"Destroyer - 022 - Brain Drain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Warren)

"He's all right," said Brother Che.

"Let's off him now. Now," said Sister Alexa.

"No, no," said Brother Che, stuffing the Smith and Wesson into his beltless gray pants.

"We can get it all printed ourselves. Every bit of it the way we want," said Sister Alexa. "Let's stick it to him."

"And two hundred people who already think like us will read it," said Brother Che. "No. The Times will make it international knowledge."

"Who cares what someone in Mexico City thinks?" said Sister Alexa.

"I don't trust him," said Brother George.

"A little revolutionary discipline, please," said Brother Che. He nodded for George to stand by the door and for Alexa to go to the closed bathroom door. The curtains were drawn over the window. It was twelve stories down from the window, Remo knew. Brother Che nodded for Remo to sit at a small glass-and-chrome coffee table.

Sister Alexa brought a pale, bespectacled man out of the bathroom. She helped him lug a large black cardboard suitcase with new leather straps to the coffee table. He had the wasted look of a man whose only sunshine had come from overhead fluorescent lights.

"Have we gotten the money?" he asked, looking at Brother Che.

"We will," said Brother Che.

The pale man opened the case and clumsily put it on the floor.

"I'll explain everything," he said, taking a stack of computer printouts from the suitcase, laying out a manila envelope which proved to have news clippings, and finally a white pad with nothing on it. He clicked a green ballpoint pen into readiness.

"This is the biggest story you're ever going to get," he told Remo. "Bigger than Watergate. Bigger than any assassination. Much bigger than any CIA activity in Chile or the FBI's wiretaps. This is the biggest story happening in America today. And it's a scoop."

"He's already here to buy," said Brother Che. "Don't waste time."

"I'm a computer operator at a sanitarium on Long Island Sound in Rye, New York. It's called Folcroft. I don't know if you've ever heard of it."

Remo shrugged. The shrug was a lie.

"Do you have pictures of it?" asked Remo.

"Anyone can just walk up and take pictures. You can get pictures," said the man.

"The place is not the point," said Brother Che.

"Right, I would guess," said the man. "I don't know if you're familiar with computers or not, but you don't need all that much information to program them. Just what's necessary to the core. However, four years ago, I began to do some figuring, right?"

"I guess," said Remo. He had been told it was three years ago that Arnold Quilt, thirty-five, of 1297 Ruvolt Street, Mamaroneck, three children, M.S. 1961 MIT, had started his "peculiar research" and was being watched. The day before, Remo had gotten Arnold Quilt's picture. It did not capture the utter lack of natural light on his face.

"Basically, and I'd guess you want to simplify it this way, I suspected I was being given a minimum of information for my job. Almost a calculated formula to deprive me of any real reference point outside the narrow confines of my job. I later calculated that there were thousands like me and that any function that might lead a person to a fuller understanding of his job was separated in such a way that all cognitive reference was negated."

"In other words, they'd have three people doing what one could do," said Brother Che, seeing the man called Remo idly glance toward the shaded window. "One person might get to understand a job fully, but if you have three doing it, none of them ever finds out exactly where he fits in."

"Right," said Remo. He saw the tension go out of Sister Alexa's breasts.