Safe House nfe-10

by Tom Clancy

  It is enough to turn me into an astronomer, Laurent thought. And a big shiver went through him, hot and cold at once, and then another one, so that he was surprised for a moment, and checked the ship’s controls to see if something was wrong with the suit conditioning system, or the cockpit’s own environmental controls. But all the lights were green, so that Laurent laughed again, at himself this time. He tumbled the ship once more to get one last look at that huge arm of the Galaxy, lying draped over a third of the sky, like a blazing banner spread out on some impossible wind—

  “Niko?”

  Uh-oh, he thought, and tumbled the ship one more time, getting a fix on Maj’s hangar and heading for it. “Coming—”

  It was Maj’s mother, outside the virtual space. It amused Laurent that her family all seemed to leave the option open to talk to each other from inside or outside their various virtualities, no matter what they were doing. “Do you eat lamb, honey?”

  “Lamb? Yes!”

  “Oh, good,” she said, invisible but amused. “An enthusiast. Garlic?”

  “We all have to eat garlic,” Laurent said. “It is required. It keeps the Transylvanians away.”

  “Mmm, no comment,” Maj’s mother said. “If I didn’t know better, I would have believed you about the cows, too. Are you going to be in there much longer?”

  “I am coming out now,” Laurent said. He was landing the Arbalest in Maj’s hangar even as he spoke — which was just as well, since the light over one of the hangar’s pedestrian doors started flashing, indicating that someone wanted to come in.

  “Good,” Maj’s mother said. “Because the Muffin is giving me grief at the moment that you are not available to be played with.”

  “Oh. I will be right out.”

  The hangar ceiling was almost finished shutting, and the huge space began to repressurize.

  “‘Niko,” said Maj’s voice in the middle of the air, suggesting that the Muffin was indeed within range, “what are you doing in there?”

  “Just letting the air back in.”

  The process finished as he got down onto the floor again. The flashing light over the door turned green, and the door opened. Maj came strolling across the syncrete as Laurent went through the walk-around, which Maj told him was traditional among pilots, to make sure that nothing had fallen off their craft — or if it had, to find what it was so that someone else could be charged for it.

  “And where have you been?” she said, trying to sound severe.

  “Flying,” he said. “I finished with my work space for today….” He sighed a little. “It will take a while to get it the way I want it.”

  “You didn’t take it out in the real game, did you?” She looked at him narrowly.

  “Well,” he said. “Yes.”

  “Oh, come on, Laurent,” she said. “I promised I would make sure you didn’t overdo it. And what if the Archon had come along with one of his fleets?”

  “But the Archon was blown up. In the Big Bang.”

  Maj blew out an annoyed breath. “You know they’ll just clone him from the bits and pieces.” she said. “In fact, there are probably clones sitting around on Darkworld right now waiting to be uncanned and reprogrammed. He could have turned up the next day!”

  “But he did not. And besides, you said it would have been tactically unwise.” He grinned at her.

  “Space lawyer,” Maj said. “Come on, lose the suit. I hear that Mom is going to make her famous impaled lamb chops with garlic stuck all through them.”

  Laurent concentrated and vanished the suit. “What does it mean,” he said as they walked back to the door to Maj’s space, “when you try to make something in the work space, and it fails?”

  “It’s just incomplete visualization,” Maj said. “All kinds of reasons for that. In your case, you’re still getting used to the hardware-software interface…failures are common.” She looked around her at the soft evening light coming through the high windows in her own work space as they stepped through the door. “You should have seen how long it took me to get this right. The lighting, the synchronization to local time. The sounds, the smells…” She looked at the floor with amusement. “And the carpet kept changing color. It drove me crazy until I found out why it did that. I’d stolen the ‘template’ from a carpet company ad online…and every time they changed the ad, the rug changed, too….”

  “But there is no rug here.”

  “No, I got rid of it.” She smiled a rather embarrassed smile. “See, I didn’t find out what I was doing wrong until much later. I vanished the carpet and put in hardwood flooring…and then found out. But look, Laurent, really, your dad said that he didn’t want you to spend too much time Netside, and I—”

  The door on the other side of the work space opened, and a tall, gangly young man wearing fluorescent floppy clothes and a marked resemblance to Maj’s father looked in. “Maj, is your friend — Oh, here he is. Hi there.”

  “Laurent, this is the famous Rick you keep hearing about,” Maj said. “The phantom stranger.”

  “When I’m home all the time, she complains,” Rick said, coming over to shake Laurent’s hand. “When I’m not home all the time, she complains. Let me give you advice — don’t have any sisters.”

  “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 n
ot 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 slightly. 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.”