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

"What are you doing with your knuckles, anyway? I've never seen anyone do that. That's amazing."

"All you have to do is devote your life to it and you can master it, too, Smitty."

"Hmmm. Well, I suppose you have to occupy yourself some way. Seriously now, what do you know about oil and energy?"

"Everything."

"All right. What's a hydrocarbon?"

"None of your business."

"Well, that settles that. Let's start at the beginning and this time look at me."

So for another hour, Remo looked at the lemon-faced Smith while he detailed the problems of oil, both economically and criminally, and explained why he had decided that CURE must get involved, even though the situation was technically outside the organization's jurisdiction. If the country came apart, he explained, it would make little difference whether the constitution existed or not.

"And energy is more dangerous in its aspects than atomic weapons, Remo."

"That's terrible," said Remo, looking at Dr. Smith's pale blue eyes, while exercising the balance of his arms in continuity by the ever-so-slight touching of his fingernails. Every few minutes, Remo repeated, "terrible, awful, horrible," until Smith said:

"What's horrible, Remo?"

"Whatever you said, Smitty. This oil thing."

"Remo, I knew you were barely listening. Why do you continue in service? I don't think you care about America anymore. You used to."

"I do care, Smitty," said Remo, and now he was looking at that crusty New England face, with the majestic snow-crowned Rockies rising behind it, out past Denver. Behind Remo were the American plains and the big old cities. Behind Remo was where America had fought a civil war, losing more men than in any other war. Behind Remo was where bloody strikes and bloody company goons wrote labor history.

He had been born back there in the East, and abandoned, which was why he could become a man who didn't exist. Who would he feel required to contact again? Who would miss him?

Folcroft Sanitarium was back there, and that was the second time Remo was born, and this time he knew more about life.

"I continue to serve, Smitty, because that is what is right. The only freedom anyone has is to do right."

"The moral thing, you mean."

"No. Not necessarily. Those mountains behind you are the most mountain they can be. They are, and they are right. I must be that, too. It came to me while I was here. I am what I am. And what I am is ready."

"Remo. For a wise-guy Newark cop, you're beginning to talk like Chiun. I don't think I have to remind you that Sinanju is a house of paid assassins, centuries old. We pay Chiun's village for his services. We paid for your training."

"Smitty, you're not going to understand this, but you paid for what you wanted Chiun to do, not for what Chiun did. You wanted him to teach me parlor tricks of self-defense. He taught me Sinanju."

"That is absurd," Smith said. "You're talking nonsense."

Remo shook his head. "You can't buy something you don't understand, Smitty. You'll never understand . . . Now why not get on with the assignment?"

Smith smiled wanly and proceeded to outline the problem and the assignment.

Problem: the Arab nations were putting a slow oil squeeze on the United States. American researchers working on oil substitutes had been killed.