"Sean McMullen - An Empty Wheelhouse" - читать интересную книгу автора (McMullen Sean)

was her favourite theory so far. There was always plenty of money to do whatever was required to
complete her instructions.
Today Oakland, tomorrow... would depend upon the message that she received in reply to her latest
researches. She had been flown to New York, and found nothing meaningful. She had expected to be
fired: instead she was flown to London to read old colonial office reports. Again she found nothing of
interest, yet she was booked onto a flight to San Francisco to read records in the city's archives. The
next trip was shorter, just a journey on the BART to read some rare documents in a library on the
Berkeley Campus. By lunchtime the work was done. She packed her Toshiba laptop and modem into a
shoulderbag and dodged across Bancroft Way to the little group of shops and cafes just south of the
campus. Neil was waiting at a sidewalk table, as they had arranged over the phone.
"So, still on that contract for those folk in LA?" he asked as she sat down.
"That's right. Whatever they want, I seem to be finding it."
"I'm leaving for Hawaii right now. I'm only in town because my connect flight goes through Oakland
airport."
"Hawaii, great. I have no idea where they'll send me next."
For some minutes their conversation remained exuberant and facile, even a little hysterical. There were
more important things to discuss, unpleasant things, yet the preliminaries could be made to last. Slowly,
carefully, she assembled her meticulously rehearsed string of words, then took aim at a space in the
conversation like an Indian stalking salmon in a stream.
"What are the job prospects like for historians in Hawaii?"
"Ah, not good, not good. You'd be cleaning motels, and serving in bars."
Missed.
"You checked already?"
"Yeah, I did. Hey, do you know who you're working for yet?"
In other words, drop the subject. "No clues. It could be the KGB for all I know."
"I doubt it, they're all doing contract work for the Arabs these days. It's probably someone trying to
prove a bloodline with a millionaire who died without leaving a will."
"Then why the secrecy?"
"To have an advantage in court, maybe."
There was something tired and unworkable going on here, yet neither of them had the will to admit it.
His face betrayed nothing; his smile was controlled to perfection. There was one more hurdle for her
exhausted emotions to clear. Oddly enough, sex held no special terrors for Helen, but talking about it
was the worst possible nightmare. Any sort of verbal exchange worried her, she wanted to rehearse her
words, to type them into a computer, then rearrange and polish them, then hand the printout to Neil who
would give her a score out of ten.
"I've got a room across the bay," she said while staring intently at her coffee cup. "It's not long on the
BART."
"Look, that would be great, but, well I really don't have much time between flights. It was hard enough
just seeing you here and... I'd better rush. My flight leaves soon."
When he had gone Helen slumped with relief, then ordered a large slice of coffee cake with plenty of
cream. Free again, free from talk. She had studied history because most of the subjects were safely
dead, with their words on paper. Her special project was a dream come true: the communications were
terse, and arrived by electronic mail. Perhaps it would last for a very long time.
The next phase of the project took her back to London, and lasted a month. Each night she would
open a line to her enigmatic employer in Los Angeles and type in a few likely records from the
nineteenth-century registers. Only occasionally did she get a reply, and the replies were short.
At last she had a breakthrough. A clerk at the city attorney's office in the San Francisco of the early
1850's shared a feature with one convict: a pair of parallel scars on his chin. It was a small thing, but
enough. Patrick O'Hallorin, an Irish immigrant, had been given a job in the city attorney's office in 1852,
and had worked there for eleven months. He was five feet nine inches tall, and had brown hair and blue