"Richard Morgan - Thirteen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morgan Richard)

At the far end of the room, a boomerang-angled bar made from riveted tin sections held up half a dozen
drinkers. It was set far enough back from the windows that the beer coolers on the wall behind glowed
softly in the gloom. There was a door set in the wall and propped open on an equally dimly lit kitchen
space, apparently empty and not in use. The only visible staff took the form of a dumpy indigena
waitress slouching about between the tables, collecting bottles and glasses on a tray. Carl watched her
intently for a moment, then followed her as she headed back toward the bar.

He caught up with her just as she put down her tray on the bartop.

"Bottle of Red Stripe," he said, in Quechua. "No glass."

She ducked under the hinged access section without comment and opened a cooler cabinet on the floor.
Hooked out the bottle and straightened up, gripping it not unlike the criollas in the ad panels outside.
Then she cracked it deftly open with a rust-spotted key that hung off her belt, and set it on the bar.

"Five soles."

The only currency he had on him was Bolivian. He dug out a COLIN wafer and held it up between two
fingers. "Swipe okay?"

She gave him a long-suffering look and went to get the machine. He checked the time display in the
upper left corner of the Cebe lenses, then took them off. They'd cycled for low light anyway, but he
wanted clear eye contact for what was coming. He dumped his hat on the bartop and propped himself
next to it, facing the room. Did his best to look like someone who didn't want anything, like someone
fitting in.

In theory, he should have checked in with the GH site manager on arrival. It was procedure, written into
the Charter. Extensive previous experience, some of it sticky with his own blood, had taught him not to
bother. There was a whole shifting topography of dislike out there for what Carl Marsalis was, and it
touched on pretty much every level of human wiring. At the high cognitive end, you had sophisticated
dinner-party politics that condemned his professional existence as amoral. At a more emotive level there
was the generalized social revulsion that comes with the label turncoat. And lower still, riding the arid
terminology of the Jacobsen Report but swooping into the hormonal murk of instinct, you could find a
rarely admitted but nonetheless giddy terror that he was, despite everything, still one of them.

And worse than all of this, in the eyes of the Colony corporations, Carl was bad press walking. Bad
press and a guaranteed hole in finances. By the time someone like Gray was ready for shipping out,
Garrod Horkan could expect to have plowed several tens of thousands of dollars into him in varied
training and mesh biotech. Not the sort of investment you want bleeding out into the altiplano dust under
the headline insufficient security at colin camp!

Four years previously, he'd announced himself to the site manager at a camp south of La Paz, and his
target had mysteriously vanished while Carl was still filling out forms in the administration building. There
was a bowl of soup still steaming on the kitchen table when he walked into the prefab, a spoon still in the
soup. The back door was open, and so was an emptied trunk at the foot of the bed in the next room.
The man never surfaced again, and Carl had to conclude, to himself and to the Agency, that he was now,
in all probability, on Mars. No one at COLIN was going to confirm that one way or the other, so he
didn't bother asking.

Six months after that, Carl announced himself late one evening to another site manager, declined to fill in