Max Collins - After the Dark

... a minicassette recorder.

The other three entered the small room, Mole first, saying, “Doesn’t look like anyone’s coming back. When you already killed everything that moves, a return trip’s kinda pointless.”

“Fubar,” Joshua breathed, looking at the body.

It was a word Alec had taught him and Max didn’t care for.

Alec was at Max’s side. He said, “Badar Tremaine — well, he was the head man.”

Max shot him a glare.

“Sorry,” he said. “Couldn’t help myself... I mean, he is sitting at the head of the table.”

Joshua grabbed Alec’s arm. “No jokes. That headless man... what if it was Logan?”

“But it isn’t,” Alec said, glancing over at the object in Max’s hand. “What have you got there?”

On Badar’s T-shirt, she wiped saliva and blood from the little machine. “Tape recorder.”

“Press ‘play’ yet?”

Alec, Joshua, and Mole were gathered around her, near the table with their headless host. She looked from face to face among her three friends.

“Go on,” Mole said. “Maybe it’s a message.”

She let out some air, and pushed the Play button.

“Hello, 452.”

They all recognized the voice instantly.

“I knew,” Ames White’s vaguely processed voice said from the tiny machine in her palm, “ you would never just deliver the ransom and pay to get your friend back. You’re not built like that. You can never play by the rules, can you, 452? I can relate. ”

The urge to throw the recorder off the wall was nearly overwhelming.

“ That’s why I employed the Furies, to acquire my hostage. I knew you would track them down. And, of course, they couldn’t be left alive to talk to anyone about certain arrangements I made with them... So as you can see, I made new arrangements with them, this evening. ”

She glanced down at the unseeing eyes of Badar Tremaine.

“The media might even get the story that vengeful transgenics killed the whole gang. I’m fairly sure some good citizen will pass that information along. After all, the raid on Logan Cale’s apartment was close to Terminal City, and the victim was... is... a friend of yours. ”

Joshua growled low and deep in the back of his throat.

“Now that we know the lengths you’ll go to in order to get your friend back — and now that your friend is in my personal custody — it’s important that we talk about the real ransom.”

“Bastard’s been playin’ us since jump,” Alec said.

“ You know what I want, 452. Think. ”

As if answering the voice, Max shook her head. This had gone from bad to much, much worse...

“ This is your karma... You New Age Terminal City trolls believe in that nonsense, right? You see, you took my son from me. So I took Logan Cale from you. ”

“Damnit,” Max said, her voice hard and cold.

“You want your friend back,” White’s voice said. “ Well, I want Ray back... Getting the idea? ”

“Yes, you son of a bitch,” she said. “Yes.”

“Stay by your cell phone, 452. I’ll be in touch. You have three days to comply, or your friend dies. Oh, and, uh... Merry Christmas.”

A woman named Wendy Olsen had been looking for her son.

The boy had been kidnapped, and Mrs. Olsen came to Eyes Only for help in finding — and retrieving — young Ray. Logan’s investigation was already under way when he brought Max aboard, sharing with her the shocking revelation that the boy they were looking for was the son of NSA agent Ames White.

For several years various Seattle citizens — disenfranchised from city, state, and federal governments that seemed on the one hand uncaring and on the other corrupt — had turned to Eyes Only, seeking underground aid in situations like these. Logan would do his utmost to resolve such problems, utilizing his operatives, and for almost two years Max had been his chief field agent.

And Max and Logan had indeed — true to form — rescued the boy, Ray, carrying the child away from Brookridge Academy, a private school that served as a front for the cult Ames White served, the so-called “Familiars.”

Ray had been weak — the result of a typically twisted snake cult ritual that involved slicing the boy’s arm with a sword dipped in venomous blood — but White’s son had somehow survived the attentions of the Familiars. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for his mother.

When she went to the town of Willoughby, in search of her missing son, Wendy Olsen White was murdered... by her own husband.

In the end, Logan had located Wendy’s sister, and Ray had been sent to live with her. Logan — using his seemingly endless string of Eyes Only operatives, a modern day underground railroad — had helped the pair vanish, their whereabouts unknown even to Max.

Now the only option open to Max was to play White’s game — to retrieve and deliver his son to him; and walk right into a trap. There’d be no fooling Ames White; she might have duped the Furies, but White and his snake cult associates — demented and deluded though they might be — were as shrewd as they were smart.

And she knew they were as vicious as they were smart — just ask the Furies... try using a Ouija board...

She knew damn well there would be no hostage-for-hostage trade: end game for the snake cult would include her death. That much had been made clear to Max in her previous encounters with the bizarre cult.

Still, she figured they would have to do whatever White asked; her only hope to save Logan — and herself, and the lives of those helping her, and the boy Ray, for that matter — would be to walk into the lion’s den and beard the bastards.

The problem was, she wasn’t sure how to accomplish the vital first step — finding the boy Logan had so skillfully hidden away, a step that Ames White no doubt assumed she would be able to accomplish easily. Without Logan to help her, Max’s efforts would be blocked by Eyes Only’s own security measures, designed to protect the boy from White and the Familiars.

In the kidnappings she and Logan had thwarted together, Logan found the clues, and Max grabbed up the missing person — that was the program, that was how it had always gone down.

Now, with Logan MIA — in fact, with Logan one of two key MIAs — she was left to her own devices to locate the other missing person, Ray, and secure him...

And it wasn’t like Ray was a normal missing person. Logan — a master at concealing people, at giving them new starts — had made the boy disappear, so that he would never be found even by his own father and White’s formidable network of NSA and snake cult allies. She’d be finding a needle in a haystack — only she didn’t even know where the damn haystack was.

They left the carnage of the cemetery behind — should the cops show, they didn’t want to seed the press for another transgenics media storm — and repaired to a small café. Nestled in a back booth, over the warmth of hot steaming cups of coffee, the four comrades sat — Joshua, Alec, and Mole watching her, waiting for her decision.

She was their leader, and they would follow her through the gates of Hell, if necessary; she knew as much, and she appreciated it... and this time, the gates of Hell were exactly where she’d be taking them.

On her cell phone, Max called Dix and quickly laid out the situation.

“Who do you want me to kill?” Dix asked.

“We’ll get to that,” she said. “Right now, it’s your brain I need.”