Читать книгу Night Trap - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 9

Nikkie Geblev the go-getter punched his touchtone phone and cursed Gorbachev the president and Yeltsin the mayor and anybody else responsible for his not living in New York, or maybe LA, and tried for the third time to beat the phone into submission: Get through, you fucker! he wanted to shout at it. Make connections! Be a winner!

Nikkie Geblev was surrounded with electronic gadgets that had begun their existences in Japan and Taiwan and Italy and then had had the luck to be on a truck that had been hijacked in Finland. Nikkie was an entrepreneur. A New Soviet Man. A Eurocapitalist. A crook.

“At last,” he said aloud. He was making money, relaying this call.

He heard it ring at the other end, then be picked up.

“What?” a man’s voice said.

“I’m looking for Peter from Pravda.”

Pause. Resignedly: “Peter went to Intertel.”

Nikkie didn’t want to know anything about who the man was or what was going to happen next, but he couldn’t help the images that rose in his mind—a tough man, unshaven, cruel—ex-military, hungry, impatient—Nikkie had dodged the draft because of Afghanistan and he didn’t like to think of the way ex-military would treat him if they knew. They had grenades—guns—

Nikkie cut off the images by saying, “Peter says ‘Get ready.’”

He broke the connection. He was sweating and his knees felt weak.