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

Five minutes before noon, he saw the technician punch instructions into a machine. The technician explained that the computers operated the radio aerial outside so as to get the best and clearest lock on the overhead satellite. No human hands would touch it.
A phone call came on a private line, not attached to the island's telephone communications.
It was Smith for Remo.

27
"We're going to be sending in a minute. You understand what that means? Nothing will be here. Everything will be there once the transmission is complete. We are erasing completely here."
"I don't understand that stuff, Smitty."
"You don't have to. Just stay on the phone."
"Not going anywhere," Remo said, looking at the technician in front of the computer console. The technician smiled. Remo smiled. More than a dozen years of secret investigations would be moved any moment through space to the discs in this computer. The technician only knew he was getting records; he didn't know what records, and if he had learned, it would have meant his life.
There was a crackle on the telephone line with Smith. Probably some storm across the thousands of miles of open sea.
"Okay," said Smith.
"What?" said Remo.
"Done," said Smith. "What's your reading down there?"
"What's our reading?" Remo asked the technician.
"Ready when he is," said the technician.
"Ready when you are, Smitty," Remo said.
"They are already gone," Smith said.
"He says he sent them," Remo told the technician.
The technician shrugged. "Nothing here."
"Nothing here," Remo said.
"But I got an acknowledgement," said Smith.
"We send an acknowledgement?" asked Remo. The technician shook his head. "Not from us, Smitty," Remo said.
"Oh, no," groaned Smith. Remo thought that it might just have been the first emotion he had ever
28
heard wrung from the tight-lipped CURE director. "Someone has our records and we don't know who."
"Want anything else?" Remo asked pleasantly.
"There may not be anything else," Smith said.
"I don't trust machinery," Remo said, and he hung up and headed toward where he knew Smith could reach him if he wanted.
Barry Schweid was looking for the new gimmick, the totally new concept that would catapult him from the dinky $200,000 screenplay to the $500,000 plus gross. To do that, his agent said, he had to be original.
No copying Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark or Jaws.
"Copy something nobody else is copying."
"Everybody is copying everything," Schweid said.
"Copy something new," said the agent, so Barry had a brilliant idea. He had all the old scripts put on computers, really old scripts. He would blend all the great old ideas, even from the old silent flicks. But in the middle of creating a new script, he panicked. Copying the oldies was just too original for him. He had to hook into newer material. So he had a disc satellite antenna put up outside his Hollywood home. He had the disc arranged to pick up all the new television shows and transform them by sound into scripts.
But on the first day, the whole computer system went crazy. There was no script. The software used up his entire supply of storage material which he had been assured could not be used up in a hundred years.
29
And then when he went to address his newest script to the producers, Bindle and Marmelstein, he saw the strangest readout. It was no package label that came out of the machine but three full sheets of computer readout, as to the strange ways Bindle and Marmelstein financed pictures.
They were connected with the biggest cocaine dealer in Los Angeles. And there it all was on the computer printouts. How much the man dealt, where his home was, who were his sources of drugs in South America, how Bindle and Marmelstein helped move the coke through the film industry.
There were many strange things on the computer and Schweid hadn't ordered any of them. He called the computer supplier.
"There was a storm over the Atlantic the other day. Fouled up receptions from all the satellite stations," said the supplier.
"So if I got some information, it wouldn't necessarily be wrong, but it might just be information I wasn't supposed to have gotten," Schweid said.
"Yeah, I guess so. It was all scrambled, all over the atmosphere."
When Barry confronted Hank Bindle and Bruce Marmelstein, the producers, and told them he knew about their cocaine connection, they promised that Barry would never again sell a script in the business, that this was an outrage, that he had sunk lower than anyone else in Hollywood had ever sunk before. Bruce Marmelstein's indignation was such that Hank Bindle fell into tears, realizing the depth of hurt in his partner.
Both of them were in tears when Bruce finished talking about freedom of information meaning free-
30
dom for all mankind. That done, Bruce asked Barry Schweid what he wanted them to give him to keep quiet.
"I want to do Hamlet.'"
"Hamlet" said Bruce. He handled the business affairs of the company. He had a wide Valium smile. "What's Hamlet?"
"It's old stuff. It's British, I think," said Hank Bindle. He was the creative arm of the production team. He dressed in sneakers and tennis shirts and looked like Bo Peep but those who knew him had the sense that he was more like the contents of a sewage system. But without the richness.
"James Bond, you're talking," said Bruce.
"No," said Barry. "It's a great play. It's by Shakespeare, I think."