Starting up a new stogie, the lizard man said, “Somebody's got to keep you from getting your ass beat by another tree.”
Max raised her hands, palms out, calling a halt to the floor show. “An hour and a half it is,” she said. “Be ready, and don't tell anybody. The quieter we keep this, the better off we'll all be.”
Alec said, “You don't know how right you are.”
She frowned at him. “Meaning?”
“Somebody had to tip the Furies off about where Logan lived, right? And who knows that besides our fellow Terminal City residents?”
Mole said, “That cop Clemente—a few others that were around the night Kelpy bought it.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Max said. “Are you suggesting we have a traitor in our midst?”
“I'm suggesting just what I suggested: somebody tipped the Furies off about Logan's private pad. I mean, you didn't tell 'em, did you, Max?”
“No, Alec. It would have to be somebody terminally untrustworthy—anybody come to mind?”
His eyes widened. “Hey—I don't deserve that.”
Max's expression softened. “Actually, you don't. And you raise a good point—someone tipped the Furies about Logan. But we don't have time to find out who. Saving Logan's ass is our top, our only, priority.”
Alec nodded. So did Mole, and Dix in his command chair, even though he wasn't supposed to be listening in, and Luke as he taped the bandage around Alec's ankle.
“What we're up to,” Max said again, “stays among us, and Joshua—just the core group . . . Now, let's jet.”
Ninety minutes later Alec finally met the Fremont Troll.
Under the north end of the Aurora Avenue bridge, the reclining stone troll rose eighteen feet, nearly bumping its head on the underside of the bridge. The troll looked just as Mole had described him—long-haired with one shiny metal eye, crawling on its belly, the fingers of his right hand spread, its left fist closed around a gray hulk of a car.
Alec and Mole climbed up behind the troll peeking out from the darkness under the bridge. Rolling his head on the column of his neck to ease the stiffness, Alec settled in for a wait.
No telling how long it would take the Furies to get there with Logan, but a glance at his watch told him it could be up to two hours till the scheduled hostage/ransom exchange.
“Mole,” he said. “I'm beat.”
“Sleep, then,” he said. “I got it covered.”
“I'm just gonna shut my eyes. Rest a little.”
“Go ahead.”
When his phone trilled and he bolted upright, Alec had no idea how long he'd been out. The tiny ring echoed like a church bell beneath the bridge.
“You answer it,” Mole growled, “or I break it.” The lizard man still had a lit cigar clamped between his teeth and had apparently managed to stay awake through Alec's nap.
Quickly, Alec fished the phone out of his pocket and punched the button on the start of the second ring. “What?” he asked.
“Anything?”
Max's hushed voice. She'd be at Gas Works Park, with the others.
“No,” he said, but looked to Mole for confirmation. With a derisive snort, the lizard man nodded—nothing had happened. “How about you?”
“Nobody,” she said. “And they're overdue.”
“Well, they'd stop here first, surely—to deposit their hostage.”
“You'd think. But Joshua's stood ground while I've roved the area—nobody sniffin', nothing.”
“What's your read, Max?”
“Either something's gone wrong, or the Furies are playing some new game.”
“Hate when that happens . . . Maybe they're just waiting for you to leave.”
“Nope,” she said. “I got an A-plus in recon. Trust me, they're not here. And that bag's just sittin' there—even the bugs aren't goin' near it.”
“Not good, Max.”
“Almost two hours after sunup and nothing—something has definitely gone wrong.”
The bag she referred to was a leather valise they had packed with a cake of bricks and newspaper, under a frosting of smaller bills. If anybody picked the thing up, it'd weigh enough to pass for four million dollars, and a casual opening would reveal money on top. Only a more aggressive search would reveal the ploy.
But from what Max was saying, no one seemed interested enough to even look and see if they were being ripped off.
“We need to make a move,” Alec said, surprised that Mole had let him sleep this long without kicking him. “Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“Any ideas, Max?”
“. . . I think we should visit the Furies' home.”
“The four of us . . . just drop by?”
“That's the plan, Alec.”
“And you say my plans suck.”
“You up for it?”
“Yeah. No problem.”
“Sit tight. Fill Mole in, and Joshua and me, we'll be right over—then we'll blaze.”
Gunning her Ninja, Max flew through the open gate of Lakeview Cemetery, Joshua clinging on behind her, hanging on with just his left hand, the valise full of bricks, newspapers, and a few dollars swinging from his right hand.
On Alec's motorcycle, the handsome X5 and a lizard-faced passenger were trailing a bike length behind. The engines roared throatily as they cut across the lawn away from the paved road. Though the road sliced through the cemetery and ended near the Furies' HQ, Max didn't want to take the direct approach. The Furies would have numbers, so that meant it was important that the transgenics have surprise on their side.
Immediately, as arranged, the speed on both bikes was cut and their engine roar settled into a humming purr.
Max made a quick hand signal and Alec peeled off to the right, his bike gliding across the grass, in and around gravestones, Mole looking vaguely disgusted having to hang onto the X5. Max and Joshua took off to the left, also keeping the speed and engine sound minimal. The idea was to come at the Furies' HQ from two sides.
The HQ had at one time been a mausoleum constructed after the Pulse, not far from the graves of Bruce and Brandon Lee. Max had actually visited the graves before, not long after she'd come to Seattle. The graves had reminded her of the old days, back at Mann's Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, living with the Clan, with her mentor Moody and the young man named Fresca. Back then, Moody would run movies in the theater from time to time. One had been this really cool kung fu flick called Enter the Dragon, and had starred Bruce Lee.
She had seen the late kung fu star's son Brandon in a movie called The Crow, but that had been on a cheesy video player with a bad tape. Before the Furies took over, the mausoleum HQ had been that of an Asian street gang called the Crows, so-called in honor of the late Brandon; but Badar Tremaine's forces had wiped them out, six or seven years ago.
The mausoleum stood maybe fifteen feet tall and was at least twenty-five yards long and almost as wide—suitable to house the remains of a small town.
And even that had not been big enough for the Furies, the cement wall at one end serving as a brace for a lean-to extension that had been cobbled on. The doors at either end were wooden now, the weathered coffins that had formerly been stored inside now stacked outside like so much cord wood.
Within seconds of each other the two motorcycles arrived on either side of the mausoleum. Max kicked her cycle to loud, throbbing life and Alec followed suit. Their timing synchronized, the two motorcycles broke down the doors at either end of the mausoleum as they crashed splinteringly through.
Barely inside, both Max and Alec braked, burning rubber, screeching to a halt; they laid their bikes down, the four of them rolling off and coming up in combat stances, ready for action, expecting anything . . .
Just about anything.
They froze.
All around them, Furies lay dead.
Blood painted the walls in vivid splashes, recent enough to still be a dripping red; the floor, the meager furnishings, dribbled gore. Tables and chairs were overturned, TVs smashed,
and a long wood bar that ran along one wall was pocked with bullet marks.
Max and her transgenic brothers had come prepared for a fight; what they found instead was a massacre.
Bodies lay everywhere, sprawled in various postures of surprised violent death—shot, stabbed, slashed. Whoever or whatever had done this had accomplished it with great speed and no mercy. Easily a hundred of the Furies, probably every member, had been slaughtered, and from the looks of things, they hadn't had time to put up much of a fight.
This was not the aftermath of a battle. Some spent cartridges lay scattered around, but any sign of casualties the Furies might have inflicted on their opponents were gone, if there ever had been any.
“God,” Mole said.
“Damn,” Alec said.
“Logan,” Max said, the word spoken with the reverence of a prayer, edged with the sort of sorrow that had been present so often at graveside services nearby.
Without being told, Alec and Mole went back to the doors on either end, standing guard in case whoever committed this carnage was nearby or planned a return. Max and Joshua crept through the roomful of bodies, walking gingerly, as if to not wake them, and searched for Logan.
Max recognized members of the kidnap team among the corpses. The night of Logan's kidnapping, they had presented little trouble to her, until the Tazer came out of nowhere; but whoever did this was working with heavier artillery. It was plain to see that not only had the bangers been shot to death, someone had obviously walked along strafing the bodies with automatic weapons fire, just making sure. Others had been sliced and diced—machetes, she thought—like so much meat being prepared for a giant cannibal's stew.
Amid all of this Max walked, terrified that she would find Logan among the dead . . .
. . . though if she found him, at least, she would know. How terrible not to find him, and never to know what happened to him . . .
From the other side of the room, Joshua said, “Logan not here, Little Fella.”
Though he kept his voice low, it boomed off the mausoleum walls and seemed to echo in her skull. She thought that gunfire in here, this much gunfire, would have sounded like the end of the world—reports rocketing around the walls, bouncing this way and that.
“Sad,” Joshua was saying. “So sad.”
They had come to fight these Furies, to kill if necessary; but to see this massacre was to pity the victims in death, whoever, whatever, they might have been in life.
Her half of the room revealed no sign of Logan either, but there was the cutout in the far wall that led to the wooden add-on they had seen from the outside. As she approached the shadowy hole, Max's heart pounded and she wondered if the others could hear it, echoing off the blood-spattered walls. Beads of sweat pearled her forehead, even though it was still cold both outside and in this unheated mausoleum.
There was light beyond the opening, but she couldn't make anything out yet, and no one had called out to them; of course, Logan might have been tied up, and gagged . . . But if so, the marauders who'd committed this atrocity would hardly have spared him.
Still, this was the last possible place—if Logan was here, he would be in that add-on room. Willing herself to move forward, she took a few steps, her feet feeling impossibly heavy, as if she were turning into a stone gargoyle to adorn this cemetery.
And as she slipped through the hole cut in the wall, she could see one person sitting at a table, a man, his back to her.
She felt a snake of revulsion slither in her gut as she realized that the body was headless.
The room was small, barely ten feet across, with a square table in the center, one wooden chair drawn up to it, holding the seated body—not Logan, apparently, as the corpse wore the black T-shirt and jeans of a Fury—three matching chairs scattered on the floor. In the corner, a small TV had been smashed.
Moving forward, she looked over the shoulder of the body at the table and saw what was presumably the body's former head on a plate in front of it, the face recognizable as that of Badar Tremaine, leader of the Furies.
Despite herself, she let out a sigh of relief as she confirmed that Logan was nowhere in the room. If he wasn't here, he might still be alive somewhere.
Taking another look at Tremaine's head on the plate, she noticed an object sticking out from his mouth. Though not squeamish, Max shivered, and buried the impulse to turn and flee, instead going over to the detached head for a closer look at the protruding object.
Whatever it was, it was metallic and not very large, the cylindrical end sticking out like a stiff, silver tongue.
Slowly, as the gang leader's dead eyes stared at her, she withdrew the metal object from the slack mouth . . .
. . . a minicassette recorder.
The other three entered the small room, Mole first, saying, “Doesn't look like anyone's coming back. When you already killed everything that moves, a return trip's kinda pointless.”
“Fubar,” Joshua breathed, looking at the body.
It was a word Alec had taught him and Max didn't care for.
Alec was at Max's side. He said, “Badar Tremaine—well, he was the head man.”
Max shot him a glare.
“Sorry,” he said. “Couldn't help myself . . . I mean, he is sitting at the head of the table.”
Joshua grabbed Alec's arm. “No jokes. That headless man . . . what if it was Logan?”
“But it isn't,” Alec said, glancing over at the object in Max's hand. “What have you got there?”
On Badar's T-shirt, she wiped saliva and blood from the little machine. “Tape recorder.”
“Press ‘play' yet?”
Alec, Joshua, and Mole were gathered around her, near the table with their headless host. She looked from face to face among her three friends.
“Go on,” Mole said. “Maybe it's a message.”
She let out some air, and pushed the Play button.
“Hello, 452.”
They all recognized the voice instantly.
“I knew,” Ames White's vaguely processed voice said from the tiny machine in her palm, “you would never just deliver the ransom and pay to get your friend back. You're not built like that. You can never play by the rules, can you, 452? I can relate.”
The urge to throw the recorder off the wall was nearly overwhelming.
“That's why I employed the Furies, to acquire my hostage. I knew you would track them down. And, of course, they couldn't be left alive to talk to anyone about certain arrangements I made with them . . . So as you can see, I made new arrangements with them, this evening.”
She glanced down at the unseeing eyes of Badar Tremaine.
“The media might even get the story that vengeful transgenics killed the whole gang. I'm fairly sure some good citizen will pass that information along. After all, the raid on Logan Cale's apartment was close to Terminal City, and the victim was . . . is . . . a friend of yours.”
Joshua growled low and deep in the back of his throat.
“Now that we know the lengths you'll go to in order to get your friend back—and now that your friend is in my personal custody—it's important that we talk about the real ransom.”
“Bastard's been playin' us since jump,” Alec said.
“You know what I want, 452. Think.”
As if answering the voice, Max shook her head. This had gone from bad to much, much worse . . .
“This is your karma . . . You New Age Terminal City trolls believe in that nonsense, right? You see, you took my son from me. So I took Logan Cale from you.”
“Damnit,” Max said, her voice hard and cold.
“You want your friend back,” White's voice said. “Well, I want Ray back . . . Getting the idea?”
“Yes, you son of a bitch,” she said. “Yes.”
“Stay by your cell phone, 452. I'll be in touch. You have three days to comply, or your friend dies. Oh, and, uh . . . Merry Christmas.”
Chapter Seven
* * *
DEATH RAY
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
DECEMBER 22, 2021
A woman named Wendy Olsen had been looking for her son.
The boy had been kidnapped, and Mrs. Olsen came to Eyes Only for help in finding—and retrieving—young Ray. Logan's investigation was already under way when he brought Max aboard, sharing with her the shocking revelation that the boy they were looking for was the son of NSA agent Ames White.
For several years various Seattle citizens—disenfranchised from city, state, and federal governments that seemed on the one hand uncaring and on the other corrupt—had turned to Eyes Only, seeking underground aid in situations like these. Logan would do his utmost to resolve such problems, utilizing his operatives, and for almost two years Max had been his chief field agent.
And Max and Logan had indeed—true to form—rescued the boy, Ray, carrying the child away from Brookridge Academy, a private school that served as a front for the cult Ames White served, the so-called “Familiars.”
Ray had been weak—the result of a typically twisted snake cult ritual that involved slicing the boy's arm with a sword dipped in venomous blood—but White's son had somehow survived the attentions of the Familiars. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for his mother.
When she went to the town of Willoughby, in search of her missing son, Wendy Olsen White was murdered . . . by her own husband.
In the end, Logan had located Wendy's sister, and Ray had been sent to live with her. Logan—using his seemingly endless string of Eyes Only operatives, a modern day underground railroad—had helped the pair vanish, their whereabouts unknown even to Max.
Now the only option open to Max was to play White's game—to retrieve and deliver his son to him; and walk right into a trap. There'd be no fooling Ames White; she might have duped the Furies, but White and his snake cult associates—demented and deluded though they might be—were as shrewd as they were smart.
And she knew they were as vicious as they were smart—just ask the Furies . . . try using a Ouija board . . .
She knew damn well there would be no hostage-for-hostage trade: end game for the snake cult would include her death. That much had been made clear to Max in her previous encounters with the bizarre cult.
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