"Van Lustbader, Eric - Black Blade(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

'Don't be ridiculous,' Moravia had said before he could stop himself. He bit his lip, his face dark with the implications of this discussion.
'I AM A LIFE FORM,' the Oracle said.
'But you aren't life,' Moravia had said. 'You have no living tissue or organs inside you.'
'I THINK. THEREFORE I AM,' the Oracle said with simple but profound logic. 'BUT, IN ANY CASE, YOU ARE WRONG HERE, TOO, MORAVIA-SAN. THE LAPID TECHNOLOGY DEVISED FOR ME CONTAINS A QUANTITY OF HUMAN DNA, WHICH I CONTINUE TO BREAK DOWN AND ANALYSE. SO, YOU SEE, I DO HAVE LIFE AS YOU KNOW IT INSIDE ME.'
'Fluttering like a butterfly inside a bell jar,' Moravia had said softly.
'What?' Minako said, because she hadn't heard.
'PRECISELY,' the Oracle said, because it had.
Now Moravia did smile. 'So,' he said, standing before the black cube as forcefully as a sumo, 'what is it you think you can do for me?'
'WHAT YOU WANT HAS ALREADY BEEN DONE,' the Oracle said with the air of a mischievous child.
And now here he was back in New York, a spy in amber, clinging to deliciously warm flesh, awaiting his master's call, making the best of his down time. Unwittingly, Nishitsu had opened the doors to an inner sanctum, and Moravia had absorbed all the information he could. And still there had been more! So much, in fact, that he had sent a coded fax demanding a face-to-face debriefing. This was a dangerous precedent, certainly, and against the strict regulations that had been explained to him upon his recruitment, but, he felt, justified given the extraordinary nature of his latest information on the Oracle.
That was when he felt something, surely no more than a shadow, fall across the periphery of his vision. It was akin to the sensation one experiences falling asleep during the day and awakening at night. Perhaps he felt the prick of a needle, but if so it seemed dull and far away, nothing to do with him.
His eyes, hooded and dulled in the aftermath of sex, made out only a vague darkness, as if, out swimming in deep water, he had been abruptly pulled downwards into a darkness, thicker and more silent than he could imagine.
He awoke, dizzy and sick to his stomach. He had sampled enough drugs in his lifetime to know that something very powerful was swimming in his veins. He tried to struggle against it, but it was no use.
He turned his head, noticed with a dull surprise that he was no longer at home, but had been taken to his office. Abducted - but surely one was not abducted to a place one already owned.
Becoming aware of movement, he turned his head again, was rewarded by a slosh of vectors, a wobbling of direction and dimension. He was going to be sick. He gagged, tried to puke, but he lacked the strength even for that. It was a wonder the air was going in and out of his lungs.
He saw someone swimming like a manta towards him. 'Who -?' Great wings undulating, wicked barbed tail fluttering, up, down, up, down. Moravia tried to scream, then, but there was something stuck in his throat - no, his mouth, filled with soft cotton, so much he could not bite down. He tried to get it out, gagged reflexively again, could not manage to budge it.
'How does it feel now?' a voice said - male? female? he couldn't tell. 'To be helpless.'
Moravia closed his eyes, tried to use some of his new-found strength, vitality, endurance to break whatever interior bonds were holding him fast, but succeeded only in accelerating his heartbeat to the point where the muscle began to pain him. He squinted up at the manta's terrifying, amorphous shape, blinking again and again to clear his vision.
'Here, let me help you.' Lifted like a baby, head cradled in a lap. 'Do you want to know who I am, Moravia? Then I'll tell you, just like I tell all of them.' All of who? Moravia thought dazedly. 'Every morning I pray to the gods for enlightenment, because enlightenment breeds success. There are those who would tell me that the gods will spurn me because I am unclean, stained as I am by blood spilled at my own hands. To them I say, let the gods do what they may - I have no control over what they may think or do. But I will not cease my prayers; in that, I am pure.' A hand tenderly stroked his cheek. 'And I am right, Moravia, because I have known nothing but success.'
He was rocked as he had been when he was a child. 'This is all that I am, what I have just told you. The rest is just a gloss, two arcs of rouge brushed into the cheeks before performing the important occasions in one's life -' A brush, delicate as a butterfly's passage, against one cheekbone then another '- One's birthday, perhaps . . . or one's death.'
Lips, soft as butter, cold as a dewdrop, pressed against his, and then something as concrete as a fist had seized his heart, clamping down on it with the strength of a god.
Moravia screamed - or, rather, struggled to scream. His mind, shredding like clouds before a chill north wind, commanded him to scream, but nothing appeared to work. There was only the pain, and now a pressure - inside out, insupportable - that stilled, one by one, every element inside his helpless form that pumped, sighed, pulsed and, finally, thought.






BOOK I
Inbetween Days
Three can keep a secret,
if two of them are dead.
Benjamin Franklin

ONE
New York City
On a night when thick, ugly clouds hunkered across the full moon of late February, Wolf Matheson was crouched on a rubble-strewn rooftop six storeys above the fetid swamp of East Harlem.
It had been a long run, nearly seven weeks, longer than he'd ever been on a case, but now, on this dank, malodorous night Wolf was certain he had run his quarry down, just as he had brought to justice the three other serial killers whose cases had been handed to him by. Hayes Walker Johnson, the commish, a year ago when he had appointed Wolf head of the NYPD's Special Homicide Task Force. The Werewolves, as the force was quickly dubbed out of a mixture of respect and fear inside the department, was an elite unit created specifically 'to direct' Wolf's talent for tracking down the worst form of psychotic murderer who could, from either guile or utter randomness, sometimes, God help them all, a combination of the two, otherwise frustrate whole divisions of overworked city detectives.
Wolf had first come to the commish's attention when he solved the murders of two prostitutes - a mother and daughter. The savagery of their particular deaths was grisly enough to get the attention of even the most jaded street bull but, typical of the overworked department, nothing was done until a tourist - more or less the same age as the demised daughter - was offed with the same MO. Prostitutes were so much street fodder, but a tourist was, after all, a tourist, and still represented the lifeblood of a city stumbling, without the knowledge of those who ran it for their own benefit, straight from first world to third world status. The swiftly following meeting with the publicity-minded Hayes Walker Johnson, as canny a black politician as ever held the office of commissioner, confirmed what Wolf already knew: the case had become a top priority.
Trouble was no one had a clue as to where to start the search for the killer. But Wolf, at the end of that long day of visiting the scene of the second crime, lying alone in his bed, had known. Watching the flickering streetlight, which in this city passed for starlight, seep through his bedroom skylight, he had slowly closed his eyes, but not into darkness. Within the pellucid red glow of an inner heat he had seen the face of the murderer, could smell his sourish stench, sense his peculiar tread as light as a dancer's, had felt the insistent demand - as debilitating as the pressure of an abscess - of alien voices just as he had known the murderer did.
How he knew these things he could not say. But he found his murderer within seventy-two hours and, although already a lieutenant of some wide renown throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Wolf was instantly thrust into a media spotlight, arranged to promote the commish. The Special Homicide Task Force was a direct result of the publicity fallout of the successful conclusion of the case. The commish had had to do something visible with his hero - in fact, to be perfectly fair, he had wanted to reward Wolf in some special way for sending his Q-rating -his recognition among the populace - soaring.
The nuts and bolts of forming the unit had given Wolf time to think about his bizarre talent which, considered in the new light of his rapid advancement, must have been with him in some form or other all his life.
Now, alone on the rooftop, waiting for his quarry to emerge into the darkness, Wolf crouched as still as one of those stone gargoyles guarding the rich, safe in their oversized pre-war apartments on the West Side. It was nearly four in the morning, that time when all colour had drained out of the city, a time when he and his quarries existed, listening to the cacophony of voices and acting on their cries.
His tour of duty would not be over until he brought in his man, or one of them was dead. A far cry from his childhood games of hide-and-seek, his favourite because he had never lost. Or was it?
He was on the edge of El Barrio, a burned-out, festering canker that was nominally a part of New York City but which might just as well have been a section of Calcutta for all its resemblance to any place in the modern metropolis that contained Bloomingdale's and St Patrick's Cathedral.
Swirling precipitation littered the sky. In another, less inimical clime it might have been snow, but here it had picked up so many kinds of noxious hydrocarbons on its way down that the waxy flakes disintegrated on contact with the ancient iron and the pot-holed macadam.
Nothing much was happening on the pavement below him. Sirens rose and fell streets - worlds - away, dogs barked, skirmishing with the homeless for scraps of food in the piles of litter along the gutters. Garbage-can fires burned here and there, huddled shapes bent over them, surrounded by supermarket carts piled high with scrounged junk. Further away, a razed lot had been turned into a permanent reservation of cardboard tents, their lopsided, conical shapes throwing shadowy fingers into the clogged gutter. An old man, bare feet as white as maggots under the fizzing sodium lights, picked his way through the broken green glass that served as the reservation's border. Spying a rat in his path, he hawked and spat a thick gob of phlegm, guffawing as the rat went tumbling back into the darkness. A pieced-together black Firebird waited at a No Loading zone, its exhaust rumbling softly. Opposite, an old souped-up Chevy with stylized flames painted on its sides revved, then roared away from the kerb, adding to the stink of the night air.
Somewhere within that jungle of iron and fire his men, Bobby Connor and Junior Ruiz, were hidden. In the specifics of his job Wolf worked alone, but he always had backups in the immediate environment in the event his quarry outran the perimeter of his own personal defence - or, of course, killed him. With men such as those he had been given a mandate to find, one was obliged to consider all the worst possibilities.
Wolf did not need to look at his watch. Time had become insubstantial, irrelevant; he was living inbetween days: immersed in the inner language used by his quarries as they went about trying to make sense of a disordered and dysfunctional universe.
This time his quarry was a Colombian named Chucho Arquillo, a major player in narcotics bought from the Cali Cartel, and arms which he had cleverly siphoned out of US military bases. Had Arquillo graduated out of big-time conduit to big-time assassin, or had he simply gone stone loco? This was a question, though intriguing, not sufficiently central to the problem of locating him and bringing him in, so that while Wolf had turned it over in his mind like a crystal, its facets had remained opaque; much like the enigma of his own talent for unearthing the whereabouts of the city's most unappetizing - and dangerous - denizens.