Runaways

am the cops, Mark thought. Or I will be as soon as Winters gets the subpoena! But even Winters couldn't get something like this handled instantly. Judges are not ordered around at will by law enforcement organizations. And this business was as time-sensitive as it came, unfortunately not even to be handled by a friendly call to Breathing Space. Too many layers of explanation to work your way up through, not enough time. Company was coming, would be along any minute now. And there was no more time. Mark swayed forward and back with the rhythm of the flames wavering in front of him. No more time, no more time, no more time-

He jumped through, came down wrong, sprawled. But it didn't matter. He was inside.

He ran across the landscape inside the wall of fire, a forest of trees which were actually tree structures. Great, a programmer who thinks that the pun is the highest form of humor. But it made Mark's work a little easier. He touched the bole of each tree he passed, and the labeling glowed through the bark, showing names and intake dates. The most recent ones were closest to the wall. Mark found the one that matched the time period that went with 'Dawson's' back story, three months old, then poked the. tree with one finger, and said to it, 'Down.'

Obligingly it sank into the ground like an elevator until Mark said, 'Stop.' He found the 'D' branch and reached under the 'cloak of invisibility' for what he had brought with him, the file confirming Leif's backstory. Right now this was still shaped like a manila file folder, but Mark looked at all the other files hanging off this branch of the tree structure, and grinned, for they were all in the shape of leaves. He twiddled the file in his hands, and it changed shape, shrank, went small and green and pointy, like all the other leaves. With care he held the file near the branch. A bare twig grew out to it, met the leaf, joined onto it. Mark took his hand away, and the leaf held.

And then he heard the voices…

Ohmigod, Mark thought.

'Up!' he whispered. The tree shot back up to its original level, almost dislodging Mark as he scrambled further up it like a panicked squirrel, hiding himself away up in the leafy branches, well above the dates involved in 'Dawson' 's records. There he crouched on a high branch, as close to the trunk as he could get, and held very still.

Underneath him and not far away the fire died down, and two men in armor of the kind mistakenly called 'chain mail' came stalking through it. They both had helmets on, hiding their features. These were symbols for 'seeming' programs which were running concurrently with the 'armor' routines that were protecting them from the fire. Inside job, thought Mark immediately. Crap! Someone inside Breathing Space had freely given them access to this data.

'Do you know where it is?' one of the men was saying.

'Are you kidding? Week in, week out I am in here… I know the place entirely too well. Right, here we are.' The armored figure reached out and poked the trunk of the tree Mark was hiding in. 'Down-'

Down it went, so that Mark's poor stomach complained bitterly, and he clutched the trunk and tried to keep absolutely still and silent. 'Let's see now,' said the man, feeling along the branches of the tree no more than six feet under him, while Mark urged him silently, Don't look up, don 9t look up…

'Aha,' the man said, 'here we are.' He reached to the leaf which Mark had placed there only a few seconds before, and plucked it.

'Reading mode,' he said.

A text window appeared in the air near him, and the man turned to it and began to read. 'Yes, yes,' he said as he read.'… Yes, all very unfortunate…' He made a couple of tsk, tsk noises as he read. Then he stood there, silent.

'So?' the other man said. 'What's the problem? We have to get going, we have his interview shortly.'

'I wonder if we should,' the first man said.

'Why? What's the matter?'

'The date stamp on this file is wrong,' said one of them.

A cold chill went right through Mark. 'What?'

'Look at this,' the man said. 'The file was accessed only this afternoon. Only a couple of hours ago, in fact.'

'So?'

'So why would it be? Why would anyone access this particular file at this particular moment in time?'

'Good question. Routine reevaluation?'

'Hmm…'

Mark swallowed, trying to do it quietly, and nonetheless convinced that the entire planet could hear him.

'Three months after intake date.'

'See, there you are. Routine.'

'I don't know… '

'You're too suspicious. Come on.'

'I stay free by being too suspicious. No… for me, this clinches it. Let him go, I don't want him.'

'Isn't there a better way?'

'Such as?'

'Send him out, get some work out of him, and then lose him.'

'Oh, like this last one.'

'Yes.'

A long pause. 'It would teach them not to try planting anyone on us, wouldn't it.' Then that man laughed softly. 'All right. We'll 4hire' him… but his employment will be brief.'

'Plants, though,' said the other man.'… Now there's a nasty thought.'

'Oh? What?'

'That last one, the blond boy. If this one is a plant… that one could be, too.'

The first man laughed out loud. 'Him? You're kidding. He barely knows what's happening to him. That's what you said made him so perfect for the present job.'

'Yes, I know. All the same…'

'Oh, come on, forget it! He's history now anyway, or about to be so. Stop worrying and come on. We don't want to keep our new 'employee' waiting.'

'Where were you thinking of sending him?'

'That cash drop. Kiev.'

'You really don't want to pay them, do you?'

'Increasingly, no. What better way to avoid it than to have someone kill the courier, and then claim thieves did it? And over there, it's the perfect excuse. They're all the time stealing from each other, that lot. We get the money back, though they don't know that; we set them at odds against each other, which can only be good for us. And we also avoid having to close a deal that was going sour anyway. Gangsters, the whole lot of them. I hate giving them good money that they don't even know how to launder properly anymore.'

'Well, yes. Cash is tight all over'

They walked away, casually chatting about the murder of other human beings, and Mark hid there up in the branches of the tree structure and shook with rage, most specifically because it had never occurred to him that this was a place where it would have been a good idea for him to have been 'wired for sound.' What he had just heard would have been enough to put these men away without Leif ever having had to take his meeting at all. And now it was lost, evidence that could only be given as his word against theirs…

Mark let out a long breath, waiting to see the fire spring up again, a sign that they were gone. Then, 'Down,' he said to the tree, 'slowly.' It obeyed him, and he headed for the firewall himself, intent, whatever happened, on not missing the meeting that would follow…

You're going to come to no good end, was one of the lines that Burt always heard from his father. Well, now it looked likely enough that the old man was going to be right, and that left Burt absolutely infuriated. He had been right, and Burt had been wrong, for all Burt's natural life; and now Burt was going to be dead, and his father was still going to be right. It was too much to bear.

'You never could think worth a lick,' he heard his father saying. 'Never think things through. Just go charging in, don't get your story straight, don't have a clue what's happening until it starts happening. And then it's too late, because the ones who've done the thinking have already outthought you. Why didn't I get a dog and shoot the dog?'

Burt was going alternately hot and cold with rage at the familiar words, and at how for once they seemed