Before the Dawn

Chapter eight Art attack

Under the cover of a dense fog, Max made her way across Puget Sound in a small battered motorboat, the outboard chugging like a tired vacuum cleaner — she had “borrowed” it from a nearby group of similar craft designated for tourist rental, and a sleeker, faster number would have been preferable, of course... but the absence of such a boat might have raised too much attention.

Such tactics were second-nature to the X5-Unit. The night air was windless but cool, almost cold. Vashon Island, her destination — home of her target — lay somewhere in the mist off the port bow. In her black turtleneck, black slacks, and rubber-soled boots — and the new black leather vest with pockets for all her toys — she might have been (but was not) a commando mounting a one-woman raid. The ensemble had been expensive, but even a bandit could be stylin’, right?

That brittle chill in the air promised a deeper cold to come, and Max was glad she hadn’t had to swim. Just because she’d been genetically engineered to ignore such trivialities as freezing her buns off, she saw no reason to embrace hardship.

As the boat putt-putted into the fog, Max kept the throttle down on the motor, both for safety’s sake, on this pea-soupy night, and so as not to advertise her approach. It was possible there was security, in this wealthy part of the world, that she had not anticipated.

Some security she could anticipate. The Sterling home, a secluded multimillion-dollar castle on Vashon Island, sat on Southwest Shawnee Road behind a tall brick-and-concrete wall and would undoubtedly boast a state-of-the-art system. Main access to the island was provided by toll ferries — one running to the northern end, one to the southern tip — though Max knew they were not the only avenues of approach.

The precious object she sought might be covered by video, infrared, pressure alarms, and God only knew what else; but Max still had to smile. With no mines and no lasers trying to dissuade her, this time around, a simple home invasion would be a walk in the park... or anyway, cruise on the lake.

Even now, as she moved through the fog with single-minded purpose, Max remained in something of a personal fog. She was disappointed that her straight life had required this crooked side trip; she wished that the straight-and-narrow path could have stretched endlessly on for her...

She liked the idea of not being a burglar; even relished the notion of becoming just another straight in a world of straights. But she could only kid herself so long: she was not normal, not straight, merely hiding in that world, behind that facade.

Keeping gas in her Ninja, when fuel was over eight bucks a gallon, having the occasional meal and now and then a beer — and paying off-the-books rent, even with Kendra’s help — was about all her pitiful messenger wages covered. And a normal person — a straight person — could put up with that, make do with eking out an existence.

But when you added in buying tryptophan off the street, to control her seizures — one of the genetic drawbacks of her Manticore breeding — and in particular factored in funding her efforts to find Seth and her other siblings... well, maybe Max had known all along it was only a matter of time before she’d have to turn back to what Moody had taught her — maybe crime was her true calling.

She just wished it hadn’t come back around so soon.

In particular, keeping that private eye on the trail of Seth (and Hannah) would soon require more cash. Sure, Vogelsang may have been a trifle seedy, but Max needed that. An investigative agency higher up the food chain would have cost even more, might have lacked the P.I.’s usefully shady connections, and might be too tied in with the upper-echelon of the city, the very radar she was trying to fly under.

Since arriving in Seattle, Max had been reading the local papers on line, borrowing Kendra’s laptop, in an attempt to find out more about Eyes Only and, she hoped, Seth. But in more recent days, she had turned her Moody-trained eye toward potential scores, as well.

Frustratingly, she hadn’t learned anything substantial about Eyes Only — he was a “menace,” according to the mayor, and “awards for information leading to yada yada yada” — and had come up with zip on Seth, also... no coverage since that scrap with the cops that SNN had covered.

But she had stumbled across a story about a billionaire art collector — and political contributor — named Jared Sterling.

The focus of the recent press attention was Sterling’s latest “major” acquisition, an original Grant Wood painting called Death on the Ridge Road. Color photos showed Sterling in his late twenties, not bad looking... thick blond widow’s peaked hair with a well-trimmed beard, and piercing blue eyes, short, straight nose, thin decisive line of a mouth, turning up in a sly smile, in this photo, anyway.

Good looking and loaded, she’d thought as she stared the LCD screen; maybe I oughta give up burglary and go on the sugar-daddy hunt...

In several of the photos — shown next to Sterling — the painting was a vaguely cartoony illustration of an antique red truck bearing down on a black car turned sideways on a twisting road... painted in 1935, the cutline indicated.

Max didn’t know the painting, but — thanks to Moody’s schooling — she certainly knew Grant Wood, and recognized the distinctive style. And she knew as well that Wood works were fetching as much as ninety to a hundred thousand, now that so much Americana was being sold off.

Due to her particularly warped upbringing, Max had little sense of what America had once meant; but she knew Moody had been disturbed by such things. With the Baseball Hall of Fame sold and moved to Kyoto, Japan — not to mention the Statue of Liberty, purchased by the Sultan of Brunei — it was obvious that America (Moody would rant), and all her possessions, were for sale “to the highest goddamn bidder.”

To Max, however, what this painting meant was one thing: with proper fencing, it would cover Vogelsang’s expenses for a good, long while...

Max knew a great deal about art, artists, jewelry, antiques, collectibles... hell, she even knew the value of baseball cards. Moody had taught her well — not for altruistic reasons, or to broaden her human horizons (at least that had not been the main purpose).

Rather, her Fagin-like mentor knew that LA was a city of collectors, that even after the Pulse, and after the Big Quake, the town brimmed with valuable artifacts. Anticipating this — knowing the Chinese Clan might from time to time encounter any number of priceless objects on their various larcenous forays — Moody had made sure he was trained to recognize the finer things, and — as he was more and more not accompanying his kids on their capers — had methodically passed this knowledge along to Max.

A quick study, Max had devoured the material given her by Moody and sought out even more; she told herself her motivation was practical, but art nonetheless stirred something within her.

And it got to where she could walk into any antique shop in LaLa-land and know, in a glance, what was worth stealing and what wasn’t. She had known, just looking at it, that the Heart of the Ocean was no fake; the level of security alone would have been a tip-off, but the stone itself had spoken to Max, telling her it was the real deal.

She’d done her on-line homework on Jared Sterling, the painting, and the place where Sterling now kept it; much of the information could have been discovered by anyone with a Comsat link. But to a Manticore-trained hacker like Max, the cyberworld was an oyster coughing up one Internetted pearl after another...

Fittingly enough, it seemed Sterling had made his money in resurrecting the post-Pulse computer infrastructure. Almost singlehandedly, ol’ Jared had gotten the Internet up and running again, on the West Coast. Only a shadow of its former self in many areas at first, the Net was up, thanks to Sterling, and progress was quickly made.

Being in the right place, at the right time, with the right technology, had given Jared Sterling wealth comparable to the Bill Gates (pre-Pulse, before Gates went famously broke, of course). The hard-hit East Coast states had come sniffing around Sterling, trying to convince him to help them get back into the on-line world; but when they wouldn’t (or perhaps couldn’t) meet his price, and his terms, he’d left them on the outside looking in.

Sterling’s hard-nosed way of doing business — he was often a vicious target of liberal op-ed writers — meant that once the eastern states did come crawling back, to avail themselves of his product and his services, the price would double, if not triple. Sterling had a legendary mean streak, and the country’s major left-wing political magazine, Hustler, had not long ago made him their “Post-Pulse Predator of the Month,” accusing him of having no conscience.

“A lot of businessmen have been called sharks,” publisher Laurence Flynt III opined, “but Sterling is the real thing. Rumor has it, he even has slits tailored into in the back of his thousand-dollar suits, to accommodate his dorsal fin.”

Politics were a blur to Max, of course — all she knew was, Manticore was tied to the federal government; therefore, federal government... bad.

As for the painting, Max already knew Death on the Ridge Road had been created by Wood in 1935. What she found out online was that the work was oil on a Masonite panel, thirty-two by thirty-nine inches... which made it kind of big and unwieldy, for a cat burglar. But the paycheck would more than make up for the hassle factor.

In 1947, Cole Porter, a twentieth-century songwriter, (the online info listed several “famous” song titles, none of which rang a bell for Max) had given the painting as a gift to the Williams College Museum of Art in Massachusetts. After the Pulse, however, Death had disappeared for ten years before turning up, unharmed, on that easel next to Sterling.

The Net magnate only laughed when the media asked where he’d purchased the painting, and waved off any suggestion that it might be stolen property. Such ownership issues had become something of a moot point, after the Pulse, of course.

“I acquired it from a private collector,” was all he would say.

Although none of the media had made a thing out of it, two days after Sterling’s picture had appeared with the Grant Wood, a Miami collector named Johnson washed ashore in the Gulf of Mexico, the victim of an apparent boating accident.

This Max had not discovered online. In fact, that particular piece of information came courtesy of one of her other interests... when, at Jam Pony, as she and Original Cindy were waiting for their next assignment, an Eyes Only broadcast had interrupted SNN headline news on the break-area TV...

“This cable hack will last exactly sixty seconds,” the compelling voice said, as strong, clear eyes stared out from between bands of red and blue at the screen’s top and bottom, over which moving white letters (STREAMING FREEDOM VIDEO) were superimposed. “It cannot be traced, it cannot be stopped, and it is the only free voice left in this city.”

“’Cept for Original Cindy,” Original Cindy said.

Sketchy leaned in. “I dig this guy — he’s intense.”

“He’s just another scam artist,” Max said, pretending to be unimpressed.

“The mainstream media considers this small news. But Eyes Only wonders if there is a connection between the death of art dealer Harold Johnson and the very much alive-and-well art collector, Jared Sterling...”

After driving the boat onto the sand, sliding it up into some bushes, and securing it, the young woman in black made her catlike way up a rolling landscaped lawn to the wall of Jared Sterling’s estate. The fog hadn’t dissipated any, in fact was clinging to the earth like a cloud that lost its way; this would make Max harder to detect on video.

The wall — seven feet of brick topped with video cameras at every corner — proved to be little challenge to Max. She jumped to the top, easily got her footing, hopped down, and landed gently on more grass. Listening closely, she heard only silence, saw merely the general shape of the castlelike house in the fog.

Edging low along the wall, she avoided the cameras even though she felt sure they couldn’t catch her in this soup unless she was on top of one. It was a hundred yards across a pool-table green lawn — no slope, now, nice and flat — to the looming tan-brick house, and Max covered the turf quickly, making time an Olympic runner would have envied.

She had half expected dogs, but she sensed no animal presence: canines would have made her cat’s nose twitch. Her only other real fear... make that, apprehension... would be motion detectors that might trigger yard lights. Nothing. And the only lights on in the entire immense house were in two windows on the first floor in the back.

Security room, Max thought.

Up close, the three-story house seemed huge. An article in the on-line Architectural Digest said the place had seven bedrooms, two kitchens, and four bathrooms; a carriage house on the opposite side of the estate housed Sterling’s full-time ten-man security team (this fact she had hacked from the security company’s Web site, having learned their I.D. from info lifted from the Sterling Enterprises official Web site). Eight-foot evergreens stood between the windows like giant green sentinels. Centered on the near side of the house were French doors with two windows on either side, the whole thing wired to that security room in the back of the mansion.

She wouldn’t be going in this way.

Most home invaders avoided the one point of entry that wouldn’t start sirens screaming and or bells clanging, the moment it got popped: the front door.

That was only because most home invaders lacked Max’s singular skills.

Even here, behind the security-up-the-wazooed walls of a paranoid ka-zillionaire like Jared Sterling, Max would have a good thirty seconds to punch in the correct security code, before the ten-man team came scrambling after her. The keypad and its pin did make this a little tougher than taking candy from babies.

A little.

Four wide concrete stairs, with a huge concrete lion presiding over either side, led to a small landing in front of a formidable green door (it looked to Max like a big dollar bill) with a fancy brass knob and above that a centered, ornate brass knocker. Thankfully, the porch light was not on.

Large dark-curtained windows, each about thirty inches wide, bookended the door, and for a brief second Max considered just breaking one, climbing in, and kicking the shit out of those security boys... just for practice... just for fun...

Pleasing though the notion was, Max thought of Moody (“Only amateurs take unnecessary chances on a score”), and she withdrew her switchblade from her jacket pocket and eased its tip into the latch of the big green door. Less than ten seconds later, that oversized dollar bill yawned open, and Max silently started to count.

Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight...

She stepped inside the entryway, and was swallowed by the darkness of the slumbering house; her night vision would kick in soon. She folded the knife, slipped it away, the world in here so silent she heard only the ticking of a few clocks, her own breathing, and the counting in her head.

Twenty-five, twenty-four...

The keypad was on the wall to her right, each touchpad conveniently aglow, a red light shining in the right bottom corner, a green light in the left, with a copper-colored window to display the code above the numbered pad. She’d been correct: ten digits. Typically, a four-number code.

Twenty-two, twenty-one...

Her extraordinary eyesight determined which of these keys — four of them: 1, 3, 7, 8 — had wear; the code would be twenty-four combinations thereof...

Sixteen, fifteen, fourteen...

Her hands flew over the keyboard, her eyes, ears, and brain working in concert at a pace only nanoseconds slower than a computer.

Ten, nine...

Eleven combinations tried.

Eight, seven...

Seventeen tried.

Six, five, four...

Finally the correct combo kicked in and the red light blinked green. Thinking, It would have been more fun to just break a window, she smiled nonetheless with satisfaction, touched a button marked IN, and the light blinked back red.

The house was secure...

... at least that’s what Jared Sterling’s security staff would be thinking.

Max’s night vision was in full force now. She was in a foyer larger than most homes. The floor was marble (pale yellow in the photos on-line), the walls plaster, and the furnishings here, and elsewhere in the house, were Mission-style, some of them vintage pieces, including some Frank Lloyd Wright originals. She had entered a starkly beautiful, masculine world where every item, however mundane, might be a valuable object d’art.

Straight ahead a staircase wide enough to accommodate ten people abreast led to an upper floor where a long hallway would extend to either end of the house. Glancing up at the landing, Max could make out a couple of dark wood doors, ironically making the second floor, with its plaster walls, look like a hallway in an inexpensive hotel.

On the left side of the staircase, maybe halfway up, was a small wall-mounted video camera trained on the entryway.

To Max’s left and right, closed doors led to living rooms and billiards rooms, dens, and a few other rooms whose functions were not spelled out in her online research. She had tried to find plans for the house, but even with her hacking of both the security company and Sterling’s own firm, plus the web site of the architect who’d built the castle, the plans for Sterling’s home remained elusive, apparently guarded as if they were a government secret. What she did know, Max owed Architectural Digest...

The curtains on the windows bordering the front door were heavy masculine maroon brocade, Pretty fancy, Max thought, but then my digs run more to taped drywall and sheet plastic. Sterling could afford to live well, and his quality of life was reflected in the quality of his things. If she’d been able to, Max would have backed a moving van to that front door, and spent the rest of the night hauling enough swag out of this joint to retire at nineteen.

Hugging the walls, she worked her way around the foyer till she was on the left side of the staircase, near the camera. Staying low, she climbed the stairs to the camera, got behind it and carefully unscrewed it from its mount, then unscrewed the coaxial cable from the back, all the while listening for the sound of pounding feet, a sure sign she’d been spotted.

She heard nothing. Just those same few clocks... and of course the steady beat of her heart.

Next, from a vest pocket, she took out a device much like a small Tazer, touched it to the cable, fired it, sending a high-voltage burst through the cable. This should short out the entire video system.

Now she heard feet pounding through the house, voices, too, whispers so as not to alert any intruder too quickly. She replaced the camera on its wall mount and hoped the security cam would look normal enough to pass a rapid inspection. Melting into the shadows behind one of the brocade curtains, she watched as four men, all in shirts and ties, converged in the foyer.

Two of these spiffy security guards had pistols drawn, 38 Colt Specials, while the other two carried automatic weapons, Heckler & Koch MP7A submachine guns. A negative wave of emotion ran through Max, momentarily breaking her remarkable self-control.

Guns made her react like that — but it was not fear...

... and she knew how to use such weapons herself, proficiently in fact; only, since her sib Eva’s death, she could hardly stand to touch the damn things.

Each man wore an earphone and... was that?... She looked closer, the cat’s eyes working their magic — yes, each also had a tiny microphone peeking out from the end of his sleeve. Sterling would seem to be serious about protecting his possessions: suits and ties aside, these boys were six feet tall or better, ranging from midtwenties to early forties, two white, one black, one Hispanic, apparently all in shape, their manner professional, their look hard-core, that chiseled emotionless quality you found only in career soldiers... or mercenaries.

Max smiled; she felt a tingle of excitement...

Not that looking at the men frightened her, or intimidated her in any way. But she knew that if the master of the house had gone to this much trouble to protect something, that something must really be worth protecting... something more, even, than a highly valuable painting like the Grant Wood. Maybe, just maybe, she would make an even bigger haul here than she had imagined.

And, too, she kind of liked the challenge of being up against worthy opponents...

Tall, with a graying crew cut, the oldest of the quartet took charge; he had narrow colorless lips, dime-sized scars on either cheek, and — like Max — he wore black from head to toe... his shirt and tie included.

“Maurer,” the leader said, “upstairs.”

One of the guys carrying the MP7As — black, broad-shouldered, clean-cut, wearing a gold shirt with a striped tie — ran up the stairs right past the camera Max had used to disable the video system.

“Jackson,” the leader barked.

Also carrying an MP7A, Jackson identified himself to Max by stepping forward. Burly, white, the youngest of them, he looked like a college athlete attending an awards dinner in his too-tight white shirt and gray slacks with a red-and-blue-striped tie.

The leader said, “You start working the grounds.”

Jackson said, “Yes sir,” crisply military, and moved over to the keyboard, where he punched several buttons, the alarm light turning green. Once Jackson had gone outside, the fourth member of the team — a muscular young Hispanic in a light blue shirt, navy slacks, and navy tie — punched the IN button, once again setting the alarm.

Max turned her head to watch Jackson heading away from the house, holding her breath, just waiting for him to turn and look right at her, standing there in the window... but he did not. Soon the foggy front yard had swallowed him.

“Morales,” the leader said, his voice soft, “you go right, I’ll go left.”

While the leader opened the door and entered the room on the left, Morales entered the room on the right. Through the second of the open doors, just before Morales closed it behind him, Max glimpsed a painting in a gold-leaf frame on the far wall.

She decided that was as good a place as any to start.

A minute ticked by. Stealing a look in the direction the leader had gone, then glancing up the stairs, Max satisfied herself neither man was headed back her way, not immediately anyway.

So she made her move.

She slipped from her hiding place and crept across the foyer; she opened the door slowly, carefully, quietly, peeked into the room...

... and didn’t see Morales.

She eased in.

The room was large, almost... huge, more like something out of a museum than a house. High-ceilinged, with a beautifully polished hardwood floor and dark mahogany paneling, this was home to painting after painting, framed canvases covering all four walls of the windowless chamber, three and sometimes four rows of them, like fabulously expensive wallpaper. A few Mission-style chairs were positioned around the floor, but it was essentially bare, and — more important to Max — vacant.

Stepping farther into the gallery, she noted another door on the opposite wall at the far end. Morales had obviously entered, not seen anyone, and exited right out the other side, to check rooms beyond.

Max strolled up the middle of the room, gazing at the paintings on either side. Some she’d seen before in Moody’s books, and in magazines and online; but others were strangers to her, though the styles were familiar and she could probably play pin-the-artist-on-the-painting...

This was more than she could ever have imagined.

Again the thought of stealing enough to retire surfaced, but she wouldn’t need a moving van to do it; she could cut canvas after canvas out of their frames, roll them up, and take the whole lot. If Moody’s lessons on quality had served her well, then her eyes told her she wouldn’t need Vogelsang to find Seth. She could buy an uptown detective agency; hell, she could buy Manticore!..

This fantasy blipped across her mind, and then she banished it — too much time, too many risks; in this house, with those four armed security soldiers roaming, she could spend no longer thinking about such things. She needed to get her damn painting — and maybe one or two more — and get the hell out of Dodge.

The thief found her Grant Wood halfway down the right-hand wall. She did not fool around, jumping the alarm wire, pulling the painting down, and freeing it from its ornate antique gold frame... which, she momentarily lamented, could have been sold for a good price, as well; but that would have made this package even more bulky than it was now.

The thirty inch by thirty-nine inch sheet of Masonite was heavy and hard, and perhaps she just should have abandoned it as her goal, and gambled on a few canvases; but this painting was a sure thing, an objective she’d researched well.

Plan and execute, Moody would say; improvise at your own risk...

Max carefully slid the Wood into a zippered waterproof bag she’d carried in folded under her vest, and glanced around to see if she dared snatch one more prize, before the security boys came back.

As her eyes flicked from frame to frame, something in a corner at the far end of the room caught her attention — a pedestal on which perched a Plexiglas case about the size of a basketball, with something resting on black velvet inside. The only such display in the room, it had a temporary feeling, as if this had been arranged only until a better showcase could be found.

As she got closer — and finally began to comprehend just what it was she was beholding — her stomach wrenched, and she suddenly had the feeling that a nest of snakes was slithering down inside her...

Sitting smugly on black velvet, much as it had back at the Hollywood Heritage Museum, was the Heart of the Ocean.

The air seemed somehow thinner now, and her breathing came in short, rapid gasps. Questions tumbled through her mind, like dominoes knocking into each other...

How had it gotten here?

Had Sterling been Moody’s buyer?

Or had some fence bought it from Moody and sold it to Sterling?

Sufficient time had passed, since the original theft, for either of those transactions to have taken place; and yet somehow Max couldn’t understand how the necklace had gotten from Moody’s pocket to this room, in this house. Something seemed... wrong.

Very wrong.

Her face felt hot, her stomach icy, and goose bumps of fear ran up her arms, something that had not happened since... and she flashed on herself, in the woods, the night of the escape, fleeing Manticore, fleeing Lydecker...

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” a warm voice asked from behind her.

And yet there was something cold about it.

In fact, the voice froze her, the zippered bag with the Grant Wood inside still dangling from her right hand, like an absurdly oversized purse.

It wasn’t a voice belonging to any hired help: this was Jared Sterling’s voice; she hadn’t turned around yet, but she recognized it, from video clips she’d played on Kendra’s computer.

Still looking at the lovely blue stone, she said, “Someone told me once... diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”

“Wrong movie... You want to put the painting down?”

Max shook her head slowly. “Not really. I worked pretty hard to get it.”

“As did I.”

A door opened, and another voice blurted: “Sir!”

“Ah — Morales. Take over, would you? I’m just having a glass of warm milk... my ulcer again.”

Behind her, she heard a pistol cock.

“Try not to kill her, Morales,” the warm voice said. “She has a very nice ass.”

Then another door opened, and footsteps echoed away.

The new voice spoke again, and it was touched with a south-of-the-border lilt: “Turn around, you... slowly.”

She did as she’d been told — a good girl — and Morales stood in front of her now, his pistol aimed at the middle of her chest.

“Nice and easy now,” he said. “I want you to set that bag on the floor, like it’s your poor sweet gran’ma.”

Again she did as told — even though she had no “sweet gran’ma” that she knew of.

Morales’s other hand went up to his mouth and he spoke into his sleeve. “Intruder contained in the gallery, repeat, the gallery.”

Rising slowly, she heard a crackily “ten-four” from Morales’s earpiece.

Then the security man crossed slowly toward her and, though his face remained impassive and professional, something sexual flickered in his eyes when he said, “I’m going to have to pat you down.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Put your hands behind your head, little girl; wing those elbows.”

Morales crouched, keeping his handgun and his eyes on his captive even as his free hand reached for the zippered bag. He had begun to rise, slowly, when footsteps in the foyer drew his eyes toward the door, just long enough to give Max the opening she needed.

She swung at the waist, twisting her body as if exercising, and one of those elbows he’d requested caught Morales on the side of the head.

Pitching sideways from the blow, he got off one wild shot that buried itself in the wall, between two of those valuable pictures. She thrust her right foot into his throat, and — already off-balance — he tumbled backward, gasping for breath. Before he hit the floor, Max had kicked the gun from his fingers and it went spinning across the waxed wood floor, clattering against the floorboards clear across the room.

Morales gurgled and seemed vaguely conscious, but showed no sign of getting up.

Behind her, in that doorway Sterling had slipped out, a deep voice growled, “Freeze!”

Instead, Max did two cartwheels, and was into her back flip when the tall crew-cut leader’s pistol coughed harshly, twice, both rounds missing the blur that was Max and burying themselves in a wall and a painting, respectively.

The catlike home invader landed in front of him, perhaps a yard separating them, enough room for her to kick the pistol from his hand. Then she pirouetted, back-kicked the estate’s top security man in the belly, folding him up, and sent him flying across the room, where he smacked into a wall hard enough to make several pictures hang crooked.

He still had that gun, so she went to him, incredibly fast, and when he tried to rise, and looked at where she’d been, the intruder was gone... and he then glanced to his right, where she was now standing.

“Can’t play with you,” she said. “Sorry...”

Her left foot caught him in the groin and he cried out shrilly and sagged to the floor again. Max was taking no chances, however, and as soon as her left foot touched the floor, her right foot came up and caught the leader under the chin, knocking him unconscious and sending him sliding across the waxed surface, like a kid on a sled.

She sprinted back to where Morales lay bubbling — he was unconscious now — and snatched up the waterproof bag. Then she smashed the Plexiglas case with a kick, and — for the second time! — grabbed the precious Heart of the Ocean, triggering an alarm: a buzzerlike bawling.

Max slipped the necklace into a vest pocket, which she zipped shut, and carried the bag with the painting in her left hand as she moved toward the door that would take her back to the foyer — she had come in the front way, she’d go out the same.

She was heading for the security keypad when she all but bumped into the black guy, Maurer, finally down from upstairs, looking a little disheveled, and sweaty, from an apparently thorough and fruitless search of the vast upper floors. The MP7A was in his hands, and he swung it up, leveling the weapon at her...

... but Max leapt high and with a martial-arts kick sent the weapon flying; when the MP7A landed on the marble floor, hitting hard, it fired off its own burst and shattered a priceless Frank Lloyd Wright chair into kindling.

Maurer was no pushover, however, and he came roaring at her with his fists raised.

“Wanna box?” she asked.

A straight right broke his nose and another landed squarely on his jaw with a satisfying crunch. Maurer fell backward, stiff-legged, and did a backward pratfall, his head smacking on the marble. The only question Max had was whether he was out from her punch, or from losing that battle with the floor...

She didn’t bother to Gameboy the keypad; it wasn’t like they didn’t know she was there. She threw open the front door, triggering the alarm — this one an annoying honking, which made an off-key counterpoint to the gallery buzzer (different sounds apparently indicated different security breach points — Max admired the strategy).

Bad move, she thought, realizing she should have taken the time to punch in the keycode; mentally, she pictured Moody frowning and shaking his head at her.

Those dueling alarms would, with honking and screeching, draw the attention not only of the rest of the security team, but cops and neighbors and anybody for at least a square mile who wasn’t stone-cold deaf.

Halfway across the yard, slipping back into the fog, she suddenly saw Jackson emerging from the swirling mist, crossing toward her, his MP7A raised.

Not waiting for him to act, Max launched herself to one side, diving, rolling, disappearing into the smokelike fog.

The guard knew enough not to fire into the fog — he might shoot one of his own team — and when he pursued her, assuming she was on the move, almost ran into her.

Startled, his eyes popped open, and before he could fire, she kicked him in the side of the head, dropping him out-cold to the lawn like a toppled garden gnome.

With those alarms still blaring like dissonant horror-show music, waterproof bag tucked under an arm, Max circled the house, leapt the wall, and approached her hidden boat carefully, in case any of Sterling’s security team had scouted ahead.

But only her boat was waiting, and she eased it out onto the lapping water and she, the Grant Wood, the Heart of the Ocean, and the ungainly tourist craft disappeared onto the fog-flung lake.

Not exactly a perfect heist, but the haul was good, and even with a few flubs, she knew Moody would be proud of his girl. This was a seven-figure evening, easy, enough to finance the search for Seth and allow her to slip back into the anonymity of the straight life... for a while anyway.

A few hours later, with the glow of the coming day already lightening the easterly sky, Max sat on the couch in her squatter’s flat, staring at the necklace.

She still had no idea how Sterling had ended up with it, and now she wondered what she was going to do with it. The painting needed to be fenced, which would cover immediate expenses; unfortunately, she had no such connections in Seattle... yet.

She had not called Moody in LA, since getting to town and settling into this new life; she’d wanted a clean break... but now she had to talk to him. This time of night... or morning... she didn’t dare bother him. But in a few hours, she’d find out what the hell was going on with the real prop of the necklace.

Dropping the stone into a black velvet bag, she hid it in her bedroom, and ambled back out to the living room to try to relax — so hard for her to get to sleep after a score...

To Max’s surprise, Kendra was sitting on the couch now, watching TV.

“What’s up?” Max asked.

Kendra gave her roommate a coy smile. “Just got home. Had a date.”

“Really?” Max sat beside her, gave her sly look. “Nice guy?”

Kendra’s smile widened. “No, he was a bad, bad boy... in a nice, nice way.”

They laughed at that, perhaps a little too much — what with Kendra a little drunk, and Max trapped in wide-awake exhaustion.

“Details,” ordered Max, “details.”

“No way.”

“I would tell you.”

Her mouth open wide in mock astonishment, Kendra said, “You would not, and we both know it — you are the most secretive little bee-atch on the planet... and you’re pumping me for details?”

“I wasn’t pumping you,” Max said with a laugh. “What I want to know is, who was pumping you?”

“Oh, you’re wicked...”

They were interrupted by the distracting white noise of TV static; both young women quickly recognized what this signaled, and their conversation ceased as they gave their attention to the cool yet intense eyes on the screen, eyes bordered above and below by blue, with the words STREAMING FREEDOM VIDEO gliding in white letters against a red background.

“Do not attempt to adjust your set,” the calm yet intense voice intoned, making the same introduction as before, a sixty-second untraceable cable hack from the only free voice in the city.

“Look at those eyes,” Kendra said.

“Shhhh,” Max said.

“He can hack my cable any ol’ time...”

“Quiet, Kendra.”

“This bulletin contains graphic violence, and we are broadcasting at this hour to avoid young viewers. This footage — banned from the media in Los Angeles where the slaughter occurred two days ago — is sobering evidence of what happens to people who stand up for freedom.”

Max’s eyes widened in dread as she saw the handheld footage of the outside of the Chinese Theatre.

“Official documents indicate that the gangster group the Brood was responsible,” the electronically altered voice continued, “but the media clampdown — and reports of black-uniformed, heavily armed soldiers at the scene — indicate government involvement, even collusion.”

The camera moved closer to the theater and revealed four bodies sprawled on the patio in postures of bullet-riddled death. Max’s fingers clutched the cloth of the couch.

“The Chinese Clan, freedom fighters in the Los Angeles area...”

Freedom fighters? Max thought bitterly. Not hardly...

The camera moved into the lobby where more bodies were flung, some of them Brood members, and she wondered if Moody’s crew had been able to fight back, to hold off the onslaught, to limit the carnage...

“... were gunned down by the Brood in a dispute, allegedly over stolen goods.”

And Max saw Fresca, in his worn Dodgers jacket, lying in rubble next to a headless girl... Niner? Fresca’s jacket, originally Dodger blue, was now an ugly, blood-soaked purple.

“None of this group of freedom fighters escaped the wrath of the Brood.”

The handheld was in the auditorium now. Bodies lay strewn about like abandoned, broken toys.

“Gross,” Kendra said; but her eyes were glued to the screen.

Again Max felt warm wetness trailing down her cheeks, but she otherwise remained passive, simply sitting watching the video footage of her dead Clan family.

“Eyes Only sources indicate the Brood may be expanding into Seattle,” the voice continued. “If this criminal gang truly has government sanction, our city will be further enslaved.”

The camera swung around in the theater’s auditorium for the image Eyes Only had chosen to make his final point: Moody’s head impaled on a spike. On spikes on either side of him were the heads of Tippett and Gabriel...

“Shut it off!” Max gasped, and turned away.

Kendra used the remote, but the bulletin was already over, SNN back on; the tears on Max’s cheeks surprised her roommate into sobriety.

“What’s wrong, Max? You’re not the squeamish type.”

“I know them... knew them.”

“What?”

“I was one of them... the Chinese Clan. They were... family. Like family...”

Kendra slipped an arm around Max’s shoulders. “Oh, God, Max, I’m so sorry. What can I do to help?”

Max shut the grief off, as if she’d thrown a switch. “You can help me find Eyes Only, I’ve got to talk to him. I’ve got to find out more about what happened at that theater.”

Kendra’s eyes were big, and she was shaking her head. “Honey, I don’t know anything about him — nobody does. He comes on the tube at will, he does his thing, he splits.”

Max shook her head. “There’s got to be more to it than that — there must be an underground movement in this city.”

“Well, if so, I don’t know anything about it. And I don’t know anybody who knows anything about Eyes Only... you gonna be all right?”

Nodding, Max said, “I’m fine.”

“No you’re not. You’re holding it in — that’s not healthy. If you don’t let it out...”

“There’s nothing to be done for them now.”

Kendra frowned in concern. “You sure you don’t want to talk it out?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Well...” Max’s roommate rose, yawned, and said, “I guess I better catch some z’s... that is, if you’re sure—”

“Kendra, go ahead and crash... I’ll be fine.”

After Kendra stumbled off to bed, Max went to her own room, where she took from its hiding place the black velvet bag with the necklace.

This stone had cost Moody and the others their lives... and she hadn’t been there for them...

She wept, quietly, her face in a hand, for several minutes; then the thoughts, the questions, began to crystallize.

Eyes Only, Seth, this necklace, the Brood, the art collector Jared Sterling, and maybe even Manticore and Lydecker himself were interwoven in the tragedy that had befallen the Clan.

But how?

She knew where to start. Not Eyes Only — his whereabouts, like his identity, were a mystery. Seth had given up no leads since the brawl with the boys in blue; and the necklace was a mute witness. The Brood was in LA, and Lydecker was at Manticore.

That left one option.

The ten-man security team would be ready for her next time, but she could see no other choice: Max would have to return to the scene of the crime.