Seven rented nights in this coffin, Sandii. New Rose Hotel. How I
want you now. Sometimes I hit you. Replay it so slow and sweet and mean, I
can almost feel it. Sometimes I take your little automatic out of my bag,
run my thumb down smooth, cheap chrome. Chinese .22, its bore no wider than
the dilated pupils of your vanished eyes. Fox is dead now, Sandii.
Fox told me to forget you.
I remember Fox leaning against the padded bar in the dark lounge of
some Singapore hotel, Bencoolen Street, his hands describing different
spheres of influence, internal rivalries, the arc of a particular career, a
point of weakness he had discovered in the armor of some think tank. Fox was
point man in the skull wars, a middleman for corporate crossovers. He was a
soldier in the secret skirmishes of the zaibatsus, the multinational
corporations that control entire economies.
I see Fox grinning, talking fast, dismissing my ventures into
intercorporate espionage with a shake of his head. The Edge, he said, have
to find that Edge. He made you bear the capital E. The Edge was Fox's grail,
that essential fraction of sheer human talent, nontransferable, locked in
the skulls of the world's hottest research scientists.
You can't put Edge down on paper, Fox said, can't punch Edge into a
diskette. The money was in corporate defectors. Fox was smooth, the severity
of his dark French suits offset by a boyish forelock that wouldn't stay in
place. I never liked the way the effect was ruined when he stepped back from
the bar, his left shoulder skewed at an angle no Paris tailor could conceal.
Someone had run him over with a taxi in Berne, and nobody quite knew how to
put him together again.
Splinters.
Darkness.
Fear.
Delirium.
Illness.
Fear.
The moon.
To kill you.

<3
начинаю свой пууть