Safe House

7

Elsewhere, another room was very small and dark. It had been a coal bin, once, in the cellar of this house, in a time when people still used coal for heating in the cities; its walls were all black with soot, and a few forgotten lumps of coal still lay around on the rammed dirt of the floor. The coal cellar had just one way to the outside, a pair of metal doors at a forty-five degree angle to the stucco of the building. The doors’ hinges were long since rusted shut, as was the padlock through the old hasp, connecting them. They had been painted over, for good measure, some time in the last decade, with (in a gesture of optimism) a rustproofing paint. Plainly, from its external appearance, no one could possibly be in here…which made it an excellent place to hide.

Armin Darenko sat as comfortably as he could, leaning against the sooty wall, concentrating on the tiny line of light that came to him through those old doors, from a not-quite-painted-over crack on the right-hand side of one of them. He had come in a couple of days ago, in the dead of night, through the tunnel in the middle of the floor. His clean clothes were down in that tunnel, now, so as not to become smirched with soot that would draw attention to him when it was time to leave. He knew that time would come in the next few days — his friends were working for him, out there. But that did not stop him from being very afraid, as he sat here, and his mind ran in frightened circles like a rat in a particularly inhumane Skinner box, always looking for the cheese and never finding it, and being shocked again and again by the same fear.

He sighed, took a deep breath, and tried, for the thousandth time, to break the cycle. Laurent was safe. Of that much he was sure. Laurent was in Alexandria, with the Greens, and was almost certainly coping splendidly. His son had all his mother’s old toughness, that ability to deal with what was happening around her and not be more trouble to others than necessary. And he was carrying the silent little helpers which would keep him healthy, protect him by brute force from passing infections against which he might not have been inoculated, keep his system chemistry in kilter, and otherwise make themselves useful. Very useful indeed they would be, some day, when they were in the right hands and turned loose to help a suffering world. For the moment, though, Laurent was their unwitting custodian, and in a safe place…so the two things about which Armin Darenko had been more concerned than about anything else in the world were now where he did not need to worry about them. Now Armin was free to concentrate on getting himself out of here.

Getting in had been easy enough, for a man who for a long, long time had been idly considering that there might come a day the events of which called for a sudden departure. Escapes planned at the last moment rarely do well, he knew. So quietly Armin had begun, about twenty years ago, keeping his ears open for information which might come in handy eventually. And sure enough, it came. When the governments started changing over with more than the usual speed, rumors started turning up here and there about tunnels under the city. Some of them were just that, rumors — but occasionally they were true. This particular network of tunnels, which apparently went right back to the bad old Ceaucescu days, was one of the true ones. They did not lead anywhere really useful — just from cellar to cellar of some of the houses in this part of town — but that fact in itself made them useful, since tunnels which actually led directly to escape would have been found long since and filled in, or blown up. Right now a simple place to hide was all that Armin could want in the world.

He had enough food and water to keep him going for a couple of days yet, and a cache under a rock in the nearby park where he could, with the greatest caution and in the dark of night, slip out and get more, if he needed it. He was intent on not going out if he could avoid it, though — not until he heard, on the tiny radio he was carrying, the coded news from the people who had agreed to help get him out. Armin had risked enough going out to the lakes, three days ago, to leave the false trail that he much hoped would concentrate the authorities’ search in that direction. It was too much to hope that they would keep looking there for long, after they found no sign of him in the space of a couple or a few days. They were not stupid people. But even a couple of days’ distraction would allow the friends who were helping him here to complete their own plans. With luck, in a couple of days, maybe less, he would go to join Laurent.

And then the world would have to be started all over again, for both of them. He knew the medical community in the States would welcome him. So would others…and this time he would have to be more careful than he had been here. It was not as if there were not cruel, venal, and evil people in the United States, just as well as here; people who would see, in the delicate and intelligent little machines he had created, a weapon instead of a tool. He would have to work with Martin, and with Martin’s friends at Net Force and elsewhere in the intelligence and scientific communities, to find ways to control his creations so that they could not be modified for deadly purposes.

He sighed, alone there in the darkness, and knew that it would be an uphill fight, if indeed this purpose could be achieved at all. There was no putting the genic back in the bottle, as the old story had it. It was out, now — out walking around the world in his son’s body. Soon enough it would be in the lab, being studied by other scientists. And after that…

Armin felt around him in the darkness for the plastic bottle of springwater, took a swig, sealed it, and put it aside again. At least he had left no working prototypes here. What hurt him most now was the price he suspected that some of the people who had been working with him must be paying. But there comes a time when one must, however reluctantly, weigh lives in one’s hand — one’s own life, as well as those of others — and decide whether sparing two lives, or five or ten, here and now, is worth losing thousands, perhaps millions, later on. For Armin was not so naive as to think his invention would stay inside his country’s borders if he completed it and turned it over to the government. Cluj desperately needed hard currency. He would sell the microps to anyone who would pay him. Terrorists, intelligence organizations, criminals, common murderers, other countries with better intentions would all pay well for them. And chaos would ensue. Soon the negative uses would proliferate, outnumbering the positive ones. No one would know whether anything they ate or drank was normal food, or something that could take them apart from the inside — either slowly, molecule by molecule, or very quickly indeed.

Armin’s only consolation was that he had managed to destroy all the locally held records about the section of coding which told the microps how to “breed,” how to reproduce themselves from raw materials, protein chains and mineral ions, inside their host. He had destroyed not only the code, before he left, but all his notes, and as many of his associates’ notes as possible. Not all of them had been accessible…but he had made sure that it would take a long, long while before anyone remaining behind here would be able to retro-engineer the microps from the bits and pieces which were all that remained when he left the laboratory for the last time the other night, having that afternoon sent his son off, ostensibly to visit the vampire’s castle.

Half his work was done. Now all that remained was to get himself to safety as well. The quiet people who had slowly let him know that they would help him were now busy out there — he would hear from them soon. Most of his time he now spent listening to the little radio on its earphone, amusing himself by judging the tenor of the search for him by the increasing or decreasing shrillness of the announcements about him during the “crime bulletins.” The rest of the time, he spent thinking about new microps designs, taking refuge in the sweet orderliness of the molecular-level world, where structure and symmetry reigned….

…And about his son. Safe, thank God, he thought; safe….

In the darkness he closed his eyes.

The darkness sang to him, and Laurent streaked out through it, laughing. Maj had been right about the Arbalest. It needed very little expertise in handling, in this mode — a normal joystick was enough. “Right now you’re going to be flying it for pleasure, not mastery,” she had said, having handed him the icon. “So there’s no harm in letting the game module ‘read your mind’ a little. But don’t overdo it. And I wouldn’t go in the main game, if I were you. The Archon’s people are still drifting around there trying to make trouble, some of them…and if you get my fighter shot up, we’re going to have words.”

But she had also shown him how to return instantly from the Cluster Rangers game to her own simming space…and Laurent had not been able to resist. Maj’s re-created space, though full of stars and matching the Cluster Rangers space closely in terms of astrography and physical laws — this being important for the high-G work — still did not have that subtle, sublime look-and-feel that the original had. He craved the sound of the stars singing, and he was going to have just a little of it, on his own, before coming back to mundane life again.

Listen to me, he thought as he flew up and over the curve of Dolorosa, into that spectacular view. “Mundane,” I am calling her life, after only, what? A day and a half of it? Two days. And a life that any of the other kids at school would kill for — I don’t care how high up in the government their parents are. Look at me! I’m becoming jaded. Decadent.

He laughed for sheer pleasure as the great arm of the Galaxy spread itself out before him, the sound of it shimmering silvery against the ship’s skin, tingling all through him. This is what virtually should be like, Laurent thought, tumbling the Arbalest in its yaw axis so that it turned to face the view of the great heart of the Seraphim Cluster, all those burning jewels spilled out across the night, flaring and fading, flaring and fading again. You would never have thought the stars could have so many colors, he thought. He knew the stellar types, but the prosaic letters and numbers did not even hint at this wild treasury of shades and brilliances, set dazzling in the darkness.

It is enough to turn me into an astronomer, Laurent thought. And a big shiver went through him, hot and cold at once, and then another one, so that he was surprised for a moment, and checked the ship’s controls to see if something was wrong with the suit conditioning system, or the cockpit’s own environmental controls. But all the lights were green, so that Laurent laughed again, at himself this time. He tumbled the ship once more to get one last look at that huge arm of the Galaxy, lying draped over a third of the sky, like a blazing banner spread out on some impossible wind—

“Niko?”

Uh-oh, he thought, and tumbled the ship one more time, getting a fix on Maj’s hangar and heading for it. “Coming—”

It was Maj’s mother, outside the virtual space. It amused Laurent that her family all seemed to leave the option open to talk to each other from inside or outside their various virtualities, no matter what they were doing. “Do you eat lamb, honey?”

“Lamb? Yes!”

“Oh, good,” she said, invisible but amused. “An enthusiast. Garlic?”

“We all have to eat garlic,” Laurent said. “It is required. It keeps the Transylvanians away.”

“Mmm, no comment,” Maj’s mother said. “If I didn’t know better, I would have believed you about the cows, too. Are you going to be in there much longer?”

“I am coming out now,” Laurent said. He was landing the Arbalest in Maj’s hangar even as he spoke — which was just as well, since the light over one of the hangar’s pedestrian doors started flashing, indicating that someone wanted to come in.

“Good,” Maj’s mother said. “Because the Muffin is giving me grief at the moment that you are not available to be played with.”

“Oh. I will be right out.”

The hangar ceiling was almost finished shutting, and the huge space began to repressurize.

“‘Niko,” said Maj’s voice in the middle of the air, suggesting that the Muffin was indeed within range, “what are you doing in there?”

“Just letting the air back in.”

The process finished as he got down onto the floor again. The flashing light over the door turned green, and the door opened. Maj came strolling across the syncrete as Laurent went through the walk-around, which Maj told him was traditional among pilots, to make sure that nothing had fallen off their craft — or if it had, to find what it was so that someone else could be charged for it.

“And where have you been?” she said, trying to sound severe.

“Flying,” he said. “I finished with my work space for today….” He sighed a little. “It will take a while to get it the way I want it.”

“You didn’t take it out in the real game, did you?” She looked at him narrowly.

“Well,” he said. “Yes.”

“Oh, come on, Laurent,” she said. “I promised I would make sure you didn’t overdo it. And what if the Archon had come along with one of his fleets?”

“But the Archon was blown up. In the Big Bang.”

Maj blew out an annoyed breath. “You know they’ll just clone him from the bits and pieces.” she said. “In fact, there are probably clones sitting around on Darkworld right now waiting to be uncanned and reprogrammed. He could have turned up the next day!”

“But he did not. And besides, you said it would have been tactically unwise.” He grinned at her.

“Space lawyer,” Maj said. “Come on, lose the suit. I hear that Mom is going to make her famous impaled lamb chops with garlic stuck all through them.”

Laurent concentrated and vanished the suit. “What does it mean,” he said as they walked back to the door to Maj’s space, “when you try to make something in the work space, and it fails?”

“It’s just incomplete visualization,” Maj said. “All kinds of reasons for that. In your case, you’re still getting used to the hardware-software interface…failures are common.” She looked around her at the soft evening light coming through the high windows in her own work space as they stepped through the door. “You should have seen how long it took me to get this right. The lighting, the synchronization to local time. The sounds, the smells…” She looked at the floor with amusement. “And the carpet kept changing color. It drove me crazy until I found out why it did that. I’d stolen the ‘template’ from a carpet company ad online…and every time they changed the ad, the rug changed, too….”

“But there is no rug here.”

“No, I got rid of it.” She smiled a rather embarrassed smile. “See, I didn’t find out what I was doing wrong until much later. I vanished the carpet and put in hardwood flooring…and then found out. But look, Laurent, really, your dad said that he didn’t want you to spend too much time Netside, and I—”

The door on the other side of the work space opened, and a tall, gangly young man wearing fluorescent floppy clothes and a marked resemblance to Maj’s father looked in. “Maj, is your friend — Oh, here he is. Hi there.”

“Laurent, this is the famous Rick you keep hearing about,” Maj said. “The phantom stranger.”

“When I’m home all the time, she complains,” Rick said, coming over to shake Laurent’s hand. “When I’m not home all the time, she complains. Let me give you advice — don’t have any sisters.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Laurent said, a little shyly, as they made their way back to the door. “Yours seem all right.”

“Huh,” said Rick, an all-purpose sound of skepticism, and embarked on a list of Maj’s weak points, all spurious as far as Laurent could tell, while Maj followed her brother through the door into his own work space and made scathing comments about his dress sense. Laurent smiled a little as he followed them through the space, which resembled nothing else so much as a huge warehouse piled up with wildly assorted objects of all kinds. “Welcome to Icon World,” Maj said to Laurent. “My brother is a little object-oriented, as you can see. Rick, was there a reason for this intrusion, or were you just practicing being a nuisance?”

“Oh, I heard you doing the ‘Behavior Police’ act and thought I’d come see what it looks like when you do it to other people…. This door shuts your implant off,” Rick said to Laurent while stepping over the sill of another doorway which was standing, incongruously, in the middle of the huge warehouse space. “I understand that your presence is being requested in what we laughably refer to as the Real World.”

A moment later Laurent found himself sitting in the implant chair in the Greens’ den, and the sound of someone running down the hall made him stand up. A few seconds later the Muffin came charging in and grabbed him around the legs. “I have to read to you now,” she announced, breathless.

“That depends. When is dinner?” Laurent said.

“Half an hour,” said Maj, putting her head in through the doorway. “Muffin, no dinosaurs now. You’ve exceeded your Net time for today. And so have you,” she said, wagging a finger at Laurent, “so behave.”

“We will be good,” Laurent said, with a rather helpless smile as the Muffin grabbed his hand and dragged him out of the den and toward her room. Maj smiled at him and went off; and Laurent, following the Muffin, reflected that though the family he preferred the most was his own, there were others which could, very temporarily, make an acceptable distraction.

He found his hands shaking just a little, a fine muscle tremor, as he sat down on the Muffin’s bed and watched her start rooting through her bookshelves. The jet lag is finally catching up with me, he thought. Or maybe it’s just nerves. Why am I spending time scaring myself? Things are happening as fast as they can. And Popi is smart…smarter than they are. He’ll be here soon enough, and if I’m wrecked with worrying, he won’t be happy.

Laurent let out a long breath and watched the Muffin settle down on the floor and open the book….

The Quality House Suites in Alexandria was as relentlessly chainlike as most of the other hotels in the chain, or so the major heard one businessman telling another over drinks in the hotel’s downstairs bar. Herself, she could not understand what his problem was. There was nothing wrong with one hotel being like another. The same kind of service everywhere, what was wrong with that? These people were too individualistic for their own good.

She tried to put the locals’ quirks out of her mind, though it was hard, stuck here among the millions of them, trapped in all this offensive opulence and conspicuous consumption. This whole country was vulgar, a vast expanse of expenditure for its own sake, money spent just to prove it was there in the first place. Other countries would have used these resources more wisely…if they had had them, and if this country had not spent so much time and spite making sure that other countries did not.

Well, the major thought, sipping her mineral water as she sat alone at the little table in the hotel lounge and made shorthand notes on a pad, they will soon see the tables rather painfully turned, for a change. Once this recovery operation is over and the results start to be developed, our balance of payments should show a great improvement…and the countries around us which have been so busily shoring up their connections to the Western democracies will start wondering whether they should instead have looked closer to home for financial aid. Not that they will get any from us…not now. They have shown all too clearly where their loyalties lie.

But that was in the future. Right now the major was busy reviewing what had been done so far since she arrived, making sure everything was sorted out. It was no small matter to arrange the theft of an ambulance, but she was working on it. Money talked, even to the local organized-crime groups, and she thought she would shortly have all the necessary resources in place. She already had what little weaponry she needed — in this country there was never any problem with that, no matter what the government tried to do, or said it wanted to. Its own people, unable or unwilling to discriminate between their condition now and that of three hundred years ago, had it hamstrung there. In any case, it would not be firepower that would make the difference to this operation, but speed, surprise, and the amount of traffic between here and the Embassy. Two out of three of those elements, the major could control. They would be more than enough.

She folded up her pad and put it away in her sidepack, and sipped at her mineral water again. Things were now progressing nicely. Her source back home had informed her via coded message to her pager that the first “burst” signal had been sent — the microps were awake and accepting new programming, and would also relay directional information the next time the boy was in the Net. Now the clock was running. Within about twenty-four hours there would be a call for an ambulance…and she would be ready with its “crew” to take the poor sick boy someplace where he would be “properly” cared for.

Something bleeped softly behind the concierge’s desk, and he looked up. “Mrs. Lejeune?” he called. “Your car is here. It’s waiting out front.”

“Thank you,” the major said. She finished her mineral water, then walked out the front to where the rental car had just settled into the pickup pad.

She slid in behind the driver’s seat, lined up her implant with the car’s Net access, and let it confirm her identity and credit information — all very routine stuff, which (having been planted here long since by her own service) confirmed that she was Mrs. Alice Lejeune of Baton Rouge, owner of a small printing company. Anyone at Avis whose eye happened to fall on her rental details would think she was probably up here on business, just as the people at the hotel had.

She knew exactly where she was going, for she had memorized the maps before ever passing her own country’s borders. Now the major took the stick and drove along sedately for some miles, idly noting the seenery. This whole area had become relentlessly suburban over the years, affluent, smug. Well, there was at least one family here who would have its smugness ruffled somewhat in the next twenty-four or thirty-six hours.

She hung a right out of the main north-south artery, letting the car drive on auto for the moment while she activated the small video camera she had brought with her, using it to look around and take careful note of what cars were parked in this area. One of her assistants would be making another pass later, in another locally registered car, to compare those images with these. She was fairly sure that Professor Green would have called for some kind of external surveillance by now. But over the next twelve hours the major and the operatives who had been onsite until now would get a complete record of which vehicles were the same, which ones changed…which were registered to genuine locals, and which belonged to people trying not to look like they were keeping an eye on the Greens’ house.

The major looked down as the car turned right and proceeded along the small quiet suburban street…and there it was. A longish house, looking as if it had been built in stages. A front door with steps leading down to the standard suburban front walk through the standard suburban lawn. A back door leading out into a large fenced garden with a child’s play set. A garage, not connected to the house, and a driveway out in front of it, with the family car sitting on it at the moment. Lights on in several rooms, and — as she pulled down her “sunglasses” and looked through them — one, two, three, four, five, six blurred heat-shapes in the dining room, with other shapes over to one side; the oven, the refrigerator, the microwave.

Family dinner. How charming.

In her mind she made note of the entrance and exit routes — distances, obstacles — and smiled slightly. Shortly the Greens’ suburban bliss would receive a wake-up call. Well, they would have brought it on themselves. And Professor Green in particular would be taught a sharp lesson in not interfering in other countries’ affairs. At the national level there was no hope that any notice would be taken…but at the personal level, she imagined there would. The message would be plain enough—This could have been your children. Back off, become wiser…or next time, it might be.

The car continued on by. The major sat back, looking at the last dregs of the broad sullen sunset, and smiling slightly at the prospect of action. Tomorrow, about this time, or a little later.

Poor little Laurent…I’m sure you’ve had a nice holiday. But it’s time to go home.

The evening tapered off into one of those informal we’re-all-here-at-once, isn’t-it-amazing family evenings which were Maj’s favorite kind, rather than the more structured “family nights” which her father insisted on once a week, usually on Thursdays unless something more important got in the way. Dinner was spectacular, and the family breathed garlic happily at one another all evening — no one moved from around the table for a long time, everyone seeming content to just sit around talking about life, the news, the various levels of school the family had to deal with, and so on. Laurent was plainly enjoying himself, but to Maj’s surprise, he was the first one to excuse himself and get up. “I think the jet lag is coming to get me, finally,” he said.

Maj’s father looked at him with some concern. “Do you feel all right? You look a little pale, actually.”

“Just a headache,” Laurent said.

“Poor dear. Maj, show him where the asprothingies are,” her mother said.

“Sure, come on….” She took him down to the bathroom, thumbprinted the medicine cabinet open, and rummaged around for the dissolvable aspirin that one of her father’s colleagues in England sent them once every few months. “This stuff is great…it has no taste at all. Two in water every four hours.” She reached up for a glass and half filled it with water, dropped the tablets in.

“Thanks,” Laurent said.

She looked at him thoughtfully. It wasn’t just the bathroom light — he really did look pale. “I wonder if you might have picked up a flu bug or something on the way in,” she said. “All those people in the airport, after all…a new country, lots of new strains of germs…”

“I don’t know,” Laurent said. “But I’m tired, all of a sudden. I wasn’t tired before, not like this.”

“Huh. Well, look, why not turn in early?”

“‘Turn in—’”

“Sorry…idiom. ‘Go to bed.’”

“I might,” he said, and sagged against the doorsill a little, watching the tablets fizz themselves away.

“Did this just hit you?” Maj said.

“Yes. Or maybe not. I felt — shivery — while I was…when I was inside Cluster Rangers. It wasn’t anything, I didn’t pay any attention to it.” He shrugged now. “You are probably right…it is probably just the flu.”

“I don’t know,” Maj said. “I’ve been online often enough when I was sick, and that’s just where you don’t feel it — the interface cuts your ‘normal’ bodily reactions out of the loop. You might have noticed,” Maj added with some amusement, “the first time you’d been there for a couple of hours and then found out real suddenly that you needed to visit the bathroom….”

He laughed at that, looking wry. “Yes.”

“I learned real early to lay off the fluids before simming,” Maj said. “Still, it’s a little weird…. Well, look, get some rest.”

The liquid in the glass finished its fizzing. Laurent picked it up, drank it down. “There is no taste,” he said.

“Believe me,” Maj said, “I prefer that to my brother’s method. He chews up aspirin tablets whole. Says the taste doesn’t bother him.” She shuddered.

So did Laurent. “That felt like a chill,” he said mournfully. “The flu, then. What a nuisance.”

“We’ve got some stuff in here that’s good for that,” Maj said. “One of the new multiplex antivirals. Wait a few hours to see if it really is the flu…then take one of these.” She reached into the cabinet again, showed him the box. “Same deal — two in a glass of water, then go lie down…because it’ll knock you on your butt.”

Laurent smiled a little wanly. “Idiom,” he said. “But I understood that one.”

“Go on,” Maj said, “go crash out. You’ve been through enough lately that you shouldn’t be surprised if it catches up with you.”

He headed off for the guest room. Maj made her way back into the kitchen, where her mother was talking the Muffin into getting ready to go to bed, and her father was leaning back in his chair talking curling with her brother. “Is he okay?” her dad said to her as Maj sat back down.

“He thinks he might be flu-ish,” Maj said. “He’s had a couple of chills.”

“Could be,” her mother said, and sighed. “That airport is always full of germs from exotic parts of the world, looking for new people to bite. Did you show him where the virus stuff was?”

“Yeah,” Maj said. “He’ll know better than any of us if he needs it.”

“All right,” her mother said. “I just don’t like to think of him being sick here alone. It’s busy the next couple of nights. You have that alumni thing again—”

“I can cancel if I have to,” Maj’s father said. “Any excuse.”

“That’s not what you said last night,” her mother said. “You said it was important. And I have that consultant’s meeting with the Net-dorks at PsiCor — heaven only knows how late that’s going to run…they kept me till ten last time. And you’re off sliding stones as usual,” she said to Rick.

“Mom, don’t sweat it, I’ll be here,” Maj said. “I’m flying with some of the Group tomorrow night. We were going to take Niko with us, but one way or another, I’ll be on site. It’s just the flu, anyway.”

“Yes, but he’s in a strange place…”

“Mom,” Maj said, “he doesn’t need his diaper changed, either. No need to do the Great Earth Mother thing.” She grinned a little. “You just go play kick-the-client as scheduled. Everything will be fine.”

“Yes, of course,” her mother said, and got up. “Come on, Miss Muffin, let’s get you in the restraints for the night.” She picked up the giggling, wriggling Muffin and carried her down the hall, shushing her as they went.

“He’s a nice kid.” Rick said. “Has he shown any interest in sports?”

“You mean in sliding rocks around on ice?” Maj said with good-natured scorn. “He’s shown much better sense than that. I think we’re going to make a simmer out of him.”

“A complete waste,” her brother said, getting up and stretching. “Oh, well.” He got up and started picking up dishes.

Maj looked at her dad. “You could always use the excuse,” she said.

“No, your mom’s right,” he said. “Duty before pleasure. Unfortunately.” He got up and started collecting silverware, and Maj rose to help him clear things away, it being the rule in the Green household that the Cook Didn’t Clean But Everyone Else Did.

Her brother chuckled. “Smart kid,” he said, “absenting himself before the cleaning frenzy was due to begin. He’ll go far.”

“He didn’t know,” Maj said. “And I don’t think he would have avoided it, frankly…” All the same, she found herself fretting in a mode similar to the one in which she had spent much of the day at school.

It’s just the flu. He’ll be fine.

But if I’m so sure, then why am I twitching like this?

In the small dark room, six thousand miles away, a man sat in the predawn darkness listening to his little radio through his earphone. At the end of each day’s first news broadcast, and after the day’s last one at six, there was always a reading of personal announcements which people had phoned or linked in to the national broadcaster — sometimes notices for people traveling in the country, sometimes mundane announcements like details about sales or a change in the time of a local country market, news about police roadblocks (at least, the ones they wanted you to know about), or information about where the roads were being worked on. Armin listened to each of these broadcasts every day, waiting for the one that would tell him that his unknown friends were ready to help him leave the cellar, and the country, for the last time. Now he sat waiting, tense as always, getting more impatient all the time as announcement after announcement was read, and none of them was for him.

“—the A41 national road at Soara, we regret to inform travelers that this road will be closed for the next two weeks due to bridge repairs on the route. Travelers are advised to use the A16 road through Elmila instead…Leoru Town Market will start at eight-fifteen next Saturday morning rather than at nine-fifteen as previously scheduled…. To Bela Urnim, presently traveling to Timisoara on business—”

The breath went into him in a gasp, got stuck there.

“—we have received your message of the eighteenth and understand it.”

Armin sat up convulsively against the wall, feeling his hands go cold with fear all in an instant. That was one of the code phrases in the book given him by the organization that had been helping him, the book which he had memorized. This one phrase had stuck particularly in his mind even before everything was committed to memory, because he had often wondered in what circumstances it might be used. And now he knew.

It meant, All is betrayed.

Armin began to shake.

“Your shipment has been collected at its destination by Customs and the information which you designated before leaving is being used to process it,” the uncomprehending voice reading the announcement went on. “The processing of perishable materials will be complete in twenty-four hours. You have that long to contact us regarding your desires regarding further handling. Otherwise the contents of the shipment will be disposed of…. This is a message for Gelei Vanni, traveling from Organte to—”

He pulled the earphone out of his ear, turned the radio off, dropped it on the dirty floor.

They have him.

He covered his face in his hands. I thought he was safe. I was a fool. They’ve found a way to get at him.

And they’ve activated the microps….

He rubbed his eyes, trying desperately to get hold of himself, for now he had to think, think. One of his associates had broken — no telling which. Sasha, or Donae, possibly. They would have known the machine codes for the microps which Laurent was carrying — there was a set of master codes which all the little creatures had been built to answer to in case of the need for an emergency shutdown. Now the police had those. And they had used them in the most effective manner possible, from their point of view.

His friends were all betrayed — they could not help him now. And the meaning of the message was clear enough. Come out and give yourself up, and we will spare your son’s life. Keep hiding, and…

Armin stopped rubbing his eyes. All too clearly in memory he could see the slides from the brains of the poor rats who had had the “mistake” happen to them, the ones in whom the microps had run wild for only half a day. That was happening right now, inside his son. It would take longer…but not much longer. They would now be migrating to his spinal column to make their way up through the cerebrospinal fluid into the brain. Once there, they would start pulling the myofibrils apart, chewing away at the myelin that coated and interconnected the brain cells. In eighteen hours, his son would be seriously ill. In twenty-four, he would be on his way to being a vegetable.

All he had to do now, to stop it, was give himself up.

And after that he would be made to re-create his work — especially, he knew, the dark side of it. If he did not, they would threaten Laurent again. Or they would simply kill them both, and hand his work over to someone else to continue. For they had Laurent — and dead or alive, they could be able to get enough information from whichever of his associates had cracked to get the microps out again. After that they would not care what happened to him.

Armin sat there for what seemed an eternity, in the darkness, frozen and trying to think what to do. It was, in reality, about five minutes. There’s no point in fighting any longer, said the back of his mind. They have him. It’s all over now. If you’re going to save him, you must act quickly.

Yet there was still another part of him, stubborn, sullen, angry, which was unwilling to give up while he was still breathing. There was one last chance. Very slim, not likely to do any good…but he had to try it. For Laurent’s sake, as much as for his own.

Armin sighed, reached into the deep pocket in his trousers, and came up with the cell phone.

He had purposely not used the cell phone at all for the last few days, had not even turned it on, because its signal could be all too easily targeted…assuming he was in a location where it would even work. But he had been given a number to call if things went badly wrong, a last-resort number, which he could call once but not again.

This seemed like the time to use it.

Armin thumbed the button to turn it on, and waited.

Waited.

Then, after about ten seconds, during none of which Armin breathed, a single bar of light appeared above the little “antenna” symbol. The phone was close enough to an antenna to successfully dial out.

He hurriedly touched in the quick-dial code for the number programmed into the phone, and put it to his ear.

It rang.

It rang for at least thirty seconds, and Armin hung on, beginning to shake. It was not safe to have the phone active even this long, really, and activating it twice — he didn’t dare. Yet the thought that he would have used it in the first place and possibly caused himself to be found without any success at the reason he used it in the first place—

Someone picked up the phone. “Yes?” said the voice, in English.

He told them who he was, and where he was, all in a quick burst of words; and he told them why he was calling.

“We know,” said the voice on the other end.

“Help me,” was all he could say. “My son…” And he ran out of breath.

“We’ll try,” said the voice. “No guarantees.”

“I know. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank us yet,” said the voice, and hung up.

He stared at the now-mute chunk of plastic and put it back in his pocket, and then breathed out and put his head down on his knees. It was all he could do.

It was all he had time to do…for, in the next breath, he heard them outside, hammering at the old painted-over door with something heavy. He heard the ancient rusty padlock break.

And then with a screech, and another screech, the old doors were levered open, and the light of dawn came flooding in, blinding him. His eyes watered, so that he could barely make out the uniformed shape that came down the stairs, silhouetted against the light. He did not need to see details. He knew who put hands under his arms, who helped him up and walked him, staggering slightly, up the stairs.

It was Death.