"MacLean, Alistair - Airforce One is down (John Denis)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Alistair)

losing his persona.
He could not, though, have been in more skilful or patient hands. Stein's
operating theatre, in which he was joined by only two members of his staff,
wholly dependent on him for money and drugs, was set out like a society
photographer's salon.
Every inch of wall space was given over to huge blow-up pictures of McCafferty's
face taken from six different angles, including a shot of the back of his neck,
showing the precise set of his flat, trim ears.
The operating table was surrounded by a forest of tripods bearing
multi-bracketed floodlights, adjustable vertically and in their angles of
concentration. Stein, bent over the table which glowed under its own bank of
arc-lamps, constantly barked instructions to his minions to sharpen or
illuminate particular features of the subject.
Then, squinting fiercely at the pictures that charted McCafferty's face with the
fine detail of an Ordnance Survey Map, Stein wielded his scalpel on the
unconscious Jagger to trade cheek for cheek, jowl for jowl, nose for nose.
With total detachment, and a square centimetre at a time, Stein sliced away
slivers of Cody Jagger and moulded them into jigsaw pieces of Joe McCafferty,
like Lego bricks of flesh, the common denominators of a man which the surgeon
simply rearranged in the shape of a different man.
Finally it was done, the stitches out, the scars pink and fresh. It was 0330 on
the morning of the fifth day, and Stein, slumped cross-legged on the floor
studying his handiwork in an enlarging mirror set into the ceiling, reflected
sourly that in only a day and a half more, the God of Abraham and Isaac had
created an entire world. 'Probably had better hired help than me,' Stein
chuckled malevolently. He had never felt so enervated, so completely exhausted.
He looked at the taped and bandaged head. If there was no tissue infection, the
bulk of the hard work was over. But Stein had sensed from the mounting urgency
in Dunkels voice on the phone that Smith's plans were coming to a head.
Stein knew he could delay no further in contacting Karilian.
The Mercedes drew up once more at the Edelweiss Clinic, midway through the
evening of the same day. Stein, Who had spent the intervening hours sleeping,
crabbed down the steps to greet the large, square-faced man who had elbowed the
respectful chauffeur impatiently aside. The driver, by inclination a gregarious
type, was rapidly tiring of ferrying rude and uncommunicative foreigners to his
employer.
Axel Karilian, KGB controller, Switzerland, ignored Stein's outstretched hand,
grasping him instead roughly by the elbow and pivoting him around to face back
up the steps. 'Show me,' he commanded, propelling the little Swiss doctor
through the entry doors.
As a high-ranking and, by definition, high-risk criminal. Smith was customarily
fed in his cell, keeping him away from contact with other prisoners. So when his
evening meal-tray was removed, and the others in his block (Smith subconsciously
counted them, identifying the cells solely by the sounds of their doors closing
and the number of steps it took to reach them), he knew that it would be half an
hour to the guard's final round of the day, a further twenty minutes to complete
the tour, and an additional fifteen minutes to "lights out". The regimen never
varied. Smith would have been distressed if it had.
That evening, while Doctor Richard Stein was entertaining Axel Karilian in the
Edelweiss Clinic's penthouse. Mister Smith ate his dinner in the prison's