"Destroyer 022 - Brain Drain.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

The two long-fingered hands opened in an offering of innocence. "Then what would you want of me?" Chiun asked. "I give you diamonds, and you prefer to play with mud."
"I wanted to share my feelings with you."
"Share your good feelings. Keep the bad for yourself," said Chiun and in Korean he spoke about the inability of even one so great as the Master of Sinanju to transform mud into diamonds or a pale piece of pig's ear into something of worth, and what was even the Master to do when an ingrate came
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back with handfuls of mud and complained that it did not sparkle like diamonds?
"Shared feelings," mumbled Chiun in English. "Do I share a belly ache? I share wisdom. You share stomach pains."
"You never had a belly ache," said Remo, but he stopped talking as soon as "As the Planet Revolves" resumed. The shows were basically the same as a few years before, but now they had blacks and abortions and people no longer looked longingly at each other; they shared a bed. Yet it was still attenuated gossip, even though its star was none other than Rad Rex, whose autographed picture Chiun carried wherever he went.
Remo saw a country cleanup crew ride past in a pickup truck. A banner announcing a bicentennial art exhibit fluttered from the side panels. Chiun got along with the local people well. Remo felt like an outsider. Chiun had told him that he would always be an outsider until he recognized that his true home was Sinanju, the tiny village in North Korea from which Chiun came, and not America, where Remo was born.
"To understand others you must first realize they are others, and not just you with a different face,". Chiun had said. They had been living in the house only a week when Chiun explained the hostility local people always felt toward tourists.
"It is not their wealth they resent or that they come for the most pleasant of seasons. It is that a tourist will always say goodbye and goodbyes are little deaths. So they cannot like anyone too much for they will be hurt. The problem is not that they
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dislike tourists but that they are afraid to like them, for fear of hurt when parting."
"You don't understand Americans, Little Father."
"What is there to understand ? I know they do not appreciate fine assassins, but have amateurs practicing hither and yon, and their great dramas have been ruined by evil men who wish only to sell things to wash garments. There is nothing to understand."
"I have seen Sinanju now, Little Father, remember. So don't go talking about the wonders of North Korea and your own little bit of heaven by the bay. I've seen it. It smells like a sewer."
Chiun had looked surprised.
"Now you tell me that you don't like it. You loved it when you were there."
"Loved it? I almost got killed. You almost got killed. I just didn't complain is all."
"For you, that is loving it," Chiun had said, and that had closed the subject.
Now Remo sat back waiting for a commercial. He looked out the window. Down the road came a dark green Chevrolet with New York license plates. The car drove exactly at a thirty-five-mile-per-hour speed that would bore most people into sleeping at the wheel. The speed limit was thirty-five miles per hour. The exact speed of the car, around curves as well as on straightaways, never varying, told Remo who was driving it. He went outside to the driveway shutting the door quietly behind him.
"Hi, Smitty," said Remo to the driver, a lemony-faced man in his fifties, with pursed tight lips and a dehydrated face that had never been moistened by emotion.
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"Well?" said Dr. Harold W. Smith.
"Well what?" said Remo, stopping him from entering the cottage. Smith could not enter quietly enough not to disturb Chiun while the shows were on, for although he was still athletically trim of body, his mind let his feet clop in the normal Western walk. Chiun had often complained to Remo about these interruptions after Smith had left. He did not need the aggravation of verbal abuse from Chiun today; he felt bad enough about using a gun.
"The job," Smith said. "Did it come off well?"
"No. They got me first."
"I don't need sarcasm, Remo. This one was very important."
"You mean the other jobs were vacations ?"
"I mean if you didn't do this one right we will have to close shop, and we're so close to success."
"We're always close to success. We've been close to success for more than ten years now. But it never comes."
"We're in the social tremors preceding improvement. It's to be expected."
"Bullshit," said Remo, who a decade before had come out of a coma in Folcroft and been told of the secret organization named CURE, headed by Dr. Harold W. Smith, designed to make the Constitution work, a quiet little group that would insure the nation's survival against anarchy or a police state. At first Remo had believed. He had become CURE'S killer arm, trained by Chiun, the Master of Sinanju, the world's greatest assassin, and he had believed. But he had lost count now of the people he had eliminated who would have made the quiet little group known as CURE into an unquiet big organization.
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The four in the Bay State Motor Inn were just the latest.
Remo handed Smith the Tucson program.
"Good," said Smith, putting it in his jacket pocket.
"It hasn't been photographed either," said Remo. "You forgot to mention photograph copy."
"Oh, they can't photograph this kind of paper."
"What do you mean by that ?"
"Can't be done."
"How do you do that?" asked Remo.
"None of your business."
"Thanks," said Remo.
"It has to do with light waves. Are you happy now?" said Smith. He wore an immaculate gray suit with starched white shirt and that gruesome Dartmouth tie that never seemed to collect a grease spot. Then again, Smith didn't eat grease. He was a turnip and boiled cod kind of person.
"Okay," said Remo. "The commercials are on."
"Can you really hear through walls ?"
"None of your business," said Remo.
"How do you do that?"
"You refine quietness. Are you happy now?" said Remo.
Chiun rose to greet Smith, his arms outstretched in salutation.