Runaways nfe-16

by Tom Clancy

  Someone who doesn't want people who have family ties.

  Someone who wants people who are already missing… and wouldn 't surprise anyone if they never came back.

  … I've got to find him!

  She turned the Coke bottle around and around on the table. "If I wanted to do work like this," Megan said, very softly, "who would I ask for?"

  Bodo stared at her. "Oh, come on, you're not-"

  "Bodo," Megan said, "please."

  She looked him in the eye and would not look away.

  Finally he glanced down at the red-and-white-checked tablecloth. "There's a guy named Vaud," Bodo said, hardly above a whisper. "At least, it's a male persona he wears when he's in here, and that's the name he uses."

  "And what 'street corner' does he hang around?"

  For a long time Bodo wouldn't say anything. Megan just sat there and looked at him.

  After a while he looked up at her. "Do you like Burt or something?" Bodo said.

  Megan strangled the first answer that tried to get out of her throat, since it would have profoundly shocked both her father and mother, as well as embarrassing her by making it plain that she even knew such expressions. "Not for myself," Megan said. "In fact, I'm a whole lot more inclined to kick him than kiss him at the moment. But I have to do this nonetheless. Probably I'll make an appointment for myself with the nearest shrink as soon as I've found him again."

  "Huh." Bodo finished his Rivella, put the glass down, and then looked over his shoulder. After a moment he turned back to her. "You can get there from here," he said, "but not at this time of day. The schedule's wrong."

  "When will it be right?"

  Bodo shook his head.

  "Come on," Megan whispered.

  He stopped shaking his head… then said, very softly, "Give me a virtmail address for you."

  "Link to workspace," Megan said.

  "Active," said her workspace's management program in a distant whisper, hardly audible above the chatter and laughter of the crowd.

  "Pass my virtmail address to client 'BodoV account."

  "Done."

  He nodded, then, not meeting her eyes. "I'll mail you," Bodo said.

  "Thanks."

  She started to get up… then sat down again. Bodo gave her a bemused look.

  "Tell me one thing before I go," Megan said.

  "Ask," he said, though again he wouldn't look at her.

  "Why have you told me all this?" Megan said. "It could get you thrown out."

  "I don't think so," Bodo said. "Well, maybe so, if they found out. I don't think they will. They're not nearly as all-seeing as they make themselves out to be. It's part of the place's protective coloration, the thing that keeps it from being exploited more than it is. But as for the rest of it…"

  Bodo looked up at her, favoring her once more with that expression which had seemed so odd the first time. "Since I got here," Bodo said, "I mean the first time I got here, not this one… you're the first person who's asked me why I'm here, other than the professionals who have to ask."

  Megan was startled. "Uh-"

  "A lot of people here are real self-absorbed," Bodo said softly. "Interesting to run into someone who wasn't, for a change. Very interesting indeed."

  Megan swallowed. "Bodo," she said, "I want to thank you. Thank you very much."

  "Don't thank me until you've got reason," Bodo said. "I may not be able to help you."

  "You already have. And I thank you anyway." She turned away. "I'll be waiting to hear from you."

  Megan activated the egress doorway back to her own workspace, closed it behind her. Not until the bright sunlight of that plaza was gone, replaced by the blackness of near-Saturn space, did she feel entirely safe again… and she had no idea why.

  And then Megan stood there looking at the images still littering her amphitheater floor, all frozen in the middle of talking about Breathing Space. All that information in one place… but the one thing she most wanted to know about it, none of these people knew.

  "Save everything," Megan said to her workspace management program, and turned her back on the images. / need to think. But not in here. I've had enough virtuality for one day.

  "All saved, Megan."

  "Good. Close down."

  'This is a preprogrammed message. 'Megan, your mail is piling up enough that it's going to start perturbing Rhea's orbit if you don't do something about it!' "

  She stopped where she was at the sound of her own voice, and her face twisted in annoyed response. Then Megan sighed. The curse of a tidy mind… "Abort shutdown," she said. "Show me the mail."

  "Priority specifications?"

  "None. Just open everything."

  Shortly the bottom level of the amphitheater was littered with a crowd of talking images that looked like some kind of animated direct mail convention. Megan walked among them and examined each one in passing. Some of them were images of schoolmates other than Wilma, fervent announcements about softball games, desperate requests for bring-and-buy nights for one or another of the charities her class was sponsoring, schedules for group study sessions… Most of these Megan messages grabbed out of the air as if they were flimsy pieces of paper or cellophane, folded up, and "filed" in a cardboard box she'd conjured out of the empty air to follow her across the floor and receive them. Other messages-ads for restaurants, announcements about sales at stores in one of all too many nearby malls-she treated like the junk mail they were, plucking them out of the air, crunching them up into crinkly "paper" balls, and pitching them with great force up away from the surface of Rhea. They soared through the tenuous atmosphere without difficulty, heading in a leisurely manner toward Saturn and out of sight. Finally with her space looking a whole lot less cluttered than it had some minutes before, Megan came to the last virtmail, the one nearest the edge of her workspace, where the floor of the amphitheater ended, and the scatter of bluish methane snow began. There, slight, redheaded, and freckled, leaning on the hood of a Cadillac carved out of ice, Leif Anderson looked out at her.

  Leif

  Abruptly, without warning, the idea began to grow in Megan's mind, and started turning into a plan, racing through her thought and swiftly strangling the objections she raised in the same way a vine strangles a sapling tree.

  He would be perfect. Perfect.

  But he'd never do it. And it wouldn't be fair to ask him. And besides-

  Megan stood there for several long seconds, irresolute.

  "Are you finished with these mails?" her system said.

  "No," Megan said. She grabbed Leif's mail out of the air, crunched it back down into the iridescent ball-icon which it had been originally, and threw it straight up in the air, where it hovered. "Live link to sender."

  "Working on that for you now."

  Oh, please let him be up now, Megan thought, for it was pretty late. Come to think of it, please let him be on this coast Or this continent. His folks traveled a lot, and Leif couldn't always be counted on to be in New York, especially as the summer got closer-

  The amphitheater side of Megan's workspace went dark, and then a moment later began to glow blue with an eerie light. All that side of her workspace turned into a cave of ice-but not your usual cave. Here the ice was all of that particular pure clear blue that occurs only in the interiors of icebergs and glaciers. And in grottoes chiseled deep into the thick walls, many strange shapes stood-televisions and phone booths, plants and trees and people and animals, and many more cars than just the Cadillac. Why an Edsel? Megan found herself thinking, for there was one of those, too, back in the distance. She could clearly make out the peculiar radiator grille. The deepest recesses of this place were like a great long garage for cars of the previous century, all carved out of ice. "Leif," Megan said to the cold and echoing blueness, shaking her head, "not even you could make this up. This is so weird it has to be real somewhere."

  "It's in the Alps," Leif said, coming out from the depths of the cave. He was wearing a parka, which seemed app
ropriate, considering the setting, but still made Megan laugh, because the temperature in here could be anything he liked without melting his virtual ice. "Somebody started carving these in the glacier early in the last century _.. other sculptors have added to the collection since then." He scowled at Megan a little. "Meanwhile, you sure took long enough to get back to me," Leif said, managing to sound genial and annoyed. "How busy can you have been? You-"

  He stopped suddenly, and looked more closely at her, and his face changed. 'Tell me, Megan," Leif said, "who knocked you down and walked over you? You look really strung out. What's the matter?"

  She sat down on the hood of the icy Cadillac and started to tell him.

  Chapter 6

  When Megan was finished, all Leif seemed capable of doing was staring at her in astonishment. "Bozhe moi," he said finally.

  Megan was shivering, and not because of the virtual ice all around. The reaction to some of the things that Bodo had said to her was finally catching up with her at the end of a long and stressful day. "They don't come back," she said to Leif, and slid off the hood of the Cadillac. "I can't get that out of my head. Leif, those kids aren't failing to come back because they've bought houses on the Riviera or retired to Florida. They're not coming back because they can't. They're in trouble, or locked up somewhere… or maybe even dead."

  'That I could easily believe," Leif said.

  "And my friend Burt is out there now, all excited, thinking he's on to a good thing," Megan said. "He'd probably kill me for saying this, since I'm hardly an expert, either, but he's not terribly experienced in 'the ways of the world.9 He's kind of short on social skills. He tends to do things without thinking them through, and after he's made a mess, he doesn't seem terribly good at cleaning it up. He's no suave secret agent type. He is a prime candidate for just getting himself killed if we don't find out something about who's sent him where, and get him back!"

  Leif nodded and stood there with his head down, his hands thrust into his parka's pockets, studying the icy floor. After a moment he looked up again.

  "So what are you going to do?" he said. "Blow the whistle, obviously."

  "With what evidence?" Megan said. "Even if Bodo was willing to talk to the cops about this, which I doubt, it'd just be his word they'd have to go on. No one would take us seriously. And as soon as the people responsible for this kind of 'recruitment' got a single whiff of what was going on, they'd be over the hills and far away. Probably no one in Breathing Space would hear from them again for months, maybe years, until the 'recruiters' figure the heat's died down. But I don't think that'll be the only thing dead by then."

  Leif paced back and forth across the frost-powdered blue ice of the floor. Megan swallowed. "What we need to draw them out," she said, "is for someone to show up that the recruiters would really want to hire… someone they'd be absolutely crazy not to hire."

  There was a long pause at that. "Someone, for example, who knows two or three languages," Leif said then. "Or four. Or six…"

  He looked at her with slightly narrowed eyes, but also with amusement. The expression looked a lot older than the sixteen-year-old who wore it.

  "That's why you're here, isn't it," he said.

  "I would never ask you," Megan said hurriedly.

  "But you'd let me figure it out for myself."

  "Leif, believe me," Megan said, "at first I thought I would do it myself. But there was a weak spot in that idea. I've been in the space already, as a guest, logged in and identified as such. If one of the people responsible for this secret recruitment spotted me there now, they'd be in a position to figure out exactly what I was up to."

  Leif kept pacing, and didn't say anything.

  "Are you home right now?" Megan said after a moment. It was never a sure thing, with Leif. His father was the head of a multinational banking and investment firm, and since Leif was very small his dad had thought nothing of taking him out of school for a couple of weeks at a time without warning, hiring a tutor for him, and carting him halfway across the planet. It was the kind of life Megan dreamed of, but Leif sometimes seemed almost bored with it.

  He nodded now, looking abstracted. "Dad's taking care of some 'home office' business with the Anderson Investments board members… paperwork stuff. Mom's putting together a dance workshop for the New School. I finished my 'finals' work last week, so school's done for me until the fall. This is kind of a quiet time before the usual travel craziness starts in the summer."

  Leif looked up. "And the quiet's been driving me nuts," he added. "I think you've hired yourself an off-duty linguist."

  Megan swallowed hard. "Leif… we've been in a bad spot or two before, and walked away from it. But this is different. I don't think this is going to be very safe."

  "It's not going to be simple, either," Leif said. "For one thing, if I'm going to be the 'inside man,' I have to get inside. And it would kind of cause talk if I suddenly turned up at a genuine Breathing Space center and logged myself in as in need of a place to stay." Leif grimaced. "My dad would think we'd had some kind of breakdown in communication… and my mom would rip my head right off my shoulders and give it a big talking to." He shook his head. "We're going to have to 'fake' me in there somehow, under a seeming. Falsify the virtual ID 'tags' that the Breathing Space system puts on its users… and find a way to get into their safe virtual space without going through one of the approved gateways." He looked thoughtful.

  "All very illegal…" Megan said.

  "Sure, I know that. But on one level, how hard can it be? The 'recruiters' are plainly doing it at will. What they can do, I bet someone we know can help us do. But we can't take all day about it, either, if as your buddy Bodo says the Recruiters are only there for a few days every few months."

  Megan nodded. "What I'm not exactly clear about yet," she said, "is what we're going to do when we find out who these people are."

  Leif's slight smile went grim. "I wouldn't bank big money on ever finding out who they really are. But what they want, and how they're operating… that's another story. If we can spoil that here and now, we'll have done something worthwhile. The important thing is to get the access fakery sorted out. I think I might be able to get help on that today."

  "Okay. But, Leif, there's another problem. We can't just toss you at the Recruiters blind. We need a script."

  "I'm not ready to make the movie of my life yet," Leif said.

  "I don't mean that. Besides, you're not photogenic enough. I mean we need-"

  "I beg your pardon. I'm told I'm handsomer than most."

  Megan rolled her eyes. "Leif, just wrap it up tight and put it awayl Like you need to fish for compliments. I mean we need a backstory for you. Something to account for all these languages, and, dare I say it, a rather unstar- ved look."

  Leif had the grace to blush. "I can starve if I have to."

  "Yeah, well, better get started, because these people may be a little suspicious if you look absolutely in the pink of health. Why would someone with your good looks and talent be on the road all of a sudden? And why can't you produce any ID at all? Why isn't there any previous evidence of you in the Net?"

  "There's plenty of evidence."

  "All of it about Leif, not about this nameless kid who turns up all of a sudden looking good and speaking six or nine or thirteen languages! You've got to convince me that you're not a plant."

  "I am a plant."

  "You're so helpful. Don't make me start making unkind remarks about the vegetable kingdom. Start making up a story about yourself that'll hold water."

  He grinned at her. "All right… I should be able to come up with something in time. Once I've got that handled, and we've seen what can be done about the 'fakery,' when do you want to meet?"

  "The sooner the better, probably," Megan said. "I'm waiting for a virtmail from Bodo, but I have no idea when it'll come."

  "You're not concerned about if it'll come…"

  She thought of Bodo's odd look at her. "No," Megan said. "He'
ll mail, one way or another."

  "Okay. Time for me to get busy, then. You go get some sleep… You look like you could use it. I'll call you in the morning. You have class tomorrow?"

  "Unfortunately, yes," Megan said.

  "When do you leave?"

  "About quarter of eight."

  "I'll be in touch with you around seven, then. That okay?"

  She nodded, glanced back toward her doorway. "Leif," Megan said slowly, "it's a lot to ask of you, getting involved with this. I feel guilty already."

  Leif leaned against the chilly Cadillac again, dusting at the right front "headlight" with one sleeve of his parka, and then looked up at her. "What do you want me to say," he said, "that I wouldn't do it just because you asked? Well, I wouldn't." He grinned at her shocked expression. "Sorry, I couldn't resist. But first of all, it's not like you're asking me something you wouldn't have been willing to do yourself. But also, this isn't just about your friend, is it? Looks like there could've been a lot of kids our age… younger, even… who these people have used. Putting a stop to that seems like a good thing to be involved with. And as I said, I don't have anything better to do for a couple of weeks, until my dad gets his head out of the corporate filing cabinet and my mom stops speaking in dance notation twenty hours a day. So don't bother feeling guilty about anything. Let's get on with business and make your plan happen."

  Megan nodded and made her way toward the doorway back into her workspace… then paused, turned. "Leif?"

  "You still here?"

  She laughed at his gibe. He could be infuriating sometimes… but it was worth putting up with.

  "Thanks."

  "You're welcome. Now go away so I can start thinking about my new 'life.' "

  Megan went.

  In the old Union Station in Chicago, Burt stood near a magazine stand by the foot of one of several flights of stairs leading down into the white-marble main waiting room. As far as he was concerned, the place was earning its name: he was waiting, as he had been for several hours now. Burt was bored out of his mind, and he leaned there looking one more time at the statuary group over the big old door opposite him, surrounding the big station clock. The figures leaning on the clock were (he supposed) intended to represent Day and Night. He could understand why Day was holding, in his hand, a rooster. What was less clear was why Night appeared to be holding a penguin.