“Niko—” she said.
This time there was something almost deliberate about the way he responded. “Yes.”
“You look completely wrecked,” Maj said.
He stared at her…and his face sagged, as if being confronted with his own weariness made it all right to reveal it. “Yes,” he said. “Tired, you mean?”
“Tired, yes. Wasted. Utterly paved. Do you want to take a nap? Get some rest, I mean?”
“For a while,” he said, “I would not mind.”
“Have your coffee, first. There’s no rush. You’re—” She stopped herself, for her intention had been to say, You’re safe here. Then she realized that she had no idea why she was going to say it. Except that he had been carrying himself very much like someone who was not safe, someone who was seriously afraid.
Time to get this sorted out, Maj thought.
“You’re among family,” she said. “You don’t have to sit up and be polite around us. You’re jet-lagged, you look like you could use some rest. You rest as much as you want. When you feel like getting up, get up. Maybe later this evening. I have some Net stuff to do…. If you want to come along, you’d be welcome.”
I can’t believe I’m saying this, she thought. But he needs a friend right now, poor kid…and virtuality is one thing, but reality is another. Reality takes precedence.
At the mention of the Net, his eyes lit up. “I would like that,” he said. “Very much!”
“Yeah,” Maj said. “Look, take your coffee with you…go on, get your rest. I’ll wake you up around five, and you can come see what I’m up to. It’s pretty neat.”
He nodded and got up with his coffee cup. “It was the fourth room down?”
“Fourth room down. If the Muffin tries to bother you, just throw her out.”
“She would not bother me,” he said, and grinned briefly, and just for the moment looked much less tired. “She is very — cute?”
“Cute. You got that right,” Maj said. “Welcome to America, kiddo. Go get some sleep.”
He vanished down the hall. Maj waited about fifteen minutes, and then went to find her father.
3
Major Arni would really have preferred to handle this meeting as a phone call, or virtually. But she could not, for Ernd Bioru outranked her considerably — not in straightforward military rank, which she could have dealt with, but in the shadowy and uncomfortable outranking which a very few politicians held over her department — and if he demanded an in-person meeting, he would expect his request, or rather order, to be dealt with instantly.
She stood there in the big plush office full of expensive furniture and watercolors waiting for Bioru to look up, and fumed at being treated like a piece of furniture herself. Unfortunately there was nothing she could do about it. The minister for internal defense had Cluj’s ear, and a whisper in that particular appendage could land you in all kinds of uncomfortable or permanent places if you weren’t careful. Inwardly, she scorned Bioru, for he had opted out of the working ranks of the intelligence service early, choosing instead to go abroad on diplomatic duties — achieving status by subtle means rather than by the overt hard work and slow climb through the ranks which the major considered the approved manner. Outwardly, though, she kept her manner toward Bioru correct and a touch subservient. It was safer to do so at the moment. In a year, two years, five, things might change, and an officer who had kept her mouth shut and done her work properly might yet see this upstart thrown out on his own ear. Cluj was well known in the upper reaches of government to be a volatile man, and even those who thought they best knew his mind and could “manage” him had received some savage surprises, just in these last few years. But for now—
Now she looked at this short, slight, dark little man in his fancy charcoal-gray foreign suit and cursed him in her mind as he sat there reading his paperwork, page by deliberate page, and not looking up, just making her stand there. Finally he put the papers aside, sat back in his big comfortable chair, and looked at her. His was one of those bland faces, for all the sharpness of the bone structure. There was no telling what was going on inside that smooth regard — approval or rage — and no way to anticipate which way he would jump. That immobile face made the blue eyes look curiously flat, like a shark’s.
For all his diplomatic service, there was nothing of the diplomat about Bioru at the moment. “Major,” he said, “where is the boy?”
“Sir, he is in a private home in the Alexandria area. As far as we can tell, the man holding him is an old scholastic associate of the father.”
He drummed his fingers on the expensive desk. “‘As far as you can tell’?” he said. “This kind of vagueness sorts oddly with your reputation for precision and effectiveness, Major.”
“Unfortunately the spaceplane was diverted due to a mechanical fault,” Major Arni said, wondering one more time exactly how likely that was with a machine as carefully serviced as spaceplanes were, especially the hybrids. “Our operative had been at Baltimore-Washington, and we were unable to get an operative to Dulles in time to do a more effective intercept. Not that the security systems in operation would have made a straight ‘lift’ of the boy possible at that time.”
“Considering the case in hand, you should have had someone at all that area’s airports.”
“Budget limitations do not permit us such latitude, sir,” she said. “I am sorry.”
There it was, she had had to say it. Now all she could do was wonder how he would take it.
To the major’s amazement, Bioru let it pass. “As long as you know where the boy is now.”
“We were able to determine that immediately from the local traffic computers,” the major said, “to which the DC area police have access. Fortunately we have a source in the police force. Such personnel are chronically underpaid, and usually do not look carefully at where their data goes after they allow it to be leaked.”
He nodded at that, turned over another page. “Just in a private house, though, you say.”
“Yes, sir. In the suburbs. We are running a background check on the father at the moment. There are some connections which are not immediately analyzable, but that is understandable, when a background in political science is involved. The mother and the rest of the family are of no interest.”
“You have someone doing surveillance at the house now?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is it someone you trust?”
She swallowed. “For the moment.”
Bioru looked up sharply, held her gaze for a moment. “Surely you’re not angling for an assignment over there for yourself,” he said.
“I have the language skills, granted,” said the major, “but I have more pressing matters occupying me here.”
“Such as?”
She knew an incoming rebuke when she saw it, and understood the message that nothing was more important than this was at the moment, at least to this man. “Sir,” she said, “I am entirely at your disposal in this regard.” Then she immediately became sorry she had used the word “disposal.”
“Huh,” Bioru said, a noncommittal sound, and turned his attention back to his papers, turned a couple of them over. “It says here that work has begun on questioning the father’s immediate associates,” he said. “‘Equivocal results,’ it says here.”
“The associates are—”
“One of them is dead,” Bioru said. “I would not normally call that ‘equivocal.’ What kind of bunglers are you employing over there?”
“Sir, we can be as conscientious as anyone would wish—”
“Not so much so as I would wish, plainly.”