Before the Dawn (18 page)

Now Seth plopped down in a chair opposite the couch. A tiny, almost naughty smile formed on the sullenly handsome face. “I think it's time.”

“Time?”

“Time we went after Manticore.”

Logan sighed again. “It is
not
time.”

“Well,
I
think it is.”

That was the level of their discourse, Logan thought:
Is too,
is not,
is too,
is not. . . .

Meeting the young man's unblinking gaze with his own, Logan said, “We don't know enough. Really, we don't know anything. We still don't know where their headquarters is, we don't know where you were raised, other than the Wyoming mountains somewhere. . . .”

Seth exploded out of the chair. “What have you been doing while I been risking my ass?” Seth gestured with both hands, his arms wide in frustration. “What are you doin' with those fancy-ass computers? Downloading porn? Hitting the cybercasinos?”

“These things take time.”

Bouncing on his heels, Seth said, “You've had what—three, four weeks? Enough time for me to take out Devane, and you haven't found out
anything?
”

Seething inside, Logan resisted the urge to tell Seth to use his abilities to take a spectacular flying fuck, and said, “I've started looking into old factories, abandoned prisons, military bases. But these people are smart, and they're dangerous, and they don't want to be found. If they did, you would have found them already.”

Seth seemed almost to pout, and said, somewhat childishly, “But you've had three weeks, man!”

“You've had how many years? And you haven't found them, have you, Seth?”

“I haven't been looking—I've been hiding. But now I got
you,
and your resources . . . we can take 'em on, Logan! We can take 'em down!”

“And we're going to. We
are.
And I do have a lead. . . .”

Seth's eyes widened, like a child anticipating Christmas. “What kind of a lead?”

“I take it you didn't see the bulletins on the LA Massacre—I ran it three times yesterday.”

“No . . . I was . . . busy.”

“I guess you were. Come with me.”

Logan walked Seth to the office-cum-broadcast-center, where the main monster computer was (as always) running and each monitor had several windows open. The cyberjournalist played the X5 a video CD of the bulletin that included the grisly footage of the Chinese Theatre slaughter. At the mention of the troops in black rumored to have supported the Brood in the massacre, Seth perked up.

“That's Manticore . . . that's
got
to be Manticore.”

Logan ran the VCD again, with the sound down. “What would draw Manticore into helping one side of a street gang war?”

“I'd like to know the answer to that.”

“Good.” Logan smiled at Seth, rather blandly. “Because that's where we're going to start . . . assuming you don't kill our target, before we find anything out.”

Seth smirked. “Who is he?”

“Well, it is a him . . . but it's
more
than a him. It's a ‘them.' ”

“The Brood?”

“The Brood is part of it. You heard the bulletin: they're expanding to Seattle.”

“Who did they send here?”

“They didn't ‘send' anybody—the top man himself came . . . Mikhail Kafelnikov.”

Logan brought up another picture: a muscular blond man who had the good looks of a pre-Pulse rock star, and the rap sheet of a serial killer. “He's rumored to have ordered or taken part in as many as one hundred murders in Los Angeles.”

The young man studied the picture. “You made a good point, Logan—Manticore and a street gang . . . it just doesn't compute.”

“Seth, back in the early part of the last century, street gangs of Italian kids evolved into the biggest, most successful organized crime syndicate in the history of man.”

“And this history lesson is because? . . .”

“The Brood may evolve into something much bigger than a street gang . . . particularly with covert support from Manticore.”

“So what is this . . . Haselhoff guy
up
to, in our great city?”

“It's Kafelnikov . . .”

“Whatever.”

“. . . and he's selling art and Americana to foreigners. Any precious remnant of our past that he can get his hands on, really, he'll sell to whoever offers the most.”

Seth arched an eyebrow. “And we care, because? . . .”

“Because he's selling off priceless works of American art.”

Seth was not following this. “The point being . . .”

Logan knew he could never make Seth understand how he felt, and why this battle was important.

No Americana would eventually mean . . . no America. He'd watched other countries sell the heritage that was their symbolic soul, during financial hardships since the Pulse. People needed that cultural bedrock to build their societies on, and when that bedrock was peddled to other nations, it took away a country's sense of permanence, a people's sense of home. Citizens began to feel like renters in their own land.

“I can't explain this easily,” Logan said. “You were Manticore's prisoner for how long?”

“Ten years. What's that got to do with it?”

“Even though you hated it, even though you eventually ran from it, Manticore was your home. When you escaped, didn't part of you miss it?”

“You
are
high!” Seth's eyes blazed. “No,
hell,
no!”

Logan put a hand on the boy's shoulder. “You mean to say you didn't . . . you don't . . . miss your siblings? The sense of belonging that comes from being with a group you know you can trust to take care of you? That sense of wholeness? You didn't miss any of that?”

Seth looked at him for a moment, then the young man's eyes fell away and he found something on the floor to study.

Logan said, “That's what I'm talking about, with these people selling off American art. It destroys, one piece at a time, who we are . . . how we feel about the American
family . . . making it easier to divide us. We're all abused children, now, Seth—and this kind of abuse to our . . . national spirit . . . well, it's one thing we don't need.”

“Run for fuckin' office, why don't you? Look, this art scam—it's the first hustle the Brood's working on our turf?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Logan, why didn't you say so. We got to stop the bastards.”

Feeling a little embarrassed, and a bit like a pompous ass, Logan couldn't keep himself from smiling. “Kafelnikov isn't moving the stuff out of LA—somehow he's moving it out of the country through Seattle.”

“And you want to know how he's doing that?”

“Yes—who's working with him, and where the deals go down—maybe we can . . . rescue some Americana.”

“Groovy,” Seth said, still unimpressed by the cultural flag-waving. “Any clues at all?”

Logan leaned in, used a mouse to open a window on one of the many glowing monitor screens. A picture popped up of a blond, trimly bearded man in his late twenties, next to a painting called
Death on the Ridge Road.

Pointing, Logan said, “That's Jared Sterling.”

“Looks like an upstanding citizen.”

“As upstanding as they come . . . major art collector, philanthropist, and billionaire computer magnate.”

“Sterling . . . Sterling—the Internet guy?”

“The Internet guy.”

Seth leaned in, taking a closer look at the Grant Wood painting. “Looks like he's into, what's-it, Americana, too.”

“Oh yes.” Using the mouse, Logan brought up pictures of various American art pieces. “These paintings—
American Gothic . . . Whistler's Mother . . .
Jackson Pollock's
Key,
works by Thomas Hart Benton, Winslow Homer, and several other major American painters—have come into Sterling's hands . . . legally . . . and then disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“Perhaps that's overstating. He acquires these pieces—sometimes with great fanfare—seems to have them for a while, loans them for a museum showing or two . . . and then they vanish into his ‘collection.' As art pieces the public can appreciate, they drop out of sight, and are never seen again.”

“If he owns them, I guess he's got the right.”

“Well . . . I don't want to venture into ethical waters with you again, Seth. But you should know also that Jared Sterling is considered to be one of the most ruthless and, yes, unethical businessmen to emerge in the post-Pulse world.”

“Even if he's selling this stuff overseas, Logan, it's no crime—he owns the shit, right?”

“Yes he owns the ‘shit'—but it
is
a crime.” After the Cooperstown and Statue of Liberty debacles, there had been a backlash, and a number of bills had been passed to protect what remained of America's heritage. “The American Art Protection Act, of twenty-fifteen, makes it very illegal for any paintings on the protected list to be sold outside of our shores.”

Seth frowned. “There's a list of paintings like, what? Endangered species?”

“More like historic landmarks, important buildings that can't be torn down to make room for another detention center. Jared Sterling owns dozens of paintings on the Smithsonian American Masterpieces list.”

“So Sterling can own these paintings, but he can't sell them?”

“Not overseas—the paintings would be confiscated, and he'd be a felon. In addition, I suspect he's moving stolen art, and some of the ‘legal' transactions include such odds and ends as the original owner of Sterling's latest acquisition washing up dead on a beach.”

Mention of a murder seemed to have finally caught Seth's attention. “Where would
we
come in?”

“Well, he's obviously making these transactions discreetly . . . and he may be using the same conduit to move his artwork as Kafelnikov. In fact, Sterling may
be
that conduit . . . that may be what brought the Russian to Seattle.”

“So Sterling's scam will lead us to the LA guy's scam.”

“My instinct is it's the
same
scam.” He handed Seth a slip of paper with an address on it, and some security info Logan had hacked. “Your next
stop . . .”

Seth glanced at the paper, memorized in an instant, and tossed it on the nearby computer station. “You're the boss,” Seth said, with only the faintest sarcasm.

Logan walked him to the door. “And do me a favor, Seth?”

Seth smirked. “Why not?”

“Please don't kill this one right away.”

“Which one you talkin' about—Sterling, or this Russian guy?”

“Either. Neither.”

Seth shrugged. “Fine—but take this Russian, for example. Look at all those gang kids he massacred. Guy is an evil dude—and he's tied to damn
Manticore!
Wouldn't the world be better off without him?”

“Just gather the information, Seth.”

Seth was shaking his head, truly not getting it. “If this Kasselrock is the
problem . . .”

“Kafelnikov.”

“. . . then killing his evil ass ought to
end
the problem . . . his part in it, anyway.”

Logan grasped the X5's arm. “Seth, if you kill him, we'll never know what happened to the paintings he's already smuggled . . . assuming, of course, that he's the right guy to begin with.”

“If these paintings are gone, they're gone. What's the difference?”

Logan wasn't sure whether Seth was . . . teasing him, or really was this bloodthirsty; probably the former, but that he could even be considering the latter was very disturbing. . . .

“Seth, we need to know if Kafelnikov is tied to Manticore . . . and if so, how, and why.
That's
our best lead, at the moment.”

“You don't mind if I let
that
motivate me,” Seth said, “and not some sense of preserving ‘Americana.' ”

“Not at all. But watch your all-American ass, my friend. The Russian, whose name you refuse to learn how to pronounce . . .”

Proving he'd been yanking Logan's chain all along, Seth said, “Kafelnikov.”

“Any way you say it, Seth, he's a dangerous man.”

Halfway out the door, the X5 shrugged. “
I'm
a dangerous man.”

Logan couldn't think of anything to say to that.

MANTICORE HEADQUARTERS
GILLETTE, WYOMING, 2019

Colonel Donald Lydecker sat at his desk, drumming his fingers on its Lucite-covered metal top.

Had Max been there to see him, she would have noted that he looked little different than he had when the X5s broke out of Manticore back in '09. The years had been kind to Lydecker, despite an alcoholism problem that he had kept in check during that same time span. His blond hair now contained a few straggling grays but was thick as ever. His icy blue eyes had changed only in that he now needed glasses for reading, and more “smile” lines had been etched in the corners. His body was still tight and muscular . . . it just took a little more effort these days, to keep it that way.

His office was strictly government issue, the walls and ceiling a pastel mint green, the file cabinets, chairs, desk, and computer table all standard institutional gray. Not one personal item adorned the top of his desk or any other part of the anonymous, no-nonsense office. Only his black shirt, slacks, and leather jacket were—because of his sub-rosa status—not GI.

Across the desk from him were two subordinates—a kid in his early twenties, Jensen, and an African American in his mid- to late thirties, Finch. The two men stood at attention, soldiers in civilian suits and ties, and Lydecker thought he detected a slight trembling in both.

It pleased him that they feared him—in his lexicon,
fear
and
respect
were analogous. He let his breath out slowly, calming himself, getting centered, just as he'd taught his kids.

“I've been watching video footage of one of our X5s—a male.”

“Yes, sir,” they said in unison.

“And where do you suppose I got that footage?”

They glanced at each other quickly, then turned their eyes front. Neither man spoke.

“Perhaps I got it from our own intelligence efforts. Do you think I got it from our own intelligence efforts, Mr. Jensen?”

“. . . no, sir.”

“How about you, Mr. Finch?”

“Yes, sir . . . I mean, no sir. . . .”

Lydecker sighed, just a little. “I got it from SNN.”