"Rob Grant - Colony" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Rob)

Maybe a hardcore gambler could convince himself he could ride that tide. But
Eddie's not even a softcore gambler. In the pornographic scale gamblers seem to
measure each other by, Eddie's not even the swimwear edition of Sports Illustrated.
He's an accountant. He can work out the odds. He can't help himself.
Forty-six thousand, six hundred and fifty-six to oneтАж
That's what it will take to turn this sweaty gaming chip into the two and a quarter
million he owes to people who would break all of his ribs one at a time with a toffee
hammer for a handful of change.
Face it, Eddie: it's not going to happen.
Who's he trying to kid with this positivity nonsense? Good things like that hardly
ever happen to truly lucky people. And Eddie? Eddie isn't even partially lucky. The
only time Fate gives Eddie anything good is so Luck has something juicy to whisk
away from under his nose just as he's reaching out to grab it.
He opens his mouth to sigh, and his tongue actually makes a Velcro ripping
sound as it tears clear of the roof of his arid mouth. He tastes his own blood. He
imagines he'll be tasting a lot more of it before the morning. Plenty of that particular
delicacy coming his way. A few pints he'll quaff. Well, on the bright side, it should
help to ease the passage of his smashed teeth down his stomped gullet, and take
away the taste of leather toecap.
He's startled by a long creaking noise that sounds like a deck shrinking in
equatorial heat on a doldrums-bound ship. It's his stomach.
He looks down at the doomed street again. He starts to count people who are
laughing. He gives up when it starts to become clear that absolutely everyone is
laughing. Every single member of the crowd below is giggling, chuckling or
guffawing with that unbridled delight normally only enjoyed by children, the freshly
in love, and undeserving movie award winners.
It seems everyone, everywhere is relishing life and having fun, except for Eddie
O'Hare, who will never smile again.
Because he owes two and a quarter million toтАж
ToтАж
His reflection looks back at him from the blue smoked glass. A sad ghost full of
pity for a soon to be sad ghost. The spectre shakes its head in sympathetic disbelief.
The cruel twist is: it's not Eddie's fault that he's living this nightmare. He didn't
actually do anything wrong. He didn't actually steal from the people he can't bring
himself to name in his thoughts.
The money was stolen by a computer. Not a hacker. Not a living-flesh human
trickster using superior technical skills to break through firewalls within firewalls,
hack through uncrackable chains of encrypted passwords, and bypass the most
sophisticated alarm system in security history. It was stolen from Eddie's computer
by Eddie's computer.
Eddie doesn't have any idea where the money went. One nanosecond it was there,
the next it wasn't. No sign the system had been accessed from the outside. The
computer just up and disappeared the money. And for reasons currently
unfathomable to Eddie, it left behind an electronic trail that led to him.
He's been framed for a non-existent crime by a mass of wires and hot electrical
circuits.
Now, you try explaining that to theтАж to those kind of people.
No. Eddie was left with just two alternatives: somehow replace the money before
it was missed, or spend the rest of eternity as a small portion of the foundations of
some unfinished hotel no one would ever check into, with ice picks lodged in his