"Chelsea Quinn Yarbro - Merchant Prince" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yarbro Chelsea Quinn)

claustrophobic confines of the Moonbase for long. The stranger was someone called Dee, rumored to be
English, and he was the man responsible for Newton’s heart attack—though no one was quite sure how. This
Dee was certainly wealthy and obviously quite high up in Newton’s organisation, Minuteman Holdings,
because he had moved into Newton’s apartment and installed his own people, a red-haired beauty named
Kelly Edwards and a enormous, dark-skinned, bald bodyguard who went by the name of Morgan d’Winter.
And Lee Vantis couldn’t help but wonder how much this information would be worth on the open market. Or,
better idea still, how much Dee would pay to keep his name off the Omninet and out of the newsgroups.

Doctor John Dee read through the email twice, an overlong beautifully manicured fingernail following the words
on the screen, lips moving in synch with the letters. If he lived to be a hundred, he would never come to terms
with these too-regular letters shaped and placed behind glass. He grinned suddenly; actually he supposed he
had lived to be a hundred—in fact, more than five hundred years. Well, no matter how old he was, in his
opinion, a missive should be on vellum or, at the very least, on paper, and in a legible, nicely rounded hand.
He always maintained that it was possible to tell much of the character of a person from how they shaped
and wrought their letters. But this—this printing told nothing of the person’s character, his state of mind, or
the purpose; though, in truth, he acknowledged, this was one of those occasions when he didn’t need to
know more than the words on the screen. Blackmail was blackmail, no matter how it was written or phrased.
“Doctor Dee, it is most urgent that we meet to discuss your relationship vis-à-vis Royal Newton.”
Dee reached forward and touched the screen, and the email whispered out of the printer set into the desk.
Settling deep into the antique high-backed leather chair, the small man steepled his fingers before his face,
pressing the tips to his thin lips, and considered the wafer-thin sheet of transparent paper. How much did the
person know? And what did he want?
He looked at the header on the email—Lee Vantis. Real or assumed? Dee knew how difficult it was to
acquire a false name in this time and place, but he was also aware that his assistant, Kelly Edwards, had
prepared four different emails, names, and nationalities for himself for when he wished to send discrete
messages.
Dee’s fingers moved across the console, accessing the Moonbase records, and moments later Vantis’s
description and biography appeared. So the man existed, with an address in a four-by-four cubicle in the
workers’ quarters. Dee looked at the mail again; the headers certainly seemed to confirm that it had come
from this Vantis person. Dee wondered if he would be so stupid as to make a threat and use his real address.
Stupid or arrogant? Men could be dreadful fools through vanity as well as ignorance, he reminded himself.
On a whim he reached over and manually dialled Vantis’s cubicle number. All the equipment in the room was
voice-and presence-activated, but Kelly Edwards had not managed to completely remove Royal Newton’s
voice from the programs—with the result that some of the commands executed erratically or disastrously,
and Doctor Dee was actually too short to activate some of the motion detectors which were set to Newton’s
height.
The call was answered on the second ring, the square panel rippling with liquid colour before showing
Vantis’s slightly distorted head and the hint of a filthy, chaotic cube behind him. Dee knew that Vantis would
not be able to see him in the screen; only the golden Minuteman Holdings symbol was revealed, revolving
sedately on a field of blue velvet. “Did you just send me a message, Mr. Vantis?” Dee said without preamble,
the machine taking his flat, clipped accent and turning it into something female and liquid.
“Is that you, Doctor Dee?” Vantis spoke with the nasal twang of those who had spent too long in the recycled
air of Moonbase.
“I speak for Doctor Dee,” Dee said absently, one eye on the screen, while simultaneously watching another
monitor which had begun to scroll Vantis’s movements over the past months, his expenditures, and current
financial status. “What do you want?”
“If that is you, Doctor Dee”—Vantis leaned close to the tiny monitor in his cubicle as if he could peer into it to
see the speaker beyond—“then I have a proposal for you.”
“And what is that?”
Vantis grinned, showing perfect plastic teeth. “I’ll not discuss it on an open channel. This is for a face-to-face