"Trevor, Elleston as Hall, Adam - Quiller 03 - The Striker Portfolio 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hall Adam)

'Waring is due back.' He looked at me instead of the picture.

'There was nothing doing in Munich. That was as good as leave.'

'Not quite Paris, is it?'

'This aeroplane,' I said.

'It isn't for you.'

'Why not?'

'You're a shadow executive.'

He turned away.

'Why was I sent there?'

To observe.'

'Well I did.'

'But you didn't observe anything. It just fell down, so you said. We wanted to know why.' He was staring out of the window at the winter sky.

The portfolio on his desk had a word on the cover.

'That's all I saw. You read my report. It just came down like a ton of bricks.'

The word on the cover was Striker.

'Quite.'

'Look, is it because I mucked up the Bangkok thing?'

'I don't think you mucked it up, did you?' He turned round again and I could watch his face, the mask with the colourless holes. 'We're giving this one to Waring.'

'Why him? He doesn't know anything about aeroplanes. He doesn't know which end the flint goes in.'

Parkis stood very still. 'It's not really about aeroplanes.'

I was getting fed up. 'You send me out to a precise map reference just in time to fetch a Striker SK-6 on top of my head and now you say it's nothing to do with aeroplanes.'

The thing that nettled me was that I wanted to know something and I couldn't ask him. He'd sent me to observe a Striker crash that he'd known was going to happen, even to the time and the place. I wanted to ask him how he'd known.

'Not really,' he said.

I tried an oblique level. 'You wanted confirmation.'

'We have to put someone on it.'