Читать книгу Albedo Castle - - Страница 7

Richard woke up when the sun was down. He was alone in the hotel room, covered with a blanket, the lights of Tokyo glittered outside from the height of the skyscraper. Pain shot through his side at an awkward movement, he was wincing as he sat upright on the bed.

Next to him, on the empty half of the bed, lay a tarot card. The World – from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, with a half-naked woman in the center, surrounded by four characters: a youth, a bird of prey, a lion, and a bull.

Alexandra had left him a message – and is most likely walking around the evening city or having dinner somewhere … Richard wouldn’t mind a meal himself, he couldn’t remember the last time he ate, on the plane he couldn’t eat a morsel.

He would know the approaching footsteps from a thousand, when the door of the room opened he was still sitting on the bed, with a card in his hand and the corner of the blanket on his hips.

There was a container in Alexandra’s hands.

“Soup?” she declared right from the threshold.

Richard wanted to smile, but grew even more pensive and simply nodded.

“We’ll brainstorm later,” she went on. “You’ll tell me who these people are.”

“I can tell you now,” Richard replied. “About everyone except the lion.”

Instead of soup, Alexandra handed him the water bottle from the bedside drawer. Richard put the card on the bed and began to guzzle. She stopped him halfway through the bottle.

He was looking up into her eyes, sitting on the bed, he didn’t close the bottle.

“That’s you in the center,” he started. “The man in the menagerie is me.”

“I think it’s the opposite,” Alexandra chuckled. “At the very least, because you’re naked, at most – because you’re the main character of the story.”

Richard frowned, vertical lines on his nose bridge deepened even more.

“Possibly.”

“What are you doing?”

“Dancing.”

He remembered that the less he thought about it, the more accurate the interpretation would be.

“With two wands.”

“I have two of something – for balance,” Richard said. “Two of something.”

The dialogue sounded strange, but they understood each other perfectly well. Richard smiled weakly.

“The eagle, hawk, falcon, whatever the hell it is – the Circus …” he mused. “Because Falcon is chief of the Circus.”

Wordplay, symbolically meaningful surnames – and coincidences.

“The bull is Rote Stier.”

“Interesting,” Alexandra said as she sat down on the edge of the bed.

Richard drank water again, she didn’t take her eyes off him until he finished the bottle.

His full bladder was already making its presence felt, but he stubbornly refused to get up from the bed, unwilling to leave the conversation halfway through.

“What’s left is to figure out who the lion is.”

“What is a lion to you?”

She always asked that way, as if she knew the answer – and he, like an indolent student, was slow on the mark. She never gave him a ready solution – she made him think on his own, search for answers in his own system of symbols.

“The proud king of beasts, self-centered,” Richard recounted, “he surrounds himself with material benefits, chasing renown. Someone from the elite.”

He had no ideas about who it might be … Throughout various missions, he was always surrounded by the rich and the power-hungry, spoiled hypocrites who he had to pretend to be friends with. He was presented to them at the negotiation table, planted in their bed – so he would find out their secrets and draw closer to the control room.

He had too many enemies from the past. The one intending to spook him, threatening him with exposure, could be anybody.

“You said he called you by name.”

“The man in Rote Stier attire was a mercenary, he said what he was told to say. He was faceless, and it’s impossible to trace it back to the client through him.”

“He called you Richard North.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. On one hand, it could be one of your acquaintances,” Richard smirked, Alexandra maintained a neutral expression. “Someone who saw us together – while we were together: at your events, on the street, in Moscow, in London.”

“On the other hand,” she continued his line of thought, “someone could have seen you in the news and on social media, an old acquaintance could have seen you – and recognized you. That’s why he called you Richard North, with the public name – and not something else.”

“Fair.”

Richard sighed, ahead of him lay remembering all the lions – which were many. Lions, lionesses … Alexandra knew almost all of them – indirectly, through reading his dossier – that he gave to her when he travelled to Dante’s Hell – left it on the threshold, like hope. He didn’t fill her in on the details of the mission with the Rote Stier racing team – but she knew that he had spent these months working as a mechanic, travelling from one city to another across Formula One facilities.

“He said I was a dead man. This could be important, too.”

It was Alexandra’s turn to sigh.

“What does a dead man mean?”

He looked up at her – before that, he was looking at her hands with long white nails, folded on her knees.

“That he’s going to kill me. Or wishes for my death or—”

“That Richard North doesn’t exist,” they said in unison.

“It means that he is threatening to expose me,” Richard winced. “He knows I’m undercover.”

“But you have several covers.”

“And he learned the one that’s known to many – and he definitely recognized me by my face.”

“But why in Singapore specifically?”

“No idea,” he huffed, throwing the blanket aside and preparing to get up. “Maybe it’s a coincidence. Both days, I was racking my brain for what the connection between the Bulls and the Poets could be, but I can’t come up with anything except a personal vendetta. There’s nothing tying Richard Bateman and Richard North – except myself.”

He opted to think in categories of his job, he was still hiding behind the masks of his covers. He was just Richard – and yet, wanted to be Richard North more than anyone else – because Richard North was with Alexandra, Richard North was a Poet and an alchemist.

Richard silently got up and went to the bathroom. On the marble surface of the sink’s sides, there were dressing supplies prepared, he turned the water on, looked through the wooden horizontal blinds of the full wall window that separated the bathroom from the room. Alexandra sat on the bed, deep in thought, holding the empty bottle in her hands.

He showered and treated the wound himself; when he left the bathroom, Alexandra was standing next to the panoramic window, in the same pose as in the morning, the night lights of Tokyo were flickering and shimmering in the distance.

Richard approached her from behind, touching the back of her head with his chin.

“Tomorrow’s free practice,” he said. “I did want to watch at least one Grand Prix as a spectator – but not at this cost.”

He was smiling, she could hear it in his voice.

“Formula One is completely different behind the scenes,” Alexandra affirmed.

“It’s an entire world. They’re a real team. And they’re as mad as we are.”

She once jokingly called the Rote Stier racing team alchemists … Richard saw it for himself.

In just a few years, British rookies under an Austrian license, associated exclusively with an energy drink, had become world champions7– assembled an incredible team of enthusiasts and professionals. Rote Stier performed aerobatics – a good example of investments in technologies that provided circuses for the masses, bread – to all the participants of the enormous alchemical pot.

The drivers are always in the spotlight – their entire lives are made into a show. Their task was to demonstrate how dreams become reality, and that nothing is impossible – but they, as Richard understood, don’t mind. Max has reflexes of a cat that catches flies at the speed of light, Sergio has everything under control, as if he can see the future, and Daniel is always brimming with positivity, he has an endless supply of energy …

Richard also didn’t realize right away that Formula One is a showbiz with stars of its own. Engineering and design achievements broke their own records with every race, setting the trends and benchmarks for the rest of the automotive industry – and the entire world was watching, with bated breath, the inconceivable implementation of human design, endurance, and bravery.

The majority of the viewers don’t understand even a small part of the action – but they’re swept up in the wave of the drive, Formula One is a cult that people wanted to be a part of and stay in.

The drivers are rock stars, but there’s a whole team behind them – each member playing a vital role, irreplaceable during the season. They all work together, setting up pit boxes around the clock, delivering sets of tyres, spare engines, gearboxes, composites and fuel, assembling cargo containers around the clock, for them to then be shipped overseas for race weekends, they fine-tune the race car configuration nightly if they can avoid curfew … On the pit wall and in front of board monitors is a real spaceflight mission control center, every second counts, and every detail, every inch, and every movement matter during the pit stop.

Three people are involved in changing a single wheel: the one placing it, equipped with protective gloves – because the tyre is preheated out of the cover; the gunner, in bright yellow gloves, to give a visual signal about the end of the procedure by raising his hand; the one taking the wheel off – and tossing it aside, preferably not at a colleague – because it’s also scorching hot. The world record for the shortest pit stop was set by the team of a race car driven by Max four years ago.

The names of the mechanics and engineers aren’t released to the public, but the star drivers and the names of the Bulls on the pit wall are on everyone’s lips.

Each of the sixteen race weekends, Richard had been the tyre carrier on the left rear wheel. This Sunday, he’ll be substituted.

Phil, the chief mechanic, conducts the orchestra in the box, he’s always near the car and always on standby, aware of the action. Adrian and Rob, genius designers, are often in the box, but sometimes run away to the pit wall to catch their breath or avoid the congestion of mechanics, race engineers, and drivers. During the races, only those working directly with the race car are by its side – and everyone is wearing headphones, communicating via radio, typically within their own crew.

Dario Fisher is in charge of the headphone stand, radios and microphones, the transmitters in the drivers’ helmets, ensures uninterrupted communication. Right now, he’s on the Suzuka track paddock, likely having signed every headset on the stand and reminded everyone to put the equipment back at the end of the day – to avoid confusion tomorrow.

Chicken soup – the real European one – had already gone cold, but Richard ate heartily. Almost immediately afterward he grew drowsy, he resisted as much as he could, but in vain – and soon he fell asleep, his nose buried in the pillow, hoping that the next day he would no longer be a vegetable and would finally handle everything.

He never got around to unpacking his things, his dead phone lay on the bedside drawer next to the documents, time seemed to stop – because the chess game had already begun, and the opponent awaited his move.

For some reason, Richard was confident that the opponent – the very lion – acts by the rules of the genre and plays chess. It was important to understand what the next move should be.