Max Collins - Before the Dawn

He would find out, when he caught up with them. He knew that someday he’d catch up with all of them.

Now, however, he was concerned that if the X5s were all communicating, maybe they were planning something, too. Maybe they were planning on catching up with him.

Shaking his head, trying to drive away the thought, he went back to work. But the notion that they might be after him as much as he was after them — that the children might come home to take revenge on their father — did not go away easily.

It never would.

Rain battered the windows of the high-rise condo, as Logan stared out into the night, seeing nothing but shapes and blurs.

Ten days had passed since something had gone terribly wrong at the Space Needle, and — despite what he could only assume were Manticore’s best efforts — Eyes Only had managed to piece together only a few details.

At first, Logan had thought Seth had double-crossed him, had taken the money and the masterpiece, and killed everyone, then disappeared across the Canadian border; that the boy’s homicidal streak had combined with greed and fear to get the best of the X5.

Then Logan had started thinking about what was wrong with that scenario. Sterling’s body had been found in the parking lot, yes; but there’d been no sign, living or dead, of a certain Korean art dealer, and a notorious, ambitious Russian street gang leader out of LA... though street rumors strongly suggested the presence of the latter.

And what of Sterling’s bodyguards? Logan knew Sterling wouldn’t so much as go to lunch without his muscle. Had there been a gun battle in which only Sterling himself had gone down? Or, if bodyguards had been combat fatalities (and with the X5, that would seem inevitable), why would Seth leave only Sterling’s corpse to be found?

And the more Logan mulled it over, the more absurd seemed the story of a billionaire’s suicide over business setbacks.

No mention, for example, was ever made of Sterling’s car — where was it? Had Seth stolen it? If so, why hadn’t it been found? The boy surely would have ditched it by now. And what if Seth hadn’t stolen the car? Obviously, Sterling wouldn’t have walked the twenty miles from his house to the Space Needle, just to jump off...

So — how had Sterling gotten there? Where was his driver?

Spurred by these inconsistencies, Logan had started digging into Sterling’s alleged financial setbacks. At first blush, every column seemed to add up; but the more Eyes Only looked, the more things appeared out of whack.

Stocks that Sterling lost money on had shown only marginal dips, far less significant than officially reported versions of the dead man’s deficits. Businesses that were ancillary to his Internet company had failed, but checking their track records for the previous six months revealed each had been financially healthy until the day of Sterling’s death.

So many people had their own financial woes in the economic minefield that was post-Pulse America that Logan knew no one would look very close at a calamity suffered by the wealthy likes of Jared Sterling. The country was in no mood to pity some billionaire who’d flung himself off a building at the first sign of trouble.

No, Logan told himself, no one would look into this... except Eyes Only. And Eyes Only knew somebody was cooking the books. The question was... who?

Logan had far more questions than he had answers, and whenever he spotted that pattern, his mind turned to a cover-up. And when he thought cover-up, he thought government, and when he thought government... in the case of a mysteriously missing X5, anyway... Eyes Only turned to Manticore.

He knew more about the organization now, but he still had few hard facts. Lydecker’s group did, however, seem to have the kind of major clout to pull off a cover-up of this magnitude — sweeping murders under the carpet, perhaps committing more murders in the process.

But the question that nagged him was...

... why would Manticore cover up what happened at the Needle?

For Logan, the inevitable and rather chilling answer was: because Manticore had caught up with Seth.

This gave Logan a whole new scenario for what may well have happened at the Space Needle on that rainy, windy night... a scenario even more disturbing than his previous theory.

Initially he’d thought that Manticore had somehow caught up with Seth at the Needle, and captured him. Only, if Lydecker had nabbed his renegade X5, and taken him away, why had Sterling also been killed?

Not just Sterling, but the other witnesses, the Korean, the bodyguards, and God alone knew how many other unrecorded victims...

But if Seth had been captured, alive... why kill anyone? These witnesses were involved in a crime; they could be coerced into silence, easily enough. Sterling, Kafelnikov, and the others would have no knowledge of Manticore and the X5 program; to them, Seth would merely be an extraordinary physical specimen.

The only answer Logan could come up with was that Manticore had tried to intercept Seth in the midst of the art deal going down... and Seth had not gone quietly into that rainy night, and Manticore had been forced to kill its wandering son.

In front of witnesses.

Who had to die, so Manticore could cover its tracks.

The cyberjournalist turned away from the window and moved aimlessly through his rich man’s apartment. He could not be sure this scenario was the correct one, but he felt certain he could not be far off the mark. And it made him feel sick...

Bitterly, Logan recalled how he’d lectured Seth about ethics, and yet... hadn’t he ruthlessly, recklessly used Seth?

No matter how noble Logan’s motives might be, in the end, he’d used the young X5 for his own purposes... which had gotten Seth killed.

If Logan Cale had helped Seth disappear, as the boy had requested, instead of recruiting him to help in the Eyes Only crusade, maybe the young man would be plotting his next revenge against Manticore from somewhere remote and safe, like the small town near the Arctic Circle where he’d sent the lab tech, Ben Daly.

Logan fell heavily onto his bed, on his back, and took off his glasses, resting them on the nightstand and closing his eyes, pressing a thumb and forefinger to the inner bridge of his nose.

Sleep would not come easily tonight... or any other night, not for a very long time. The guilt he felt for getting Seth killed would gnaw at him like a small, voracious animal, always there, chewing him up inside. When sleep did come, it would only be after considerable reflection on the memory of Seth, and speculation on whether Logan had himself tumbled into the ends-justify-the-means abyss.

A few months from now, Logan Cale — Eyes Only — would meet another X5, recognizing a young woman’s superior feats as those of a Manticore soldier... with the barcode to match.

But his sense of guilt over the death of one of her sibs would prohibit Logan from immediately confessing his “crime” to her. He would work with her, collaborate with her as he had with Seth, in the pursuit of Eyes Only’s crusade... though always filtered through what he had learned from his first unhappy experience with an X5.

The second X5 would be beautiful and trusting of him, and — as he fell in love with her — Logan’s secret would turn dark and even fester; but he wouldn’t tell her, for fear of driving her away.

It would be a very long time before she learned his secret... and when she finally did, it would come at a terrible time in both their lives, with a potentially damaging cost.