"Hall, Adam - The Sinkiang Executive" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hall Adam)

He sat perfectly still, looking up at me over his glasses. By the way I'd said it he knew I wasn't joking.

'Did you say "fired"?'

'Invited to resign. Same thing.'

Very quietly: 'What in Christ's name for?'

'Breach of security.'

His large greying head tilted sideways, and I remembered his good ear was the left one.

'You?'

My mouth tasted awful and I wished I hadn't started this: in the course of sixteen missions I'd learned to keep things to myself, and what I was doing now felt like a confession under interrogation and I didn't like it because I'd experienced interrogation a good few times and they'd never broken me.

But my voice went on. 'It wasn't anything professional. I mean I didn't make a slip or blow cover or lose information,' I had to turn away from him now. 'It was something I did in hot blood.'

Again he said, and as quietly: 'You?'

It made me turn back on him. 'All right, 'I'm ten-tenths reptile, is that what you mean?'

'How else could you do your job?' he asked gently.

'I'm not looking for excuses. I am what I am and I do what I do and - a fractional hesitation in my mind while I asked myself exactly what I was, what I did - 'and it's too late to make any changes.'

'Of course,' he said after a while. 'It's the same with most of us.' He didn't glance down at the rug on the wheelchair but I sensed it was what he meant. 'Who was the woman?'

I went across to the window, subconsciously looking for escape. I wanted to stop talking and get out of here: he knew me too well. I don't like being known. 'How's business?' I asked him. 'Can't grumble.'

I heard his chair moving behind me, the rhythmic squawk of the tyres on the polished floorboards. 'You ever get out of this place, Charlie?'

'What do you think I am, a fucking cripple?'

'Not with those arms.' They were enormous; I'd seen the weights and pulleys in the corner when I'd come in here. He couldn't run anywhere but if anyone got within reach of him and he didn't like it I'd say they'd be better off with a black widow. 'We could have a meal,' I said, 'some time.'

'Delighted.'

'After it's official.'

'Oh,' he said cheerfully, 'that's a lot of balls. They can't do that to you - you're one of their top men, still in your prime.'

'I've heard it's the best time to quit: when you're winning.' I watched the man selling roast chestnuts down there in the winter sunshine, and realized it must be all written down somewhere. A mission was one thing, but life was another. In a mission you went in with everything worked out for you and all you had to do was stick to the instructions and watch out for traps, and by the time you'd been a few years at it you could handle pretty well anything because your mind turned into a computer, scanning the data and keeping you out of trouble. But life wasn't circumscribed by the limits of your own experience, and you could run smack into a land-mine because you couldn't see it: because it was all written down somewhere that you should do just that.

Katia. Novikov. Two names. Take them separately and you'd got two elements of a mission, one on our side, one on theirs. Put them together and you'd got the two components of the bomb that had blown me apart. Question: did I regret it? No, I would do it again, my arm round his neck, tightening, tightening, tremendously strong, stronger than Charlie's. All that was left, really, was the shockwave of knowing it had cost me everything 'I'd got.

'Where are you sacking out?'

I turned round.