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

"Perhaps," concurred the Zealot, his red eye winking, and we left it at that.

I was home when the data began rolling in. Things move pretty fast once they pick up momentum.
Between Marilyn and the Zealot, I'd hoped for at least something to clarify the situation. What I got for
my trouble, though, was more than I'd bargained for.
I lived in the Old Quarter, in an apartment on the top floor of a small building nestled in the middle of a
thatch of 'scrapers. The view was nice, with lots of lights, but hardly breath-taking, so I'd concentrated
on the interior instead, making my rooms as pleasant as possible on a shoe-string budget. Polished wood,
vat-grown leather and plenty of books camouflaged (I hoped) the hi-tech office that my home operated
as, at times.
The only area outside of my house that I really bothered with was the garden. The roof was divided in
two between the apartment and a small yard. Trees and grasses managed quite well on the paper-thin
allowance of soil and light they received in the city, and it gave me somewhere to relax. I'd even set up a
small tribe of Hess machines to provide a natural ambience when the sun fell. On this particular night, I
was leaning in my doorway, listening to their electronic cheeps and chirrups and thinking quietly to myself,
running over everything I'd seen that day.
The first thing I'd done upon returning home was download the information stored in my implants. My
optic and auditory nerves had been 'bugged' by one of the Zealot's backyard techs some years ago.
Despite the fact that the implants were (a) illegal in the city and (b) contrary to my chosen idiom, their
obvious benefits made them essential to any form of investigative work. They allowed me to record
everything I saw and heard for up to an hour at a time, then replay it later via the PC I kept hidden
behind the lid of my mahogany writing-desk.
I'd hoped to discover a clue I'd missed at the scene of the suicide itself. But despite scanning through
those vital minutes several times--from the moment the guy in the Nissan had swerved to the arrival of the
police--I'd found nothing. All I'd gained was an increased dislike for the song that had been on the radio
at the time. Familiarity really does breed contempt, and I'd heard that song so many times by the end that
I could it recite it by heart.
The Perfect Gun is a door someone opened.
The Perfect Gun implies that there are others behind it.
The Perfect Gun is a dark intention . . .

The words echoed the suspicion, deep in my gut, that something was afoot, but only hindered my search
for the truth by distracting me from the details. Whatever the Perfect Gun was, it eluded me completely.
The phone buzzed for my attention, its racket silencing the sound-sensitive Hess machines. The tiny
devices had been programmed to interpret foreign noises as 'predators', and still hadn't grown
accustomed to the phone.
I hurried back inside and hit the Receive button on the console. No voice, no sound, just a coded request
for permission to transmit data. I turned to my PC and keyed the modem's scrambler. The influx of data
took less than a second.
Opening up a simple word-processor, I settled back to browse. The bank statement was the first item to
greet me, confirming my guess that the squirt had come from the Zealot.
33531325-001
26 11 UAC DEBIT 232.72
8
 44865472-001 ATM
26 11 40.50
4 DEBIT/UAC
11758215-099 KAS
27 11 600.00 *

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