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Declare

Declare

Titel: Declare Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Tim Powers
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him after he had gulped several swallows and tipped it up herself. When she lowered it and licked her lips, she said, “We need to consult Claude Cassagnac as soon as it can be arranged—he’s the only other member of our network that I know, and he’s been in the game since even before the last time Moscow rolled up the networks.”
    Hale wanted to ask her what she had seen—and heard and smelled, and thought —here; but he found that he couldn’t frame the words, and he felt himself blushing to realize that it was self-consciousness, or shame, that was choking his question. And he didn’t want to ask himself why he should feel ashamed of what had happened. This had been some electrical phenomenon—static charge in the atmosphere causing interference and unsynchronized duplication of the signal, turbulent air preceding a thunderstorm. Exhaustion had made him impose the familiar rhythms on the random noise, just as it could conjure voices or the ringing of a telephone out of the sound of a filling tub; and only exhaustion could be the reason he was reminded of his boyhood reluctance to tell his year’s-end dreams to the priest in the confessional.
    But he was shivering, and he couldn’t make himself ask Elena about what they had just experienced.
    “Really?” he said instead, in a brittle voice. “ ‘The last time’? Easy work for the Abwehr and Gestapo, just wait for Moscow to hand over her spies again.”
    Elena too seemed to be distracted. “Moscow works in ways that needn’t be explained to us.”
    “Her wonders to perform,” agreed Hale in English.
    “Marcel,” she said in what struck him as an inordinately angry tone, “I have no choice but to report your—flippancy! Can’t you—”
    “What’s that?” he interrupted.
    Looking past the radio set, he had noticed a shadowy delta of spots on the floor, fanning out toward the window; and when he walked over on his knees to look at it more closely, he saw that it was hundreds of hair-thin rings scorched into the polished boards. Some of the faint rings could be traced to be a yard across, but most were no bigger than a penny, and some were such tiny black pinpricks that he assumed a magnifying glass would be needed to see that they were actually rings. He swiped at a patch of them with the damp palm of his hand, and they had been so lightly burned in that the blackness rubbed away almost completely.
    Elena had stood up and crossed to the window. “It’s on the sill too,” she said humbly. “Some kind of electrical discharge… ?”
    “Ball lightning, probably,” he agreed almost shrilly, crawling back to where they had left the bottle. It could have been ball lightning, he told himself as he pulled out the cork. It could have been.
    “I think we sleep in our clothes tonight,” she said, stepping away from the window and tugging the frames shut over the aerial wire and latching them. Clearly she was wishing there were curtains to pull across the view of the darkening sky. Still facing the glass, she said, “I think we should sleep together, with the light on.” She exhaled sharply. “Once I would have prayed.”
    Hale glanced at the faint black soot marks on the palm of his hand—and he thought he understood why Adam and Eve had hidden from Yahweh, in the Garden, for he wouldn’t be praying tonight either. I heard Thy voice in the Garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. “Once I would have too,” he said. It occurred to him that she probably assumed that because he was British he had been brought up as an Anglican. “I was a Roman Catholic,” he said, barely loud enough for her to hear.
    “Oh, you are a bad influence!” She turned and looked at him. “You do understand in our clothes , don’t you?”
    I was naked, and I hid myself. “Yes, Elena.” In this half-light, with her hair pulled back and her rumpled skirt and blouse looking too big for her, and the eyes in her narrow face wide with uncertainty, she looked twelve years old; and Hale himself was wishing that he was back in Chipping Campden and could climb into the old upstairs box bed.
    “Dawn, be sudden,” she said in English as she lay down next to where he sat.
    Hale thought it was a quote from a poem he had read, but suddenly he was too exhausted to ask her about it.
    Next day they bought fresh clothing at a black market stall by the river and moved into a different apartment, and that night Hale gingerly strung his antenna and

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