After the Dark (14 page)

She didn't.

In less than ten minutes a woman opened the door and stood in silhouette against the bright sunshine. The door closed slowly and Max's eyes readjusted to the dim light as the woman came down the stairs, spotted Max, and came over to take a seat next to her at the bar.

A slim blonde with her short hair tucked neatly up under a stocking cap, the woman was mannequin thin with alabaster skin, standing slightly taller than Max, with large dark eyes. When the blonde sat down, Max got a glimpse of the tattoo on the woman's back, just about waist level.

“Asha,” Max said, by way of hello.

The blonde's smile showed some teeth, but seemed forced. She and Max had never been friends, exactly, even if they had been allies much of the time. Max knew Asha had a thing for Logan, and she wouldn't have been at all surprised if the blonde still resented Logan picking her.

“Max,” Asha said, with a curt nod.

That was the extent of their chitchat.

After Asha ordered a coffee for herself, Max laid out the situation—Asha's only reaction to hearing of Logan's kidnapping was a tightening between her eyebrows, but that spoke volumes—then Max told Asha what she needed.

Asha's eyes tightened, and her mouth did, too. “You really think I'm gonna betray Logan's trust?”

Max shrugged. “Only if you want to save his life.”

The blonde took a sip of her coffee and carefully set the cup on the bar in front of her. Her eyes never left the cup as she said nothing for a very long minute.

Then her eyes rose and she said, quietly, “If I tell you anything, Logan will never speak to me again.”

“If he's dead,” Max pointed out, “he'll never speak to anyone again.”

She shook her head, and the blonde hair shimmered with barroom neon. “He'll never be able to trust me.”

Max let out a breath. “Asha, he'll never know I got it from you. You have my word.”

Asha studied Max for a good thirty seconds—it seemed an endless time to Max, but she let the blonde make up her own mind.

Finally Asha spoke. “I believe you, I really do. Despite our . . . differences, you've been honest with me. And I would help you if I could.”

“But?”

“I really don't think I know anything.”

“Sounds to me like you're not sure . . . Any little thing you could share would be more than I have right now.”

Again Asha shook her head. “You're asking me to betray a trust. Do you know what it does, between two people, when trust is shattered? When one betrays the other?”

Max looked away.

“What?” Asha said.

“Nothing.” Max shook her head, smiled a bitter little smile, and said, “We don't have the luxury of social niceties right now, Asha. I'm afraid ‘betraying' Logan's trust is the only way of saving Logan's
life
.”

Looking back into her coffee, Asha kept her voice low, barely above a whisper. “All right . . . all right. But I don't remember the woman's name—the aunt?”

Max nodded slightly, one eye going to the bartender to make sure he wasn't watching them.

“And I didn't have all that much to do with it,” Asha continued. “I tracked the woman down, introduced her to Logan. The rest was Eyes Only.”

Like most of Logan's operatives, Asha did not know that Logan
was
Eyes Only.

“I understand,” Max said.

“All I can tell you is, the aunt lived in Fremont. Once Logan reunited her with her nephew, he gave her the money and the new papers to make the move. I did hear him mention Appleton.”

“Appleton . . . about an hour and a half from here? Upstate?”

“I don't know. Could be some other Appleton in Arkansas or Maine, who the hell knows. Would Logan salt somebody away so close to home?”

“Actually, he might. It's unexpected enough . . . Asha,
think
—”

She shook her head, hair shimmering with neon again. “Max, honestly—that's all I know. Really.”

“Thanks, Asha.” And she touched the woman's hand on the bar. “I appreciate it.”

Asha gripped Max's hand; the squeeze they exchanged was the most personal, warmest moment they'd ever shared. “You save his fine ass, girl—understood?”

“Understood.”

“And you didn't hear any of this from me.”

“Also understood.”

Appleton.

It wasn't much.

But it was more than she had when she came in to Crash, wasn't it? Tossing some money on the bar, Max retreated up the stairs and out into the bright sunlit day. As she rode back to Terminal City on her Ninja, she wondered if the others were having any luck. Her pickings were pretty damn slim.

Alec was already there, in the control room, when Max strode in.

“How'd you do?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Zip, zally, zero. Sung didn't sing—he doesn't know anything about the White kid.”

“
Says
he doesn't know, or doesn't know?”

“I didn't hook him up to a lie detector, Max, but I know a lot about lying . . . and I don't think he was. Besides, you know how highly Logan regards Sung.”

She wondered if Alec had run into another Eyes Only loyalist who was refusing to share info out of respect to Logan.

“How did
you
do?” he asked.

Shrugging, she said, “Not much. Small lead. Maybe.”

Dix and Luke came in next, Luke carrying a small black box in his arms like it was a new puppy. Max cocked an eye; the “puppy” seemed to be smoking from one end.

Luke looked up, tears in his black eyes. “This little box has broken every code I've ever turned it loose on.”

“It doesn't look so good,” Max said.

“No, it doesn't,” Dix admitted. “We've what you might call a setback.”

“Yeah?”

Luke, nodding, said, in the voice of a school kid who'd been beaten up on by a playground bully, “Logan's computer burned up my codebreaker.”

“What?”

“Burned it up! Tied it into some kind of loop that kept going faster and faster until the poor baby finally overheated and just . . . burned up.”

Max grunted a laugh. “Logan's a smart cookie.”

“I thought my little box was pretty smart, too,” Luke said, walking off with the smoking box, possibly to bury it.

“So you got nothing?” Max asked.

Dix shrugged. “Does a migraine count?”

Mole came in next, his head down. “Bling says Logan swore him to secrecy.”

“Maybe I should go talk to him,” Max said.

“Can I watch?” Alec asked.

But Mole was shaking his head, saying, “I don't think he knows anything, anyway. Bling's a pretty tough character—and he'd just go into a yoga trance while we pulled out his toenails with pliers or somethin'.”

Max said, “I have the pliers.”

“Not worth the trouble,” Mole said, and relighted his stogie. “Anyway, Bling said Logan never let him know that kind of info—figured Bling was too obvious a target, and if somebody did torture him or use truth serum on 'im or somethin', best Bling not know anything important.”

Joshua straggled in last, carrying a pillowcase like a sack. Whatever the shaggy transgenic was lugging looked heavy.

“What did you find, Big Fella?”

“Nothin', Little Fella. Sorry.”

Max felt sick to her stomach. She had the name of the town, and that was a start; but there could be ten thousand or more people in Appleton. What were they going to do, go door to door?

“If you didn't find anything,” Alec asked, “what's in the pillowcase? Kibble?”

Joshua shrugged. “Not kibble, Alec.” He gazed mournfully at Max. “Logan had some of Father's books out, so I brought them along. But I couldn't find anything else.”

“Let's see the books,” she said.

Joshua emptied the pillowcase onto the map table, and the volumes clattered like big hailstones.

A dozen books lay in front of them. At Max's instructions, everybody picked one out and started flipping through the pages, in case Logan had made a stray note in one of the margins. Max knew Logan well enough to realize he didn't trust his own memory—bright as he was, Logan still felt the need for pneumonic devices, so he was always leaving himself cryptic little notes.

The third book Max picked up was
Gulliver's Travels
, a hard-back edition of the classic satire, similar to one she'd had when she was living in the projection booth at Mann's Chinese Theater in Los Angeles. On the inside of the cover, next to where Father had inscribed it for Joshua, Max saw a doodle—a pencil-drawn little apple . . .

Appleton?

Had Logan, looking for a new name for Ray White, absently plucked one from a book?
This
book?

“We have a name or two to try,” she said, trying to keep the excitement out of her voice.

She could stand the despair . . . It was the hope . . .

“Get me an uplink,” she said. “We're going to see if the tiny town of Appleton, Washington, has a ‘Gulliver' family, or maybe a ‘Swift,' or even ‘Lemuel' . . .”

“Max,” Alec said, “you're grasping for straws . . .”

“And if we come up blank, we try every other ‘Appleton' in the U.S. and Canada . . . Alec, grasping at straws is the only way to find a needle in a haystack.”

With night falling, they commandeered Logan's car and were on the road toward the upstate hamlet of Appleton.

It had been easier than she had thought to locate Ray White. She just needed the right cryptic clues and a little insight into Logan and, oh yes, some luck; if a man named Moody hadn't given her Jonathan Swift's great book to read, years ago, they would not have this chance tonight to save Logan Cale.

Accompanied by Alec, Mole, and Joshua, Max drove through Seattle, using her old Jam Pony ID and claiming to have an emergency delivery. When the sector cops asked why it took four messengers to deliver one package, she jerked her thumb toward Joshua and Mole in the backseat.

“It's radioactive, with a potential leak,” she said. “The transgenics are the only ones who are able to deal with it without dying.”

The prospect of leaking radioactivity was plenty to convince every sector cop they encountered. Max and crew and their hazardous materials were allowed free passage. And once they cleared the checkpoints in the city, the rest was easy.

As they whipped down the highway, Mole had the wheel with a foot mashed down on the gas. Max rode shotgun, studying the map even in the dark, her cat eyes still able to make out the details. In the back, Joshua and Alec tried to catch some rest and the two of them leaned into each other as they slept, a boy and his dog . . . his really, really big dog.

Glancing over her shoulder, Max wished she could take a photo of the two sleeping warriors; it wasn't often she was presented with an image that was on the one hand warm and fuzzy, and on the other, perfect blackmail material.

Leave it to Logan Cale to come up with a literary alias for Ray White. Lemuel Gulliver traveled between two worlds, and so had Ray. Max remembered the book fondly from nights when it lulled her to sleep back at the Chinese. That book had been the one possession she regretted leaving behind in Los Angeles when she'd left, seeking Seth in Seattle.

Max missed her Chinese Clan family, Moody, Tippett, and especially Fresca; but they were dead, and revenge, such as it was, had been taken. The book, though—
Gulliver's Travels
—had stayed with her. Like memories of a childhood she'd never had, the book was always part of her.

She wondered if Logan had remembered her talking about the book when he picked Ray White's alias. If so, she'd planted the very clue she'd been able to interpret; the irony of that made her smile, a little. Maybe she would ask Logan about that when she saw him . . .

If she saw him.

The first order of business would be convincing the boy's aunt—now using the name Sara Gulliver and pretending to be the boy's mother—to help them. Max knew the woman would be reluctant to get involved, and risk the boy's safety; but perhaps to help rescue the man who had saved both her life and Ray's, she might consider it.

Once Max had the name, tracking the pair down on the Internet had been surprisingly easy. The Internet was getting better every day, more and more like the heyday in the early '00s, especially here on the left coast, farther from the reach of the Pulse.

Things were less screwed up here than on the East Coast, and businesses were making a comeback. Even though that pirate Jared Sterling had made millions bilking the public as he rebuilt the Internet, his death had signaled a new freedom to build; and the Internet was playing a large role in renewing commerce within the United States, if mostly out West.

The Internet also provided more information than it had at any time since the Pulse. Now, Max not only knew where the Gullivers lived but where Sara worked, where Lem went to school, and even what kind of grades the boy was getting—not surprisingly, considering his genes, straight A's.

“Town,” Mole said back over his shoulder.

The two in the back stirred, saw the position they were in, and instantly slid to the far sides of the vehicle, each looking toward the front to see if anyone had noticed them. They glanced quickly at each other, gave a little nod that signaled they didn't think the others had seen, then they both sighed in relief.

“You lovebirds have a nice nap?” Mole asked.

Joshua glared at the lizard man, and Alec offered a couple of short words in response.

Within minutes they were pulling up in front of the Gulliver house, a white two-story clapboard dating to the first half of the twentieth century, resting on a well-tended sloping lawn, a large ash tree in the front yard, and they could glimpse some other big trees out back. It was after dark but early in the evening, yet no lights were on inside the house. Max wondered if the Gullivers were out to dinner or visiting a neighbor.

They could be anywhere, doing anything, blithely leading an idyllic small-town life, unaware of the storm swirling around young Ray White . . . that is, Lem Gulliver.

And all the transgenic team could do was wait for them to come home. Leaning against her side of the car, Max looked up at the house. She hoped the Gullivers wouldn't be gone all evening. She wanted to get back to Terminal City; getting the boy was only the beginning—a strategy to defeat White, and return Logan, had yet to be developed.