"Chalker, Jack L - G.O.D. Inc 3 - The Maze in the Mirror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

"What the hell is you?" she mutters, not afraid but startled.
"Pardon, Madam," he responds, in an elegant upper class London accent tempered
by a crackling voice and total exhaustion. "The name is Bond. James Bond."
And then the stranger collapses half inside her door.
Doctor Macklinberg shook his head in wonder and closed the door to the guest
bedroom as he exited into the hall. She looked at him quizzically. "Well?"
He shrugged. "Bad exposure. He should be in a hospital right now but you know
why we can't do that. Stripping him and getting him into the hot tub in the
basement was a brilliant reaction. He still might lose some toes or perhaps
worse-I can't tell this soon-but if he pulls through it will be because of your
quick thinking."
"I come in this house out of the storm and stripped and jumped in that thing
myself to thaw out too many times not to think of it," she responded. "You know
who he said he was?"
The doctor nodded. "Yes, he's mumbled it several times to me."
She fumbled and then got out his wallet. "Says so in here, too. London address,
bunch of cards for fancy clubs over half the world, a couple of credit cards on
European banks, and a fair amount of these." She handed him some very large
bills. He took them and frowned.
"Pound notes with King Charles VI on them. Fascinating. Our Charles would only
be the third, I think. That's not him, though. I wonder if the Stuarts still
rule our Mister Bond's England? I wonder what else they rule?"
She shrugged. "I never pay much attention to that kind of thing. The main thing
is that he's not from the here and now and that means he came in through the
substation and he did it without settin' off no alarms in the house here or in
Stan's security office."
"You been down there?"
"Uh uh. Not with Sam in Philadelphia and everybody else checkin' out everything.
Hell, I got a kid I can't leave, Doc. You know that. Stan got down there,
though. The station wasn't active but it was a hot area, and the snow all around
was all crudded up. Looks like he used his coat over the barbed wire. Parts of
it are stall stickin' there."
"Well, the barbed wire was probably the least of his problems. He has several
gashes in him as well, all fairly new and some fairly deep, like he'd been stuck
by all sorts of nasty, sharp knives. He's been through a lot tonight, that's for
certain."
She nodded. "Well, Stan's gonna go in and send a message up the line to Company
Security, and I already called it in to Bill in Philadelphia while you was in
there. It's gonna leave me short-handed, though. They got a pretty mean storm in
the east right now and it's socked in Sam by air or road. With Stan going up
line that leaves only three of us here on the grounds tonight."
Macklinberg sighed. "I wish I could just stay with him but I'm on call tonight
at the hospital. I have three women in labor now and what with the insurance
thing I'm the only one around at the moment willing to deliver their kids.
Ordinarily I'd send a nurse over or maybe a resident but I can't chance what
this fellow might say if he starts babbling or comes out of it. He's definitely
scared of something, though, and if he's anything at all like his fictional
counterpart he doesn't scare easily. I've given him what I can to help him
along-antibiotics, that sort of thing-but I didn't dare give him a sedative even
though, God knows, that's what he needs. I thought that if he came out of it