Runaways

Chapter 9

Megan had often suspected her father of some level of affiliation with Net Force that had never been made fully plain to her, and probably wouldn't be for a long time… if ever. It had occurred to her privately that being a writer, with the freedom to go places without warning and investigate almost anything with no better reason than "I'm writing a book about it," would be a very useful cover for someone who was actually doing a whole lot more than writing a book about it. But she had never said this to her father, and she wasn't going to start now. She simply got out of the Net, went straight down into his office, and said, "Daddy, James Winters said I should talk to you."

He was sitting in the implant chair with his head leaned back, eyes closed, lips moving slightly-she had always teased him about being, not a lip reader, but a "lip writer." He liked to dictate, in his own virtual workspace, walking up and down and telling his stories out loud to an audience. Now the lip motions stopped, his eyes opened, and he looked at her with some mild concern. "About what?"

She told him. It took very little time. The thought of "the meter running" was very much on her mind.

As Megan talked, her father swung himself around on the seat of the implant chair, so that he was sitting more or less "sidesaddle," and looked at her in silence. "He said if there were any questions, you should call him," Megan said.

"Well," her father said. "I guess the immediate question is, why didn't you give me or your mother a hint that this was going on?"

"Daddy, I know," Megan said. "I'm sorry. It's just that all this started happening so fast… if there'd been a little more time I would have told you. But we had to start moving or we would have lost our chance to do anything useful…"

Her dad sat there for a few moments and looked off in an unfocused way into the air. "You really are worried about Burt, aren't you," he said. "It's not just you trying to keep Wilma off your case."

Megan's eyes went a little wide at that. She had hardly spared a thought for Wilma since this business had started getting really busy. "Uh. No," she said. "Not that. It's just that Burt is… Burt's not used to this kind of thing, Dad! And stopping these people is the best way of finding out what they've done with him and getting him home again. Assuming he wants to come home. But he just ran away because he was unhappy, Dad. He doesn't deserve to get kidnapped or killed because he made an error in judgment!"

Her father didn't say anything for a moment. "Normally I would consult with your mother about something like this," he said at last, "but I get the distinct feeling from you that time is short. And to a certain extent, I agree with you… and there's probably not too much that can happen to you while James is riding herd on you both."

He chewed his lip for a moment. "Go on, then, get on with it," he said, mostly to Megan's back. She was already halfway down the hall to the other machine.

"Thanks, Dad!"

"I'll call school and tell them you won't be in," he called after her. "But tell Winters I'd appreciate a call from him when the excitement dies down… "

"I will!"

Megan threw herself into the seat, lined up her implant, and went virtual.

Elsewhere in the virtual realm, Mark Gridley pressed himself up against a wall in the darkness and tried very hard to be still and small and nonexistent, for the monsters were after him.

Naturally they were not really monsters. The physical shapes presently stalking him were symbolic representations of the hunt/trace/immobilize routines that the programmers responsible for Breathing Space's client data storage had erected as protection around their clients' confidential personality-profile and counseling records. The routines had been written in a new release of Caldera II, the Net programming language that Mark knew and liked best. Unfortunately, they also incorporated some of the newer features of Caldera, ones with which Mark was presently not as familiar as he was with the older version of the language. As a result, the dragons had so far chased Mark three times right around the system firewall, knowing that someone was trying to get in and get at the files, but-because of the "cloak of invisibility" nondetection routine that Mark was wearing, they were unable to do anything more concrete about him than keep on following the "scent" his attempts to subvert the routines were leaving in the system. You couldn't rewrite code without leaving a trace, and the hunter/stalker guard routines were all too skilled at detecting that trace, that "scent," and following it. Every time they detected it, Mark had to move. If the routines actually came in contact with his virtual self, he would be thrown right out of the system, and he didn't have time for that right now. Time was, in fact, getting desperately short.

He kept on trotting around the firewall, which manifested, in an access of some programmer's rather skewed wit, as an actual wall of fire. If there's a big rock in there with a Valkyrie sleeping on it, I'm leaving, Mark thought. But leaving was very low on his list of things to do. He had to get in, and fast. The people he was expecting were certain to be along any time now.

He paused, looking at the fire, watching the pattern of it, the way the flames wavered. Behind him he could hear the dragons snuffling along, getting closer. But for a moment he ignored them. The flames did indeed have a repeating pattern. The anti-incursion routine meant to keep intruders out was cyclic, a single piece of code, recursing itself. The programmer was trying to save space, Mark thought. Not a terrible idea, usually. Could have been very elegant. But he stopped too soon. He should have hooked a random-number generator into it as well. He didn't, though, and the cycle is processing, canceling itself out in places-

The snuffling behind him, around the curve of the firewall, was getting louder. Mark ignored it, concentrated on the pattern. He had seen girls getting ready to jump into a double jump-rope in motion doing this same kind of pattern analysis with the body as well as the mind, looking for the open spot, the rhythm in which it repeated. Miss it and the ropes would clip you hard enough to raise a welt-or, in this case, the firewall routines would grab your Net persona, fling it into a "holding area" from which there would be no escape, and call the cops. You dumb thing, I am the cops, Mark thought. Or I will be as soon as Winters gets the subpoena! But even Winters couldn't get something like this handled instantly. Judges are not ordered around at will by law enforcement organizations. And this business was as time-sensitive as it came, unfortunately not even to be handled by a friendly call to Breathing Space. Too many layers of explanation to work your way up through, not enough time. Company was coming, would be along any minute now. And there was no more time. Mark swayed forward and back with the rhythm of the flames wavering in front of him. No more time, no more time, no more time-

He jumped through, came down wrong, sprawled. But it didn't matter. He was inside.

He ran across the landscape inside the wall of fire, a forest of trees which were actually tree structures. Great, a programmer who thinks that the pun is the highest form of humor. But it made Mark's work a little easier. He touched the bole of each tree he passed, and the labeling glowed through the bark, showing names and intake dates. The most recent ones were closest to the wall. Mark found the one that matched the time period that went with "Dawson's" back story, three months old, then poked the. tree with one finger, and said to it, "Down."

Obligingly it sank into the ground like an elevator until Mark said, "Stop." He found the "D" branch and reached under the "cloak of invisibility" for what he had brought with him, the file confirming Leif's backstory. Right now this was still shaped like a manila file folder, but Mark looked at all the other files hanging off this branch of the tree structure, and grinned, for they were all in the shape of leaves. He twiddled the file in his hands, and it changed shape, shrank, went small and green and pointy, like all the other leaves. With care he held the file near the branch. A bare twig grew out to it, met the leaf, joined onto it. Mark took his hand away, and the leaf held.

And then he heard the voices…

Ohmigod, Mark thought.

"Up!" he whispered. The tree shot back up to its original level, almost dislodging Mark as he scrambled further up it like a panicked squirrel, hiding himself away up in the leafy branches, well above the dates involved in "Dawson" 's records. There he crouched on a high branch, as close to the trunk as he could get, and held very still.

Underneath him and not far away the fire died down, and two men in armor of the kind mistakenly called "chain mail" came stalking through it. They both had helmets on, hiding their features. These were symbols for "seeming" programs which were running concurrently with the "armor" routines that were protecting them from the fire. Inside job, thought Mark immediately. Crap! Someone inside Breathing Space had freely given them access to this data.

"Do you know where it is?" one of the men was saying.

"Are you kidding? Week in, week out I am in here… I know the place entirely too well. Right, here we are." The armored figure reached out and poked the trunk of the tree Mark was hiding in. "Down-"

Down it went, so that Mark's poor stomach complained bitterly, and he clutched the trunk and tried to keep absolutely still and silent. "Let's see now," said the man, feeling along the branches of the tree no more than six feet under him, while Mark urged him silently, Don't look up, don 9t look up…

"Aha," the man said, "here we are." He reached to the leaf which Mark had placed there only a few seconds before, and plucked it.

"Reading mode," he said.

A text window appeared in the air near him, and the man turned to it and began to read. "Yes, yes," he said as he read."… Yes, all very unfortunate…" He made a couple of tsk, tsk noises as he read. Then he stood there, silent.

"So?" the other man said. "What's the problem? We have to get going, we have his interview shortly."

"I wonder if we should," the first man said.

"Why? What's the matter?"

"The date stamp on this file is wrong," said one of them.

A cold chill went right through Mark. "What?"

"Look at this," the man said. "The file was accessed only this afternoon. Only a couple of hours ago, in fact."

"So?"

"So why would it be? Why would anyone access this particular file at this particular moment in time?"

"Good question. Routine reevaluation?"

"Hmm…"

Mark swallowed, trying to do it quietly, and nonetheless convinced that the entire planet could hear him.

"Three months after intake date."

"See, there you are. Routine."

"I don't know… "

"You're too suspicious. Come on."

"I stay free by being too suspicious. No… for me, this clinches it. Let him go, I don't want him."

"Isn't there a better way?"

"Such as?"

"Send him out, get some work out of him, and then lose him."

"Oh, like this last one."

"Yes."

A long pause. "It would teach them not to try planting anyone on us, wouldn't it." Then that man laughed softly. "All right. We'll 4hire' him… but his employment will be brief."

"Plants, though," said the other man."… Now there's a nasty thought."

"Oh? What?"

"That last one, the blond boy. If this one is a plant… that one could be, too."

The first man laughed out loud. "Him? You're kidding. He barely knows what's happening to him. That's what you said made him so perfect for the present job."

"Yes, I know. All the same…"

"Oh, come on, forget it! He's history now anyway, or about to be so. Stop worrying and come on. We don't want to keep our new 'employee' waiting."

"Where were you thinking of sending him?"

"That cash drop. Kiev."

"You really don't want to pay them, do you?"

"Increasingly, no. What better way to avoid it than to have someone kill the courier, and then claim thieves did it? And over there, it's the perfect excuse. They're all the time stealing from each other, that lot. We get the money back, though they don't know that; we set them at odds against each other, which can only be good for us. And we also avoid having to close a deal that was going sour anyway. Gangsters, the whole lot of them. I hate giving them good money that they don't even know how to launder properly anymore."

"Well, yes. Cash is tight all over"

They walked away, casually chatting about the murder of other human beings, and Mark hid there up in the branches of the tree structure and shook with rage, most specifically because it had never occurred to him that this was a place where it would have been a good idea for him to have been "wired for sound." What he had just heard would have been enough to put these men away without Leif ever having had to take his meeting at all. And now it was lost, evidence that could only be given as his word against theirs…

Mark let out a long breath, waiting to see the fire spring up again, a sign that they were gone. Then, "Down," he said to the tree, "slowly." It obeyed him, and he headed for the firewall himself, intent, whatever happened, on not missing the meeting that would follow…

You're going to come to no good end, was one of the lines that Burt always heard from his father. Well, now it looked likely enough that the old man was going to be right, and that left Burt absolutely infuriated. He had been right, and Burt had been wrong, for all Burt's natural life; and now Burt was going to be dead, and his father was still going to be right. It was too much to bear.

"You never could think worth a lick," he heard his father saying. "Never think things through. Just go charging in, don't get your story straight, don't have a clue what's happening until it starts happening. And then it's too late, because the ones who've done the thinking have already outthought you. Why didn't I get a dog and shoot the dog?"

Burt was going alternately hot and cold with rage at the familiar words, and at how for once they seemed justified. He sat there in the departure lounge which had been assigned to his KLM flight, and twitched. The passengers' baggage had already been X-rayed and metal detection done at the entry to the Duty-Free area. At least Burt was in no imminent danger of being caught with this stuff on him. But shortly they would get on the plane, and in seven hours they would be back in the States, and Burt would get off the plane and be caught with this stuff…

You never could think worth a lick.

Burt sat there and burned hot with rage. Why me? Why are they doing this? I was doing what I was told.

Plainly they counted on me to do as I was told.

But why? Why hire a courier and then throw him away after he's done what he was supposed to do?

Burt stared out the plate-glass window revealing the broad expanse of Schiphol Airport, all that green grass under a blue sky, all incredibly flat. Why-

He could just see himself getting off at Reagan, going through customs. And then getting caught. There would be a big deal: look at this, look what we found in this kid's luggage. All the faces turned accusingly toward him, all the eyes staring-

And then, as he saw the eyes, as the sweat of humiliation and fear broke out on him again, Burt also saw something else. The eyes, the attention… and someone else slipping away in the middle of it all.

I'm not the important one on this plane! I'm just a distraction!

Someone else here has something much more important than I've got. They're going to get through when I don't

Suddenly it was obvious. If Burt got caught, then whoever was on the plane and was carrying something much more important, much more valuable or more seriously contraband, would slip on by, be out, be gone, while Burt was still being strip-searched and flashrayed and probably just about turned inside out. Whoever this person was would have to be carrying the stuff in their cabin baggage, or on their person. They couldn't afford to have to wait to claim their luggage. It would be someone who only had carry-on.

Burt looked at his fellow passengers in near-despair. He didn't have any baggage to check, himself, and so hadn't had to stand in line at check-in and see who had checked their baggage in and who hadn't. And everyone here had some kind of carry-on with them. It was hopeless….

Hopeless. And frustrating, knowing that right here with him, one of these people had something really illegal or dangerous, and they were going to use Burt to cover their escape, and get him caught instead.

An irrational impulse to start grabbing people and shaking them, one by one, and shouting, "Why are you doing this to me!" washed over him and almost immediately passed. That would be really stupid. Get him caught right now, probably. A bad idea. Yet at the same time, the urge to confront the person who was doing this to him, just by looking at him or her, would not go away.

Crazy idea.

Nonetheless, for lack of anything better to do, in the face of that DELAYED sign and the thought of his last few hours of freedom, Burt started to do it. He decided that he was not going to be obvious about it. But he was going to look every single passenger on this flight in the eye, and let them know that he knew what they were doing, what was going to happen to him. One of them would have to get the message. If the other two hundred or however many of them thought he was a little crazy, so be it. But he was going to have this last small satisfaction.

Burt started moving gently around the departure lounge with the overnight bag slung nonchalantly over his shoulder, positioning himself in one spot or another, and looking at people, systematically, starting near the door through which they would all board their plane, and working his way toward the door through which people entered from the main concourse. That was so he would be able to look at all the people inside, and when he'd looked into the eyes of every one of them, he could do the last ones in by standing at the entry door as they came in.

Burt made a game of it, working not to be obvious about it. Mostly people looked at him, bored, and let their eyes drift away. A few stared back, then lost interest. It went on that way for about fifteen minutes, as Burt moved as unobtrusively as he could from one spot to another, meeting the eyes of his fellow passengers, studying them all for signs that this person was the one who was going to betray him.

And then, maybe a hundred and fifty people along, he noticed something odd. There was a man in a long leather trench coat, a piece of clothing that Burt immediately envied, so that his glance at the man lasted longer than it might have otherwise. But as the man turned, he avoided Burt's eyes. And as Burt tried to make eye contact with him again, not being obvious about it, but just persisting, it slowly became obvious to Burt that this man would not meet his eyes under any circumstances. He would not even look in Burt's general direction.

It got to be more than a coincidence, as Burt casually drifted around the lounge, positioning himself here and there, and watched what happened. There was just no way to get the man to look at him at all. No matter where Burt might stand, the man in the brown leather trench coat, the man carrying the brown leather briefcase, the dark-haired man with a very ordinary face, simply was always looking somewhere else. Trying to get this guy to see him was like trying to look at the back of your own head without a mirror.

The uncertainty started to become certainty, and the certainty started to become triumph. That's him, Burt thought. This is the one. No one else. Somehow he just knew he was right.

The certainty made him almost giddy with relief. All right, he thought to himself, severely. It was almost his father's tone of voice, but newly made his own. Let's think this through. Don't get all excited too soon. Fine. So this is the guy. What are you going to do about it?

Burt withdrew behind a nearby pillar and looked at the man, while trying to seem as if he had his attention bent elsewhere. The guy had a briefcase, pretty much like anybody else's. Fine, but there could be all kinds of things inside a case like that. Burt thought of the diamond he had seen being weighed for that young guy back at the stall. That gem alone could have been worth tens of thousands of dollars. Five or six of those, tucked away in a briefcase full of important-looking papers, or hidden in some part of the briefcase less obvious-that could be very, very serious money.

But whatever he was carrying, he wanted nothing to do with Burt. That was all that mattered. Now all Burt had to do was figure out what to do with the information

"Figuring out" isn't your strongest suit, my boy, he heard that old familiar voice saying, amused, triumphant. Burt frowned. We911 see about that…