Runaways

outlived its usefulness. Certainly for you. Take him and his friends away, boys and girls… '

The Net Force operatives closed in around Vaud: a moment later they all vanished together.

James Winters turned to where Megan and Leif were standing, as the operatives dispersed. 'We got a clean line on where they were 'physically' during this little visit,' he said. 'Three locations: Prague, Helsinki, and New York. Tessin there was right around the block from your dad's corporate headquarters,' he said to Leif, 'not too far from Wall Street. That wants to be looked into.'

Then he grinned rather ferally. 'Nice job, though,' Winters said. 'Nice work, both of you. Though you turned a few of my hairs gray when you upped the price, Leif.'

'Why do a deal right away?' Leif said. 'I had something they wanted. And besides, it would have made me look too eager.'

'Yes, well,' said Winters, bending a slightly more severe regard on Leif. 'You should talkSo all right, maybe it was allowable as protective coloration, seeing what everybody else was wearing. Just this once. Now take those off… until you're entitled to them.'

Obediently enough, though with a touch of regret, Leif vanished his Net Force uniform, going back to polo shirt and jeans, and saw Megan revert the seeming of her clothes to the more normal sweatshirt and day tights that she had been wearing.

'But what about my friend?' she said, losing her brief smile. 'What about Burt?'

'We have a couple of guesses where he is at the moment,' Winters said, and smiled again. 'We'll confirm them if we can with Mr. Vaud. I think he's likely to prove talkative enough. So let's get on with business… '

The process of getting off the plane seemed to take forever. It was amazing how long people could take just to get their bags together and walk off a plane without getting in each others' way.

Into the crowd of people standing around the baggage claim area, surrounding one of the carousels, came stumbling a tired looking young blond man carrying an overnight bag. His stance and gait suggested that he was desperately weary. He was, having been thinking with desperate speed for the last seven hours… but he wasn't tired enough so to make him stagger. Ahead of him, the man in the trench coat was stuck in a tangle of luggage carts behind some people who were trying to reorganize their bags on those carts, while waiting in line at the exit to drop off their customs declarations with the U. S. Customs people at the desks between them and the exit doors. Burt came slowly along behind the man in the leather trench coat, though not too slowly, and yawning.

Without looking at Burt, but as if he knew he was there, the man speeded up a little, as if trying to make it up to one of the Customs desks before Burt. The guys at the desks were looking at the people they were then dealing with. Not one of them, as far as he could tell, had even seen Burt yet, and they were not noticing what was happening behind the people right in front of them.

Burt stood there, wobbled, swayed… and fainted.

Or at least it looked that way. He simply pitched himself forward, not trying to catch himself with his arms at all, and plowed right into the man. Burt had played enough football in his life to make sure that his weight hit the guy right in that spot in the small of the back where it's almost impossible for the unfortunate person tackled to save themselves from falling. They either go down or hurt their back real badly in trying to prevent it. The guy started to go down, and now came the tough part, as Burt fell down on top of him, twisting rightward and sideways as he went, pushing the bag rightward, sideways, and most important, under… so that when they finally finished falling, the overnighter was mostly under the guy, and his briefcase had gone skidding right across the floor.

That got the attention of the Customs guys. The two of them who were processing people directly in front of Burt and his target looked up. The Customs agent immediately to their right, who had just finished dealing with somebody, now came around from behind his desk at the sound of the exclamations of the passengers behind them and the sight of Burt falling. He helped Burt up.

'Oh, he dropped his bag,' Burt said. 'I'm sorry, mister, look, there's your bag-' And he pointed to the overnighter, which was mostly under the man in the trench coat.

'That's not mine,' the man was saying, shaken, 'that's not my bag, where's my-'

And it was immediately obvious why he might have said something like that, for the overnighter's zipper had been open when Burt dropped it; and protruding from it now, sticking partway out of its jiffy bag, was an object which could not possibly have been mistaken for anything but a large rectangular lump of brown stuff with a texture like that of a good fudge brownie.

Now Burt stood there brushing himself off, and wondered in sheer terror whether this was going to get him in even more trouble. After he had decided to try his chances at changing the situation he was stuck in, and had decided on a plan, he had spent an uneasy few minutes in the one of the airplane's toilets with the overnighter- using one of the disposable, thin plastic toilet-seat shields to cover his hands while he wiggled the contents of the jiffy bag halfway out of it. He didn't know if he had contaminated himself again in the process. All he had thought at the time was that he was going to be in trouble no matter what happened, and it would be stupid not to try to alter the situation a little in his favor.

But now the Customs agents had the bag with the drugs in it, and were peering into it in greatly increased interest; and to Burt's utter astonishment, the man in the leather trench coat actually tried to push one of the agents away and run out through the door into the arrivals hall. The Customs agent grabbed him, and was joined a moment later by another one.

The passengers all around stared at this. And suddenly there now seemed to be about twenty Customs agents concentrated in a relatively small area. Where did they all come from? Burt wondered.

One of the Customs people, glancing around, said, 'Okay, folks, come on, give us your cards and go on ahead… ' And several others of them led the man in the brown trench coat away into a small side room. One of them, holding the overnighter in rubber gloves, followed them.

Burt stared at this, too; then, as unobtrusively as he could, he attached himself to the confused family who were going past the desks now, the ones with all the baggage. They had several older sons, and some of these guys were passing in separate declaration cards for themselves. So Burt simply went in last after the third son, and passed his card in, too, as if the bags that went with it were on one of the carts. The agent who was taking the cards now just stamped Burt's and waved him on through, her attention rather more focused on the door through which her colleagues had taken the man in the brown trench coat.

Burt was shaking harder now, and hoping it didn't show, expecting every second that somebody was going to say 'Wait a minute, kid' from behind him. But no one did. That was nice, but it was not the end of his troubles. For just past the Customs area door, probably, was the person to whom he was supposed to pass on his package… the package Burt didn't have any more. They would be waiting for him… and Burt was sure that when the man in the brown trench coat didn't come out, that other person would almost certainly figure out what had happened… and would not feel very kindly toward Burt. I have to get away. But where…? How?…

He brushed blindly through the crowd of taxi drivers and car-service people who were standing outside the Customs area, holding signs, some paper and some electronic, on which appeared the names of passengers who had yet to come through. Burt didn't stop, and didn't look at any of them, for any of them could be his pickup, the person he now desperately didn't want to meet. No one followed him right away. But this was no consolation. It was still hopeless. He had no money left. There was nowhere for Burt to go.

Except the one place they didn't expect he would be likely to go, under any circumstances, considering that Burt was a runaway…

He hurried across the arrivals concourse to where there was a line of public-access Net booths. The first one he came to was engaged. Burt gulped and went on to the next one, and the next, and the next, and they were all engaged. There were footsteps coming fast behind him, but he didn't look back at the source of them, he didn't dare. Never look back, they might be catching up. The next one was occupied. And the next. Oh, come on, what are all you people doing on the Net, don't you have lives! Burt thought, and put his hand on the last one-

AVAILABLE, read the little green glowing sign over the door.

He threw himself into it, shut himself in, and threw the lock. There he stood trembling, half-waiting for someone to start banging on the door.

'Megan,' he breathed. She was a Net Force Explorer. He had teased her about it enough times in the past. Now maybe it would come to something. He felt around in his pocket for his local-access comms chip-it seemed about a hundred years since he'd stuffed it into his pocket on leaving home-and threw it down on the booth's reader plate.

Everything went white as the Booth's Net hardware locked on to his implant and pulled him into synch.