"Chalker, Jack L - G.o.d. Inc. 2 - The Shadow Dancers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

Bill Markham sighed. "I wish it were that easy, Sam, but it's not. This is a
class A operation all the way. They're very good, whoever they are. Vogel will
spook and run at the first suspicion, and probably has people there working for
him even he doesn't know about whose only job is to take him out if he gets
nabbed or exposed. The labs, the whole place he's got, are wired for one hell of
a big explosion should anything go wrong, and we don't even know who might
trigger it or how. We could kill him, of course, anytime, but that only buys us
time until they can set up another site like his that we don't know about. We've
tried tricking him out, but he's always come up with a plausible excuse not to
leave. If we press too hard, he'll blow that joint and split to a safe line."
Bill sat back in his chair and sighed. "You see," he continued, "he's our only
real lead and he's eggshells. He's no good to us dead. And we have to know what
the hell is going on. We don't know what this stuff is, where it comes from,
who's bringing it in and how, and, worst of all, we don't know what they plan to
do with it. We have a lot of pieces, very few real live suspects, and none of
them fit. Why go to all this risk? What's it all about? All we know is that
clearly they can't synthesize it, either, so they're pretty limited, and that
means they have a very specific plot in mind-but what? Something big, real big,
or they wouldn't take all these risks. Very big people are involved just to do
what they've done. Who are they? How did they manage it? What are they planning?
You see?"
I did see. Bill had one hell of a problem on his hands. "But, Bill-you got
agents, all that technology, all that power. Surely you can do a snatch-and-grab
with this guy," I said.
"You'd think so, wouldn't you? The trouble is, this guy's stationmaster and he's
smart. He wouldn't have turned traitor without taking that into consideration.
He knew what he was up against, and who. Cranston was a station-master, top, you
remember, and he'd even set up a resort on a weak point with a Labyrinth
substation in his basement, and he came damned close to getting away."
We remembered. We had to chase the bastard through the Labyrinth and he still
almost killed us.
Markham slipped some switches and the room went dark and a panel came down in
back of his desk. Another button, and some slides appeared on the back, the
first of a really enormous mansion that looked like a cross between a fancy home
in the country and Fort Apache.
"Looks like a federal penitentiary with a nice house in the middle," Sam noted.
"Are those machine gun towers on that outer wall?"
"They are, and you have three rows of fence before you even get to the wall. The
distance between the first two fences is wide enough for men with nasty dogs to
go through, which they do, and there are sensors on the fences for any kind of
disturbance. Even a rabbit brings the dogs running. The third fence line is
electrified with enough juice to fry anybody. Then there's the wall, which has
both machine gun coverage and is thick enough for riflemen to stand between the
towers. A hundred and eighty-six guys held a far less secure wall against five
thousand infantry for twelve days at the Alamo."
"But they eventually lost," Sam pointed out.
"Yeah, they lost-but you could hold this place for a while, anyway. Long enough
to realize you were going to be overrun, burn the papers, get out of there and
blow the whole complex. The entire estate is honeycombed with tunnels packed
with explosives that would leave a crater half a mile wide."