Blonde Bombshell by Tom Holt

Author:Tom Holt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-07-11T17:41:19+00:00

29

Novosibirsk

Mark Twain pressed the button and looked at the grille in the wall. Nothing happened for a bit, then there was a crackling noise and a voice said, “Yes?”

He’d researched the next bit. You said your name, and who you’d come to see.

“Mark Twain,” he said.

“What?”

“My name is Mark Twain.”

Pause. Crackle. “What?”

“I said, my name is Mark Twain.”

“Sure. And I’m Edgar Allen Poe. Get lost or I’ll call Security.” He wasn’t quite sure what to do. There was a CCTV camera mounted on the wall just above the grille. He took a step back so he could see his face, and smiled into it. That ought to do the trick.

He waited. Nothing. So he pressed the button again.

“Hello?” he said. “Mr Poe?”

“I thought I told you to—”

“I have an appointment to see Ms Pavlov,” Twain said loudly. “At eleven-fifteen.”

There was a hint of doubt in the silence that followed. Then the voice said, “What did you say your name was?”

“Mark Twain.”

He distinctly heard fingers tapping a keyboard. Then: “Ms Pavlov will see you now,” the voice said sweetly, and the door opened.

His first thought, as he walked through the door into what was presumably some kind of waiting room or reception area, was, Hey, I’m home. When he refined the thought and narrowed the parameters of what he meant by “home”, he realised that the room reminded him ever so strongly of the flight deck of the bomb vehicle. That was sparse, white and plastic too. In fact, the only difference was the vase of flowers perched nervously on a large white plastic box. The equivalent box on the flight deck housed the sensor relay condenser array. Here, he was pretty sure it was just a box. The overall impression was that someone had done their best to copy the design and layout of an Ostar R’wfft-class bomb-vehicle flight deck, but without the faintest idea of what they were copying actually was.

It was a pretty close copy none the less, and that meant there were no seats. He found that annoying. He’d got used to sitting down when movement wasn’t required. He leaned against a wall instead, but it wasn’t the same.

He looked round the room. The vase of flowers kept snagging his attention. It shouldn’t be there. Something about it bothered him, but he couldn’t think what.

“Mr Twain?”

He hadn’t heard her come in. As he turned to face her, something like an explosion of appalling symptoms tore through his central nervous system; he slumped back against the wall, his mouth fell open and his eyes went wide and stuck like it.

“Mr Twain?” he heard her say. “Are you feeling all right?”

He tried to smile, but he knew it wasn’t working properly; one side of his face had jammed open, the other side wouldn’t budge. His heart was bashing up and down like a triphammer, and there was a serious malfunction in his knee joints. He didn’t have to be a biosystems engineer to realise that something was badly wrong.

“Would you like me to get you a glass of water?” Ms Pavlov asked.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.