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  Safe House

  ( Net Force Explorers - 10 )

  Tom Clancy

  Steve Pieczenik

  Diane Duane

  To save a prominent scientist and his son from a corrupt government's agents, the Net Force Explorers embark on a terrifying virtual hunt for their enemies — before it's too late.

  Tom Clancy, Steve Pieczenik, Diane Duane

  Safe House

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We’d like to thank the following people, without whom this book would have not been possible: Diane Duane, for help in rounding out the manuscript; Martin H. Greenberg, Larry Segriff, Denise Little, and John Helfers at Tekno Books; Mitchell Rubenstein and Laurie Silvers at Hollywood.com; Tom Colgan of Penguin Putnam Inc.; Robert Youdelman, Esquire; Tom Mallon, Esquire; and Robert Gottlieb of the William Morris Agency, agent and friend. We much appreciated the help.

  PROLOGUE

  His father had told him repeatedly that everything would be all right. The two things that surprised Laurent, after the fact, were how little he believed this — even though he went along with the plan — and, even though he’d been told there was nothing to be afraid of, how blindingly afraid he was.

  The talk between him and his pop had been very light all the way to the train station — chatter about school, and school food, and Laurent’s performance in the last soccer game against Garoafa (it had been terrible — Laurent wished his father wouldn’t keep bringing it up).

  They had walked as usual from the side street where their apartment was located, into the middle of town through Piata Unirii with its huge, ugly blockish high-rise buildings left over from the middle of the last century, and out the other side of the plaza to the Foesani train station. There they made their way past the armed guards as usual, showing their ID cards and their train passes, and went down the stairs under the tracks, coming up on the other side to stand on the bleak gray platform with all the other people in their dark coats and somber dresses. The weather was unseasonably chilly — a surprisingly raw wind for June was sweeping down from the low misty line of the mountains to the north. The wind whistled in the overhead wires that powered the local electric trains — the few of them still running — and made Laurent shiver. At least that was the excuse he gave himself.

  From down the tracks came a loud, sour hoot, the cry of one of the old diesel locomotives usually used for hauling freight but now released for passenger hauling work in the summer, when there was theoretically no need to supply the carriages with heat. Laurent was a little train-mad, as were many kids in his part of the world. The trains spoke to them of travel, of other places different from home, and of (whisper it) freedom — places where (rumor had it) the transit went on one rail rather than two, on maglev rather than wheels, or hybrid air/lox jets rather than turboprops.

  There was no way to tell if the rumors were true — the government didn’t let the local Net or media say much about such things, all products of the decadent cultures outside the borders. But in the meantime, the trains Laurent could see any day at the station were interesting, if not particularly varied, and he knew them all like old friends. This one was ST43-260, a diesel made at the old 23 August Factory down in Bucuresti, a low, flat-faced locomotive with two headlamps and big windshield plates that made it look like a huge, dim, friendly bug. Lurching and creaking, with the ting and clang of hanging ’tween-cars chains accompanying it as it came, the dirty cream and dingy red ST43 pulled up to them and past them, hauling the ten second-class carriages, all ancient CFR stock from before the turn of the century, creaking and groaning behind it. It came grumbling and hissing to a stop, the diesel roar of the loco only slightly subdued by a couple of hundred yards’ distance.

  Normally they would have gotten right on — other people started pushing past them and doing so. But his father was looking down the platform, looking for someone, and Laurent found himself suddenly wishing, irrationally, Don’t let him come. Let’s not do it. I wish—

  “There he is,” his father said, suddenly sounding very relieved. “Iolae!” He waved at a broad figure in a dark coat, away down the platform.

  The figure approached them, hurrying a little through the crowd, smiling, and as he came up to them and put out a hand for Laurent’s father to shake, Laurent was filled with misgivings. The two men didn’t look anything like brothers, his father tall and blond and a little hawkish-looking, except for the glasses, which transformed the hawk-face into the slight squinting expression of an owl; the newcomer shorter, stouter, broad-faced, balding. This isn’t going to fool anybody, Laurent thought, the sweat breaking out on him. And when the police figure it out, they’ll just take us off the train and—

  “Thought I was going to be late, didn’t you,” said his “uncle,” and bent to hug Laurent. Laurent reciprocated, but there was no warmth about it, though neither his father nor his “uncle” seemed to notice.

  They pushed their way into the line with all the other people, and got up into the train, showing their ID cards and tickets again to the bored guard standing in the doorway beside the train conductor. Then they slowly made their way down the aisle, Laurent glancing around him as he always did in hopes of spotting a piece of new, or at least different, equipment on this line. Not much chance of that, though, he thought. He knew this train-car by heart — the grimy linoleum — Laurent sometimes spent long minutes trying to figure out what pattern had been there when the linoleum was new — no telling now — the torn or cracked maroon “leather” seats, cream-enameled walls with the paint chipping, bent-out-of-shape wire mesh luggage racks propped up high between back-to-back pairs of seats. Laurent sometimes tried to imagine what this stock had looked like when it was new, back in 1980 sometime. It was like trying to imagine what dinosaurs had looked like. He sighed and followed his father and “uncle” until his pop saw an open seat, and they all crowded together onto it.

  All the while the newcomer and Laurent’s father were talking as if they actually were brothers, laughing sometimes, talking about work. Mostly this meant Laurent’s father not saying much, of course. You never knew who might be listening. He was a biologist, but he rarely spoke much about exactly what kind of biology he was doing, and wise people didn’t ask. It was just as well, since he was working for the government. With the privilege came a certain amount of responsibility — or, to Laurent’s mind, a certain amount of danger. But he didn’t mention this any more than his father did. It was understood.

  After a few moments the train lurched forward, and Laurent sighed a little, relieved, and not entirely certain why. Normally his father would get off at the next stop, and then Laurent would get off at the one after that, closest to his school, which was just outside the Focsani town limits. Today, though, was special. Today he was going on a day trip with his uncle Iolae to Brasov, to see the old castle where Voivod Vlad Dracul had lived, across the border in Transylvania. He had repeated the story over to himself a hundred times since his father first explained it to him, doing his best to learn it so well that it would sound natural if somebody from the police asked him—

  And the train was stopping already at Focsari-Nov. Laurent gulped. His father glanced at him. “So enjoy yourself,” his father said, reached out, and gave Laurent a hug.

  Laurent hugged him back — and suddenly felt terrible pain all through him, and sweat starting out again all over him, so that he was sure everyone must be able to see it. This was it, they were saying goodbye, and he didn’t know when he was going to see his father again. I might never—But no. That was a dumb idea. No matter how dangerous things were getting at work, his father wouldn’t send him away forever without telling him first.

  Would
he?

  His father pushed him away, not hard, but briskly enough, as if they both had things to be doing. “You mind your uncle now,” he said, and patted Laurent on the shoulder. “Have a nice day.”

  “I will, Pop,” he said, his mouth dry. Laurent’s father reached down to the other man, shook his hand again warmly, if casually, the gesture of someone he expected to see again that afternoon — except that Laurent knew he wouldn’t. And for the first time Laurent began to realize that his father was a pretty good actor, and that could be one of the reasons that all this would work out the way he said it would.

  “You have a nice time now,” his pop said to “Uncle Iolae.” “Thanks for taking him. Don’t let him get out of hand.”

  “I don’t imagine he will,” said the other man. He thumped Laurent’s father good-naturedly on the arm, and Laurent turned to watch Dr. Armin Darenko walk away, hidden after only a moment or two by other people getting off the train.

  He gulped again, and tried to get some control over himself, tried to look normal. “How long will it take us to get there?” he asked his “uncle.”

  “Uncle Iolae” looked at his watch. “About three hours. Half an hour to the border, then checks and a change of trains…after that, fifty minutes to Ploiesti…then another two hours to Brasov.”

  Laurent nodded, looked out the window…and found his father looking in at him. The face he saw there was one holding itself calm, but Laurent knew his father well enough that the attempt to hide the emotion didn’t work. Laurent did his best to hold his own worry inside as tightly as he could, for there was no point in burdening his father with it. He smiled and waved, and his father smiled, too, just a crack of a smile, a thin, strained look. And then Dr. Darenko turned and left.

  Laurent could have wept at the suddenness of it, at the way the pain and uncertainty stabbed him…except that would have given everything away. He said nothing, and the train started up again, pulling forward with a groan. Then his “uncle” looked at him and said softly, “I know.”

  Nothing more.

  But there was something bracing about it — the sense of a shared secret, and someone who understood. And shared danger, that was there, too, so that Laurent reminded himself that he needed to get a grip. He got a grip, straightened himself in the seat, blinked, and then sneezed on purpose so as to get rid of the threatening burning in his eyes.

  The next hour was nerve-racking in a way Laurent hadn’t expected. Until his father had left him with this stranger, it had all seemed like a game — exciting, not real. But now it was real. He was leaving, for who knew how long, and he might not see any of this familiar terrain again for a long time…maybe even never. He looked out the window and stared, when the train stopped again, at the band of trees that hid his school from the little station and the train tracks. All the kids he knew there, the ones he liked…he might never see them again. Then again, he thought, the ones I don’t like, I might never see them again, either…. But this was less of a consolation than he expected it to be, and as the train pulled away, he found himself staring at everything they passed — trees, patches of gravel by the tracks, old factories, junked cars — as if trying to imprint them on his brain, to memorize them. I may never pass this way again….

  Soon enough they pulled into the town and station of Sihlea, where they would have to change trains, and Laurent and his “uncle” got up and made their way off, slowly, behind everyone else. This was new territory to Laurent, since it was illegal for “citizens not yet of age” to travel more than ten miles from home without a citizen-of-age to accompany them. His father rarely had time to take him anywhere, since the government kept him busy all the time in the labs and offices in Focsani and Adjud.

  Laurent had sometimes grumbled about this. If his pop was doing such important services for the state, whatever it was he was doing, then why didn’t they let him get some rest sometimes, so that he would do the work even better? But having seen the look on his father’s face the first time he voiced this opinion out loud at home, Laurent now kept such ideas to himself. He might be thirteen, but he wasn’t stupid. Everyone at school knew there were subjects in their country that could cause you, if you were heard bringing them up, to be arrested and tried…or worse, simply to vanish and never be seen again. Whispered opinion varied wildly on whether these were good or bad ideas. What no one argued about was that it was bad to vanish.

  As they got off, Laurent glanced around him. The platform was small, too small to take two trains front to back, so as the one they had been on pulled away, the second one pulled up to the platform from where it had been waiting in the nearby marshaling yard. Laurent’s “uncle” took him amiably by the arm, and the two of them joined the line of people waiting to get into the nearest door of the train.

  It was identical to the first one as to grime and age, though slightly interesting to Laurent because he hadn’t seen this particular car working this line before. When the train started up again, he looked out the window at the new and unfamiliar countryside outside the town until his “uncle” said, “Here comes the conductor. Give me your papers.” Laurent reached into his pocket and handed them over. He tended to watch his paperwork carefully, as most people did in a country where being caught without it could get you sent to jail, so, never having taken his eyes off what he gave his “uncle,” he was astonished when the conductor came up to them, checked the papers, punched their tickets, and Laurent took his papers back…and found they were not the ones he had given his “uncle.”

  He forced himself not to stare or look surprised. But Laurent found himself deep in the annoyance of someone who’d just had a magician pull an egg out of his ear and didn’t understand how it was done. He glanced at his ID card, his “internal passport,” and saw that his name was now Nicolae Arnui, as his father had told him it would be. The picture was his own. The embossing and the hologram looked exactly as they should have, a little beat-up. Laurent started wondering how much his father had had to pay for this forgery — and the sweat broke out on him yet again. Forging ID was one of the offenses for which, if they caught you, they shot you. And being caught carrying the forged ID could make you vanish….

  “So tell me about that game with Garoafa,” his “uncle” said. Laurent groaned, but playing along, he told him all about it…while thinking how strange it was, all of a sudden, to have an uncle. Well, he had had one, but that uncle, the real Uncle Iolae, had been trapped on the Transylvanian side of the border when Partition happened, and when he tried to come back home, he vanished. No one in the family had talked about it except his mother. Now that she was gone, no one talked about it at all.

  This new Uncle Iolae reminded Laurent strangely of his father, in the way that, when they weren’t talking, he would sit quiet for long minutes at a time, looking out at the landscape as if memorizing it. His father had that thinking, memorizing look no matter what he looked at, so that when he returned to paying attention to you after a spell of it, the absolute immediacy of his regard came as a surprise. He might be a dreamer, but he was one of the kind who then immediately upon waking got about the business of building what he’d seen in his dreams. Laurent had slowly started to understand that people like this are both valuable and dangerous — dangerous both to be and to be around. It was why the government made sure his pop had a good apartment and access to the “special purchases” parts of the state grocery and hardware collective stores, and why Laurent had new school uniforms every year, and went to a school that had better books and computers than any other in the city, and his father didn’t have to pay extra for it. But at the same time, there was always the hint that, if the dreams stopped, and the building of what was in them stopped, then all this would stop as well. There were other prices to pay, too — the knowledge that they were often watched, both of them, but his father most carefully of all. His father didn’t mention it, but there were times at home when Laurent could feel the fear more clearly than usual, the sense of being watched an
d obscurely threatened. And lately the fear had become stronger and stronger…until finally his father had told him, two days ago, that they were getting out. Or, rather, that Laurent was.

  “Here we are,” said his “uncle,” and Laurent looked up in shock to see that they had reached Rinnicu Sanat, the town at the border. The border. A thrill of fear went through him. If the guards realized that the ID was fake—

  He breathed in and out and tried once again to calm himself as he got up and followed his “uncle” down the aisle of the train. They got out into a slightly warmer day than the one they had left behind in Focsani. This area had some hills between it and the mountains, Laurent remembered from school, so that it had a more sheltered “microclimate.” But he was still having to fight off the shivers.

  Come on, he told himself. If you look nervous, and give it away, they’ll come after Pop—

  His “uncle” led him down to the end of the platform, down a flight of stairs, through a dark tunnel under the tracks, and up the far side, using another flight of stairs, to a middle platform in the station. There was another train waiting, an unfamiliar one, and between them and it, at a guardpost mounted at the top of the stairs and fenced in with wire, were guards with machine guns…and the police.

  He saw just one ISF man in his neat gray uniform, watching them come up the steps. But one was enough. And the two soldiers who stood there watching them come up the stairs looked as if they hated the day, and hated standing there, and would hate Laurent, too, if he gave them the slightest excuse — a word or a look, anything that would draw their attention away from how much they were hating everything else.

  This was the last barrier. Laurent hardly dared to look up as he brought out his ID card and his train ticket and handed them to the ISF man, afraid that he would notice that they were damp from Laurent’s sweating hands. The policeman stuck the card in the reader, and turned his attention to the ticket as the reader beeped softly to itself. “A lot of counterfeits coming through lately,” he said absently, scratching the paper of the ticket.