The Pekin Target

Начало книги

For a moment I thought I saw a face; then it was gone.

Chandler, standing beside me, hadn't spoken a word for ten minutes. No one had.

The smell of the river came on the night air, bland and rotten. We went on watching, and I glimpsed a black wet fin disturbing the surface not far from the bank. Bubbles popped in the soft light of the lamps, tracing a regular pattern.

The face came again and I kept my eyes on it, but it must have been a patch of rubbish or something, surfacing on the slow current; it vanished again. From across the river Big Ben started chiming the prelude to the hour. The air was sultry after the heat of the long summer day.

On our left the small boat was moving downstream, the two men in it paying out the lines to the net. Someone on the bank swivelled the end floodlight, and we saw an oily black ripple as one of the divers neared the surface and rolled over, going down again. The eleventh chime of the clock faded to silence.

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