Runaways nfe-16 Page 14

  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?

  Chapter 9

  Megan had often suspected her father of some level of affiliation with Net Force that had never been made fully plain to her, and probably wouldn't be for a long time… if ever. It had occurred to her privately that being a writer, with the freedom to go places without warning and investigate almost anything with no better reason than "I'm writing a book about it," would be a very useful cover for someone who was actually doing a whole lot more than writing a book about it. But she had never said this to her father, and she wasn't going to start now. She simply got out of the Net, went straight down into his office, and said, "Daddy, James Winters said I should talk to you."

  He was sitting in the implant chair with his head leaned back, eyes closed, lips moving slightly-she had always teased him about being, not a lip reader, but a "lip writer." He liked to dictate, in his own virtual workspace, walking up and down and telling his stories out loud to an audience. Now the lip motions stopped, his eyes opened, and he looked at her with some mild concern. "About what?"

  She told him. It took very little time. The thought of "the meter running" was very much on her mind.

  As Megan talked, her father swung himself around on the seat of the implant chair, so that he was sitting more or less "sidesaddle," and looked at her in silence. "He said if there were any questions, you should call him," Megan said.

  "Well," her father said. "I guess the immediate question is, why didn't you give me or your mother a hint that this was going on?"

  "Daddy, I know," Megan said. "I'm sorry. It's just that all this started happening so fast… if there'd been a little more time I would have told you. But we had to start moving or we would have lost our chance to do anything useful…"

  Her dad sat there for a few moments and looked off in an unfocused way into the air. "You really are worried about Burt, aren't you," he said. "It's not just you trying to keep Wilma off your case."

  Megan's eyes went a little wide at that. She had hardly spared a thought for Wilma since this business had started getting really busy. "Uh. No," she said. "Not that. It's just that Burt is… Burt's not used to this kind of thing, Dad! And stopping these people is the best way of finding out what they've done with him and getting him home again. Assuming he wants to come home. But he just ran away because he was unhappy, Dad. He doesn't deserve to get kidnapped or killed because he made an error in judgment!"

  Her father didn't say anything for a moment. "Normally I would consult with your mother about something like this," he said at last, "but I get the distinct feeling from you that time is short. And to a certain extent, I agree with you… and there's probably not too much that can happen to you while James is riding herd on you both."

  He chewed his lip for a moment. "Go on, then, get on with it," he said, mostly to Megan's back. She was already halfway down the hall to the other machine.

  "Thanks, Dad!"

  "I'll call school and tell them you won't be in," he called after her. "But tell Winters I'd appreciate a call from him when the excitement dies down… "

  "I will!"

  Megan threw herself into the seat, lined up her implant, and went virtual.

  Elsewhere in the virtual realm, Mark Gridley pressed himself up against a wall in the darkness and tried very hard to be still and small and nonexistent, for the monsters were after him.

  Naturally they were not really monsters. The physical shapes presently stalking him were symbolic representations of the hunt/trace/immobilize routines that the programmers responsible for Breathing Space's client data storage had erected as protection around their clients' confidential personality-profile and counseling records. The routines had been written in a new release of Caldera II, the Net programming language that Mark knew and liked best. Unfortunately, they also incorporated some of the newer features of Caldera, ones with which Mark was presently not as familiar as he was with the older version of the language. As a result, the dragons had so far chased Mark three times right around the system firewall, knowing that someone was trying to get in and get at the files, but-because of the "cloak of invisibility" nondetection routine that Mark was wearing, they were unable to do anything more concrete about him than keep on following the "scent" his attempts to subvert the routines were leaving in the system. You couldn't rewrite code without leaving a trace,
and the hunter/stalker guard routines were all too skilled at detecting that trace, that "scent," and following it. Every time they detected it, Mark had to move. If the routines actually came in contact with his virtual self, he would be thrown right out of the system, and he didn't have time for that right now. Time was, in fact, getting desperately short.

  He kept on trotting around the firewall, which manifested, in an access of some programmer's rather skewed wit, as an actual wall of fire. If there's a big rock in there with a Valkyrie sleeping on it, I'm leaving, Mark thought. But leaving was very low on his list of things to do. He had to get in, and fast. The people he was expecting were certain to be along any time now.

  He paused, looking at the fire, watching the pattern of it, the way the flames wavered. Behind him he could hear the dragons snuffling along, getting closer. But for a moment he ignored them. The flames did indeed have a repeating pattern. The anti-incursion routine meant to keep intruders out was cyclic, a single piece of code, recursing itself. The programmer was trying to save space, Mark thought. Not a terrible idea, usually. Could have been very elegant. But he stopped too soon. He should have hooked a random-number generator into it as well. He didn't, though, and the cycle is processing, canceling itself out in places-

  The snuffling behind him, around the curve of the firewall, was getting louder. Mark ignored it, concentrated on the pattern. He had seen girls getting ready to jump into a double jump-rope in motion doing this same kind of pattern analysis with the body as well as the mind, looking for the open spot, the rhythm in which it repeated. Miss it and the ropes would clip you hard enough to raise a welt-or, in this case, the firewall routines would grab your Net persona, fling it into a "holding area" from which there would be no escape, and call the cops. You dumb thing, I am the cops, Mark thought. Or I will be as soon as Winters gets the subpoena! But even Winters couldn't get something like this handled instantly. Judges are not ordered around at will by law enforcement organizations. And this business was as time-sensitive as it came, unfortunately not even to be handled by a friendly call to Breathing Space. Too many layers of explanation to work your way up through, not enough time. Company was coming, would be along any minute now. And there was no more time. Mark swayed forward and back with the rhythm of the flames wavering in front of him. No more time, no more time, no more time-