"Lumley, Brian - E-Branch 3 - Avengers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

For a moment Argyle's mouth fell open in astonishment. This sudden outburst - for all that it was mainly correct - seemed to confirm his original opinion. But since he was here to cater to these people, pander to their needs . . . he gritted his teeth and said, 'Let me assure you, Mr Trask, that I'm only-'

'Don't you go "assuring" us of anything!' The girl standing beside Trask spoke up, narrowing her eyes where she stared into Argyle's face as intensely as Trask himself. 'Mr Trask's right: you've been thinking your nasty, pig-headed thoughts all along. You consider us high-powered, mentally impoverished bureaucrats or something: morbid thrill-seekers swarming around the Mediterranean, who'll eventually report back to our bosses in Whitehall and make out we've actually done something. But at the end of the day it'll be you who gets stuck with the job.'

Argyle frowned back at her, rubbed at his chin awhile, finally grinned wonderingly . . . and genuinely! Both Trask and the girl, they'd come pretty close. 'Actually,' he answered, 'I was thinking you might be Lloyd's underwriters or something. From Mr Trask's expression, I would have guessed he was calculating his personal losses!'

Relaxing a little, Trask shook his head. 'My future losses, possibly . . . and not just mine or Lloyd's but the world's. So let me straighten you out, Commander. We're not the bureaucrats and utter assholes you might think we are. But this time around we are the experts. Yes, there was, and probably still is, a plague here, but it didn't originate in China and it isn't what you've been made to believe. In broad daylight like this -high noon, as it were - it can't do us any harm. The only mistake the Navy made, which in the circumstances was pretty much understandable, even if it wasn't what you'd been advised to do, was to send in that recce chopper in the twilight, after sundown.'

'Would you care to explain?' Argyle had begun to sense something of the other's authority now. Just looking at this man he knew he wasn't exaggerating, waffling, or just plain lying, yet at the same time he wasn't saying too much, either. So what the hell was going on here? What was it all about? 'You see, if you really want me to commit this aircraft, placing the pilot, your people and myself in danger, I really should know what-'

But again Trask cut him off. 'No, you really shouldn't! You see, Commander, even if I were to tell you, it's doubtful you'd believe me -and I certainly wouldn't blame you. But if or when you've seen something of it for yourself . . .'


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'Seeing is believing,' said the girl. 'Well, in most cases, anyway, where people aren't quite so stiff-necked, locked into their own little worlds. But at least it's encouraging that you are actually beginning to think now, and not just snarling away to yourself.'

The Commander gave a small start. For it was a fact that he had been 'snarling away to himself' - getting all hot under the collar - and it was also a fact that he was 'actually beginning to think now'. Which made one too many times that Trask and the girl had seen through him. But right through him, to the core!

'Who on earth are you people?'Argyle stared at Trask, then at the girl - also at the tall pale man, and at the yellow one - and began to feel more than a little foolish as he tried to grin and frown at the same time, and only succeeded in blinking his confusion. The way they looked back at him (not in contempt, no, but rather, what, sympathetically?) made him feel very much cut down to size. So that again he felt prompted to inquire, 'I mean, all I was told is that you're E-Branch. So what does that make you? Mind-readers? Psychics or something?'

Or something, obviously.

For the girl only smiled and looked away; likewise her colleagues, the tall man and the small yellow man both, while Trask said, 'Now maybe you'll be so good as to have the pilot take us in closer? There's no danger, Commander. Not as long as we don't try to alight on this lady, and even then not until nightfall.'

The 'lady' Trask had referred to was a cruise ship that had beached herself on an unnamed island - or more properly a fang of sun-bleached rock - between the island of Ayios Evstratios, itself little more than a boulder, and the popular Greek island resort of Limnos ten miles to the north. Except E-Branch's best bet was that she hadn't simply run aground in some kind of accident but that she'd been wrecked deliberately, and it was just possible that the wreckers were still aboard. As for a mutating strain of the Asiatic bubonic plague: that was the cover story, certainly, but as Trask had stated it was a very different kind of plague that he and his party expected to find here. They had even dared hope (albeit remotely) that they might also discover its source here . . . and put an end to it forever.

'What do you think, David?' Trask asked the smallest of his colleagues after Argyle had ordered the pilot to take them down and in a little closer. 'How does it look to you?'

'Mindsmog,' said the other at once, his voice taut as piano wire over the headsets. 'The ship is full of it, stem to stern. This is where they escaped to, definitely. But I find it doubtful that they themselves are still here. It's too thin. There's no heavy presence or presences that I


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can detect, just a lot - a bell of a lot - of individual sources. Not that we can put a great deal of faith in that. For it was the same on Krassos for a while until we learned what we were doing wrong, or what they were doing right. Our'old friend' is good at shielding himself, while she . . . I don't need to remind you what she can do! Still and all, I reckon they've moved on. They must surely have known they'd make one hell of a target sitting here. So I don't think we need worry so much about them as what they've left behind.'

Trask offered a grim nod of agreement. 'They're on the run, and they're all through with doing things quietly, covertly. We hit them in Australia, Krassos, London, and ruined their plans. Now they're deliberately giving us work - leaving a trail, yes, but one of destruction - in the full knowledge that while we're dealing with problems like this . . .'

'. . . We can't concentrate on tracking them,' the yellow man, whom Argyle knew to be called David Chung, finished it for him. 'Yes, that sounds about right . . .'

'Liz?' Trask glanced at the girl; and, totally bewildered by their double-talk, Argyle looked at her, too. Now that a little of his venom had been drawn, that wasn't at all hard to do. Liz Merrick, as she'd been introduced to him when first the Commander met up with these people, was maybe five-seven and about as pert as a girl can get - as he'd found out the hard way. She'd be twenty-something; she was all curves, long-legged and willow-waisted, and when she smiled (she bad actually smiled when they had been introduced, but that hadn't lasted long) it was like a ray of bright light. Her green eyes were a very different shade from Trask's - deep as a beer bottle, deep as the sea - but her stare could be equally unnerving. Her hair, black as night, and cut in a boyish bob, had the shine of natural good health to it . . . and Argyle suspected that if he had photographs of her in a swimsuit he could earn himself a month's salary selling them to HMS Invincible's crew! Come to think of it, it appeared that at least one member of the crew had already contrived to get to know her a little better; she was wearing ship's fatigues three sizes too big for her that had never looked nearly this good on any sailor of Argyle's acquaintance!

As he was thinking these things the chopper performed a jig in a small thermal, and for a moment the beached and apparently derelict pleasure cruiser sidestepped out of view. In that same moment Liz glanced at Argyle, and said, 'That's better. But now, if you'll try to keep your mental observations low-key, this is one "Virtually Incompetent Pleb" who's trying to concentrate.'

Argyle's jaw fell open. Dumbfounded, he could only stare at her. But the shipwreck had swung back into view maybe a hundred feet below and a hundred yards away, and as Liz focused all of her attention on it


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