"Simon Ings - Open Veins" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ings Simon)

"She have help?" I asked him.

"What for?"

"The bandages. Retying them can't have been easy."

"You met the Lewises?" he said. "There's nobody else around. If it was anyone it was them."

I remembered, it was Mrs Lewis who had called the police, who in turn had called us. But why had she called the police? Most people find a body they call an ambulance, not a policeman.

The Lewises were somewhere about. I was supposed to introduce myself, but I didn't feel ready. I'd been brought in to reassure this frightened couple, convince them to unsee what they had seen, unhear the things they'd heard, and, if they'd got involved somehow, to tell them it was over; all was fine.

The trouble was, Laura and Peter Lewis weren't frightened.

Each hour she undid the dressing and let out more blood. Had they helped her? If so, why? Until I had those answers, I knew I could not begin to erase what had happened here.

I thought over what I knew. She'd been in the tank. She'd been floating -- "She was plugged in to the hotwire feed when you found her?"

"Yes."

"Doing what?"

"Nobody knows, or if they do nobody wants to say."

Once you're plugged into a hotwire feed you can surf the world: control in real-time the trajectory of a satellite, lower or raise the price of corn on the Nippon Exchange, read teletext in Urdu, or fire an automated gun on the Iran-Iraq border. There's a price tag to this virtual joyride: the surveillance they put you under is hardly less invasive than the surgery. So how had Joanne Rynard slipped our net? Fortunately, that wasn't my problem. My problem was how to erase the evidence.

"And something else." Morley reached into his coat and pulled out a blister-pack. The stiff, clear plastic was heat-sealed around three slender hypodermics, each containing maybe thirty CCs of red liquid. "This was stolen from an army pharmacy three months ago. We found a stash of it beside the tank."

"What is it?"

"Rose Red."

"What's it do?"

"Cripples your immune system."

I stared at the hypodermics. "Well who would want that?"

Morley shrugged and walked off, ramming the packet quickly back into his coat. I realized he had told me things even he was not supposed to know.


I wandered around the base a while, waiting for people to leave.

The site bore little mark of its military past. The hardened bunkers, the offices and barracks, had been ripped out years ago. The radar arrays and satellite dishes had all been dismantled, leaving large, low concrete platforms, their smooth grey surfaces punctuated by rusted spars, irregular brick walls, depressions and score-marks: the tracks and spoor and burrow-mounds of artificial life. The single concrete runway was crazed and weed-lined and there were shreds of cable rotting in the verges.

I was still avoiding the Lewises, and it wasn't easy: their stone cottage was the only house in sight; the only building the army had left standing when they quit. That and the tin hangar.

I tried the hangar door. It was open.