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

meeting.”
Dee tapped the second monitor with the back of his hand. There! Vantis has been in the infirmary on two
separate occasions, one of them apparently in connection with a brawl—not a reassuring sign, but indicative
of the man, Dee supposed. There was always a possibility that he had seen Dee and Newton. The man had
meager savings, no prospects, and had been disciplined on two recent occasions for arriving at work
obviously under the influence of pure oxygen.
“It seems I must place myself at your disposal, Mr. Vantis. Where would you care to meet?”
“Do you know the Unnamed Bar in the Sub-Levels?” He sounded furtive, but with a veneer of bravado to cover
it.
“I do not. But I will find it.”
“In an hour, then,” Vantis said eagerly. “And come alone. If I see you come in with that black bodyguard of
yours, then I’m gone and your story is splashed all over the Omninet.”
“I’ll be there,” Dee said softly, his manner anything but threatening. “And I will come alone.” He thumbed off
the screen and sat back into the chair, an expression of absolute distaste on his narrow face. Blackmail was
such an interesting sport—when played properly. In his time he had blackmailed and been blackmailed in
turn, and really, the rules were very simple. To be blackmailed, one had to allow oneself to be blackmailed.
And he was not willing to acquiesce.
Chapter
2
“SHALL I TELL YOU
what I have discovered about our employer?” Kelly Edwards pulled off the screen-goggles and swivelled in the
chair to look at Morgan d’Winter.
“Absolutely nothing?” d’Winter guessed, white teeth flashing in his ebony face.
“Absolutely nothing,” Kelly agreed, standing and stretching, pressing her hands into the small of her back and
working stiff shoulder muscles. “The man simply does not exist.” She stepped away from the huge computer
console, pulling off the almost transparent interface gloves and draping them over the back of the chair. “I’ve
spent the best part of a week digging through every avenue and byway of the Omninet looking for some
reference to him. I’ve even gone so far as to access birth records for people approximating his age; I’ve done
hunts on people of his height and eye colour; I’ve voice-matched his vocal patterns and attempted to match
them to a particular local. But even his accent doesn’t exist. There is nothing. The man simply does not
exist. And has never existed.”
“Why do you want to know?” d’Winter asked, standing before the food dispenser and staring blankly at the
menu. “This Newton had very exotic tastes. Some of this isreal fruit!”
“When you’re the richest man in the world, you can afford the very best,” Kelly said, joining d’Winter at the
dispenser. The red-haired woman barely came to the bodyguard’s shoulder.
“And yet our own Doctor has very simple tastes,” d’Winter remarked.
“Did your own research reveal anything?” Kelly asked casually as she leaned forward to dial up some orange
juice.
D’Winter grinned. “I should have guessed you’d find out that I, too, am looking into the enigma of the good
doctor.”
“You left some fingerprints on the Omninet.” Kelly grinned back, looking up into d’Winter’s broad face. The
fish-hook earring in his left ear took the light and sparkled menacingly. She handed him the orange juice and
dialed up another for herself.
D’Winter moved away, the glass almost lost in his huge hands. He stood before the window and stared out at
the desolate moonscape. He knew that what he was seeing was an image taken from some camera on the
moon’s surface and relayed deep into the heart of the moon, where it was projected onto this screen to give
the impression of a window. “I went looking for our employer in places you wouldn’t even know existed,” he
said, glancing over his shoulder. “Men like Dee are not that common. They may change their names, their
faces, their skin colour, but certain things remain. An assassin may always work with a particular calibre of
gun or type of explosive; a torturer may favour a particular method. There is a superstition to it, as if the