"Clancy, Tom - Net Force 02 - Hidden Agendas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clancy Tom)

filled before she'd ever logged on to registration. Too
bad. Stars were much more inter esting than rocks.
Kathryn Brant sighed, leaned back in the
creaky chair, and rubbed at her eyes. Geology.
Bleh.
She leaned toward the desk again and got another
nail wrenched-from-wet-wood noise. Lord.
Brand-new, and already the chair squeaked as if it had
been left out in the Louisiana rain for a couple
years. But that was what happened when you bought everything from
the lowest bidder--a bid that had probably been the
low one because the company had bribed somebody in the
Contracts office. Bribery was a normal way of
doing business around here. Kat had taken two
semesters of political science at LSU, where
she was, thankfully, a senior. Studying
politics was almost a necessity in Louisiana,
where people still spoke fondly of Huey Long, the
govemortumed-senator who'd been assassinated in
the main part of the capitol building, just up the hall
there, more than seventy-five years past.
Huey had been one in a long list of rogues
who had run the state, and with the public's blessing. After
all, the big oil companies had paid for everything for
decades, there hadn't been any income tax--no
property tax to speak of--and if you were going to elect
somebody, why not elect somebody colorful,
especially if it didn't cost you anything? Her
political science professor had once told the
class that when he'd been a teenager, he and his friends
would catch a bus to the capitol and sit in the
gallery, watching the House in action. More inter esting
than going to a movie, he'd said. People came from all
over the country to study Louisiana politics, and
rightly so.
She grinned as the wind howled at the glass
doors that opened out onto the capitol grounds.
Huey was out there, in spirit and in bronze, just around the
bend, the spotlight from the top of the tall and pointed
building--once the tallest in the entire South, and
still pretty much the tallest in the state-again
shining down upon the populist martyour's huge statue.
Every now and then, the state tightened its purse
strings and decided to turn the spotlight off to save
a few dollars, but they always turned it back on
again. Tourists still came to see old Huey out there,
pigeons and all.
Working your way through school as a guard at the
state capitol wasn't the best job in the world, but
it left plenty of time to study, that was the main