"Allison Sinclair - Assassin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sinclair Allison)

to kill. Thinking perhaps that he was buying back his innocence, buying his
acceptance. I told him that Errel who had been Joshua might have gone mad with
his irreconcilable worlds. I told D'Inde I understood how that could happen, and
asked him if there was something I did not know, something that could be
blinding me. It was like talking to a statue. Except when, at the end, I looked
up. Statues do not cry. I knew then what I was going to do.
Searching your own apartment is not easy--you know all the myriad nooks and
cubbyholes where things may be hidden--least of all if you do not want to leave
a mess that screams: I've been searched! I might as well not have bothered. I
picked a lock on the bottom drawer in Errel's desk in our joint 'study'--a cop
and a farmer's advocate don't make enough for a three bedroom--pulled it open,
and saw a dot of light flash off my thumb as I reached in for the single disc I
found there. The high tech equivalent of the old strand of hair. I had until
Errel came home, no longer.
I isolated our PC from the nets, took the hard drives off line and loaded the
disc. The first thing that came up was a pair of lips, suggestively vertical,
outlined in red. It was the last thing I expected. The lips swung round to
horizontal, puckered, and in the pucker six silver dots appeared. Password
needed--it figured. If I played around with it I might erase the disc; I'd wait
for Errel. I considered going on with the search, but I had the feeling that if
this were not what I wanted, it could be used as a lever to give me what I
wanted. I set the disc aside and reconnected the hard drives, and started
working on the other part of my plan.
Errel had the grace to come home late--about twelve thirty. I'd just finished
putting on the finishing touches when the intercom buzzed, and I had time to
shut down the system and settle down in the living room with the disc on my lap
and my gun down between the cushions when he opened the door. The gun down the
side of the cushions was the easy part of my set up. But Errel, raised under the
eye of an omniscient and unforgiving God, and scarcely less omniscient and
unforgiving elders, took one look at the disc as I held it up, and I didn't need
mood beads to see shock, guilt and dismay written all over him.
For the second time that day, I almost cried.
"Why?" I said.
"I don't know," he told me, shaking his head very slowly, dazedly. "It's not as
though--I haven't been happy with you, and please believe me, Les, I wouldn't
endanger what we had. But--" he blinked, "The only thing that comes to me is
right out of the Bible--'She tempted me and I did eat.' Which I know you won't
let me off with, and I shouldn't be let off with either. She's beautiful and
careless and exciting, and I didn't have--I didn't have the sense to refuse
her--even if--even if she hadn't made promises about the help she could give me
and the people I work for. I felt guilty the whole time--for what it's worth."
This made no sense to me; he was not defending himself against the charge I had
to level. "What about the rest of it?" I demanded, and when he started towards
me, said, "No! Stay there."
He stopped, looking bewildered and hurt. I kept my hand over the gun.
"The interfaces, you mean," he said. "She was the one. She said--"
"No," I said. "The viruses."
"What--viruses?"
I looked straight at him. "Are you conning me, Errel?"
"I don't know anything about viruses," he said. "I thought you'd--" he gestured