"Murphy, Warren - [Destroyer 016] - Oil Slick" - читать интересную книгу автора (Destroyer)

No, there was different treasure now, that no one could take away from him. Remo stopped in front of the adjacent hallway door. Well, only one person could take it away. That one person was sleeping hi the adjacent room. His teacher, Chiun, the Master of Sinanju.

Remo took an elevator down to the lobby, hushed hi its deep night wait until morning would make it alive wit! people again.

When he and Chiun had checked into the hotel the day before, Remo had looked out the window and said, "There are the mountains."

Chiun had nodded almost imperceptibly. The frail wisp of a beard on the yellowed parchment face seemed to shiver.

"Here it will be where you must find the mountain," he said.

"What?" Remo had said, turning to Chiun, who was sitting on one of his fourteen gaudily lacquered steamer trunks. Remo wore all his clothes. When they became soiled, he threw them away and bought new ones. Chiun never threw possessions away, but he chided Remo for his white American materialism.

"It will be here," said Chiun, "and you must find the mountain."

"What mountain?"

"How can I tell you, if you do not know?" asked Chiun.

"Hey, don't play philosopher with me, Little Father. The House of Sinanju is a house of killers, and you're supposed to be an assassin, not a philosopher," said Remo.

"When something is so good, some one thing is so glorious, then it must be many things. Sinanju is many things and what makes us different from all those that have ever been before is what we think and how we think."

"God forbid Upstairs should miss one payment to your village, Little Father; they'll find out how philosophical you are."

Chiun thought a long moment while he looked at Remo. "This may be the last time I look at you the way you are," he said.

"Which way? As what?"

"As an inadequate piece of a pale pig's ear," said Chiun with a high cackle before he disappeared into a separate room. He did not answer when Remo knocked. Not for morning exercises nor for evening advancement did the Master of Sinanju respond to Remo's knocks, even though during the day, Remo could hear the dull television voices of the soap operas in which the Master of Sinanju found pleasure. Thus it was for several days, until Remo was awake and aware that he was ready.

It was cool that spring night in the mile-high city, and while Remo could not see the great Rockies ahead of him, he knew snow was there. At a street corner, he stopped. The snow would melt and whatever destruction the winter had done to life would be exposed. If not buried in some dry place, elk or man or fieldmouse would rot in the sun and become part of the soil and of the mountain which had been there long before life tiptoed over its crust, and which would be there long after life was buried in it.

Ten years ago, when Remo had started his training, he did not think of such things.

He had been framed for a murder he had not committed. He had thought he was being executed but had awakened to find he had been selected as the enforcement arm of a secret organization that did not exist.

It did not exist because public knowledge of it would be an admission that the United States Constitution did not work. Its job was secretly to balance the books that had tilted on the side of crime. Remo, as its assassin, was the chief bookkeeper. "Violate the constitution to save the constitution," the young president who created the secret organization named CURE had said.

Only three men knew what it was and what it did. One of them was the president, another was the head of CURE-a Dr. Harold W. Smith, director of the Folcroft Sanitarium research center in Rye, N.Y., that served as CURE'S cover-and Remo.

After he had been recruited from the electric chair, Remo had been put in the hands of Chiun, an aged Korean, for training in the assassin's art. But not even Dr. Harold W. Smith of Folcroft could have anticipated the changes that the training would make. No computer could have projected what the human body could do, not even if they had fed in data calculated on the per gram strength of an ant limes the balance of a cat

They had selected one man and his body to be a tool to serve a cause, and ten years later he found himself using the cause to serve the tool.

Remo felt the mountains and knew this. He was who he was, and he realized now he had always known this. It was the mountain that Chiun had told him he must find, the mountain of his own identity.

Over the decade the Master of Sinanju had shown through training, through pain, through fear, through despair, just what Remo could be, and now that he understood it, he knew that what he could be, of course, was just what he had always been.

Done. Then he knew. So this was it. As Chiun had said, the truth is a common thing. Only fairy tales glitter like rubies in a crystal universe.