Safe House nfe-10 Read online

  “Don’t tempt me….”

  They both glanced up at the hum of a vehicle pulling up in the main parking place out in front of the house. But it was just the school bus bringing Maj’s little sister home from preschool. “I thought her dad was bringing her back today,” Maj’s mother said, straightening up for a moment and massaging her back.

  “No, he had something to do at the university….” Maj’s father’s workload had increased somewhat after his tenure came through, so that Maj (and everyone else in the household) was getting used to his schedule not behaving itself, and sometimes messing theirs up as well. But this time of year, with summer coming on fast, fortunately there was little left of Maj’s schedule for her dad’s to interfere with. She had finished her pre-SATs and her finals and was waiting, not entirely calmly, for the results for the former. She had passed all the finals and so had little left to occupy her except the music and riding that she indulged herself in while not building elaborate virtual simulations of aircraft, poking her nose into various interesting parts of the Net, and (very quietly) pursuing the studies which she intended to use to get herself into Net Force.

  Which was where her heart really was, these days. Her mother sometimes looked at Maj strangely as she realized that her daughter was no longer the crazed schoolwork fiend she had been in recent years, or rather, she was no longer studying everything that got in her way just because it did. Maj’s studies now had to be more directed, more aimed, because Net Force mattered more than most of the other things in her life, even the hobbies she loved. That fact itself sometimes caused her mom and dad concern…and Maj heartily wished that they wouldn’t waste the effort the concern was causing them. “You ought to keep your options open,” her mother would say, mildly distressed; and “It’s too soon to make up your mind what you’re going to be doing for the rest of your life, or even the next half of it. Wait until after college,” her father would say, trying to look calm, and usually failing. All Maj would do, though, was “Yes-Mom” or “Yes-Dad” them, because she knew what she wanted. She wanted to be in Net Force.

  She was working on that already, having started, once she was allowed elective subjects in junior high, to take classes that would play to her strong suits, the things she was already good at. Mostly, Maj was good at figuring things out. Not just short-term circumstances or events, but the way a whole set of events would proceed both if left alone, and if you started tinkering with them. For a couple of years now, since she fully came to the realization that she had the beginnings of this talent, Maj had been privately “predicting” the way events she saw on the news channels in the Net would unfold…and she was much heartened by the fact that the analysis-of-history and group-psych classes she had taken in her freshman and sophomore years had seemed to help the quality of her analyses. The more information you had about the world and the way it had gone before, the better you got at predicting — within limits — the way it would go next. Within limits, of course, which was why Maj kept practicing the art of listening, both to others and to her own hunches. There was no way to predict what would happen if you closed yourself away from useful data by not keeping your eyes and ears open, or by looking in the wrong direction at the right time.

  So Maj was concentrating on going in the right direction. She had managed to get into the Net Force Explorers — by itself, not such a shabby achievement, considering how many thousands of kids wanted in and didn’t get there. Maj had some of the smartest “Netizens” of her own age to brainstorm and network with — exploring the Net with them, looking for trouble spots, working out ways to deal with them which could be passed on to Net Force’s senior staff (if you didn’t manage, out of sheer cunning, to do something about a given problem yourself, and cop the credit for a good intervention). And eventually, oh, in two or three years, during or after college, she would apply to join Net Force as an adult operative…and they would hire her. Maj was almost sure of that. There were never enough analysts who were as interested in the world outside the Net as the world inside it, and the crucial interface where they met. That was Maj’s passion — the place where real estate and “unreal estate” met, the juncture between the physical and the virtual. People comfortable on both sides of the divide were what Net Force needed more than anything else if they were to effectively police the “unreal” side — the fastest-growing part of the world these days, and increasingly, as thieves and terrorists and various other kinds of criminals found more and more ways to exploit it, one of the most dangerous.

  That last part of the analysis, of course, was one that would have occurred to both her mother and her father before now. But it’s their job to be overprotective, Maj thought, smiling as she heard her little sister coming up the walk outside. In two or three years they’ll see it my way…especially if James Winters has asked me to join up.

  That was the only uncertainty in all this. He was a nice man, the Net Force Explorers liaison, but unpredictable, sometimes unreadable…even for Maj, which she found unusual. Since (having worked with her as a Net Force Explorer) he would most likely be the one to give the go/no-go decision on her hiring, she spent more time than usual wondering what was going on in his head…and wondering how to influence it in her direction, and her favor.

  The back screen door was now yanked open, and a short sturdy shape with curly blond hair pushed in through the opening and let the door slam behind her. Maj’s mother sighed. “Adrienne, honey—” she said.

  “You’re just going to have to get the compressed-air thing on the door fixed, Mom,” Maj said. “She’s only little. She can’t remember not to slam it all the time.”

  “She can’t remember most of the time,” her mother said, sounding fretful as she turned back to the sugar-working lamp and plate. “Oh, well…”

  “C’mere, Muf,” Maj said.

  Her little sister shouldered out of her little knapsack, dumped it on the floor, and fixed Maj with an annoyed expression. “I hate school,” Adrienne said. She was wearing the same stubborn expression Maj remembered her as wearing the day she had decided never again to answer to the name “Adrienne,” but only to “Muffin.”

  “No, you don’t,” Maj said. “C’mere. You mean you hate something that happened at school. Be precise.”

  “Later,” the Muffin said, and Maj had to work not to laugh out loud. That was her father’s preferred line.

  “Okay,” Maj said. “Come sit on my lap.”

  This was apparently already on the Muffin’s mind. She climbed up into Maj’s lap and looked around her. “Are you virtual now?”

  “No, sweetie, it’s turned off.”

  The Muffin looked over at their mother. “What’s Mommy doing?”

  “Making a castle, Muffin,” their mom said wearily. “Or a mess.”

  The Muffin looked interested until she saw the size of the stacked-up cutout cardboard “walls” which were templates for the plates of melted and spun sugar her mother was presently manipulating, or attempting to manipulate. “That castle’s too small for anybody to live in.”

  “They could if they were pixies,” Maj said.

  Maj’s sister gave her a reproachful look. The Muffin believed enthusiastically in dinosaurs but had no time for pixies, fairies, or any of various other theoretically cute life-forms infesting her storybooks or her virtual “edu-space.”

  “A bird could live there,” Muf said after a moment, apparently willing to allow Maj that much slack.

  “Probably,” Maj said, resigned. She could remember when she could have gotten away with the pixies remark. There were times when it seemed to her that her little sister was growing up too fast.

  “It would starve,” Maj’s mother said absently. She had given up on trying to make a tower out of the piece of wall she had been working with, and had managed to flatten it out properly. Now she finished affixing that piece of wall to the plate-sugar base waiting for it, and having done so she leaned against the counter while she waited for the next piece of suga
r plate to heat. “Birds can’t eat sugar, Muf.”

  “No. It would rot their teeth,” said the Muffin with the world-weary air of someone who had heard this concept entirely too often.

  “Birds don’t have teeth,” Maj said.

  “They did when they were dinosaurs,” said the Muffin, and smiled, looking slightly feral.

  There was no arguing with such a statement, and it was probably wiser not to try to anyway.

  “Where’s Daddy?” the Muffin now demanded. “He said he would take me to the park when he came home.”

  “If he’s much later, I’ll take you, Muf,” Maj said. “I think he’s late at school.”

  “Why? Was he bad?”

  “No,” Maj said. “Usually they keep Daddy late at school because he’s good.”

  “Hah,” her mother remarked in deep irony. She had her own opinions about Maj’s dad’s tendency to overwork, and to allow himself to be overworked, when what he thought the good of his students was at stake.

  The Muffin was still reacting to what seemed the illogic of Maj’s statement. “Bobby Naho,” she said, “threw his clay at Mariel, and they made him stay after and be counseled.”

  “I promise you that Daddy hasn’t thrown his clay at anybody,” Maj said. “Though I bet he’d like to sometimes.”

  “I’m going to wash up for going to the park,” said the Muffin abruptly, and vanished into the rambling depths of the house.

  Maj’s mother turned to watch this with some interest. “That’s a new development,” she said.

  “Yeah, Muf has it all figured out. Wash for going out, and going out has to happen.”

  “She’s discovered causality,” her mother said, and sighed. “We’re all doomed.”

  Another high whine from outside made them both turn their heads again. This time it was one that Maj immediately recognized — her dad’s car.

  Maj stretched and got up to put the kettle on the stove for a cup of tea. Shortly she heard the front door open, and the sound of keys and briefcases being dropped here and there, away up in the front hall — Maj’s house was a long one, built in stages over some decades, and it straggled somewhat, so that the distance between the front hall and the kitchen was not really long enough to require you to take a packed lunch with you but seemed close (especially when the kitchen phone went off and you had to run for it). After a little while Maj’s dad came through the kitchen door and paused there, looking at what his wife was doing at the counter.

  “You’ll never have that done in time,” he said while the Muffin screeched “Daddy! Daddy!” down the hallway, and abruptly impacted into his legs from behind, making him wobble.

  “Wanna bet?” Maj’s mother said, not looking up. “We’re due there at eight-thirty. The question is, will you have done the laundry so you have a clean shirt?”

  “Was it my turn? Sorry, I forgot. Things got hectic.” He picked up the Muffin in one arm. “Yes, I know. The park,” Maj’s father said to her, and leaned against the doorpost. From there he looked at Maj, the overhead light shining off his bald spot. “Well, guess what.”

  There was something odd about the way he looked as he said this, though his face was cheerful enough, and Maj watched him carefully as she said, “What?”

  “We’ve got company coming.”

  “How are they at house-tidying?” said Maj’s mother, wrestling with the next piece of sugar plate. “Because I’m not going to have time.”

  “No, it’s not right now. And I don’t think we need to do anything special. It’s family.”

  Her mother turned with a surprised look. “Oh? Who?”

  “Not close family,” Maj’s father said, putting the Muffin down again. “Go get your park toy, honey,” he said, “just one.”

  “Okay. Who’s coming?” Muffin said. “Are you getting me a little brother finally?”

  Maj grinned and turned to get the kettle off the stove. This had been a recurrent theme of late, since Muffin’s preschool classes had started a “family life” unit. “Muffy, don’t give them ideas,” Maj said. “You don’t know how lucky we are to have just one brother. We’ve got him outnumbered…let’s keep it that way. But, Dad, who is it?”

  “A third cousin…I think.”

  “Mom’s side of the family?” It was the usual assumption. Her mother was the youngest of seven kids now scattered all over the planet, and one attempt some years back to count all the resulting cousins and second cousins had been the only reason Maj got to stay up late enough at one of her aunt’s weddings to see her uncle Mike dance something he called the “Funky Chicken” on the head table. They had finally stopped counting at something like eighty cousins, and after hitting a hundred in the second-cousin count, everyone had given up and gone back to watching Uncle Mike.

  “That’s right,” her father said. He looked over at her mother and said, “Elenya called me today — she couldn’t reach you, apparently.”

  Elenya was one of Maj’s mom’s cousins, a cartographer who now lived in Austria with her formerly Hungarian husband and worked for the Austrian national cartographic service.

  “Oh, gosh,” Maj’s mother said, “I’ve been in and out all day…. She didn’t leave a message in the system, though.”

  “No, I guess when she couldn’t reach you, she figured she would catch me at work. Anyway, the visitor in question is one of her second cousins, a youngster named Niko. Apparently his father is having to get ready for a relocation from Hungary to the States, and their apartment is having to be closed up before the new one here is ready. School’s done there already, and there’s nowhere for the youngster to go. Elenya wanted to know if we had room and inclination to put him up for a few weeks until his father arrives to take charge of him.”

  “Of course we do,” Maj’s mother said. “That’s what spare rooms are for.” She glanced up. “Is he English-speaking?”

  “Fairly fluent, apparently.”

  Maj was trying to make an image in her mind of exactly how the newcomer’s relationship to her own family would look if set up as a “family tree” diagram, and failing. “So if he’s Mom’s cousin’s second cousin…that makes him a…third cousin…twice removed?”

  “Something like that,” Maj’s father said, looking bemused. “The ‘removal’ thing always confuses me. Anyway, his father will come and pick him up after he’s finished tying up some loose ends of his business back in Hungary.”

  “Wow, Hungary, that’s exotic,” Maj said. She grinned. “This Niko kid…is he cute?”

  Her father cleared his throat and gave her one of Those Looks. “A little young for you, Maj. He’s thirteen.”

  “Will he play with me?” the Muffin demanded at the top of her lungs.

  “How could anybody not play with you, you curly thing?” Maj’s father said, holding the Muffin out at arm’s length and shaking her around. The Muffin squealed with delight. He put her down and said, “Now, go on, get the park toy! We won’t have a lot of time, I have to get back…”

  “…and do the laundry,” Maj’s mother said as the Muffin ran off for her toy.

  “Rub it in, you slave driver,” Maj’s father said, a little wearily, and ran one hand over where his hair wasn’t anymore.

  The Muffin’s yells of excitement receded down the hall. “Is this going to be okay for you, Maj?” her father said. “He’ll need some attention — I don’t want him to feel left out.”

  “Dad,” Maj said, “don’t worry about it. Thirteen’s kind of young, but just because he’s young doesn’t by itself make him a nuisance. And besides, there’s the Net. He’ll either bring stuff with him that he’s interested in, or he’ll get at his home server through ours.”

  Her father nodded. Again Maj caught that faintly worried look. Once might have been accidental, or caused by something else, but twice?

  There’s something about this he’s not telling me, Maj thought. Telling us—

  “When’s he getting in, hon?” Maj’s mother said, not turning aroun
d, still wrestling with the sugar plate.

  “Tomorrow, around noon,” her father said. “It’s an AA flight into Baltimore-Washington. No point in making him take the train down. He’ll be wrecked as it is — he’ll have had a long trip. I thought I’d go up and get him.”

  “You’re an angel,” Maj’s mother said, and turned around to kiss him soundly, holding her sticky-gloved hands up and away like a surgeon avoiding becoming nonsterile.

  “I’ll go with you,” Maj said.

  Her father smiled slightly, but there was just a little something missing about the smile. “Going to lay down the law early, huh?”

  “I might not need to,” Maj said, and smiled. “But if he starts acting up, well, better get the corrective measures started right away.”

  Her father chuckled and turned to head back down the hall to the bedroom end of the house. “Let me change out of this shirt,” he said. “If there’s anything else that needs to be washed, make a pile in the hall. Muffin, you ready…?”

  Maj went to get herself a mug for her tea, and went fishing in the canister on the window for a teabag, while for the moment keeping her face turned away from her mother’s. What’s going on…? she wondered. It wasn’t that sudden guests from strange places were unusual. In this house, they weren’t.

  What wasn’t usual was her father looking afraid….

  “There is nothing we can do at the moment,” said the tense voice down the other end of the comm line. “We caught the ‘identity shifts’ they pulled, finally…but too late. He’s gone.”

  In the plain, bare little office, with its two pieces of steel furniture and the peeling beige paint on the walls, Major Elye Arni swore softly under her breath. Outside the office, things got very quiet. Her assistants knew better than to bother her at such times. “How did it happen?”

  “Apparently someone got him fake ID that was good enough to get through our border systems. Then the boy was picked up and taken out of immediate surveillance range by an escort previously unknown to us.”