The God Hunter Read Online Free PDF

rate.
    â€œBest wishes to your frog.”
    She kissed me on the cheek. It was a good try, but I still didn’t turn into a prince.
    â€œTake care,” she said. “You worry me.”
    â€œI worry me, as well.”
    And then I got into my car and drove away.
    I t’s lovely country there. I drove back slowly, half my mind still snagged on the past: the Stone Age past, the past of elephants and hippopotami along the Thames, of standing stones and deer hunts and druidic rituals; the past of marriages and crazy jobs and many other things that started off in great hopes and then boiled down to something else entirely.
    Back in the conference hall, a man in a flamboyant yellow suit announced that we were “facing challenges mankind has never seen before, but facing them with courage, hope, and, best of all—­with all the deep resources of our human ingenuity.”
    He had a great gimmick: his firm had found a fuel source in old diapers and what he carefully called “animal by-­products.” The process was effective, but the stink from their plant brought so much flack they’d twice had to move premises.
    Later, I met a man who’d built a car that ran on chocolate.
    He showed it to me on his phone, a little, lightweight buggy whizzing round in circles on a bar of Dairy Milk.
    â€œIncredible,” I said. “Incredible, amazing. Thrilling. Astonishing.”
    Then I went home.
    It bothered me a little, seeing Moira. It always did. Part of my own, personal past I couldn’t get a handle on, a part that should have meant so much and somehow didn’t, yet which I’d never really left behind. It would have been much easier to say that we were friends, except it wasn’t that; we irritated one another, got on one another’s nerves, got angry with each other —­and still kept meeting up.
    If it was friendship, it was the kind of friendship linked by mutual experience, a bond of history as much as anything. We had become like some old married ­couple, creatures of habit, comfortable in repetition, the difference being that we’d long since bailed out of the marriage.

 
    CHAPTER 6
    SEDDON
    â€œE xpenses forms?”
    Derek didn’t answer me, just rolled the words around his prim, pink mouth, stretching the syllables exquisitely: “Ex-­ pen -­ses forms . . .”
    â€œThat’s what I said.”
    I jerked open another drawer, flicking through the papers.
    Nothing.
    â€œSeddon wants to see you.”
    â€œHe can wait.”
    â€œMy, my. I’ll tell him, shall I?”
    â€œDo.”
    â€œHe’s got you for some secret mission. Very hush-­hush. Don’t know the details.”
    I slammed the drawer shut, moved on to the next.
    â€œWhat you’re looking for,” he said at last. “They’re not there.”
    â€œWhere are they, then?”
    â€œOh . . .”
    I said, “They’ve changed the system again, haven’t they?”
    â€œThree weeks back. You got an e-­mail.”
    â€œI didn’t.”
    â€œYou got it, you just didn’t read it, that’s all. Not the same.”
    â€œThis is ridiculous—­”
    Derek pulled a haughty little moue, then made a show of clipping up his papers. He looked like an efficient vicar. “You got an e-­mail,” he repeated. “It was ‘all staff.’ You couldn’t not have got it.”
    â€œI get a million e-­mails. It’s all ­people I’ve never heard of, telling me not to contact them ’cause they’re on leave. How am I supposed to know which one’s important? Jesus—­”
    â€œ ‘I’m too old, I can’t adapt, I want to die.’ ”
    â€œI don’t want to die. I want to put in my expenses claim like anybody else, that’s all.”
    â€œI’ll let Seddon know you’re here, shall I?”
    â€œNot till I’ve filed