'Are you finished with these mails?' her system said.
'No,' Megan said. She grabbed Leif's mail out of the air, crunched it back down into the iridescent ball-icon which it had been originally, and threw it straight up in the air, where it hovered. 'Live link to sender.'
'Working on that for you now.'
Oh, please let him be up now, Megan thought, for it was pretty late. Come to think of it, please let him be on this coast Or this continent. His folks traveled a lot, and Leif couldn't always be counted on to be in New York, especially as the summer got closer-
The amphitheater side of Megan's workspace went dark, and then a moment later began to glow blue with an eerie light. All that side of her workspace turned into a cave of ice-but not your usual cave. Here the ice was all of that particular pure clear blue that occurs only in the interiors of icebergs and glaciers. And in grottoes chiseled deep into the thick walls, many strange shapes stood-televisions and phone booths, plants and trees and people and animals, and many more cars than just the Cadillac. Why an Edsel? Megan found herself thinking, for there was one of those, too, back in the distance. She could clearly make out the peculiar radiator grille. The deepest recesses of this place were like a great long garage for cars of the previous century, all carved out of ice. 'Leif,' Megan said to the cold and echoing blueness, shaking her head, 'not even you could make this up. This is so weird it has to be real somewhere.'
'It's in the Alps,' Leif said, coming out from the depths of the cave. He was wearing a parka, which seemed appropriate, considering the setting, but still made Megan laugh, because the temperature in here could be anything he liked without melting his virtual ice. 'Somebody started carving these in the glacier early in the last century _.. other sculptors have added to the collection since then.' He scowled at Megan a little. 'Meanwhile, you sure took long enough to get back to me,' Leif said, managing to sound genial and annoyed. 'How busy can you have been? You-'
He stopped suddenly, and looked more closely at her, and his face changed. 'Tell me, Megan,' Leif said, 'who knocked you down and walked over you? You look really strung out. What's the matter?'
She sat down on the hood of the icy Cadillac and started to tell him.
Chapter 6
When Megan was finished, all Leif seemed capable of doing was staring at her in astonishment. 'Bozhe moi,' he said finally.
Megan was shivering, and not because of the virtual ice all around. The reaction to some of the things that Bodo had said to her was finally catching up with her at the end of a long and stressful day. 'They don't come back,' she said to Leif, and slid off the hood of the Cadillac. 'I can't get that out of my head. Leif, those kids aren't failing to come back because they've bought houses on the Riviera or retired to Florida. They're not coming back because they can't. They're in trouble, or locked up somewhere… or maybe even dead.'
'That I could easily believe,' Leif said.
'And my friend Burt is out there now, all excited, thinking he's on to a good thing,' Megan said. 'He'd probably kill me for saying this, since I'm hardly an expert, either, but he's not terribly experienced in 'the ways of the world.9 He's kind of short on social skills. He tends to do things without thinking them through, and after he's made a mess, he doesn't seem terribly good at cleaning it up. He's no suave secret agent type. He is a prime candidate for just getting himself killed if we don't find out something about who's sent him where, and get him back!'
Leif nodded and stood there with his head down, his hands thrust into his parka's pockets, studying the icy floor. After a moment he looked up again.
'So what are you going to do?' he said. 'Blow the whistle, obviously.'
'With what evidence?' Megan said. 'Even if Bodo was willing to talk to the cops about this, which I doubt, it'd just be his word they'd have to go on. No one would take us seriously. And as soon as the people responsible for this kind of 'recruitment' got a single whiff of what was going on, they'd be over the hills and far away. Probably no one in Breathing Space would hear from them again for months, maybe years, until the 'recruiters' figure the heat's died down. But I don't think that'll be the only thing dead by then.'
Leif paced back and forth across the frost-powdered blue ice of the floor. Megan swallowed. 'What we need to draw them out,' she said, 'is for someone to show up that the recruiters would really want to hire… someone they'd be absolutely crazy not to hire.'
There was a long pause at that. 'Someone, for example, who knows two or three languages,' Leif said then. 'Or four. Or six…'
He looked at her with slightly narrowed eyes, but also with amusement. The expression looked a lot older than the sixteen-year-old who wore it.
'That's why you're here, isn't it,' he said.
'I would never ask you,' Megan said hurriedly.
'But you'd let me figure it out for myself.'
'Leif, believe me,' Megan said, 'at first I thought I would do it myself. But there was a weak spot in that idea. I've been in the space already, as a guest, logged in and identified as such. If one of the people responsible for this secret recruitment spotted me there now, they'd be in a position to figure out exactly what I was up to.'
Leif kept pacing, and didn't say anything.
'Are you home right now?' Megan said after a moment. It was never a sure thing, with Leif. His father was the head of a multinational banking and investment firm, and since Leif was very small his dad had thought nothing of taking him out of school for a couple of weeks at a time without warning, hiring a tutor for him, and carting him halfway across the planet. It was the kind of life Megan dreamed of, but Leif sometimes seemed almost bored with it.
He nodded now, looking abstracted. 'Dad's taking care of some 'home office' business with the Anderson Investments board members… paperwork stuff. Mom's putting together a dance workshop for the New School. I finished my 'finals' work last week, so school's done for me until the fall. This is kind of a quiet time before the usual travel craziness starts in the summer.'
Leif looked up. 'And the quiet's been driving me nuts,' he added. 'I think you've hired yourself an off-duty linguist.'
Megan swallowed hard. 'Leif… we've been in a bad spot or two before, and walked away from it. But this is different. I don't think this is going to be very safe.'
'It's not going to be simple, either,' Leif said. 'For one thing, if I'm going to be the 'inside man,' I have to get inside. And it would kind of cause talk if I suddenly turned up at a genuine Breathing Space center and logged myself in as in need of a place to stay.' Leif grimaced. 'My dad would think we'd had some kind of breakdown in communication… and my mom would rip my head right off my shoulders and give it a big talking to.' He shook his head. 'We're going to have to 'fake' me in there somehow, under a seeming. Falsify the virtual ID 'tags' that the Breathing Space system puts on its users… and find a way to get into their safe virtual space without going through one of the approved gateways.' He looked thoughtful.
'All very illegal…' Megan said.
'Sure, I know that. But on one level, how hard can it be? The 'recruiters' are plainly doing it at will. What they can do, I bet someone we know can help us do. But we can't take all day about it, either, if as your buddy Bodo says the Recruiters are only there for a few days every few months.'
Megan nodded. 'What I'm not exactly clear about yet,' she said, 'is what we're going to do when we find out who these people are.'
Leif's slight smile went grim. 'I wouldn't bank big money on ever finding out who they really are. But what they want, and how they're operating… that's another story. If we can spoil that here and now, we'll have done something worthwhile. The important thing is to get the access fakery sorted out. I think I might be able to get help on that today.'
'Okay. But, Leif, there's another problem. We can't just toss you at the Recruiters blind. We need a script.'
'I'm not ready to make the movie of my life yet,' Leif said.
'I don't mean that. Besides, you're not photogenic enough. I mean we need-'
