The old boy certainly wasn’t half bad to look at; she wondered if she were possibly viewing a snapshot of Logan at that age. That such a thought would form again, unbidden, was a positive sign... Maybe she was getting past the Seth thing. Maybe Logan Cale was worth growing old with, after all.
Assuming he wasn’t already dead...
Dusk was deepening to night and they hadn’t heard from Alec yet; she couldn’t wait any longer. The ransom note had shown up at Terminal City early this afternoon — delivered by a Jam Pony messenger, no less — and Max now knew the depth of their trouble. The message — addressed to Max, boldly, arrogantly signed “The Furies” — said that if she didn’t bring $4 million to Gas Works Park tomorrow at dawn, Logan would die.
It troubled Max that the note had been addressed to her — they knew of her friendship with Logan, knew it ran deep enough to convince them she could raise this fortune, either from the Cole family or by Logan trusting her with his finances.
Four million or forty million, what was the difference? Without Lyman Cale, she had no chance of saving Logan. His cousin Bennett — now in charge of Jonas’s millions — would just as soon see Logan dead as alive. At least Jonas had liked having Logan around just to have someone to persecute; Bennett didn’t even care enough about Logan to hate him — all Bennett knew was one less cousin meant a larger stake for him, when the Jonas Cale fortune eventually got split up.
The night was clear but cold as Max eased the “borrowed” boat out into the water. She was amazed at how easily she slipped back into her old ways. Telling herself that it was for Logan helped muffle the micron of guilt, but in truth she felt comfortable in the role Moody had schooled her in. In some dark part of her, it felt good, breaking the rules again.
The borrowed boat had a big outboard; while she didn’t know much about the difference between boat motors, she was well-acquainted with the concept of “bigger means faster.” Manticore had also trained her to operate most any motorized vehicle, so racing across Puget Sound in someone else’s speedboat was no prob.
The sound lay quiet and glassy smooth, and Max’s new toy skimmed along the surface at just over thirty miles per hour. That might be too fast, given that it was dark and she didn’t know for sure what lay in her path; but she was anxious to make contact with the elder Cale, and the thought of Logan’s dilemma drove her mercilessly.
So she dropped the hammer and roared through the night. The moon was a big bright white ball, a hole in the sky letting in light that made this leg of the journey easy; but it would provide more illumination than she would want, on landing.
Still a mile away, she cut the engine, anchored the speedboat, and took a smaller rubber raft the rest of the way. Dragging the raft up onto the shore, she was surprised that there seemed to be no walls around Lyman Cale’s compound. The old man owned the whole island, and the mansion and two guest houses were the only ones on the tiny private piece of land. A massive forest made up the perimeter, but she knew — from her net research — the mansion sat in the middle.
Slow-scanning the woods in front of her, she looked for lasers, electronic eyes, dogs, anything... and found nothing. Moving carefully, she started inland. By her estimate, she was only about a quarter mile from the big house when she saw the first hint of security — a guard dressed in black leading a Doberman around the perimeter. The guard had on TAC team fatigues, including a balaclava that covered most of his face and a Kevlar vest, and he carried an automatic weapon that hung loosely from his right shoulder.
Max’s enhanced night vision gave her an advantage over both man and beast, but when the dog’s nose went into the air, and the animal’s head cocked in her direction, she knew she had trouble.
“What is it, boy?” the guard asked.
The guard was about to key the mike attached to the left shoulder of his uniform when Max put on a burst of speed and outflanked the pair. She came right up behind the guard, tapped him on the shoulder, and when he turned, she smiled pleasantly at him.
This unexpected behavior coming from an attractive young woman froze the guard, and he said only, “Huh?”
Or at least that was all he got out before she kicked him in the groin, a dry heave of pain groaning up out of him as he doubled over: Before that groan could turn into something louder, Max delivered an uppercut that lifted the man off his feet and deposited him in an unconscious heap next to the surprised dog, which had backed up at this blur of movement.
Now, however, baring its teeth, the Doberman prepared to launch itself at Max; before it could, however, she yanked a baseball-size hunk of hamburger from her pocket and lobbed it to the dog, who caught it in mid-flight, swallowed the thing practically whole. Chewing, licking his chops, the creature took a menacing step toward her, eyeing her — giving Max a chance to toss him some more burger before taking care of business.
The Doberman made several slow threatening steps her way when it began to wobble, went glassy-eyed, then dropped onto its stomach, as if the urge for a nap had overridden everything.
Which it had.
The Doberman began to snore as Max bent over the prone figure of the guard. The pill in the center of the hamburger had been a concoction courtesy of Luke, who had promised that the dog would be having happy puppy dreams for the rest of the night, no harm, no foul. That was good, because Max preferred not to harm animals, with the occasional exception of humans.
Of course, hamburger — any meat, for that matter — was a black market extravagance in today’s third world economy; still, Max felt this had been money well spent. “Stuff costs an arm and a leg,” a protesting Dix had said. Maybe so, but — from the look of that slumbering Doberman — thanks to Luke, at least the limbs lost tonight weren’t hers.
She lifted the guard’s radio and clipped the mike to her own shoulder; couldn’t hurt for her to hear what was going on around her.
Continuing on, she repeated the procedure with three more perimeter teams, her kicks taking out the guards, Luke’s special meatballs downing the dogs. She had just taken out the fourth — and what she figured to be the final outside man-and-dog guard team — when the radio crackled to life.
“Post One — report.”
Max said nothing — even if she’d known what to say, her unfamiliar female voice would have sent up a red flag. Knowing full well “Post One” was not going to be answering his page anytime soon, she approached the big house, a three-story replica of a plantation mansion out of the Civil War South. Though she’d never been east of the Mississippi in her life, Max had received Manticore training that included segments on Sherman’s march to the sea, with an emphasis on the folly of pitched battles such as Gettysburg; so she recognized an antebellum mansion when she saw one.
“Post One — report! Johnson, you there?”
Only silence greeted the dispatcher.
“Post Two, check on Post One... Post Two?”
More crackly silence.
She heard the dispatcher mutter, “What the hell?” Then a fire-type clanging alarm went off and light flooded the yard from the top of every building.
Max ducked into a hedge near the front door, getting out of sight. The lights had turned the front lawn into instant noon. She peeked out from the bushes to see half a dozen security men come pouring out the front door. The first four looked like your average rent-a-goons, but the last two were broad-shouldered, muscular paramilitary types. Both had close-cropped hair, one blond, one brown, and wore TAC fatigues like the others, only on these guys the clothes looked different, as if they knew what all the nasty toys were for. The clanging alarm stopped as they took off toward the water, running in two-man combat formation. By comparison, the rest of the crew seemed to be auditioning for a Chinese fire drill.