Safe House nfe-10

by Tom Clancy

  Bioru smiled, and suddenly she realized why he had been taken out of the diplomatic service and redirected into politics. No diplomat, seeing that expression across a desk from him, seeing those eyes come alive, would do anything but panic. “Get on it,” he said. “I want you in place to make the recovery on signal. There are some aspects of the operation that have to be finessed at our end before it can go ahead. For the time being, close surveillance will do. I will be in contact with you immediately after you arrive over there, in the usual way. Make sure you’re ready to jump the instant you hear from me.”

  From me. Not from her normal superiors. How many levels above me have been cut out of this operation? the major thought. Or perhaps cut out permanently?

  “Yes, sir,” she said, saluted, and left, resolved to carry this whole business out with absolute care and panache. There could be all kinds of promotions at the end of it, if everything worked out.

  There would certainly be all kinds of shootings, if it didn’t.

  Maj’s father was nowhere to be found when she went looking for him; at least nowhere in the house where Maj would go — there being an understanding that the children of the family did not enter their parents’ bedroom without permission, or knock on the door when it was shut except in case of emergency or a phone or link call that hadn’t been picked up. That door was shut, and Maj looked at it, shrugged, then went back into the kitchen to see if there was any more e-mail and to look over the Group of Seven briefing again.

  There was nothing new in her in-box — or rather the slick steel-and-hardwood table where such things arrived in her work space — and the briefing told her nothing she hadn’t digested the first time around. We’re going to have a bad time of it was most of what she had learned from the first reading. A big amateur squadron had gone in last night in a preemptive attack on the space station which was the focus of this operation, trying to snatch a little glory for themselves. They had managed mostly just to get away with their skins, and not much more. The defenses of the place were redoubtable, and the Archon’s forces had been waiting for them, not even a particularly large grouping of the Black Arrows…but it had shredded poor DawnSquad, “killing” most of the players and leaving the rest of them with crippled ships. Maj was feeling increasingly nervous at having missed the briefing and the final practice session which had followed it. Nothing to do about it now…. she thought. Just go in there tonight, tough it out, do our best…

  …As DawnSquad had done its best. The thought nagged at her as she got up and stretched. She listened to the air around her. Somewhere in the distance she thought she could hear Mom and the Muffin talking together, the Muf still all excited, her mother making sedate calm-down-dear noises as she worked. She was in the household Net, probably working online, and keeping the Muffin occupied and away from Niko’s bedroom at the same time. Quite an accomplishment…. Maj thought.

  “Dad?” she said to the air.

  There was a pause. “Yeah, hon?”

  “You busy?”

  “In my office.”

  She smiled slightly. “The big one or the little one?”

  “Both.”

  “Got a moment?”

  “Sure.”

  Maj went to the door in her back wall, opened it, stepped through.

  Books, and the echo — that was always her first impression. Her father was one of those people who read every hour of the day, who read anything, and then filed the information away in their heads, seemingly able to find it again at a moment’s notice years later. She wondered sometimes whether this library was a conscious expression of that trait, a joke, or just good old-fashioned virtual wish-fulfillment, his picture of where he’d like to be if he had his choice. Now, as she walked down the long, long hall full of brown shelves full of books, towering up toward the ceiling, reaching away in all directions, she found herself leaning toward the latter theory. And it made her smile, for her father couldn’t make up his mind where he wanted to be.

  There was part of this place, about half a mile along the central hall, which looked like a straightforward reconstruction of the Great Library of Alexandria, burned along with all its books three thousand years ago — open porticoes and columns, that ruthless Mediterranean sun burning outside, the sea lapping up nearly against the steps. The part to which she was now coming looked more like the old British Museum Reading Room — a high, light dome, a huge circular room full of shelves and ladders for getting up them without killing yourself. But out one of the side doors, Maj knew, was a part that looked more like the National Library in Dublin, all carved mahogany shelves with busts of philosophers on pedestals at the ends of them, and the Book of Kells in a glass case down at one end. Another hallway favored the Stiftsbibliotek in St. Gallen in Switzerland — thousands of shelves in light wood, aged dark, high stained-glass windows half a millennium old, a floor worn smooth by twenty lifetimes’ worth of readers. A third one led out the front hall of the New York Public Library and left you standing on the stairs between the two white lions, Patience and Fortitude. “I always have a soft spot for that one,” her dad had told her once. “They threw me out of there once when I was six….”

  She kept meaning to ask him what he’d done. But for the moment there was other business. She wandered through into the light streaming down through the dusty air from the windows set high in the dome of the Reading Room, and made her way over to where her father’s desk sat incongruously in the middle of it all. He looked up as she came over.

  All those Eastern European books and magazines were still scattered over the desk. He pushed a few of them off to one side to make room for her to sit down. “Quiet out there,” he said.

  “For the moment,” Maj said. “Mom has the Muffin. Niko’s had a collapse.”

  Her dad raised his eyebrows. “Nothing serious, I hope!”

  “No,” she said as she swung herself up onto the desk and got comfortable. “Just jet lag, I think. But, Daddy,” Maj said, “his name’s not Niko.”

  Her father turned a rather shocked expression on her. “What did he—”

  “He didn’t tell me anything,” Maj said. Then she smiled slightly. “He doesn’t answer to it, that’s all. Not the first time, anyway.”

  “Oh,” her father said. “Oh…” He sighed. “Well, this was why I wanted to talk to you, anyway. What is it with the timing of things, this weekend? Everything keeps getting messed up….”

  She idly picked up one of the bound sets of Eastern European magazines. “He’s not really a relative of ours, is he,” she said.

  Her father shook his head. “Not by blood.”

  “So what was that big story you told us yesterday?”

  “I knew you were going to pick right up on that,” he said, looking rueful. “I would have preferred to tell you and your mom right then, but the Muffin was there…and if she didn’t think she had an immediate handle on who our guest was, she would have started asking questions. And probably in public as well as in private. And the fewer questions asked about our guest, the better.”

  Maj was inclined to agree. The Muffin had the family curiosity in full measure, and if she thought someone had a secret, she would pester them mercilessly. For her, all secrets smacked of Christmas or birthdays. “Simpler to let her think he’s what his ID says, I guess.”

  “I thought so. But truly, Maj, I didn’t want you to think I didn’t trust you. It was all just bad timing.”

  Maj nodded. “Daddy, it’s okay. You told Mom, didn’t you?”

  “Last night.”

  “I think she tried to tell me this morning. Just bad timing again. The Muffin arrived in the middle of it. So what is he really?”

  “A thirteen-year-old kid,” her father said, running one hand wearily through what was left of his hair, “whose father is very big in biotech in his home country. Which is the Calmani Republic.”

  Maj had to search around in her head for a moment to think why the name seemed familiar. “It was part of Romania,
wasn’t it?” Maj said. “It split up.”

  “Sort of the same situation as Carpathia,” her father said. “Worse, in a way…from the historian’s point of view, anyway. Never mind that. His dad has been working on some cutting-edge research in biotech. Stuff that would be advanced even if it were being done on our side of the cultural divide. Nanotechnics…”

  “Microsurgery,” Maj said, “that kind of thing?”

  “More involved,” her father said. “I don’t understand the details. Frankly, I don’t think a lot of people are equipped to understand the details…which is probably the source of the trouble. He’s really one of the brilliant ones, a groundbreaking scientist in his particular art. Which is building the smallest machines anyone’s ever seen, and programming them to do the most delicate work possible…at the molecular level, maybe even the atomic level.”

  He folded his arms and looked thoughtful for a moment. “He and I met at Georgetown together when I was doing my master’s-level work. One of those unusual friendships — heaven knows, ‘interdisciplinary’ stuff is considered strange enough on campus. When a physicist or a biologist starts to hang around with humanities people, there are those who’ll start to question the sanity of both sides. And there was the language barrier as well. And even beyond that, a certain amount of mistrust. Everybody knew why his government had sent him over, and Armin wasn’t too sure at first that we weren’t all spies. But despite everything, Armin and I hit it right off. And he amazed me from the very beginning. I knew he was going to be big at whatever he decided to do.”

  Her father stretched, then smiled a little. “You know this thing, that your mom likes to do when you complain?” He lifted one hand, rubbed the thumb and forefinger together. “‘This is the world’s smallest violin, and it’s playing just for you?’”

  Maj laughed, and her father looked ironic, for the truth was that mostly her mother used that gesture on him. “Well, once, as a joke, when he had met your mother — this was some time before we were married — and heard her use that line on me, he built that. The world’s smallest violin. Four longchain molecules fastened together with benzene rings, and one molecule knitted back into itself for a bow. Five thin little hyoprotein constructs for strings on the violin. One to string the bow. And a little submolecular wheel and pulley to make the bow go back and forth across the string. I saw it work. Of course, you needed an electron microscope to see it.” He grinned.

  “He did that as a joke?”

  Her father nodded, somber. “That was always the problem with Armin,” he said. “You never knew what to say around him, because you might give him an idea for something he could build…and then he would vanish for weeks at a time until it was done. Oh, he’d come out for exams and lectures and so on…. but in between times, you wouldn’t see him until he’d succeeded at what he was doing.” He sighed. “Absolutely brilliant man. And with the most important part of brilliance — persistence.”

  He let out a long breath. “And now,” he said, “I can’t get in touch with him. Which, if it means what I’m afraid of, suggests that what he was afraid was about to happen has happened. They’ve arrested him.”

  “Oh, Daddy, no!”

  Her father nodded, looking grim. “Maj, I don’t know for sure. But he had hoped to be at his new contact address by now, so he told me the other day…so one way or another, something’s gone wrong. I really hope they don’t have him. It would be bad news if they did. But it’s so soon, maybe too soon, to tell….”

  He leaned back and looked across the room at nothing in particular. “He saw this coming some time ago,” he said softly. “Armin has been…well, maybe a little too brilliant. The Calmani government has been very much shut out of trade, the way Carpathia has. Import sanctions linked to improvement of their human-rights record — and since they have no intention of improving that, there are all kinds of things they can’t get. High-technology things, mostly. To have someone like Armin was a big coup for them — someone whom they could, in a way, use as a bargaining chip with the West. You want our technology, you have to trade us things we want.”

  Her father raised his eyebrows. “That by itself, maybe, didn’t bother him. He loved his country, though I doubt he would have extended that love to his government. But Armin rarely stopped to think about such matters. He wanted to get busy creating things, and he was willing to stay where he had been born and do that…help his people, work for them, especially when he thought the Calmani government would help him do that. And for a while, he thought he was doing all right, and that the work he was doing would actually get to the people he was trying to help. But then I think he started to realize that the government had other plans for what he was doing. Especially the medical end of it. He was involved mostly with building micromechanisms that would heal people. The government, I suspect, saw them in an entirely different light. I don’t know the details…but that was when Armin decided to detect. He was intent on getting Laurent — that’s Niko’s real name — out of there. Well, that’s gone well enough. Except that now the government certainly knows what he intends by what he’s done.”

  “Oh, no…” Maj swallowed.

  Her father shook his head. “Exactly what the problem is at the moment, what it is that made Armin decide to jump right now, I can’t say. He wasn’t willing to discuss it much, and I wasn’t willing to press him on the subject. He was none too sure of how secure his own communications were; even the last one I got came to me secondhand. But I think he had come up against some kind of crunch. Either he felt that he couldn’t go on with his work as he had been…or that it was becoming too dangerous somehow…He was very oblique.”

  Maj was still stuck with the idea that Niko’s, no, Laurent’s father was in some little windowless cell somewhere, with secret police looming over him. She imagined how she would feel in Laurent’s place, and shivered. “If they do have him…then what?”

  “I wouldn’t necessarily think that would be a permanent situation,” her father said. “Armin has a lot of friends working for him, there…and here. Though ‘here’ may matter more at the moment. Net Force is interested, as you’ll doubtless be hearing. I spoke to James Winters this morning. It was the least I could do.”

  Maj blushed hot and slipped down off the desk to look at a book in a nearby bookshelf, for no reason except to keep her dad from seeing the look. “You think they can get him out?” she said.

  “If they can’t, they can at least work out who to contact who can actually do the job. Net Force is owed all kinds of favors, all around the world, in some unlikely places.”

  Maj wondered if this would be enough. “That’s a help, anyway.”

  “Yes. But there are other things on my mind.” That worried sound was in his voice again, and it made Maj’s head turn. “The Calmani authorities are hardly going to just sit around and let this happen without acting, honey. That’s not their style. They’re going to do their best to alter this situation to their liking. One good way to put pressure on Armin to do whatever it is they’re trying to get him to do would be to threaten Laurent.”

  “But he’s here,” Maj said. “What can they—”

  Then she stopped. This house was not exactly a security zone. It was an ordinary suburban house with ordinary suburban locks on the doors and windows, and an ordinary security system mostly designed for stopping burglars, not kidnappers. If armed people came along and tried to snatch someone who was living here — She opened her mouth to say, “The police—” and then stopped herself again. The police here were good…but were they good enough to take on armed snatch operatives? Or fast enough?

  “We have a little security that doesn’t show,” said her father. “And more to be added shortly, at least of the ‘passive’ kind. Some guys will be coming from ‘the phone company’ to install it over the next day or so, so don’t be surprised.” He ran one hand over where his hair used to be. “It’s a happy coincidence that I asked a month ago to have our lines checked for bandwi
dth constriction. This will look as if that’s being fixed, to the casual observer…but as a result, people on ‘our side’ will be watching the house and its environs a little more closely than would otherwise be the case, until Laurent’s dad makes it safely over to this side of things.”

  Maj nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I assume part of my job in this is to keep an eye on him.”

  Her father nodded. “You can’t do much during school, I know that, but Mom will be working from home during the business week for the next little while, and she’ll be able to keep an eye on him during the day. If you could just keep an eye on his ‘recreation time,’ that’ll be a help.”

  “Does he have to stay inside?”

  “Oh, no. Though he may need a little coaching in how to act when he goes out. He’s not a dumb kid. He’ll catch on quickly.”

  Maj knew that already.

  “Though,” her father said, “you might want to keep an eye on what he’s up to online, as well. His father was concerned about that.”