"Destroyer 052 - Fool's Gold.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

And then there were two, the last two pirates of St. Maarten.
One emptied the clip of a 9-mm pistol at the stranger. He could have sworn he was hitting the body but the body did not drop. It was dark that night with only a sliver of moonlight. It became much darker very quickly and forever.
And then there was one. He had intended to finish off whatever there was to finish off, but no one ever left him with much in the way of combat. It had been his job to kill the children left over on boats stranded in the Caribbean and he liked the work because he was the crudest.
"Leave something for me," he called, turning around, and then he saw that it was all left for him. "Oh," he said.
"Yes," said the stranger.
So the last Malaise looked at his sixteen dead brothers and knew it was up to him. Well, he was the most cunning Malaise. He was the one who had trained his body to perfection. He was the Malaise who held not only the black belt in karate

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but the famed red belt. He had blended karate with taekwondo.
He had never needed weapons.
He went into his battle position and assumed the posture of the cobra, hissing the power into every sinew of his body.
The stranger chuckled. "What's that?"
"Find out."
"Don't have time for the play stuff," the American said.
The last Malaise saw the stranger's skull and prepared the blow that could not even be seen by human eyes, such was its speed. It came from the very bottom of his feet and went out at the stranger's frontal lobe, driving, striking . . . unfortunately, without much power because the body was not behind it. The body was not behind it because the arm was going forward and the body was going backward, and the last Malaise was dead.
"Leave them there," said Mrs. Malaise.
"I was going to clean them up," Remo said.
"Don't bother. We're going to have funerals so the undertaker can do it. Have you eaten?"
"Yeah. I'm not hungry. I've got to find a place here and do something else by noon tomorrow."
"You're kind of cute. Spend the night. You don't want to go walking around the island at night."
"I've got to."
"Part of the quiz game?" the woman asked.
"Sure," lied Remo.
"What do I get for telling you what a fuesal is?"
"Nothing," Remo said.
"It's a form of Balinese makeup."
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"Wrong," said Remo. "It's got something to do with boats."
"Right. What was I thinking of? Is there a consolation prize?"
"You have the funerals. You get all their money if you're smart," Remo said. "What more do you want?"
"Never hurts to ask," said Mrs. Malaise. Remo walked out beyond the sleepy alligator and the loose strands of electrical wire and back to the main road, a narrow two-lane and nothing to spare strip that surrounded the island.
On this island, Upstairs could create all the traffic it wanted and it would blend with the tourists who kept the restaurants filled. Upstairs could do all its international work in serving America, as the powerful secret organization that did not exist on paper. It could never be exposed to light or investigated by some headline-hungry politician because it simply never was.
And now its foreign operations were moving to this ideal island. As Upstairs had said, in the form of one rather dry, Dr. Harold W. Smith, director: "It is a perfect base for satellite communication. It is easy to disguise ingress and egress among the tourists. And best of all, it is not American soil. If our cover gets blown, at worst it can be blamed on the CIA."
And since the key to the operations was the vast and complex computer system that monitored key financial and criminal traffic in the world, Smith had an even better plan. A far safer plan than any physical transfer of the records of international violence and crime.

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The records would be lost if they were physically carried from one spot to another. But they would be absolutely safe if they were beamed in code from one computer system to another, from the home base in Rye, New York, where the organization's cover identity, Folcroft Sanitarium, was located, to the new one on St. Maarten Island.
As Smith had explained, since human hands would not touch it, since no tangible object would carry it, since it would happen in microseconds, the crucial information that the organization ran on would be safer in transit by satellite beam than any other way. Just as safe as if the information remained in headquarters in America-safer even, because America with all its probing groups and publicity-happy politicians could become a bit uncomfortable. There had been too many close calls, Smith told Remo. Too many people that Remo had had to quiet forever.
Remo had said, "Not that many. You ought to leave things where they are."
And Smith had said it was better to beam the records to St. Martin, and Remo had said, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," but Smith hadn't listened.
Remo walked past the small villages, hearing frogs croak in marshland ponds, through streets so narrow they could not accommodate two passing cars and a pedestrian side by side, past elegant restaurants and then he turned right.
A small airstrip was to his right with a building the size of a woodshed. An innocuous little private airfield.
Behind it stood a neat new building with the sign, Analogue Networking, Inc., the new high-
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tech business of St. Maarten. Smith had explained that they would employ at least one hundred people off the island without one of them understanding what he was being paid to do. Which was crucial for the cover. All operatives of CURE, the secret organization, did not know what they were doing or who they were working for. Except Smith and Remo. And Remo didn't care.
Remo introduced himself at the Analogue Networking gate and forgot the password. It was not unusual for high-tech industries to have passwords lest someone steal valuable microchips.
Remo suggested "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too."
"It's 'Mickey Mouse,' " the guard said. Then he shrugged. "You close enough. One can't be too much the stickler, can one?"
"Nope," said Remo agreeably.
Remo waited inside the plant until morning when the programmer arrived with a large loaf of fresh French bread, less than an hour from the bakery ovens. Remo refused a bite. He had eaten only two days before and his body wouldn't need anything for a few days more. Still, the smell was good and reminded him of the days when he ate normally, before his training, before so many things.