"Mark Phillips - The Queen's own FBI Trilogy - Brain Twister, The Impossibles, Supermind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Phillips Mark)

 Prologue

In nineteen-fourteen, it was enemy aliens.

In nineteen-thirty, it was Wobblies.

In nineteen-fifty-seven, it was fellow-travelers.

And, in nineteen seventy-one, Kenneth J. Malone rolled wearily out of bed wondering what the hell it
was going to be now.

One thing, he told himself, was absolutely certain: it was going to be terrible. It always was.

He managed to stand up, although he was swaying slightly when he walked across the room to the
mirror for his usual morning look at himself. He didn't much like staring at his own face, first thing in the
morning, but then, he told himself, it was part of the toughening-up process every FBI agent had to go
through. You had to learn to stand up and take it when things got rough, he reminded himself. He blinked
and looked into the mirror.

His image blinked back.

He tried a smile. It looked pretty horrible, he thought-but, then, the mirror had a slight ripple in it, and the
ripple distorted everything. Malone's face looked as if it had been gently patted with a waffle-iron.

And, of course, it was still early morning, and that meant he was having a little difficulty in focusing his
eyes.

Vaguely, he tried to remember the night before. He was just ending his vacation, and he thought he
recalled having a final farewell party for two or three lovely female types he had chanced to meet in what
was still the world's finest City of Opportunity, Washington, D.C. (latest female-to-male ratio,
five-and-a-half to one). The party had been a classic of its kind, complete with hot and cold running ideas
of all sorts, and lots and lots of nice powerful liquor.

Malone decided sadly that the ripple wasn't in the mirror, but in his head. He stared at his unshaven face
blearily.

Blink. Ripple.

Quite impossible, he told himself. Nobody could conceivably look as horrible as Kenneth J. Malone
thought he did. Things just couldn't be as bad as all that.

Ignoring a still, small voice which asked persistently: тАЬWhy not?тАЭ he turned away from the mirror and set
about finding his clothes. He determined to take his time about getting ready for work: after all, nobody
could really complain if he arrived late on his first day after vacation. Everybody knew how tired
vacations made a person.

And, besides, there was probably nothing happening anyway. Things had, he recalled with faint pleasure,
been pretty quiet lately. Ever since the counterfeiting gang he'd caught had been put away, crime seemed
to have dropped to the nice, simple levels of the 1950's and тАШ60's. Maybe, he hoped suddenly, he'd be
able to spend some time catching up on his scientific techniques, or his math, or pistol practice....