China Lake [antikvár]

CHAPTER 1Later, Tannis often wondered if there'd been a warning, some clue he'd missed. Presumably someone had been watching him, so there must have been a change, which he should have picked up, in the routines around him. He didn't like it. He didn't like the idea that anyone could get the better of him. He hadn't been "operational "for years, but he was a professional all the same. As best he could, he went over the preceding days the cars behind him driving to L.A., his phone calls, a man he hadn't known outside his bank. He wondered: had some detail, among all those details he kept track of, been out of place? had there been some crucial, subtle difference? But he couldn't say for sure In truth, he suspected nothing. Everything seemed as usual, and that Friday night appeared no different from a hundred others. Since his retirement the days had all run together anyway and he was never exactly certain where he wasApril? November? '58? '85? It made no difference to him. He was as timeless as the desert, and never "looked back" in the usual sense, his past fading like the contrail of a jet in a high, white sky. His life was like that; apparently it had never quite materialized, or had long since dissipated and dispersed. He'd caught the tail end of a war that had become a myth and had waited for the next one, a myth in a different way, for it hadn't come at all and now seemed as strange as movies on the Late Show, part of a world that might mysteriously stand still or be attacked from Outer Space. But it