"Murphy, Warren - [Destroyer 060] - The End of the Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Destroyer)

The End of the Game
The Destroyer #60
by Richard Sapir & Warren Murphy





ISBN 0-7408-0853-2
First Peanut Press Edition



This edition published by
arrangement with


DOOMGAME

Abner Buell was world video game champion. He could annihilate anyone at any electronic contest ever devised-- including all the ones he had invented to reap billions in profit while reveling in bright bursts of perverse pleasure. Now there was only one game left for Abner to create and then conquer all opposition: a game that turned men into killer pawns, women into wantons, and the great powers of the world into dead-certain nuclear suicides.

Remo Williams, the Destroyer, and his Oriental mentor Chiun, had to pull Buell's plug before Buell punched the ultimate key to catastrophe. But how could they win out over this fiendish wizard when Buell crossed enough circuits to program Chiun to destroy the Destroyer--?
BChapter One

Waldo Hammersmith believed that none of the good things in life was free. Everything in the world cost. You paid for what you got and sometimes you paid double and sometimes you didn't get anything to begin with and still paid double.

That was what he always said. But if Waldo Hammersmith had really believed his good advice instead of using it just to cry about his misfortunes, he might one day not be looking very closely at a 38 Police Special. It would be held by a detective.

The detective would be telling him to do something illegal. Waldo Hammersmith would not believe him.

"Aw, c'mon. This has got to be a game," Waldo would say.

He would see a bright flash coming out of the barrel. He would have no time to disbelieve that he was being shot because that portion of the human anatomy that was in charge of disbelieving was covering the wall behind his blown-open head.

It was too late for Waldo. Everything was too late for Waldo because he had been played to perfection, as if someone somewhere had a schematic diagram of his soul and had pressed all the right buttons to make him do what he was supposed to do.

It had all started one wintry morning, when Waldo Hammersmith had begun to believe that he was getting something for nothing.

It came in the mail. Ordinarily, Waldo opened the bills last. But this day, he opened those envelopes first. The credit card for gas had hit almost a hundred dollars that month. He had driven his wife, Millicent, to her mother's twice. Her mother lived far out on Long Island and the Hammersmiths lived in the Bronx. Waldo grumbled over the bill, then decided there might be a small benefit in it. When he showed it to his wife, they might decide not to visit her mother that often.

There were other bills. There was heating that was too high. A general charge bill that he had thought he had held down but which had come booming back with an old charge he had forgotten. There was the rent and the partial payment on the medical insurance and the totals came to roughly twenty-five dollars more that month than he brought home in legal salary.

Waldo Hammersmith lived in terror of the Internal Revenue Service computers somehow putting those two things together. He drove a cab and while he reported most of his normal tips, he did not report what kept his nostrils barely above sea level-- those five- and ten-dollar bills he got when he would drive a passenger to any sexual delight he might want.

That was the real reason he worked the International Terminal at Kennedy. He would get both a tip from the passenger and a small cut from the brothel, and thus he did, by daily crime, barely make it. If Millicent didn't lose her job.

Waldo went through his bills like someone suspecting a cancer in his personal economy, something that eventually must be fatal but had so far been kept miraculously under control by the sudden strange lusts of Pakistanis or Nigerians waving hundred-dollar bills and looking for a good time.

He saved his Insta-Charge bill for last. It allowed him what he called his no bounce security. He could write a check for more than he had in his account and the bank treated the overdraft as a loan.