Desmond, Washington.
Looking through the dusty window of the bus, Max watched the faded city roll by. Along the curb, she saw the discarded old dryers or old couches, awaiting new owners or garbage disposal trucks, whichever came first. In spite of herself, Max had grown attached to her dingy little safe house. Now, she had a sense of foreboding as she sped away from the small town. One hundred twenty-five days ago, she had left her beloved Ninja in the garage and gotten onto a bus, holding a bag with more ID's than clothes. After a day and a half of crossing and re-crossing the same roads, she found herself at the front door of the safe house in Desmond, an dusty, nondescript city halfway to the Canadian border.
"I'd kill for a hot shower right about now," she had thought grimly to herself, as she had headed for the bathroom. She had swept aside the shower curtain, her eyes falling on the low metal bench in the shower. Her mind went back to the day they had brought the bench to the safe house for Logan. Eva had climbed onto the bench to grab the shower head and had managed to spray herself and both her parents, shrieking and laughing.
They had set up the safe houses together. Now, she was here alone.
Max had leaned her head against the cool tiles, "The sooner I find that rat and squeeze him until he tells me what he knows, the sooner I can go home."
That was four months ago. Tracking down the source of the tip proved to be harder than she thought. As the designated go-between, Sebastian had sent her all the information they had on the tip. She had gone over it countless times. The informant had heard that there was a hit out on a transgenic, a woman who had been worked on a mission with Eyes Only. The next day, the informant had turned up dead. A search of his apartment had yielded only a note with a few scrawled words and an address to an internet café. There had also been large, empty, mailing envelope with the address partly removed. She had spent two weeks combing through all the email traffic that had gone in and out of the café during the week preceding the tip, but the work had yielded nothing but a stiff neck. In desperation, she had followed the partial address to a shipping company on the California-Oregon border, but the trail had ended there. All the while, she had lain low in between her snooping missions, not wanting to arouse too much suspicion, since she still had no idea whom she was chasing.
The headlights from the oncoming traffic played across her face as she fingered the note and the envelope. In truth, the note was actually a transcript of a note, emailed to her by Sebastian. Something about the difficulty in encryption had prevented him from scanning the actual note for her. Max's dog-eared copy read,
TRANSGENIC X5, SHE REPORT IQUID COMPOUN
EETING 3 PM EYES ONL DROSTEN
645 WEST FILLMORE ST
The address was the internet café, whose internet traffic had buried her for 2 weeks. The rest of the note meant nothing to her. She and Logan had worked on countless cases together and there seemed to be no way to narrow down the possibilities. Max knew that Logan would have gone through all their cases, looking for Drosten, but she was certain nothing would turn up. Even after all these years, Max could never let go of her Manticore training. She remembered every name in every case – she was sure there had never been a Drosten in their case files
The only Drosten Max could even find on a map was a town 200 miles away, somewhere to the east of Seattle. Now, she was finally heading there, having exhausted every other possibility near the city. The city had finally finished work on the new metro-bus-link, christened with the decidedly dull name, the MOBIUS. The new public transit system had been ready to open prior to the Pulse, but the electronic meltdown had also dissolved funds for the sleek, new system. It had stood unused for 10 years. In the past couple of years, the city had finally settled down enough to reopen the system that allowed individual buses to pick up passengers all around the city, then link up at the terminal to become one long train. The beauty of the system was that it allowed the long train of buses to lock onto a high speed railway that could take you to San Francisco in 2 hours, and Billings in 6 hours.
Max fished the mini laptop out of her bag to check for any encrypted messages on the website Logan had set up for informants. One from Sebastian caught her eye.
"Finally managed to scan in the original note for you. Can't make heads or tails, but then again, my Spanish is rusty."
The original note was in Spanish? Max tried to remember if she had known that before.
TRANSGENETICO X5 EL DICE CHEMICOS LIQUIDOS
EETING 3 PM DROSTEN
Max's hands froze on the keyboard. That couldn't be right. She had just assumed that the words transcribed by Sebastian would be right, but there it was as plain as could be. She had been chasing the wrong leads all along.