"A. R. Yngve - Parry's Protocol" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yngve A. R)

"In there was a tiny little furnished rock shelter, lit by candles, and almost all of
them had burned out. Man, it was freezing in there. And at the very end of the
shelter there was an extremely old, bald man, lying in a small bed, shivering with
cold. I covered the holy man with my jacket, and an interpreter translated my
question to him: 'What is the secret of Creation?' The ancient, toothless man
whispered something in the ear of the interpreter -- and then he died.

"I shouted: 'What'd he say?! What'd he say?!', shaking the interpreter's shoulders.
And the interpreter looked gravely at me for a looong moment... and he said:
'Beats me, I don't understand French at all.'"

The roars of laughter from the TV set mixed with the night-watchman's chuckles.
An imaginary listener who wouldn't have known Perkins, might have believed he
was sobbing. From the corridors of the institution came no sounds, except the
occasional ticking of the strip-lights, and a faint whisper of wind from the old
ventilators. The patients in their cells slept: the deep, dreamless sleep brought
only by large drug doses.




(To Chapter 1)
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Chapter 1


WESTMOREHAM COUNTY
WASHINGTON STATE, SOUTHEAST REGION
SEPTEMBER 8

Dr. Abram Lemercier leaned forward over the steering-wheel, squinting. His thick
glasses did not improve his view much in the compact haze that wrapped over the
billowing fields ahead of him. He glanced at the satellite-linked roadmap on the
tiny dashboard screen; a blinking cursor, representing the car, assured him of an
absolute position in the world.

Lemercier, a man of fifty-three years with a worried face and beginning baldness,
stroked his pointed, droopy white moustaches with his left hand and looked up at
the rear-view mirror. His hand habitually drew across the short, graying beard and
adjusted the bow tie of his brown tweed costume. That didn't make him look less
tired -- his shoulder-long white back-hair suggested a considerably wilder life,
which this middle-aged man in a rented car had left behind him long ago.

Abram sighed lightly and switched on the radio. "Urban" country music -- he
switched to another station. Classic Seattle grunge rock -- he switched again. At
the third switching came some obscure local station.

"...out for the fog, okay? You're listening to WRBC, reaching five thousand
listeners twenty-four hours a day! The joke of the week: Where can you find the
dumbest people in Westmoreham? In City Hall. And where can you find the