"Stross, Charles - The Family Trade v1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

An hour later the doorbell rang. Miriam stood up and went to answer it, trying to suppress her worries about how Paulette might be coming. She was waiting on the doorstep, impatiently tapping one heel, with a large shopping bag in hand. "Miriam!" Paulette beamed at her.
"Come in, come in." Miriam retreated. "Hey, what's that? Have you been all right?"
"I've been worse." Paulie bounced inside and shut the door behind her, then glanced around curiously. "Hey, neat. I was worried about you, after I got home. You didn't look real happy, you know?"
"Yeah. Well, I wasn't." Miriam relieved her of her coat
and led her into the living room. "I'm really glad you're taking it so calmly. For me, I put in three years and nothing to show for it but hard work and junk bondsЧthen some asshole phoned me and warned me off. How about you? Have you had any trouble?"
Paulette peered at her curiously. "What kind of warning?"
"Oh, he kind of intimated that he was a friend of Joe's, and I'd regret it if I stuck my nose in any deeper. Playing at goodfellas, okay? I'd been worrying about you ... What's this about a job offer?"
"I, uhЧ" Paulette paused. "They offered me my job back with strings attached," she said guardedly. "Assholes. I was going to accept till they faxed through the contract."
"So why didn't you sign?" Miriam asked, pouring a mug of coffee while Paulette opened the pizza boxes.
"I've seen nondisclosure agreements, Miriam. I used to be a paralegal till I got sick of lawyers, remember? This wasn't a nondisclosure agreement; it was a fucking straitjacket. If I'd signed it, I wouldn't even own the contents of my own headЧbefore and after working for them. Guess they figured you were the ringleader, right?"
"Hah." There was a bitter taste in Miriam's mouth, and it wasn't from the coffee. "So. Found any work?"
"Got no offers yet." Paulette took a bite of pizza to cover her disquiet. "Emphasis on the yet. You?"
"I landed a freelance feature already. It's not going to cover the salary, but it goes a hell of a way. I was wonderingЧ"
"You want to carry on working die investigation."
It wasn't a question. Miriam nodded. "Yeah. I want to get the sons of bitches, now more than ever. But something tells me moving too fast is going to be a seriously bad idea. I mean, there's a lot of money involved. If we can redo the investigative steps we've got so far, I figure this time we ought to go to the FBI firstЧand then pick a paper. I think I could probably auction the story, but I'd rather wait until the feds are ready to start arresting people. And I'd like to disappear for a bit while they're doing that." A sudden bolt of realisation struck Miriam, so that she almost missed Paulette's reply: The locket! That's one place they won't be able to follow me! IfЧ
"Sounds possible." Paulie looked dubious. "It's not going to be easy duplicating the researchЧespecially now that they know we stumbled across them. Do you really think it's that dangerous?"
"If it's drugs money, you can get somebody shot for a couple of thousand bucks. This is way bigger than that, and thanks to our friend Joe, they now know where we live. I don't want to screw up again. You with me?"
After a moment, Paulette nodded. "I want them too." A flash of anger. "The bastards don't think I matter enough to worry about."
"But first there's something I need to find out. I need to vanish for a weekend," Miriam said slowly, a fully formed plan moving into focus in her mindЧone that would hopefully answer several questions. Like whether someone else could see her vanish and reappear, and whether she'd have somewhere to hole up if the anonymous threats turned realЧand maybe even a chance to learn more about her enigmatic birth-mother than Iris could tell her.
"Oh?" Paulette perked up. "Going to think things over? Or is there a male person in play?" Male persons in play were guaranteed to get Paulie's notice: Like Miriam, she was a member of the early thirties divorcee club.
"Neither." Miriam considered her next words carefully. "I ran across something odd on Monday night. Probably nothing to do with our story, but I'm planning on investigating it and I'll be away for a couple of days. Out of town."
"Tell me more!"
"I, um, can't. Yet." Miriam had worked it through. The whole story was just too weird to lay on Paulie without some kind of proof to get her attention. "However, you can do me a big favour, okay? I need to get to a rest area just off a road near Amesbury with some hiking gear. Yeah, I know that sounds weird, but it's the best way to make sure nobody's following
me. If you could ride out with me and drive my car home, then put it back there two days later, that would be really good."
"That's ... odd." Paulette looked puzzled. "What's with the magical mystery tour?"
Miriam improvised fast "I could tell you, but then I'd have to get you to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would make anything The Weatherman offered you look liberal. And the whole thing is super secret; my source might spike the whole deal if I let someone in on it without prior permission. I'll be able to tell you when you pick me up afterward, though." If things went right, she'd be able to tell a more-than-somewhat-freaked Paulie why she'd vanished right in front of her eyes and then reappeared in front of them. "And I want you to promise to tell nobody about it until you pick me up again, okay?"
"Well, okay. It's not as if I don't have time on my hands." Paulette frowned. "When are you planning on doing your disappearing act? And when do you want picking up?"
"I wasЧthey're picking me up tomorrow at 2 p.m. precisely," said Miriam. "And I'll be showing up exactly forty-eight hours later." She grinned. "If you lie in waitЧpretend to be eating your lunch or somethingЧyou can watch them pick me up."
Friday morning dawned cold but clear, and Miriam showered then packed her camping equipment again. The doorbell rang just after noon. It was Paulette, wearing a formal black suit. "My God, is it a funeral?"
"Had a job interview this morning." Paulette pulled a face. "I got sick of sitting at home thinking about those bastards shafting us and decided to do something for number one in the meantime."
"Well, good for you." Miriam picked up her backpack and led Paulie out the front door, then locked up behind her. She opened her car, put the pack in, then opened the front doors. "Did it go well?" she asked, pulling her seat belt on.
"It went likeЧ" Paulette pulled another face. "Listen, I'm a business researcher, right? Just because I used to be a paralegal doesn't mean that I want to go back there."
"Lawyers," Miriam said as she started the engine. "Lots of work in that field, I guarantee you."
"Oh yeah," Paulette agreed. She pulled the sun visor down and looked at herself in the mirror. "Fuck, do I really look like that? I'm turning into my first ex-boss."
"Yes indeed, you look just likeЧnaah." Miriam thought better of it and rephrased: "Congresswoman Paulette Milan, from Cambridge. You have the floor, ma'am."
"The first ex-boss is in politics now," Paulie observed gloomily. "A real dragon."
"Bitch."
"You didn't know her."
They drove on in amiable silence for the best part of an hour, out into the wilds of Massachusetts. Up the coast, past Salem, out toward Amesbury, off Interstate 95 and on to a four-lane highway, then finally a side road. Miriam had been here before, years ago, with Ben, when things had been going okay. There was a rest area up on a low hill overlooking Browns Point, capped by a powder of trees, gaunt skeletons hazed in red and auburn foliage at this time of year. Miriam pulled up at the side of the road just next to the rest area and parked. "Okay, this is it," she said. There were butterflies in her stomach again: I'm going to go through with it, she realized to her surprise.
"This?" Paulette looked around, surprised. "But this is nowhere!"
"Yeah, that's right. Best place to do this." Miriam opened the glove locker. "Look, I brought my old camcorder. No time for explanations. I'm going to get out of the car, grab my pack, and walk over there. I want you to film me. In ten minutes either I'll tell you why I asked you to do this and you can call me rude namesЧor you'll know to take the car home and come back the day after tomorrow to pick me up. Okay?"

She got out in a hurry and collected her pack from the trunk. Then, without waiting to see what Paulette did, she walked over to the middle of the parking lot. Breathing deeply, she hiked the pack up onto her back and fastened the chest strapЧthen pulled the locket out of the outer pocket where she'd stashed it.
Feeling acutely self-conscious, she flicked it open and turned her back on the parked car. Raised it to her face and stared into the enamelled knot painted inside it. This is stupid, a little voice told her. And you 're going to have your work cut out convincing Paulie you don't need to see a shrink.
Someone was calling her name sharply. She screened it out. Something seemed to move inside the knotЧ
This time it was raining gently. Miriam winced at the sudden stabbing in her head and pocketed the locket. Then she did what she'd planned all along: a three-sixty-degree scan that took in nothing but autumn trees and deadfall. Next, she planted her pack, transferred the pistol to her right hip pocket, retrieved her camera and the recorder, and started taking snapshots as she dictated a running commentary.
"The time by my watch is fourteen twelve hours. Precipitation is light and intermittent, cloud cover is about six-sevenths, wind out of the northwest and chilly, breeze of around five miles per hour. I think."
Snap, snap, snap: The camera had room for a thousand or so shots before she'd have to change hard disks. She slung it around her neck and shouldered the pack again. With the Swiss army knife Ben had given her on their second wedding anniversaryЧan odd present from a clueless, cheating husband with no sense of the difference between jewellery and
real lifeЧshe shaved a patch of bark above eye level on the four nearest trees, then fished around for some stones to pile precisely where she'd come through. (It wouldn't do to go back only to come out in the middle of her own car. If that was possible, of course.)
As she worked, she had the most peculiar sensation: I'm on my second moon mission, she thought. Did any of the Apollo astronauts go to the moon more than once? Here she was, not going crazy, recording notes and taking photographs to document her exploration of this extraordinary place that simply wasn't like home. Whatever "home" meant, now that gangsters had her number.