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 justified. He sat there in the departure lounge which had been assigned to his KLM flight, and twitched. The passengers' baggage had already been X-rayed and metal detection done at the entry to the Duty-Free area. At least Burt was in no imminent danger of being caught with this stuff on him. But shortly they would get on the plane, and in seven hours they would be back in the States, and Burt would get off the plane and be caught with this stuff…
You never could think worth a lick.
Burt sat there and burned hot with rage. Why me? Why are they doing this? I was doing what I was told.
Plainly they counted on me to do as I was told.
But why? Why hire a courier and then throw him away after he's done what he was supposed to do?
Burt stared out the plate-glass window revealing the broad expanse of Schiphol Airport, all that green grass under a blue sky, all incredibly flat. Why-
He could just see himself getting off at Reagan, going through customs. And then getting caught. There would be a big deaclass="underline" look at this, look what we found in this kid's luggage. All the faces turned accusingly toward him, all the eyes staring-
And then, as he saw the eyes, as the sweat of humiliation and fear broke out on him again, Burt also saw something else. The eyes, the attention… and someone else slipping away in the middle of it all.
I'm not the important one on this plane! I'm just a distraction!
Someone else here has something much more important than I've got. They're going to get through when I don't
Suddenly it was obvious. If Burt got caught, then whoever was on the plane and was carrying something much more important, much more valuable or more seriously contraband, would slip on by, be out, be gone, while Burt was still being strip-searched and flashrayed and probably just about turned inside out. Whoever this person was would have to be carrying the stuff in their cabin baggage, or on their person. They couldn't afford to have to wait to claim their luggage. It would be someone who only had carry-on.
Burt looked at his fellow passengers in near-despair. He didn't have any baggage to check, himself, and so hadn't had to stand in line at check-in and see who had checked their baggage in and who hadn't. And everyone here had some kind of carry-on with them. It was hopeless….
Hopeless. And frustrating, knowing that right here with him, one of these people had something really illegal or dangerous, and they were going to use Burt to cover their escape, and get him caught instead.