The Infant of Prague
- Автор: Granger Bill
- Серия: November Man #8
- Год: 1987
- Язык: французский
- Год: Warner
- ISBN: 0446347809
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «The Infant of Prague». Краткое содержание книги:
For in a humble Chicago parish church, the sacred statue of the Infant of Prague is found weeping real tears. A visiting Czech child star actress, transfigured by the wondrous event, declares, on live television, her intent to remain in American in the name of Christ and freedom.
Only an operative as cynical and seasoned as the November Man can sense the sinister link between two dramatic, yet apparently unrelated defections. A miracle has plunged him into a vast global adventure. And it will take a miracle to get him through it alive.
The defection of a highly visible Czech sparks an international crisis, and the November Man is caught in the middle.
Zeebrugge was an ugly village with a few shuttered cafés and hotels near the main harbor entrance. In the Middle Ages, the sea had come to Bruges fifteen kilometers away. Over the centuries it had brought silt and sand and rocks to the coast and the land extended more and more out into the sea, so that Zeebrugge became the new port and Bruges, lovely and old, became a place for the past.
“This is the place? What do we do now, take a ferryboat to England?” Miki smiled. He was very relaxed now and he spoke to Devereaux as though he were talking to a friend.
Devereaux stared out to sea. The sea was as black as the sky. The sands snaked from the beach across the road and piled up against the fences around the summer homes.
“What do you do?” he asked the driver.
“Make the signal. Three times. I’m supposed to go down the beach a little ways. You gentlemen are to wait up here.”
“Why?”
“Sir, I don’t ask those questions. That’s what I was told to do.”
Devereaux got out of the car and Miki scrambled across the leather seat to follow him. Devereaux felt the chill pluck at his face. The wind cut at him.
Miki shivered immediately. “Damned cold, damned cold,” he said in English.
The Mercedes growled into gear down the street. The two men looked around them for shelter. There was the shuttered café across the road, but the wind was roaring straight at it. Perhaps in the lee of the harbor wall.
Devereaux saw the Mercedes turn to face the sea. He saw the signal. He stared out to sea and saw the answering signal at last. Then it was all right after all, he thought. For the first time, he let the pistol slip into his pocket and he took out his hand.
Miki turned from the wind and tried to light a cigarette. He saw it first.
He cried out and Devereaux turned and then he too saw the Mercedes bearing down on them. The big car was moving very fast.
Miki began to run across the street toward the café buildings.
Devereaux, alone on the sand, pulled the pistol from his raincoat pocket and fired. The bullet went high and he fired again.
The car nearly nicked him as it skidded on the sand and the brake lights flashed on.
Devereaux had leaped aside. Now he was on his knees in the sand, bringing the Python up in both hands, firing.
The glass shattered in the rear window.
Devereaux looked around for Miki and saw the two men emerge from the gangway between two buildings. They carried boxy Uzis in their hands and they were firing.
Devereaux shouted “Miki!” once and then returned the fire.
The one on the left went down hard, while the spray of machine-gun bullets plowed up the sand in front of the kneeling American agent.
Devereaux fired on until the hammer sounded hollow on a spent chamber. He pulled the Spanish knockoff out of his other pocket and fired at the man by the café door. And he saw the man had stopped firing and was grinning at him.
He saw the horrible grin.
Everything had been a setup, he thought.
And did not see the Mercedes backing up wildly in the sand toward the sea, the rear wheels spinning furiously. He did not even feel the impact when two tons of German steel caught him sideways and flipped his body up above the car and back toward the sand. Did not feel pain, thought, regret: only saw the face of the other man who had stopped firing, saw the familiar leering grin, saw what it had all meant in that final moment of life as he fell through a childhood nightmare without any sound but his own muffled scream.
4
Big Ben Herguth was. He wore size 52 jackets and 46 slacks. The slacks came in at $650; he picked up his clothes at a place in Palm Springs. He was always brown from the sun, even in the rainy season of Los Angeles. The other thing about him was that his eyes were flat and dead.
“I don’t know what the connect is, Julie,” he said. He rolled the cigar next to his unoccupied ear. The other held the receiver of a white Prince Oleg Cassini telephone. He had his boxy Sunset Strip office redecorated every year by the same decorator. He liked change but not too much change. There had been too much change the last couple of days.
“You want to know what I think, I think there is a connection because that is the way the G works. Remember all that shit about how Reagan was giving money to fucking Iran to get some hostages out, and then it was being ripped off two ways and going back to the contras? You come to me with that bullshit for a script and I tell you to walk. I mean, William Goldman couldn’t make shit out of an idea like that. It just happened to be true though. So yes, I definitely think there is something going on between the fucking CIA and that little bitch in Chicago who decides to defect, and I think there is some shit going on by coincidence with the CIA and our old friend Miki, who disappears Wednesday night in Brussels. You fucking-A-do, I think that.”
Ben Herguth listened then. Julie talked in a soft voice all the time. He had soft hands. He would probably live to be a hundred, which was a lot longer than Ben Herguth figured he would last, but what the hell, Ben had fun. Julie never seemed to have fun. Except for the little girls and that was not Ben’s cup of tea, but Julie was Julie and he was the most important man in Ben Herguth’s large and important life.
Julie was saying, “The first priority is Miki. Find out who took him and why. We got a lot invested here, Ben. We don’t need a double cross from some cowboy at Central Intelligence.”
“I still say we end-run them,” Ben Herguth said. “This is all connected to that little girl in Chi. She musta been some kinda connection. A movie star, for Christ’s sake, tell me that Miki didn’t know who she is. This is some setup, and when the G starts setting you up, it’s always some fantastic plot idea like this that nobody would believe in the first place. But why would they want Miki and why would they want to put the screws to us?”
“The reporter at the O and O in Chicago. Kay Davis,” Julie said. “I wish I had never heard of her. Apparently, she has an in with the girl. And the girl’s attorney.”
“I looked her up with some of my friends in the shyster business. Her name is Stephanie Fields, she’s a big do-good civil-rights-type broad. She is complicating it.”
“I think this Kay Davis could work for us if she saw the right way,” Julie said.
“All right, that’s the subtle approach and I take off my hat to you, you always usually make it work. But I think this is a matter of time here. I mean, if the G has got Miki and he’s starting to talk too much—”
“What are they going to do with it? They’re in for a pound as much as a penny.”
“That’s it, Julie. I can’t figure out their angle except they have to have an angle. All I know is fucking Miki goes to the ladies’ can at the city hall place where they was holding this party and he’s got a bimbo with him, he’s going to give her a standup bang in the ladies’ can—”
“Who was it?”
“Nobody with a brain, I checked that out. If she’s working the CIA, then you can sell your savings bonds and start buying Russian. You know who it is, I forget her name, she was in Zapata’s Raiders. She was the one they raped in the convent but not the nun. Sandra something, it’ll come to me. I sent my boy to talk to her and she ain’t hiding nothing, believe me. She just wanted a fuck. So Miki fucks her and stays in the john to take a pee. She goes back to the party and that’s when he got out. The john is on the ground floor. But where did he go then? And who did he go to?”
“What do our friends in Prague say?”