"Sean Williams - The Perfect Gun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Sean)

Marilyn's room was on the sixth floor. Not a penthouse or anything special,
but sufficiently large for her needs. She preferred stark, simplistic
designs--lots of metal and glass, very slick, like a doctor's surgery with
carpet. I tried not to imagine what was happening to her in there, focussing
instead on the times I had stayed with her, concentrating on the way it
normally was and letting the anger percolate through. I vowed that if we came
through this I wouldn't let anything so petty as a difference in idiom keep us
apart any longer.
Corny, I know. Blame it on the view through the hood, which took a little
getting used to.
The building seemed unnaturally deserted as I crept through the maintenance
corridors, until I found an old analog clock. The time was almost three in the
morning. No wonder it was quiet. But why, then, was Marilyn accessing the
 Genotek network as though nothing untoward had happened?
Thanking fortune that I had brought my key-ring--on which dangled the key to
her apartment--I caught the elevator to the floor above hers, then
back-tracked to the stairwell. I passed no one along the way, for which I was
also grateful. Light-cloaks work best at night, against a mottled background;
not even the advanced tech allowed outside C20 could provide a perfect magic
coat. The corridors, although dimly lit, were too narrow for me to avoid
detection at close range.
I eased open the door from the stairwell to her level, and shut it behind me
as quietly as I could. Her room lay to my right, along a corridor branching
off from the one in which I found myself. I approached the corner with
caution, peering around it to survey the territory before daring to approach.
Seated on a chair outside her room was a security guard.
I retreated, stumped for the moment. I couldn't possibly creep close enough to
disarm the guard. She would be sure to see me and raise the alarm. And if I
ran, the sound of my feet on the carpet would give me away instead.
My revolver was useless in this instance; it would attract attention even more
effectively than my cloaked figure. Besides, I didn't want to kill anyone in
cold blood, especially while the possibility remained that I could be
mistaken. Marilyn might conceivably have evaded her pursuers and arranged for
a guard to watch her back during the night.
I didn't believe it for a second, but couldn't afford to take the chance.
Which left me with only one option.
Stepping back from the corner, I reached for the belt and switched off the
cloak. Taking a deep breath, I strolled past the entrance to Marilyn's
corridor, glanced up to notice the guard at the same time she noticed me,
waved nonchalantly, and continued on my way. When I was out of sight, I
counted to three.
"Hey!" I followed my exclamation with a grunt of pain, and a stamp on the
carpeted floor loud enough for her to hear.
With my back against the wall, I switched the cloak on and listened for the
guard's footsteps. Having just faked a maybe-convincing attack on an innocent
resident of the building, I hoped she'd be professional enough to at least
check it out. For all she knew, it might have been me on the warpath.
She fell for it. As her head inched around the corner, I grabbed her and
knocked her out as quietly as I could, feeling bad while I did it. She was,
after all, just doing her job.