Runaways

Chapter 8

The view of James Winters's office, early the next morning, was probably not too much different from that of anyone else in Net Force: plain institutional desk and chairs and "filing cabinets," slightly dusty Venetian blinds drawn against the sun coming in the windows this time of day, the desk all scattered with solid datacarts and printouts and scribbled notes. But the ordinariness of it was a surprise, since Winters was fairly highly placed in that organization. Indeed, some people who didn't know better would probably wonder why someone with such career prospects, a decorated Marine as well as a very senior member of the organization, would have taken on such a relatively unimportant job as running the liaison office to the Net Force Explorers. Just a bunch of kids, after all.. But Megan knew that this man did not hold the thousands of "kids" he worked with as some kind of ornamental junior auxiliary or publicity stunt. He was as serious about his commitment to the online world and the business of making it safe and keeping it that way as he knew they were. It made dealing with him a touch easier… because he was a man of formidable personality, a little scary sometimes. Megan never went into his virtual "office" without twitching a little, for he expected his contacts among the Explorers to behave as professionally and proficiently as his senior agents. The idea seemed to be that, if the Explorers were careful and lucky, they would be senior agents some day… so getting a head start on the expected behavior was a good idea.

Megan's problem at the moment, as she and Leif waited in her workspace "on hold," looking at a dimmed-out view of Winters's office while he was briefly absent, was that she wasn't sure they had started the "professional" part of this particular escapade soon enough. Once or twice in the not too distant past, she had erred badly by refraining from calling Winters and Net Force in because she had seriously believed that she was handling everything just fine by herself. Now Megan was trying to be very virtuous about assessing her situations, aware that making the same mistake twice could be seen as fatal in this organization… and in dealing with some of the clever, unscrupulous and deadly lawbreakers that Net Force met during the course of its policing, often enough a repeated mistake would be fatal. It really should be all right, she told herself while she paced around on the worn marble of the amphitheater floor. No one's done anything really dangerous… yet. I think. The problem was that what someone in her late teens considered "not really dangerous" could sometimes clash spectacularly with the opinions on the subject of someone in his forties, who had seen too many of his people, over the last ten or fifteen years, fail to return from interventions-

"Nice view," said James Winters, having walked "out of the air" and into her space, wearing shirt and tie and dark trousers, with the unfakeable Net Force ID hanging from his pocket. His office now appeared undimmed and seemingly adjacent to Megan's space. "Sorry that took a little longer than I thought it would. It's been a busy morning."

Leif's space was also "adjacent" to Megan's at the moment, and he slid down off the hood of the Ice Cadillac and came into Megan's space to face Winters with her. "Morning, Leif," Winters said, peering past him into Leif's space, without comment for the moment. "Your dad in the country at the moment?"

"New York, sir. At least, he was there this morning at breakfast… "

Winters made a wry expression. "The story of all of our lives. You never know where you're going to be when it's time for the next meal."

He looked over at Megan again. "Which of you wrote the precis I just read?"

"We both did," Megan said.

"Good," Winters said.

He turned and walked a few steps to reach back into his space, grabbed something in the air Megan couldn't see, and pulled it into Megan's workspace. It was a text window which must have been free-floating in the air there. Now it became visible to them, too, and Meg got a glimpse of the content scrolling past in the window and recognized what she and Leif had sent Winters earlier, a document describing as dryly as possible what they had been up to. "The first question I have for you," he said, "is-have there been any new developments in this situation since you filed this with me?"

"No, Mr. Winters," Megan said. "We didn't want to move any further until we heard from you."

"All right," he said. "That was a good idea." And Megan relaxed a little. "Let's look at possible options-"

Then one side of Megan's workspace, over toward the right side of her desk, suddenly turned into the same swirling default blue that she had seen when Mark had touched base with them earlier. Mark walked out of it, and said, "Sorry I'm late. Dad was using the mobile."

Winters raised his eyebrows at Mark. "Was he calling the Surete to come and take you away, do you think?"

"Huh?"

"Huh, he says." Winters threw Mark what Megan's father would have described as "an old-fashioned look." "Mark, you really want to check out the differences between the French laws governing online 'sovereignty' and the North American ones. While I understand what you were doing in Breathing Space last night, and I acknowledge that it may do some good in the future, in the present you have under French law committed an act corresponding to criminal trespass-"

"I wasn't entering any system of theirs!" Mark said.

"Yes, but you entered Breathing Space from an access point based on French soil, and you did it without legal authorization, without a search warrant from any online or other jurisdiction! That makes it not just entering, but breaking and entering with assumed/implied intent to defraud or steal. Cyberburglary. No matter that you did it in a good cause. If the French authorities find out, even your father's influence may be insufficient to keep you out of the pokey, because it's not the English/American modality of law they practice here, it's the Napoleonic one. You are presumed guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. Which you're not. And you've made these two accessories after the fact. Are you listening, Mark?"

He was. Mark was about as pale as Megan had ever seen him. She was sweating herself, but there was still something slightly amusing about it. Or there will be if we 're not in trouble… /

"Yes, sir," Mark said, in a surprisingly small voice.

Megan blinked. She had never heard Mark call anyone "sir."

"So," Winters said, "let's see what kind of order we can bring out of this chaos… seeing that we have the data to begin with. And the implications are serious… but in their way encouraging, since it confirms suspicions that some of our operatives have expressed in the past."

"You've been working on Breathing Space already?" Leif said.

"Not specifically. But there have been too many reports of minors, or even juveniles, being caught up in international 'business' where they have no business being," Winters said, pushing his hands into his pockets and walking across to the edge of the amphitheater to look out across the bleak abruptly curving wilderness of crags and crevasses and methane snow. "Mostly it seems to have been courier work. The classic 'deadfall' routine; give a dangerous package to someone who doesn't have a clue what it is, so that if the authorities catch them with it, they take the fall, not you or the person for whom it was intended. Or worse, camouflage a parcel as something else entirely… the way they used to send 'sensitive' documents which were no such thing. Or maybe they were, but they weren't nearly as important as the microdot masquerading as one of the periods on the paper. Either way," Winters said, turning back to them, "over the past several years we've had about ten cases of minors 'taking the fall,' being caught with materials associated with some hostile intelligence operation or money-laundering scheme, or getting involved in some other shady scam. Some of them have been in pretty bad shape when we found them. Some of them have been dead. And unfortunately we have made very little headway with our investigations, because the people behind this seem to have been exquisitely sensitive to which kids are real ones, and which ones are Net Force operatives who just happen to look and act very young." Winters got a rueful look. "It seems that in some areas, there's just no substitute for having been born in the last twenty years."

"So you want us to-" Leif said.

Megan saw the flash of annoyance in Winters' s eyes and immediately wished Leif had kept his mouth shut. "I do not want you to," Winters said. "The people we're dealing with, whatever their purposes may be, are professionals at what they do… which is staying hidden, and getting other people jailed, hurt, or killed on their behalf. Usually kids around your age… usually ones who are at least nearly as smart as you are." He glanced at Mark. "Almost all of present company excepted. I would very much prefer to let our own people continue handling this."

Then he sighed. "Except that this is the first concrete indication that we've found of the intentions and methods of the people who might actually be running the 'recruitment scheme,' and that they're actually being somewhat structured about it, enough so to keep coming back to the same places. And they've been canny about it, too… recruiting from a 'labor pool' who because of multiple run-ins with the law or a long history of 'going missing' are already either discredited as witnesses, or already given up for dead… or in a position to be. Nasty, very nasty… and I want it to stop. Not least because what Breathing Space does, when it's working correctly, helps a lot of people, and I would very much dislike to see the whole operation shut down in an atmosphere of scandal. Especially since Net Force should have been able to crack this by now, and hasn't. Results speak loudest, and the excuses would ring very hollow… especially to the parents of those kids who never came home."

Leif opened his mouth, then closed it again.

Megan simply looked at Winters. Winters looked back at her, and after a moment said, "I'd be willing to hear your recommendations."

She thought for a moment. "While they were in the report we filed with you," Megan said, "I understand that you might have concerns for Leif's safety… and almost might be concerned that he may have had second thoughts since we filed. However-" She glanced at Leif. He shook his head. "I think you should let him proceed," Megan said.

"Why?"

"Because substituting a Net Force operative for me, even one wearing an identical 'seeming' that you're pretty sure can't be seen through, has too many risks associated with it," Leif said. "What if the interviewer detects a change in 'tone' from the one I used with him? What if the substituted agent messes up some detail in the scripted history I've been working with, and with which I've had a fair amount of time to rehearse? And most to the point- what if you can't find anybody as good with as many languages as I am? Because you can't."

"You know," Winters said idly, "smugness is a big failing in our business, Leif." Leif flushed a shade of red that clashed with his hair. "Especially," Winters added, "when coupled with being right."

He paced a few steps across the worn white marble, his hands clasped behind his back, thinking. Leif gulped. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to sound that way. But if you scare these people off the nest now, it'll be months, maybe years, before they try something similar, and you know they won't try it in the same place. Drive them even further underground than they are already, and they'll just go off and pull the same number in Moscow, or Buenos Aires, or Beijing… and it'll take Net Force just as long then to get a handle on it as it's taken now, and maybe longer, because they'll have gone to a lot of trouble to cover up their tracks in some way that'll make it difficult or impossible to catch them in the kind of thing they're doing at the moment. If you're serious about stopping these people from ruining any more kids' lives, temporarily or permanently, I don't think you have much in the way of choices. Let us help you get the evidence you need to put these operatives away, anyhow."

Winters looked at him, then sighed and took a few more paces. "It's the problem with the Hydra's heads, isn't it," he said. "Cut a few of them off and five more grow back for every one you chopped. But at the same time… that's no excuse not to cut off the ones you find biting people, even if it does make other crooks elsewhere more cautious."

He glanced over at Megan. "This, of course, doesn't solve your problem, does it? Your friend is still missing."

"Yes," Megan said.

"Doubtless you're hoping that when we arrest the 'bad guys,' that under interrogation they'll let slip, or in the process of 'plea-bargaining' trade us, information about what happened to Mr. Kamen."

"I would hope for that, yes," Megan said. And she swallowed. "But I wouldn't hold my breath. And I wouldn't let it stop me from going ahead with what we're planning."

Winters stopped and looked at her thoughtfully. "Would you care to elaborate on that?"

She didn't want to.. but this particular line of reasoning had been chasing itself around in her head for many hours now, and there was no escaping from it. "I don't think it's likely that Burt is the only person they've 'recruited' in the past week, or the past month," Megan said. "There have to be a fair number of others. If these kids are seen as a safe and easy way to pass confidential information around, avoiding the Net or other methods that're more carefully policed, then there'll be a lot of them out there… and because there are potentially so many of them available, they may be seen by these people as disposable. Yeah, worrying about Burt got me into this.

I'm still worried about him. But the important thing is to stop this. It's not just Burt's safety that's at stake. Other kids are out there whose parents may really want to get them back safe. Their lives deserve to be saved as much as Burt's. And saving them may make the people who started running this particular scam think again about doing it at all any more… especially if it looks like Net Force may actually be using kids our age in iive' operations. They'll never know for sure, in the future, when they're about to be 'stung.' Strikes me as a good thing, whatever my personal feelings about my friend might be."

Winters gave her a long look, then went back to his pacing. "And you?" he said, looking over at Leif. "Do you agree with Megan's assessment?"

"By and large, yes."

"Care to poke some holes in it?"

"To what purpose?" Leif said. "The meter's running, as we say in New York. Besides, you have your mind made up already."

Winters stopped for a moment, stared at Leif, and then grinned at him. "Does it show that much?… All right, look. You're suggesting that we enact full surveillance on Leif's next interview with the 'Recruiters.' You know that, if it goes as planned and we succeed in making arrests, you'll have to testify in court, and that despite the usual precautions being taken to protect your real identities, this could possibly lay you open to, shall we say, 'recriminations' from the Recruiters' people at some later date. Or immediately."

Leif and Megan both nodded.

"Obviously you two are going to have to clear your further involvement in this with your parents," Winters said. "Better find out what the situation is with them, and do it quickly. As you say, the meter is running."

Winters turned to Mark. "I know you understand this, insofar as you understand anything legal, because, having been properly empowered by Net Force, you've already participated in such undertakings. We can safely assume that the security arrangements which already cover your mother and father can be assumed to protect you as well. Maybe someday you'll even do something to earn them." Now it was Mark's turn to turn a discordant red. "Other than constantly manifesting a wild talent with computers which could turn you into our century's version of Professor Moriarty, if you weren't so clearly obsessed with being seen to be operating on the Side of Good."

"Professor who?

Megan grinned.

"Little Philistine," Winters said mildly. "What do they teach them at these schools?"

"And as for being on the side of good-"

"Stop before you say something more incriminating than anything you've said so far," Winters said. "Which, admittedly, would take some doing. Remember, the Surete are only a virtmail away.. and there's a standing one hundred thousand Euro reward for turning in a cyberbur- glar in France. Comes to quite a chunk in dollars, at the moment. Don't tempt me. My back porch needs fixing."

Mark stood there and said nothing, looking extremely glum.

"So as regards your part in all this," Winters said, "the initial surveillance you did was, as usual, highly effective. Megan attached a copy. I watched it all. Very incriminating. Very promising. And totally inadmissible as evidence due to the illegal way in which it was acquired… and also inadmissible without a search warrant, which we are now going to have to get busy acquiring so that the next set of evidence also is not contaminated. I'll handle that end of things." He glanced at Leif. "You're still waiting for your notification of the time and 'place' of the next interview, I take it."

" 'Around the same time today,' they said. Nothing more specific."

"It'll do," Winters said. "I'll instruct the system to fast- track any message from you to me immediately, whatever I'm doing, as this whole business is very time-sensitive. I want to hear about this next meeting thirty seconds after you do, from inside Breathing Space's virtual environment if necessary… there are ways to pass the information that won't compromise you. We'll work something out. Mark, have you planted the necessary backup files to substantiate Leif's claim?"

"Uh, not all of them."

"What??"

"I was working on it earlier, by my dad came in and threw me off the machine. He needed it for business," Mark said, rather plaintively. "And anyway, I was having trouble… that's why it took so long to get started in the first place. The Breathing Space client data files are better protected than the virtual space is-a lot better. I think somebody screwed up over there."

"I wouldn't throw rocks if I were you," Winters said. "Get back online and deal with it. I'll have the Paris bureau deliver you another set of Net server hardware pronto, so you won't be interrupted; and I'll speak to your dad. What's your room number?"

"I don't know if it has a number. It's the Presidential Suite."

Winters smiled slightly. "Ah, the privileges of rank. How often during this stay has your dad actually been in that suite, though? Poor guy. Mark, why are you still standing here? Go get on with it, and hurry up! There's no telling what records the Recruiters are pawing through at the moment, and you need to be there first!" He cocked an ear at the empty air, and added, "The Paris bureau chief says that in ten minutes there'll be someone coming down in the elevator with one of the new Force Nine portable setups." Mark's eyes widened. "Don't let your father steal it. And don yt break the chair!"

Mark turned and vanished hurriedly, looking both harried and very relieved. Winters turned to Megan and Leif, who had been watching all this a little wide-eyed. "Don't mistake what you're seeing," Winters said. "I know I'm hard on him, but he's in a unique position, and his folks are busy.. and they're friends of mine. Heaven forbid he should get messed up because somebody didn't spend enough of the right kind of time with him. But that's what this is all about, isn't it?"

They nodded.

"All right," he said. "Good job, you two. Go get hold of your parents, get things sorted out. Have them call me if there are any questions. I'll be right here… I have about twenty things to organize and we can't move until they're all in place. So your recommendations are accepted in full… God help us. Now get going!"

They went.

Schiphol Airport outside Amsterdam had once been a relatively small place, built after the war, reclaimed from the sea like so much other polder, and named for the medieval and Viking ships that they had found there, on the old sea bed, when they walled in the area and pumped it dry. Now a replica of at least one of those ships stood in the middle of the new Arrivals Hall built ten years ago-lean, mean and rakish, sail down but her oars all out, and the dragon prow very pointedly facing the "wrong" way, toward the sea and the outside world. But there was some appropriateness in that, since the Duty-Free area, now more than half the size of the whole airport area, had been relieving foreigners of their money as assiduously as the Vikings ever had, for many years-and with this difference, that mostly the foreigners turned their money over, not just willingly, but gladly.

Burt wandered through the Duty Free area with his eyes wide. It was acres and acres of polished white marble and granite flooring, a space that made you swear you could see the curvature of the Earth, and the whole thing dotted and scattered with shops selling everything you could think of. That was what Schiphol's main Duty Free Sales area was about. Once it had been a little thing, barely a twinkle in the airport designers' eyes. But over the last half a century it had grown like a very lucrative fungus, spreading itself over many hectares of airport, so that the actual ticketing concourses and arrival and landing gates were now like mere tendrils and fringes around the body of a large beached beast swollen with much cash.

Burt had at first thought that it was a pretty raw deal to have to do what his instructions entailed-which was to go to Amsterdam, get off the plane, stay for a night in the airport hotel without leaving the area, and then the next morning, having made his drop and a reciprocal pickup, get right on the plane and go straight home again. My first time out, he'd thought, and what do I get to see? Nothing! Not a damn thing. This realization, as he looked sleepily out the window that morning-gazing for the first time the end of hours of ocean against a strange new coastline-had so soured Burt's mood that the approach to Dutch passport and control and customs, which would normally have made him appropriately first-time nervous, now merely made him want to snarl. In that he was exactly like about nine-tenths of the other passengers getting off the KLM red-eye flight out of Reagan International, and possibly for that reason Customs paid Burt almost no attention at all, past waving him through the "blue channel" with barely a glance or two.

Burt had gone gladly enough to the hotel and had had a hot shower, and then had fallen gratefully into bed, getting the sleep which he had not been able to get on the plane due to a mixture of excitement, nervousness, and a seemingly never-ending background of crying-baby sound effects. When he woke up, and realized that it was about five in the afternoon Dutch time, and he couldn't leave the hotel, then he really began to be annoyed. There was, however, nothing he could do about it. He wouldn't be paid for this work until he got home; he only had enough credit on the debit card they had given him to pay for meals and some drinks and his hotel room. He didn't even have enough credit to pay for a Net call home… not at the rates they charged here. The rates posted on the very basic little Net cubicle across from the shower room had made him blanch, even after he did the Euro-to-dollar conversion. Burt had been entertaining the idea of how much fun it would be to call Wilma from a public booth, from Amsterdam, both to let her know he was okay, and to completely astonish her. They had used to talk together about how much fun it would be to go overseas. Neither of them had ever envisaged being able to do it any time soon. But here I ami Burt thought.

For all the good it does me. I can't go see anything worth seeing. This is a waste of time…

Still.. there was the money to think of. He thought about it, and watched the local TV news in the cubicle, becoming increasingly fascinated by how strangely like English Dutch sounded sometimes. He looked at various other entertainment channels available, including one pay- per-view channel which caused him to turn so red with astonishment and embarrassment that he actually bolted the Net cubicle. Apparently the Dutch were amazingly liberal about some intrapersonal relationships… And finally, after going down to the hotel's twenty-four hour cafe and having a big plate of a smoky sausage called "rookworst" and a Coke, he had given up and gone back upstairs to sleep again. His plane back to Reagan was at lunchtime the next day. He would go to the airport early, he decided. It had to be more interesting than the hotel.

Now-standing in the midst of that vast, polished, glittering space that was the main "sales hall" in Schiphol Duty Free-Burt realized that he had been understating the case somewhat. There was more stuff here to buy than he had ever seen in one place in his life. Jewelry, clothes, liquor, watches, cameras, vidders, tricams, sound systems, porcelain, crystal, gold by the gram, ounce or kilo, diamonds by the carat or gram-He had stopped to stare in front of a little open-countered stall where a handsome young woman in a trim Schiphol staff uniform was weighing an emerald-cut diamond the size of Burt's thumbnail for a young man, while his girlfriend pored over another part of the case where still bigger ones lay under the security-wired glass, each in its little box, each labeled for size and brilliance. Burt had lingered there for a while, wishing he could bring something of the sort home for Wilma. But he didn't even have to look at these to know that their prices would turn him a whole lot paler than the ones on the Net cubicle back in the hotel.

He turned away regretfully, checked his watch. The pickup's ten minutes away. Better go put myself where I'm supposed to be.. He started walking the eighth of a mile or so to the place where he had been told to wait, looking as he went at the stall next to the diamond place. There was a large rectangular hole in. the floor, there, and Burt stopped to look at it curiously as a discreetly hooting klaxon began to sound. At the desk in front of the hole in the floor, a man in a dead black sliktite was bent over some paperwork, signing it, as the glittering new car he had just bought ascended from out of the depths to be examined before it was crated up and put on the man's flight out.

I want this, Burt thought. I want to live like this. I like this kind of life! Not that he had had much of it himself, so far. But he had seen other people living it now… and that was enough for him. He would do as much of this work as he had to to keep on living this way. No life Burt had ever thought possible for him at home had had this kind of wonder about it. It was uncomfortable, too, but it was worth it.

Burt made his way to the spot where he had been told to make his pickup-a fast-food shop owned by a famous chain. Burt hated their hamburgers, but he had been told to buy one, and which table to sit at to eat it, with his carry-on bag on the seat beside him. Then he was to go to the newsstand five stores down from the hamburger joint and buy a copy of a magazine called Paris-Match.

He did all these things, though he had never cared for hamburgers, finding them too greasy. Afterward, the rack carrying Paris-Match was well toward the back of the newsstand, and Burt had to go digging on the shelf for it, as someone had piled copies of some noisy yellow tabloid called Blick in front of it. He had put his bag down by his left foot, and was watching it out of the corner of his eye, so that when another bag that looked just like it appeared there, having been placed there by the owner of a very shapely pair of legs in blackline stockings, Burt was not surprised. After a little while the stockings moved away, their owner having picked up Burt's bag in exchange for her own, and vanished.

Shortly thereafter Burt squeezed his way back out to the front of the newsstand, between a number of other people who had appeared there, paid for the magazine with his debit card, and went on out into the concourse to see if his flight had been called. He knew from what he had been told that he should have had little time to do anything but go straight to his gate after making the pickup. But the big holographic display hanging in the middle of the sales hall, and automatically "repeated" in smaller versions down the length of the hall, said "delayed" in several languages. Burt sighed and went to the men's room.

Inside the stall, he sat down and stared at the bag. He had been told not to look… but he couldn't help it. What was the point of doing this kind of thing if you didn't have a hint of what was going on?

Very quietly Burt zipped open the bag. There was another jiffy bag in it, identical to the last one, but he had felt the difference in the weight of the bag the moment he picked it up. Burt peered into the bag, then took some toilet paper and used it to protect his hands as he pulled the jiffy bag out of the overnighter.

The jiffy bag wasn't closed. Burt peered into it. Inside was something which appeared to have been vacuum- sealed in heavy clear plastic. It was a brown substance. He couldn't smell anything, but Burt could see a faintly fibrous structure…

Burt sat there and just went cold. He had always laughed at people's description of the blood draining out of their faces and down to his feet, but now he felt it happening to him, and he wasn't laughing. He was no expert on drugs… but this was what either marijuana or hashish looked like when you pressed it down tight and vacuum-packed it: Burt had seen enough news broadcasts featuring seizures of the stuff to have at least this much of a clue about what he was carrying.

Now he broke out in a genuine cold sweat. Burt had told Mr. Vaud that he would never ask questions. At the time he had meant it. But now everything had changed… for everyone knew how carefully flights that came in from Amsterdam were checked. There were old drug connections there that never went away, no matter how the Dutch authorities tried to stamp the trade out. An old tradition of tolerance for the "soft" side of the culture had created tremendous problems for them, adding to the ones already in place by virtue of the Netherlands' position as a country on the coast.

Why didn't this occur to me before? The answer was simple. Too excited, too glad to get away to think things through…

And what do I do now?!

Burt glanced hastily around him for places he might "lose" the package… but then he let out a long breath, for there was no way that was going to work. The courier who would be expecting to make his pickup would be waiting for him on the far side of U. S. customs, Vaud had told him. If he didn't have the package… it would be very bad for him. Burt shivered.

Yet at the same time, he was sure that something just as awful would happen to him if he went through U. S. Customs, and if one of the people there, possibly just by looking to see how nervous Burt was, should ask him to stop and be checked. The sniffers they were using these days were delicate and accurate beyond belief: if one of them took a smell of his hands, there would be no question of what Burt had been in contact with, toilet paper or no toilet paper. He would go to jail for about a million years. And Wilma.. what would Wilma think, when she heard about it on the news?

Why have they done this to me?! I was doing what I was told! I cooperated with everything!

Why?

And what do I do now?