"Destroyer 003 - Chinese Puzzle.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

"I must seriously consider dismantling the organization," Smith said.

The President sighed. "It is very hard to be President sometimes. Please, Dr. Smith."

The President leaned into the sharp light on his desk and held his forefinger and thumb a pencil width apart. "We're this close to peace, Dr. Smith. This close."

Smith could see the tired courage in the President's face, the steel discipline pushing the man toward his goal of peace.

"I will do what you ask, Mr. President, although it will be difficult. Exposing that person as a bodyguard or even an investigator might lead to someone who knew him while he was living, recognizing his voice."

"While he was living?" the President said.

Smith ignored the unspoken question. He stood up and the President stood with him. "Good luck, Mr. President." He took the offered hand, as he had failed, and since regretted many times, to take the hand of another President years before. As he turned to walk out the door, he said: "I will assign that person."



CHAPTER FOUR



Remo was at peak. He could see the old Korean looking for the slightest wrinkle on the toilet paper and finding none, looking up in surprise. He had been training Remo for almost a solid year now since a miscalculation had kept Remo at peak for three straight months.

Remo did not wait for a compliment which would not come. In seven years of intermittent training, compliments had been rare. Remo got dressed by peeling off the ninja suit and putting on jockey shorts, white tee shirt, and covering them with slacks and a green sports shirt. He slipped into sandals, then brushed his short hair. He had gotten used to his face in the last seven years, the high cheekbones, the straighter nose, that hairline that receded just a little more. He had almost forgotten the face he used to have, back before he had been framed for a murder he did not commit and escorted to an electric chair that did not quite work, although everyone else but his new employers had thought it worked.

"Good enough," said Chiun and Remo blinked. A compliment? From Chiun? He had been acting strangely since August but a compliment for doing something right after failing so many times was incredibly strange.

"Good enough?" Remo asked.

"For a white man whose government is stupid enough to recognize China, yes."

"Please, Chiun, not that again," Remo said in exasperation. It was not that Chiun resented America recognizing Red China, he resented anyone recognizing any China. And that had caused the incidents.

Remo could not cry, but he felt moistness making demands on his eyes.

"Even for a Korean, little father?" He knew Chiun liked the title. When Remo had used it in those first days when the burns were still on his forehead and wrists and ankles where the electrodes had been placed, Chiun had rebuked him. Perhaps it had been the joking tone of voice; perhaps it was that Chiun had not believed he would live. In was back in those early days when Reno discovered the first people who also believed that, as a Newark policeman, he had not shot that pusher in an alley.

He knew he hadn't. And that was when the whole crazy life began. With the monk in to give him last rites, with a little pill on the end of his cross, asking him if he wanted to save his soul or his ass. And the pill in his mouth, and the last walk to the chair, and biting into the pill, and passing out, thinking that this was the way all condemned men were brought to the chair, by lying to them that they would be saved.

And then waking up and discovering others who knew he had been framed because they had framed him. It was really part of the price he paid for being an orphan. He had no relatives, and having none, he would be missed by no one. And it was also part of the price he paid for having been seen efficiently killing some guerillas in Vietnam.

And so he had awakened in a hospital bed with a choice. Just start some training. It was one of those beautiful little steps that could lead to anything. To a journey of a thousand miles, a lifelong love affair, a great philosophy, or a life of death. Just one step at a time.

And so CURE, the organization that did not exist, got their man who did not exist with a new face and a new mind. It was the mind, not the body, that made Remo Williams Remo Williams. Whether he was Remo Cabell or Remo Pelham or all the other Remos he had ever been. They could change neither his voice, nor his instant response to his name. But they had changed him, the bastards. One step at a time. Yet he had helped. He had taken that first step, and done, albeit laughingly, the first things Chiun had taught him. Now he respected the aged Oriental as he had respected no one else he had ever known. And it saddened him to see Chiun react so un-Chiun-like to the talk of peace with China. Not that Remo cared. He had been taught not to care about those things. But it was strange that so wise a man could act so foolishly. Yet that same wise man had said once:

"One always retains the last few foolishnesses of childhood. To retain all of them is sickness. To understand them is wisdom. To abandon all of them is death. They are our first seeds of joy, and one must always have plants to water."

And in a hotel room many years from the tune of that first wisdom of the little father, Remo asked:

"Even for a Korean, little father?"