"William Gibson - Spook Country" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

Hollis guessed it was.

She sat up, a very high thread count sliding to her thighs. Outside, wind found her windows from a new
angle. They thrummed scarily. Any very pronounced weather, here, worried her. It got written up, she
knew, in the next dayтАЩs papers, like some lesser species of earthquake. Fifteen minutes of rain and the
lower reaches of the Beverly Center pancaked; house-sized boulders coasted majestically down hillsides,
into busy intersections. SheтАЩd been here for that, once.

She got out of bed and crossed to the window, hoping she wouldnтАЩt step on the robot. She fumbled for
the cord that opened the heavy white drapes. Six floors below, she saw the palms along Sunset thrashing,
like dancers miming the final throes of some sci-fi plague. Three-ten on a Wednesday morning and this
wind seemed to have the Strip utterly deserted.

DonтАЩt think, she advised herself. DonтАЩt check your e-mail. Get up and go into the bathroom.

Fifteen minutes later, having done the best she could with all that had never been quite right, she
descended to the lobby in a Philippe Starck elevator, determined to pay its particulars as little attention as
possible. SheтАЩd once read an article about Starck that said the designer owned an oyster farm where
only perfectly square oysters were grown, in specially fabricated steel frames.

The doors slid open on an expanse of pale wood. The Platonic ideal of a small oriental carpet was
projected across part of this from somewhere overhead, stylized squiggles of light recalling slightly less
stylized squiggles of dyed wool. Originally intended, she remembered having been told, to avoid
offending Allah. She crossed this quickly, heading for the entrance doors.
As she opened one of these, into the weird moving warmth of the wind, a Mondrian security man was
looking at her, one ear Bluetoothed beneath the shaven cliff of a military haircut. He asked her something,
but it was swallowed by a sudden down-drafting gust. тАЬNo,тАЭ she said, assuming heтАЩd asked if she
wanted her car brought up, not that she had one, or if she wanted a cab. There was a cab, she saw, the
driver reclining behind the wheel, possibly asleep, dreaming perhaps of the fields of Azerbaijan. She
passed it, a weird exuberance rising in her as the wind, so wild and strangely random, surged along
Sunset, from the direction of Tower Records, like the back-draft from something straining for takeoff.

She thought she heard the security man call to her, but then her Adidas found actual unstyled Sunset
sidewalk, a pointillist abstract in blackened chewing gum. The monster open-doors statuary of the
Mondrian was behind her now, and she was zipping up her hoodie. Heading, it felt, not so much in the
direction of the Standard as simply outward bound.

The air was full of the dry and stinging detritus of the palms.

You are, she told herself, crazy. But that seemed for the moment abundantly okay, even though she knew
that this was not a salubrious stretch for any woman, particularly alone. Nor for any pedestrian, this time
of the morning. Yet this weather, this moment of anomalous L.A. climate, seemed to have swept any
usual sense of threat aside. The street was as empty as that moment in the film just prior to GodzillaтАЩs first
footfall. Palms straining, the very air shuddering, and Hollis, now hooded blackly, striding determinedly
on. Sheets of newspaper and handouts from clubs tumbled past her ankles.

A police car whizzed past, headed in the direction of Tower. Its driver, slumped resolutely behind the
wheel, paid her no attention. To serve, she remembered, and protect. The wind reversed giddily,
whipping her hood back and performing an instant redo on her hair. Which was in need of one anyway,
she reminded herself.