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maybe not. Yardley keeps pushing his imports.. . We keep blocking them. Spike
fence.
I give you permission to sniff all local trails and if they re still cold
after two days, you have clearance for an official visit to Hispaniola.
Assistants if you need them, as many as five.
I ll need two Hispaniolan experts, Mary said.
My office will find them and pass their names and currvitas on to Supervising
Inspector D Reeve, unless you have people in mind already..
She did not. Do I have your permission to query Citizen Oversight?
Ellenshaw averted for a moment, frowning. We can only make so many
Oversight queries. But if any case merits, this one does. You have permission
to go to
Oversight.
Thank you. She inclined.
Details are on your orders. We ll work with federal to get Hispaniola to
cooperate with you. Call me anytime. Don t be isolated. You might be our flak
armor on this one. He smiled cleanly.
Yes, sir.
She left Ellenshaw s office knowing this was the case of her career and pd was
giving her extraordinary support; also knowing federal bad deemed her
expendable, but not in a minor cause. She would be stupid not to be afraid. To
those concerned with basic human dignity Colonel Sir John Yardley was the
western world s prosperous heart of darkness. Mary Choy allowed herself the
requisite fear, but no more.
The comb towers went dark against the last blue wink of dusk. She drove a
slaveway to the pd shade central on Sepulveda and filled out a request for
overnight research space, slept an hour in a cop cot, drank a nutrient
cocktail and went to work.
LA City of Angels like a horse sleeps on its legs. I ve walked the shade
(since before it was shadowed) late night and seen the noctw-nal hc4f conduct
itself busily not just machines but people... Don t think the shade ic
reckless eccentricity. It has its own life, not clean like the therapied hives
perhaps, but rich and full as any past city, as organized; shade has its
mayors and councils, bosses and workers, mommies and daddies, neighborhoods
and businesses, hospitals and pd stations, churches and libraries, and they
are vital. Bootstrapper, perfecter of humanity, don t forget the ground you
lift yourself from, unless you want a hard fall!
10
Sure as is, they had him Fausted; Albigoni and Lascal had tempted and Martin
Burke was about to succumb. It was all over but the night of pangs. Still the
forms must be observed; the night of pangs must pass.
Page 26
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Adult enough to realize that the prize might be hollow, Martin Burke tried to
deny the temptation but could not. The pair had found his most vulnerable
patch in his most pale and yielding underbelly. His life was science and he
had been removed from that life through no fault of his own, merely as an
accident of bad politics and history. To have it back would mean he could live
again. He longed to walk the Country of the Mind. That was a stimulus like no
other; knowledge from the frontier that defined all frontiers.
Martin grinned in the half dark watching a playback of the AXIS reports. He
selfsaw that grin and sobered. He did have one train of questions to answer
but Carol
Neuman was not taking her calls and she did not have a home manager.
Martin closed his eyes and tried to stop shaking. Ethical questions all too
obvious and tenacious. Goldsmith s right to deny intrusion. Still, a poet, a
murderer whose country of the mind would reflect the artist s adaptation of
subaware forces... Never such an opportunity. Never.
I am not a bad man, he said out loud. I didn t deserve what happened to me
and I do not deserve this now. This what. Qualms. Opportunity/temptation.
Albigoni had nothing to lose. If Martin would not give him what he wanted
nobody could except perhaps the ghostsl doppelgangers of Martin Burke that
might exist elsewhere, sucking his discoveries raking his ground with more
brutal clawed fingers, the far less scrupulous who might exist in Hispaniola [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]