“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.