"Timothy Zahn - Blackcollar 2 - The Backlash Mission" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

"I was told to cut back your ambitions," Bernhard said quietly. "How I do that is my choice. Though
if I have to come back the results are likely to be more permanent."

"Ah. In other words, Sartan doesn't feel up to a full-scale war yet, is that it?" The older man snorted.
"Well, let me return his favor with a little advice. No one's succeeded in fencing Denver up as his
own private preserve for over two hundred years. Not in peacetime, not during the war, not in thirty
years of Ryqril occupation. If Sartan thinks he can do it he's going to get himself buriedтАФand if you
get too closely tied to his muzzle you'll go the same way." He glanced at Kanai, and even across the
room Kanai could see the aura of age around those eyes. With regular Idunine doses, Reger's middle-
aged appearance meant nothing, of course, any more than Kanai's lithe body showed its own six
decades. How old was Reger, anyway? Old enough to have been trying for control of Denver's
underworld himself in the days before the Ryqril threat? Possibly. Maybe even probably.

Not that it mattered. The world had changed thirty years back, and it was Bernhard and Kanai who
knew how to operate in it now. Reger and his kind were the dinosaurs, doomed to ultimate
extinction.

"I'll give Sartan your words of wisdom," Bernhard told the older man, his tone lightly sarcastic. "Just
don't make us come back."

Another hand signal passed, and Kanai headed back the way he'd come, ready to clear out any new
threats Reger's men might have set up. But whatever firepower still existed in the mansion was
apparently still too shaken to offer fresh resistance. The three black-clad men made their way back
outside and into the woods surrounding Reger's now slightly damaged property. Kanai sensed, rather
than saw, the four backups withdrawing with them, and all seven men arrived at their hidden cars at
the same time.

"Well?" one of the backups asked.

"He'll fall into line," Bernhard said tiredly, pulling goggles and battle-hood off and massaging the
bridge of his nose. "And once he does, all the little quarter-mark operations on this side of Denver
should follow."

"At which point," someone else commented, "we'll have something real to play with."

"Or Sartan will," Bernhard said with just a hint of reproval. "Sartan's in charge of this, not us. Never
forget that."

A minute later they were all heading toward the sprawling metropolis of Denver to the southeast. In
the back seat, leaning against the right-hand door, Kanai stared moodily out the windshield as the
first drops of rain began to fall. So the big consolidation scheme was working. The promise of a

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Blackcollar: The Backlash Mission

better future... and all they had to do to achieve it was continue to be the most elite strong-arm force
the criminal world had ever known.

What a level, he thought, for blackcollars to sink to.