"Alan Williams - Holy of Holies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Alan)

and soul-music and balloons of brandy, and the taxi-pilot, Ritchie, with his
drip-dry ladykiller smile, and the oily foreigner, Newby, with his flashing
diamond, both paying court to him as the heroic underdog defending the Faith
amid the dreary huts and regulated wastes of an RAF camp, when just look what
he was missing. Forget the rules. Rules were made to be broken.

And slowly, even without realizing it, Rawcliff had been drawn into Mason's
place, sharing his frustrations, his feelings of inferiority, with the dawning
of an uneasy excitement.

The house around them both was very still. Judith and Little Tom, safe
upstairs, were for the moment forgotten. 'Go on,' Rawcliff said quietly. 'How
much?'

'What?' Mason blinked dully: it was as though he were reliving that night in
the Barbican penthouse all over again.

'How much did they offer you?' Rawcliff repeated.

'They didn't tell me straight out. But Newby did say that the moment I agreed,
there would be a down-payment deposited for me in one of those Swiss bank
accounts. No tax. Pretty heady stuff for a bloke like me - more the sort of
thing you read about in books. I must have looked rather shaken, because
Ritchie gave me a refill of brandy; then I managed to ask Newby how much I
stood to get at the end of it. He told me it wouldn't be a fortune, but a very
comfortable sum, thank you, by English standards.'

Rawcliff interrupted again: 'Did this man Newby say what he did for a
living?'

'No. I just assumed he was some sort of business man.'

'Did he strike you as crooked?'

Mason reddened. 'To tell you the truth, things were happening so fast that I
didn't really get round to forming an impression. But Ritchie looked fairly
straight to me. Seemed a nice sort of bloke - sort of gave the whole business
a more solid air. I thought he was the kind of person I could trust.'

Rawcliff nodded. 'That's no doubt why he was there.'

Mason sat forward, gripping his glass as though he were afraid of dropping it,
and looked across at Charles Rawcliff with his solemn, innocent eyes,
bewildered and beseeching.

'So then what happened?' said Rawcliff.

'Well, everything was left in mid-air. Ritchie finished his drink and stood
up, and that was obviously the signal for us to leave. Newby was the first to
go, but just as he said goodbye, he told me what he called "a little