"Destroyer 034 - Chained Reaction.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

"I know," Remo said and there was no mocking in his voice now.
"They call us murderers and killers."
"Well, they have a point. To a degree."
"They don't understand what we do."
"How could they?" Remo asked. He wondered if he needed duck. A young man normally had enough fat in a grain food not to need the duck. A bead of fat glistened on the whitish flesh of the boiled duckling. Remo decided no.
"And in this country, your country, it is worse. You have amateur assassins working everywhere.
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Anyone who owns a gun thinks he has a right to kill."
"I know," Remo said.
"But a good assassin, why, even the victims respect him. Because the victim has a better death than if old age attacked, for in old age one is tortured into the grave. One sees one's limbs stiffen and breathing go and eyesight wither and all manner of ills befall. But, when a person goes with the assistance of a great assassin, he lives one moment and all but painlessly does not the next. I would rather be assassinated than be in one of your car accidents," said Chiun.
""I'm going, Little Father," Remo said. "Are you coming?"
"No," said Chiun. "This is too much to bear. Goodbye. I am old and poor. Perhaps you are right and this is the time to leave me."
"You're not poor. You've got gold stashed all over in little packets. And besides, there never has been a time when an assassin can't find work."
Remo packed everything he owned in a small blue canvas bag. An extra pair of chinos, three pairs of socks, four black T-shirts, and a toothbrush.
He thought he would be interrupted by Chiun any moment but the interruption did not come. He zipped up the bag. Chiun worked on his duck, taking little pieces with his long fingernails and chewing them as Remo had chewed his rice, into liquid.
"I'm going," said Remo.
"I see," said Chiun. Remo knew Chiun had
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giant steamer trunks that had to be labeled for shipments. He had not asked Remo to label them.
"I'm going now," Remo said.
"I see."
Remo shrugged and let go a sigh. He had worked more than a decade as an assassin and he could not, if he wanted to at this moment, fill his bag with valuables. He was going to a new life. He was going to where he would have a home and a wife and a child. Maybe several children.
Chiun had said children were like orchids, best appreciated when someone else had to do the labor of growing them. They had had this discussion before. Many years before. And many times since.
Remo did not know if he was going to that home and family. He did not know if he really wanted it anymore but he did know he wanted to leave. And he did know he did not want to kill again for a long while, if ever. It was not a big new thing that came on him, rather something that had been coming for so long and so slowly it felt like an old friend whom he had suddenly decided to say hello to.
Chiun did not get up.
"I don't think 'thank you' would be enough," said Remo to the man who had given him that new life.
"You never gave enough," said Chiun.
"I gave enough to learn," said Remo.
"Go," Chiun said. "A Master of Sinanju can do many things. He cannot do miracles. You have allowed yourself to turn into corruption and rot. The sun can make some things grow. It makes others spoil."
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"Goodbye, Little Father. Do I have your blessings?"
And there was silence from the Master of Sinanju, a silence so deep and so cold that Remo felt the shivers through his bones.
"Well, goodbye," said Remo. And he did not cry. He did not disapprove of those who did; it was just not for him.
Walking down the gangplank to the dock, Remo wanted to take one last look at the man who had given him Sinanju, forever making him someone else from that one-time policeman in that eastern city, who was framed by CURE, lured into its service, and then transformed by Chiun.
He wanted to look but he did not. It was over.
He made the dock, and the sunny day seemed more like a rude heat bothering him. One of the wealthy men from Delray, in blue blazer and yachting cap and a boat that he somehow managed to let everyone know was worth a cool million, which he never had time to run, greeted Remo with his greeting for everyone.
"Hot enough for you, fella?" asked the man from the deck of his yacht and Remo leaped over the railing and slapped tears into his eyes.
Then with his one blue canvas bag he went to the marina office and telephoned for a taxicab to take him to the airport. A secretary using the telephone to talk to a friend was intently describing her previous night, when she told someone triumphantly where to get off.
Remo compressed the telephone into her lap.
She looked horrified at the black shards that had, just moments ago, been a communications link to her friend. And now it was in her lap. The
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man had crushed the phone as if it had been made of compressed dry cereal.
She didn't say anything. The man who was waiting for the taxi didn't say anything. Finally she asked if she could wipe the plastic pieces and metal parts from her lap.
"What ?" asked the man.
"Nothing," she said, sitting very quietly and very politely with a lap full of telephone.
She glanced out the window at a small crowd gathering near a yacht, where one of the wealthier customers was holding the side of his face and gesturing wildly. And alongside that came a most peculiar sight. It was like a blue sheet being propelled by a frail wisp of a man with only a hint of a scraggly white beard, floating up around the dock. She didn't know how he could get around the mob that clustered around the customer holding his face, a mob that stretched from one side of the dock to the other.
The frail little Oriental moving the diaphanous blue robes across the dock did not go around. And the secretary, not wanting to take her eyes off the maniac in her office nor let that incredibly big smile dissipate, because she did not want her steel desk shredded on her, forced herself not to blink. Because the old man in the blue robe didn't go around. He went through, in that strange shuffling gait, unbroken as if the mob didn't exist. And there was the commodore of the marina himself, rolling around on the dock, grabbing his groin in great pain.
And then a horrible thought struck the mind of this secretary, this mind already overloaded with terror. The old man, the Oriental, was coming to
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the office. He was berthed along with the lunatic who shredded telephones, and he might be even worse, because he moved through crowds as if they did not exist.