"Patrick Tilley - Mission" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tilley Patrick)

file:///F|/rah/Patrick%20Tilley/Mission-Patrick_Tilley.txt

Chapter 1

The night I called at the Manhattan General to pick up this lady
doctor I was dating, something quite extraordinary happened.
For Miriam and me, it was the first in a chain of events that were to change our lives - mine
especially - in a way that neither of us could possibly have imagined. For what we stumbled across
that night was not the beginning of the story. If I am to believe what I have learned so far, the
beginning was before and beyond Time as we know it. Our life-streams along with those of the
handful of other people who became involved - have established a brief interface with a cosmic
event whose magnitude dwarfs the imagination.
If this is starting to sound heavy, hold on. I'm not kidding. This is going to change all our
lives before it's over. Or end them. It's that big - and that simple. Even so, I don't guarantee
to explain everything. You'll have to figure some of this out for yourselves. That's the' way it
works. But it's one hell of a story. I've got notes, photographs,
tape-recordings. All the evidence is locked in a safety deposit box registered in my name at the
Forty-seventh and Madison Branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank. I've put down everything I saw and
everything that was said just the way it happened. It can all be
checked against this account I am writing now. It's all true. Every
word of it. So help me God.
Before we go any further, I'd better tell you who I am. My name is Leo Resnick. I'm thirty-five
years old and, at the time this thing started, I was a partner in the Manhattan law firm of
Gutzman, Schonfeld and Resnick. The firm specialises in corporate legal work but occasionally
handles divorce suits for its more favoured clients. I was supposed to be making good as a claims
attorney. How true that
9

is, is not for me to say, but they put my name on the door last Christmas so I guess I must have
been doing something right. Let's just say that it brought in enough to eat out in restaurants
where they don't put the prices on the menus, run a three-litre Porsche Carrera, pay the bills on
a nice apartment up on 75th Street and a weekend place overlooking the Hudson. Except that to see
the river, you have to stand on the roof.
Actually, the house at Sleepy Hollow was left to me by my uncle. Still, it added to my net worth
and gave me problems like replacing shingles, cutting grass, buying heating oil and alarm systems.
And so on. But there were a few bonuses too. Ifyou had time to look, you got to see the leaves
change colour, clouds moving across a Panavision piece of sky, hear the wind in the trees, and
split kindling for the log fire in the living-room.
The whole Back-to-Nature bit.
To be honest, I didn't get up there all that often. I don't know about you, but I always got a
little twitchy sitting around just listening to the grass grow. I needed the buzz from the
streets, the big-city hype to get my nerve-ends tingling. Some of that tangy, rush-hour traffic
air in my lungs. It sharpens a guy up. Makes him feel human.
In town, most of my time was spent working. Either at the office or my apartment. Boning up on
case law, laying the groundwork for suits. Looking for angles. I'm not married. I'd been going
steady with this lady doctor for a couple of years. I guess you could say we were close but
neither of us had let it get too serious. In other words, I'm open to offers. Miriam - that's the
lady doctor - knew they came my way now and then. She wasn't too wild about it but we always
managed to avoid any heavy scenes.
So much for romance.