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

"My promise isn't worth squat, right?"
"You said it." She returned to her meal, apparently satisfied by the admission of guilt. "It goes with the
job, I hear."
We finished our meals in silence, lost in private thoughts. I didn't know for sure what was on her mind,
although I had a pretty good idea, but I knew exactly what was on mine:
A non-existent man--the same man I myself had inexplicably been paid to follow--commits suicide on a
freeway for no apparent reason. How did he get into the city, and why did he come here in the first
place? Did he shoot himself because I was following him? Or was there more to it than that?
This whole thing stinks . . .
Had I needed any incentive to investigate the suicide, that would have been enough. Bob Tasker smelled
a rat too big to chase himself; how could I not be curious? That he'd also warned me to be careful didn't
matter. I could look after myself.
He might have saved his breath, though. I'd been on the case hours before he'd asked to see me.
When Marilyn and I finished, we split the bill fifty-fifty and went our separate ways: she back to work
and me deeper into the city. Whatever it was we had between us, it was easy to resist that night. Every
time I closed my eyes I saw the terrible flower unfolding from the dead man's skull.
Who was he?
For that question, at least, I had a loose end to follow, apart from the matter of the ID. I figured that if
anyone knew anything about the guy in the Nissan then my employers surely did. They hadn't paid two
hundred dollars a day to give me a little fresh air, that was for certain. They must have had a reason for
wanting him watched, and all I had to do was find it, and them.
Whoever they were.

The Zealot lived downtown, behind an underground club called the "Jack-in-a-Box". A regular, muffled
thumping issued through the walls as I approached the concealed door in the venue's rear alleyway--a
wild mix of techno and hard-core rap; alien signals from an alien time. Me, I prefer smoky jazz, Coltrane
or Moore, especially after a quiet night with Marilyn.
I tapped on the door and waited patiently. Eventually, a small portal opened at about chest-height in the
brick wall, into which I stuck my hand. A flickering of lasers scanned my prints, my genetic pattern and
my invisible ID tattoo before beeping in satisfaction. A shadowy light-cloak--illegal in C20--enfolded me,
hiding my movements from prying eyes, and the door slid open.
I stepped inside and walked along a bare, grey corridor to the inner door. More complex instruments
scanned my body for weapons and bugs; their feathery touch made my skin crawl.
"Please disarm," said a voice, obviously artificial. I tugged out my service revolver and placed it into a slot
by the speaker grille. The slot closed with a hiss and the inner door opened.
The Zealot's home was dark, perpetually ill-lit by LEDs, VDUs and holographic tanks lifted from the
early Twenty-First Century and subsequently modified. Technology crowded on all sides, like the trunks
of trees in a rainforest; wire and light cables snaked like vines from trunk to trunk, vanishing behind
consoles and black boxes. The place had the look of a voodoo workshop somewhere off the South
American track. But the weirdest thing about it was the Zealot himself.
He wasn't wearing his mask, and the cold, silver skeleton of his facial reconstruct glittered in the dim light.
From left cheekbone to temple, his face was a metal skull, complete with red-glowing artificial eye. But
even with the mask, he was a weird sight to my C20-adapted eyes: grey skin rolled back in hairless
waves from his forehead to the nape of his neck; his nose flared wide above a lipless mouth and pointed
chin. His one good eye was gold in colour, and bloodshot.

Unlike most people in C20, the Zealot maintained his caste-form with something akin to pride. To
preserve the illusion of the Twentieth Century, most of the city's occupants underwent gentle biomod
therapy before arrival, enough to mask the more obvious divergences of the castes from the pre-Trouble
Human Ideal. Even so, there was no hiding the truth buried in genetic codes. Marilyn still retained