Runaways nfe-16
Page 17
Oh, no! said some part of Megan's mind, very loudly.
And she hit him. Right there, with full straight-armed extension, with the heel of the hand; right in the good spot, the spot where her martial arts instructor had strongly suggested she not hit anybody unless she really meant it, since the move actually veered a lot closer to unarmed combat than any martial arts move, and unarmed combat (unlike martial arts) is about having people not get up again after you hit them.
She heard the man's sternum crack. He fell backward down the stairs.
Oh, no, she thought, going no more than one step after him, and there falling into ready position, just in case he should try to get up again. But he showed no signs of doing any such thing. Oh, please don't let me have ruptured his pericardium, Megan thought, for that was always a danger when you played around with the sternum. Your opponent could bleed to death in a matter of a minute or so. Or bruised his liver-1
"Megan," her father said, very calmly, from behind her. "One step to the left please, dear."
She turned. Her father was holding what was usually kept locked in its safe in the den, a firearm of truly monstrous proportions, to her mind anyway, and it was leveled at the man's head. Megan gratefully took one step to the left.
"Megan," said Mike, coming around the corner of the house from the garage side at a dogtrot, holding a kayak oar with what looked like very unfriendly intent, "you've gotta stop doing this stuff to the magazine salesmen. It's not their fault."
"Megan," Sean said, appearing behind her father with a towel wrapped around his middle and completely dripping wet, "how're we supposed to beat up the people who beat you up if you won't let them beat you up first? We never get a chance to do the brother thing anymore."
Megan stood there, breathing hard, and smiled.
"Your mother's going to be furious that she missed this," Megan's father said mildly. "As for you, sir, I suggest that you lie very still and try to keep the writhing to a minimum, as I or one of these extremely dangerous and uncontrolled youngsters might be forced to construe some sudden motion of yours as an aggressive action, and then to do something we'll all regret later. Though as a family we would certainly be sure to send flowers afterward. Megan, is this one of your threesome?"
"I don't think so. Net Force accounted for all of them," Megan said. "But he's nobody I do recognize, and why should anybody I don't know come here looking for me right this minute? But look, we'd better get him to the hospital-"
"Panic button's hit," Sean said, pushing his wet hair out of his eyes. "Let him lie there, the professionals'll handle it. Our legal liability is now limited. Dad, did he make an aggressive move just then?"
"Wishful thinking, son. Go put some clothes on. Response time is down to about a minute these days, the ambulance'11 be here soon enough. Ah-"
But it was not the ambulance. A big multipurpose vehicle with the Net Force stripe and logo came howling down the street and pulled up in front of the house, and even before it stopped, people with various kinds of armament even bigger than her dad's were piling out of it. They surrounded the man lying at the bottom of the steps, and shortly another Net Force van arrived, with an ambulance in tow. A stretcher was produced, and the man was transferred to it and thoughtfully restrained. The handcuffs were probably just an afterthought.
And within about five minutes the vans were all gone, leaving behind them just a quiet suburban street with about fifteen different neighbors standing out in their front lawns or on their front sidewalks, staring at Megan and her father and her brothers. "We're going to hear about this from the neighborhood association again," her father said wearily, turning to lock the handgun away again. "They'll accuse us of lowering the property values around here."
"Idiots," Mike said, heading around the house again with his kayak oar over his shoulder. "Megan's just making the world safe for democracy again."
"Yeah," said Sean, and took his dripping self back inside.
Megan stood there a moment more. "Dad?" she called after him, as she followed him into the house. "I take it back about the boys. They can live."
"Oh, good," her father said. "Funeral expenses are getting so unreasonable lately"
Late that afternoon, in Megan's space, she and Leif met with James Winters. The news had come through a couple of hours ago that Burt had been picked up at Reagan International by a Net Force flying squad. The D. C. police had the man who had been hammering on the booth's door. They were holding him on attempted assault charges for the moment, confident that they would shortly have something much better to book him on.
"Well, first of all, the Gridleys have now left France for Germany," James Winters said, sitting and admiring the view of Saturn in a chair which Megan had summoned out of the air for him, "so I suppose we can all stop worrying about Mark being sent to Devil's Island after all. Though he may wish he'd availed himself of that opportunity after his mother gets through with him." Winters's smile was dry.
"He won't be in too much trouble, will he?" Leif said.
Winters sighed and shook his head. "He'll be all right. He's plainly being saved for bigger things." He turned his attention to Megan. "Which brings us to you, for whom it seems the same could be said. But it all links back, as you thought, to your friend Burt. The operative chasing him had a 'listener' of a kind we haven't seen before. Net booths are supposed to be shielded against such things, but there's always somebody out there coming up with something new" He sighed. "He pulled Megan's Net address from the booth as Burt was dialing it. After that it was, as usual, all too simple for him to get your street address… What went on in the guy's head after that, I'm not sure. He may have thought he could snatch you and use you to put pressure on us to release his associate, the man with the briefcase. Not that it turned out all that well for him." He gave Megan a rather cockeyed look. "You reacted fast. Maybe a little too fast."
"You try being born last behind four large and hungry brothers," Megan said, "and see how fast it makes you."
Winters produced a dry smile. "Point taken. Anyway, your reasoning about why someone unknown should show up there right then was correct enough. And I wouldn't worry about having him turn up on your doorstep any time soon-not that, after a welcome like that, anyone lacking a deathwish would be terribly eager to. Besides a very sore chest and a body-bruise you could paper a wall with, the guy's already got several counts of assault, interstate flight, various other black marks… We and the other law enforcement agencies will be having a series of long talks with him, and one or more of those will land him in some none too comfortable Federal retreat for a good while. Your guy in the trench coat may not spend that long on our shores, but that's only because of all the extradition arguments that are going on at the moment."
"Why?" Leif said. "What was he carrying?"
"If either of you spent as much time watching the news as you do working on your hobbies," Winters said, leaning back in his chair, "you might make an educated guess."
They both looked blankly at him. "You really do need to pay more attention to the news," Winters said. "Two weeks ago someone shanghaied a bankers' courier outside the main train station in Milan. Dragged him off somewhere, then stuffed him into the trunk of a car that they left up near Udine somewhere, and went off with what the courier had been carrying-which was one point five billion Swiss francs' worth of 'white paper' negotiable securities. The police in Milan assumed that the thieves would run up into Liechtenstein with the paper-they're in a currency union with Switzerland-or maybe over to Jersey via France, and launder the paper by running it through one of the smaller merchant banks there, then moving the funds right along after clearance into various other jurisdictions, the Caymans, say, or Andorra… But whoever was running this particular white-collar thief decided to try the 'hide in plain sight' maneuver instead. They told him to go to the U. S. yia Amsterdam, and then arranged with your friend Mr. Vaud to put a 'disposable' courier on the same flight as a distraction." Winters shook his head.
"Strikes me as an error in judgment. They should have covered him up a whole lot deeper… or alternately, they should have given your young friend Burt the paper. Who would have suspected him?"
Winters stretched and yawned. "But they outsmarted themselves. Always nice when they do that" He smiled slightly. "And you two are sitting pretty at the moment. If you want to go to Italy, I suspect the Milanese police would be willing to pay your airfare. That stuff was snatched on their watch."
Megan smiled. "Well," she said, "I'll see what my dad thinks." She sighed. "All I want now is to see Burt. I've had about six calls from my friend Wilma in the last two hours… "
"I'll get out of here," Winters said, standing up. "Come on, Leif. Let's let real life, whatever that looks like, reassert itself." He looked at Megan with something she had never seen on his face before, something which brought her out in a hot embarrassed flush: just simple pride.
It lasted about a second. "I want a complete report from the two of you, with discussion of the sociopolitical ramifications, in eighteen hours," James Winters said. "See me in my office for critique and further discussion two hours after you submit it."
And he vanished.
Megan let out a long breath. "Homework," she said with genuine loathing.
"Yeah, but what homework," Leif said. "I'll call you later."
And he vanished, too.
About two hours later Megan and Wilma and Burt were in Megan's space, sitting around and just reveling in things being a lot more normal than they had been for the past few days.
"I hate to tell you this," Burt said, "but even after all that… I don't know if I want to go home just yet."
"Nobody's going to make you," Megan said.
"But I miss you" Wilma said, She squeezed Burt's hand. The two of them had been holding hands almost constantly since Burt arrived, having been questioned by the police and released as soon as they had conferred with Net Force.
"I miss you, tooBut I can't go back there."
"Megan?" said what sounded like the voice of the Great and Powerful Oz.
"Yeah, Dad?"
"Can I come in?"
"Sure, come on ahead."
A moment later he was in her space and glanced over at Burt. "Perfect," her father said. "I hoped you were here. Look, Burt… You've been through a lot, and you've managed it surprisingly well. If you don't mind, I'd be happy enough to offer you a spare room for a couple of months. We're redoing the garage at the moment, since we haven't been using it. It's better than being in a shelter, no matter how humane the shelter is."
Burt shook his head. "Mr. O'Malley," he said slowly, "it's really nice of you.. but I think the distance was doing me some good. I want to keep working with the Breathing Space people for a couple of months and see where it gets me. But I'll stay in the area." He looked over at Wilma. "We've got those qualifiers to think about in a few months, after all."
Wilma took his hand and didn't say anything.
"Everybody will be able to find me," Burt said. "I'll be getting in touch with my folks, all right. I have some things I have to say to them. Maybe not the things they think… especially my dad. But after that.. We'll see. I can manage to finish school, anyway, if I don't have to go home at night. After that…" He looked at Wilma. "I don't know for sure. But we've got a while to work on it."
"Okay," Megan's father said. "That sounds good to me.
And he vanished.
The three of them sat there looking at one another. "So…" Megan said.
"So," Burt said. "Let me see how you've messed up the sim of Buddy. Maybe if someone puts a real rider on top of him, we can get it fixed."
A moment later he was being assaulted by two young women. A moment later they dragged him off into another area of virtuality. Beyond the white marble amphitheater, the Sun dipped below the surface of Rhea, and very gently, all around, the atmosphere began to sublimate out in a low-G storm of bluish swansdown snow…
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