"Destroyer 002 - Death Check.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

Chiun always had a bit of wisdom that didn't seem to mean anything, until one day you needed it." Now it meant something.

He had been kept at peak alert for three months while CURE attempted to figure out what it was protecting, and with the first sign that it was in danger, they sent in their weapon to be able to destroy it on command.

"Brilliant," Remo said to himself, running water into the sink. He watched the photographs become white, then separate, then dissolve and turn the water in the sink to milk. "Brilliant."

And he played with an idea he played with almost every month. Running. He could never be a cop again, he had no past. But he might be able to get into the Teamsters or even into a job where no one cared about the past. Maybe a salesman. Maybe open a store somewhere after clipping CURE for a bundle. A store.- A wife. A family. A home.

And then one day he would lift a car off a person, or settle a dispute in a bar and do it just a mite too well, and CURE would find him. And that would be that, because by then there would be another just like him and if that person came delivering the mail or the milk, Remo would be dead. If a thinking man wants to get you badly enough, he will get you. How few people realized their vulnerability . . . well, why should they? No one was after them.

And so the pictures were now liquid and Remo Williams pulled the plug and let them go down the drain where they would wash into sewers and then rivers, and then never be seen again. Lucky fucking pictures.

Remo read the transcript. "A conversation between A and B two years ago. B is another agency, same' team. A is the head of XXX."

Even in a water seal envelope, CURE took precautions to break links.

"A) What we're doing is taking traditional parts to make a new sum. An interdisciplinary approach to an old situation, the dynamics of conflict.

"B) You're trying to find out why people have conflicts with other people, correct?

"A) In a way, perhaps. You see, man as an animal has conquered the world. Conquered other animals. With ease, as a matter of fact, even though today individual man isn't sure of it. With that out of the way, man has turned to the only challenge left. Conquering other men. The history of war shows that. Well, why should some men conquer and some be conquered? What are the dynamics of that? That's our problem. If you knew, you could defeat any army in the world today with a smaller army. You might say a simple little plan to conquer the world, which I'm sure some politician cr militarist would just delight in. But you see the plan is really irrelevant, because conquest is meaningless until you define conqueror aria" conquered.

"B) You have a plan to conquer the world?

"A) Oh gracious, don't tell me you're one of those. If someone told you he unlocked the atom, would you run out right away to try to use it in a lightbulb or a bomb?

"B) This little plan to conquer the world? Have you achieved it?

"A) What difference does it make9 It's only a minor byproduct of our basic work here at XXX.

"B) Would you explain that minor function?

"A) No, not now. Only when we're ready, and then as part of the full corpus of our work. Otherwise, you can imagine the sort of people we'd have running around here, I'd close the forum first."

End of Transcript.

Remo filled the basin with water again and let the transcript go the way of the pictures, first to whiteness, then particles, then dissolve.

That answered one of the why's. A was Nils Brewster, head of the Brewster Forum which had its hands on "a little plan to conquer the world." Brewster would stop everything if he thought the military or the government was moving in. That explained why the forum had been a CURE function. Probably because better than any other group in the world, CURE could watch something or someone without anyone knowing-neither those under surveillance nor those doing the surveillance.

And then the photographs turned up. And that indicated that some other force was involved somehow. Moving in. And the United States could not allow .this little plan to conquer the world to go to someone else. And therefore everyone involved, everyone who might know, must die-if it proved necessary.

Remo pulled the plug in the sink and the milky water disappeared. Maybe a sports store in Des Moines, thought Remo, or a bar in Troy, Ohio. That woman in the cab would give him a recommendation. The bar would be nice. Until a customer put a bullet hi his head, then took money from the cash register to make it seem like a robbery.



CHAPTER SEVEN