"Richard Preston - The Cobra Event" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

The Cobra Event (v3.0)

Richard Preston, 1997




It is the greatest art of the devil to convince us that he does not exist.
-- Baudelaire




Part One
Trial




Arc of the Circle
New York City, Late 1990s

Kate Moran was an only child. She was seventeen years old and lived with her parents in a
loft apartment on the top floor of a handsome old building to the west of Union Square, just
on the edge of Greenwich Village. One Wednesday morning in late April, Kate was slow getting
up. She had woken in the middle of the night in a sweat, but it went away, and she fell back
asleep, into bad dreams that she could not remember. She came awake with a fresh cold, and
she could feel her period coming on.
'Kate!' It was Nanette, the housekeeper, calling to her from the kitchen. 'Katie!'
'Okay.' She didn't like being called Katie.
She sat up and found a Kleenex and blew her nose, and went into the bathroom. She
brushed her teeth, then went back into the bedroom and dressed in a flowered dress that she
had found in a flea market. The mornings could be chilly this time of year, so she put on a
sweater.
Kate had wavy russet hair, beautiful hair with natural pale highlights, which she wore
medium length. Her eyes were grayish blue or bluish gray, depending on the light and the
weather and her mood (or so she liked to think); complicated eyes. Her face was changing
fast. She could almost see the bones of the woman emerging, yet she had found that the
more she stared at her face in a mirror the less she understood it. She thought about this as
she brushed her hair, pushing it back so that the two platinum earrings in her left ear were
visible.
Kate's mother called her the Packrat, because she accumulated things. The worktable in
the corner of her room was littered with old cigar boxes covered with their original
illustrations, plastic boxes, metal containers, purses, bags, puzzles. Things that opened and
closed. There was an old dollhouse that she had found in a junk shop in Brooklyn and had
been taking apart, cannibalizing it for a project. She reached into the dollhouse and pulled out
a prism made of glass, and the smooth white skull of a vole, with tiny yellow teeth, that she
had bought at a bone shop in SoHo. She held the prism up to the light falling through the
skylight of her bedroom, and just to see what it would look like, she held the vole's head
behind the prism. No colors appeared; you needed direct sunlight. She stuffed the objects into