"Clancy, Tom - Op-Center 05 - Ballance of Power" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clancy Tom)

sorry."
The woman's limbs felt heavy and she was sick that
the reflexes that had been so quick with those street kids
had failed her completely here. Intellectually,
Aideen knew that she wasn't to blame. During her
weeklong orientation when she first joined Op-Center,
staff psychologist Liz Gordon had warned
Aideen and two other new employees that if and when
it happened, unexpectedly facing a weapon for the first
time could be devastating. A gun or a knife
pulled in familiar surroundings destroys the
delusion that we're invincible doing what we do
routinely every day-in this case, walking down a city
street. Liz had told the small group that in the
instant of shock, a person's body temperature,
blood pressure, and muscle tone all
crash and it takes a moment for the survival instinct
to kick in.
Attackers count on that instant of paralysis,
Liz had said.
But understanding what had happened didn't help. Not
at all. It didn't lessen the ache and the guilt that
Aideen felt. If she'd moved an instant
sooner or been a little more heads-up-by just a
heartbeat, that's all it would have taken-Martha might
have survived.
How do you live with that guilt?
Aideen asked herself as tears began to form.
She didn't know. She'd never been able to deal with
coming up short. She couldn't handle it when she found
her widower father crying at the kitchen table after losing
his job in the Boston shoe factory where
BALANCE OF POWER 19
he'd worked since he was a boy. For days thereafter she
tried to get him to talk, but he turned to scotch
instead. She went off to college not long afterward,
feeling as though she'd failed him. She couldn't
handle the sense of failure when her college
sweetheart, her greatest love, smiled warmly at
an old girlfriend in their senior year. He left
Aideen a week later and she joined the army
after graduation. She hadn't even attended the
graduation ceremony; it would have killed her to see
him.
Now she'd failed Martha. Her shoulders heaved out
the tears and the tears became sobs.
A young, mustachioed sergeant of the palace security
guard raised her gently by the shoulders. He helped
her stand.
"Are you all right?" he asked in English.