"Mack Reynolds - Day After Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Mack)

you out of this world and far beyond. You've got to have a chandelier, even
to start."

She snorted. "I'll bet. However, I'm an old-fashioned girl and stick to
only the more normal perversions."

"What's a normal perversion?" Larry said. He was intrigued.

"I'll never tell."

On his way to his office, he wondered why the Boss kept her on.
Classically, a secretary-receptionist should have every hair in place, every
pore. But in her time LaVerne Polk must have caused more than one
bureaucratic eyebrow to raise. Efficiency was probably the answer. The
Boss couldn't afford to let her go. The old boy probably wasn't even laying
the girl. Larry got the impression she wasn't exactly an easy lay.




II


Ilya Simonov was an excellent driver. He drove with the same care and
efficiency that he expended upon all of his activities. Now he tooled his Zil
aircushion convertible along.the edge of Red Square, paralleling the
giantic eyesore which was the GUM department store, and opposite the
red marble tomb of Lenin. He turned right just before St. Basil's Cathedral
and took the Moskvoretski bridge over the Moscow River.

He merged into the largely automated traffic of Pyatnikskaya and at
Dobryninskaya Square blended west into the traffic that led to Gorki Park.
He sped along the edge of the park on Kaluga until he came to tine Czarist
baroque palace which was the headquarters of the ministry of which he
had been a member for almost all his adult life.
 Theoretically, there was no parking before the ministry. However, he
pulled up to the curb and the two guards, staring directly ahead, snapped
to the saluts. Ilya Simonov flicked them a return with the swagger stick he
carried. It was an anachronism.

Not since the days before the revolution had a Russian officer carried a
swagger stick. It was, in a way, his trademark. A good many persons, on
both sides of the Iron Curtain knew Colonel Simonov on sight, although
they had never seen him before, by the swagger stick.

He was tall for a Cossack, slightly slanted of eye, due to his Siberian
heritage, black of hair, and obviously iron of body. He had an air of
intensity and dedication about him, and, instinctively, there were few who
dared thwart him.