Safe House nfe-10

by Tom Clancy

  Maj gave her mother her own version of what her mother described as “an old-fashioned look.”

  “Oh,” Maj said, “I don’t know.” But she wandered farther down the hall before her mother could get any more of her guesses right.

  “Nice try, honey. He’s online,” her mother called after her. “In the den.”

  “Why does this not surprise me?” Maj said softly as she turned back to her mother’s office and leaned against the door. “Are the phone people done?”

  “With the concrete part of the installation, yes,” her mom said. “They said we might lose service once or twice this afternoon before business hours are over — it seems they have to do some tweaking at the exchange. It shouldn’t affect us too much, though. I wouldn’t start anything vital right now, that’s all.”

  “Wasn’t planning to.”

  Maj wandered down the hall again and looked in the den door, saw Laurent sitting there quietly in the implant chair. The Muffin was sitting in his lap.

  Maj smiled a little and went into the kitchen. She dumped her book bags and the light jacket she had brought home from school with her, rooted around in the fridge briefly for some milk and a peach, and sat down at the table to line her own implant up with the doubler over the sink.

  From her own work space she opened the transit door and looked through into the Muffin’s. Sure enough, in the midst of the ancient Cambrian rain forest, all waving with giant horsetail ferns and club mosses, there was Laurent, with a crowd of dinosaurs sitting or standing around him, while the Muffin sat a little elevated on a nearby rock and read to them all.

  “‘Ay,’ Puck said. ‘I’m sorry we lost him out of Old England—’”

  Laurent looked up at the slight rustling the dinosaurs made at Maj’s approach. He was wearing the new sweats Maj’s mother had ordered for him, and looked extremely relaxed.

  “All right, you guys,” Maj said, “shove over…”

  She pushed a couple of the larger tyrannosaurs out of the way and sat down on the grass next to Laurent, composing herself for the Muffin to resume.

  “I was nearly done,” Muf said with some dignity. “You almost missed everything.”

  “Well, go on,” Maj said. “I’ll just have to fill in the blanks. It’ll be suppertime soon, and you’ll need to wash up. But I’d love to sit here and listen to you finish this first.”

  It took about another twenty minutes for the Muffin to plow through to the end of that chapter of Rewards and Fairies. Maj and Laurent kept quite still through this — the fierceness of the Muffin’s concentration was impressive, and none of the dinosaurs dared to move. Finally, when she was done and closed the book, Laurent applauded a little. The Muffin beamed at him.

  “You are very young to be reading that,” he said. “You’re doing very well.”

  “I’m not that young,” said the Muffin, with the air of a grand dame explaining that she wasn’t that old. “Daddy started reading when he was three. So, what else do you want me to read you?”

  “Nothing right now, Muffaletta,” Maj said. “Mom is going to want to give you supper, and then Daddy will be home.”

  “Oh, good,” the Muffin said. “I’ll come back later, then.” She put down the book and vanished.

  Maj and Laurent looked at each other with amusement. “She really is reading above her age level,” Maj said, “but it’s traditional in the family. Have you read that one before?”

  He shook his head. “It was not familiar.”

  “Kipling,” Maj said. “It’s never too late. I’ll lend you a paper copy.”

  “They would not have let us have such literature at home,” Laurent said, leaning back and looking up at one of the dinosaurs. “It has kings in it.”

  “Presidents, too,” said Maj, “of wicked foreign countries. That part did, anyway.”

  He made an amused snorting sound which reminded Maj, somehow, of her father. “Yes, we are always warned about the dangers of dealing with decadent Westerners.”

  “Decadent,” Maj said, and sighed. “I wish I had time to be decadent. Lying around doing nothing, you mean, eating chocolates and making a lot of money?”

  “That is always the kind of picture I had in my mind,” Laurent said.

  Maj laughed. “Well, you can lose it. I don’t know anyone who does that. Well, there’s a lot of chocolate in my life, I admit that.” She thought she might as well be honest about it, because whenever her brother showed up, he certainly would be. One of his less desirable nicknames for Maj was “Miss Hershey of 2025.”

  “But I know some government people, and they don’t seem to have time to do anything but work like dogs all day.”

  “Oppressing people, my government would say.”

  Maj snorted, definitely a copy of her father’s sound of derisive amusement. “You want oppression, take a look at my dad when I tell him I need new clothes,” she said. “If I’d known there was a way to get the kind of results you seem to be getting, I would have started pretending to be an escapee from your part of the world a long time ago.”

  Laurent’s grin acquired a slightly sad edge, and he didn’t reply.

  “I don’t suppose,” Maj said, “there’s been any news about your dad….”

  He shook his head. “Nothing yet,” he said. And he sighed. “There are moments when it seems like all this is some kind of dream. A moment ago, just a day or two ago, we were sitting in the apartment, and he said to me, ‘Lari, time to go now. But one glass of tea before we go.’ It was the way he said it — it was not going to be just another walk up to the train to go to school. And I said, ‘Now?’ and he said, ‘Ten minutes.’ Then everything started to move very fast….”

  Laurent made the small snort again. “Now all of a sudden here I am in America…and I have flown with the Group of Seven against the Archon’s Black Arrows…and bought clothes without even trying them on—”

  “Do they fit?”

  “They fit fine.” He laughed out loud at that. “It is just all so strange. Like another planet.”

  Maj thought that his was the world that sounded like another planet — but that was not anything she would have said to him out loud.

  “And the Muffin,” he said, with affection. “Children are not so friendly to strangers at home. When they meet you, you can see them looking at you and wondering, Is this person safe? For we are told from very young that our country is full of spies and saboteurs who want to overturn our good government and put something worse in its place.”

  Like what? Maj thought, another reaction she would not have spoken out loud.

  “And so you always look at the person and think, They always told us, anybody could be an enemy….”

  “And people from my side of the world,” Maj said, “definitely.”

  Laurent looked at her with a rather dry expression. “We also learn young,” he said, “not to necessarily believe everything they tell us. Or at least some of us do. You are certainly not my enemy. Nor the Muffin.”

  “I imagine your president would say we were, though,” Maj said.

  Laurent swallowed. “I think,” he said, “that my president would also say that my father is a traitor and a seller-out to the imperialists, and other things that are not true.” He shook his head. “A scientist, yes. But I think my father saw that something wrong was happening, that he had invented something that was going to be good, originally, and now was going to be made bad…. Sorry, I don’t have the vocabulary for this.”

  “Are you kidding?” Maj said. “I wish I spoke Romanian like you speak English. All I can do at the moment is sort of stagger around in Greek and German and a little French, and my accent makes grown men cry.”

  Laurent smiled at the image. Behind him, a stegosaur lay down with a grunt. “I think, though,” he said, “that Popi decided he couldn’t do it anymore, that he had to stop or it would be too late. I would see him sitting home, sometimes, looking sad…as if something had gone so wrong. It hurt me that he couldn�
�t talk about what was the matter. But we couldn’t talk about it…not even when we would go out to the lakes, out west, to go fishing sometimes. You can never tell when somebody is listening. And if you’re important, they listen more, not less….”

  “He must have had ways of telling you, though,” Maj said, her heart wrung by the thought of not being able to openly tell your family what was going on in your head. She knew there were people who probably would think she was out of her mind, but this was how she had been raised — some occasional shouting and stamping, yes, but no uncertainty about where you stood. “Somehow or other…”

  “When it was very important, he would write me notes,” Laurent said, with that dry smile. “He would leave them on the kitchen table. Always facedown…”

  The image, and what it implied, left Maj speechless for a few seconds. “But it sounds as if you don’t know a lot about what he was doing,” she said.

  Laurent shook his head. “He didn’t think it was good for me to know too much. It is too easy to become…useful….”

  “A tool,” Maj said. She shivered, though the forest was tropical.

  “I know in a general way,” Laurent said. “He was building micromachines that could walk around inside you and repair cellular damage. Or disassemble tumors, cell by cell. They would have been wonderful things. But one evening he left a note on my pillow, facedown. It said, I am not going to let them make me a murderer. You are going to leave soon, and I will be right behind you.”

  “And here you are,” Maj said.

  “Yes,” Laurent said. “But where is he?”

  She had no answers for him.

  “It is foolish,” he said. “But I wish, now, that I had taken longer to drink the tea, and look at him….”

  Around them the ancient forest suddenly tattered and split at the seams, leaving Maj sitting at the table and blinking.

  “Uh-oh,” she said.

  “There it goes,” her mother said from down the hall. “I hope you weren’t doing anything important.”

  Maj refused to comment. A moment or so later, Laurent wandered in. “Did I do something wrong?” he said.

  “No, it was the repair guys, they’re still fiddling with the lines,” Maj said.

  “Good. I would not like to think I messed up your sim somehow. I would very much like to fly again later….”

  Maj gave him an amused look. “Yeah,” she said, “I think that can be arranged. Meanwhile, come on, let’s see what the fridge wants us to eat before its use-by date.”

  Laurent blinked. “It is going to tell us what to eat? I am not sure I approve.”

  “See that, you’re getting decadent already,” Maj said, and pulled the refrigerator door open. “Let’s graze. But if you don’t want to hear this thing get really ugly, stay away from the butter….”

  6

  The spaceplane was much more comfortable than it had any right to be, even in coach, and the major sat there by the window, looking out at the curvature of the Earth, and could feel little except a vague sense of offense that such an experience should routinely be denied to her people. The Western countries could blather all they liked about the danger of terrorism to the planes, and their right to attempt to negate it by strictly controlling access to them. It was all finally about keeping the “banana republics” in their place — keeping down small independent-minded countries whose only sin was disagreeing with the big and powerful ones, refusing to dance to their tune. The major disliked having to travel on forged documents — she was pleased with who she was, and with the nation which had raised her, despite all the attempts of the big countries to interfere, in its own moral and economic tradition. Still, sometimes work made you do things you didn’t care for…and right now, getting the job done was much more important than indulging her personal preferences.

  Besides, there was always the matter of promotions to consider.

  She glanced up one more time at the light for the Net cabin at the end of the “coach” area — still red. She glanced one more time at the screen in front of her, still blathering in 3-D and full color about some inexplicable service it wanted her to buy. In one corner of the stereo display (rather annoyingly good for such a small one) was a red digit 2, blinking steadily. Two people ahead of her in the queue. The sheer spoiled impatience of these people, she thought. Only three hours in this thing, and they have to be indulging themselves on the Net half the time? Why don’t they just stay home hooked up to their darned machines if they can’t do without their drug for that long? Especially when people who really needed to use the Net, like her, were kept waiting.

  And as for what they did with it…well. The Net could have been a wonderful tool for education and commerce, but like anything else sourced in the Western countries, it had become a tool for endless hucksterism, a way to make jobs for more people selling things that people didn’t really need, services simply designed to make you more lazy or stupid than you already were…a goal which she suspected the Western democracies fully supported, since they kept themselves in power by the votes of the few human beings energetic enough to haul themselves out of their houses to a polling place, but still naive or dim enough to believe that their voices made a difference, or were paid attention to. It could have been an endearing illusion, if the countries encouraging it in their citizens had not been so overwhelmingly, unfairly powerful, sitting on coffers and arsenals fattened by centuries of this operation.

  Indeed, she thought as yet another screaming, out-of-control child ran down the aisle nearest her with its parent in leisurely pursuit, there was a truth there which the democracies were missing — one which would have made them more powerful still if they had ever gotten to grips with it. Individual persons might be clever, or useful, but people in the mass, the great enfranchised mobs that constituted the North American and European democracies, people were stupid. If you really meant to keep your working population well fed, productive, and obedient, the best way to manage this was to completely ignore their ideas about how to run a country — since mostly they didn’t have any, or only ones which had never been thought through. Tell them how it should be done, show them how it should be done…and if they complained, if they didn’t like the way things were run, let them go somewhere else. After you had gotten anything out of them which made a fair return for the money you had spent raising them, of course.

  This last part of her viewpoint was possibly heretical, and not one that she would ever have shared. The major doubted that the president thought it fair that anyone on whom the State had spent funds should ever be allowed to exit it except for the most pressing reasons, or possibly any reason at all…and certainly not just because they felt like it. That being, of course, the whole reason for this whole exercise.

  The stereo display began showing a rechanneled version of some ancient film, and the major sat back in her seat and sighed; and the digit in the corner of the display turned to “I” as a woman came out of the Net booth and a man went in. I could almost find it in my heart to feel sorry for poor Darenko, she thought, when we finally force him out of hiding. Except that there will probably not be much left to be sorry for. Once a man has betrayed him, especially a man who has so much to be grateful for, and a man of such gifts, Cluj is not the sort to readily forgive. And under the circumstances, she could understand it. How a man could do all the work necessary to lay a mighty weapon in his nation’s hand, an invaluable tool — and then, with the work almost finished, simply get up and flee…? It was insanity at best, and treachery at worst. In either case, putting the man out of his misery was the best and quickest option. And in the case of treachery, doing it as publicly as possible was always a good idea. Every now and then, she thought, the people, stupid as they are, will understand an example set before them if it’s nasty enough. If they—

  The digit “I” turned to “0” and began flashing as the man came out of the booth. To the man sitting reading beside her, the major said, “Excuse me—” and got up to slip
past him, heading for the booth. She sidestepped skillfully around yet another child plunging down the aisle and hurried into the booth — shut it, leaned back against the 85-degree support couch that leaned forward from the wall, lined up her implant, and when the temporary work space came up around her, set it for scramble and gave it the necessary address.

  She waited for the encryption protocols to come up and breathed out in annoyance. They can’t even discipline their children, she thought. Here they are running loose like so many hooligans, free to annoy anyone they like. You wouldn’t see this kind of behavior at home, our children know that they’d—

  Then she found herself looking at the minister, Bioru, in his office. “Sir,” she said, and not being in uniform, did not salute. “I had thought I would be talking to—”

  “I intercepted the call. We have had some movement, Major.”

  Her heart started to pound. “Has he been found?”

  “Not as yet. But one of his associates has begun telling us what we want to know.”

  She had wondered when they would start getting results. Questioning was always such a tricky business — those who seemed most potentially resistant sometimes cracked immediately through fear or overimaginativeness, while others who seemed least likely to put up a fight sometimes produced astonishing amounts of resistance, either due to high pain thresholds or plain obstinate stubbornness. In all cases it took a professional to work out how much force to apply, and in what form — and there were too many chances for accidents, as she’d seen. She had been dreading another. “I am very glad to hear that,” she said.

  “The details,” said Bioru, looking grim, “are rather less cause for joy. Darenko’s work was nearly complete, the final stage of his construction almost ready for delivery. But apparently he had reservations which he did not share with us about the purposes to which his work would be put. As if he had any right to such.” The frown got blacker. “Apparently he has been feeding our agent on his team false progress reports for some good while…and, during that time, he has been both sabotaging his other associates’ work and destroying or undoing work which he himself has done. Various ‘partial’ prototypes of the microps have been destroyed or rendered useless in ways which were undetectable until someone actually tried to activate the mechanisms. And we have none of the fully functional models left, none at all. Darenko destroyed them before he left, possibly with something as simple as a Net-borne command to their programming centers.”