The Merchant’s War полностью

"Yes." He nodded. "Plenty of time to take your shoes off."

"Okay." She bent down automatically, then blinked stupidly. "This doesn't come cheap, does it?"

"No." She heard a scrape of chair legs across carpet.iiul looked up, catching Erasmus in the process of sitting down in a spindly Queen Anne reproduction. He watched her with his wide, dark, eyes, his bearing curiously bird-like. Behind him, Empire Station slid past in ranks of c list-iron pillars. "But one tends to be interfered with less if one is seen to be able to support expensive tastes."

"Right... so you're doing this, spending however much, just to go and see a man about a book?"

A brief pause. "Yes." Erasmus smiled faintly.

Miriam stared at him. Arid you gave me a gun to carry? Wilier you're mad, or you trust me, or... she couldn't complete the sentence: it was too preposterous. "That must be some book."

"Yes, it is." He nodded. "It has already shaken empires and slain princes." His cheek twitched at some unspoken unpleasantness. "I have a copy of it in my luggage, if you'd like to read it."

"Huh?" She blinked, stupidly. "I thought you said you were going to see a man about a book? As in, you were going to buy or sell one?"

"Not exactly: perhaps I should have said, I'm going to see a man about his book. And if all goes well, he's going to come back east with us." He glanced down at his feet. "Does Sir Adam Burroughs mean anything to you?"

Miriam shook her head.

"Probably just as well," Erasmus muttered to himself. "I think you ought to at least look at the book, after dinner. Just so you understand what you're getting into."

"Alright." She stood up. "Is there an electrical light in the bedroom? I need to plug my machine in to charge..."

The fridge was half empty, the half-and-half was half past yogurt, and Oscar thought he was a burglar. That was the downside of coming home. On line upside: Mike could finally look forward to sleeping in his own bed without fear of disturbances, he had a crate of antibiotics to munch on, and Oscar hadn't thrown up on the carpet again. Home. Funny place, where are the coworkers and security guards? Out on the street, obviously. Mike watched Herz drive off from the porch, then closed the door and went inside.

The crutches got in the way, and the light bulb in the hallway had blown, but at least Oscar wasn't trying to wrap his furry body around the fiberglass cast in a friendly feline attempt to trip up the food ape. Yet. Mike shuffled through into the living room and lowered himself into the sofa, struggled inconclusively with the one shoe he was wearing, and flicked on the TV. The comforting babble of CNN washed over him. I need some time out, he decided. This being hospitalized shit is hard work. Spending half an hour as a couch potato was a seductive prospect: a few minutes later, his eyelids were drooping shut.

Perhaps it was the lack of hospital-supplied Valium, but Mike-who didn't normally remember his dreams- found himself in a memorable but chaotic confabulatory realm. One moment he was running a three-legged race through a minefield, the sense of dread almost choking him as Sergeant Hastert's corpse flopped drunkenly against him, one limp arm around his shoulders; the next, he was lying on a leather bench seat, unable to move, opposite Dr. James, the spook from head office. "It's important that you find the bomb," James was saying, but the cranky old lady on the limousine's parcel shelf was pointing a pistol at the back of his head. "Matthias is a traitor; I want to know who he was working for."

He tried to open his mouth to warn the colonel about the old madwoman with the gun, but it was Miriam crouching on the shelf now, holding a dictaphone and making notes. "It's all about manipulating the currency exchange rates," she explained: then she launched into an enthusiastic description of an esoteric trading scam she was investigating, one that involved taking greenbacks into a parallel universe, swapping them for pieces of eight, and inching them down into Swiss watches. Mike tried to sit up and pull Pete out of the line of fire, but someone was holding him down. Then he woke up, and Oscar, who'd been sitting on his chest, head-butted him on the underside of his chin.