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
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
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
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.
she'd thought as she stared the LCD screen;
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
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,
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
