Skin Game Read online

  Dix asked, “Where d’ya know him from, Kade?”

  “Not the streets—Manticore. His name was Stoop. He was a squad leader. If he got his nose broken, it’s ’cause he let somebody do it.”

  They all traded looks, obviously wondering why these “transgenics” would invade the school . . . and, beyond that, why one of their own would fight them.

  Were the two Alec and Joshua?

  On the tube, the janitor was being interviewed by Petty.

  Rhoades was saying, “I don’t think they wanted trouble.”

  “Then how do you explain them breaking your nose?”

  Shrugging, Rhoades said, “They were scared. I discovered them in my supply room—probably just looking for stuff, you know.”

  “You’re being heralded as a hero,” Petty said, “for saving these children.”

  “I don’t think—”

  Petty turned toward the camera. “There you have it—a pair of transgenics, chased off in fright by a grade school janitor.”

  Max shook her head. This just kept getting better and better, didn’t it?

  “Keep a tape of that garbage,” she told the monitoring crew. “But for now, I’ve seen enough.”

  She was on her way out of the room when the phone rang. She answered with her standard, “Go for Max.”

  “It’s me,” Logan said in her ear, and just the sound of his voice soothed her.

  “Hi. Anything?”

  “I may be making some progress. Can you stop by?”

  “New place?”

  “Yeah. Now would be good.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  She hung up, relieved at the thought of being in Logan’s presence. This leadership gig was the pits. . . .

  Walking toward the back fence of Terminal City, she watched as the community settled in for another night. A helicopter thrummed overhead, its searchlight probing their home like a prison beam searching for escaping prisoners; but at least it kept moving, stopping to hover for only a moment, at various points. The tension level in their toxic little town was high enough already, without choppers and firebombs, and she had to wonder if Clemente’s control outside the fence was any less tenuous than her own, inside.

  Here and there she saw transgenics bedding down. Some, she knew, like Dix, had real beds and real rooms, however shabby they might be; many, though, had only whatever scraps they could make into a bed, with a hollowed-out building to serve as shelter. Sooner or later this situation had to break. Other than Clemente, though, no one on the outside seemed interested in talking. She could only guess the authorities—and this included Ames White, but also more responsible types, without snake-cult hidden agendas—were patiently waiting to starve the transgenics out.

  That was a plus, since the outside world was unaware of their Medtronics tunnel supply line.

  On the minus side, her slender grip on the Terminal City reins seemed to be slipping. If she couldn’t even get her closest comrades—Alec and Joshua—to follow her orders, how did she expect to get any of the others to?

  Arriving at Medtronics, she slipped through the door, down the stairs, and into the tunnel. She trotted easily to the other end, went upstairs and found Logan bent over his computer, hard at work.

  The office looked only slightly neater than the last time she’d been here, and a third desk had already been added to the cluttered two. Three different monitors displayed images, and Logan seemed to be tasking between all three.

  “Hey, you,” she said.

  “Hey,” he answered, his attention still on the computer stuff, but just enough warmth in that one word to make her feel better. The disappointment of Joshua and Alec’s betrayal might have degenerated into self-pity, had she not known that Logan was still there, steadfast.

  She tried to look over his shoulder without getting too close. If she leaned in to read, and even a stray virus-infected hair touched him . . . well, she didn’t want to think about that. “Progress, you said?”

  Logan nodded but kept working. After a few seconds of punching keys, the image on the middle monitor changed. “No kidding,” he said to the monitor.

  “What?”

  He glanced at her. “That tape you gave me of you and Clemente?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Clemente talked about prints in the computer coming up as a shoe salesman on the skinner’s first victim.”

  “That’s what he told me,” Max confirmed with a nod, “but also that something was hinky with the ID.”

  “Hinky is right,” Logan said, tapping some more keys.

  “Don’t tease—what do you have?”

  “The victim’s name, according to the fingerprints, is Henry Calvin.”

  “Okay.”

  “Only, the shoe store where Henry supposedly worked went out of business six months ago.”

  “Making the late Henry an unemployed shoe salesman.”

  “Well, his being out of work might explain why he lived on a vacant lot—’cause that’s what his address checks out as.”

  “Sure about this?”

  He gave her the “puh-leese” look.

  “How’d you do that?”

  Small shrug. “It was easy, really. The file was designed to stand up to a cursory viewing. The government, as usual, never thinks that anyone will dig any further.”

  Max took a step closer, still careful to not get too near. “So the guy’s ID is fake.”

  “And if he’s a fake shoe salesman, in a government file—what is he in real life?”

  “Someone who works for a government agency—a covert one, maybe?”

  Logan swung around in the chair. “I think that’s a reasonable assumption.”

  Excited, Max said, “The NSA, then—White!”

  He favored her with a grin. “Interesting thing, though. I hacked into the NSA files and there’s no file for Henry Calvin.”

  “Why, does that surprise you?”

  “Not really—so I kept digging, and it turns out that on the same day that Henry Calvin died, an NSA agent named Calvin Hankins retired.”

  “Retired?”

  “Yeah . . . and another odd thing is that his partner, only twenty-seven years old, left the NSA the same day, on full disability.”

  “You mean, he retired at age twenty-seven? Disability for what?”

  “Good questions, and maybe we should ask the agent himself.” Logan swung back around and tapped the keys some more.

  A picture popped up on the screen. The man was young, slender, good-looking in a nondescript way, with dark hair swept straight back and brown eyes that made him look wiser than his years.

  “Sage Thompson,” Logan said by way of introduction. “Hankins’ partner.”

  “It would seem,” Max said, “a reasonable assumption that his leaving the NSA had something to do with his partner’s death.”

  “Maybe he had a full-bore mental breakdown over his partner being murdered and skinned . . . maybe this all went down when the two were out in the field together.”

  “Meaning Thompson knows something about that first murder.”

  “Again—a reasonable assumption.”

  “Any idea where we can find him?”

  “He’s in the phone book,” Logan said.

  Max smirked darkly. “That’s encouraging. With White involved, the guy could be on the bottom of Puget Sound.”

  “I called his house and got no answer. Then I got Asha to do a drive-by, and she said the place was vacant . . . and there’s a For Sale sign in the yard.”

  Asha Barlow, a friend of Logan’s, ran with the revolutionary S1W, an underground cell almost as wrapped up in saving the world as Eyes Only. Despite her initial jealousy of Asha, Max had learned to trust the woman and knew that if Asha said Thompson was a ghost, a ghost he was.

  “You’ll find him for me, Logan? You know, my hands are tied here. I promised Clemente I’d stay put.”

  “I’m looking,” he assured her. “I’ll do what I can.”

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nbsp; “Track him down, get whatever you can—using Asha’s a good idea, with me on the sidelines. We’re under enough pressure here without Ames White making a transgenic poster child out of a serial killer.”

  “What if that serial killer really is a transgenic?” Logan asked.

  “Then we’re going to need all the media magic Eyes Only can muster.”

  Her cell phone rang again.

  “You’re a popular girl,” Logan said.

  “I shouldn’ta listed myself with that dating agency.” After the second ring, she punched the Send button. “Go for Max.”

  Dix’s voice blurted, “The cop’s back at the fence! You better get up here. He doesn’t look happy.”

  Shaking her head, she said, “On my way.”

  “What?” Logan asked.

  “Clemente’s dropped by—seen the news lately?”

  Logan nodded. “I figured that was just typical Ames White disinformation.”

  “I hope to God it is—Alec and Joshua went over the fence this morning.”

  “Oh hell. . . .”

  Max let out a sigh that started at her toes. “No one knows why. And we’ve heard nothing from them. Can you beat that, Logan? I ask this band of outcasts for one thing—stay put till this is negotiated—and two of my closest confederates ignore my request.”

  Pushing away from the computer, Logan said, “Leadership is getting someone to do what they don’t want to do—to achieve what they want to achieve.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Tom Landry.”

  Max just looked at him.

  “Football coach—Dallas Cowboys.”

  “If you say so. But by that yardstick, I failed.”

  “No—they probably failed you. But you also haven’t heard their side of it yet. And you owe them that much, right?”

  She said nothing at first, but as his eyes unrelentingly bore in on her, she finally said, “Right. . . . How do you stay so positive?”

  “Because the alternative is despair. And when that happens—the Ames Whites of the world win.”

  Max looked at him long and hard, knowing that her love for this man had blossomed from an admiration that somehow still grew.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I needed that. . . . Now I’ve really gotta go.”

  She didn’t want to leave Logan’s side, but she turned away and headed for the tunnel back to Terminal City.

  Clemente was waiting at the main gate when she got there and, what a shock! He looked pissed off . . .

  . . . not that she could really blame him, after the day’s fiascoes.

  “You took your sweet time,” he said, his voice edgy and cold.

  Max ran a hand over her face. “Ramon, I’d love to tell you that you’re my only problem right now . . . but you’re not.”

  He sucked in a breath, then nodded. “All right—I can accept that.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Come with me for a while,” he said.

  She smirked. “Yeah—right.”

  Clemente’s eyes locked with hers. “Trust is a two-way street, Max . . . and right now yours is looking like a dead end.”

  “Well, that’s cute, Ramon, but—”

  “I need to talk to you in a secure location. Can you appreciate that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Should I trust you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then are you willing to come with me, on the assurance that I’ll allow you to return to Terminal City?”

  “Yes,” she said, thinking that Clemente was living up to that Tom Landry definition of leadership damn well.

  Turning toward one of the security cameras, Max made several hand motions.

  “What was that about?” Clemente asked.

  “Just telling the gang what to do if I don’t come back.”

  The transgenic sentries, at her bidding, opened the gate for her.

  Clemente led Max through the blockade of squad cars, around the officers who glared at her, unmasked hatred in their eyes, and past the National Guard trucks, the troops scattered along the perimeter. Moments later she was following the detective into a seven-story office building.

  The first floor had an atrium lobby with a bank of three elevators to the left and, at the right, the restaurant that was their destination. Sitting in a booth next to a huge plate-glass window, Max could see the Terminal City main gate and the large military presence on this side of it.

  She wondered if part of the exercise was for her to see just what she and her people were up against.

  The restaurant itself was more like a lunch counter with a dozen booths lined around two outside walls. Back in the pre-Pulse days the place probably did great breakfast business as all the medtech people stopped in on their way to work. The back wall of the counter area was mostly a huge mirror surrounded by shelves that held coffee cups, water glasses, malt glasses, and sundae bowls. The red Formica counter held stainless steel napkin holders and sat in front of silver stools with red tops.

  It felt strange—comforting and a little surreal—to be out in the real world again.

  The booths were still comfy, the tan Naugahyde worn but clean. Usually open until eight or nine, the place had been commandeered—Clemente explained—as the officers’ mess during the siege. At the moment, other than one anxious-looking middle-age waitress, the place seemed vacant.

  Arriving with coffee, the waitress poured two cups, set one in front of each of them, then set the pot on the table too.

  When the waitress left quickly—too quickly—Max’s smile disappeared. “Secure location, huh?” she said, her voice cold. “Get ’em out.”

  “What?” Clemente seemed confused.

  “You get them out or I’ll do it for you.”

  “What are you—”

  “Cut the crap, Ramon. Show of trust? You’ve got three SWAT guys playing hide-and-seek behind the counter. I can see them in the damn mirror.”

  Reluctantly, he turned and saw what she meant. “All right—you heard her. Up and out.”

  The three SWAT team members stood, sweat beading their faces. Max wondered how long they’d been crammed down back there. For the first time today, she wanted to smile; but didn’t. The SWAT officers looked as irritated as they did embarrassed, and she saw no reason to antagonize them further.

  “The two in the men’s room, too.”

  The detective’s eyes were wide with amazement. “How did you—”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “You just told me.”

  He sat back in the booth, rubbed a hand over his face and let an exhausted smile leak out. “Johnson, Carlesimo,” he yelled, not bothering with the walkie. “Come on out!”

  Two more SWAT officers emerged from the men’s room, weapons in their hands, confusion on their faces.

  Clemente thumbed toward the door. “Go ahead—it’s okay. Everybody out.”

  The entire SWAT contingent trooped out, the waitress, too.

  “How the hell did you figure that?” the detective asked, his face betraying no trace of embarrassment at being caught with his pants around his ankles.

  “With only three behind the counter, you’d want backup. The only place out of sight was the bathrooms. You wouldn’t want me stumbling into your guys in the Women’s, so that meant they had to be in the Men’s.”

  “And you knew there’d be two because . . . ?”

  “SWAT guys can’t pee by themselves. You breed it into them. They’re like pigeons—they mate for life.”

  Clemente nodded. He seemed chagrined. “Neither one of us has been very trustworthy, have we?”

  “I’ve at least tried. I didn’t hide shooters behind a lunch counter. And that waitress is a policewoman, right?”

  His face turned stony. “Maybe—but you just helped two transgenics leave Terminal City.”

  “Not true.”

  “What about that elementary school? I know you’re monitoring the news—you saw it.”

  “I told you befo
re, Ramon, not all the transgenics in this city are inside our—”

  He cut her off. “But these two were. I got detailed descriptions from the school staff. These two I saw with you that first night, saw them myself.”

  “You could be wrong,” she tried feebly.

  “I might have believed that if we hadn’t taken them into custody earlier.”

  Detective Clemente tossed two photos on the table in front of her, and Max felt her stomach do a back flip—and land badly.

  She looked down at the pictures of Joshua and Alec—they were on a floor, their eyes closed, their faces peaceful.

  Trying not to betray the emotion she felt, she asked, “Are they dead?”

  Shaking his head, the detective said, “No—but they had a hell of a close call.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “They were attacked by someone who almost electrocuted them.”

  “What?”

  “With stun rods.”

  “Where did this happen? When?”

  “An apartment house of squatters in Queen Anne—over on Crockett.”

  Max tried to make sense of it, but couldn’t add anything up. “What were they doing there?”

  Clemente studied her. “You’re asking me?”

  “Yes I’m asking you!”

  “You really don’t know?”

  “They were gone for hours before I even found out they were on the outside.”

  “Are you saying they’d already gone over the fence when you told your people to stay put?”

  She drew a deep breath, let it out. “I wish I could tell you that. . . . No. They knew about my order.”

  Max stopped short of telling the cop that these were two of her closest comrades.

  “Shit,” Clemente was saying. “I was hoping you’d know something.”

  She glanced around. “Is this location really secure?”

  “Yes. Swept it for bugs this morning. And there’s been no sign of White or his people.”

  “Ramon—why were you hoping I would know something? You’re the one on the outside. What’s your problem?”

  The detective reached beside him, into a briefcase, and pulled out more pictures, arraying them around the table. Max looked them over as he spoke. “The stun rod you see in these photos . . .”