"Donahue, John - Sensei" - читать интересную книгу автора (Donahue John)

senseless violence.

But the accretion of facts, the stories spun by witnesses, build on
you. And then you can say here is where it begins. It's not that
things are inevitable; they just look that way in retrospect. What you
are left with is the sense of something that grows over time, the
result of a thousand small and seemingly insignificant events. You can
ask why. And to answer you can point to any one of the facts you
uncover. But once isolated by clinical explanation, it's not very
convincing. Or satisfying.

We're all looking for answers of some type. And we search for them in
different ways and along different paths. We hope that knowledge
brings control. But life reveals this notion to be a comforting
fiction.

It's like explaining a storm. Waves are spawned by the dance of
gravity and wind and tide. They gain strength and momentum until they
hurl themselves at us, standing surprised and stupid on the shore. It's
a hard lesson. Meteorology provides faint comfort to the survivors.

Ronin

He slipped into the empty building before anyone else. Fitness is big
business in LA, so it must have still been dark, hours before the
overachievers got there.

The killer knew his quarry well. The patterns would not have changed,
even in America. The master soon-to-be victim would pad quietly into
his training hall hours ahead of anyone else. He trained fighters, but
a sound business was a diversified business, and he had branched out
into general fitness and health. It meant a big jump for the bottom
line. His school was clean and upscale, with a reception area and
account reps who kept the budget fed, smoothly enticing the hesitant
and recording it all on the PCs that sat like putty-colored fetishes in
the office cubicles. For the master, even after fifteen years in
America, it was, ultimately, a distraction. The noise, the coming and
going, the lack of focus that was LA all made it harder and harder for
him to find time to pursue his art. And he was, despite all his
success, still an artist at heart. Which was why, increasingly, he
found himself before dawn, alone in the training hall, pushing himself
further and further, in fierce pursuit of the moment when he and his
art became inseparable.

His name was Ikagi, and he had been training in karate for over forty
years. He had the tubular build of martial artists all those movie
fighters look like weight lifters because that's what they spend most
of their time doing. Ikagi was a professional of the old school. In
his time in LA he had led and harassed legions of aspiring black belts
into his demanding vision of the martial arts. And he was no less