Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 55

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THEY WERE CHUBBY, DUSTY LITTLE GIRLS with wan faces and long chestnut braids. “We're all soaked and filthy,” Anne-Marie said. “Didn't want you to see me like this.”

“We're human, Anne-Marie. We're alive.”

“Everyone else in the building is dead.”

“The ones who were knocking, they're still down there –”

“I told the rescue team. They're looking.”

Behind them the street swarmed with diggers in the maw of each gutted building, one building completely gone, only the stairway sticking up into bright morning. “Let's get the girls home,” she said. “Their parents will think they're dead. My building has a generator. If there's water we can heat some.”

A Mercedes had stopped out on Basta. Palestinians, one a young woman with a camouflage T-shirt and tanned muscular arms, a black scarf over raven hair, silver earrings, a silver bracelet, a Kalashnikov. Two other cars were with them and they all got out and came down the street toward the flattened buildings. The Palestinian girl with the AK47 was familiar, he couldn't stop looking.

You. No, that had been Christian East Beirut and this was Muslim West, and that girl had been Christian – the Lebanese Red Cross. He'd hot-wired her Land Rover...

She walked past, glanced at him quickly, glanced away.

“What's the matter?” Anne-Marie said.

“Seeing spirits.” He looked into her eyes and there was no hiding there, just hers looking strongly into his. I could live with someone twenty years, he realized, and never know her as well as I know you.

“CAN YOU REACH WALID, see if he'll meet me? Tell him I want his thoughts on peace. What he'd give for it.”

“You're wasting our time, Neill. There's been a hundred peace attempts. A thousand.”

“I don't give a shit about peace, Khalil. I'm doing my job.”

“You've got this agenda always, ever since I know you.” Khalil Hussein's thick glasses twinkled, making him seem merry. He patted Neill's hand. “The betterment of man.”