Safe House nfe-10

by Tom Clancy

  “I know, I know, I won’t be….” Maj had said, unnerved by the mutter of annoyance coming from the others. She had fled, then, intent on getting into the bathroom for at least a few minutes before she would have to get dressed and pile into the car with the rest of the crowd. Now here she sat, feeling rather hot and bothered, insufficiently showered, and altogether not caring whether she made any kind of good first impression on anybody.

  Yet she was still distracted by the one connection she couldn’t put together. James Winters…and Dad. Talking about him. Maj sighed. I’m going to have to cut him some kind of slack, I guess, no matter how annoyed I am.

  The Muffin was oblivious to all this, and to everything else, as the car pulled out of the fast-speed “lanes” and chimed at her father for him to take control back to do local approach. She was singing “We have a cousin, we have a cousin!” at the top of her none-too-small lungs as Maj’s dad slipped into the airport parking approach and brought the car around into the access circle, where once again the local remote control computers took it off his hands and guided it into the parking facility. Nothing was allowed to randomly circle within a kilometer from the airport center. There were too many things cycling through the neighborhood at the best of times to allow parking-place anarchy in, too.

  “We’re running early,” Maj’s mother said, somewhat surprised, from the other front seat, as the car settled gently into the parking place that the local space control had assigned it.

  “Welcome to Dulles International Aerospace Port,” said a pleasant male voice through the car’s entertainment system. “To better serve our visitors, please note that parking rates in short-term are now thirty dollars per hour. Thank you for your cooperation in keeping our airport running smoothly.”

  Her father grunted, a sound which Maj knew concealed a comment that would have been much more vigorous if the Muffin hadn’t been in the car. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get in there and fetch our guest before we have to go into escrow to get out again.”

  A couple of rows from their space was the shelter for the maglev car that ran to the main terminals, and they all made their way to it, wincing a little at the sound of cars all around them parking or winding up their engines to take off again. Maj looked with some dry amusement at the poster inside the shelter as they climbed into the maglev car which almost immediately slid up to meet them — GROWING AGAIN TO SERVE YOU BETTER! This was Dulles’s third “refit” in the last twenty years, almost finished — so the airport kept promising — now that the fifth runway, the one for the aerospaceplanes, was finished, and the additional wing to Terminal C was almost done being extended and overhauled to service it. It wasn’t entirely ready, though, and so it came to pass that the place where they met Niko looked more like a building site than a terminal.

  And Maj, all too ready to be annoyed with him, caught the first sight of the youngster standing over near the “designated meeting” area with the AA flight services lady, and immediately felt all her annoyance drop off her in embarrassment. It was impossible to be angry at anyone who looked so small and lost and scared, and who was trying so valiantly to hide it.

  He really was kind of small for his age, his dark jeans and sober sweatshirt and plain dark jacket like something left over from a school uniform, suggesting that he had somehow been trying to avoid notice, and indeed he looked uncomfortable, standing there out in the open, as if he would have preferred to be invisible.

  Maj’s dad made straight for him, and Maj hung back a little, watching the kid’s face as he registered this tall, balding man heading in his direction, waiting to see his reaction. The boy looked at her father with dark, assessing eyes. He was himself shadowy — dark hair, a little bit olive of complexion, and had sort of a Mediterranean look, though with high cheekbones. As Maj’s dad came up and paused there, towering over him, the slightest sign of a smile appeared, and it was a relieved smile.

  “Martin Green,” her father said to the flight services lady. “And this would be Niko. Grazé, cousin.”

  “Grazé…” said the boy as Maj and her mother and the Muffin came along behind her dad.

  “Professor Green, can I get you to look into this, please?” said the flight services lady, holding up a “little black box” with an eyepiece.

  “No problem.” He took it from her, took off his driving glasses, and fitted the eyepiece to his eye. Then, “Ow,” he said, and handed the box back. “Can they make that light any brighter?”

  The flight services lady laughed, turning the box over to check the LCD readout as it came up. “Probably not. That’s fine, Professor. Can I get you to sign this, please?” She held out an electric “pad” and a stylus to him.

  He scribbled his name, handed the pad back. “Thanks, ma’am. Where’s his luggage?”

  “There wasn’t any,” said the flight services lady, glancing down at Niko. “Some kind of problem with the onload from the train at Zurich…The baggage people are trying to track it down. They have your number. They’ll deliver it to your house as soon as it’s found.”

  “Oh, my gosh, that’s awful,” said Maj’s mother immediately. “What an awful way to have a trip start! We’ll sort something out for you. Welcome, Niko, I’m Rosilyn. And this is Madeline. Maj, we call her. And this is Adrienne—”

  “I’m not Adrienne, I’m Muffin!” said the Muf in defiance, and then — apparently startled out of her wits by having actually spoken to her “cousin”—the Muffin did the impossible and came down with an acute case of the shys. She actually hid behind Maj’s mother and looked around the side of her, as if she were a tree. “Hi,” she whispered, and hid her face in Maj’s mother’s trousers.

  Her mother and father looked at her in astonishment. Maj took the moment to hold her hand out. Niko reached out and shook it. “Hello,” he said, and then looked up at her father and mother. “Thanks for letting me stay with you.”

  “No problem at all,” said Maj’s father. “Look, if your luggage is lost en route, there’s no point in us standing around here trying to second-guess these people. Let’s get home and have some breakfast. Or lunch, or dinner, or whatever your body clock is up for…”

  They headed out of the torn-up terminal, past the posters with pictures of how it would look when it was finished, and Maj noticed that her father seemed to be rather more in a hurry than usual. Normally he liked poring over the details of new construction when they came across it. Then again, there was always the possibility that thirty dollars an hour for short-term parking was on his mind.

  On their way back to the parking lot, Maj noticed how politely Niko seemed to be trying to pay attention to everything her mother and father said, while at the same time looking at absolutely everything around him as if he had never seen anything like it before. The Muffin was beginning to get over her shyness and had made her way around her mother, while the maglev car was in transit, to sit closer to Niko. He had noticed this and was smiling at her while he answered Maj’s mom’s questions about how things were in Hungary, the weather and so forth. By the time they got to the car and started to get in, the Muffin had apparently decided that there was no further need for shyness, and insisted on being belted in beside Niko.

  “I thought Hungry was something you got,” said the Muffin as the car lifted off.

  Maj rolled her eyes in amusement, listening with one ear as Niko tried to explain the difference between a country and something that happened in your stomach. With the other ear she was amused to hear her mother going with unusual speed into full maternal mode.

  “That’s terrible about his clothes,” she said. “And we haven’t kept anything of Rick’s that would fit him. And God knows when his luggage will arrive, or what continent it’s on at this point. Never mind that. Maj, when we get in, why don’t you take him over to GearOnline and pick up a few things for him? Jeans and so on. Put it on the house charge, and we’ll sort it out later.”

  “Sure, Mom.” This raised some interesting questions fo
r Maj, as she had never taken a boy clothes shopping before and wasn’t sure if the online protocols were the same as they were for girls. Next to her, the Muffin’s conversation was rapidly gaining in speed and volume as the car fed itself into the traffic stream heading back toward Alexandria. “Our car is old,” the Muffin said. “Mommy says it’s an antique. It’s a big car. Is your car like this one?”

  Maj saw Niko’s glance out the window — a casual one, though his face seemed to her to be fixed in an expression of quiet amazement. “Oh, no,” he said, and Maj caught just a flicker of amusement in his eyes as he turned away from the windows. “We don’t have cars where I come from.”

  This news astonished the Muffin almost into silence, but she quickly recovered. “What do you have?”

  “We have cows,” Niko said, and he glanced at Maj just for a second as he said it, so that there was no mistaking the wicked humor. “We ride them when we need to travel.”

  Maj kept her face straight. The Muffin was hanging on every word he said, her mouth open, her eyes big and round. For his own part, Niko had eyes for none of the rest of them at the moment. “And we ride them everywhere. Even to the airport.”

  “They would poop in the road,” the Muffin said after a moment.

  Niko looked at Maj again, his eyes eloquent of laughter being held under absolute control. “‘Poop’—”

  “Uh, excrete,” Maj said. “Defecate.”

  “Absolutely they poop,” Niko said to the Muffin. “But it doesn’t matter, because we do not just ride the cows; we make them carry our things as well. The cows we ride have little carts behind them. And between the cows and the carts, we put canvas slides with buckets at the end, and the poop goes down the slides into the buckets.”

  “What do you do with the buckets?” the Muffin whispered, absolutely riveted.

  “Empty them over people’s rosebushes,” Niko said.

  “That’s it,” said Maj’s mother. “You’re moving in with us for at least a year. Someone who understands what rosebushes need is welcome in our house for as long as he cares to stay.”

  They were only in transit for another fifteen minutes or so, but Maj found them some of the funniest fifteen minutes she had ever heard, as Niko kept spinning absurd stories about “Hungry” for the Muffin. Her mother, though, once glanced back at her, and Maj found herself knowing exactly what her mother was thinking — that Niko’s funniness had an edge to it, and somehow felt very purposeful — as if he was trying to distract himself.

  And who knows, I might do the same thing, Maj thought. Arriving in a strange country, meeting strangers, not even having my luggage with me…And, something at the back of her mind added, not having the slightest idea what was going to happen to me next….

  They landed at home, and the Muffin was practically the first one out, pulling on Niko’s arm and demanding, “Come and see my room!”

  “He’ll come in a while, honey,” Maj’s mother said. “Right now you have to have your breakfast.” The look she threw over her shoulder at Maj added, And give this poor kid five minutes to breathe!

  “I’m not hungry!”

  “Yes, you are,” Maj’s mother said with serene certainty. “Maj, honey, show Niko the guest room, and where the bathroom is…”

  “Come on,” Maj said to him, and led him down the hallway, pushing the guest room door open. It had been her mother’s office once before the “new wing” had been built onto the end of the house several years back. Now it had a comfy old sofa in it, and a single bed, and a beat-up chest of drawers that had been in Rick’s room, and bookshelves…lots of bookshelves, all full, mostly of “overflow” books from her father’s study. Niko looked around at it all. “You read a lot,” he said, as if he approved.

  “Not as much as I wish I had time to,” Maj said, and sighed a little. “Here’s the closet…not that you have anything to hang up in it at the minute! Look, take a few minutes to get yourself sorted out, and we’ll go online and get you some clothes. Come on, here’s the bathroom….”

  She showed it to him, and Niko disappeared into it with a grateful look. Maj dodged into her dad’s study, woke the Net machine up out of standby mode, and “told” the implant chair there that it was going to have a new implant to add to its list of authorized users. When Niko appeared again, Maj pointed him at the chair and said, “I’ll access it from the kitchen and show you the way…we have a doubler in there. Sit yourself down, get comfortable…”

  He sat down, wriggling a little as the chair got used to him and molded itself to his body. “It’s very strange,” he said. “Mine does not do that….”

  Maj grinned at him. “For a moment there I thought you were going to tell me you sat on cows for this, too.”

  He grinned back. After a moment he said, “When does it start? I do not see anything.”

  “Uh-oh,” Maj said. “Mom?”

  Her mother appeared a moment later at the study door. “Problems?”

  “He should be in my work space by now. But he’s not getting anything.”

  Her mother looked bemused. She came around to stand behind the chair in which Niko sat, and lined up her own implant with the Net computer, then blinked. “It doesn’t recognize his implant,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “The story of my life. Why they can’t just get everyone to agree to standardize these things….”

  For a moment more Maj’s mother stood still. “Okay, I see,” she said then. “It’s just a different protocol…. We don’t use that one much over here. Let me just tell the machine what it should do instead….”

  A moment’s silence. “Okay, Niko,” her mother said then. “Try that and see how it works.”

  He tilted his head a little to one side, then straightened it again. “Oh!” he said.

  “It’s a jury-rig,” Maj’s mother said, not sounding entirely happy. “Your implant had a bandwidth limiter written into the code. I just circumvented it. It can be put back the way it was whenever you like. Are the visuals okay now?”

  “Yes…!”

  “Okay. Maj, check the sales area. It’s getting to be the time of year when they’ll be reducing prices on some of the spring boys’ wear…and this is just for casual wear anyway. Niko doesn’t have to worry about being a fashion plate at the moment. His luggage will be here in a while anyway. If you want to use the machine in my office, go ahead, I won’t need it for an hour or so….”

  “Okay, Mom, thanks. Stay there, Niko, I’ll be with you in a minute….”

  She went around to her mom’s office and settled into the chair there. A moment later she was in her work space, and Niko was standing there, looking around him in astonishment. “This is…very sophisticated,” he said after a moment.

  “A poor thing, but my own,” said Maj. “Computer…”

  “Yes, boss?” said her work space.

  “GearOnline, please. Boys’ wear.”

  “Enter, please.”

  “Through here, Niko,” Maj said, and opened the door at the back of her work space, between the bookshelves. Niko went over to it, peered through.

  “Bozhe moi,” he said softly.

  “I know,” Maj said. They walked through the door together. “I don’t shop here a lot anymore. It’s too easy to get confused….”

  The sheer “acreage” of the place always bewildered her a little; the designers had apparently decided to make this space a direct virtual descendant of the old snail-mail catalogs from the distant past, so that every single thing the chain stocked was out here, arranged on a “floor” which Maj guessed was probably roughly equivalent to the area of the surface of the moon.

  “Come on over here,” she said, and led him over to what looked like a single changing room, standing there by itself in the middle of the vast floor full of clothes hanging up on racks and stacked up folded on shelves. “I don’t see why we should wander around in all this and get lost. See this grid?” Maj pointed to a lighted square on the floor, all crisscrossed with grid lines. “Just st
and here….”

  Niko stepped onto it, bemused.

  “Store computer, please…” Maj told it.

  “Ready to be of service, ma’am. And thank you for shopping GearOnline!”

  “Yeah, sure. Please do a measurement template for this gentleman. Niko, hold still, the thing’ll get confused if you twitch.”

  The grid of light-lines peeled itself up off the “floor” and wrapped itself around Niko, molding itself to him. He held quite still, but Maj could understand his slightly alarmed look — the template’s feel could be rather snug.

  “Don’t freak. It’s getting the readings off the sensors in the chair,” Maj said. “By the way, that was great, in the car…the story you were telling the Muffin, about the cows.”

  He gave her a slightly rueful look. “You mean you don’t believe it, then.”

  “That you ride cows to work?” She had to laugh. “Have you ever ridden a cow?”

  He laughed, too, then. “They are bony.”

  “And they dump you off and step on you,” Maj said. “I tried it once when I was little and my folks took me to a farm. Once was enough. Riding horses, though, that’s another matter.”

  “You ride—” There was a pause while he got rid of one set of gridwork, tried on another. “Funny.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “Why would it be funny?”

  “Oh. Your name.”

  Maj blinked.

  “In my language, Maj might be short for amajzonu. Amazon. A woman who rides.”

  She grinned a little. “Well,” Maj said, “the name is really Madeline, but we don’t use it much.”

  “A little cake? I think amazon is better.”

  The grid of light walked off Niko and stood to one side, a Niko-shaped webwork, glowing green. Niko brushed himself down and stared at it. “Now what do we do?”

  “Go crazy trying to figure out what we want,” Maj said. “Chair, please.”

  A chair appeared. She sat down. “You want to sit?” Maj said.

  “Uh, no, it’s all right,” Niko said. “I was sitting a long time today.”