"Destroyer 012 - Slave Safari.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

"They did not ask me," said Chiun. "No one asked me. Who asked me? If they asked me, I would say let the beauty of the drama remain. Beauty is rare but investigations you have with you always. Where is this person who does the questioning? I would speak with him for surely he would be interested in my opinion also."

"You're not going to kill a pollster, Little Father," said Remo.

"Kill?" said Chiun, as if Remo had broached the subject to a Carmelite nun, instead of the most deadly assassin in existence.

"Those things do tend to happen, Chiun, when someone gets in the way of your daytime shows. Or are you forgetting Washington and those FBI men, or New York and all those Mafiosi? You remember. They turned off your programs. Chicago and the union thugs. Remember? Remember who had to get rid of the bodies? Do you forget those little things, Little Father?"

"I remember beauty being interrupted and an old man, who has given the best years of all his skills to an ingrate, being reprimanded for attempting to enjoy a moment of beauty."

"You have a very selective memory."

"In a country that fails to appreciate beauty, a memory which forgets ugliness is a necessity."

And that had begun the renewed personal supervision of Remo's training by the Master of Sinanju. No longer could Remo do his exercises alone. Deprived of his daytime TV shows, Chiun had to supervise the basics and Remo could do nothing right.

Sitting by Lake Patusick in the Massachusetts Berkshires where they rented a cottage for the spring, Remo heard Chiun tell him he breathed like a wrestler. During the water movements, Chiun screamed that Remo moved like a duck, and when Remo was doing the stomach flips-an exercise in which Remo lay flat on his stomach and then used his abdominal muscles to flip himself over onto his back-Chiun said Remo moved like a baby. "You should have a nurse, not the Master of Sinanju. That was slow and clumsy."

Remo assumed the position again, the spring grass near the cool Berkshire lake tickling his cheeks, the smell of the fresh muddy rebirth of life in his nostrils, the morning sun on his bare back, illuminating but not warming. He waited for Chiun's click of fingers to signal the flip. It was a simple exercise, trained into his reflexes more than a decade before, as he began the training that changed a man the public thought had been electrocuted into the killer arm of a secret organization that was designed to fight crime.

Remo waited for the snap of the fingers but it did not come. Chiun was having him wait. Better to wait, he thought, than have to find a place to put the body of the man who was responsible for taking As the Planet Revolves off the air. He felt a slight pressure on his back, probably a leaf failing.

He heard the snap of Chiun's fingers and his stomach muscles slapped the ground like springs released from restraint, but his body did not spin around as Remo expected. The instant pressure of two feet on his back sent his body flat down in the wet spring mud. Remo spit the mud out of his mouth. It was not a leaf he had felt fall on his back, but the Master of Sinanju alighting, weightlessly on him. Remo heard the chuckles above him.

"Do you need help, little baby?"

To the untrained eye, it would appear that a thirtish man of moderate build with extra thick wrists and dark hair had attempted a pushup and failed because an old Oriental was standing on his back. Actually, the force expended by both men could shatter slate.

This simple little accident was viewed by three men who had walked around from the front of the cottage and now stood watching the pair-the young white man face in mud, the aged Oriental giggling.

The three men wore dark business suits. The shortest carried a briefcase, the others .25 caliber Berettas that they believed were hidden under their jackets.

"I'm looking for a Remo Mueller," said the man with the briefcase. Remo lifted his head from the mud and felt Chiun alight from his back. He wanted to send a razor sharp hand into the old man's giggling face, but he knew the cutting edge of the hand would be jelly before it ever touched the face. Perhaps in ten years, his mind and body would equal Chiun's and then maybe Chiun would not use Remo as a punching bag for his frustrations.

Remo saw by the way the two taller men stood that they were carrying weapons. There is a reaction of the body to a weapon it carries, a certain heaviness of the body around the weapon. The two men stood with heaviness.

"Remo Mueller?" asked the man with the briefcase.

"Yes. That's me," said Remo, spitting out mud. He had been given the name Mueller several weeks before. This was the first time he'd heard anyone use it, and he wondered if it should be pronounced Muell-er as in fuel, or Muell-er as in full. This man pronounced it as in full.

"The name's pronounced Mueller... as in fuel," Remo said, deciding that Chiun had no corner on perversity this day.

"I'd like to talk to you about a magazine article you wrote for the National Forum of Human Relations."

Magazine article. Magazine article, thought Remo. Sometimes upstairs planted an article under his byline when they wanted to give him a cover as a magazine reporter, but he did not remember being informed of any article by upstairs recently. He had been told to rest.

Remo stared blankly at the man. What could he say? "Let me see, the article I was supposed to have written." Upstairs moved in peculiar ways, right from the first day when former Newark policeman Remo Williams discovered that upstairs had been responsible for the frameup that put him in the electric chair, and equally responsible for getting him out alive, the man who did not exist for the agency which did not exist

The explanation was simple, as most of upstairs' explanations were. The Constitution no longer worked; the country could no longer withstand the onslaught of crime. The answer was an organization that functioned outside the Constitution, doing whatever it had to do to equalize the odds.