"Destroyer 036 - Power Play.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

"More," he said. "Go to sleep. It's been a long day."
Almost reluctantly, she started down the hall, then stopped and went back to Pruiss's room and peeked inside.
"He's sleeping," she told Remo.
"Good," said Remo.
"I want you to kill anybody who tries to go into that room tonight," she said sternly.
"You got it," Remo said. "Go to sleep."
He entered his own room, undressed and lay on the bed. There had been a time, years before, when he had had trouble sleeping. Going to bed was just another struggle in a day filled with struggles and he would turn and toss on his bed until his drained and exhausted body reluctantly accepted sleep.
But that had been years ago, back before CURE, back before Chiun had transformed him into something different by giving him control of his own body, able to make it do what he wanted it to do.
He had once mentioned the change in his sleeping habits to Chiun, who laughed one of his infrequent laughs.
"You have always been asleep," Chiun had said.
When Remo finally came to understand the gifts Chiun had given him, he reflected that the ancient Korean was correct. He had been asleep, never in touch with his body. Most men used only a small fraction of their bodies and an even smaller fraction of their senses. Remo was man pushed toward the ultimate, using almost all his body, almost all his senses. And Chiun? Chiun was the ultimate. The secrets of centuries of Sinanju were stored in his mind and body and it explained why that frail old man, less than five feet tall, weighing under a hundred pounds, could bring physical forces to bear that had to be seen, and still were disbelieved.
Now, for Remo, sleeping was just another function of living and Remo was in control of those functions. He slept when he wanted to and for as long as he wanted to and the totality of rest he twisted from sleep was so great that a few minutes rest to him was the same as hours of sleep to a normal man.
And to go to sleep was the simplest thing of all. It did not require consciously willing the body to sleep. It simply meant letting the body do the natural thing, which was to sleep. "A lion never has insomnia," Chiun had once said. Sleeping became a thing done more by instinct than by conscious desire. But Remo controlled the instinct.
He thought of none of these things as he lay on the bed, because one moment he was awake, and the next moment he was asleep. Not the "little death" of sleep that most men suffered through. Because Remo lived a life without tensions racking his mind and body, because he was not in conflict with himself during the day, he did not have to escape that conflict at night in the deep coma that most people called rest.
Thirty minutes later he heard it and was fully awake. There was a sound in the hall. Chiun too would have heard it, he knew.
Remo moved quietly from the bed toward the open door of his room. The sound was footsteps, soft footsteps. It was someone barefooted moving down the thick carpeting of the hallway, and while to most people the movement would have been soundless, that was only because they were used to listening to the hard clicks of hard shoes on hard floors. Anything less than that was silent. But Remo could hear the soft crinkle of the wool carpet as it was pressed down by the bare feet stepping along it, and then the slight release as the foot lifted and took the next step. It was a hissing sound. The footsteps were coming closer to him. He heard no sound of clothing rustling.
A small person. Perhaps five-foot-six or seven. One hundred and seventeen pounds. Long legged. Chiun seemed to know something about the person who had thrown a knife into Wesley Pruiss's back. Did that make the assassin an Oriental? Remo wondered. An Oriental might fit the physical description of the person coming slowly and softly down the hallway toward Remo's room. Toward Pruiss's room.
Remo waited until the steps were only three feet from his open door and then walked out into the hallway.
Staring up at him was Theodosia. She was dressed only in white panties and bra. She looked up at Remo in surprise.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"I was testing you," she said. "Just to see if you were on the job."
Remo shook his head. "You'll never know how lucky you are."
"Why?"
"Because you gave instructions to kill anybody trying to enter Pruiss's room. If you had touched the knob on that door, Chiun would have put you away before you could blink." Without raising his voice, Remo said, "It's all right, Chiun. It's Theodosia. Go back to sleep."
The faint Oriental voice squeaked back from inside Chiun's room. "Sleep? How can I sleep with herds of elephants thundering down the hall at all hours of the night? I will never get any rest on this job. Woe is me."
"Come on in here," Remo said. "Unless you want to hear him kvetch all night." He led Theodosia into his room and closed the door behind them.
"I thought I was being very quiet," she said. She seemed not at all self-conscious about wearing nothing but her lingerie.
"You were," he said. "Most people wouldn't have heard you."
"You did."
"We're not most people," Remo said. He realized Theodosia was standing close to him, her body pressed against his. She seemed so small, so vulnerable that he lifted up her chin with his hand and leaned over to kiss her on the mouth.
Her lips stiffened momentarily, then relaxed and were rich and pulpy as they slid against Remo's. He moved his hands down her bare back, which felt smooth and oiled, and toyed with the elastic waistband of her nylon panties. Theodosia pressed against him with the middle of her body and clapped her arms about his neck.
She released her lips, leaned her head back and smiled at him.
"What's a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?" she asked.
"Just lucky, I guess," said Remo, drawing her close to his body again by wrapping his arms around her bare back.
He allowed his body to stir and when it did, he remembered how pleasant it had once been. It was all too easy for him now and he would never recapture the lustful joys of scoring when scoring was hard to do. Still the woman in his arms pleasured him. He fiddled with the little metallic clip on the back of Theodosia's bra but couldn't open it, just as he had never been able to open them, so he nipped the elastic strap between his right thumb and index finger and with a small twist of his hand, broke the elastic in two. The bra slid down the front of Theodosia's chest as she shrugged her shoulders and Remo felt her hard-pointed breasts touch his chest.
He raised a hand to her breast and she pressed her lips against him again, hard, demanding, insistent, and pushed him backwards toward the bed. He felt her fingers slide against the muscled flesh of his hard stomach and her long fingernails traced lazy circles about his navel.
She wore a sweet perfume but it was sweet with the smell of the outdoors and not with the sweet of sugar and chemicals. It wafted into Remo's nostrils and he savored the aroma as he let her body carry him down onto the bed. She was feverishly clawing at the waistband of his undershorts and Remo said,
"Easy, easy. What's the hurry?"
"Easy, my ass," Theodosia said and somehow twirling around on the bed, she had both their undergarments off and she was climbing over him.
Even though he did not want it to happen, it had become too much a part of him to ignore and Remo remembered all the steps ingrained in him by Chiun's training, and without thinking of them, he went from step one to step two to step three.
Chiun had taught him twenty-seven progressive steps for sex. Chiun had called it a beginner's course "but adequate for most of your needs, especially since you whites rut like cows in a field." Twenty-seven steps and Remo had never found a woman with whom he could get past Step 13 before she was turned into a flesh-covered mass of quivering jelly.
Theodosia moved around Remo as he went through the steps, the pressure touch on the small of the back, the fingernail scrape three inches from the center of an armpit, the tug and release of the small hairs at the back of her neck. He felt guilty about getting ready to turn the woman into jelly, but he knew nothing else to do in sex now except the things he had been taught. He wondered for a moment if Theodosia's continuous exposure to rampant, kinky sex at Gross magazine and as Pruiss's mistress might somehow render her immune to his processes.
He performed Step 13, deciding to use the left elbow instead of the right, but there was no visible response from the woman and for the first time, he moved to Step 14, involving both his hands and the inside of his right ankle and the back of Theodosia's left knee.
He paused, waiting for her to scream in a paroxysm of ecstasy.
She smiled down at him and said, "You're tickling me."
Remo lay back on the bed, for a moment totally relaxed, and then went on to Steps 15 and 16 and 17. At 18, Theodosia began to purr and he got all the way to step 22 before they joined together in a mingling outpouring of warm wet bliss that left Theodosia apparently dazed and Remo relaxed and calm, lying naked on his back on the bed.
Gallantly, he said "Congratulations."
"For what? You're not going to tell me I rescued you from homosexuality are you?"
She was already sitting up in bed, almost businesslike, as if the passion of the last few minutes had had nothing to do with her. He wondered at her resiliency.
"You're kind of remarkable," he said.