"And as for being on the side of good-"
"Stop before you say something more incriminating than anything you've said so far," Winters said. "Which, admittedly, would take some doing. Remember, the Surete are only a virtmail away.. and there's a standing one hundred thousand Euro reward for turning in a cyberbur- glar in France. Comes to quite a chunk in dollars, at the moment. Don't tempt me. My back porch needs fixing."
Mark stood there and said nothing, looking extremely glum.
"So as regards your part in all this," Winters said, "the initial surveillance you did was, as usual, highly effective. Megan attached a copy. I watched it all. Very incriminating. Very promising. And totally inadmissible as evidence due to the illegal way in which it was acquired… and also inadmissible without a search warrant, which we are now going to have to get busy acquiring so that the next set of evidence also is not contaminated. I'll handle that end of things." He glanced at Leif. "You're still waiting for your notification of the time and 'place' of the next interview, I take it."
" 'Around the same time today,' they said. Nothing more specific."
"It'll do," Winters said. "I'll instruct the system to fast- track any message from you to me immediately, whatever I'm doing, as this whole business is very time-sensitive. I want to hear about this next meeting thirty seconds after you do, from inside Breathing Space's virtual environment if necessary… there are ways to pass the information that won't compromise you. We'll work something out. Mark, have you planted the necessary backup files to substantiate Leif's claim?"
"Uh, not all of them."
"What??"
"I was working on it earlier, by my dad came in and threw me off the machine. He needed it for business," Mark said, rather plaintively. "And anyway, I was having trouble… that's why it took so long to get started in the first place. The Breathing Space client data files are better protected than the virtual space is-a lot better. I think somebody screwed up over there."
"I wouldn't throw rocks if I were you," Winters said. "Get back online and deal with it. I'll have the Paris bureau deliver you another set of Net server hardware pronto, so you won't be interrupted; and I'll speak to your dad. What's your room number?"
"I don't know if it has a number. It's the Presidential Suite."
Winters smiled slightly. "Ah, the privileges of rank. How often during this stay has your dad actually been in that suite, though? Poor guy. Mark, why are you still standing here? Go get on with it, and hurry up! There's no telling what records the Recruiters are pawing through at the moment, and you need to be there first!" He cocked an ear at the empty air, and added, "The Paris bureau chief says that in ten minutes there'll be someone coming down in the elevator with one of the new Force Nine portable setups." Mark's eyes widened. "Don't let your father steal it. And don yt break the chair!"
Mark turned and vanished hurriedly, looking both harried and very relieved. Winters turned to Megan and Leif, who had been watching all this a little wide-eyed. "Don't mistake what you're seeing," Winters said. "I know I'm hard on him, but he's in a unique position, and his folks are busy.. and they're friends of mine. Heaven forbid he should get messed up because somebody didn't spend enough of the right kind of time with him. But that's what this is all about, isn't it?"
They nodded.
"All right," he said. "Good job, you two. Go get hold of your parents, get things sorted out. Have them call me if there are any questions. I'll be right here… I have about twenty things to organize and we can't move until they're all in place. So your recommendations are accepted in full… God help us. Now get going!"
They went.
Schiphol Airport outside Amsterdam had once been a relatively small place, built after the war, reclaimed from the sea like so much other polder, and named for the medieval and Viking ships that they had found there, on the old sea bed, when they walled in the area and pumped it dry. Now a replica of at least one of those ships stood in the middle of the new Arrivals Hall built ten years ago-lean, mean and rakish, sail down but her oars all out, and the dragon prow very pointedly facing the "wrong" way, toward the sea and the outside world. But there was some appropriateness in that, since the Duty-Free area, now more than half the size of the whole airport area, had been relieving foreigners of their money as assiduously as the Vikings ever had, for many years-and with this difference, that mostly the foreigners turned their money over, not just willingly, but gladly.
Burt wandered through the Duty Free area with his eyes wide. It was acres and acres of polished white marble and granite flooring, a space that made you swear you could see the curvature of the Earth, and the whole thing dotted and scattered with shops selling everything you could think of. That was what Schiphol's main Duty Free Sales area was about. Once it had been a little thing, barely a twinkle in the airport designers' eyes. But over the last half a century it had grown like a very lucrative fungus, spreading itself over many hectares of airport, so that the actual ticketing concourses and arrival and landing gates were now like mere tendrils and fringes around the body of a large beached beast swollen with much cash.
Burt had at first thought that it was a pretty raw deal to have to do what his instructions entailed-which was to go to Amsterdam, get off the plane, stay for a night in the airport hotel without leaving the area, and then the next morning, having made his drop and a reciprocal pickup, get right on the plane and go straight home again. My first time out, he'd thought, and what do I get to see? Nothing! Not a damn thing. This realization, as he looked sleepily out the window that morning-gazing for the first time the end of hours of ocean against a strange new coastline-had so soured Burt's mood that the approach to Dutch passport and control and customs, which would normally have made him appropriately first-time nervous, now merely made him want to snarl. In that he was exactly like about nine-tenths of the other passengers getting off the KLM red-eye flight out of Reagan International, and possibly for that reason Customs paid Burt almost no attention at all, past waving him through the "blue channel" with barely a glance or two.
Burt had gone gladly enough to the hotel and had had a hot shower, and then had fallen gratefully into bed, getting the sleep which he had not been able to get on the plane due to a mixture of excitement, nervousness, and a seemingly never-ending background of crying-baby sound effects. When he woke up, and realized that it was about five in the afternoon Dutch time, and he couldn't leave the hotel, then he really began to be annoyed. There was, however, nothing he could do about it. He wouldn't be paid for this work until he got home; he only had enough credit on the debit card they had given him to pay for meals and some drinks and his hotel room. He didn't even have enough credit to pay for a Net call home… not at the rates they charged here. The rates posted on the very basic little Net cubicle across from the shower room had made him blanch, even after he did the Euro-to-dollar conversion. Burt had been entertaining the idea of how much fun it would be to call Wilma from a public booth, from Amsterdam, both to let her know he was okay, and to completely astonish her. They had used to talk together about how much fun it would be to go overseas. Neither of them had ever envisaged being able to do it any time soon. But here I ami Burt thought.
For all the good it does me. I can't go see anything worth seeing. This is a waste of time…
Still.. there was the money to think of. He thought about it, and watched the local TV news in the cubicle, becoming increasingly fascinated by how strangely like English Dutch sounded sometimes. He looked at various other entertainment channels available, including one pay- per-view channel which caused him to turn so red with astonishment and embarrassment that he actually bolted the Net cubicle. Apparently the Dutch were amazingly liberal about some intrapersonal relationships… And finally, after going down to the hotel's twenty-four hour cafe and having a big plate of a smoky sausage called "rookworst" and a Coke, he had given up and gone back upstairs to sleep again. His plane back to Reagan was at lunchtime the next day. He would go to the airport early, he decided. It had to be more interesting than the hotel.