"Bruce Sterling - The Littlest Jackal" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

over wooden market tables run by Turks and gypsies. People were selling salmon
straight from the decks of funky little fishing boats.

Khoklov sighed. "Lekhi, you have no historical perspective." He plucked a
Dunhill from a square red pack.

One of Khoklov's two bodyguards appeared at once, alertly flicking a Zippo. "No
proper sense of culture," insisted Khoklov, breathing smoke and coughing richly.
The guard tucked the lighter into his Chicago Bulls jacket and padded off
silently on his spotless Adidas.

Starlitz, who was trying to quit, hummed a smoke from Khoklov, which he was
forced to light for himself. Then he paid for the shades, peeling a
salmon-colored fifty from a dense wad of Finnish marks.

Khoklov paused nostalgically by the Czarina's Obelisk, a bellicose monument
festooned with Romanov aristo-fetish gear in cast bronze. Khoklov, whose
politics shaded toward Pamyat rightism with a mystical pan-Slavic spin, patted
the granite base of the Obelisk with open pleasure.

Then he gazed across the Esplanadi. "Helsinki city hall?"

Starlitz adjusted his shades. When arranging his end of the deal from a cellar
in Tokyo, he hadn't quite gathered that Finland would be so relentlessly bright.
"That's the city hall all right."

Khoklov turned to examine the sun-spattered Baltic. "Think you could hit that
building from a passing boat?"

"You mean me personally? Forget it."

"I mean someone in a hired speedboat with a shoulder-launched surplus Red Army
panzerfaust. Generically speaking."

"Anything's possible nowadays."

"At night," urged Khoklov. "A pre-dawn urban commando raid! Cleverly planned.
Precisely executed. Ruthless operational accuracy!"

"This is summer in Finland," said Starlitz. "The sun's not gonna set here for a
couple of months."

Khoklov, tripped up in the midst of his reverie, frowned. "No matter. You
weren't the agent I had in mind in any case."

They wandered on. A Finn at a nearby table was selling big swollen muskrat-fur
hats. No sane local would buy these items, for they were the exact sort of
pseudo-authentic cultural relics that appeared only in tourist economies. The
Finn, however, was flourishing. He was deftly slotting and whipping the
Mastercards and Visas of sunburnt Danes and Germans through a handheld cellular