Safe House nfe-10

by Tom Clancy

  “‘Camber,’” she muttered. “Bob needs his head examined.”

  She turned toward the “door” into the Muffin’s space and headed through it. Muffin was still sitting on her rock and reading to the dinosaurs — one particularly large stegosaur was looking over her shoulder, while chewing a mouthful of grass.

  Do they really eat grass? Maj wondered.

  “And the woodcutter said—”

  Maj peered over the Muffin’s shoulder briefly. “Come on, you,” she said. “Bedtime.”

  There was a general groan of annoyance from the dinosaurs. Way up above her, a tyrannosaur bent down and most expressively showed its teeth. “Yeah, you, too,” Maj said, unimpressed, waving a hand expressively in front of her face. “Wow, when did you brush last?”

  “It’s not my fault,” the tyrannosaur said. “I eat people.”

  “Yeah, well, you could try flossing in between meals,” said Maj, wondering once more who was doing the programming for these creatures. They were somebody’s sim and theoretically came from someone who had been qualified to write sims for small children, though at moments like this Maj wondered exactly what those qualifications looked like. At any rate, she doubted they were doing the Muffin any particular harm. Her little sister was in some ways unusually robust.

  “I didn’t finish the story,” the Muffin said, annoyed.

  “Okay,” Maj said. “Finish it up. Then bedtime.”

  The Muffin opened her book. The dinosaurs leaned down again. “And the woodcutter chopped the wolf open, and Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother fell out. Then the woodcutter took great stones and put them in the wolf’s belly, and sewed the wolf up again, and threw it in the lake, and it never came back up. And the kindly woodcutter took Red Riding Hood home to her mother and father, who cried and laughed when they saw her, and made her promise never to go into the woods alone by herself again.”

  The Muffin closed the book, and the dinosaurs stood up around her with a kind of sigh of completion. “Good night,” Muffin said to them, and there was a chorus of grunts and hoots and growls, and they all stalked off among the trees, where darkness began to fall.

  Maj suddenly began to wonder why she had been bothering to worry about the saurians. Chopping wolves open, stuffing them with stones, and throwing them in lakes—?! I don’t remember that being in the story I read. But then it had been a long time ago…. “All done?” she said to the Muffin, picking her up.

  “All done,” said Muffin. The virtual landscape faded away, replaced by Maj’s little sister’s bedroom.

  Maj got the Muffin into her pajamas and put her in bed. “What did you make of that story, small stuff?” Maj said.

  “I didn’t make it. It was there.”

  “I mean, what do you think it meant?”

  “That you shouldn’t go into the forest by yourself, or talk to strangers,” the Muffin said. “Unless you’re a grown-up, or you have an ax. And it’s very bad to kill people, or eat people. Unless you’re a dinosaur and can’t help it.”

  Maj blinked. “And that last bit, about the stones?”

  “The wolf had it coming,” said the Muffin.

  Maj choked on a laugh. “Oh,” she said. “You want a drink of water?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, honey. You have a good sleep.”

  “Night night,” said the Muffin, and turned over and snuggled down among the covers.

  Maj softly shut the door to her room and decided that she didn’t have to bother worrying about her sister’s relationship with the virtual dinosaurs. The Brothers Grimm, though, might be another matter, though in this area as well the Muffin seemed to be handling things her own way, calmly and with a certain panache.

  She chuckled and made the rounds of the house, checking the locks before turning in. She had an early morning coming up, and then there would be this new kid, Nick, to deal with as well. As long as his being here doesn’t interfere with the sim, she thought, everything should be fine….

  Six in the morning came all too early. It was not Maj’s idea of a normal time to get up, but some of the Group of Seven were on the Pacific Coast, and this was the time of day and/or night when it was easiest to get everyone together.

  All the same, she was not going to go virtual at such an hour without at least a little preparation. She strolled out to the kitchen in her bathrobe, rubbing her eyes, and put the kettle on, then went back down the hall, hearing a voice — her mother’s, she thought.

  By her mother’s office door she stopped and listened. No sound — the voice she had heard was coming down the hall from the master bedroom.

  Some early morning Net show, she thought. Her father was addicted to news and talk shows and might be caught listening to them at any hour of the day or night.

  However, a little light seeped under her mother’s office door. Maj knocked softly — no answer. She opened the door very quietly, peeked in.

  Her mother was leaning back in her implant chair, her eyes closed. The chair began to hum as she stood there, going into a “massage” cycle to keep her mother’s muscles from getting cramped up while she worked.

  Maj backed out and shut the door. As late as they had been out last night, there was no keeping her mother away from her work, even on a weekend. “When I sell a system, honey,” her mother kept saying, “I sell service, too. That’s why they keep coming back to me.” And indeed Maj knew her mother’s systems were well thought of in the DC area. She had at least one small government contract, which she didn’t discuss, and many other contracts for various firms in the District and the tristate area. I just wish these people wouldn’t screw their systems up after Mom installs them, Maj thought, so that she has to keep fixing them….

  She headed on down to the bathroom. Her brother’s bedroom door, which she passed on the way, was open just a crack. She could hear a faint snore coming from inside.

  Another late night for him, Maj thought. But this time of year, that was normal. He and his curling buddies often didn’t finish a “weekend” training session until midnight, after which they would go to one of the all-night diners down in Alexandria and eat and drink until two or sometimes three. Her brother claimed that it was amazing the way curling took the energy out of you. It was all mindwork, he claimed — nothing to do with the mere physical exertion involved, which mostly involved scooting up and down a lane of ice, brushing it with brooms and shouting occasionally off-color suggestions to a large polished rock. Maj had her doubts about the “mindwork” aspects of this sport, or how much energy it took out of you. But she didn’t bother voicing them to her brother, who sometimes claimed that there couldn’t possibly be any energy expended while playing a viola. Like he has the slightest idea…

  She brushed her teeth while waiting for the kettle to go off, and as she finished and came out of the bathroom, she caught that murmur of sound again, from the main bedroom…Not a show. Her father’s voice. He was using the “repeater” in the bedroom to hook into the main Net computer in his study, and talking to somebody. At this hour? But then again, in Europe it was lunchtime. If it was something to do with their new guest…

  Maj started to turn away, then paused. She was not a big eavesdropper, normally, but there was something about the timbre of her father’s voice that made her stop and stand still right where she was, straining to hear better without going any closer.

  “…Yes. Yes, I know, but I didn’t feel that I had much choice. He’s a friend, Jim. If you don’t help your friends when they need it badly, then there’s not much point in the concept of friendship to begin with.”

  Maj had been about to step away from the door, rather embarrassed at her own eavesdropping, until she heard the name “Jim.” There were only two people whom her father addressed that way. One was an uncle in Denver, his brother. The other was James Winters, the Net Force Explorers liaison. Considering what time it was in Denver, Maj thought she could guess which one it was.

  “Yes, I know. Well, it’
s a done deal. He’s about to arrive. I would have liked to give you more warning, but by the time this particular movement had to start happening, any more communication between him and me might have tipped off the very people he was trying to avoid. And then I couldn’t get you last night.”

  A long silence. “Of course we will,” her father said. “Maj is good that way.” And another pause. “Yes, around ten. We should have gotten him home by then, assuming the traffic’s not too bad. Right. Till then.”

  She blushed and moved off quietly down the hall. Bad enough to hear yourself being complimented while you were being a sneak and listening to people’s private conversations, or half of them.

  But this kid coming in, this Nick, is one of our relatives. Why would Dad be talking to James Winters about him…?

  She went back up the hall toward the kitchen, listening for the kettle. It was grumbling to itself, not ready to whistle yet. At the door of her dad’s study Maj paused, was briefly overcome by one more yawn, then wandered in to look at some of the books and paperwork piled up on the worktable in vast quantities, as usual. Some of them were quite old—“Eastern European studies” stuff, bound magazines in various East European languages, some in Cyrillic lettering and some in Roman, some of them fifty, maybe sixty years old. Somehow Maj started to get the idea that all this stuff was not anything to do with coursework.

  She wandered back out again and into the kitchen, where the kettle’s grumbling and rumbling was getting louder, and thought about her relatives. The Greens had relations all over the Western part of Europe — Ireland, mostly, and some in France and Spain and Austria. She had been surprised to find that some of them had married into the famous Lynch winemaking family, Irish emigrants who had settled in Bordeaux in the 1800s and had been deep in viticulture ever since. Eastern Europe, though, Maj thought, putting the kettle on. No one ever mentioned before that we had anybody out that way. Weird….

  Unless we don’t really have anyone out that way.

  The kettle began to whimper, preparatory to breaking into full cry, and Maj reached up to open one of the cupboards and get a teabag of the Japanese green tea with roasted rice that she favored, then she got a mug off the mug tree. That her father was on the link to James Winters was in itself odd enough. Not that she didn’t know that they were friends. Apparently they had been at school together at some point. But why would her dad be discussing their visitor with him…?

  Unless this new kid is Net Force business somehow—Which made it, as far as Maj was concerned, her business as well…especially when it turned up in her own household.

  The kettle started to shriek. Maj pulled it hurriedly off the burner and poured the boiling water onto her teabag, then killed the burner and took the cup over to the table, sat down with it. A moment later her mother came scuffing in, also wearing that slightly beat-up “work bathrobe” she favored for these early morning work sessions, a garish multicolored thing she had brought back from Covent Garden in London after a consulting trip. “These people,” she muttered, making for the same cupboard Maj had opened, and taking out a one-shot coffee dripper from it. “I build them a system that works like a dream, but can they leave it alone? Noooo. They have to tinker with it, and attach new programs to it, and they don’t debug the programs, and then they wonder why the whole thing crashes….”

  “Morning, Mom,” Maj said.

  “Morning, honey,” her mother said. “Thank you for not saying ‘good.’”

  Maj was itching to ask her mother why her dad would be on the phone to James Winters…but that would reveal that she had been eavesdropping.

  “Daddy up yet?” her mother said.

  “I think so. Sounded like he was on the link or something.”

  “The man just won’t rest.”

  “Neither will you.”

  “And what are you doing up this hour?” her mother said. “Before you accuse us of being incorrigible workaholics.”

  “Oh, our big space battle’s tonight. Prebriefing.”

  “That serious?” her mother said, pouring water into the prepacked coffee filter.

  “Well, we’ve spent a lot of time on development,” Maj said. “We don’t want to get immediately dead because we didn’t discuss what we were going to do with what we developed.”

  “Mmm,” her mother said then. “No argument there…”

  They sat in companionable silence for a while and drank their tea and coffee respectively. After a few moments, there came a faint tick! from one side of the kitchen. Maj’s mom cocked her head. “Aha,” she said, for the tick! had come from the water heater. “He’s in the shower, then.”

  Maj’s father would have lived in the shower if he was allowed to. He claimed he got his best ideas there. Maj’s thought was that it was probably best that he had a day job which kept him out of the shower occasionally. Otherwise he would now quite likely rule the world. “I’m in no rush,” she said. “I was going to go to this meeting first.”

  “Good.” Her mother had another slurp of coffee. “Honey, about our little guest…”

  “Mmmh?”

  “You do realize that he’s—”

  “Mommy, Mommy, look what I found!”

  The Muffin, horribly awake for this hour of the day, came charging into the kitchen, waving a tattered picture book. Maj sighed. Whatever the manufacturers said about these books being “childproof,” they had not yet run them past the Muffin.

  “—thirteen,” her mother said after a moment, looking slightly bemused.

  “Oh, yeah, Mom, it’s no problem,” Maj said. “I’ll manage.”

  “It was lost,” the Muffin said, “and I found it under my bed.” She waved the book under her mother’s nose. It had an earnest-looking dinosaur on the cover.

  “That’s where most things go,” said Maj, who had previous experience in this regard with her little sister. The Muffin regarded “under the bed” as a storage area of infinite flexibility.

  “Will you read it to me, Mommy?”

  “But you can read it yourself, sweetie,” her mother said, wearily taking another swig of coffee.

  “It’s good to read to people,” the Muffin insisted. “I read to my dinosaurs. It makes them smarter.”

  Maj and her mother gave each other an amused look. “Well, honey,” her mother started to say, and then the phone rang.

  “Now, who can it be at this hour?” her mother said, looking up. “They’d better not be expecting imagery, because they’re not going to get it. Hello?” she said.

  The Muffin looked annoyed and wandered over to the other side of the table with the book, where she climbed up on a chair, slapped the book down on the table and began to read aloud to herself.

  “No,” Maj’s mother said to the air over the recitation of dinosaur names, “he’s not available at the moment; may I take a message for him? — Yes, this is Mrs. Green. — Oh.—Oh. And it’s landing where?”

  There was a pause. “Seven-fifteen? There wasn’t any problem with the plane, was there?”

  Maj’s eyebrows went up. “—Oh, well that’s good,” her mother said. “No problem. Yes, we’ll be there. Thank you! Bye now!”

  She blinked, “hanging up,” and turned to Maj. “So much for the virtues of getting up early and having half an hour to relax,” she muttered, and glanced at the Muffin. “They’ve diverted our young cousin’s flight to Dulles.”

  “Isn’t that good for us, though? We don’t have to go all the way down to BWI.”

  “It would be good if he wasn’t landing in three-quarters of an hour,” her mother said, getting up and swigging down the rest of her coffee at a rate that made Maj wonder one more time if her mother had an ablative-tile throat. “Better get dressed, honey, we’ve got a plane to meet.”

  “Ohmigosh,” Maj said. “My meeting with the Group—!”

  “You’re going to have to abort it,” her mother said. “This is family stuff, hon, sorry…I think you’re needed. Tell them you’ll talk to them lat
er.”

  “It wasn’t just a talk, it was—!”

  But her mother was already on her way down the hall, and a second later she was banging on the bathroom door, shouting, “Sweetie, the sky is falling, better come out of there!”

  Maj heard a strangled noise come through the faint sound of rushing water. Reluctantly she got up and went off to get dressed, after which she would have to rush to commandeer enough time on the computer to tell the Group she was going to have to miss out on the briefing. They’re going to be furious. Come to think of it, I think I’m furious.

  So much for this little Niko not interfering with anything, Maj thought as she stalked off down the hallway. What a wonderful time we’re going to have together….

  Fortunately, it being the awful hour of the morning it was, the traffic into Dulles wasn’t too bad. Maj could almost have wished it was a little worse, in that there would have been more time for her to lose her bad mood completely. The reaction of the Group, when she had stuck her head into Chel’s work space and announced that she couldn’t stay for the meeting, was all too predictable, especially from those who had stayed up late. “Look, I’ll meet you all early here tonight,” Maj had said as she turned to go, and Shih Chin, usually so good-tempered, had actually growled, “Miss Madeline, if you’re late tonight…we’re going without you. The battle starts at six central—”