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

the forms until later, and was set upon by five men with baseball bats as he exited the admin office.
Fortunately, they weren't professionals, and in the dark they got in one another's way. But by the time
he'd wrested one of the bats free for himself and driven his attackers off, the whole camp was awake.
The street was lit up with flashlights and the news was spreading at speed; there was a new black face,
an outsider, down at the admin building, causing trouble. Carl didn't even bother braving the streets and
streets of stares to check on the camp address he had for his target. He already knew what he'd find.

That left the fallout from the fight, which was equally predictable. Despite numerous passersby and even
one or two blatant spectators, there were suddenly no useful witnesses. The man Carl had managed to
hurt badly enough that he couldn't run away remained steadfastly silent about his reasons for the assault.
The site manager refused to let Carl question him alone, and cut short even the supervised interrogation
on medical grounds. The prisoner has rights, she iterated slowly, as if Carl weren't very bright. You've
already hurt him badly.

Carl, still oozing blood from a split cheek and guessing at least one of his fingers was broken, just looked
at her.

These days, he notified the site managers after the event.

"Looking for an old friend," he told the waitress when she got back with the machine. He gave her the
COLIN wafer and waited until she'd swiped it. "Name of Rodriguez. It's very important that I find him."

Her fingers hovered over the punch pad. She shrugged.

"Rodriguez is a common name."

Carl took out one of the hardcopy downloads from the Bogot├б clinic and slid it across the bartop at her.
It was a vanity shot, system-generated to show clients what they'd look like when the swelling went
down. In real time, that soon after surgery that cheap, Gray's new face probably wouldn't have looked
amiss on a Jesusland lynching victim, but the man smiling up out of the clinic print looked uninjured and
pleasantly unremarkable. Broad cheekbones, wide mouth, an off-the-rack Amerind makeover. Carl,
eternally paranoid about these things, had Matthew go back into the clinic dataflow that night just to
make sure they weren't trying to fob him off with an image from stock. Matthew grumbled, but he did it,
in the end probably just to prove he could. There was no doubt. Gray looked like this now.

The waitress glanced incuriously down at the print for a moment, then punched up an amount on the
wafer that certainly wasn't five soles. She nodded up the bar to where a bulky fair-haired male leaned at
the other end, staring into a shot glass as if he hated it.

"Ask him."

Carl's hand whipped out, mesh-swift. He'd dosed up that morning. He hooked her index finger before it
could hit the transaction key. He twisted slightly, just enough to take the slack out of the knuckle joints.
He felt the finger bones lock tight.

"I'm asking you," he said mildly.

"And I'm telling you." If she was afraid, it didn't show. "I know this face. He's in here drinking with Rubio
over there, two, maybe three times a week. That's all I know. Now, you going to give me my finger
back, or do I have to draw some attention to you? Maybe notify camp security?"