"3 Star Brothers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bova Ben)

But Baker was muttering, "We all work for Vanguard, dearie. You, me, An Lmh, everybody They own us all."

Ignoring his implications, Dr. Lucacs tried to get the conversation back on subject. "How well did you know Dr. Stoner?"

"Not well. But too well, if you get my meaning."

"I'm sorry?" She shook her head.

Baker gulped the rest of the cognac in his glass, then leaned his head back as if inspecting the high ceiling with its slowly-turning fans.

"I knew him well enough to damned near get killed," he said, bitter anger in his voice. "I knew him well enough to get kidnapped and tortured. Too damned well."

She said nothing, but glanced at the purse in her lap where a miniaturized tape recorder was hidden.

"You don't know about Stoner, not really." Baker hunched forward in his chair, leaning both arms heavily on the table and bringing his face close enough to hers so that she could smell the liquor on his breath.

"He's not human. He can see right through you and make you do things you don't want to do. I saw him make a bloke go blind, just while we were sitting at the dinner table. Made his eyes bleed, for chrissakes! Drove him dotty." His words were blurring together now, coming out in a half-drunken rush, frenzied, urgent. "He turned the owner of Vanguard Industries into a basket case just by saying a few words to him. He never sleeps! He spent months with An Lmh in Africa and never touched her--for sex, I mean. I think he can walk through walls if he wants to. He's not human, not human at all!"

Dr. Lucacs's tawny eyes were glittering. "He spent several years aboard the alien spacecraft," she whispered, almost to herself.

"That's right. He was frozen up there in space, and when they brought him back to Earth it was another ten years or more before they figured out how to thaw him and bring him back to life."

"And no other human being has ever been thawed successfully and revived."

"Because he ain't human," Baker insisted. "While he was in that alien spaceship, I think they grew a clone of him or something. He's just not human. A human being can't do the things he can do!"

"He won't let me examine him," Dr. Lucacs said.

"'Course not. Then you'd find out what he really is."

"But I have all his medical records from the Vanguard Research Labs, where he was revived, fifteen years ago. They are the records of a normal human being."

"Faked."

"They match his earlier records, from the years before he went into space."

"Faked, I tell you."

She looked doubtful. "Why would . . ."

"Don't be a naive fool!" Baker snapped. "He's the property of Vanguard Industries, the most powerful corporation on this planet, for god's sake! He married the corporation president . "

"Ms. Camerata? I didn't know that."

"Don't you see? He's secretly controlling the biggest corporation on Earth. Through her. He killed off her first husband and set himself up in his place. He paid off An Lmh with Global Communications and stuck me with this bloody IIA "

She looked surprised. "But I thought that you were the chairman of International Investment Agency."

"Sure I am!" Baker made a sound halfway between a laugh and a snort. "It's like being the mascot of a rugby team. You get treated well and everybody admires you. But they don't take you very seriously, do they?"