"Stross, Charles - The Midlist Bombers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

"Yes," she said. "My sponsors were quite ... explicit about what they want. I have a test kit; we can arrange a mutual exchange as soon as you have the consignment."
"The money?"
"Deposited in a numbered account in Lichtenstein. We can give you a pass to verify this; the withdrawl codes follow when we've assayed the product for purity."
"Ah, Miss Little." Abdul smiled thinly. "Such suspicion!"
She shrugged, uncomfortable in her business suit. "What do you expect?" she asked. "If the Mossad were to get wind, they might sell the idea to one of our rival publishing houses ..."
Abdul shook his head. "It is a poor age," he said, "when the work of poets must be sold at the muzzle of a gun."
Lydia sighed. "Look, let's just get this over with," she said. "Show me the commodity and I'll show you the colour of our money. Then we'll see if we have a deal."
Adbul nodded. "We shall see ... "

t minus 9 days 11:21 p.m.
Jonathan thought that Stringfellows was overcrowded and over–rated, but that didn't stop him. Esme, as his accountant called herself when off–duty, sparkled in the company of livewire spending power; she was a creature evolved to swim in a sea of money, he concluded, a woman who in past ages would have been content to be the mistress of a very rich man but who now expected to earn it all by herself. She bubbled with champagne and chattered happily with him about work and other things; about cars - - hers was a BMW – and mortgages and music and expense accounts. "It's criminal what the government is doing to free enterprise, don't you think?" she asked. "Keeping control of all those nationalised industries!"
"Um, yes," said Jonathan. "But who'd buy them? I mean, who'd want shares in the Ministry of Ag and Fish?"
"You'd be surprised," she said with ebulient tenacity. "If you can make a profit out of Sunflowers, what about rape seed oil? All we need is a financial Van Gogh, to show the Tories the errors of their protectionist ways!"
"Let's dance," suggested Jonathan, who would rather do anything other than dance, except listen to this voodoo economics. "When it's all over I'm going to write a book about it."
"That's lovely," she smiled. "Do you suppose it could be a best-seller?"
Jonathan grinned. "All books will be best-sellers," he said, rising to the occasion. But later that night, lying in her bed and in her double-entry book–keeping system – which had nothing to do with money, but everything to do with pubic scalps – he lay awake for a long time, meditating. Money, it seemed, could be a potent aphrodisiac. And what did that suggest about the future of romance? Perhaps a new genre was in the offing, offering fulfillment to millions of underpaid women who would give anything to be in Esme's office, if not her lingerie.
Esme rolled over and fetched up against his flank. He yawned. "Mmm," she said. "Mmm ... "
"Mm?" he hummed, distracted from his meditation.
"Mm ... mmm ... money," she breathed.

t minus 7 days 10:04 a.m.
The manuscript-sized parcel arrived at the London offices of Schnickel and Bergdorf by registered post, landing on the slush pile with the dull thud of another leaden trilogy. The bored secretary broke off updating her desk diary to pick it up and thrust it under the makeshift scintillation counter that Nigel Frogland had set up in the office the previous afternoon: when it began to buzz her jaw dropped and she nearly spilt her coffee.
"Miss Bergdorf," she gasped into the phone; "you've got to come! It's arrived! The, the first consignment!"
"Hold on until I get there," Victoria commanded crisply, putting the phone down. She looked up and glanced round. "Where's Jonathan?" she demanded. "Bloody hell!" She stood up with all the weight of her forty-nine years and headed for the door. "Trouble as usual," she muttered tiredly.
She reached the reception desk just as Jonathan was arriving. She checked her watch; "where've you been?" she snapped.
"Getting into our accountants good books," he said, tiredly. "Is something the matter?"
"Yes," she said, pointing at the package. "It's arrived! Take it away! Get it out of here at once!"
"Oh," he mumbled. "Is that it?"
"It's radioactive!" gibbered the secretary, who was trying to occupy the farthest volume of the office from the offending parcel.
"Right," he said, reaching over and taking it. "I'll get it to the team right now, hey?"
"You do that," said Victoria. "And don't come back until it's ready!"
"Roger," he said, saluting with a kilogram of plutonium. "I'll do my best ... "

t minus 5 days 6:12 p.m.
The crack accountancy team who were gathered in the conference suite to listen to the boffins had an air of quiet expectation about them. The boffins, for their part, were jittery with a mixture of anticipation and too much caffeine. It was left to Jonathan to kick off the briefing session.
"Right," he said; "you all know why we're here, you've all been told what the project consists of ... now shall we run through the specifics? Dave, if you'd like to kick off?"
"What? Oh." Dave fiddled with his hearing aid. "Yes, now as I was saying ... building a bomb is child's play; the difficult part is getting the EMP right. That's electromagnetic pulse, knocks out electronics everywhere, very messy. Hmm." He smiled vaguely.. "The higher up we detonate the device, the better. Modern consumer goods – videos, televisions – are bloody vulnerable. At eighty miles, the whole of Greater London and a fair chunk of the south-east is going to be reduced to thirties technology, with virtually no loss of life. Sod-all fallout too, if we do it right. That's all."
Jonathan cleared his throat. "Right. Dave?"
Dave grinned widely and sat on the edge of the table; he fiddled with a gadget and a slide projector flickered on, pasting the schematic of a rather odd-looking missile across the wall behind him. "Hi, everyone, it's really great to be here," he said. "Yes, I've got nothing but the best for you! Rocket motors from Morton-Thiokol – left over from the Minuteman program – nose cone stolen from the Imperial War Museum's V-2. Software programmed by our very own system's house; this bird will fly!" He emphasized the point with zooming motions of his hands and finished it by rubbing his bald patch and smiling. "You bet!" There was a pop as the projector bulb burned out.
"Thanks, Dave," said Jonathan. "Now the financial prognosis ... Julian?"
One of the accountants stood up and cleared his throat nervously. "Well, ladies and gentlemen," he said, "we can see that this estimable scheme has considerable profit-generating potential, except in the insurance field ... for which purpose we intend to attribute it to the Butlerian Jihad Organisation." His cheek twitched. "There are unfortunate overheads – buying of hot-lead typesetting machines, manual typewriters and plutonium – but these are in hand and are trivial compared to the other possibilities. Do you realise that there are more than a million video recorders in the Greater London area?" His eyes glistened with enthusiasm. "We must strike while the fallout is hot – we must launch take-overs for the Amstrad and Sony corporations at once! While there is no television we will sell books in huge numbers; then we will sell televisions and videos instead of books ... and finally we can drop another bomb and re-start the cycle!"
Dave tried to catch Dave's eye during the ensuing grumble of applause from the accountants, but Dave was nodding vigorously and contemplating the inner landscape of quasi-harmonic consumer growth patterns that he'd been designing for his next space opera. Despairing, Dave turned his attention back to the podium.
"Good," said Jonathan. "So we're agreed it's a workable idea in principle?"
"Yah," said Esme, who, sitting at the back of the room, was keeping careful note of how her new subordinates were behaving. Her smile sparkled like perrier water. "The board has given it the go-ahead and I agree. Forward to a bright new age of limited nuclear destruction and higher publishing profits!"
The accountants stood and saluted as one. Dave finally caught Jonathan's eye and shook his head; Jonathan froze, then looked faintly guilty.
"Over here," Dave hissed. Together they left the room.
"What is it?" asked the editor as they stood outside in the plush corridor of the Spart-Dibbler offices.
Dave breathed deeply. "Haven't you ever thought that there might be something faintly wrong about all this?" he asked. "I mean, zapping every television in the Thames area ... "
Jonathan shrugged. "Serves them right for not buying our books in the first place," he said. "What is it? Lost your nerve?"
Dave shrugged. "Nah, it's not that," he said. "It's them. The accountants. I mean, once they get the idea they can make cash from nukes, what are they going to do next? Bomb the Vatican so they can make money selling holy relics that glow in the dark? Look, books mean nothing to these people. They're just a route to more money. If they realise that they can do without us they'll ditch the publishing trade without a second thought and carry on regardless. So what can we do?"