"Steven Gould - Jumper 02 - Reflex" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gould Stephen Jay)

I jumped?

I jumped.

I jumped!

Immediately on the other side of the barrier one of the diners, a woman, was staring at her with
her mouth open, a glass of water lifted halfway off the table, but frozen. Her companion, a man facing
away from Millie, was saying, "What's the matter, Paula. You look like you'd seen a ghost."

Millie tried to reassure her with a smile but she was still shaky and the expression on her face felt
strange. Apparently it looked strange, too, for the woman flinched and dropped her glass on the floor.
It wasn't a loud noise among the din of the diners but the Monk turned his head just as Millie turned
back to check on him.

His eyes widened slightly and he turned back away from her, casually. "Would you give my best
to Portia and the gang and tell her I can't wait to see her?" He listened for a second. "That's right." He
was walking away as he talked, moving across the concourse toward the gift shop.

Millie fought back an urge to plant her toe firmly up his ass and turned, walking as quickly as she
could toward the West Building. If she understood the Monk's conversation, there wasn't anybody
covering this end of the concourse. Well, not yet. There might be someone running across, at the Mall
level, right now.

She paused at the end of the shop, just before she turned right toward the stairs. The Monk had
turned and was walking briskly after her, still back by the restaurant, but closing. He was talking on
the phone again.

She ran up the stairs but shied away from the door at the top. It was straight across to the East
Building and she could see a figure sprinting toward this door but still quite a ways away. She ducked
into the gallery at the top of the stairs and stopped, unable to move, before Whistler's The White
Girl.

"Oh my God." She said it out loud. The girl, clad in a long white gown and standing on a wolf
skin, was life size, the painting itself almost seven feet tall. White drapes behind, shining with light, an
oriental carpet below the wolf skin. The woman's eyes, her dark brows, her dark brown hair, and red
lips stood out against a sea of varying hues of white conveying a surprising amount of detail, but the
thing that stopped Millie in her tracks, that captured all of her attention, was her stillness. Not an
artificial stillness, but a calm stance.
 Serenity. She's serene.

She wasn't running away from strangers. Whatever she was doing, she was facing it calmly, with
poise.

I can do this. She reached into her blouse and pulled out the tracking bug. Since talking to
Sojee she'd disabled the microphone pickup but now she slid the back off and pushed the slide switch
to its full-function position.

There was a museum guard standing at the entrance to the next gallery, but she was watching a
group of children instead of Millie. Millie turned and said conversationally, "I'm being tailed, guys, and,