"Charles Stross - Merchant princes 02 - The Hidden Family" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

claws, I could go back to being the real me. Really. Then she thought about the
rest of them. About the room at the Marriott, and what had happened in it. About
Roland, and her. Maybe.

She picked the phone up again. It was easier than thinking.

Iris answered almost immediately. "Miriam, dear? Where have you been?"
"Ma?" The full weight of her worries crashed down on her. "You wouldn't believe
me if I told you! Listen, I'm onto a story. It'sтАФ" She struggled for a suitable
metaphor. "It's as big as Watergate. Bigger, maybe. But there's people involved
who're watching me. I'd like to spend some time with you, but I don't know if it
would be safe."

"That's interesting." She could hear her adoptive mother's mind crunching gears
even on the end of a phone. "So you can't come and visit me?"

"Remember what you told me about COINTELPRO, Ma?"

"Ah, those were the days! When I was a young firebrand, ah me." . "Ma!"

"Stuffing envelopes with Jan Six, before Commune Two imploded, picketings and
sit-insтАФdid I tell you about the time the FBI bugged our phones? How we got
around it?"

"Mom." Miriam sighed. "Really! That student radical stuff is so old, you know?"

"Don't you old me, young lady!" Iris put a condescending, amused tone in her
voice. "Is your trouble federal, by any chance?"

"I wish it was." Miriam sighed again.

"Well then. I'll meet you at the playground after bridge, an hour before closing
time." Click.

She'd hung up, Miriam realized, staring at her phone. "Oh sweet Jesus," she
murmured. Never, ever, challenge a onetime SDS activist to throw a tail. She
giggled quietly to herself, overcome by a bizarre combination of mirth and
guiltтАФmirth at the idea of a late-fifties Jewish grandmother with multiple
sclerosis giving the Clan's surveillance agents the slip, and guilt, shocking
guilt, at the thought of what she might have unintentionally involved Iris in.
She almost picked up the phone to apologize, to tell Iris not to botherтАФ but
that would be waving a red rag at a bull. When Iris got it into her mind to do
something, not even the FBI and the federal government stood much chance of
stopping her.

The playground. That's what she'd called the museum, when she was small. "Can we
go to the playground?" she'd asked, a second-grader already eating into her
parents' library cards, and Iris had smiled indulgently and taken her there, to
run around the displays and generally annoy the old folks reading the signs
under the exhibits until, energy exhausted, she'd flaked out in the dinosaur