“Yeah. On the south side of Hartford. Where all the warehouses and the trains run.”
“Do you think you can lead us back there?” Lisa asked.
Alix nodded. “Yeah. I remember from when Cynthia drove me. It was getting dark, but I know exactly where it is. They didn’t let me see it when we were coming back. But I remember the exits. I’m pretty sure I can find it.”
Lisa’s smile was almost sharklike. Alix hesitated, suddenly uncertain. “What will happen to them?”
Lisa looked impatient. “Well, they’ve been breaking a lot of laws, Alix. There’s conspiracy. There’s fraud. There’s kidnapping. Probably other things, depending on how aggressively the DA goes after them.”
“Aggressively,” Dad declared. “She’ll go after them aggressively.”
Lisa nodded. “There you go. They’ll be brought up on charges. The ones who are minors will probably be treated differently, but it sounds like the ringleaders may be over eighteen. We’ll press to try them all as adults, though. This is serious. It’s not a game. And the things they’re doing have escalated way beyond pranks.”
Alix swallowed. “We can’t just, I don’t know… give them… some kind of warning… I mean…” she trailed off. “I mean, I think they’re just really confused. They’re just kids,” she said again.
“Harris and Klebold were just kids,” Lisa said. “Give a kid a TEC-9, and you’ve got a killer. Today, they’re trying their hand at kidnapping; tomorrow, who knows how many bodies we’re sorting.”
Still Alix hesitated.
Lisa knelt down in front of her. “Time’s passing, Alix. If they suspect their plan isn’t working, they’ll pack up and run. They’ve been doing this for a little while already. And every time they do something, they escalate. They’re learning, Alix. Every time they succeed, they learn. You’re the only person who can stop them before someone gets hurt.”
Alix swallowed, wishing there was some clear answer. She thought of Cynthia, playing as her friend. Moses, so hot and cold. Kook and Adam and Tank.
“They’re orphans,” she said. “I mean, they’re alone. Maybe they’re just hurt and confused.”
Lisa looked at her kindly. “They’re escalating, Alix. It started with tagging. But now it’s gone beyond that. They raided a lab and stole a semitruck full of rats, then they assaulted your school’s headmaster. Then they drugged you, and put you in a cage. They’re out of control. We can’t guess what they’ll do next. And when they find out this little virus trick has failed, they’ll escalate again.”
What was right, and what was wrong? It was so impossible to tell. “Okay,” Alix said, finally. “I’ll show you. But only if you let me go with you all the way. I want to see them.”
“Alix…”
“I have to see them. I have to go back.”
Lisa made Alix wear a bulletproof vest.
“They don’t even have guns,” Alix protested.
“Do you remember the last time we had a conversation about safety?” Lisa asked. “I think that time, you ended up spending a night in a cage in a factory while we all tore our hair out looking for you.”
Alix subsided into abashed submission, and Lisa fitted her with the vest.
Now Alix sat in the SUV, watching with interest as Lisa pulled on her own body armor, along with the rest of the Williams & Crowe team. Dad sat beside her, his expression hard. He’d tried several times to persuade her to wait at home, to just show them on Google maps where they needed to go, but she had remained adamant. In the end, he’d come along, too, as if he were going to be more protection than the professionals from Williams & Crowe. She was glad to have a familiar and comforting presence there, though, as they got closer and closer to the factory.
Alix had expected the police or FBI to be with them, but it was only five SUVs full of Williams & Crowe people who navigated slowly between the warehouses, letting Alix zero in on the one where she’d been kept.
“You’re sure they don’t have weapons?” Lisa asked as she loaded rounds into her tear gas gun. It had a drum for the tear gas canisters and a short, fat muzzle so wide that Alix thought she could almost slide her hand inside.
“I don’t think so,” Alix said.
“You don’t think so? Or you know?”
“I didn’t see anyone with guns.”
“We need to be sure,” Lisa said. “Did you see any evidence that they had any weapons?”
“Well, the one kid talked about making things explode. The little one, Tank, said that. But he just said something like that once. He was like some kind of tinkerer or something.”
“A bomb?” Lisa prompted. “Was he making a bomb?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say that, exactly.”
Alix had the uncomfortable feeling that her words meant different things to her than they did to Lisa, because her bodyguard was already nodding significantly to her compatriots and radioing to the other vehicles. “We’re going in hot. Possible explosive ordnance.”
“What’s ‘going in hot’ mean?” Alix asked.
Lisa glanced back. “It means we aren’t going to give them a chance to blow us up.”
“I didn’t say they had a bomb rigged,” Alix protested.
“Better safe than sorry,” Lisa said. She slammed a bulletproof helmet over her head. Beefy guys were climbing out of the other vehicles. They, too, had blunt guns with tear gas rounds, but they also had what looked like assault rifles slung on their shoulders.
Alix reached over the backseat and grabbed Lisa before she could exit. “The one kid, Tank. He has asthma. Will the tear gas hurt him?”
Lisa shrugged. “If it does, we’ll revive him after.”
“You’ll what?”
But Alix didn’t have a chance to say anything else because Lisa’s radio squawked to say the rest of her people were in place. “Stay here,” she ordered. “If things go sidewise, we can’t have you in the cross fire.”
She pushed the door of the SUV closed and stealthed toward the warehouse. More black armored forms were scampering for the building. Alix saw them holding automatic rifles at ready. More and more Williams & Crowe people in SWAT-type gear preparing to go in.