"Destroyer 052 - Fool's Gold.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

Wissex wanted to hear exactly how the woman screamed and after the Gurkha knifeman explained how he had made sure the head fell into the lap by the angle of the cut as Lord Wissex had suggested and how the woman could not control herself, Lord Wissex smiled and said it was time to dispense with pleasure and get down to business.
A small computer terminal rested on a silver tray. Wissex punched the result of the job into the computer. There were certain things one did not let servants do. One had to do these things oneself if one wanted to continue to prosper.
"Let me see your thrust again if you would be so kind," said Wissex.
The Gurkha made the short smooth thrust and Wissex punched its description into the computer.
"Yes, that's fine," Wissex said, calling in a draw from the computer. It showed immediately how many knife fighters were in the employ of the House of Wissex, how many could be recruited, how many could be trained in how much time and
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the general state of the market at the moment. They had lost some people in a small job in Belgium that the local authorities there had mistaken for a sex attack because the victim happened to be a woman and the weapons used were knives.
But there would be no more jobs like that if this new one worked. The House of Wissex would be able to go on for the next ten years on just this job if it worked.
Lord Wissex looked at the market pattern on the screen with wedges going to the Middle East, to South America and Africa. There was so much good business in the Third World nowadays, but this one could put them all to shame.
"We're going to promote you and give you a raise," said Wissex, looking up at the Gurkha. They might need many good knife fighters soon, if everything worked out as beautifully as it had in the caves of North Carolina.
When Terri recovered, she thought she heard a government man say she was going to be protected by a force so great and so secret that even the head of the department only knew that the President had given such assurance.
"The President of the United States, Terri, is personally authorizing a protection so awesome we don't even know what he's talking about. How is that?"
"How is what?" said Terri. She was fighting with all her strength to keep some broth down in her stomach.
"You are going to be protected by something only the President can authorize."
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"Protected for what?" Terri Pomfret asked.
"You're going back into that cave," said the man.
Terri thought that was what he said. She could have sworn that was what he said. But she wasn't quite sure, however, because she was in a very comfortable, deep blackness.
Two
His name was Remo and the sun was setting red over Bay Rouge in St. Maarten as he guided his sloop to a slow anchor in the small bay.
The West Indies island was the size of a county back in the states, but it was a perfect location to beam and receive information from satellite traffic in space. That was what he had been told.
The island was half French and half Dutch and therefore, in that confusion, America could do just about anything without being suspected. It was the perfect island for a special project, except that it had too many people.
Seventeen too many.
Jean Baptiste Malaise and his sixteen brothers lived in grand houses between Marigot and Grand Case, two villages that were barely large enough to deserve that name, but which had more fine restaurants than almost any American city, and all of Britain, Asia, and Africa. Combined.
Fine yachts would dock at Marigot or Grand Case for their owners to enjoy the cuisine. And sometimes, if the owners were alone and returned
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to their yachts alone, sometimes they were never seen again and their boats, under a different name and different flag, would join the drug fleet of the Malaise family.
The family might never have been bothered except that the island had to be clean. And it had to be cleaned of seventeen people too many. There could be no outside force functioning on the island.
The initial plan was that Remo would purchase a powerboat, just the kind that the Malaise were known to prefer for their drug traffic-two Chrysler engines with a specific gear-to-power ratio, a certain kind of propellor, a certain kind of cabin, a special decking that they absolutely loved, and a rakish swept configuration that was produced largely by a California man in conjunction with a Florida motor assembly works.
Remo would take this boat and dock on the eastern side of the island. Then he would go to a restaurant alone, allow himself to be followed by one of the seventeen Malaise brothers, and then quietly dispose of him somewhere off the island.
He would continue to do this until the remaining brothers stopped following him, and then he would quietly remove whoever was left.
But the plan didn't work. The problem was the boat. He had bought the right boat in St. Bart's, a neighboring island, right on time a month ago.
But the boat needed what Remo understood was a "fuesal." Everybody else he brought the boat to didn't know what a fuesal was. When someone finally figured out he was mispronouncing the item, three weeks of his time had gone and no one could
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get the part for another month because it had to be flown in from Denmark.
He never did find out what a fuesal was exactly. He pointed to another boat.
"Give me that," he had said.
"That is not a powerboat, sir."
"Does it run?"
"Yes. On sail with an auxiliary motor."
"Sails I don't need. Does the motor run and does it have enough gas to get me to St. Maarten?"
"Yes. I imagine so."
"I want it," Remo said.
"You want the sloop," the man said.
"I want the thing that has enough gas to get me from here," said Remo, pointing to his feet, "to there." He pointed to the large volcanic island of St. Maarten, squatting under the Caribbean sun.
So instead of a powerboat a month earlier, a powerboat that the Malaise family would have coveted, he had a sloop and now he had only 24 hours to clean the island.
He made it to St. Martin easily in the unfamiliar boat because he did not have to turn too much.
He was a thin man and he slipped into the water of Bay Rouge without a wrinkle on a wave. No one on the beach noticed that his arms did not flail the water like most swimmers, but that that body moved by the exact and powerful thrusts of the spinal column, pushing it forward, more like a shark than a man.
The arms merely guided everything. There was hardly any wake behind the swimmer and then he went underwater so silently one could have watched