Hacking is defined as an appropriate application of ingenuity. This directly follows the idea that the meaning of hack is "an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation."
This, he thinks, applies equally to what he does and to what Max does, to line after line of perfectly written code, poems in a language unintelligible to most eyes, and to the precise location of a pinprick to unlock a door and the amount of pressure necessary to break through plate-glass windows. There is an equation to find her trajectory, the path along which she flew, but he hasn't bothered to solve it. He knows the answer already, so why bother?
Darryl Halovich left behind a wife and a child when he disappeared. The newspapers said that he lost his life, an idea which struck a much-younger Logan as strange, for certainly all he had to do was find it. The image of a ghostly man wandering the streets in search for something he would never find (because what does a life look like, anyway?) gave him nightmares. Then, of course, he grew up and the fantastic faded as the story became rife with political significance, one more point along the timeline that measures the increase of blatant corruption.
The timeline. Right. He frowns at the pile of printouts in front of him, the pages strewn across his desk, and tries to envision the organization that will allow them to qualify for such a title. Even the thought is daunting. He will focus on one case at a time, one name, one person. One ghost.
He does not, he tells himself, believe in ghosts, in the haunted-house sense.
The sun is setting outside his windows. The windowframes divide the panorama into a collection of scenes and it is impossible to view in its entirety. The snow has melted, leaving a thin veneer of water in its place, and it reflects red sunlight like diluted blood or Communion wine. It will be dark soon; Max will be coming. And she does, true to her words, as soon as the sun disappears completely. She startles him, something he should be used to, when she appears directly behind him at his desk, and he shivers, tells himself that ghosts, among other things, are nothing to be afraid of. Ghosts, unlike said other things, do not exist.
"So, what does one bring to a ghost-hunt?" she asks, not seeing, or ignoring, his reaction.
"I wouldn't know," he says. "And since we're not hunting anyone, much less a ghost, I'm not sure it matters."
She shrugs, her eyes darkening, and he's almost surprised when she doesn't call him a spoilsport, tell him that he's not any fun. "Depends on what you call a hunt," she says.
"Eyes Only doesn't hunt," he says almost primly, as if hunting were a sort of perversion, something journalists-of-the-people were above. Or supposed to be above. "Tracks, maybe, or busts . . ."
"So," she amends, "how does one prepare for ghostbusting?" That, he thinks, was what she was asking all along. She's having too much fun, he thinks, which isn't by any means a bad thing, except that this is real and he thinks that soon he'll be too tired for wordgames, to finish what he's started.
"Well," he says. "Never having had the experience, I honestly can't say."
"First time for everything, huh?" she asks. He nods, feeling like some sort of lawn ornament, one of those dipping birds, up and down, up and down. "You ready?"
"Yeah," he says, gathering his accessories. Keys, phone, wallet, gun (even though ghosts aren't tangible, one corner of his mind points out). She waits for him, waits in the hall while he locks the door behind them, and they continue on to the elevator. He stares at their reflection in the mirrored walls as they descend. She's La Femme Nikita dressed for an assassination and he looks like he should be drinking coffee in some café with outrageous prices and a name unpronounceable without years of college. A most unlikely partnership, he thinks, especially for activities like this.
Even the air in the garage is cool, chill with evening and past snows. Her motorcycle is parked beside his car, sleek black lines beside a collection of dusty blue, cementing the idea of oddities, strange bedfellows. That, he decides, was a very poor choice of words, and he busies himself with unlocking the Aztek, transferring inside. The closing of his door is the division of two worlds and they make their way through the Seattle night as fellow travelers, isolated from the outside as if they were making their way through the stars, the cold, silent vacuum of space.
But Max isn't content to sit still and watch the world they're passing by; she fiddles with the radio and the CD player, decides that jazz is good travelling music, and when she leans back, he has to admit that she's right.
It's sleeting by the time they arrive at the scene of the sighting, streaks of hard white across the windshield. They will fade by morning; it's too early for any accumulation, for the snow to stay. The clouds are low over the horizon, heavy over the water; the nearby warehouses disappear in a haze of mist.
"He's haunting a warehouse?" she asks.
"Or hiding out in one," he says.
"You'd think he'd have better taste," she says. She pauses thoughtfully. "Unless ghosts can only haunt where they're killed."
"He's not," he begins, and then he catches her eye and she grins. "It's the old Lexington unit," he says.
"Lexington. Got it." She opens the door, admitting a burst of cold wind, and leaves him alone to wait. He wonders if she'll find Halovich, drag him back to the car and deposit him inside, glare at the man until he answers Logan's questions. Maybe she won't find anything at all and she'll tell him that he owes her dinner. Though he wouldn't mind retreating to the safe recesses of his apartment, what Halovich could, at least in theory, tell him is worth this wait, this foray into the vast wilderness of relatively isolated coastline.
Well, the coastline part's accurate, anyway.
He crosses his arms and considers turning up the heat, but he's not sure that Max's tolerance of extreme temperatures extends to warmth, too. Still, if she's going to be gone for any length of time –
Something moves in front of him, barely visible through the sleet flickering like television static. He narrows his eyes, reaches to lock the doors without altering the direction of his gaze. It's probably Max, he knows, or maybe his informant or one of the man's fellow denizens, but ghost stories are returning unbidden to his mind and he wonders if Halovich is the vengeful sort. He sees it again, a blur of movement, and he almost dials his cell phone, calls Max's beeper. But she's probably not carrying it, and even if she is, it's possible that she's found something, that telling her to return now would mean forgoing whatever answers she might bring.
The warmth in the car, faint as it is, is suddenly oppressive, hypnotic in that it claims the majority of his attention. He stabs at the heater, turns it down and looks out the window for the movement. He doesn't see it and decides that its source must have gone inside one of the warehouses, someone looking for shelter, or maybe it was all in his mind to begin with. In the background, Ella hits a high note and he watches the sleet come down, concentrates on not falling asleep and scans the area around him, looking for movement or Max, coming through the storm like a triumphant Valkyrie, Halovich's soul in hand and frost silvering her hair as she walks through the night.
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