Runaways

Chapter 7

Megan woke up earlier than she normally would have, even after the talk with Leif. Her anxiety wouldn't let her sleep. As a result, she found her mother in the act of getting ready to leave for the airport-heading off for some meeting in New York that couldn't be conducted virtually. Megan often wondered what went on at these, for whatever else seemed to be going on at work, the Time staff seemed to go out of their way to get together physically once a month for the "screaming sessions" her father had mentioned to her in passing. Her mother always came back from these meetings looking energized and cheerful, almost younger than she had when she'd left; but on the mornings of departure she was always grim, and she barely looked up when Megan came into the kitchen in a desperate search for caffeine.

"I hate these early mornings," her mother said to the air. "I went freelance to avoid these early mornings. I am supposedly still freelance. Why, then, does it appear to be five-thirty in the morning?"

"Six," Megan said. 'The Earth rotates, Mom."

"Six! Oh, heavens, where's the cab?"

"It'll be here, Mom," Megan said, putting the heat on under the kettle. "By now Kevin knows better than to be late."

"But what if they don't send Kevin?"

The kettle started whistling almost immediately. Meg made tea and watched her mother take what appeared to be the third or fourth inventory of her coat and briefcase. As she straightened up from this, someone honked outside the house, and Meg's mother grabbed coat and briefcase and headed for the door.

"Whoa!" Meg said, picked up her mother's reading glasses from the table, slapped them into their case and handed them to her mother.

"I hate this," her mom said. "Hate it. Remind me to resign."

"Resign, Mom."

"Right. Bye bye, honey, have a good day. Better than mine, I hope."

"Bye-bye, Mom. You'll feel better in a while."

"From your mouth to the Deity's ear, daughter of mine," her mother said, heading out the door.

'Tear 'em a new one, Mom!" called a voice from the front door.

"Arrrgh," Megan heard her mother say as she got into the cab. Chuckling, Megan closed the side door, hearing Mike do the same at the front.

She got some sugar for her tea, then went into the den and settled herself in the implant chair. A few moments later she was standing by her desk in her workspace, holding the mug of tea and looking around to see if there were any new virtmails. Nothing. Damn. Suppose he doesn't… Suppose he changes his mind…

But there was no point in worrying about it right now. "Manager…" she said to her workspace.

"Here, Megan."

"Link to Leif Anderson's space."

"That link is already active. He has been waiting for you." The doorframe appeared on the floor of her amphitheater. "Please go through."

Megan went through into the ice cave. It was brighter. The earlier lighting must have been twilight, she thought. As she stood there, looking around her, a figure moved in the depths of the cave, down by the ice-Edsel, and came toward her.

It was Leif… she thought. He looked pallid and worn. His hair, normally a surprisingly fiery red, looked dull and tired. He looked thin, and there were shadows under his eyes. Even his skin tone looked bad-it looked looser than usual, somehow. Megan sucked in breath. "Leif? Are you sick, are you coming down with something? What's happened to you?"

He grinned at her and straightened up. "Makeup," Leif said. "If anyone wants to meet me in the nonvirtual mode, I don't have to be afraid of looking too good."

"Boy, you're right about that," Megan said. "You look like death warmed over."

"Good," Leif said. "Naturally, in Breathing Space, I'll wear a seeming that matches this one fairly closely. It might look a little better, to maintain the illusion… Most people who look this bad would try to improve their looks a little while virtual. But out in the real world, this'll fool a surprising number of people. My mom's taught me a lot about stage makeup… and even in broad daylight, there's a lot you can get away with if you really know your own skin tone."

"If you were unscrupulous," Megan said, admiring, "you could get off a lot of school that way."

"Don't remind me. There have been times…"

There was a soft chime in the depths of the ice cave. "Come on in!" Leif said.

A slight young dark-haired boy with slightly Asian features walked out of the air and glanced over at them. "Hey, Megan."

"Mark!" Mark Gridley was small, and fairly young for a Net Force Explorer. But he was also one of the sharpest and most devious young minds that Megan had ever had the dubious pleasure of being associated with… besides being the son of Jay Gridley, the head of Net Force. There was very little that Mark couldn't get a Net-oriented computer, facility, or resource to do if he was properly motivated, and Mark didn't take much motivating, being possessed of a curiosity that would have made the Elephant's Child look like an ostrich by comparison. Megan often reflected that it was a good thing Mark was on the side of law and order. Otherwise, the law enforcement organizations responsible for online life, meaning Net Force in particular, would have their work cut out for them. Far better he should be used for "peaceful purposes…"

"Took you a while," Leif said.

"I was busy," Mark said, sounding mournful. "It's harder than usual getting online time when we're traveling."

They glanced at the dim and hazy background out of which he'd walked, a sort of swirling default blue. "Where are you, exactly?"

"Paris," Mark said, making it sound more like he might as well have said "Alcatraz." "Boy, am I glad it's lunch- time here. I'd hate to get up as early as you two."

"Go on, rub it in some more," Megan said. "What've you been doing over there? Is it a vacation?"

"Don't I wish," Mark said. "Why does my dad have to go do these things physically? He could be there in a second, virtually, and not mess up my work schedule." Mark sighed. "But he feels the need to go 'press the flesh' sometimes. Claims he can tell things from actually being with people that he can't tell just from virtual experience. And he insists on bringing me along to 'expand my horizons.' He can't fool me… he's just trying to keep me out of trouble. Unsuccessfully, I might add, since here I am." Mark grinned innocently. "He has to take his Net hardware with him wherever he goes… but at least he isn't always using it. I can get some business done."

Megan reflected that Mark must be one of the few human beings on the planet who could be taken out of school and sent on an all-expenses-paid vacation to Europe and still feel like he was being badly treated. "So this is what you meant when you said you thought you knew someone who could manage the 'fakery,' " Megan said to Leif. "I see your point. Mark, what have you got?"

"Well. I won't bore you with the technical details-"

Leif and Megan exchanged skeptical looks.

"Come on, you guys, eventually you have to learn something about the bones of the system you use every day-"

"Not today, we don't," Megan said.

Mark sighed like a philosopher denied the chance to cast pearls before swine. "Well, after Leif called me and told me what you told him, and what you two were thinking of, I went and had a look at Breathing Space's security 'cordon.' It's comprehensive, but not watertight… but then no system is watertight, if you poke it hard enough." Mark frowned. "The problem is, I didn't have to poke it nearly hard enough."

"You didn't?" This surprised Megan a great deal, after what she had read about the hacking attacks on Breathing Space in its early days, and the huge amounts of money the service had spent on security thereafter.

Mark shook his head. 'There are entirely too many holes in their system," he said. "They're not all obvious. But there are a whole lot of side doors and back doors in and out of the space for administrative use, and someone's gotten a little careless about closing them down behind counselors and staff who've left the charity. In particular, there are even some 'ready-made' side doors, templates, sitting around stored away for assignment to new staff."

"You're kidding," Leif said.

Mark shook his head again. "This," he said, reaching into his pocket and flipping something small and bright and shining to Leif, "is one of them."

Leif caught it. It looked like an ordinary old-fashioned house key, the kind that would go into a physical lock. Megan peered over at it as Leif turned it over in his hands, and found that it even said "YALE" on it.

Mark said. "That's a symbol for one of about twenty template mail and space accounts they had lying around. A sign that someone over there really hasn't thought things through. Not in the charity itself. They don't handle their programming, it's contracted out. I know who the contractors are, too. They even do some work for Net Force. But if they did this kind of work for our people, and someone caught them at it, they and their contract would get flung right over the horizon. They may have implemented these 'ready-made' keys as a courtesy to the staff, or the staff may even have asked them to make them as a way to avoid extra 'call-out' charges when new entry/ exit protocols for added staff had to be written. But either way, in terms of security, it's a dumb idea. And it's entirely possible that the kids inside, the ones who're savvy to security structures, have found out about these keys, hijacked a couple of them, and are using them to set up these 'street corners' inside the main system."

Megan looked at Leif. "You don't suppose that someone on the inside has just… you know, let these loopholes be there"

Leif looked thoughtful. "Without evidence, it's hard to say. But it makes me wonder. If I was one of the people doing this shady recruiting we're interested in…

wouldn't it be simple to bribe someone to leave a back door or two open? Or not even anything that obvious. Just a little money slipped into someone's personal account to allow some information about Breathing Space's security structures to fall into the hands of the kids themselves, the ones inside, the ones who really want to 'tunnel out.' That way, when you come in through the same tunnel, you don't look responsible for anything in particular… "

Megan thought about it. If Leif was right about this, the cynicism behind the strategy just about took her breath away.

"As far as the rest of your little plan goes," Mark said, "the way Breathing Space itself is structured is going to work in your favor. They don't revoke their clients' access to their virtual space for ninety days, in case they have second thoughts about meeting with staff or their families. So part of your backstory can be that you were in one of their facilities recently, but you came out… and now you're 'visiting' again."

"You're going to have to plant records that make it look like he actually was in one of them," Megan said.

Mark nodded. "Doable," he said. "I need to get the details from you first, though," he said, glancing over at Leif.

Leif grinned. "I've been assembling a precrs," he said. "Some baby pictures of mine, altered just a little, in case we need them. Enough truth so that if I get asked for details, the lies will sound genuine. Enough manufactured stuff so that they won't be able to link anything to the real me."

"Send it over to my space," Mark said, "and I'll see that it gets where it's needed. The filing system in the Breathing Space mainframes has better security than the virtual space does, believe it or not. But I can crack it, given an hour or two. Which I've got," Mark said with a heavy sigh. "My dad's left me in the hotel with some of his staff, and I don't find them any more interesting than they find me."

"What hotel?" Leif said, suddenly sounding interested.

"The George V."

"Holy cow, Mark, don't just stand there, call room service and order stuff!"

"Why? Is the food good here?"

Leif hid his face in his hands and moaned. "You'll ruin your makeup," Megan warned him. "Cut it out. Mark, go do what you have to with Leif's files. We don't know when the word is going to come from Bodo, but I want to be ready."

"Okay," Mark said, and turned back the way he came. "What should I order? Caviar? I hate caviar."

"You've got a sweet tooth, haven't you? Have them come up and do the crepes suzette for you. But don't let them set the curtains on fire."

"Think that's a possibility?" Mark said, his eyes glinting with interest. "I'll try it and tell you what happens."

He vanished. Megan smiled a little, but the smile came off as she looked back at Leif.

"Are you still sure about this?" she said. "I meant what I said before. This is looking less and less safe… and there are a lot of things that could go wrong."

"I'm sure," Leif said, surprisingly gently. 'This is going to be worth doing, Megan. Now, go on. You're going to have to leave for school pretty soon."

Sighing, she nodded, and headed back for her own space.

When Megan got home from school, the first thing she did was head into the den. Mike was just settling into the Net chair. Megan came up behind him and said, "Give me five minutes."

"Go 'way, Megan, you bother me."

She leaned around him and looked into his face, and batted her eyelashes a couple of times. "Your birthday," she said, "is getting awfully close"

Mike looked at her, and then laughed. "Five minutes," he said, and got up. "Fll go have a snack."

Megan sighed as she sat down. She had been thinking about that herself, but her guess was that when she got into the kitchen, it would look like the aftermath of Sherman's march on Atlanta, as far as food was concerned. She closed her eyes in resignation and blinked herself into her space.

Night hung over Rhea as usual. Even the Sun's full light on the rocks and methane snow never did more than make it seem like a particularly bright night, lit by a star a couple of times brighter than a full moon. Megan checked the space around her desk.

Her appetite deserted her. There was a virtmail hanging over her desk, bobbing up and down with unusual energy. It had the number 1 on it, like one of the balls that might come out of one of the old lottery machines, but in this case it meant the message was a "read-once," sent by some anonymous user from a public access and without the usual routing headers that would reveal its source. Megan hadn't seen many of these, and she was sure she knew who had sent it to her. She went over to it, poked it.

Bodo was standing there looking at her. "Tonight," he said. "Twenty hundred your time."

He vanished; the mail destroyed itself, popping like a soap bubble, and was gone.

Megan took a deep breath and called Leif.

Leif Anderson had learned very young how to be comfortable in strange and potentially intimidating places. Since he was almost big enough to walk, he never knew where he might suddenly find himself walking: down the Ginza in Tokyo or along a dirt track in Lesotho, down a beach near Rio de Janeiro or along a pathway by the River Thames, in the shadow of Big Ben. Leif had very early become used to the absolute ease that his father's wealth lent someone who wanted to get around, and during his childhood he had learned not to take any particular notice of it, moving gracefully and without too much fuss from the upper east side of Manhattan to the west side of Zurich. Later, as he grew into his teens and became clearer about how very many other people didn't enjoy such ease, he had a brief period of discomfort with his father's wealth and others' needs, and for a while he walked through the beautiful and exclusive places his father took him with a faint aura of guilt, aware that he had done nothing to deserve such good fortune. Now, though, late in his teens, Leif had realized that he was stuck with his upbringing, and it was his job to make the most of the advantages which had been showered on him; to try to make them pay off for the people around him.

The constant movement among continents had left him with what might have started out as a gift for languages, but rapidly turned into just another way to exercise a broad-ranging curiosity about everything that crossed his path. It was hard to ask people questions all day unless you spoke their language, so, when he was very young, Leif started learning how to do that. He was sixteen now, and there were very few languages on Earth that he didn't at least know about. He spoke at least the most important words and phrases in nearly fifty of them now-"please," "thank you," "Can I have the menu?" "Where are the toilets?" and "Can I help?" Other languages he knew much better, speaking them fluently, but he spoke them best when in the right places, a given language's home. He was in one of them now.

Leif looked around him from the little table where he sat in the plaza, and grinned slightly, for he had been here before, more than once-no way to avoid it, when your father was involved in investment banking. This was the Barenplatz in Bern, that city of elegant arcaded buildings six centuries old, of the Bundesrat, the Swiss Confederation's parliamentary body, and of many, many discreetly camouflaged banks, innocent behind mirrored plate glass or behind goldstone facades which revealed nothing but lace curtains and the inevitable windowboxes full of downspilling red geraniums. Those who thought all the big Swiss banks were in Zurich were deluding themselves. In quieter places, like this one and innocent-looking little Zug halfway across the country, much more serious money was stored than lay even under the pavement of the Bahnhofstrasse, for money these days came in many more concentrated forms than gold.

Leif had sat here often enough before, killing a soft drink in the sunshine and listening to the trams go by, while his father sat upstairs in one or another of these graceful old buildings, discussing money in amounts with so many zeroes after them that they didn't seem real. Off to one side, the noble squared green-bronze dome of the Bundesrat building looked down on the revelry, which this time of year never seemed to really die down. Leif could remember at least one warm night in one of the local hotels when the endless mutter and growl of conversation in the plaza had gone on until past three in the morning, causing his father to finally stick his head out the French doors and yell, "Don't you people have homes to go to?"

He smiled at the memory. But this time his father was nowhere in the neighborhood. This time Leif was on his own, and there was something lying in wait here that was more dangerous than any number of investment bankers.

And the chill went down his back as, in this genial reality, he felt a door open behind him, a door in the air, and someone said in a gentle accent that sounded more Czech than anything else: "I am ready for you now, Mr. Dawson."

Leif got up and turned, and saw the blueness behind him through the doorway. No one else saw it. No one else near him was realThey were all generated by the virtual environment program, as background, atmosphere, noise. I could vanish right now, and no one would know, Leif thought, and the thought gave him another chill. There was no consolation in the idea that Breathing Space was supervising this virtual environment. Mark had been able to subvert it without an incredible amount of trouble. What he could do, others could do. Had done. And there was no telling what else they knew how to do that wasn't terribly obvious right now.

Leif got up and followed the voice into the blueness. Waiting for him, as the door closed, he found a table with a chair on either side of it, and a man sitting in one of them: short, salt-and-pepper-haired, with a narrow face and a hard mouth, with gray eyes set close together and very small, fine hands laced together casually as they rested on the tabletop. The man's suit harked back to the turn of the century, as if he had found a style he liked and didn't intend to change it on account of something so ephemeral as fashion.

Leif kept his face straight and his affect flat "Gruezi," he said. Sometimes it would have been a matter of showing off to speak German so perfectly in the local dialect, but Bernerdeutsch was as idiosyncratic a form of Swiss German as any of the other forty or fifty kinds scattered around the country, and an ability to speak it well meant not only that the person speaking was linguistically talented, but that they were better than usual at blending in.

The man with the cool thin face looked at him with only mild surprise. "Gruezi. You may call me Mr. Vaud. Are you local?" he said, speaking formal German, Hoch- deutsch.

"No," Leif said, "I live… I lived in New York. I just don't like to stand out."

"And when you go south," said Vaud, "what language do you speak down there?"

"Chei lai sudet?" said Leif, for Romansch was spoken in the southeastern cantons. "Perei la sojourna da Italia?" And switching languages again, "Meish al-neimah suv uurneh."

Vaud laughed softly. "Young man, you've never been to Morocco!" he said.

"You don't have to be," Leif said, "to speak a little of the language."

"European languages, any?"

"Spanish and Swedish I'm fluent in," Leif said, taking care to sound sullen. "Russian, too. Enough French, German, Italian, and Danish to get by. Flemish, a little."

Vaud sat there in silence for a little while and considered him. "Unusual talents for one so young."

"Don't make the mistake everyone else does," Leif said. "I'm a machine."

Just for the moment, Vaud looked confused. "You look human enough."

"I'm a performing animal," Leif said, spitting the words out with some force. "My father was a language teacher. He's been using me to experiment on for years. I'm his hobby. I never had a day of my life that wasn't full of rules and grammar and exercises. He drilled me until I was perfect at everything but saying what I really thought of what he was doing to me. Finally I got tired of being hit for mishandling the optative." Leif turned his head away. "He can sit home and do it to my little sister now, if he likes, but I've had enough of it. Meanwhile, if I'm stuck being good with languages, fine. I might as well make some money out of it."

"And your father is where?"

"Like I care."

"I ask for information's sake.'9

"New York. He teaches at Berlitz."

Vaud looked at the table, as if reading something there that Leif couldn't see. "And you do not foresee a reunion with him in the near future."

Leif laughed hollowly. "Boy, do I not."

"Your mother?"

"She died when I was six. I think she couldn't stand it, either-life with him, I mean. They took her to the hospital suddenly one afternoon. They told me it was a heart attack, but I knew about her sleeping pills. There were a lot of them missing afterward."

"My sympathies," Vaud said smoothly enough, though it seemed obvious to Leif that they were elsewhere. "Dal- ana hewi m-iet rhunnet?"

Leif cocked his head, then shook it. "I don't have any of the Native American languages, sorry. My dad never cared about those. He said the orthographies were too artificial." Leif made a face.

"As regards that he may have had a point," Vaud said, "but it makes little odds to us. So. Meliankele nou moustei rhev'emien?"

"Kai ton emen," Leif said, correcting Vaud's pronunciation. If he was going to use an idiom that had been forged on Crete, he might as well say the word the way the Cretans said it.

Vaud raised his eyebrows and spoke another phrase, this time in what Leif recognized as Tagalog, but couldn't otherwise understand. He answered in Filipino pidgin. It went on that way for about half an hour, leaving the more esoteric languages and getting into considerable detail in Russian and French, before Vaud finally sat back in his chair and looked down at the table one more time.

After a moment he said, "I take it from the fact that you sought and came to this interview in the first place that you would not be averse to doing some work on the outside."

"This place is boring me stiff," Leif said. "And the counselors are beginning to get on my nerves. Out would be good.. and something to do that wasn't school would be good, too."

"Your talents," Vaud said, "seem considerable. There is a possibility we could use someone like you. Naturally, I must consult my colleagues in this regard, and they will want to look you over."

"Who's running this business," Leif said, "you or them?"

Vaud's lips, if possible, drew into an even thinner line than they had been manifesting already. "We are a cooperative venture," he said, "and my colleagues have a right to voice their opinions. Can you be here around this time tomorrow?"

Leif thought about it for a moment. "I don't see why not."

"I would prefer a more concrete commitment," Vaud said; the tone of voice was soft enough, but the look was sharp. "If your father has treated you harshly, that is some cause for regret, I grant you. But there is no reason to be less than civil or forthcoming with those who seek to treat you less harshly, indeed who seek to put your talents to some use."

Leif considered it time to show a little nervousness. He swallowed. "I'll be there."

"Very good. Be prompt." He glanced behind Leif, and the featureless blueness that had been swirling around him now parted to show the sunshine on the Barenplatz again.

"Good day, Mr. Dawson."

"Bye," Leif said, and went out the door. It closed behind him.

He exited from the Breathing Space virtual environment, waited for the header-strippers and other anony- mizing functions that Mark had attached to his virtual persona to undo themselves, and then glanced around him. The ice cave looked a little dim. It was a function of some of the filters and protections Mark had applied to it to make sure that no one at Vaud's end of things could tell that Leif was coming in through anything but a certified Breathing Space connection.

Abruptly the dimness cleared away, and Megan and Mark were standing there, looking at Leif. "Did you get it?" he said to Mark.

"It's all down in memory," Mark said, "in triplicate."

"You said you were going to try to run a trace on that guy while the interview was going on," Megan said. "Any luck with that?"

Mark shook his head. "He's got as many layers of an- onymization wrapped around him as you had. As far as I can tell, he didn't have much in the way of detection running. He shouldn't have been able to tell much about your connection. In fact, he may not have been trying… if he assumes you're coming in from Breathing Space, he probably thinks he knows their system so well he doesn't have to bother."

"If," Megan said.

Mark shrugged. "We can't tell for sure, so there's no point in worrying about it.

Megan was looking at Leif. "Are you okay? You look a little rocky."

"No, I'm fine. I just-" Leif laughed. "You'll think this is funny. But I hate lying. I'm no good at it. At least, I always think I'm not, though the people around me don't seem to pick up on that."

"Was he impressed?"

"I think so. There's going to be another interview."

"Same 'street corner'?" Mark said from his workspace.

"As far as I could tell. He didn't give me any directions."

"Good," Mark said. "We'll need to record that one, too, since he didn't actually offer you any work or go into details about it… just said he might. But that'll be all we need to sink him, Megan."

"Not quite all," Megan said. She looked over at Leif. "It's not like I don't think you can handle what's coming up. I know you can. But now we're getting close to material that could get really hot… and I think if we don't go see James Winters first, before the second interview, he's going to be really, really cranky."

Leif nodded. "So let's call the man in the morning," he said, "and make an appointment. We're gonna catch us some big fish.. and we'll let Winters bring some tackle of his own."