Runaways nfe-16 Read online

  Runaways

  ( Net Force Explorers - 16 )

  Tom Clancy

  Steve Pieczenik

  Diane Duane

  In the future, computers rule the world. Net Force was formed to protect us from any and all criminal activity on-line. But there is a group of teenage whiz kids who sometimes know more about computers than their adult superiors. They are the Net Force Explorers. They go where no one else can go. And they fight crime like no one else in the world.

  After her equestrian teammate, Burt, disappears, Net Force Explorer Megan O'Malley finds him at a combined online-offline refuge for runaways. But Burt's next disappearance may be his last. Short of cash, he takes a job at a mysterious courier business — a service, Megan discovers all too late, from which many runaways are sent out, but few ever return.

  Tom Clancy, Steve Pieczenik, Bill McCay

  Runaways

  Chapter 1

  Roy Stood At The Edge Of The Square, feeling cold and alone, and looked around him with the eyes of someone who was now a stranger everywhere he went. It hadn't always been this way. But he was getting used to it

  No one here spoke his language, Roy thought, but that probably was why he'd been given this job in the first place. Less chance that I might understand what they've got me carrying, he thought, only a little sourly. The idea that someone would actually send him off on a drop with a paper message was weird enough. He had studied the little flat-folded piece of paper in its plastic slip-carrier when he'd been alone on the way down here, leaning on a pole at the front end of the empty Metro car, but he hadn't been able to make anything of what he was carrying. It looked like a page ripped out of one of the old- fashioned hardcopy Michelin guides, incomprehensible enough on its own-printed in red and black, a bunch of little symbols followed by long passages in French, and a lot of numbers. It seemed mostly to have to do with restaurants, which only made matters worse for Roy, for he was hungry enough to eat a horse, which he'd abruptly discovered this morning that they actually did eat here. His stomach was going to have to wait, though. The gruff voice that always spoke to him from just out of visual pickup on the 'phone had been very definite-there was no telling exactly when the other courier was going to show up, and Roy was just going to have to wait where he was until she did.

  Roy slipped the half-page in its plastic slip back into his pocket and glanced around him again. It was gray today, promising more rain. There had already been enough of it this morning, a steady depressing mizzle and mist that made the golden stone arcades around the square look grimy and tired. Like I feel, Roy thought, hunching his shoulders a little against the damp and the chill. September in Paris-it was supposed to be a pretty time. It didn't look that way at the moment. The month had been prematurely cold, and the last tatters of leaves were almost all off the trees in the square now; the bare thin branches rubbed and rattled against one another in the cold wet wind from the east.

  At least there was shelter. The Parisians who had built this square and the perfectly matched six-story buildings that surrounded it were a patrician bunch, too aristocratic to want to be rained on when they went out. So the sidewalks in front of the buildings were under cover, the second floor having been built out over them, held up by wide sandstone columns. The ground floors of all the buildings in the square either had little shops in them, or were occupied by garages for the people living in the apartments above. Roy had "window-shopped" among them for a while when he first arrived earlier this afternoon, looking in at the soaps and perfumes in the perfumery, the expensive bags and cases in the suitcase shop, the extremely expensive suit and dress Worn by the two dead- white minimalist mannequins in the couturier's window. But soon enough he got bored with that and drifted down instead to take his first look into the restaurant at the corner, where people had forsaken the few little outside tables, even though there were gas heaters above them, and were all inside, in the golden warmth of the place, drinking wine and laughing.

  At the time Roy had smiled a little sardonically at them and walked on by. He could hardly remember the last time he laughed for sheer pleasure… let alone at something as simple as a joke. There'd been little enough to laugh about at home, what with his mother's endless complaining about how expensive everything was, and about how his father was late with the support payment again. There was never any peace at home, no matter what Roy did to try to make things better. His mother nagged him for not eating everything on his plate, and then nagged him for putting on weight. She nagged him for not doing well enough at school, because school was very important, and then in practically the next breath she would nag him for not quitting school and going out to get a job. And she didn't seem able to hear the contradictions in what she said. Pointing them out to her only got Roy slapped, and then seriously scolded for "talking back" and "being disrespectful," and then would come floods of tears and recriminations, his mother's guilt and anger and helplessness all mixed together and dumped on him. Roy often enough felt like having a good cry about it all himself, but the odds were much too strong that in their small apartment his mother would probably catch him at it, and he wasn't going to let his parents suspect that they had been successful in driving him to that kind of reaction.

  He'd borne it as long as he could, but there came one night when it all just got to be too much. For once there wasn't any triggering incident. Roy just came in from school and found his mother in the dining room, sitting at the table with her head in her hands, and Roy knew it was going to be another awful night. I can't take it anymore, some part of his brain had suddenly said to him, with terrible clarity. I just can 7. If I try to, something awful9s going to happen. Very quietly, about two in the morning, Roy had moved softly around the apartment in the dark-he didn't dare turn on a light; he was sure his mother would have sensed it somehow-and gathered up all the things he felt he absolutely couldn't live without on a long trip away. Then he wrote a brief note telling his mother not to worry, and got out of there before it got any worse.

  Now-standing here in the chill dimness under the arcades, watching the last few yellow leaves blow by across the pale golden-pink gravel in the center of the square, and whirl around the base of the fountain there-Roy had to admit to himself that he had been incredibly naive. Everything had gotten worse, much worse, immediately. Within hours of walking out the door, in fact. All the friends on whom Roy would have counted to give him a place to stay while he figured out what to do next now told him that they couldn't help him out. Reggie's folks wouldn't let someone stay with them whom they knew to be a runaway. They were afraid of legal complications. He went to Mike's and Dawn's and Lalla's and Will's, but there was always some other reason he couldn't stay with them-guests in the house, friends going away, relatives coming to visit, family trouble. It didn't matter, the result was always the same. There was no room for Roy. So finally he wound up having no choice but to go to a shelter.

  Paradoxically, that was when matters started to take a turn for the better-at the point when he had been most ashamed and depressed at having to seek help from total strangers. Roy stood in the shadows of the arcade, stamping his feet in the chill, thinking of the first time he had stood at the door of the little Breathing Space center in Toronto. Strangers they might have been, but they had treated him with more understanding than people he'd known much better. Food and a place to stay were immediately his, and Roy was given a password and Net access to the Breathing Space virtual environment, a "place" called Haven. The only thing they offered Roy that he didn't want to take advantage of was the opportunity to get in touch with his mother. They didn't press him on the subject. He was glad, for he'd had more than enough of her for the short term- />
  A sharp clatter of sound out in the square brought Roy's head up. It was just someone's two-year-old, muffled up in a brightly colored one-piece inso-slick against the raw weather, throwing a plastic bottle into the fountain. Roy watched the child's mother leave the stroller she'd been pushing, reclaim the child, scolding it in what he assumed was French, and lead it away.

  He sighed. It wasn't that the woman looked like his mother, particularly. But the thought of what that little kid would be going home to now-just the very idea of a home, a place you could depend on, where there was warmth and food and a welcomes-filled Roy with a ridiculous nostalgia. He shook himself, as if the longing were something that could be shuddered away. He had other things to think about, other more important business.

  Across the square he caught a glimpse of someone moving in the shadows of the arcade that sheltered the couturier's, and after the movement by the bundled-up, dark-dressed figure, a glint of eyes. A man. Someone watching him? Not my contact, Roy thought. First of all, the gender was wrong, and second, the men and women who sought him out on business these days were better than that-you hardly ever saw them before they saw you and slipped softly up beside you. This was probably someone looking for something else-Roy shuddered again, not on purpose this time, and not entirely because of the cold. There had been enough people who had seen him loitering around some quiet place in one city or another, during the course of work, and had assumed he was there for some other reason than dropping off or picking up small packages or obscure messages: something a whole lot more sordid. Roy had escaped almost all of them without incident, except for one. With that one, when he saw the flash of the knife, Roy had simply panicked and lashed out, somehow actually managing to knock the guy's knife out of his hand-sheer luck, nothing to do with skill-and had run for it. He had nearly missed the pickup he was supposed to make, and his "runner" had been scathing with him, threatening to let Roy go and find someone with more nerve. Roy had apologized profusely, and immediately acquired an illegal sonic.

  He wasn't carrying it today, though. The French were paranoid about privately carried weapons these days, almost as bad as the Brits, and it was worth a long sentence to get caught with one. Roy had been specifically warned against it this time out. He wasn't too worried-as far as Roy was concerned, Paris was a safe and civilized place, except for the butcher shops. And now the dark figure across the way turned, wandered off around the corner and down one of the side streets that fed into the square.

  Roy relaxed a little, looked up and down the arcade, saw no one; and out in the square itself people were walking through briskly on their business, or strolling by with their dogs. Roy made a little face as a brace of sable-and- white collies went by on the leash, pulling along their mistress, a hard-faced woman in a fox-fur coat. Dogs were all right, but the Parisians' attitude to where their pets relieved themselves was entirely too relaxed, and Roy had stepped in more dogstuff in the past day and a half than he had in Frankfurt, New York, and L. A. combined. He let out a breath at the thought of all the traveling he'd been doing lately, wondering if he would ever get over the jet lag. Half the time his body thought it was some other time than it really was wherever Roy was at the moment, and he always seemed to be hungry no matter how recently he'd eaten. It was a side effect of the jet lag, Roy supposed. At least it wasn't making him gain weight.

  If I'd known it was going to be like this when I met Jill… But then Roy let out another breath and laughed at himself a little. Silly even to think, here and now, that he wouldn't have taken her up on her suggestion. He had met Jill maybe a couple of weeks after he got into the Breathing Space shelter in Toronto, while exploring the "Haven" environment. Whoever built that virtual "place" had been a real nature freak and had filled it with astonishing scenery, seaside and mountain vistas where you could just sit and relax and let all your troubles seem remote for a little while. The Haven was amazingly complex, and it would take even a committed explorer a long time to find all its ins and outs, but Roy had quickly discovered at least one, when he met Jill.

  She had found him sitting under a tree on a hillside in some dusty golden virtual afternoon, reading from a text- windowed version of Kim that hung in the air beside him, while beyond it the mountains of western Alberta reared up, snowy-headed and looking slightly insubstantial in the low and slanting light. "Pretty," she had said, with no other word of introduction. "Boring."

  Roy had looked up at her with some surprise. A lot of the kids using Haven were none too eager to talk to other people. After a few rebuffs he had taken to leaving them alone. But there Jill had stood, small and blond and sharp- faced and slight, wearing bodytights and ankle boots and a smock that rippled with changing colors as Roy watched it. She seemed unusually put-together for someone on the run from her folks, and she stood there looking Roy over with an intensity he found both unsettling and intriguing.

  "Wanna get out of here?" Jill had said.

  "I just got in," Roy had said, bemused.

  "I don't mean out out. I mean, out of this." She gestured around her at the mountains, the impending sunset light. "This pretty cocoon they've put around us to keep us safe while we sort out our troubles."

  "Why should that be so bad?"

  Jill snorted. "Like the life they want us to go back to is so terrific. School. Living on a shoestring on whatever money your folks see fit to give you." Roy glanced away. In his case this was almost nothing, and the subject was so sore with him that he always avoided it. It was also the reason it had taken Roy as long to leave home as he had. It had taken a good while to pile up enough of what was laughingly referred to as his "allowance" to make even thinking about leaving a possibility. "And then working at some jerkwater job for the rest of your life, whether you did well at school or not."

  Roy had laughed at her, poked a finger through the text window hanging in the air to mark his place, and had waved the window away to give Jill his full attention. She was pretty, in a sharp and aggressive kind of way, and her air of absolute assurance and spiky annoyance made you want to listen to her and see what came out next. "Like you have any better ideas," Roy had said.

  "You'd be surprised," she said, looking him over again, with some attention to his clothes this time, and this time Roy blushed. He hadn't bothered to do as a lot of the other kids did, and make himself a "seeming" while visiting Haven-a fake somatype or a fancier representation of themselves, based on the original but taller, brawnier, prettier, more graceful, whatever they thought they ought to look like. The girl in front of him wore such a sense of assurance that Roy felt sure this was more or less what she really looked like. For himself, he hadn't cared until now if his clothes were out of date and showing signs of wear. Now, though-

  "You need some money?" she said.

  Something about her tone nettled him. "I don't want charity," Roy said.

  "You're in a funny place to be making statements like that," she said. "I wasn't talking about charity. You like to work?"

  "Depends on the work," Roy said. "If the money's good enough-"

  "Do I look poor?" she said.

  "How you look and what's real are two different things in a place like this/' Roy said.

  She smiled a rather crooked smile at him. "Maybe," she said. "Are you smart?"

  Roy let out a snort of laughter. "Smarter than most."

  "Come on, then," she said, "and we'll see."

  She was so annoying, and yet so attractive, that Roy had gotten up and gone with her, without then even knowing her name. He had found that out soon enough, though. And shortly he had met, virtually of course, the people she "worked with," the people who were looking for smart kids who were brave enough to hit the road on their own and didn't mind picking up a buck here and there.

  Roy glanced down the length of the arcade, and out into the square again, and seeing no signs of the woman he was waiting for, started to walk. Staying in one place around here for more than a few moments at a time was not a good idea. The ap
artments around the square were fairly high-priced, and the police presence here, his runner had told Roy, could be expected to be more alert and frequent than usual… hence the insistence that he leave the sonic weapon at home. "Home" at the moment, of course, was a coin-op locker in Gare du Nord, where the sonic lay well wrapped up inside his overnight bag. He would take the Metro back to the station when he'd made this drop, pick up the bag, and then slip into a public Net- access booth to find out where he was supposed to go next. The last time he had done Paris, he'd been sent down to Ziirich on the new maglev TGV service and made a document pickup there. This run might be something similar. Or they might just tell him to go to Orly or CDG and catch a cheap flight back to Toronto, where they'd alert him when they needed him again. That had happened before, too.

  Roy turned the corner of the arcade and started walking along the eastern side of the square, down toward where the restaurant was. He would have loved to pause under one of those heaters, but it would have attracted attention after more than a moment, and if there was anything one did not do in this job, that was it. His business was to be as colorless as possible, not to stick out in any significant way. That, Roy thought, was what had gotten him this job in the first place, when-after answering a truly mind- numbing and unspeakably nosey questionnaire with which Jill provided him-he "met" the people who were going to be paying him. The meeting had taken place in a quiet, plush virtual office which was not part of Haven, but which led out of it through a Net-portal into which Roy did not inquire too closely, since the Breathing Space people had said that such things were both not allowed and supposedly impossible. He had been carefully looked over by people he couldn't see more clearly than as shadowy seated forms, and the few words initially exchanged among his interviewers when he came in all centered around how nondescript he looked. It was, Roy now supposed, a compliment, if a backhanded one.