Safe House

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.”

“He’ll be known now, though,” she said, her voice grim with threat.

“Oh, yes, Major, we’ll have him shortly,” said the voice on the other end of comms.

He would have to say that, the major thought…both out of fear of what she would be thinking, and from fear of who was probably listening somewhere else on the line. It was always assumed, and wisely, that someone Higher Up was listening to whatever you were discussing, and even at times when she knew this not to be true, the major did not dissuade any of her associates from believing it. It was healthy for them to be scared. It kept them honest. Or as honest as they were capable of being.

“We’ll see,” Major Arni said. “I tell you, I don’t know where all these subversives keep coming from. You’d think we’d have shaken them all out, after twenty years, but no…Ingrates. So where exactly is the boy now?”

“Over the mid-Atlantic. He’ll be landing in a couple of hours.”

“And you’ll have someone to meet him at the other end, I take it.”

“Oh, of course, Major. It’s just that—” He sounded suddenly unnerved.

“Just that what?”

“Well,” said her subordinate, “we can’t just grab him at the airport, I’m afraid. Their security is too tight.”

She started to get annoyed. “Surely the airport security people don’t know anything about him that would alert them to any need for extra vigilance! He’s just a boy. And not even the son of anyone particularly important.”

“No, it’s not that, Major, of course they don’t know about him.” Her subordinate was flustered. “But the Western countries are all so paranoid about their children being kidnapped, or snatched by parents feuding over a divorce settlement, or by some prowling sex maniac, that a child in transit can’t be turned over to anyone but the person they’ve been ‘sent’ to. The airlines are strict about it. There have been lawsuits, and they—”

“If you think I have time to waste hearing about the mendacities of some corrupt Western legal system,” the major said, “you’re much mistaken. Send someone who can pass for the person picking the boy up.”

“Major, we can’t; the authorities there will be checking the collecting adult’s ID by retinal scan.”

She swore again. There were ways to fake that, these days, but not in time, and this little fish didn’t justify that kind of expense…yet. “Who exactly is picking the boy up?”

“We think it must be someone involved with one of the national intelligence organizations, Major. Why Washington, otherwise?”

She wasn’t convinced. “They could pick him up anywhere,” the major muttered. “It wouldn’t necessarily have to be there.” She brooded for a moment. “Does the father possibly know anybody in that area?”

“It’s a possibility. He studied there for a while,” said her subordinate.

The major frowned. “In America? What was a loyal scientist from our country doing there?”

“Please, Major, it’s all too common. He was sent there by the government years ago, some student exchange program, to ‘learn about their culture’—”

“To poach their science, you mean,” she growled, “and to give their damned intelligence services a chance to try and suborn him.” Still, she knew this kind of thing had gone on a lot in the last thirty years — people being sent overseas to get at the improved equipment and theory which the Western countries had refused to allow her country to import honestly, citing “human rights record problems” and other fabricated excuses to keep their enemies poor and technologically inferior. Well, in this particular case, it hadn’t worked. The CIA and its cluster of other associated intelligence agencies had hit Darenko and bounced. He simply wasn’t interested in being a double agent, it seemed…too interested in just doing science. And now Darenko’s work was proving unusually useful for the government. Everything about it had seemed to be going extremely well, there had been great hopes for the results of his newest research…until now.

The major felt like growling a lot louder. You gave people better than usual housing and salaries, rewarded them with high position and the favor of the government and the national defense establishments, and what did they do? Turn on you at the first opportunity. What does he mean sending his son off to the West like this? Except she knew perfectly well what was meant by it. He was getting ready to jump, and — smart man that he was — he knew that sending his son off alone increased their chances of a reunion later. Together, their escape would have been almost impossible. Yet by sending the boy away, he had also telegraphed his own intentions. He would shortly find out how big an error that had been.

She let out a long breath. “Well,” Major Arni said, “what do you know about the person picking him up?”

“Uh…nothing as yet.”

The major’s eyes narrowed. “You must be able to find out something! There must be information about the person’s identity attached to the boy’s ticketing information in the airline’s computers.”

“We tried that,” her subordinate said. “Unfortunately we couldn’t hack into the ticketing system. The air ticket ‘audit trail’ starts in Zurich, and the Swiss computers’ encryption—”

“I don’t want to hear about their encryption!” she yelled. “Damned paranoid Swiss, why are they so secretive?” She let out a long breath of annoyance. “Stupid little mob of hold-up-your-hand-and-vote democrats—”

The major bit off the diatribe, which would have served no purpose, and would just have re-inflamed slightly raw nerves anyway. Some months ago someone from her department had been caught bugging the new French Embassy building in Bern and had been ejected by the Swiss within six hours. No appeal, no chance to get someone in there to finish the job, just a lot of embarrassment which she was still living down. She was fortunate not to have been reassigned, and the incident still rankled. Meanwhile, the terrified silence at the other end of the phone was amusing.

“All right,” she said at last. “Fine. I don’t suppose you have anyone on the plane, someone who could get cozy with one of the flight attendants and get a look at the boy’s travel documents?”

“Uh, no, Major. On such short notice we couldn’t get the disbursements office to authorize the funds for a ‘jump’ flight. That kind of expense, they want an application filed in sextuplicate a month beforehand.” He sounded bitter and didn’t bother concealing it. And this time the major was inclined to agree with him, though he really had no business complaining about it to her. One of the perpetual annoyances of her job was the tiny budget on which she was required to produce decent results. How am I supposed to defend the security of my country on a shoestring? But hard currency was just that, hard to come by, and there was no one she could