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&039;It&039;s two hundred dollars an hour&039;

&039;I&039;ll bear that inthis kind of work, Adele?&039;

&039;I have to eat&039;

He picked the folder up off the table, opened it and spent a while looking at it, as if he were checking some kind of instructions Then he closed it and put it back on the table

&039;And where do you live? Are you renting a place?&039; he asked

&039;Uhu&039;

&039;And how many of you are there in the flat, apart from the madae the ordinary pervert would already have reached boiling point And it looked like my employer wasn&039;t too far away froirl?&039; he asked

&039;Yes, daddy, I a &039;

That was a provocative outburst He snorted in laughter What I should have done then was to go back to the short, vague phrases But it turned out he kne to be provocative as well

&039;All right,&039; he said &039;If that&039;s the way our chat&039;s going, it&039;s time for me to introduce myself&039;

An official ID card appeared on the table in front of me, open I read ritten in it very carefully, then coraph he earing a uniform jacket with epaulettes His name and patronymic were Vladimir Mikhailovich He was a colonel in the FSB

&039;Call me Mikhalich,&039; he said with a smirk &039;That&039;s what people who knoell call et to know each other very well&039;

&039;To what do I owe the pleasure, Mikhalich?&039; I asked

&039;One of our consultants complained about you Apparently you upset him So now you&039;ll have to recompensate for it Or recoht?&039;

He had a stereotypical appearance: a strong chin, steely eyes, a shock of flaxen hair But a certain trapezoidal quality in the plebeian proportions of his features made his face look like the West&039;s cliche of its Cold War opponent Movie characters of that kind usually drank a glass of vodka and then ate the glass as a snack,that it was &039;an old Russian custom&039;

&039;Fuck it,&039; I muttered &039;A freebee?&039;

&039;Hey,&039; he said, offended, &039;don&039;t you confuse the FSB with the pigs You&039;ll get your ht&039;

&039;How many of you are there?&039; I asked in a tired voice

&039;Just oneWell, two at the most&039;

&039;And who&039;s the other one?&039;

&039;You&039;ll see in a moment And don&039;t worry, I won&039;t cheat you&039;

He pulled out the drawer of the table and took out a box with all sorts of medical bits and pieces - little jars, cotton wool and a pack of disposable syringes One syringe was loaded - the bright-red cap on the needle ed on so furiously that the fla up with you,&039; I said &039;Not even for quintuple fees&039;

&039;You fool,&039; he said ive you any?&039;

&039;And I want the money up front Who knohat you&039;ll be like in half an hour?&039;

&039;Here, take it,&039; he said and threw ive et them when they receive their &039;unofficial&039; salaries It&039;s exciting As if you&039;ve been raised aloft on the wheel of social insight and offered a glies in your Homeland&039;s economic mechanismI opened the envelope and counted the money The promised triple fee was there, plus another fifty dollars Effectively the saht to be cherished - or at least I ought to pretend to cherish hily

&039;Okay, if I have to recompense, I&039;ll recompensate Where&039;s the bathroom&039;

&039;Just wait, will you,&039; he said &039;You&039;ve got plenty of tiht,&039; he repeated and started rolling up his sleeve

&039;You said there&039;d be another one So where is he?&039;

&039;Just as soon as I shoot up, he&039;ll be here&039;

He put a rubber strap round his biceps, then clasped and unclasped his fist several ti?&039; I enquired morosely

I had to knohat to preparea ride down the Kashirksy Highway&039;

I realized the syringe was full of ketamine, an extremely powerful psychedelic that only a psychopath or so to commit suicide would ever inject into a vein

&039;What, intravenously?&039; I asked, unable to believe it

He nodded I suddenly felt afraid I couldn&039;t even stand the ketamine junkies who injected it into the loomy kind of effect on therave, crushed by the weight of sohost aruy was about to take it intravenously I didn&039;t even know anyone did that That is, I knew for certain that sane people didn&039;t do it A second stiff in less than aI needed It was tiive you the money back,&039; I said, &039;and we&039;ll call it a day&039;

&039;What&039;s the problem?&039;

&039;It&039;s okay for you, you&039;ll be dead But they&039;ll drag o&039;

&039;I said sit tight!&039; Mikhalich growled

He got up, went over to the door, locked it and put the key in his pocket

&039;Get up and you&039;ll regret it Understand?&039;

I nodded He cae device that looked a bit like a Soviet-designed paper-punch out of his medicine box The device consisted of two semi-circular plates connected by a sie rubber sucker attached to the lower plate, and the upper one was stamped with a star and an inventory nuether, licked the rubber sucker obsessively and stuck the device on his forearap, carefully introduced the needle into a vein and checked - the liquid in the syringe had turned dark-red Then he touched a little lever on the strange device, and it started ticking very loudly Mikhalich frowned as if he was about to take a leap into water, set his feet wide apart, bracing theer all the way into the syringe

Almost immediately his body went limp in the armchair For some reason it suddenly occurred to h priests of the Third Reich had left the world I listened to thein alarm - as if it were a bomb that was just about to explode After a few seconds there was a click, and the paper-punch and syringe sprang off his arm and fell on the floor beside the chair A small drop of blood appeared in the crook of Mikhalich&039;s elbow A clever little invention, I thought And then it suddenly hitI can&039;t read people&039;s thoughts And no one can, because people don&039;t have anything rese a printed text inside their heads Not ht that runs incessantly across theso towritten on muddy water by a pitchfork in the hands of a madman I don&039;t mean the technical difficulty involved, but the practical value of the procedure

But thanks to our tail, we foxes often find ourselves in a kind of sympathetic resonance with somebody else&039;s consciousness - especially when that other consciousness is perfor an unexpected somersault It&039;s rather like the reaction of peripheral vision to a sudden movement in the dark We see a brief hallucination, a bit like an abstract computer-ani at all, and most of the time our minds simply filter out the effect - otherwise it would be impossible to ride in the Metro Usually it&039;s weak, but when people take drugs it&039;s a addicts

When FSB colonels inject ketas happen to thehway&039; was no h Mikhalich&039;s li along soe tunnel filled with spectral for sideways and Mikhalich chose which way to turn It was like a bobsleigh - Mikhalich was controlling his iht with minute turns of his feet and hands that were invisible to the eye, not even turns really, simplye tunnels were more than just structures in space, they were simultaneously information and will The entire world had been transforraram, except that the hardware and the software couldn&039;t be told apart Mikhalich hiram, but he possessed freedom of movement in relation to its other cora, towards a hatch behind which there was so into the final orange tunnel, reached the hatch and resolutely flung it open And the terrible thing that was behind it burst out and went hurtling upwards - towards the light of day, up into the roo back to life, but in a strange,- little spots of either saliva or foarowling fro louder, and then Mikhalich&039;s body twitched and arched, and I sensed that in another second the mysterious, terrible power from the bottom of his soul would burst out and be free I had no ti it hard and hit hi out of the ordinary happened Mikhalich sluain, and the bottle didn&039;t even break But in his internal di re up and out from his inner depths lost control and crashed into a coe tunnel There was a flash, with pulsating stars and stripes of flas on an infinitely long runway It was blindingly beautiful and reminiscent of a news report I saw in the 1960s of a trimaran speed-boat that crashed: the speedboat lifted up off the water, perforhtful loop-the-loop and shattered into sainst the surface of the lake Al happened this time, only instead of the speedboat it was the lake that was s the orange tunnel fell to pieces and went flying off in all directions with aAnd then the whole universe of orange tunnels went dark and disappeared, as if the electricity lighting it up had been cut off All that was left was alimply in a chair and a ain until I realized it was the phone

I answered it

&039;Mikhalich?&039; a man&039;s voice asked

&039;Mikhalich can&039;t coht now,&039; I said &039;He&039;s very busy&039;

&039;Who&039;s that?&039;

I couldn&039;t think of any short and simple answer After a few seconds of silence the person on the other end of the line hung up

What a crazy idea that was - to change the nareatest brand names ever was simply destroyed! The KGB was known all over the world But not every foreigner will understand what the FSB is One A &039;FSB&039; and &039;FSD&039; all the time &039;FSD&039; is &039;female sexual dysfunction&039;, an illness invented by the pharmaceutical companies in order to launch the production of the fera Sexual dysfunction in women is a bluff, of course: in female sexuality it&039;s not the physical aspects that are ine, words And to be completely honest about it, the h level of material prosperity You can&039;t solve that with a pill - as Bill Clinton said: It&039;s the econoh the naed, the personnel reh Any nor time after a blow like that from a bottle But Mikhalich started to come round quite soon Perhaps that was because he received the blow in an altered state of consciousness - when the physical properties of the body are transformed, as any alcoholic can testify

I realized he was conscious when I tried to take the key to the door out of his pants When I leaned down over hi at me with his eyelids half open I juhtened by what had happened to hi like that before, and I didn&039;t want to take any risks

&039;Phone,&039; Mikhalich whispered

&039;What about the phone?&039;

&039;Whowho&039;

&039;Who called?&039; I guessed &039;I don&039;t know So After a blow like that an ordinary man would have been more concerned about the eternal questions But this one was thinking about telephone calls As the Soviet poet Tikhonov wrote, &039;If we could make nails out of these men, everyone in Russia would have a happier life&039; (he later changed this to &039;there would be no stronger nails in all the world&039;, but the rough draft was exactly that, I&039;ve seen it)

&039;Give &039;

&039;Wait a bit,&039; Mikhalich sighed, &039;talk&039;

&039;I don&039;t talk to junkies&039;

&039;Don&039;t get clever&039;

He spoke with an effort, leaving long pauses - as if every sentence were a high mountain he had to climb

&039;Oh, sure,&039; I said in an offended tone &039;Don&039;t get clever That&039;s what they said to Liuska too And then when her client died on the sakura branch, she was arrested Her lawyer said it was peritonitis, an unfortunate accident But the investigator stuck the rupture of the colon on her, unprerand, then it&039;ll be unpremeditated, otherwise you take the full rap Give ive a da will happen to me, it&039;s self-defence&039;

And at that I picked up the bottle again

Hesomewhere in the depths of his , but all that came out was: