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

"At six-thirty? They'll be shut."

"Not to worry: the main Boots in town is open out of hours. Maybe they can help
you."

"I hope so."

"I know it. Goodbye."

On my way out of the house I paused for a moment. It was a small house, and it had
seen better days. I'm not a home-maker by nature: in my line of work you can't
afford to get too attached to anything, any language, place or culture. Still, it had
been mine. A small, neat residence, a protective shell I could withdraw into like a
snail, sheltering from the hostile theorems outside. Goodbye, little house. I'll try not
to miss you too much. I hefted my overnight bag onto the back seat and headed into
town.

****

I found Eve sitting on a bench outside the central branch of Boots, running a
degaussing coil over her credit cards. She looked up. "You're late."
"Come on." I waggled the car keys at her. "You have the tickets?"

She stood up: a petite woman, conservatively dressed. You could mistake her for a
lawyer's secretary or a personnel manager; in point of fact she was a university
research council administrator, one of the unnoticed body of bureaucrats who shape
the course of scientific research. Nondescript brown hair, shoulder-length,
forgettable. We made a slightly odd pair: if I'd known she'd have come straight from
work I might have put on a suit. Chinos and a lumberjack shirt and a front pocket
full of pens that screamed engineer: I suppose I was nonde-script, in the right
company, but right now we had to put as much phase space as possible between us
and our previous identities. It had been good protective camouflage for the past
decade, but a bush won't shield you against infrared scopes, and merely living the
part wouldn't shield us against the surveillance that would soon be turned in our
direction.

"Let's go."

I drove into town and we dropped the car off in the long-stay park. It was nine
o'clock and the train was already waiting. She'd bought business-class tickets: go to
sleep in Euston, wake up in Edinburgh. I had a room all to myself. "Meet me in the
dining car, once we're rolling," she told me, face serious, and I nodded. "Here's your
new SIMM. Give me the old one."

I passed her the electronic heart of my cellphone and she ran it through the
degausser then carefully cut it in half with a pair of nail-clippers. "Here's your new
one," she said, passing a card over. I raised an eyebrow. "Tesco's, pay-as-you-go,
paid for in cash. Here's the dialback dead-letter box number." She pulled it up on her
phone's display and showed it to me.