"Kim Stanley Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

offer. He had no choice; he was only in D.C. now because of her previous invitation
to work on the climate problem, and he had been doing that for a year now. And
they were friends, they were colleagues; they were…“I mean, I’ll have to check with
my department and all first, to make sure it will all be okay at UCSD. But I think it
could be really interesting.”
“Oh good. Good. I was hoping you’d say yes.”



The next morning, at work his doorway darkened, and he swung his chair around,
expecting to see Diane, there to discuss their move to the Presidential Science
Advisor’s offices—
“Oh! Edgardo!”
“Hi, Frank. Hey, are you up for getting a bite at the Food Factory?” Waggling his
eyebrows Groucho-istically.
“Sure,” Frank said, trying to sound natural. It was hard not to look around his office
as he saved and shut the file he was working on.
On the way to the Food Factory, Edgardo surreptitiously ran a wand over Frank,
and gave it to Frank, who did the same for him. Then they went in and stood at a
bar, noisily eating chips and salsa.
“What is it?”
“A friend of mine has tracked down your friend and her husband.”
“Ah ha! And?”
“They work for a unit of a black agency called Advanced Research and
Development Agency Prime. The man’s name is Edward Cooper, and hers is
Caroline Churchland. They ran a big data-mining effort, which was a combination of
the Total Information Awareness project and some other black programs in
Homeland Security.”
“Wait—she didn’t work for him?”
“No. My friend says it was more like the other way around. She headed the
program, but he was brought in to help when some surveillance issues cropped up.
He came from Homeland Security, and before that CIA, where he was on the
Afghanistan detail. My friend says the program got a lot more serious when he
arrived.”
“Serious?”
“Some surveillance issues. My friend didn’t know what that meant. And then this
attempt on the election that she tipped us to.”
“But he worked for her?”
“Yes.”
“And when did they get married?”
“About two years before he joined her project.”
“And he worked for her.”
“That’s what I was told. Also, my friend thinks he probably knows where she’s
gone.”
“What!”
“That’s what he told me. On the night she disappeared, you see, there was a call
from a pay phone she had used before, a call to the Khembali embassy. I take it that
was to you?”
“She left a message,” Frank muttered, more and more worried. “But so?”
“Well, there was another call from that pay phone, to a number in Maine. My friend