80 miles outside Seattle, Washington
Max stuffed the laptop back into her backpack and reached up to pull the cord to stop the bus. She had to get off this bus right now.
"You may not exit the bus during the express portion of your trip," the automated voice told her. The individual buses had already linked onto the driverless high speed rail. Now, it was nonstop to the eastern border of the state three hours away. She hurried to her feet and made her way to the back of the bus, stepping into the tiny restroom. There was no way she was willing to wait three hours, now that she knew she had to get back to Seattle.
If Max had not been so preoccupied with her laptop earlier, she might have noticed the man with the hat pulled low over his face, four rows away. When she left her seat, the man rose too and followed her to the rear of the bus.
Max threw open the tiny window of the restroom. She looped the straps of her backpack firmly across her chest and swung herself out the window and onto the ladder leading onto the roof of the bus. Instantly, the screaming force of the wind threatened to tear her hands from the ladder. She pressed herself as close to the steel skin of the bus as she could and worked her way, hand over hand, toward the roof. Out of habit, she glanced back at the window. Max thought she recognized the now-hatless man, his hat having blown off once she opened the window. Had she seen him outside her building that morning? She couldn't think about that right now.
Max crept along the roof, the wind roaring in her ears. She clung to the smooth aerodynamic surface of the roof. She didn't look back to see if the man was trying to follow her up onto the roof. She half slid across the roof to the other side of the bus and slowly lowered herself over the edge, her toes desperately trying to find purchase along the narrow ledge above the window. Pulling a rope out of her pack, she looped one end around one of the antenna and the other around her ankle. She slowly swung her body so that she hung completely upside-down along the left side of the compartment. Gradually, she inched herself lower until she could see the underside of the bus.
What resembled a huge magnetic clamp attached the individual buses to the monorail beneath. In the shadow of the enormous monorail she could just make out the smaller robotic drones that ran slowly along the underside of the monorail, following the main cars. These remote-controlled care were used to repair and maintain the rail line. She had no choice. She couldn't climb back into the car at this point. If she stayed upside any longer, she'd ended horking, not a great prospect either. It was now or never. Taking a firm grip on the step sticking out from the side of the bus, she reached up to loosen the rope's hold on the antenna and swung herself down so that she was now right side up and hanging underneath the bus. She took a firm grip of the grappling hook on her rope and hurled it at the robotic car, hooked it neatly. The robotic car was traveling in the same direction as the bus, but only at half the speed. For a moment everything seemed to stand still. Then, she let go of the main train, the other rope went taut, and she was yanked off the train. Max just barely caught sight of the hatless man staring out at her from the window of the main train. She clambered up onto the roof of the repair car, about the size of a couch. Five minutes later, Max leaped lightly down from her perch on the repair car onto solid ground. In another five minutes, she was in a cab headed back to Seattle.
When she reached the outskirts of Seattle, Max threw a few bills at the cab driver and leaped out of the car. She ducked inside a coffee shop and sat down to regroup her thoughts. The hatless man had thrown her off. If the face in the train window was really someone tailing her, he had to know she had made some sort of revelation. She had get back to Eva and Logan. She had to make sure they were safe.
Max took out the scanned note again. How could she be so stupid not to look at the original note before this? With a nervous glance up the quiet street, she tucked her backpack between her feet and plunged a few quarters into the payphone.
"Hello"
"Alec, it's me, Max." I know it's been a long time, but I've really screwed up and I could really use some help"
The pause that hung in the air seemed interminable.
"Max, is it really you?"
"Alec, I know I've been off the radar for 4 months and…"
"And I hadn't talked to you for a couple months before that. I had been figuring that you'd give old Alec a call when you got around to it…or needed something."
"It's not that. Look, I know. I'm sorry."
"The truth is, Max, I guess I've been missing your sorry ass, so I am embarrassed to admit that I have occasionally visited your lame ass husband, and played hide-and-seek with that high-octane little daughter of yours.
Max grinned into the receiver. "Look, Alec, I do need your help. Do you remember the note the informant left? It turns out that Sebastian's team translated it wrong. Remember how we thought it mentioned me? Well, it mentions an X5 working with Logan, all right, but it was a "he". The note also mentioned "androstendione", I'm sure of it."
"You mean the note was about me all along? Not you? My job with the steelheads, those antennae-for-hair guys?"
"Yeah, remember when you were you dealing 'roids with the steelheads down by the dock warehouses? Could you have been dealing androstendione?"
"I know I was."
"Anyway, the note and all the other evidence points to the bad guys accidentally losing something along with the steroids. Maybe, they were smuggling something more valuable with the drugs. Somehow, they lost track of it. Maybe now, they want it back."
"But, Max, you know that Logan went back there by himself to snag the case files tying Pierpont Lempkin to the steelheads. He went to buy the stuff from the steelheads himself. They know what he looks like and who he is. I don't think they made a connection with Eyes Only, but it doesn't really matter. They know he's Logan Cale.
The steelheads AND Lempkin went down a few weeks after that. If Lempkin is out of jail now, or he had an even bigger boss, either one of them could be tracking down that lost shipment? After all this time, they've somehow picked up the scent again,. I'm sure Logan just threw the package into that storage locker of yours at Fogle Towers. I'm sure he never looked too carefully at it."
"Alec, they might have installed some kind of tracking device. If they know about you being X5, they might know about me. What if this last 4 months has just been a wild goose chase to get me out of the picture?"
"Naw, you would have known if you'd been tailed, Max."
"Well, that's the thing, Alec, I think I saw someone today…"