Safe House nfe-10 Read online

  “Okay. Store program,” Maj said.

  “Ready to be of service, ma’am, and—”

  “Boy, I wish it wouldn’t do that…. What kinds of things do you want to wear, Niko?”

  “Uh — jeans would be fine. Maybe a shirt.”

  “Jeans,” Maj said. Instantly a pair of them appeared on the wireframe model of Niko. “How do they look?”

  He walked around the model. “And these will fit—”

  “Real closely. The company will pull the closest match off the rack in the warehouse and van them over. They have a delivery run out this way a few times a day.”

  “Do they have to be blue?” he said.

  “You want a different color?”

  “Uh…” He smiled, a very small shy smile. “I always wanted black ones.”

  “Black, absolutely,” said Maj, and the color of the jeans on the wireframe figure changed. She grinned at him. “Black’s back in this year. Want the shirt that color, too? It’ll look good on you.”

  “Yes!”

  The heck with the sale stuff. “Formshirt, black,” said Maj. One of the tight-fitting shirts that were coming in right now appeared on the wireframe. “How about that?”

  His smile said it all.

  “Great,” said Maj. “Store program. Select both, purchase both.”

  “Account confirmation.”

  “Eighteen twelve,” Maj said.

  “Thank you. Pick up or send?”

  “Send.”

  “Thank you. Your purchases will be dispatched from our Bethesda warehouse at ten A.M.”

  “That’s it,” Maj said, and got up. “Can you think of anything else you need?”

  “Anything…” Niko looked out across that huge space of clothes, across which Maj sometimes thought one should be able to see the curvature of the Earth. “No,” Niko said, and sounded shy again. “But thank you.”

  She patted him on the shoulder. He jumped a little, as if taken by surprise. “It’s okay,” Maj said. “Come on, let’s climb out of here, my mom’s going to want her machine back.”

  “It is…a Sunday? And still your mother works?”

  Maj rolled her eyes. “It’s more like no one can stop her working. Come on…”

  “And thank you for shopping at—” the system shouted after them, rather desperately, as they deactivated their implants.

  Maj snickered as the two of them headed back into the kitchen. “Are you hungry?” Maj said.

  “Uh…” He paused to look out the window at the backyard, which Maj’s mother’s tomatoes and rosebushes were threatening to take over, just as they always did this time of year. “Something to drink, maybe.”

  “Tea? Milk? Coffee?”

  Niko didn’t answer. He was leaning against the windowsill, apparently lost in thought. “Niko?” Maj said.

  No response.

  “Niko?!”

  He jumped as if he had been shot, and turned around in a hurry. “Uh, sorry, yes…”

  “Do you want some tea, or coffee, or—”

  He stared at her…then relaxed, all over, so obvious a gesture that it practically shouted, I thought you were going to do something terrible to me…but it’s all right now. “Um,” he said then. “Coffee, that would be good.”

  “How do you like it?”

  “A lot of milk.”

  “Fine. We’ll steal Mom’s coffee — it’s the best in the house.” She got out one of her mother’s single-pack drip coffee containers, put it on a mug, put the kettle on, and went to the fridge, opening it and rummaging around. “Let’s see…Oh, here it is.” She pulled out a quart of milk past the door scanner.

  “That’s the last liter,” said the fridge. “Do you want more?”

  “Jeez,” Maj muttered, “the way we go through this stuff. My brother must just pour it over his—” As she turned, she saw that Niko was staring at the fridge, completely stunned.

  “Your refrigerator talks?” he said.

  Maj blinked at that. “Oh. Yeah. Mostly to complain.” She made an amused face, pulled the door open to show him the little glass plate set in it. “See, there’s a scanner here, you run everything in front of it when you put things in after you go shopping. It keeps track of everything by the bar codes, and then when you run out, it orders more. It has a little Net connection inside, and it calls the grocery store. The delivery van comes around in the mornings and replaces what you’ve used up.” She shook the liter carton, made a face. “It may not be soon enough, the way my brother drinks this stuff.” She turned back to the door, waved the carton in front of it again.

  “Ordering more,” said the refrigerator.

  Maj closed the door. “The new ones don’t even ask,” she said, “they just do it — they estimate your needs and update their own order lists. This one’s kind of an antique, but there’s something about the door handles my mother likes, and she won’t get rid of it.”

  Niko sat down with a wry look. “Our refrigerators aren’t…quite so talkative.”

  “Believe me, it might not be a bad thing,” Maj said, sitting down across the table. “This one’s always bugging me about using too much butter. My brother keeps enabling the ‘dietary advice’ function just to annoy me, and I have to keep turning it off.” She made a face.

  The kettle, which her mother must just have boiled, shrieked with very little waiting time. Maj poured the coffee first, then the tea, so they would come out together, then put them both on the table. Niko was already sitting down there.

  “Niko—” she said.

  This time there was something almost deliberate about the way he responded. “Yes.”

  “You look completely wrecked,” Maj said.

  He stared at her…and his face sagged, as if being confronted with his own weariness made it all right to reveal it. “Yes,” he said. “Tired, you mean?”

  “Tired, yes. Wasted. Utterly paved. Do you want to take a nap? Get some rest, I mean?”

  “For a while,” he said, “I would not mind.”

  “Have your coffee, first. There’s no rush. You’re—” She stopped herself, for her intention had been to say, You’re safe here. Then she realized that she had no idea why she was going to say it. Except that he had been carrying himself very much like someone who was not safe, someone who was seriously afraid.

  Time to get this sorted out, Maj thought.

  “You’re among family,” she said. “You don’t have to sit up and be polite around us. You’re jet-lagged, you look like you could use some rest. You rest as much as you want. When you feel like getting up, get up. Maybe later this evening. I have some Net stuff to do…. If you want to come along, you’d be welcome.”

  I can’t believe I’m saying this, she thought. But he needs a friend right now, poor kid…and virtuality is one thing, but reality is another. Reality takes precedence.

  At the mention of the Net, his eyes lit up. “I would like that,” he said. “Very much!”

  “Yeah,” Maj said. “Look, take your coffee with you…go on, get your rest. I’ll wake you up around five, and you can come see what I’m up to. It’s pretty neat.”

  He nodded and got up with his coffee cup. “It was the fourth room down?”

  “Fourth room down. If the Muffin tries to bother you, just throw her out.”

  “She would not bother me,” he said, and grinned briefly, and just for the moment looked much less tired. “She is very — cute?”

  “Cute. You got that right,” Maj said. “Welcome to America, kiddo. Go get some sleep.”

  He vanished down the hall. Maj waited about fifteen minutes, and then went to find her father.

  3

  Major Arni would really have preferred to handle this meeting as a phone call, or virtually. But she could not, for Ernd Bioru outranked her considerably — not in straightforward military rank, which she could have dealt with, but in the shadowy and uncomfortable outranking which a very few politicians held over her department — and if he demanded an i
n-person meeting, he would expect his request, or rather order, to be dealt with instantly.

  She stood there in the big plush office full of expensive furniture and watercolors waiting for Bioru to look up, and fumed at being treated like a piece of furniture herself. Unfortunately there was nothing she could do about it. The minister for internal defense had Cluj’s ear, and a whisper in that particular appendage could land you in all kinds of uncomfortable or permanent places if you weren’t careful. Inwardly, she scorned Bioru, for he had opted out of the working ranks of the intelligence service early, choosing instead to go abroad on diplomatic duties — achieving status by subtle means rather than by the overt hard work and slow climb through the ranks which the major considered the approved manner. Outwardly, though, she kept her manner toward Bioru correct and a touch subservient. It was safer to do so at the moment. In a year, two years, five, things might change, and an officer who had kept her mouth shut and done her work properly might yet see this upstart thrown out on his own ear. Cluj was well known in the upper reaches of government to be a volatile man, and even those who thought they best knew his mind and could “manage” him had received some savage surprises, just in these last few years. But for now—

  Now she looked at this short, slight, dark little man in his fancy charcoal-gray foreign suit and cursed him in her mind as he sat there reading his paperwork, page by deliberate page, and not looking up, just making her stand there. Finally he put the papers aside, sat back in his big comfortable chair, and looked at her. His was one of those bland faces, for all the sharpness of the bone structure. There was no telling what was going on inside that smooth regard — approval or rage — and no way to anticipate which way he would jump. That immobile face made the blue eyes look curiously flat, like a shark’s.

  For all his diplomatic service, there was nothing of the diplomat about Bioru at the moment. “Major,” he said, “where is the boy?”

  “Sir, he is in a private home in the Alexandria area. As far as we can tell, the man holding him is an old scholastic associate of the father.”

  He drummed his fingers on the expensive desk. “‘As far as you can tell’?” he said. “This kind of vagueness sorts oddly with your reputation for precision and effectiveness, Major.”

  “Unfortunately the spaceplane was diverted due to a mechanical fault,” Major Arni said, wondering one more time exactly how likely that was with a machine as carefully serviced as spaceplanes were, especially the hybrids. “Our operative had been at Baltimore-Washington, and we were unable to get an operative to Dulles in time to do a more effective intercept. Not that the security systems in operation would have made a straight ‘lift’ of the boy possible at that time.”

  “Considering the case in hand, you should have had someone at all that area’s airports.”

  “Budget limitations do not permit us such latitude, sir,” she said. “I am sorry.”

  There it was, she had had to say it. Now all she could do was wonder how he would take it.

  To the major’s amazement, Bioru let it pass. “As long as you know where the boy is now.”

  “We were able to determine that immediately from the local traffic computers,” the major said, “to which the DC area police have access. Fortunately we have a source in the police force. Such personnel are chronically underpaid, and usually do not look carefully at where their data goes after they allow it to be leaked.”

  He nodded at that, turned over another page. “Just in a private house, though, you say.”

  “Yes, sir. In the suburbs. We are running a background check on the father at the moment. There are some connections which are not immediately analyzable, but that is understandable, when a background in political science is involved. The mother and the rest of the family are of no interest.”

  “You have someone doing surveillance at the house now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is it someone you trust?”

  She swallowed. “For the moment.”

  Bioru looked up sharply, held her gaze for a moment. “Surely you’re not angling for an assignment over there for yourself,” he said.

  “I have the language skills, granted,” said the major, “but I have more pressing matters occupying me here.”

  “Such as?”

  She knew an incoming rebuke when she saw it, and understood the message that nothing was more important than this was at the moment, at least to this man. “Sir,” she said, “I am entirely at your disposal in this regard.” Then she immediately became sorry she had used the word “disposal.”

  “Huh,” Bioru said, a noncommittal sound, and turned his attention back to his papers, turned a couple of them over. “It says here that work has begun on questioning the father’s immediate associates,” he said. “‘Equivocal results,’ it says here.”

  “The associates are—”

  “One of them is dead,” Bioru said. “I would not normally call that ‘equivocal.’ What kind of bunglers are you employing over there?”

  “Sir, we can be as conscientious as anyone would wish—”

  “Not so much so as I would wish, plainly.”

  “—but we can hardly be held responsible for physiological reactions toward which the subject has never previously shown any tendency. The woman who died had no history of any kind of cardiac difficulty; she had undergone the usual pre-questioning workup to rule out anything that might interfere. Her cardiac arrest was attended by the university doctors, and they confirmed that such things happen sometimes without any clear reason—”

  “Except pain,” Bioru said dryly. “You overdid it. Or your ‘technician’ did. I want that person removed to other duties. No one is to work on this project except the most senior tech we have who’s qualified for this work.”

  She swallowed. “Sir, it was the most senior tech who was involved.”

  He stared at her for a long moment…then pulled the paperwork over again and let out a breath. “Nothing was yet proven against that woman when she died,” he said, looking down and paging through it. “That leaves us in an unpleasant moral situation. I should make him pay compensation to the family out of his own salary.” Bioru sighed. “All right…let him stay. But I want his junior technician to work with him closely and monitor all his intervention choices. If he catches his boss in a mistake, well, we save another of these poor creatures for further investigation, and the underling gets a promotion.”

  “Yes, sir.” The major had no quarrel with that method of operation. It was what she had used to get into her present position.

  “So on to more urgent matters. The father—”

  “Is still missing,” she said. “But the search continues. The scientists with whom he routinely socializes at the university have been as cooperative as their personal loyalties allow.” She got another sharp look for that. “Sir,” she said, “if they are to remain of any use to us as scientists, we must take some care not to overly alienate them. They do understand our security concerns—”

  “They had better,” Bioru growled. “Those are more important than the whole pack of them. They’d better come to understand that. Better have some ‘friendly’ source whisper that news in their cars before we have to make examples of a few more of them. Your dead one here — an accident she may have been, but maybe she’ll speed the process up a little…get the rest of them thinking harder about letting us know exactly where Darenko might have thought to hide himself away. A chance word could make the difference between finding him quickly, or taking forever about it and looking incompetent. See to it.” He pushed the papers away again. “Meanwhile, what news on the search?”

  “Nothing new, sir. He does not seem to be in the city.”

  He pushed himself back in his chair and gave her a look of extreme annoyance. “It’s not as if he’ll have managed to get across the border,” he said. “He’s in-country somewhere. Have the usual statements gone out to the press?”

  “Yes, sir.” Privately the major had h
er doubts about the effectiveness of these CITIZENS! HELP YOUR LEADER! announcements. Most citizens didn’t have the brains to find their own fundaments with a flashlight and a road map, and the rest could be surprisingly obstructive at times, even in the extreme cases when rewards were offered. Hoax responses to these announcements abounded, usually leaving you with more people to discipline and no useful results.

  “Find him,” Bioru said. “Find him immediately. That’s all I want from you in that regard. Go door-to-door, use dogs, use infrared, use molecular air-sampling, use anything you have to. I want him searched for as carefully as evidence of a murder would be sought for, with people in fields poking every inch of the ground with sticks, if need be. Are you clear yet about how urgently he is needed? The president himself has asked to be briefed about this proceeding. And the performance of the personnel associated with it.”

  The sweat broke out all over her, instantly, and she hoped desperately that it wouldn’t show. “Yes, sir,” the major said, and hoped her voice betrayed nothing of what she was feeling.

  Those eyes went back to looking flat again, much to the major’s relief. “We have some other technicians,” Bioru said then, a little more calmly, “going through the extant data from the project at the moment. This could be very, very lucrative stuff…very useful. Most specifically, there are intelligence implications for us once we get the technique working and in production. The ability to carry the longest message undetectably, swimming free in a courier’s blood, assembling itself into content only on command…or the ability to take a rouge operative’s brain apart from the inside in a matter of hours. The little things eat holes all through it and leave it looking like a Swiss cheese. The results look just like, what was it called, mad cow disease.” He smiled a little at the image. “Even the North Americans have nothing like these little”—he lifted one of the pages, glanced down at it—“microps. And we intend to make sure it stays that way.”

  He looked up at her. “The boy,” he said. “Preparations must be made to have him recovered, without fuss, on signal, and not a moment before or later…for we’ll need him to work on the father. I’ll give you details when you need them. Take the minimum of time to assess the situation and then get him out of there and back over here. You might want to exit the country in the opposite direction, toward the far east. They might not immediately expect that. Or the great-circle route over Canada. If you feel the need, go yourself,” he said. “I’ll authorize the expense immediately. But his recovery must be so managed as to happen before the father’s found, if what we’re planning is to have the maximum effect. His own interrogation is going to require that the part of it involving the boy be very precisely timed…otherwise the father will have no incentive to cooperate properly with us.” Bioru frowned. “He’s one of those stubborn ones as it is, a psych profile like a rock…the break-but-don’t-bend type. A nuisance, likely to kill himself to keep us from finding out what we need. However, if the boy’s situation has been made properly threatening…if the timing is right…he’ll not only not suicide, but he’ll help us gladly, and beg to be allowed to do so for as long as we like.”