"Destroyer 032 - Killer Chromosomes.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

"All right. Fifty-four dancers break three dowels."
"Gotcha," said Remo. "I'll be there."
He hung up and put the code card in his rear pocket. It looked like a bank calendar with descriptions of very peculiar loan rates. He was to meet Smith at the Logan Airport shuttle room in Boston.
Chiun was in the Toyota. He was busy not writing his tale of the king's love. How could he be expected to compose beauty with Remo ramming dimes into a telephone?
"We're going to Boston," said Remo.
"That is the other side of your country."
"Right."
"How can I write when we go shifting from one side of this country to another?" asked Chiun.
On the flight to Boston, he mentioned seven times how a true artist could not write while travelling, how if he were not travelling he would have completed his novel by now, how this was the very best time to write and it might never come again. If it weren't for this trip and its chaos, he would have done the book. Now it was over forever. Because of Remo.
Not that Chiun was in the habit of blaming, he mentioned. He just wanted things understood. He was not blaming Remo but Remo might just as well have set fire to Chiun's manuscript, a manuscript that probably was superior to William Shakespeare's, a famous white writer. Chiun mentioned famous white writers because if he mentioned Hak Lo, Remo would ask who Hak Lo was.
Remo wasn't asking who Hak Lo was. A man with a big grin, a checkered suit, and a gold keychain adorning his expanse of suede vest, apologized for listening into someone else's conversation but could the fine gentleman in the kimono possibly tell him who Hak Lo was? He was interested and did not know.
Remo put the man's unfinished luncheon compote, served in plastic dishes by the stewardesses, into the man's grinning face. Not hard. But the plastic bowl did crack.
It was not asked again on the flight across the continent who Hak Lo was.
Remo remained happily unknowing.
At Logan Airport in Boston, Chiun quoted a few lines from Hak Lo:
"Oh, torpid blossom
That meanders through thine unctuous morning,
Let thy perambulant breezes cusp,
Like the dalliance of a last-breathed life."
"That," Chiun said proudly, "is Hak Loian."
"That is icky mess," said Remo.
"You are a barbarian," said Chiun. His voice was high and squeaky, angrier than normal.
"Because I don't like what I don't like. I don't care if you think America is such a new backward country. My opinion is as good as anyone else's. Anyone's. Especially yours. You're just an assassin like me. You're no better."
"Just an assassin?" asked Chiun, overwhelming horror seizing him. He stopped. The fold of the light blue kimono fluttered like a tree being hit by one sudden gust of breeze. They were at the entrance to the shuttle terminal of Logan Airport.
"Just an assassin?" Chiun shrieked in English. "More than a decade of the millennia of wisdom, poured into an unworthy white vessel, a stupid white vessel that calls an assassin just an assassin. There are just poets and there are just kings and there are just wealthy men. There are never just assassins."
"Just," said Remo.
People in their rush to catch their hourly flights to New York City stopped to look. Chiun's arms waved and the grace of the kimono flowed like a flag in a wind tunnel.
Remo, whose casual balance and strong face tended to weaken most women, often with desires they had not known they had, looked even sharper and turned like a cat toward Chiun.
And there they argued.
Dr. Harold W. Smith, whose public identity was as the director of Folcroft Sanitarium, the cover for the organization and home of its massive computer banks, looked over his neatly folded New York Times at the two men fighting, one his lone killer arm, the other his Oriental trainer, and regretted meeting in a public place.
So secret was the organization only one man, Remo, was allowed to kill and only Smith, each American president and Remo himself knew exactly what the organization did. More often than not, the organization would pass up a necessary mission because of fear of exposure. Secrecy was more important for CURE than for the CIA because the CIA was constitutionally licensed to operate. But CURE had been set up in violation of the Constitution to do things.
And now, with terror as deep as the marrow of his bones, Smith watched his killer arm loudly talking about assassins. And just in case anyone should not be interested, there was Chiun, the Master of Sinanju and the most recent descendant of a line of more than 2,000 years of master assassins, in Oriental garb, screaming, his parchment face red. Screaming about assassins. Smith wanted to crawl into the pages of his New York Times and disappear.
A highly rational man, he understood that most people would not comprehend that the two were really killers. And they had ways of getting through people and official forces that was miraculous.
The danger now was that Smith would be seen talking to Remo. He would have to abort this mission.
He folded his newspaper and blended himself into the line of passengers headed toward New York. He turned his head away from the arguing pair who had not seen him. He looked out at the airport runways beneath this circular terminal for the shuttle flights. He became quite interested in the smog over Boston.
He was almost at the ramp to the plane when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Remo.
"No, I don't have a match," said Smith. This would let Remo know that everything was off. Smith could not afford to be identified with such an attentiondrawing scene as Remo had just irresponsibly created.
"C'mon, Smitty," said Remo.
To stand there and deny he knew Remo would draw even more attention.
Feeling as though his blood was drained from his limbs, Smith got out of the line. He ignored Chiun's formal sweeping bow and kept walking. All three got into a cab to Boston.
"Everyone can have half fare if it's a group fare. It's cheaper," said the cabbie.
"Quiet," said Smith.
For the first time, Remo noticed how Smith's gray suit and vest were so confining. He had never thought the man needed to be unconfined. Probably the only baby born with constipation and a sour disposition.
"And that goes for you two also," Smith said. "Quiet. Please."
"Listen," said the cabbie. "This is our new community rate to bring you, the community, a more equitable transportation service within the economic grasp of all."
"That's pretty good," said Remo.
"I thought so," said the cabbie.
"Do you use your ears?"
"Yes."
"Then use them now. I'm not going to give you that rate. Rut if you interrupt me again, I'm going to put your earlobes in your lap. This is a very sincere promise," said Remo.