"Hutchinson, Dave - Tir-na-nOg" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hutchinson Dave)

"When I was young, little girls played with dolls," I say, unable to tear my eyes away from all those little holes.

"Well, thank God those days are gone. Where is he, Monkey?"

"I don't know."

"Of course you know. You're his best friend. He was always talking about you."

"I'm flattered."

She gives a thin smile. "You're old, Monkey. Hey's old. Old men stick together."

"You can't blame them if the world's being run by people like you."

She twists the barrel again. "On single-shot," she says, "it fires a dart tipped with batrachotoxin. You know? From the skin of poisonous frogs?"

"Only you could make a joke like that, Benedict."

"Some people have an odd sense of humor," she says with a little smile. "How's yours?"

"Oh, fine. I've always found this kind of thing hilarious."

She leans forward and puts the muzzle of the gun against my throat. "Like hitting your heart with a pickax, Monkey," she murmurs, watching my face.

And for a moment an awful feeling comes over me. An obscene feeling. I stare into those depthless oceanic eyes again, and for a moment I know that I could fall in love with her, even though she is threatening me with poison distilled from the skin of frogs, even though she despises me for being everything she is not, for being old, broken, British. I could fall in love with this beautiful child of a younger culture, this witch of dark technologies, build my love into an edifice, a mighty wheel, and break myself on it.

I feel a bead of sweat collect itself up in my receded hairline, begin to travel down my forehead. She is quite lovely in her ease with hardware. Alluring. I could tell her my feelings, and she would shoot me right here and now, out of surprise alone, out of disgust …

"Benedict," I say with an effort, "will you get it into your head that I don't have what you want? I'm a teacher, that's all. I teach the syllabus and along the way I try to teach the kids how to be better people. That's all."

She favors me with one of her cold, toneless looks. "It's a pity no one ever took the trouble to teach you how to be a better person."

"Pardon me?"

"Hey tried to call you twice in the year before he walked and both times you just told him to fuck off. We've got recordings. Not a nice way to treat a friend, Monkey."

Which, I suppose, is why they came to me. "It's not very polite to listen to other people's telephone conversations."

She laughs at such a quaint concept as politeness, unsnaps the ammo cassette from the pistol. "There are lots of people looking for Hey." She puts gun and cassette back into the case and shuts the lid. "Not all of them have my sense of humor."

I suddenly realize I'm shaking. "Well, let's hope we find him first."

"You'd better hope so. Hey hasn't defected; we'd know about it if he turned up in someone else's facility. He's gone rogue. Like a mad elephant, you know? Like a tiger. We have to stop him before he does something silly."

"Who's going to stop you before you do something silly?"

She gives me that thin smile again as she slides the case back under the bed. "Nobody at all. Beautiful, isn't it?"