"Neal Stephenson & J. Frederick George - The Cobweb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

magnificently useless elegance. He ignored the main entrance and proceeded to the back, where the
Marine guards waved him through, past parked cars to an unmarked but well-guarded entrance that led
to a small elevator. He rode it up to the fourth of five floors, where he was greeted by another Marine
guard and the CIA duty officer, who were expecting him.

He was where the action was: the secure rooms. Nothing important happened elsewhere. All of the other
folderol in the embassy was useless pretension. The duty officer punched him through a vault entrance set
incongruously in an elaborate door frame. Through the heavy door he could hear a loud whooshing noise.
When the duty officer opened it, the noise drowned out all other sound, like giant garage fans: not so
much loud as it was full and all-encompassing.

They were looking at a room within a room: a glass box built on four bimetallic springs that isolated it
from the rest of the building.

Millikan walked quickly across the few feet of empty space surrounding the glass room; supposedly it
was jammed with electromagnetic radiation that would fry your kidneys, or something, if you lingered
there. Then he was inside the glass box. His assistant, Richard Dellinger, was waiting for him as well as a
file marked “Eyes Only." It contained the latest reports from Langley to prepare him for whatever Aziz
might be up to. As usual there was nothing there that he didn't know. They weren't exactly sure why Aziz
had been called back on such short notice, but it could very well be some internal nonsense that had
nothing to do with the substance of the actual meeting, and so Millikan decided not to waste effort
speculating.

At half-past noon he and Dellinger went downstairs and proceeded to the Hotel Crillon, next door to the
embassy. Huge flowing taffeta curtains complemented the dark-red carpets and framed the high windows
that afforded a view over the Place de la Concorde and across the Seine to the Assemblée Nationale.
The dining room was full of rich Japanese tourists and Arabs. The maître d' rushed up, in a dignified way,
to inform Millikan that Aziz had preceded him.

Millikan made a bemused face at Dellinger. “He must be in a hurry."

They followed the maître d' to a small private dining room off the corner of the restaurant, containing a
single table set with crisp white linen tablecloths, silver settings, and a charming little bouquet of spring
flowers in the center. An Arab man with a shock of graying hair, a little mustache, and heavy eyeglasses
was rising to his feet to greet them.

Millikan had known Aziz since they had both been students in England, and he counted the man to be his
intellectual and diplomatic equal. Even though he represented a single-resource, underdeveloped country
led by a madman, Aziz matched Millikan in his ability to articulate the gross and crude impulses of Iraq
into a foreign policy toward the rest of the world.

Millikan and Aziz belonged to that most elite club in the world, even more elite than the great intelligence
establishments, the financial operations, and the political systems. There were a few, an extremely few,
people in the world who by sheer dint of their intelligence and their sensitivities could overcome the
limitations of national identity, the normal rewards system of politics, and, most of all, the stupidities of
their own bureaucracies to navigate the path to world survival. Politicians, of necessity, were the great
captains of the national vessels plying the difficult and anarchic seas of international relations. But they
were blind without pilots like Millikan and Aziz, men who could see both the obvious reefs and rocks of
disaster and who knew the treacherous sandbars and hidden structures of icebergs. They served their
states, because only states had the resources to make use of their intelligence. But for these people of