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.
“Please, please, please,” she said. He had her cornered in the small bathroom. He was twisting the cap.
“I hate these fucking childproof caps,” he said.
He opened the bottle and spilled the pills out into one huge hand. She hit his open hand and knocked the pills all over and she shoved him against the toilet. She had the strength because she was so afraid; she could have lifted a car. He struck his head on the edge of the shower door. He shook his head and he was bleeding.
Kay was out of the room and running toward the front door. She opened the door and ran to the fire stairs at the end of the corridor. The place was full of electrical hums and the rush of wind against the building twenty-nine floors above the ground.
He was slow, but when he got to the hall he started to run.
She pushed open the green fire door and the door resisted a moment because of the change in pressure between the concrete stairwell and the corridor.
Her robe was open and the cord trailed behind her. She ran down the stairs on slippered feet. The stairs above her rang with the sound of his large feet. She ran down and down and down and it was like falling. The numbers of the floors were painted on the doors at each floor. Down and down, her legs without any feeling, her breath coming in great, panicked sobs.
She pushed the door that said Lobby and ran into the world. The doorman was schmoozing with the cop who came around every night because he had a girlfriend in the studio condo on the nineteenth floor. The cop was big and good-looking the way young cops are before they drink too much or get too cynical about the job. He was only twenty-six but he thought he had seen it all, the crazies and weirds and winos and killers in the alleys. Now this, a crazy broad running into the lobby with her bathrobe practically falling off her so that you could see her tits.
“Someone is after me, someone coming to kill me.”
The doorman turned more slowly. He hated to be interrupted when he was bullshitting the young cop.
The big man was right behind her and grabbed her as if he were merely annoyed.
“The fuck you running for?” It was as though they were the only two people in the world. “The fuck you making it hard on yourself?”
The doorman said, “Hey, man, what you doin’?” It was something he was used to saying. He acted like he owned the building sometimes. He didn’t even look at the cop, who was taking a step toward the big man. The big man had a knife now and everyone saw it: Kay Davis, the doorman, the cop. The knife filled the lobby.
“Don’t!” she screamed.
But he was going to stick her and he pulled the knife back so that he had room to swing it into her body. He held her by the neck, like a chicken.
The cop moved the way he moved when he was playing football. You don’t even think about it, about the pain, the guy slicing off tackle toward you, the way you’re going to be hit in a few seconds. You just see your body moving through spaces that open for you. That is the way he pulled the .357 Smith & Wesson Police Special, pulled it easy off his belt and aimed and fired without even thinking about it. If he had thought about it, Kay Davis would have had a knife between her breasts. That’s what they all said later. The kid didn’t know how easy it was going to be.
The gunshot blasted the lobby to silence. It was shocking to hear a pistol shot in the context of the lobby. A cabbie leaned on his horn on State Street to make a bus move. It didn’t work.
The big man didn’t really hear the sound. The bullet was between those two eyes set so wide apart. Kay saw the dirty hole in his head a moment before he keeled over.
“I want to make this absolutely clear,” Hanley said in a sly voice.
Mrs. Neumann said, “Of course.”
“Stowe sent a blip an hour ago and we’ve just ironed it out,” he said.
The “blip” was a microwave signal sent in the clear from Brussels, bounced off a satellite and picked up by the Section receiving station near Indian Head, Maryland, about twenty-two miles south of Washington. Indian Head actually housed the U.S. Naval Propellant Plant, which was a top-secret base used by the four armed services for training of Explosive Ordnance Disposal experts — bomb squad people. But because the base was so vast and so secret, the government had appropriated other land near it along the Potomac River that was used for odd service needs — including the power-receiving and — transmission system used by R Section.
The “blip” had been.02 seconds in transmission and contained 623 digital sequences, which were “ironed out” through a complex reverse microprocessor that elongated the signal to its normal length and then translated the code.
“There is a private contractor involved and he has made contact with the Opposition concerning the sale of certain ‘damaged goods,’ ” Hanley said. He frowned, remembering the arch way that Stowe had put it in the “blip.” Stowe was of the old school and he thought spies were better spies if they could whisper without moving their lips and if they spoke in such a roundabout way that no one — not even the person they were talking to — could understand what they really meant. He was a maddening man, Hanley thought, not for the first time. “I don’t know what Stowe means by damaged goods and there’s no point right now in asking for a clear signal. Time is the problem. Prague was contacted from Brussels two days ago by the private contractor. And Prague is on the move, we’ve monitored their embassy in Brussels constantly and it’s a regular little anthill the past two days. We presume Prague — or, I should say, Stowe in Eurodesk presumes Prague — has agreed to the terms of the sale.”
“What about our man?” Mrs. Neumann said. It was ten minutes to midnight in Washington. The eerie red “eyes” of the Washington Monument — aircraft-warning lights — blinked incessantly above the city. The streets were lined with painted trees and orange anti-crime lampposts. National Airport was shut down for the night and all was deep, silent, clear, save for the faraway wail of an ambulance.
Hanley got up from the chair and went to the window and looked down at the deserted quiet of Fourteenth Street.
“There is no mention of him. There is something else.”
Mrs. Neumann waited.
Hanley cleared his throat. He remembered very well the matter on St. Michel of a couple of years ago. It had been a personal thing at the end and he did not approve of that. Section was impersonal, it was a tool of the government. There was no place in Section for personal feuds. Except that time Devereaux had had the say of how the thing would be handled.
“The private contractor has a face,” Hanley said. “Stowe really performed for us in the end.” He said it with wonder. “He had a right to have his nose out of joint, we went out of channels with Devereaux to bring Miki out. But Stowe worked it hard and he has a face. It’s one we know.”
He described Colonel Ready to her. Of course, Mrs. Neumann had been in Computer Analysis then — CompAn — but she had been his confidante then and not his superior. She knew about Colonel Ready and the business on St. Michel that had nearly cost Devereaux and Rita Macklin their lives.
“We should…” She hesitated.
“We should watch and wait and do nothing and let him come out more into the light,” Hanley said. He knew the procedure.
“But Rita Macklin. She’s in Brussels. We should—”
“We should do nothing,” Hanley said. “Ready is the target now. He is the private contractor and somehow he managed to penetrate security and hit our train. So he has Devereaux and Miki and he is apparently dealing Miki back to Prague. We can accept our losses.”
Mrs. Neumann’s hoarse whisper startled him. “Dammit, man, we’re talking about our own man in there.”