James P. Hogan The Proteus Operation

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the shrubbery toward the looming silhouette of the house.
For reasons that he hadn't disclosed, Mortimer Greene had ordered a halt to
further work on the machine after tests of some kind that he and Gordon Selby
had conducted all through the previous night and into the morning. Also,
apparently, Winslade and Scholder were on their way back from England in a
hurry. So presumably the tests hadn't worked. What it all added up to,
Ferracini wasn't sure; but it did mean extra leave for the troops, and
Ferracini had persuaded the
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ration.txt others that it was time to pay Iceman the visit they'd been
planning for some time.
Counting the ins and outs through the afternoon and evening had yielded the
tentative result that there were nine other men inside the house besides
Bruno, and also three women. All of the ground-floor and second-floor windows
were formidably barred and probably wired, and the pattern of lights suggested
that the occupants were moving mostly among the rooms at the lower front of
the building. That was convenient, for the easiest way in that Lamson had
identified was a small, circular window tucked high up on a rear wall, just
below the eaves in the angle of a large gable. That window hadn't been barred;
"obviously" there was no way for anyone to get even close to it.
At the house, Ferracini and Cassidy moved off around a corner into the shadows
on the north side and ascended a vertical recess between a wall and a
projecting pillar of fluted stonework, which they climbed by bridging across
with legs and arms. From the top of the pillar, using rubber-soled boots to
provide friction grips for most of the way, and a spike forced into a crack in
the mortar to get them over one awkward spot, they traversed horizontally
along a line of ornamental brickwork to a corner and followed the corner up to
the roof. High against the night sky, they pulled themselves around the
overhang and vanished; a few minutes later, the end of a line tied in a series
of overhand loops sailed out from somewhere above the round window and dropped
into the flowerbeds where Lamson and Ryan were waiting.
Lamson climbed the ladder of loops while Ryan steadied the bottom end; then,
when Lamson was up to the height of the window, Ryan pulled the rope outward
and inward again to swing Lamson in underneath the overhang of the eaves. On
the third swing Lamson hooked the wooden window ledge with a fine-barbed
grapnel attached to a rock-climber's 'trier, and then he stepped into the
'trier to give himself a stance where he could work on the window. The window
yielded quickly, and
Lamson climbed through. He secured the rope for Ferracini and Cassidy to lower
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themselves down hand-over-hand from above, while at the same time Ryan began
climbing the other section of the rope from below.
"Yeah, yeah, I gotcha." Bruno Verucin, known as the Iceman because of his
opulent tastes and predilection for diamonds, tilted himself back in the chair
behind his wide mahogany desk and nodded into the telephone. He puffed out a
cloud of smoke and hooked the thumb of the hand holding his cigar in his
suspenders. "Like I said, Pete, the whole idea is to get us set up off
Atlantic
City the same way they're doing out West. That ship that Tony Stralla's rigged
out as a floating casino outside the three-mile limit at Santa Monica is
making three hundred grand a month -- did you know that? Yeah, that's what I
said, Pete -- grand -- a month. Well, that's what we're out to beat, okay?"
From an armchair in one corner where he was lounging with one leg propped up
on a stool by the bar, Bruno's lieutenant, Freddie Numbers, raised his
eyebrows and looked across at OneRound
Connahan, who was leaning by the door, chewing gum, looking bored. Connahan
remained expressionless and carried on chewing.
"That's right," Bruno went on. "It all depends on the Kraut signing over the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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