His friends were all betrayed — they could not help him now. And the meaning of the message was clear enough. Come out and give yourself up, and we will spare your son’s life. Keep hiding, and…
Armin stopped rubbing his eyes. All too clearly in memory he could see the slides from the brains of the poor rats who had had the “mistake” happen to them, the ones in whom the microps had run wild for only half a day. That was happening right now, inside his son. It would take longer…but not much longer. They would now be migrating to his spinal column to make their way up through the cerebrospinal fluid into the brain. Once there, they would start pulling the myofibrils apart, chewing away at the myelin that coated and interconnected the brain cells. In eighteen hours, his son would be seriously ill. In twenty-four, he would be on his way to being a vegetable.
All he had to do now, to stop it, was give himself up.
And after that he would be made to re-create his work — especially, he knew, the dark side of it. If he did not, they would threaten Laurent again. Or they would simply kill them both, and hand his work over to someone else to continue. For they had Laurent — and dead or alive, they could be able to get enough information from whichever of his associates had cracked to get the microps out again. After that they would not care what happened to him.
Armin sat there for what seemed an eternity, in the darkness, frozen and trying to think what to do. It was, in reality, about five minutes. There’s no point in fighting any longer, said the back of his mind. They have him. It’s all over now. If you’re going to save him, you must act quickly.
Yet there was still another part of him, stubborn, sullen, angry, which was unwilling to give up while he was still breathing. There was one last chance. Very slim, not likely to do any good…but he had to try it. For Laurent’s sake, as much as for his own.
Armin sighed, reached into the deep pocket in his trousers, and came up with the cell phone.
He had purposely not used the cell phone at all for the last few days, had not even turned it on, because its signal could be all too easily targeted…assuming he was in a location where it would even work. But he had been given a number to call if things went badly wrong, a last-resort number, which he could call once but not again.
This seemed like the time to use it.
Armin thumbed the button to turn it on, and waited.
Waited.
Then, after about ten seconds, during none of which Armin breathed, a single bar of light appeared above the little “antenna” symbol. The phone was close enough to an antenna to successfully dial out.
He hurriedly touched in the quick-dial code for the number programmed into the phone, and put it to his ear.
It rang.
It rang for at least thirty seconds, and Armin hung on, beginning to shake. It was not safe to have the phone active even this long, really, and activating it twice — he didn’t dare. Yet the thought that he would have used it in the first place and possibly caused himself to be found without any success at the reason he used it in the first place—
Someone picked up the phone. “Yes?” said the voice, in English.
He told them who he was, and where he was, all in a quick burst of words; and he told them why he was calling.
“We know,” said the voice on the other end.
“Help me,” was all he could say. “My son…” And he ran out of breath.
“We’ll try,” said the voice. “No guarantees.”
“I know. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank us yet,” said the voice, and hung up.
He stared at the now-mute chunk of plastic and put it back in his pocket, and then breathed out and put his head down on his knees. It was all he could do.
It was all he had time to do…for, in the next breath, he heard them outside, hammering at the old painted-over door with something heavy. He heard the ancient rusty padlock break.
And then with a screech, and another screech, the old doors were levered open, and the light of dawn came flooding in, blinding him. His eyes watered, so that he could barely make out the uniformed shape that came down the stairs, silhouetted against the light. He did not need to see details. He knew who put hands under his arms, who helped him up and walked him, staggering slightly, up the stairs.
It was Death.
8
Maj did not sleep well that night, and she was up unusually early, even for her. What surprised her somewhat, when she pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and meandered into the kitchen for her first cup of tea, was finding her father there before her. He wouldn’t normally have been up for another half hour or so — but here he was, nursing a cup of coffee, cold from the look of it, and wearing an extremely haggard expression.
“Daddy?” she said, starting to go over to the kettle…and then stopping. There was only one thing she could think of which would make him look so bleak. “Did you hear anything?”
He nodded. He looked down the hall first to see who might be there, and then said softly, “I got a call from James Winters about fifteen minutes ago. Their information-service people who listen to the media over there picked up an announcement on the morning news. They’ve arrested Armin Darenko.”
“Oh, no,” Maj said, and forgot about the kettle, and went to sit down at the table — her legs felt weak under her all of a sudden. “Oh, no, it’s not fair—”
“I don’t know that fairness comes into it,” her dad said, looking into the coffee, “but I feel terrible.”
“Oh, you’re not alone,” Maj said. She gulped. “What happens now?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. James didn’t seem to think there was a lot of chance of getting him away from them again. The country is so isolated and so tightly sealed…and just so paranoid…that new people can’t easily blend in. Operatives from any friendly force are very thin on the ground.”
“Will they—” Maj gulped again. It was odd how it was suddenly hard to think. “They’re going to try to do something to Laurent, now, aren’t they.”
“They may have it in mind,” her father said, “but I doubt they’ll get far. The house is being watched twenty-four hours a day, James tells me. Net Force, and others.”
Somehow Maj did not feel particularly relieved. It had seemed to her, though, that there had been rather more cars than usual parked around here the last couple of days. She was almost able to be slightly pleased with herself for having noticed that, even subliminally. Not that there had been people in the cars, either…but that did not mean that they could not have been wired for eighteen different kinds of surveillance.
She sat looking at the table for a moment, and at her hands, folded in front of her, and then looked up again at her father, who was staring unseeing at his coffee cup.
“Daddy,” she said, very slowly, “are you sure they haven’t found a way to do something to Laurent?”
Her father looked at her blankly.
“Is he still sick?”
“Uh, yes,” her father said. “I looked in to see if he wanted to go running…he said no, and turned over. He doesn’t look very well. And frankly, I don’t feel much like running myself, now.”
“Fine…but don’t you think it’s kind of a coincidence that this should have happened to him right now?”
Her father looked at her a little strangely. “Maj, you wouldn’t normally strike me as the conspiracy-theory type. There’s no evidence to support such a conclusion.”
“I know, but—” Maj shook her head. “Dad, he said he started to feel funny while he was online.”
Her father shook his head, too. “Good thing there’s no such thing as a genuine ‘Net virus,’” he said. “I’d hate to think what could happen if there was one. But whatever may be the matter with him, you can’t catch diseases on the Net.”