Safe House

the final stage of his construction almost ready for delivery. But apparently he had reservations which he did not share with us about the purposes to which his work would be put. As if he had any right to such.” The frown got blacker. “Apparently he has been feeding our agent on his team false progress reports for some good while…and, during that time, he has been both sabotaging his other associates’ work and destroying or undoing work which he himself has done. Various ‘partial’ prototypes of the microps have been destroyed or rendered useless in ways which were undetectable until someone actually tried to activate the mechanisms. And we have none of the fully functional models left, none at all. Darenko destroyed them before he left, possibly with something as simple as a Net-borne command to their programming centers.”

He sat going through his papers and that terrible smile appeared again, so that the major shivered. “Thousands of hours’ worth of his and his colleagues’ work,” he said, “all gone in a moment…. Though I misspeak myself — it was not a momentary act. The man must have been planning this for a long while…the worst kind of treason. He worked until the project was almost ready, then destroyed the active prototypes. All but a few…”

“Where are they?” she whispered, shocked by the enormity of what Darenko had done. “Does he have them?”

He glanced up at the major again, and that smile got more feral, something that she had not believed could happen. “No,” he said, “but someone else does.”

She opened her mouth, closed it again. “The boy,” she said.

Bioru nodded. “Darenko was not so indifferent to the value of his work,” he said, “that he was willing to simply throw it away. The boy is carrying fully enabled microps in his body. They are so small that it would have been no trouble at all to simply give them to him in a glass of milk, a cup of tea. To judge by what the associate has told us, they are now floating around in his bloodstream doing general maintenance work, their ‘default’ programming — stripping cholesterol off the interiors of his arteries, killing passing germs, and taking apart noxious compounds like lactic acid and so forth.” The smile fell off. “Major, I do not care for the idea that a weapon which could do our country great good in its unending battle against spies and enemies inside and outside is presently meandering around in the circulatory system of a traitor’s son, protecting him from the ill effects of Western junk food!”

“I will recover him immediately,” she whispered.

“No you will not,” Bioru said.

The major’s eyes widened.

“There is something that must be done first,” the minister said. “I had some hint of this material, but I was unwilling to go on the record until it had been confirmed, and this is why I told you earlier that you were to be ready to pick the boy up on signal but not before. You will not be the only one receiving a signal.”

“The microps,” she said.

“Yes. The associate has been most forthcoming as regards the activation codes and the necessary methods for instructing the microps in what their new role will be. We will activate them and set them to work on the boy’s central nervous system — with predictable results. We will make sure the father knows about this. We have a good guess, now, where he is and how he is equipped — but there is no need to go digging him out. In perhaps thirty-six hours from the microps’ activation he will come to us without hesitation. Otherwise, if he does hesitate—” Bioru shrugged. “We will not countermand the routine the microps have been running, and it will really be too bad for the boy. I have seen the slides from the test animals,” he added, turning over some more paperwork and glancing at a photocopy of something the major could not clearly see from this angle. “There was apparently a mistake in one of the commands given in an early series of tests. After this particular ‘erroneous’ command is given to the microps, the resemblance of the subject brain at the end of the process to one which has been infected with one of the spongiform encephalopathies is quite remarkable. Sponge is definitely the operative term.”

“But if the father should not respond in time, if the boy should die—”

Bioru shrugged again. “Morgues are routinely even more lax in security terms than hospitals are,” he said. “We can as easily harvest the microps from a corpse as we can from a live body. More easily — corpses do not need anesthesia. Either way, with the boy alive or dead, we will have no problems with Dr. Darenko in future. If the boy survives, we will keep young Laurent as a hostage to further work by his father. If he does not, we will at least have recovered the microps and can pass them on to some other expert more loyal than Darenko for further work.”

The major nodded. “When will the activation happen?” she said.

“We are still working on the details of that,” Bioru said. “We think Darenko may have warned his son to stay off the Net, fearing that someone might work out how to send an activation or reprogramming burst to the microps.” The smile began to grow again. “In any case, the warning seems not to be having much effect. Granted, the boy has not yet ventured anywhere much except the Greens’ household Net — unfortunately this has become inaccessible from outside. They seem to have had some work done on their bandwidth just now, and the work included some unusual one-way traffic protocols. It seems from the phone company’s records that the good professor is extremely paranoid about colleagues stealing the articles he writes for his various journals.” Briefly that smile went merely malicious. “Other than that, the only other place he has been is this”—he peered at another piece of paper—” ‘Cluster Rangers’ entertainment, which the daughter seems presently to favor.”

“My department has registered with that server,” the major said. “Their registration should be going through shortly.”

“It has already gone through,” said Bioru. “However, the boy has not yet ventured back in. Once he is in active ‘gameplay,’ we will be ready to send the reprogramming burst. After that, it will take no more than eighteen hours for him to begin showing symptoms, and we will at that point notify the father, through public media to which he has access, of his son’s condition. If he cooperates, we will send a ‘stop’ burst and hold the damage to the boy’s system at whatever level it has reached when Darenko turns himself in. Then you will bring the boy home. He should at that point be ill enough to be taken to the hospital…and that is the point at which, if you have not already found an opportunity to move, you can easily do so. No one questions an ambulance crew fetching a sick child when they have called for it themselves. After that, a quick trip to our embassy, and he will come home the same night in the ‘diplomatic pouch,’ under seal, where none of the local police or security forces can touch him. It will hardly be the first time our embassy has designated a carrier large enough to contain a person as the ‘pouch.’ Notice is unlikely to be taken…and even if it is, there is nothing any of the various intelligence or security forces can do — they will not dare interfere with diplomatic immunity.”

The major smiled, too, now, just slightly. “I will see to the details.”

“I doubt there will be much in the way of interference from the Green family until it is too late,” said Bioru. “The only sensitive part of this operation will be happening when they will be too distracted by the symptoms to suspect the cause, let alone to delve far into it. However, if there should be any interference—”

“The father’s ties to Net Force…”

“These are mere cronyism, as far as I can tell,” said Bioru. “He seems to lecture to their people a great deal. He is not an active operative, and they are hardly likely to go out on a limb for him. Do what you have to to get the boy, Major. This matter is too important for me to enjoin you against deadly force. If this weapon falls into the hands of our enemies — even of some of our present allies — many of our people in the field could die as a result. What is the saying? ‘Do unto others as they would do unto you — and do it first’?”

She nodded. “I will take care of it.”

“See that you do,” Bioru said, and vanished.

She was left in the unornamented black work space of the booth, sweating slightly. The major sighed, stroked her hair back into place, and then turned — the door opened, and she stepped out.

Yet another small child, a little boy of about eight, barreled full tilt into her legs. She caught him. “Uh-oh,” she said, “look out, sweetheart!” and pushed him off gently in the direction of his mother, who was coming down the aisle after him.

Then she walked back to her seat, smiling gently, and thinking about young Laurent.

“Look,” Maj said. “At least give it some thought.”

The Group of Seven were in session later that evening, sitting around in Kelly’s present work space, a bizarre multistory log cabin located in some mythical backwoods surrounded by mountains high enough to make Everest feel slightly inferior. Kelly changed work space styles the way some people changed their underwear, so the Group made it a habit to meet regularly at his place, just to see what he was up to — mostly never the same thing