"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 slig
htly. 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, ten
se 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.
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