Safe House nfe-10 Read online

  Laurent stood there frozen.

  “What some people won’t do,” his “uncle” said calmly, holding out his own ticket and card.

  The reader stopped beeping, and the ISF man took out Laurent’s card, read it carefully, and handed it back to him. “Why aren’t you in school?” he said.

  “Cultural holiday,” said Laurent, and the dryness of his mouth suddenly strangled him, making it impossible to get out the casual-sounding response he had been rehearsing for the past three days.

  “Vlad Dracul’s old castle,” said his “uncle,” as the ISF man shoved his card in turn into the reader. “I went to see it when I was his age.”

  “Ugly old pile of rocks,” said the ISF man, not impressed. “And the capitalist bloodsuckers actually charge you money to see it. Waste of time.” He pulled Laurent’s “uncle’s” card out of the reader, handed it back. “Still, a nice summer day…any excuse to get out of school, huh?”

  Laurent found his attention fixed irrationally on the barrel of the gun belonging to the soldier standing closest to him. It seemed the ugliest thing he had ever seen.

  “I like school,” he said abruptly. Though not entirely true, this was at least an entire sentence, and could be taken as a suggestion that he wasn’t frightened out of his wits.

  The soldier holding the gun laughed. “Don’t worry, we won’t report you for wanting to be elsewhere,” he said, and glanced at the ISF man, who gave the two of them one last look.

  “Go on,” the policeman said. “Have a nice day with the old bloodsucker. No fraternizing with the Western tourists, now.”

  “Don’t care to talk to them much anyway,” said his “uncle” righteously. “Dirty profiteering foreigners. Come on, Niki.”

  They walked on through the chain-link-fence gate, toward the train waiting on the platform. Then, “Nicolae!” someone shouted behind them.

  The sound of the shout was as sudden and startling as a gunshot. Laurent turned, looked back to see who was getting yelled at — then belatedly realized it was him. The ISF man, expressionless, watching them, turned away. The soldier laughed, waved them on again.

  They turned again, walked another twenty or thirty yards down the platform and climbed on the waiting train.

  “Ha ha,” Laurent muttered under his breath as they got up into it and turned right through the narrow door into the second-class carriage. “Big joke, very funny.”

  “Maybe,” his “uncle” said softly. Laurent swallowed.

  They got into the carriage, sat down and waited. The carriage was very quiet. People came and settled down around them, waiting in bored silence. Down the carriage, a frustrated fly bumped and bumbled against the windows, trying to get out — bumped, buzzed, bumped again. Laurent watched the soldiers and ISF men going up the length of the train, shutting the doors that still lay open. Bang! Bang! Bang! The sound, in this nervous silence, was too much like gunfire for Laurent’s liking. The ISF man who had looked at him now came down the length of the train again, peering in the windows. Laurent made it his business to be looking out the other side of the train when the man came by again, paused outside the window, then passed on.

  Silence again. Laurent sat and twitched.

  Then there came a crash! from down the locomotive end of the train, and the world lurched forward as the diesel’s sudden convulsive forward pull propagated down the cars of the train. They were moving.

  The train accelerated to about fifty Km/h and held that speed for maybe twenty minutes. With the unfriendly eyes outside the window gone now, Laurent pressed his nose to the smudged, dusty glass and looked hungrily out at the world. It streamed by him — houses with untidy gardens and houses with tidy ones, cabbage patches and corn piled up in the shock in broad fields already cut to stubble, parking lots, level crossings, manufacturing collectives with oil sumps built into their concrete “backyards,” piles of old tires, chained-up, ratty-looking guard dogs yapping inanely at the passing train. Then suddenly the locomotive began to slow again, and Laurent realized that they were coming to another fence, one that came right up to the edges of the track. Slowly the train lumbered through, past more guards on a concrete platform, the guards looking at the train with weary or even hostile eyes.

  Then they were on the other side of the fence, and there were guards there, too, equally weary looking, but the uniforms were different, blue instead of gray. The train rumbled past them all, left them behind.

  Laurent’s heart leaped irrationally. He looked over at his “uncle,” who was gazing out the other side of the train, past two dark-dressed ladies with parcels in their laps. After a moment, as if he felt Laurent’s glance, he looked over at him. He didn’t manage an answering smile, but he raised his eyebrows.

  “Was that it?” Laurent said.

  A slight nod. Then his “uncle” leaned back. “A while yet before Brasov,” he said. “I’m going to take a nap.”

  “Okay,” Laurent said. His “uncle” shrugged his jacket up into a more comfortable conformation around him, closed his eyes. Laurent, turning to stare out the window, found that everything suddenly looked different. This was the beginning of the rest of the world.

  After that, everything seemed to happen very fast. He was not able to burn the landscape into his mind as he had been before the border. There was too much of it, too many new things — first the mountains, then the broad plain beyond them. And he started seeing things he had never seen before, but had only heard about. They got off at Brasov and changed trains, and to Laurent’s amazement no one even bothered to check anything but their tickets. Also, waiting for them at the next platform was, not just one more weary turn-of-the-century diesel, but a long sleek backsloped electric locomotive resting there on welded track, with the long double fin of the new “wireless pantograph” down both sides of the loco, a genuine broadcast-power unit. Laurent and his “uncle” boarded it, and it roared away, swiftly achieving its top speed, in the neighborhood of 200 km/h. The wheel sound now was not clickety-clack, clickety-clack, but the subdued mmmmmmmmmmmmmtchk!mmmmmmmmmmmm of track welded together in quarter-mile sections. The train flew, and Laurent, ecstatic, felt as if he were flying with it. He waited until his “uncle” felt more lively, then they went into the snack car. Laurent’s “uncle” got a beer and watched with a tolerant eye as Laurent went from one side to the other of the snack car, goggling out the windows. Soon enough, there came the magic moment when another train doing 200 km/h as well passed them with a SLAM! of displaced air and the impossible whuffwhuffwhuffwhuffwhuff of five cars passing in two seconds, there and gone again, as if you’d imagined them.

  Oh, Pop, if you could only see this—He thought it again and again.

  But Don’t waste your time worrying about me, his father had told him after breaking the news of his departure to him, over a late-night glass of tea. Enjoy yourself. I’ll be coming after you as soon as I can. A few weeks or so…for I don’t dare leave the project the way it is at the moment. Too many people could get hurt. The fear had shown starkly on his father’s face then, unconcealed for a moment, but a second later it was sealed away again. Behave yourself over there, and enjoy the trip. I’ll be with you soon, and there will be lots more trips like this one when we’re together again…except when we make them, neither of us will be running.

  The fast train ran from Brasov through the towns of Deva and Arad, to Curtici at the border. As they approached this new border crossing, Laurent began to sweat again…then was furious at himself when they got off that train, onto another — the maglev shuttle from Lököshaza in Hungary to Wien in Austria — and the border guards at the station waved them through in complete boredom, without even bothering to look at their ID’s or their tickets. At the station they met Laurent’s “Aunt Dina,” a small, silent dark-haired woman with a plain face and kind eyes, wearing a dull dress that looked like some kind of uniform with the insignia removed. Who do you work for? he wondered. How did my pop ever set all thin up, and what will they do t
o him if they catch him?! But he didn’t ask any of these questions out loud.

  They all got on the train together, and once it was underway — Laurent’s ID having once again undergone a change he didn’t manage to catch happening — his name became “Nikos,” and his “uncle” left them, patting Laurent’s shoulder and vanishing out the end of the carriage.

  Laurent left his “auntie” once, ostensibly to go to the toilet, but though he went right up to the loco end of the train and back again, he could find no sign of his “uncle.” He couldn’t imagine how the man had vanished from a moving train. Shortly, as the “Wiener Walzer” came up to its full speed, he was once more too distracted to care very much about the whereabouts of his temporary Uncle Iolae. He was beginning to tire a little, and later what Laurent mostly recalled was how, where the track curved, he could look ahead and see little birds of prey, kestrels and merlins, circling or hovering over the fields and grassland to either side of the track — waiting for the mice and other little creatures which would be frightened out of hiding by the sudden whack of air displaced by the train’s passing.

  They’ve learned the train schedule, Laurent thought. They’ve found a new ecological niche for themselves, and learned how to exploit it.

  Am I going to be able to do as well without my pop? he wondered. This new world was so strange…. But shortly Laurent was distracted again by the MGV pulling into Wien Westbahnhof and settling down onto the track with a sigh; and “Auntie Dina” led him off it and over to the platform to where what she told him would be the last ground leg of the trip was waiting — the Tunnel Train, the “sealed” UltraGrandVitesse evacuated-maglev system which would connect under the Alps with the Swiss NEAT system, completed five years ago and the wonder of its time. This last leg would be all in the dark — but it would be only one more hour to Zurich, at near-supersonic speeds, to meet the very last leg of Laurent’s journey.

  The train closed up and pressurized itself, levitated above the T-shaped “podium” it rode, slipped softly out of the Westbahnhof, took itself up to 550 km/h without any fuss, and dived into the tunnel beneath the Alps. An hour later, only slowing to enter the “vacuum-locked” part of the tunnel where it could run supersonic without having the nuisance of air pressure to deal with, the NEAT “train” called Edelweiss after a distant wheeled ancestor broke out of a darkness only briefly punctuated by the lights of stations where it didn’t stop, and pulled up in the station below Zurich AeroSpaceport. On the far side of tube security his “auntie” turned Laurent over to a young woman from groundside escort services, along with another ID that Laurent had never seen but had been told to expect — Hungarian, this time — and a purple EU nonresident “transit” chip. She clasped Laurent’s shoulder as she said goodbye, and he nodded and watched her go.

  “Come on,” said the escort officer, and Laurent followed her. Upstairs they went from the station, ascending via three levels of escalators past a slightly unbelievable array of shops and kiosks and stores apparently selling everything on earth. Sixteen hours ago Laurent would have goggled at it all. But now weariness and repeated spasms of fear and even a little irrational impatience were making a jaded traveler of him. What was really going to interest Laurent, now, was stopping — just standing still somewhere, sitting down somewhere that didn’t move, and going no further.

  He missed his father more than ever. He kept wanting to turn around and say, Pop, Popi, look at this! — but his father wasn’t there — and then the awful thought would occur to him, Maybe he never will be. Maybe—But he pushed that thought aside again and again. I’m just tired. He’ll come for me as soon as he can get out…as soon an he can finish what he’s doing.

  The airline staffer talking to him as they went got so little by way of response, as she led him through the white or glass-brick corridors full of bustling people, that finally she gave up trying. But as they went through the last security check, which Laurent hardly noticed, she smiled just a little — and moments later they came out into the great shining curvature and acreage of the main spaceport concourse, the newest and latest-completed part of that century-old Zurich facility. Straight across the white-shining floor the view went, nearly half a mile straight through one of the biggest enclosed spaces in the world under the famous glass “buckyball” dome, and out the far side through the world’s biggest single window, to the boarding pan where not one but three “jump” craft sat — a EuroBocing “hybrid” spaceplane in Swissair livery, the new Tupolev lifting body in Lufthansa gold and blue, and the “nonhybrid” American Aerospace “Double Eagle” spaceplane, in silver with the blue and red stripes.

  Laurent stopped stock-still and his mouth dropped open. The escort officer smiled as he looked over at her after a moment. “That’s what I thought,” she said, “the first time I saw it.”

  “Which one am I taking?” Laurent said finally.

  “The AA,” said the escort officer. “Come on. They’ll preboard you, and maybe you can have a look into the cockpit before they go sterile.”

  He followed her. This was everything he had imagined — a brave new world, shining, modern, new. This was what he had always wanted. All he had to do now was step out into it…all by himself.

  Just so, proud, but (despite the airline staff) still terribly alone, Laurent Darenko — now Niko Durant — went across the concourse and into the boarding tube, into the unknown…

  …and never knew how closely the eyes whose scrutiny he had most feared were watching him still.

  1

  It was Friday afternoon about two-thirty in Alexandria, Virginia, and in a sunny kitchen of a rambling house near the outskirts of the city, Madeline Green sat looking out of her virtual workspace, across the kitchen table, to where her mother was building a castle. Her mother swore.

  “Mom,” Maj said wearily, brushing aside the piece of e-mail she had just finished answering, “you’re going to give me bad habits.” The e-mail bobbed back again, the little half-silver-half-black sphere seeming to float toward her in the air — she had failed to hit the half of it that meant “erase.” She hit the black half now, a little harder than she had intended, and the sphere popped and vanished with a small bursting-soap-bubble sound.

  “Whatever habits I give you, they won’t be as bad as this one,” her mother muttered. She was bent over what, from a distance, would have looked like some sort of small light table for an artist. It had a flat square insulated plate on the bottom and a small, very bright gooseneck lamp attached to the back of the plate.

  Right now her mother was holding a square of something that could have been mistaken for red-and-white-swirled plastic close under that lamp, and trying to bend it, with little success. “Heat it up more,” Maj said.

  “If I do, the colors will run,” her mother said, “and they’ve run too much already. Maj honey, do me a favor and don’t ever let Helen Maginnis talk me into another of these last-minute projects again.”

  “I tried to stop you this time,” Maj said, “but you were the one who kept saying, ‘Oh, no, it’s no problem at all, of course I’ll make this big fancy centerpiece for the PTA dinner when you said you were going to do it and now you ran out of time. Again.’”

  Maj’s mother growled softly.

  Maj laughed at her. “This is the third time she’s done this to you, Mom. And you always say you’re going to let her get herself out of trouble the next time. You’re just a big sucker for Helen because she’s your friend.”

  “Mmmf,” her mother said, and laid the piece of sugar plate back down on the heating element to resoften. “I don’t care if it does run. The heck with perfection. You’re right, honey…”

  She turned back to her work, and Maj looked over her shoulder into her virtual space to see if any more e-mail was waiting. But the air behind her was empty, clear to the white stucco walls. Above them, through the high windows above the bookshelves and the brushed stainless-steel furniture, the remains of a furiously red-and-blue Mediterranean sunset
were burning themselves out, speaking of considerable heat outside on the Greek beach where the idea for this virtual workspace had originated, and more such heat tomorrow. Three years ago now, it had been, since the family had been able to synchronize both schedules and finances to go to Crete and the Greek islands for a few weeks, and Maj sighed, wondering when they would be able to get there again. It wasn’t that they were poor — not with her dad working as a tenured professor at Georgetown University, and her mom pulling down a better-than-average income as a designer of custom computer systems for big corporate clients. But having jobs as good as those also meant that both her parents seemed to be busy almost all the time, and getting everyone’s vacation time into the same calendar year, let alone the same month, was a challenge. At least, with her workspace linked to the weather reports and the live Net cameras sourced in that part of the world, Maj could experience the gorgeous Greek weather vicariously, if not directly. Maybe next year we’ll go again, she thought. Yeah, and maybe the moon will fall down.

  She sighed. “Work space off,” Maj said. Immediately she felt the little hiccup in the back of her head that coincided with her implant passing the “shutdown” order to the doubler in the kitchen, and from there to the Net-access computer in her dad’s workroom. The virtual “Greek villa” behind Maj vanished and left her wholly in late sunlight, sitting at the big somewhat beat-up kitchen table, watching her mother wrestling with the sugar plate. “I don’t know, Maj,” she said after a moment, “this one might be too bumpy to be a wall. Maybe I can curl it up and make a tower out of it.”

  “Maybe you should just melt it down and pour it over a waffle,” Maj said, and grinned.