view of Winters's office while he was briefly absent, was that she wasn't sure they had started the 'professional' part of this particular escapade soon enough. Once or twice in the not too distant past, she had erred badly by refraining from calling Winters and Net Force in because she had seriously believed that she was handling everything just fine by herself. Now Megan was trying to be very virtuous about assessing her situations, aware that making the same mistake twice could be seen as fatal in this organization… and in dealing with some of the clever, unscrupulous and deadly lawbreakers that Net Force met during the course of its policing, often enough a repeated mistake would be fatal. It really should be all right, she told herself while she paced around on the worn marble of the amphitheater floor. No one's done anything really dangerous… yet. I think. The problem was that what someone in her late teens considered 'not really dangerous' could sometimes clash spectacularly with the opinions on the subject of someone in his forties, who had seen too many of his people, over the last ten or fifteen years, fail to return from interventions-
'Nice view,' said James Winters, having walked 'out of the air' and into her space, wearing shirt and tie and dark trousers, with the unfakeable Net Force ID hanging from his pocket. His office now appeared undimmed and seemingly adjacent to Megan's space. 'Sorry that took a little longer than I thought it would. It's been a busy morning.'
Leif's space was also 'adjacent' to Megan's at the moment, and he slid down off the hood of the Ice Cadillac and came into Megan's space to face Winters with her. 'Morning, Leif,' Winters said, peering past him into Leif's space, without comment for the moment. 'Your dad in the country at the moment?'
'New York, sir. At least, he was there this morning at breakfast… '
Winters made a wry expression. 'The story of all of our lives. You never know where you're going to be when it's time for the next meal.'
He looked over at Megan again. 'Which of you wrote the precis I just read?'
'We both did,' Megan said.
'Good,' Winters said.
He turned and walked a few steps to reach back into his space, grabbed something in the air Megan couldn't see, and pulled it into Megan's workspace. It was a text window which must have been free-floating in the air there. Now it became visible to them, too, and Meg got a glimpse of the content scrolling past in the window and recognized what she and Leif had sent Winters earlier, a document describing as dryly as possible what they had been up to. 'The first question I have for you,' he said, 'is-have there been any new developments in this situation since you filed this with me?'
'No, Mr. Winters,' Megan said. 'We didn't want to move any further until we heard from you.'
'All right,' he said. 'That was a good idea.' And Megan relaxed a little. 'Let's look at possible options-'
Then one side of Megan's workspace, over toward the right side of her desk, suddenly turned into the same swirling default blue that she had seen when Mark had touched base with them earlier. Mark walked out of it, and said, 'Sorry I'm late. Dad was using the mobile.'
Winters raised his eyebrows at Mark. 'Was he calling the Surete to come and take you away, do you think?'
'Huh?'
'Huh, he says.' Winters threw Mark what Megan's father would have described as 'an old-fashioned look.' 'Mark, you really want to check out the differences between the French laws governing online 'sovereignty' and the North American ones. While I understand what you were doing in Breathing Space last night, and I acknowledge that it may do some good in the future, in the present you have under French law committed an act corresponding to criminal trespass-'
'I wasn't entering any system of theirs!' Mark said.
'Yes, but you entered Breathing Space from an access point based on French soil, and you did it without legal authorization, without a search warrant from any online or other jurisdiction! That makes it not just entering, but breaking and entering with assumed/implied intent to defraud or steal. Cyberburglary. No matter that you did it in a good cause. If the French authorities find out, even your father's influence may be insufficient to keep you out of the pokey, because it's not the English/American modality of law they practice here, it's the Napoleonic one. You are presumed guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. Which you're not. And you've made these two accessories after the fact. Are you listening, Mark?'
He was. Mark was about as pale as Megan had ever seen him. She was sweating herself, but there was still something slightly amusing about it. Or there will be if we 're not in trouble… /
'Yes, sir,' Mark said, in a surprisingly small voice.
Megan blinked. She had never heard Mark call anyone 'sir.'
'So,' Winters said, 'let's see what kind of order we can bring out of this chaos… seeing that we have the data to begin with. And the implications are serious… but in their way encouraging, since it confirms suspicions that some of our operatives have expressed in the past.'
'You've been working on Breathing Space already?' Leif said.
'Not specifically. But there have been too many reports of minors, or even juveniles, being caught up in international 'business' where they have no business being,' Winters said, pushing his hands into his pockets and walking across to the edge of the amphitheater to look out across the bleak abruptly curving wilderness of crags and crevasses and methane snow. 'Mostly it seems to have been courier work. The classic 'deadfall' routine; give a dangerous package to someone who doesn't have a clue what it is, so that if the authorities catch them with it, they take the fall, not you or the person for whom it was intended. Or worse, camouflage a parcel as something else entirely… the way they used to send 'sensitive' documents which were no such thing. Or maybe they were, but they weren't nearly as important as the microdot masquerading as one of the periods on the paper. Either way,' Winters said, turning back to them, 'over the past several years we've had about ten cases of minors 'taking the fall,' being caught with materials associated with some hostile intelligence operation or money-laundering scheme, or getting involved in some other shady scam. Some of them have been in pretty bad shape when we found them. Some of them have been dead. And unfortunately we have made very little headway with our investigations, because the people behind this seem to have been exquisitely sensitive to which kids are real ones, and which ones are Net Force operatives who just happen to look and act very young.' Winters got a rueful look. 'It seems that in some areas, there's just no substitute for having been born in the last twenty years.'
'So you want us to-' Leif said.
Megan saw the flash of annoyance in Winters' s eyes and immediately wished Leif had kept his mouth shut. 'I do not want you to,' Winters said. 'The people we're dealing with, whatever their purposes may be, are professionals at what they do… which is staying hidden, and getting other people jailed, hurt, or killed on their behalf. Usually kids around your age… usually ones who are at least nearly as smart as you are.' He glanced at Mark. 'Almost all of present company excepted. I would very much prefer to let our own people continue handling this.'
Then he sighed. 'Except that this is the first concrete indication that we've found of the intentions and methods of the people who might actually be running the 'recruitment scheme,' and that they're actually being somewhat structured about it, enough so to keep coming back to the same places. And they've been canny about it, too… recruiting from a 'labor pool' who because of multiple run-ins with the law or a long history of 'going missing' are already either discredited as witnesses, or already given up for dead… or in a position to be. Nasty, very nasty… and I want it to stop. Not least because what Breathing Space does, when it's working correctly, helps a lot of people, and I would very much dislike to see the whole operation shut down in an atmosphere of scandal. Especially since Net Force should have been able to crack this by now, and hasn't. Results speak loudest, and the excuses would ring very hollow… especially to the parents of those kids who never came home.'
Leif opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Megan simply looked at Winters. Winters looked back at her, and after a moment said, 'I'd be willing to hear your recommendations.'
She thought for a moment. 'While they were in the report we filed with you,' Megan said, 'I understand that you might have concerns for Leif's safety… and almost might be concerned that he may have had second thoughts since we filed. However-' She glanced at Leif. He shook his head. 'I think you should let him proceed,' Megan said.
'Why?'
'Because substituting a Net Force operative for me, even one wearing an identical 'seeming' that you're
