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.
“Is he dead?” she said.
“I don’t know. No one knows.”
Her sob surprised her.
She put down the glass and got up. She sobbed again, deep inside her chest, and groaned. He got up as well, put out his hand.
She went past him into the kitchen and opened the small refrigerator. He kept a bottle of Finlandia in the freezer: He did this, he did that, he had his secret ways, and in their lives together she had gradually discovered each way and treasured it as a souvenir of the times when he was not there.
“If he’s not dead, he’s alive someplace. Is he hurt?”
“No one knows anything. It happened less than forty-eight hours ago.”
She poured the thickened chilled vodka into a glass and took the draught like medicine. And then she began to cry, holding the glass in her hand.
David Mason stepped into the kitchen and took the glass out of her hand.
She let herself cry in his arms. She cried because he was from Section and Section would always send around a man and would try to tell the woman or the child or the aged father that, well, something had happened. No, we couldn’t go into it exactly, but it was a mission on behalf of the country and your son, your husband, your father showed the highest degree of duty and honor.…
“Is that why they sent you, to tell me that something happened but you don’t know what happened?” She pushed herself away from him and tightened the belt on her robe. “That’s stupid. That’s really stupid.” She bit her lip. “Show me something, show me who you are.”
He took out his card and showed it to her. She turned it over in her hand. It was a hard piece of plastic with a color photograph of David Mason, estimator of the Field Investigation division of the Department of Agriculture of the United States of America.
“Nobody admits anything, even at the end,” she said. “He said there was no Section, no Hanley, no operations division, no company… none of it existed if you pressed anyone on the matter. But he told me,” she said. She said the last words with defiance.
“I knew him,” he said, regretting the tense. “He recruited me.”
“He didn’t mention you. Not ever.”
Perhaps the disappointment in his face pleased her. She wanted to hurt someone who could be hurt. She felt very bad.
“I’m not really supposed to tell you anything,” he began.
“Then don’t tell me. He never told me. Sometimes he told me after it was over, sometimes when it couldn’t be avoided—”
“—He had a train. He was taking someone across—”
“—never say anything directly. The place might be wired. Talk in washrooms with the water running—”
“It was the night before last. In Zeebrugge—”
She wasn’t looking at him. “He got the call in the middle of the night. He got dressed in the dark. I didn’t ask him where he was going because he would never say. He said he didn’t know what it was until they told him. He took his passport and the pistol, he took some money—”
“He was set up,” David Mason said.
For the first time, she noticed everything about him. His voice was soft, drawling, but she couldn’t catch the accent. His eyes were lazy and watching and everything about him was uncoiled, restful. His hands were very large.
“He took the passenger to Zeebrugge and that’s where they disappeared. I went down there. There were machine-gun casings in the gutter and shattered glass, the kind they use in auto windows. I sent that to the desk in Brussels, they’ll ship it to D.C., get a make on the car if they can.”
“So he might be dead but you don’t have the body.”
He waited a moment but she didn’t want to speak again.
“Well, he might be dead,” Mason said.
“Fuck all you spooks to hell,” she said.
“Two years ago, I was coming out of a liquor store over the Line and he was in the parking lot with a lady and an old guy, all bent up, and he was stealing my car. A ’seventy-three Rambler. It was comical. Can you imagine stealing a Rambler? I just stood there and asked him what he was doing and he said, very cool, ‘Stealing your car.’ Then he said he’d return it. I got it back a couple of weeks later and this guy was sent and he said he was told to offer me a job. I didn’t even know what it was all about, I didn’t even know what Devereaux was. And the old man, I didn’t know who he was. That’s the way it works, they never tell you anything. They say it’s about security but I figure that’s just bullshit. But it’s a job and that’s something I haven’t had much luck in getting.”
“He never mentioned you,” she said again but now she was sorry she’d said it. His voice was easy. She felt hurt inside but his voice was easy on her. There wasn’t any pressure at all.
“See, they figure he’s hit and that’s why they sent me. To tell you. I never did one of these things before, I didn’t know what it would be like. I took the train from Brussels, changed at Geneva. I thought about what you would look like. I was trying to see what you would look like because I knew him. Actually, I just saw him that one time, stealing the Rambler. Damn. I liked him. He was about the first sonofabitch I ever met since my old man died that I figured knew what the hell he was doing. Everybody else is just faking it, but he knew what the hell he was doing.”
She felt tears again and she saw the man was not as easy as he looked, that there was something coiled inside that loose exterior after all.
“I don’t figure he’s hit,” David said, veering the words easily the way a sailboat tacks against a light wind on Lac Léman below the town. She felt the words rushing past her and she and Devereaux were in a boat on the lake, pulling for the French side, talking about nothing except the wine and the fried perch for lunch.…
“If he’s hit, there’s no reason to remove the body. The Belgian police don’t care that much and Section isn’t ever going to explain what this was about. Hanley said they might have thrown him in the sea but he’s never seen Zeebrugge. The sea builds in, the sea is always pounding in, you have to get out a ways to get the tow. I talked to a couple of seamen from the ferries… I don’t think he was hit.”
Where is he? she said but there was no voice.
“They’ll look into it the way they look into it. A lot of running around and then they figure they’ve looked enough. I’m supposed to tell you what I told you and a lot less than I told you. I’m going back to Brussels. It all started in Brussels.”
“Who was he taking across?”
“I don’t know.”
“Or you won’t tell me.”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you. But I don’t know. Everything is in a compartment, you know the way it works.”
“Spies. Games. The old booga-booga. He called it the old booga-booga, a couple of kids trying to scare the hell out of each other.”
He smiled. When he smiled, he didn’t look as young because the smile had sad edges. “There’s someone in Brussels now, taking a look, but he was sent over from Eurodesk and they don’t have their hearts in it and—”
“I don’t understand.”
“Devereaux,” he said, surprised. “The matter was too simple for Section to call in someone like Devereaux. So it must have been out of channels and now Section has to depend on channels to find their missing agent. No one is going to look very hard.”
“God damn them,” she said. “I’ll find him. To hell with Section, I’ll find him.”
“I want to find him, too,” he said.
She stared at him. Her eyes were fierce, and in the morning light she took on the look of some predator.