"Baker, Kage - Company 4 The Graveyard Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baker Kage)

"What are you, nuts?" Joseph's eyes widened as he opened their beers. "But isn't this a great place to talk in private? Can you imagine any Company operative coming in here for any reason at all? Get a load of this." He jabbed with a chopstick between two of the bricks in the bare wall; ancient mortar trickled down like fine sand. "Any quake over 6.2 and, boyЧ"
"Don't." Lewis closed his eyes,
"Hey, it's okay. Next big one isn't scheduled forЧ" Joseph looked at his chronometer. "Well, a while, anyway. So, what did you want to talk about?" He lifted his bottle and drank.
Lewis drew a deep breath. "You know I was posted to the Laurel Canyon HQ back in '65."
"The Mount Olympus place?" Joseph frowned. "That's the one that monitors the Lookout Mountain Drive anomaly, huh? It's a full-service HQ now?"
"Budget reasons," Lewis said.
Joseph sighed and shook his head. "Jesus. One of these days that whole place will get sucked into some black hole, you know? So, what happened? Was there a disturbance?"
"Yes, apparently, though it was over by the time I got there," said Lewis. He wondered how to tell Joseph what he had to say next. Finally, he just said it. "Joseph, I saw Mendoza."
He wasn't prepared for the reaction. Something flared for a moment in Joseph's eyes, then burned out as fast as it had appeared. He lifted his beer and took another swallow. "Really?" he said casually. "No kidding? How's she doing these days?"
"What do you mean, how's she doing these days?" gasped Lewis, staring at him.
Joseph looked for a long moment into Lewis's white face. "Oh," he said. He set the beer down carefully. He put his head in his hands.
"You mean you didn't know?" Lewis was horrified. "I'd have thought you of all people would have been notified!"
"Yes and no," said Joseph in a muffled voice.
"All these years I thought you knew." Lewis sagged back in his chair. "My God. I was never officially notified myself, I came across the partial transcript in my case officer's files."
"What happened to her?" Joseph lifted his face. His eyes were cold now. "You tell me. I'd rather hear it from you."
"She was arrested," Lewis said. "And . . . retired from active duty. Joseph, I'm sorry, I never thoughtЧ"
"Arrested? What the hell did she do? When was this?"
"1863. She was stationed in Los Angeles, andЧ"
"L.A.?" Joseph said. "They sent her down there? What did they do that for? She was in the Ventana, she was okay. Nothing grows in Los Angeles! Nothing natural, anyhow."
"Well, things used to, before the 1863 drought. There's that temperate belt, remember? She was stationed in the old Cahuenga Pass HQ."
"Bleeding Jesus!"
"Well, she was doing all right. Apparently. She'd completed her mission and everything, but . . . From what I can tell, the job ended, and she wasn't reassigned anywhere else." Lewis swallowed hard. "You know how layovers can be."
Joseph nodded. "If trouble's going to happen, it happens on a layover. Every time. Some goddam idiot of a posting officer . . . Tell me the rest."
Lewis wrung his hands. "I'm not clear on the details. As far as I could make out, somehow everybody was away from the HQ one day except for Mendoza and a junior operative. And . . . a mortal came to the station while the boy was in the field. She, er, ran off with the mortal. Deserted."
"With a mortal?" Joseph stared. "But she couldn't stand being around mortals! Not sinceЧ" He halted. "Who was this guy? Did anybody find out?"
"Oh, yes, the boy testified. It was his testimony transcript I saw, actually. The mortal seems to have been one of those Englishmen their foreign office sent out back then to court the Confederacy." Lewis stopped. Joseph had gone a nasty putty color under his tan.
"You did say Englishman, right?"
"I know. Bad luck, wasn't it? After what happened to her in England all that time before." Lewis shook his head. "Maybe the coincidenceЧI don't know. But it ended rather quickly. And unpleasantly. The Englishman died, I know that much."
"You're sure about that," said Joseph.
"WellЧyes."
"What did they do with her? Where did they send her?" Joseph asked.
Lewis made a sad gesture, turning his empty palms up on the table.
"But you said you saw her!"
Lewis nodded. "I told you there was a disturbance. It was in 1862, before the incident happened. She and a fellow operative went into Laurel Canyon hunting for specimens. I don't know what could have possessed them to do it, but they rode up to Lookout Mountain Drive. And somehow or other the temporal wave sucked them forward, into 1996."
"Forward." Joseph gaped at him. "No, that's nuts, you must have misunderstood. We can't go forward. They must have been pulled from 2062. You heard wrong."
"Joseph, I saw them," said Lewis quietly. "They were wearing nineteenth-century clothes. They'd been riding horses, even the horses had been pulled along with them!"
"ButЧ" Joseph was too stunned to continue.
"I got there just as they were being sent back," Lewis explained. "They were already in the transcendence chamber. And I saw her there, and I justЧ" He paused. "I tried to warn her about what she was going to do. I had to! And she couldn't understand me through the glass, she just stood there looking bewildered." He had to stop.
Joseph reached out and patted his arm. "It was a good try. There'll be trouble over that, though, you know."
"Oh, it's not that bad," Lewis said. "My case officer and I get along. I think I smoothed it over. It's not as though it did any good." He laughed bitterly. "History cannot be changed."
"Watch out, all the same." Joseph was still puzzled. He looked sharply at Lewis. "When did all this happen?"
"Yesterday afternoon."
"The place must be swarming with techs trying to find out how it happened. How'd you get away?"
"Well, I had business up here anyway and I thoughtЧI thought you knew about her, you see, so you might have an idea where she's being kept. It was one thing to learn about her arrest and feel awful for years, but then to see her! Suddenly I just couldn't stand it anymore. As for how it happened, well, isn't it obvious?"
"No. Would you mind letting me in on the little secret?" said Joseph harshly. "Because inЧwhat, twenty-odd thousand years of going around the block?Чthis is the first time I've ever heard of anybody defying the laws of temporal physics!"
Lewis looked at him miserably. "It was Mendoza, Joseph. She'd become a Crome generator. She set off the temporal wave. You didn't know that either?"
Joseph was silent for about thirty seconds. Then, moving too quickly for mortal sight, he leaped to his feet and hurled his beer bottle across the room. It smashed against the brick wall. The waiter looked at him reproachfully.
"Let's get out of here," croaked Joseph. "I need to do myself some damage." He pulled out his wallet and withdrew a fifty-dollar bill, which he thrust at the waiter as he shouldered past him. He ran clattering down the stairs, Lewis following him closely.
The waiter thrust the money into his pocket and, sighing, got a couple of paper napkins from the cutlery stand. Careful not to step in the broken glass with his bare foot, he crouched to shove it all together in a small pile between the two napkins. He scraped up as much as he could into the napkins. Looking around, he finally dropped them down the dumbwaiter shaft. The rest he pushed up against the baseboard, into a spacious crack there. Wiping his hands on his apron, he put on his sock and shoe again and limped downstairs. His corns hurt.
***