"Charles Stross - Antibodies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

The can of pepper spray hanging from the cop's belt. Figures on the roof of the
National Museum, less than two hundred metres awayтАФmaybe a sniper team. A
helicopter thuttering overhead like a giant mosquito.)

"Come this way, please." It was a polite order: in the direction of the van.

"Am I under arrest?" I asked.

"You will be if you don't bloody do as I say." I turned towards the van, the rear
door of which gaped open on darkness: Eve was already getting in, shadowed by
another officer. Up and down the road, three more teams waited, unobtrusive and
efficient. Something clicked in my head and I had a bizarre urge to giggle like a loon:
this wasn't a normal operation. All right, so I was getting into a police van, but I
wasn't under arrest and they didn't want it to attract any public notice. No handcuffs,
no sitting on my back and whacking me with a baton to get my attention. There's a
nasty family of retroviruses attacks the immune system first, demolishing the victim's
ability to fight off infection before it spreads and infects other tissues. Notice the
similarity?

The rear compartment of the van was caged off from the front, and there were no
door handles. As we jolted off the kerb-side I was thrown against Eve. "Any ideas?"
I whispered.

"Could be worse." I didn't need to be told that: once, in a second Reich infected by
runaway transcendence, half our operatives had been shot down in the streets as
they tried to flee. "I think it may have figured out what we are."

"It mayтАФhow?"

Her hand on my wrist. Morse code. "EXPECT BUGS." By voice: "Traffic analysis,
particle flow monitoring through the phone networks. If it was already listening when
you tried to contact Doctor Durant, well; maybe he was a bellwether, intended to
flush us out of the woodwork."

That thought made me feel sick, just as we turned off the main road and began to
bounce downhill over what felt like cobblestones. "It expected us?"

"LOCAL CONSPIRACY." "Yes, I imagine it did. We probably left a trail. You tried
to call Durant? Then you called me. Caller-ID led to you, traffic analysis led onto
me, and from there, well, it's been a jump ahead of us all along the way. If we could
get to the farmтАФ" "COVER STORY." "тАФWe might have been OK, but it's hard to
travel anony-mously and obviously we overlooked something. I wonder what."
All this time neither of the cops up front had told us to shut up; they were as silent as
crash-test dummies, despite the occasional crackle and chatter over the radio data
system. The van drove around the back of the high street, down a hill and past a
roundabout. Now we were slowing down, and the van turned off the road and into a
vehicle park. Gates closed behind us and the engine died. Doors slammed up front:
then the back opened.

Police vehicle park. Concrete and cameras everywhere, for our safety and