"Destroyer - 018 - Funny Money" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Warren)

Like climbing a smooth brick wall that went straight up.

Remo flattened his face and arms to the wall and moved his lower trunk in close and let his legs be loose and then with the easy grace of a swan pressed into the wall and raised his body by lowering his hands with great pressure on the wall and when his hands were down near his waist, the inside of his large toes touched a brick edge, securing and resting, and the hands went up again.

He could smell the recent sandblasting of the wall. When they were old and uncleaned, walls absorbed very heavily the auto fumes of the street. But when they were clean, the fumes were very faint. The hands floated up and then down and catch with the insides of the big toes and then up.

It would be a simple job tonight. In fact, it had almost been cancelled by an urgent message from upstairs about a currency problem and would Remo look at some films of a man being dismembered and tell upstairs if the man was using some hidden weapon or if it were some special technique. Remo had said that his teacher, Chiun, the aged Master of Sinanju, would know, but upstairs had said there was always a communications problem when dealing with Chiun and Remo had responded:

"He seems very clear to me."

"Well, frankly, you're getting a little bit fuzzy too, Remo," was the lemony response, and there was nothing to answer. It had been more than a decade now and maybe he was sounding a bit unclear. But to the ordinary man, a rainbow is only the signal that a shower has ended. To the wise, it means other things. There were things Remo knew and his body knew that he could not tell another Westerner.

His arms floated up and caught a piece of loose brick. He filtered it down through his hands, not thinking of the object falling to the alley below but thinking of himself and the wall as one. He could not fall. He was part of the wall. Down went the arms, catch with the toes, up with the arms, press in and down.

The training would have changed any man, but when Remo had begun his, he had just come from being electrocuted, one of the last men to die in the New Jersey electric chair in Trenton State Prison. He had been Newark Patrolman Remo Williams, convicted of murder in the first, fast and with no pardons, with everything on the side of harsh law working perfectly, until the electric chair that was fixed not to work, and he awoke and was told a story about an organization that could not exist.

The organization was called CURE, and to admit it existed would be to admit that America was ungovernable by legal means. An organization set up by a soon-to-die President that made sure that prosecutors got the proper evidence, policemen taking bribes were somehow exposed, and in general retarded the avalanche of crime against which a gentle and humane constitution of liberties had seemed helpless. It was to be for just a little while. An organization that did not exist would use for its enforcer a man who did not exist, a man whose fingerprints had been destroyed when he died in the electric chair.

But it had not been just a little while. It had been more than a decade and the training had done more than make Remo Williams an effective enforcer. It had made him a different person.

Toes catch. Not too much pressure. Arms up, down, toes catch.

"Hey, you," came a young woman's voice. "You there on the frigging wall."

The voice was to his left, but his left cheek was against the brick, and to turn his head toward the voice could plummet Remo immediately back down to where he came from. Way back down.

"Hey, you on the wall," the voice repeated.

"You talking to me?" asked Remo, listening very carefully to hear if that metal in her hand had the hollow barrel of a gun. It would have surprised him if it did. Her voice lacked the vocal tension of one carrying a killing instrument. A circle of light brightened the wall. The metal he had sensed in her hand was a flashlight.

"Well, of course you. Is there anybody else on the wall?"

"Please state your business," said Remo.

"What're ya doing on the wall already at four o'clock in the morning, twelve stories up?"

"Nothing," said Remo.

"You coming to rape me?"

"No," said Remo.

"Why not?"

"Because I'm going to rape someone else."

"Who? Maybe I know her. Maybe you won't like her. Maybe you'll like me better."

"I love her. Madly. Desperately."