Max Collins - Skin Game

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.”

“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.”