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.
“He’s dead,” Hanley said. “If we had any doubt, we can’t have any now. That’s Colonel Ready whom Stowe described. Ready is dealing Miki back to Prague. Ready has him, so Ready has Devereaux. So Devereaux is dead.”
“But he might be—”
“Devereaux is dead,” Hanley said. “It doesn’t really matter if he’s temporarily breathing. He’s out of the picture, Mrs. N. We take our losses but we look for our opportunity. Stowe identifies the man we’re looking for, the man who wrecked the train. We don’t know where he’s run to ground yet or where he is keeping Miki. We watch and wait. Stowe’s a good man. Let the thing go on the way it is. We can’t interfere with fate. Warn off Rita Macklin and what will happen? Can we trust her not to blow up that St. Michel business and make Section look bad? Can we trust her at all? It’s not as though we had an official secrets act to sign. She’s a goddamn reporter, Mrs. N. Her loyalty is to Devereaux. And we know there can’t be a Devereaux anymore, not once Ready got him. Tell her that and she won’t have any loyalty left, and that doesn’t get us Ready and it doesn’t get us closer to cutting our losses.”
“Mason. Mason is with her. He’s one of ours.” She said it without any tone in the whisper. The urgency had gone out of her voice. Hanley was laying the cards down, one at a time, and turning them over. Tarot cards: This was the hanged man, this was the sailor torn from the sea. This one was dead, this one was waiting to die.
“Mason has to be careful,” Hanley said. He said it in such a neutral voice. He was under control and he passed the calm across the desk to Mrs. Neumann. This is the way it is, he was saying: This is a world of losses, little advantages, small victories, and minor defeats, gray mixed in gray, reports filed today to be forgotten tomorrow. Agents moved in dangerous worlds because it had always been so. “Mason is a neophyte but he’s had his training, he has to be careful.”
“If she gets on Ready’s trail, Ready will get her,” Mrs. Neumann said. She thought she was weak to say it; she was showing a loyalty to her sex that Hanley would see as weakness.
“Perhaps Stowe will get Ready first,” Hanley said, turning another card over.
Mrs. Neumann stared at the words like the face of a card. It was the card of the drowning sailor.
14
Devereaux’s mouth was thick with thirst. He felt his cracked lips with his dry tongue. The pain in his left leg throbbed gently, reminding him he was alive. He had slept and now his eyes were open and he stared into the darkness of the room. He could see light from the window.
They had taken him out of the broken chair and left him on the bare floor. Because he could not eat with his hands behind his back, they cuffed his arms in front — but they chained his right leg to a small radiator pipe that ran along the wall. He tried to pull that cuff off or render the pipe from the wall but it was no good. He had eaten the crusty bread and drunk water from a bowl. But the water was all gone now and it was dark again and the house had been empty a long time.
Devereaux slept from time to time.
He dreamed of Rita Macklin. He saw her for a moment apart from him and then saw her beneath him, felt her body open, make its demand, insist upon him. He could hear her voice in his dream, smell her, make love to her. The last surprised him. When he made love to her in his dream, it was so good and real that when he awoke and he was still in darkness and pain, it seemed the darkness was the dream and that the lovemaking was the real side of consciousness.
In his dream, she smelled like flowers. She was innocent, thoughtful, staring away from him in a May field in the mountains above the town. The town was Lausanne in one part of the dream and it was Front Royal, Virginia, in another part, the part where they were in the cabin on the Virginia hill and it was before the time the two killers had come for them. The time before innocence ended.
He touched her and she turned to him and changed. Her open, green eyes became dark with lust. He touched her and she touched him back, she opened her mouth to taste his mouth and fell against him with her mouth working against his mouth, kissing and tasting each other with lips and tongues, and then she put her hands on his belly and he rolled with her in the field of flowers, hidden by the tall grass all around them. He opened her legs with his hands and felt her wanting to be opened, felt her hands now on his back, his buttocks, pulling him toward her.
He awoke and it was darkness and pain. He groaned, felt the familiar sickness in his bowels. Everything was the way Ready said it would be. The only thing he could do for himself was to kill himself before they squeezed everything out of him. He couldn’t even save Rita Macklin when Ready came after her.
“Are you still alive then?”
Devereaux tried to speak but he had no voice left. The dryness had taken it.
“You want some water?”
He had dreamed of water. He kept his head still now. He wanted to say: Yes, please give me water. Please, please, please. He wanted to beg for water. But a strong rational part of him had thought of Lubyanka, the dread prison that was part of KGB headquarters in Moscow. A part of him thought he wanted Lubyanka less than he wanted water. Even Ready could make a miscalculation about the water. He could die in a day or two and it would be over.
“Why don’t you speak? Can’t you speak?”
He closed his eyes and the man came near to him in the darkness and peered at his face.
“Hey. Are you dead?”
Devereaux opened his eyes. It was the big one called Damon, the one who had hit him in the cellar with a pistol. Damon squatted down and stared at him.
“You aren’t dead,” Damon said. He held his hand up to Devereaux’s nose to feel the breath.
Devereaux grabbed the hand with both manacled hands and twisted and the fulcrum moved the world. The big man cried out, twisted, fell to the floor on his back and Devereaux reached over his head and pulled back. The big man elbowed him in the belly. Devereaux grunted, pulled the chain taut against the big man’s neck. For one moment, the big man fought with his body. In the next moment, the big man grabbed for the chain because the life breath was going out of him and his head was about to explode. His eyes bulged out of their sockets and his tongue protruded. He made a gagging noise over and over and his lungs pumped up and down but there was no breath.
Devereaux closed his eyes to feel better the life going out of the other man. He bunched his shoulder muscles and pulled back and the big man stopped struggling. The big man was dead.
When Devereaux opened his eyes, sweat blinded them. He reached up and released the corpse and the big man’s head slammed on the floor. His eyes were open and his tongue lolled out of his mouth. Devereaux felt the pockets and found the keys. He opened the handcuffs. He found the small pistol in the right-hand pocket and opened it. It was some sort of cheap French make with five shots. He put the pistol in his pocket and tried to get up.
The left leg hurt like hell. He braced himself against the wall and rose up. When he was on his feet, he tested the left leg. He could stand on it but the pain made him wince when he lurched along the wall.
Devereaux went to the window and stared out at the night. There was a canal outside the window and all the houses were old and very beautiful. He had never been in this place and he tried to guess where it was. Below the window, the cobblestoned street was empty.
Devereaux got to the door and down the stairs slowly. No one else was in the house. When he moved, he swung his left leg out stiffly, like an old man.
Adrenaline gave him more strength than he thought he had. For the first time, he thought he had a chance. He took the pistol out of his pocket, checked the action, waited at the front door.