The Night Manager полностью

Besides, there was a hurry. When things start happening to key witnesses, you may safely say there is a hurry. When everything has been going a little too wrong for a little too long ― when you have been living further and further out on the margin while everyone has been bending over backward to convince you that you are right there at the centre of influence: Christ, Joe, where would we be without you? ― when you have been overhearing just a little too much strange political theorising in the corridors ― talk of Flagship, not just as a code name but as an operation ― talk of moving goalposts and getting a little order into our own backyard ― when you have been treated to just five too many smiling faces, and five too many helpful intelligence reports and none that is worth shit ― when nothing is changing around you, except that the world you thought you were moving in is quietly easing away from you, leaving you feeling like one man on a raft in the middle of a slow-moving crocodile-infested river going in the wrong direction ― and, Joe, for Christ's sake, Joe, you are just the best officer Enforcement has ― well, yes, you may safely say there is something of a hurry to find out who the fuck is doing what to whom.

Sometimes you watch yourself lose, thought Strelski. He loved tennis, and he loved it best when they gave you the TV close-ups of the guys drinking Coke between games, and you could see the face of the winner getting ready to win and the face of the loser getting ready to lose. And the losers looked the way he felt just now. They were playing their shots and working their hearts out, but in the end the score's the score, and the score at the dawn of this new day was not very good at all. It looked like set and match to the princes of Pure Intelligence on both sides of the Atlantic.

They passed the Grand Bay Hotel, Strelski's favourite watering hole when he needed to believe that the world was elegant and calm. They turned up the hill, away from the waterfront and the marina and the park. They drove through a pair of electrically controlled wrought-iron gates into a place that Strelski had never entered ― a piss-elegant block called Sunglades, where the drug-rich cheat and fuck and have their being, with black security guards and black porters, and a white desk and white elevators, and a feeling, once you have passed through the gates, of having arrived somewhere more dangerous than the world the gates are trying to protect you from. Because being as rich as this in a city like this is so dangerous it's amazing that everyone here hasn't woken up dead in his emperor-sized bed long ago.

Except that, on this dawn, the forecourt was jammed with police cars and TV vans and ambulances and all the apparatus of controlled hysteria, which is supposed to quell a crisis but actually celebrates it. The clamour and the lights added to the sense of dislocation that had been dogging Strelski ever since the husky-voiced policeman had called through with the news, because "we note you have an interest in this guy." I'm not here, he thought. I've dreamed this scene already.

He recogniIed a couple of men from Homicide. Curt greetings. Hi, Glebe. Hi, Rackham. Good to see you. Jesus, Joe, what kept you? Good question, Jeff; maybe somebody just wanted it that way. He recognised people from his own agency. MaryJo, whom he had once screwed, to their mutual surprise, after an office party, and a serious boy called Metzger, who looked as though he needed fresh air fast, but in Miami there isn't any.

"Who's up there, Metzger?"

"Sir, the police have about everyone they know up there. It's bad, sir. Five days without AC right up there next to the sun ― it's really disgusting. Why did they turn the AC off? I mean, that's just barbarous."

"Who told you to come here, Metzger?"

"Homicide, sir."

"How long ago was that?"

"Sir, one hour."

"Why didn't you call me, Metzger?"

"Sir, they said you were tied up in the ops room but on your way."

They, thought Strelski. They sending another signal. Joe Strelski: fine officer but getting a little old for casework. Joe Strelski: too slow to be taken aboard the Flagship.

The centre elevator took him to the top floor without pausing on the way. It was the penthouse elevator. The architect's idea was this: you arrived in this starlit glass gallery that was also a security chamber, and while you stood in the gallery wondering whether you would be fed to the pit bulls or given a gourmet dinner and a nubile hooker to wash it down, you could admire the swimming pool and the Jacuzzi and the roof garden and the solarium and the fornicatorium and the other essential furbishments of a modest dope lawyer's lifestyle.