"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 11 - Dimension of Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

more or less at the mercy of the whims of several million pounds' worth of electronic wizardry. Blade had
never been very good at sitting and waiting. He had forced himself to have some tolerance for it;
otherwise he wouldn't have lasted very long as an agent. But he knew that he would always be happier in
the middle of the action. He would have a real problem of adjustment the dayтАФa good many years off,
the doctors told himтАФwhen declining physical powers would force him to the sidelines for good.
Blade spent the next twenty-four hours in no particularly useful way. He scrounged dinner, reducing
the kitchen to chaos again. He dipped into books from his increasingly well stocked shelves, slept, and
scrounged breakfast.
It was a damp, chilly morning, the kind that makes one wonder whether spring is real or just a story
to encourage children, when Blade climbed into a taxi and gave the driver directions for
theTowerofLondon . He took no equipment, because so far he had arrived in each new dimension naked
as the day he was born. Now if Lord Leighton really wanted to do something useful, Blade thought, he
could put his mind to work on a method for sending some gear through the computer. The computer had
dropped Blade smack in the middle of battles more than once, and he would much rather have something
besides his sheer strength and unarmed combat skills to rely on in a situation like that. A gun would be
risky, of course. The current passing through his body might affect the cartridges. But a survival suit with
built-in flotation and fragmentation protection, a couple of fighting knives, some emergency rations тАж
Blade went on mentally listing the items for an ideal Dimension X survival kit and became so involved in
the task that the driver had to announce their arrival at the tower three times before Blade heard him.
Neither Lord Leighton nor J was at the surface entrance to the complex. There was only the quartet
of sober-garbed and even more sober-faced Special Branch men, who emerged from the shadows and
took position around Blade as carefully as if he had been the crown jewels ofEngland . Then they asked
for his identity card. They would have done that even if they had recognized his face, and they probably
did not. The Special Branch men who provided the above-ground security for the project served only a
single one-year tour, then returned to regular duties, forever bound by the Official Secrets Act as tightly
as Blade himself.
Blade wondered at times what impressions the security men or the scientific and technical experts on
the staff might have formed about the project, impressions that might be dragged out of them by a
sufficiently comprehensive interrogation. It might be a good idea to have one or two of the men
interrogated, just to check. Unless J had already had that done? Blade grinned. He would have been very
surprised if J hadn't already thought of the same thing. And if he had thought of it, he would have had it
done. The head of MI6 had a reputation for covering all his bets. That reputation went back to his work
in the First World War, long before Blade was even born. Blade knew that the old spymaster would
leave nothing undone to guard the project. And also to guard Blade, whom he loved like the son he had
never had.
When the elevator had dropped two hundred feet to the level of the complex and the heavy bronzed
doors had slid noiselessly open, J was waiting for him. They walked through the long corridors, with the
subdued lights gleaming on polished stone and metal, to the entrance of the computer rooms. There were
sounds of human activityтАФvoices, the clatter of a typewriter, the whine of a recording deviceтАФfrom
behind the closed doors of the corridor, but there was not a living soul in the corridor itself. No human
guards were needed down here. Each step of Blade's and J's progress, each passage through a door,
was monitored by electronic devices that represented the latest in Ministry of Defense design. The
devices never slept, never got tired, and could never be bribed or blackmailed, even if they might be
jammed.
The computer rooms were a complex within a complex, a series of linked chambers hewn from the
solid rock. But most of that rock was hidden behind the looming bulks of the computer consoles and
auxiliary equipment. From the sullen gray faces of the computers, covered in a crackled plastic finish that
made them look diseased, a fantasy of multicolored lights flickered and winked down at Blade. He found
the computer rooms the only part of the whole underground establishment that really oppressed him, but
he had never had to spend enough time there for them to really bother him.