"O'Donnell, Peter - Modesty Blaise 12 - Dead man's handle" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Donnell Peter)

Garcia paced the office, hands on hips, shaking his head in bewilderment. "But what material! He is mad, of course. A freak. Any man must be, who goes alone into Red China to take a prisoner from an army camp."
"The point is, he made it," Modesty Blaise said softly. "Who else have we got in The Network who could pull off a stroke like that?"
Garcia shrugged. "There is no other man, Mam'selle. To find one who is able to work solo on a task such as that is rare indeed. By God, what an operator."
She said as if to herself, "I'd like to have seen him arguing the toss with Wei Lu when they were on that bicycle." Again Danny Chavasse saw something that was almost a smile in her eyes, and again he marvelled. She picked up the thick envelope, slit it open and riffled through the hundred-dollar bills. "Expenses apart, this is his by right, Garcia," she said. "Open a local bank account with it for him."
Danny Chavasse cleared his throat unnecessarily, and she glanced at him with a lifted eyebrow. "Yes?"
"I think it would be wise to reconsider, Mam'selle," he said respectfully. "It is plain that to work for you is this man's heart's desire. He brings you that money not as a gift, but as belonging to you, and I think it would be wrong to throw it back at him. Better perhaps, at the end of six months, and if he does well, to give him a bonus of... say, half that amount?"
She dropped the money on the desk and said, "God damn it."
"I'm sorry, Mam'selle Ч"
"No, it's not you, Danny. You're right. But I should have seen it for myself." She looked at Garcia. "So we'll play it that way. I shall want an assessment of Garvin's skills as soon as possible, and I've a hunch you may find them quite extensive." She turned to Danny Chavasse again. "I also want him to spend time with you, Danny, learning how to handle himself in any company and any circumstances. The whole idea is to build self-confidence into him, so he can walk tall. Seeing that he pulled off the Wei Lu business only a few days after I'd taken him out of the gutter, God knows what he'll be capable of once he's able to realise his full potential. There's risk in it... if he gets big headed in the process, I'll throw him out. But it's a risk worth taking. He just might be the best investment The Network has ever made. Any comment?"
Danny Chavasse said thoughtfully, "I don't think he will get above himself. The way he handled this mission indicates that he has style. It is a rare quality, and it does not go with a big head."
Garcia grinned. "Mam'selle has style. You have style, Danny. After that, The Network is much lacking in this quality. It will be good to have a man with style in our active service department." He gestured. "No offence, Danny, but you are a boudoir warrior." Danny Chavasse laughed. "Agreed, Rafael. To each his own speciality;"
"There is another thing," said Garcia, and looked at the girl behind the desk with a crooked smile of apology. "I am fifty-one years old, Mam'selle, and I have been with you from the beginning, but perhaps in a year or two you will feel that I am getting too old for my job. I know of nobody who would be exactly right for you to appoint in my place." He gestured vaguely. "A special understanding is necessary. But if this crazy freak Garvin comes good, I say if he comes good, then he may be the very man."
She shrugged. "We'll see, but that's all a long way off, and you're not too old yet, Garcia. Now, is there anything else concerning Garvin? If not, I want to discuss an industrial espionage contract we've been offered, and an approach for a freelance mission that's come from a British intelligence bigwig named Tarrant."
Garcia said, "I have no further comment on GarvinЧoh, except that I will instruct him that he is not to address you as Princess. He must address you as Mam'selle, like everybody else."
Modesty Blaise picked up the ivory plaque bearing her chop and studied it absently. "No, don't do that," she said at last. "God knows he's done enough to earn something of a cachet in the organisation, so let him go on calling me Princess . . . but just make sure nobody else does."

Chapter 2
When the Chinese girl in the skimpy bikini of soft leather was a hundred yards away along the shore she halted and turned, leaning her head to one side and extending a spread hand in an attitude of query. Willie Garvin responded by thrusting a thumb skywards several times in an exaggerated gesture of approval, then he concentrated on the frisbee he held, a blue plastic disc a foot across, raised in the centre to form a shallow cone.
Carefully he weighed it in his hand once again, sensing it in all its aspects, considering the weight, the shape and the aerodynamic properties, seeking an intuitive understanding of its whole nature. The shore was a broad strip of golden limestone thirty yards wide, worn smooth from millennia of weathering by wind and sea. To his right the great cliffs of Malta's south-western coast reflected the afternoon sun and also caused a slight deflection of the small breeze blowing obliquely towards him from a little to seaward of where the Chinese girl had halted. To his left the flat limestone fell sharply away at the sea's edge in a tangle of jagged rock.
Except by climbing there was no access to this stretch of shore from the land, for it was cut off at each end by sheer cliffs thrusting out into the sea. They had come here in a motorboat that now lay moored in a small natural inlet piercing the rocks near the eastern end of the beach, and had picnicked in solitude except for sight of a sailing dinghy passing well off-shore.
A big man, Willie Garvin, with untidy fair hair and cheerful blue eyes. There had been a time when they were rarely cheerful, but that was long ago; for many a year now they had looked upon the world with an air of serene enjoyment and pleasurable anticipation. At the moment he wore only faded denim shorts, revealing a tanned body without surplus fat but not obtrusively muscled. Dangerous men had died from misjudging his strength and speed.
When satisfied that he had established rapport with the frisbee, he looked up and began to assess the external factors that would influence its flight; the strength and direction of the slight breeze, the cooler air the disc would encounter when curving out over the sea, the warmer air rising from the limestone shore.
Without losing concentration, he noted and was amused by the sight of Molly Chen walking about on her hands while she waited, slender legs waving in the air. This was a new trick she had acquired in pursuit of her ambition. A little over five feet tall, Molly weighed less than a hundred and ten pounds. Her body was small-boned but nicely fleshed, and Willie Garvэn had found great delight in it. Her dark hair was cropped short, and it seemed to Willie that her face had scarcely aged at all in the nine years since he had first met her in Hong Kong. It was a broad face, rather plain, with large happy eyes, and Willie was very fond of it.
He folded his tongue between his teeth and emitted a shrill whistle. She came to her feet, stood to attention, gave an exaggerated salute, then lifted both hands above her head and waited. Eyes fixed on her hands, Willie Garvin let his subconscious take over and threw the frisbee with a long swing of his arm. It soared sweetly, spinning fast, curving in a shallow loop out over the sea, starting to slant down, then curving in again and steadying to descend at a slower rate as it met the warmer air.
It would have passed a foot above Molly's hands and a little to one side of her if she had not jumped slightly to catch it. She made an elaborate bow, then dropped the frisbee and strutted with hands clasped above her head in a mime of boxing ring victory. It hadn't been that good, thought Willie, but it hadn't been too bad either. Not that it mattered anyway -
When the shot sounded he felt no immediate alarm, for this was the season when many Maltese lay in wait to shoot the quail migrating from North Africa, and his first thought was that somebody had used a shotgun on the flat cliff-top. Then he saw that Molly Chen had started to run towards him, very fast, and in the same moment he realised that the report had not been that of a shotgun but of a smaller calibre weapon.
She was calling something as she ran, and signalled urgently for him to stop when he started towards her. He ignored her signal, and saw a man appear from beyond where Molly had stood, clambering up from the rocks fringing the sea, wearing jeans, a grey shirt and a jockey cap.
Another man appeared behind him, this one in navy slacks and shirt, bare-headed. The first man carried something in his right hand, something that glinted metallically in the sun. As Willie reached the Chinese girl the man stopped, rested the barrel of the gun on his forearm, and fired again.
Willie said, "Keep going," and swung round behind Molly to cover her as they ran. A handgun with a long barrel, then; perhaps a Ruger Blackhawk or something of that sort. But the shots had gone well wide, as was to be expected. Sixty yards was an absurd range for the average gunman with an average gun. The big trouble was, Willie told himself grimly, that the range would not remain at sixty yards. The end of this rocky beach was not far off, and beyond that there was nowhere to go except up the cliff face or into the sea, either of which would be fatal.
The man with the gun would arrive before they were twenty feet up the cliff. And close by, along the shore, would be the boat that had brought the man with the gun. There was no way they could hope to out-swim it. Molly was veering right, towards the tiny inlet where Willie had moored their own boat, but he knew there was no chance of escape that way. The inlet was dogleg in shape, and it would take a full minute to manoeuvre the boat out and start the engine. By then they would be sitting targets.
He glanced over his shoulder and saw that the man with the gun had not bothered to run but was walking at a steady pace, the gun hanging from his hand. There was an air of easy confidence about him now, and it was well justified. He had a gun, his quarry had gained ground but could not escape, and they were unarmed. A good situation for a simple risk-free killing.
Willie Garvin assessed all that was available to him. It was very little. A few pebbles here and there, thrown up by the sea, nothing big enough to do real damage as a thrown missile before the man came close enough to start shooting. Now if onlyЧ
He called sharply, "Hold it, Molly! Stand still!" She halted after a pace or two, breathless with running, turning with fear in her eyes as he came up to her. "The boat, WillieЧwe must get to the boat," she panted.
"No use, love." He was staring about him, bending to pick something up. "Let's 'ave your bikini, quick."
"My ... ?" She was uncomprehending, but his coolness steadied her and she snatched at the thongs of her bikini top.
"Jesus, no. The bottom," he said, and looked back along the shore. The man with the gun was fifty yards away.
The Chinese girl said in a shaking voice, "Here, Willie," and put the small leather pouch in his hand, an elongated triangle with a thin leather thong at each corner. His hands moved with the ease of long practice as he wound the ends of two of the thongs round his third and fourth fingers, slipped a smooth pebble into the pouch, and clipped the third thong between his thumb and index finger.
The man was forty yards away . . . now thirty-five and raising his gun. The improvised sling spun above Willie's head on a plane of some thirty degrees relative to the ground, and so fast that Molly Chen heard the whirring sound it made. Then came a miniature whipcrack report, and in the same instant something seemed to happen to the man's face just below the peak of the jockey cap. His head jerked back as if struck by an invisible club. The gun fired once into the ground, then dropped from his hand, and he fell straight back like a tree going down before the axe, his head making an audible sound as it hit rock.
Willie said, "Stay put, Molly, there's a good girl," and ran to where the man lay. She watched, teeth chattering despite the sun's warmth, as he knelt by the limp figure. In the distance along the shore, the man in dark slacks and shirt lifted glasses to his eyes but made no other move. Thirty seconds later Willie Garvin walked back to her, a gun in one hand, a wallet and her bikini bottom in the other. He gave her the scrap of leather and said gently, "Thanks, Molly. Get dressed now." He turned, looked along the shore towards the man watching, and held the gun up high.
"Modesty always reckons that when it comes to handguns I couldn't 'it a barn if I was standing inside it," he said. "She's right, too, but they don't know that, and I don't think they fancy a shoot-out, even if there's one or two more we 'aven't seen. They must 'ave come round the point close in and under oars, or we'd 'ave seen or heard 'em."
She knotted the thong at her thigh with hands that trembled a little and said, "That one who had the gun, Willie . . .?"
"Probably wondering about 'is next incarnation," Willie said without noticeable regret. "He's certainly finished with this one. You keep an eye on that bloke who's watching us while I get our boat out."
"What about . . . the dead man?"
"Well, I don't want 'im. He's their problem. They're not the sort who enjoy 'aving inquiries made about their departed friends, so Ireckon they'll commit 'is body to the deep, as the saying is." Holding her arm, he had walked her to the small inlet as he spoke. Two minutes later she heard the engine start and he called from the boat, "Right, come aboard, love." Along the shore, the man with field glasses was still watching. Seized with sudden fury, she swung her bent arm with fist clenched in an uppercut, slapping her other hand against the bicep in the international sexual gesture of contemptuous insult, then she turned and slithered down the slope of rock to the boat.
Once clear of the shore, Willie turned east, away from where the other boat must lie and towards the little bay of Ghar Lapsi, where they had left the car. Beckoning Molly to take the tiller, he sat facing aft with the revolver in his hand, watching until they had rounded the point. "Sorry about all this, Molly," he said. "I don't usually take a pretty girl away for a couple of weeks in the sun and end up nearly getting 'er shot."
She said, "Who are they, Willie?"
He shrugged. "I've never seen the bloke in the jockey cap before. I'll go through 'is wallet later. Might find a name that rings a bell."
"Why would they want to shoot me?"
He gave her a half smile. "I expect it was me they were after, Molly, but it rubbed off on you. They couldn't leave you around to tell the tale."
"So why did they want to shoot you?"