Mob Psychology

She shut the door behind her, saying, "What's wrong? As if I can't guess."

"The last CE guy went berserk," Tony Tollini said miserably. "He broke the PC."

Wendy Wilkerson sank into a chair, saying, "Oh, God."

"They want a Jap. Today."

"Excuse me?"

"A Japanese service engineer. And they want him now."

"This can't go on, Tony. If the board finds out, do you know what will happen to you?"

Tony Tollini's head came up like a startled giraffe's. "Me? You mean us. This was your idea."

"It was a joke! How many times do I have to tell you? I never meant you to take it seriously."

"Well, the joke's on us. We have to do something fast. I can't hold them off much longer. I have to send out a real customer-service engineer."

"Are you crazy? If another one doesn't come back, we'll have the FBI, never mind the board, on our backs. I don't know about you, but I'm beginning to think there are worse fates than to be exiled to an office at the end of the south wing. "

"Name one."

"Discovered stuffed in the trunk of a Buick, for one."

"I'll take it," said Tony Tollini, trying to get the childproof cap off a bottle of aspirin. After grunting and groaning without success, he simply bit the thing off with a savage jerk of his head.

He swallowed four pills. Dry.

"I'm going down to customer service. You'd better come."

"Why me? I'm only director of product placement."

"I need the moral support. And we're in this together, like it or not."

They walked down the corridor and turned into a more brightly lit corner of IDC world headquarters.

"I sure miss having seventy-five-watt bulbs in my work area," Wendy Wilkerson said forlornly.

"I heard in Atlanta they have to make do with forty-watters. "

Wendy Wilkerson hugged herself tightly and shivered.

"It's a cold cruel world out there."

"In here too."

They went through the door marked "CUSTOMER SERVICE."

Amid a profusion of spaghetti wire and computer equipment in various states of disrepair, lab workers in white smocks and medical-style caps were conducting diagnostic tests.

"Attention, everybody," said Tony Tollini, lifting his hand to get their attention. "I have an important announcement."

Heads turned. Surgical gauze masks were pulled away from puzzled mouths.

"I need a volunteer," said Tony.

Everyone froze. Fingers in the act of removing surgical caps stopped as if paralyzed. A single gasp could be heard.

"Our Boston client needs us. Needs us desperately."

A man corkscrewed to the floor in a dead faint. A woman wearing horn-rimmed glasses ducked under a workbench and shivered like a toad under a sheltering rock during a hard rain.

"Please," Tony said. "This is important. I need help here."

"You go, then," a voice snarled.

"Who said that?" Tony Tollini demanded, head swiveling angrily. "Who spoke?"

No one volunteered. The surgical masks completely disguised lip movement.

"I tell you what," Tony said suddenly. "We'll draw straws."

"Are you in the pool?" a pinch-faced technician demanded.

"I'm VP of systems outreach," Tony Tollini said fiercely. "And I am ordering you all to draw straws."

No one had any straws, so Tony Tollini snipped a length of blue wiring into equal lengths and one slightly shorter one.

He turned to Wendy Wilkerson, saying, "Wendy, you do the honors."

Nervously Wendy Wilkerson gathered up the bits of bright blue wire and arranged them in her fist so that they stuck up to equal height. She held out a trembling fist. There were tears in her eyes.

Timidly the technicians in the room clustered around Tony Tollini and Wendy Wilkerson. No one made a move for the bright blue bits of wire which gleamed copper at their tips.

"Come, now," Tony Tollini urged. "Don't freeze up. IDC men do not shirk before a challenge. Remember, the odds are better for those who draw first."

A trembling hand reached out. It withdrew a bit of wire. No one was quite certain if it was long enough, so they held their breath.

"Let's go," Tony urged. "Slackers face shorter odds."

Another hand reached out. Another short bit of wiring came to light. The two bits were compared side by side. They matched.

Whoops of joy came from the two who had drawn the wires. They reverberated throughout the room. The remaining technicians looked sick. One began to retch. Another threw up. A third said, "My God! This is a clean room. He threw up in a clean room."

"Enough." Tony pointed to the man who had spoken. "You, you're next."

Before the next straw-drawer could move, the doors behind them flew apart and a loud, squeaky voice announced, "I seek the one known as Antony Tollini."

All eyes turned to the source of that loud voice.

It was an old man, impossibly ancient, his eyes cold as agates. He was an Asian in native costume.

Antony Tollini stepped forward and said, "I am Antony Tollini. "

The tiny man bowed deeply. "And I am Chiun."

"Chiun?"

He lifted an imperious finger. "Chiun the Great."

"Great what?"

"Great computer genius, of course."

Tony Tollini's jaw dropped. "You?"

"I am pleased that you have heard of my renown."

"Excuse me," Tony said stiffly, "but I'm familiar with the world's leading experts in the field, and I've never heard of you. "

"That is because I did not wish you to," said the old Oriental called Chiun flatly. "But this has changed. I now seek employment in your tribe."

"Tribe?"

"Yes. This is a corporation, is it not?"

"Yes. "

"I understand corporations are very tribal. I, myself, once owned my own corporation."

"Would I know the name?"

"It was called Nostrum, Ink."

Tony gasped. "Nostrum! The Wall Street venture capital company? I read about you in Forbes. But I didn't know you were in information services."

"My mighty hand is everywhere," said Chiun.

"Are you by any chance . . . Japanese?" asked Tony Tollini suddenly.

The face of Chiun wrinkled with distaste, like a prune shriveling in stop-motion.

"Some have called me so," he said in a grudging voice.

"What was that?"

"It is one rumor," Chiun said through tiny set teeth.

"Are you or are you not?" Tony Tollini pressed.

The answer was a single word, low, tight, and sibilant, like a cobra cursing.

"Yes."

Tony Tollini's tight features broke out in a pleased smile.

"You," he said brightly, "are hired."

The old Oriental bowed smartly. "Of course," he said. "I am Chiun. Believed by some to be Japanese," he added bitterly.

"Can you leave right now?"

"Once we have made arrangements for my salary," Chiun said quickly.

"We'll give you three thousand per week and a three-hundred-dollar-per-diem for expenses," Tony said instantly.

"I will require one-half of my niggardly fee in advance," Chiun said stiffly.

"Advance? IDC doesn't do advances. You'll see your first check in two weeks."

"I will see half my fee now or I will seek employment elsewhere," Chiun said sternly.

"Let's take up a collection!" a technician shouted.

"Yes, let's!" cried another.

Wallets were opened and coins extracted from pockets. Like votaries before an implacable idol, the IDC employees laid the money before the sandaled feet of the Great Chiun, the Japanese genius.

The Master of Sinanju cast a cold eye down at the heaping pile of bills coins, and old cards lying at his feet.

"This will not suffice,' he said.

Groans came from the huddled technicians. A solid gold money clip sailed into the pile pinching a lone dollar bill.

"Take it. It's my bus fare home."

Chiun shook his aged head. "That is better, but you lack twelve dollars to satisfying my modest demands."

Tony Tollini nudged Wendy Wilkerson in the ribs.

"Get it out of petty cash," he hissed. "Fast. And have a car brought around. I think our problems are solved."

"You can't send him," Wendy shot back.

"Why not?"

"Look at him. He's such a sweet old man."

"He's also a genius. And it's either him or one of the staff. Unless you'd like to volunteer?"

"I'll be right back," said Wendy Wilkerson, hurrying from the room. Her heels clicked away like nails being driven into a coffin.

Chapter 14

The Master of Sinanju rode to the airport in silence, the book called "LANSCII" on his lap. He deigned not to glance over it. Such things were for whites, who understood machines-one of the few things whites were good for.

At the airport Harold Smith was loitering in a waiting area, craning his neck to see past a baggage X-ray machine, pretending to be searching for an arriving passenger.

The Master of Sinanju paused and placed the blue notebook on a standing sand-filled ashtray. He moved away.

Smith moved quickly to the ashtray. He bent to relace one of his gray oxford shoes. When he straightened up, the blue notebook was under one arm.

He exited the terminal and hurried to his dilapidated station wagon, which was parked nearby.

The Master of Sinanju endured the flight to the city called Boston despite the hectoring of the galley servant who insisted that he ride in the front of the plane, where everyone knew death sat should the plane fly into the side of a mountain, as frequently happened.

"I will ride over the wing," he told her.

"But, sir, your ticket says first class," the stewardess pointed out. "You are entitled to our best service."

"And the best service you can render me is to allow me to sit over the wing so that if it should fall off, I will know this."

"I've never head of a wing actually dropping off in flight."

"Then it is bound to happen," Chiun snapped, "for every other calamity imaginable has already befallen these pitiful metal birds you whites command."

At that example of invincible logic, the stewardess relented, and a coach passenger was delighted to discover upon boarding that the flight was overbooked, but instead of being bumped, he would be permitted to sit in first class.

The wing did not fall off, although the Master of Sinanju did notice that it wobbled alarmingly upon takeoff:

He spent the flight confiding to an elderly woman that he was the victim of a foul slander.

"What slander?" the woman gasped.

"That I am Japanese," Chiun admitted in a pained voice.

"You poor dear Chinaman. How awful."

After that the Master of Sinanju pointedly refused to listen to the details of the ignorant woman's hysterectomy, going so far as to insert his fingers into his ears by way of hint.

At the Boston airport there was a Roman servant awaiting him.

"You the Jap computer guy?" he asked.

"I am Chiun. I am not called the Jap."

"Name's Bruno. The boss is waitin', and boy is he steamed. "

" I am very interested in meeting this steamed boss of yours," said Chiun, walking beside the servant. "Is he also a Roman?"

"The boss is Italian, like me. Proud of it, too."

"Pride is very Roman. It is good to be proud of your heritage," Chiun sniffed. "Even if you have sunk into mediocrity."

"Is that an insult?"

"And ignorance," added Chiun, whose ancestors had worked for the Roman emperors when the sons of Rome had not been debased by the pagan cult called Christianity. If only the lions had been more plentiful . . .

The corner of Boston called the North End made the Master of Sinanju think of parts of the outer world he had visited when he was very young, in the beginning part of this century. It did not make him feel nostalgic, however. Nothing in the modern world was to be admired. Although the Ottoman Empire had its good points.

He was taken to the side door of an ugly brick structure, where the cracked glass face of a computer stared back like the shattered eye of a Cyclops. Three swarthy Romans stood around it like glowering votaries.

"This is the troublesome machine?" asked Chiun.

"What does it look like?" said Bruno. He laughed. "This here's the Jap," he told the security guards.

His voice dripping disdain, the Master of Sinanju said, " I will proceed to fix this. But first I must know what has befallen it."

Bruno shrugged. "It's simple. It broke."

"Explain. "

"First the boss was having trouble with it. It wasn't doin' what he told it to. So he gave it a good whack."

"And?"

"It went blooie."

Chiun nodded safely. "Ah, blooie. Yes, I have seen blooie before. A common scourge of machines. It is possible to fix this. "

"Then the last guy IDC sent, when he couldn't fix the disk, broke the whole machine. His name was Remo, too. Can you imagine a guy named Remo doin' that?"

" I cannot imagine one named Remo not doing that," said Chiun, advancing upon the machine.

His hazel eyes narrowed at the strange oracle the whites called a computer. Emperor Smith had explained certain things about these machines to him. His eyes went to the black panel which concealed the all-important hard discus.

He inserted two long fingernails into a vent and pulled sharply.

The black panel popped off, exposing naked machinery.

"Ah-hah!" cried Chiun. "Behold! No wonder this machine stubbornly refused to do its master's bidding."

Bruno crouched to see better. "Yeah? What is it?"

Chiun reached in and extracted a thick-edged black disk.

"This," he said. "It is the wrong record for this brand of machine."

"It is?" Bruno asked, dumbfounded.

"This is designed for a seventy-eight-rpm computer. You have the thirty-three-and-one-third kind."

Chiun held the shiny black hard disk up to the light triumphantly.

"Do they work that way?" asked Bruno doubtfully.

"It is a professional secret," said Chiun conspiratorially. " I am only revealing this to you because you have been abused by Remo the Terrible."

"What do we do?" asked Bruno, straightening up.

"I must secure the proper record."

"You don't have one with you?"

"Alas, no. I was misinformed by my employer as to the true nature of the problem. I must return to Idiocy right away. "

"You mean IDC."

"I mean what I mean. For I am Chiun, world's greatest repairer of computers such as this."

"I'd better check with the boss."

The Master of Sinanju nodded. "I must treat with your master. So this is good."

Bruno went to a door and knocked once.

"What?" a raspy voice growled.

"The Jap figured out what's wrong with the box."

"Is it fuggin' fixed?"

"No. He's gotta take a part back. Says we got a seventy-eight when we shoulda had a thirty-three and a third. Like on a record player." "That don't mean nothin' to me.'

"It's like records. You know."

The door opened.

"Is that right?" asked Carmine Imbruglia, for the first time hearing something about computers that made sense.

"You the Jap?" he demanded, staring at the Master of Sinanju.

"I am Chiun," said Chiun frostily. He raised the hard discus. "And this is the source of all your vexing problems." Chiun looked more closely at the one known as the boss. "You are a moneylender?" he asked.

"What's it to you?"

"You remind me of a moneylender. Such as lived in Roman days. "

"You need a loan? I can front you a few bucks. Six for five. "

"No, I need only a conveyance from whence I came."

"What's that in American?" asked Carmine suspiciously.

"I must return to my employer, who will replace this faulty record."

"That ain't the hard disk, is it?"

"No. "

"That's good, because I ain't lettin' the hard disk outta my sight," said Carmine firmly. "I told them that before. It stays here. "

"You are very wise," said Chiun blandly.

"Just to be safe, I want you to show me the hard disk, okay?"

"Why?"

"I'm from Brookyn, right? I don't know nothing from computers. You show me and I'll let you go get the right record."

"Very well," said the Master of Sinanju. He peered into the open aperture, saying, "It is that silver object there."

Don Carmine Imbruglia blinked into the aperture like a gorilla into a hole in a tree.

"That little silver dingus?" he asked, surprise in his raspy voice.

"The very same."

Don Carmine squinted his piggish eyes. His brutish face scrunched up like a fist.

"So that's what it looks like. All this trouble over that little thing. It looks like a little washer. Who knew?"

"It is the way with these machines," said Chiun firmly.

Carmine straightened.

"Okay, you done good. About time, too. Bruno, you take this little Jap genius back to the airport. Give him anything he wants. Then you stay there until he gets back. You understand?"

"Got it, boss."

"When this is over," said Don Carmine to the Master of Sinanju, " I wanna talk to you about maybe doin' a little work for me on the side. Savvy?"

"On what side?" asked Chiun curiously.

"On my side."

The Master of Sinanju bowed.

"When I return," he said, "we will have much to discuss, you and I."

Chapter 15

The supersecret organization, CURE, ran by computer.

In the basement of Folcroft Sanitarium, behind a sealed wall, a bank of mainframes hummed like a grandmother doing her knitting.

For the three decades Dr. Harold W. Smith had overseen the organization, those data banks had grown and grown, absorbing and retaining vast files on every American, every business entity, and every conceivable fact that might be of use to Dr. Smith in his tireless effort to hold in check the forces that threatened to rend America apart.

Smith loved his computers. Although he had seen action during World War II as an OSS operative and later in the CIA, in his declining years Smith preferred the quiet order of his office and its simple terminal that could access virtually any computer on the continent.

Today he had his system up and running, its tentacles reaching out through the phone lines to the mainframe at IDC world headquarters, only a few miles away from Rye, New York.

The blue LANSCII notebook lay propped up beside it.

Smith was conducting a surreptitious search through the IDC data banks for the LANSCII program. The IDC system had succumbed to a brute-force password testing program like a sand castle swept aside by a surf.

He had been doing this for over an hour. Although it should have taken no more than ten minutes to isolate LANSCII if it were there, he kept at it.

"It must be on file. LANSCII is an IDC program," he muttered to himself.

But it seemed not to be.

When at last he was forced to admit defeat, Smith logged off IDC, and picked up the blue notebook. He looked at the cover again.

He knew that LAN was a computer term meaning "local area network." A fancy name for a PC. Assuming it was identical to the end letters of Ascii, the double I would mean "information interchange." Ascii actually stood for Association Standards Committee for Information Interchange.

But this strange configuration had him stumped. Except that it sounded hauntingly familiar. But Smith as yet could not place it in his memory.

"What could the SC stand for?" he muttered.

Cool fall sunlight streamed through the replacement window behind Smith's hunched form. He frowned.

A buzzer buzzed.

"Yes, Mrs. Mikulka?" Smith said absently.

"Dr. Gerling asked me to tell you the new patient remains in stable condition."

Smith looked at his watch. "Thank you. Inform Dr. Gerling I will expect the next update at precisely three-oh-five."

"Yes, Dr. Smith."

Smith went back to the blue notebook. His knowledge of computer systems, in the days when CURE was new, had been as good as anyone's. Superior to most. Over the intervening decades, Smith had kept up with the fabulous developments in the field. But in recent years he had been forced to concede that technology had outpaced his ability to keep abreast of it.

Still, he was able to understand most of the LANSCII program. It was a combination spreadsheet and inventory accounting program. A variation on existing software.

True, some of the rubrics and subsets were odd. But computer terminology had a tendency to be either overly technical or playful to a degree Smith found asinine.

What on earth, he wondered, was meant by VIG? Or LAYOFF? The former appeared to be an employee tracking component, but it was not connected with the configuration surrounding the LAYOFF rubric, which appeared to be some sort of insurance program along the lines of futures trading.

A moment later his secretary buzzed him again.

"Yes?" Smith said, this time a trifle testily.

"Mr. Great is here to see you."

"Who?"

"He says his first name is Chiun. You know, that man."

"I see," said Smith. The Master of Sinanju had been a frequent visitor to Folcroft, and Smith had allowed his secretary to believe that Chiun was a former patient subject to delusions. It covered virtually every outburst the old Korean might make. "Send him in," Smith said crisply.

The door flew open. Chiun came billowing in like a blue-and-silver cloud-the colors of his kimono. He waved a hard disk in the air triumphantly.

"Behold, Emperor! The very prize you seek!"

"You extracted the disk," Smith said, his face falling into long drawn lines of regret.

"Of course," Chiun said proudly. "Was there any doubt?"

"But," sputtered Smith, rising from behind his shabby desk, "hard disks are not supposed to be removed like a common CD. They require delicate handling. A clean-room environment. The data have no doubt been destroyed."

"Why do you say that?" asked Chiun, taken aback by the sheer ingratitude of his employer.

"It's too complicated to explain," said Smith with a sigh. "But suffice it to say that dust and debris on the surface of the disk, no matter how minute and seemingly inconsequential, would obliterate the very magnetic particles that store the data."

Chiun wrinkled his tiny nose at the incomprehensible babbling of his emperor. He raised the disk into the air on the tip of one long-fingered nail. With the other hand he set it to spinning. Faster and faster, he spun the disk.

Then with a touch of the same finger, he brought it to an abrupt halt.

"It is now clean," he said tightly.

Smith blinked. He knew it was hopeless, but he also knew the power of the Master of Sinanju. He came out from behind his desk with his long face quivering with suppressed hope.

"It is worth a try," he said, taking the disk between two fingers.

As Chiun watched, Smith opened a port in his terminal. It was one of two capable of accepting auxiliary hard disks. He inserted the new disk into the drive, closed the port, and engaged the disk.

The drive whined warningly.

"Not a good sign," Smith murmured.

"I endured great personal hardship to recover that object," Chiun pointed out. "Canards and abuses were heaped upon my poor head like cold raindrops." The tone of his voice told Smith that the Master of Sinanju was miffed.

Greenish symbols appeared on the screen. They looked like a combination of English and Chinese. Garbage.

"I am sure you did," Smith said, moderating the drive's speed. The whine lessened, the symbols on the screen shifting in and out of readability.

"I allowed myself to be known as a Japanese," Chiun said, drawing near.

"As I explained to you earlier, you were undercover. In disguise. No one will know it was you."

"I was forced to identify myself to ignorant persons as Chiun, former chief of Nostrum, Ink, the mighty corporation of which everyone has heard."

"That was quick thinking. I am very pleased."

"And so I am branded in some eyes," Chiun continued, "a lowly and avaricious Japanese instead of a graceful Korean. My ancestors would weep tears of bile if they knew of this."

Smith said nothing. He was absorbed in his manipulation of the mysterious disk. Letters were resolving themselves.

"How does Remo fare?" asked Chiun, changing the subject. As always, the white was unreachable when communing with his machine.

"He is fine. Just fine," said Smith, his pinched face almost the color of the glowing screen. A sickly phosphor green.

When he had the whine muted, Smith tapped several keys.

He got a sign-on screen. It read:

LANSCII

Smith would have grinned, had smiling been in his nature.

The screen winked out, was replaced by another image.

This one read:

***LOCAL AREA NETWORK***

***SICILIAN CRIME***

***INFORMATION INTERCHANGE***

Dr. Harold W. Smith stared at this with a stupefied expression as the screen was replaced by a user-friendly menu.

Frantically he exited the system and rebooted. Again he got the sign-on. Then the second screen. He stabbed a pause button.

The glowing green letters stared back at him mockingly.

***LOCAL AREA NETWORK***

***SICILIAN CRIME***

***INFORMATION INTERCHANGE***

"Good God," said Harold Smith hoarsely. He disengaged the pause.

"What is it, Emperor?" asked Chiun, coming around to Smith's side of the desk to see what had so amazed his emperor. If it were important enough, it might be something to throw in Smith's face at the next contract negotiation.

Smith did not reply. He was going through the system. His eyes widened. At one point he input the name VIG.

A screen came up, showing a simple ledger accounting format. It was headed VIGORISH.

"Vig? Vigorish!" said Smith, his lemony voice tinged with disbelief.

" I do not know these words," remarked Chiun with interest.

"'Vigorish' is a slang term for the interest paid in usurious loans," Smith explained, not taking his eyes from the screen. "Sometimes shortened to 'vig.' "

"Of course. The Roman they call the boss is a moneylender. He offered me five for six."

Smith nodded. "A shylock."

Chiun shrugged. "It is not so bad. Brutus was infamous for demanding sixty-percent interest."

Smith looked up quizzically.

"Brutus?"

"The thug who betrayed Caesar."

" I see." Smith returned to his screen. He paged through the data, squinting harder as he concentrated. He discovered that the LAYOFF program was simply a method of tracking the laying off of high-risk sports bets. An insurance scheme, as he had deduced.

Half-forgotten underworld slang came back to him. He found programs covering running numbers, a method of randomly selecting floating-dice-game locations and what appeared to be an accounting of the daily take on supermarket cash registers. It was an old trick, Smith knew. A manager would be strong-armed and coerced into installing a checkout line unsuspected by the parent chain. All proceeds from the phantom register would go into criminal hands.

All the old, familiar patterns of racketeering were present. Each of them made super-efficient by IDC software.

Finally he exited the system and leaned back in his cracked leather chair.

Letting out a sigh of unhappiness, Smith said, "What we have here is a software system specifically configured to serve the needs of the Mafia."

"Ah, yes, the Black Hand," said Chiun. "I know of them. Bandits and thieves without any shred of honor."

"They have not gone by that name in a long, long time."

"But their ways have not changed," said Chiun, wondering if that remark were an aspersion cast upon his great age. Whites were notoriously disrespectful of age. Even old whites such as Smith.

"Now they have," said Smith tightly. "This computer system could be the first step to bringing the Mafia into the next century."

"Then I say we dispatch them swiftly," Chiun said quickly. "Eliminate them in this century so they do not live to enjoy the next."

Smith shook his head. "No, not that way. If this catches on, it could spread to the Yakuza and the Colombian drug lords. There is no telling where it might stop."

"A few select assassinations could have a desired effect on the rest," Chiun pointed out.

"Master Chiun," Smith said suddenly, "did you notice any other equipment adjacent to the terminal you extracted the disk from?"

"No. There were only the plastic oracle and the hard discus. "

"Disk. "

"The Romans would call it a discus, just as would the Greeks."

"This is only the tip of the iceberg," mused Smith. "It is important to learn why and how the Boston Mafia was able to coerce IDC into pioneering software specific to their needs."

"I will be pleased to bring the moneylender to you, on his knees and fearing for his life," Chiun offered hopefully.

Smith shook his head. "No, this is best investigated from the IDC end."

"Since I am currently in their employ, although as a Japanese, I am prepared to venture into their toils once more," Chiun said in a wounded but heroic voice.

"No," Smith said firmly. "I believe this is something best handled by Remo."

"Remo?" Chiun squeaked. "Why? What is wrong with my service that you would cast me aside like a cracked rice bowl?"

"Nothing, nothing," Smith hastened to say. "It is just that Remo is-"

"Hopeless, callow, and inept," Chiun spat contemptuously.

"-Caucasian," said Smith.

Chiun made a face. He began pacing the floor, waving his hands in the air. " I am ruined," he cried. "First I am forced to pass for Japanese. Now my very Koreanness is cast aside as if unimportant. Where will the ignominies end?"

Smith stood up. "Listen to me, Master of Sinanju. You were just sent to Boston by IDC, ostensibly to repair the Boston Mafia's system. You stole the hard disk. Eventually this will be discovered."

Chiun whirled. "I can return the disk," he cried. "No one will suspect. They do not know it is missing." He struck a proud pose. "Unlike me, they know nothing of computers."

"No. This disk contains all the financial data for the day-to-day running of the Mafia. Their loans, their gambling, everything. For the moment, they are paralyzed."

"A perfect opportunity to strike a mortal blow."

"Not yet," said Smith. "Listen carefully. When Remo's face has healed, he will be unrecognizable to the staff at IDC. I will send him back into the firm, where he can get to the bottom of this. It is the perfect solution."

"And what of my services?"

"Your services, I am sure, will be invaluable-as our campaign takes shape."

"Campaign? We are going to war?"

Smith nodded grimly.

"Against the Mafia."

Chapter 16

Tony Tollini shivered at his desk, his stark white shirt soaked in sweat despite the temperature-controlled environment.

At the end of the business day-five o'clock-he tiptoed out from behind his desk and opened the office door a crack.

Out in the anteroom, his secretary was putting on her gray rabbit-fur overcoat.

"No calls?" he asked fearfully.

"None, Mr. Tollini."

Tony Tollini's face lost its wound-like-a-mainspring tightness. He almost smiled. The would-be smile crawled across his lower face like a grimace.

"Is that all?" the secretary asked.

"Yes, yes. Thank you," said Tony Tollini, thinking that perhaps the ingenious Chiun had saved the day after all.

Once his secretary had disappeared down the hall, Tony knocked on the next office over. It read "WENDY WILKERSON,

DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT PLACEMENT."

"Good news," he called through the door.

Wendy opened her door a sliver. One round green eye appeared, as if at a mouse hole.

"What?"

"No calls from Boston," Tony said in a hushed voice.

The door opened wider. So did the eye. "You don't think .. you can't imagine . . . ?"

"I think he did it," Tony said excitedly. "The little guy pulled it off!"

"Great!" Wendy rolled her green-as-emerald eyes ceilingward with relief.

"Care to join me in a celebratory dinner? I know this fabulous Italian place."

"Pul-leeze. Anything but Italian."

"Chinese?"

"Let me get my coat!" Wendy said quickly.

Out in the parking lot, they strolled along as if all the cares of the world had been lifted from their shoulders.

"I'll follow you, okay?" Wendy said.

"It's just up the highway."

"I know the place. Their fish in a rice basket is scrumptious."

They split off; going to their respective cars.

Tony Tollini was whistling by the time he got to his Miata. He inserted the key in the driver's door, and was reaching for the handle when he felt sudden pressure on his elbows.

"Tollini," a baritone voice growled. "The boss wants to see you."

Tony Tollini froze. He looked to his right. There was a man towering over him with a jutting jaw like a bestubbled iron plow.

He looked left. The man to his left was shorter, but infinitely wider. Tony Tollini could not remember ever seeing a man so wide in his life. He looked like a wall jammed into a sharkskin suit.

"Boss?" Tony croaked, his mustache drooping in defeat. "You mean the CEO of IDC, don't you? Please say that's what you mean. Even if its not true."

"I mean our boss," said the human wall. "And he ain't happy."

Tony Tollini left his keys in the door of his car. He had no choice. Fingers like cold chisels were guiding him by the elbows, somehow managing to simultaneously grind his funny bone in such a way it felt like champagne got in his marrow.

He tried to cry for help. Only he could not. There were cold chisel fingers squeezing his lips into something resembling a chamois bag opening with the drawstring mouth pulled tight.

Tony Tollini was escorted to the open trunk of a black Chrysler Imperial. He took the hint. He even helped pull the lid closed. It was almost a relief. No one would massacre him in the trunk. He hoped.

When Wendy Wilkerson piloted her Volvo out of the IDC parking lot, she looked both ways, thinking that she had missed Tony Tollini. All she saw, however, was a long black Chrysler Imperial slithering into traffic.

Thinking Tony had gone on ahead, she drove north to the Chinese restaurant up the road.

When after twenty minutes Tony Tollini did not show, she became uneasy and sped home, where she ate reheated Chinese and lay awake all night staring at the shadowy ceiling.

Tony Tollini did not sleep that night. He was hauled out of the Imperial's trunk in a shadow-smeared alley and taken to a black walnut alcove where sat Don Fiavorante Pubescio.

"Uncle Fiavorante," Tony sputtered, forcing a weak smile. "Great to see you again. Really great. Really."

His outstretched hand was ignored.

"Sit," said Don Fiavorante.

Tony sat. He didn't know what to do with his hands, so he folded them as if in church. The saints on the walls made it seem appropriate somehow.

Don Fiavorante began speaking, using the hushed, authoritative tones of a priest hearing confession. "I have had a call from my friend Don Carmine. You remember Don Carmine?"

"We've, never met, actually," Tony admitted sheepishly.

"I have told you of him. He is the business associate of mine for whom you did a certain thing."

"It wasn't my fault!" Tony said quickly. "The disk crashed. He must have-"

Don Fiavorante raised an immaculately manicured hand for silence.

"Have some tea. It is ginseng," said Don Fiavorante as tea was served by a silent waiter. "Much easier on the stomach than espresso."

"You have sent your people to my friend Carmine. None of them could do anything with this machine of yours. Not one. "

"I tried to tell him that we needed to take the system into a clean room, have it checked over by media recovery specialists. But he refused to listen."

"My friend Carmine is funny that way. He does not wish that other people know his business. This is understandable."

Tony Tollini relaxed. "Then I'm not in trouble?"

"But someone has removed his property."

"What?"

"A Japanese gentleman. He came, he saw, and he took. He promised to return with a new part."

"What part?"

"This wily Japanese called it a record. But from what Carmine described to me, it was the hard disk over which there is so much trouble. This was yesterday. Yesterday, and this Japanese gentleman promised to return yesterday. No Japanese gentleman yesterday. No Japanese gentleman today. Don Carmine is very upset. He called me. He asked me, 'Don Fiavorante, my friend, how can I pay you rent when I have no financial records? All is on the stolen disk.' "

Don Fiavorante shrugged as if it were a small matter.

" I told Don Carmine that I would give him, how you say, grace on his rent. He pays me next Friday and I ask only that he pay double."

"Double?" Tony gulped. He took a hit of the ginseng tea.

"That is what my friend Carmine said. He does not like to pay double. He prefers to have his records so he can pay me on time. Without these records, he does not know who owes him and when. It is bad business not to know these things."

"I never saw the guy again!" Tony protested, "I thought he was still up there, doing good work."

Don Fiavorante Pubescio leaned across the black walnut table, which bore a faint scar of an old bullet furrow. "This is what you want me to tell Don Carmine? That you never saw this Japanese again?"

Tears were starting to race down Tony Tollini's pale cheeks.

"No. No. Give me another day. Please, Uncle Fiavorante."

Don Fiavorante eased back in his chair. " I tell you what," he said, pursing his lips. " I think you are not, how you say, complicit in the stealing of this disk. I think this Jap was a crook. So I will make you a proposition."

"Anything," Tony said tearfully.

"Go to Boston. Meet with Carmine, who is a friend of mine. You will work for him, help him get on his feet. You know many things. He needs help." Don Fiavorante tapped his temple. "He is not smart, like us."

"But I have a job. At IDC."

"Where they treat you like a buffone. No, you go to Boston. You make Carmine happy. If he is happy, I will be happy. If both of us remain happy, your continued happiness is assured."

"He won't kill me, will he?"

"A very good question. You are very bright to ask that question. I will ask my friend Carmine."

Don Fiavorante snapped his fingers and a telephone was brought to the alcove and set before him. Picking up the shiny receiver, he dialed a number.

"Carmine!" he said, after a brief pause. "How are you? Good, good. Yes, he is here. I have spoken to him. He knows nothing about the unfortunate theft, and I believe him. What can I say? He is my wife's sister's son. I have told him he must work with you now, but he has a question. He wants to know if you intend to, how you say, kill him."

Don Fiavorante listened. Finally he said, "Good, I will tell my nephew."

Tony looked expectantly at his uncle as Don Fiavorante replaced the receiver.

"My friend Carmine, in answer to your question, said, 'I'm gonna fuggin' kill the cogsugger if he don't make it right with me. After that, I'll fuggin' see.' "

"I'll take the job," said Tony Tollini instantly.

Don Fiavorante Pubescio smiled broadly. "I knew you would. Now, go. Carmine is waiting. Give my regards to your mother, such a sweet woman. There are so few like her anymore. Addio."

Chapter 17

Remo Williams woke up with his face on fire.

Not knowing where he was, unable to see, he found his center, in Sinanju believed to be the solar plexus.

The long years of training came into play. Remo got his breathing under control first. Letting the pumping of his lungs serve as a focus point, Remo willed the fear of the unknown to drain from his mind. His adrenals stopped flooding his system. He redirected the blood to his face, the only portion of his anatomy that hurt.

At first, the agony increased. His facial nerves felt like traceries of acid. That told Remo he was injured. Then the pain began to ebb and he concentrated on controlling it.

In a way Remo could not understand, but which was as familiar to him as walking, he sent the pain signals coursing out of his facial nerves and down his neck to his torso, and then, radiating in ever-diminishing waves, to his extremities.

The burning of his face ebbed like fading music. He felt a dull ache in his arms and legs. When his fingertips and toes tingled as if mildly burned, he knew he had his nervous system under control.

Remo lay supine a moment, listening. There were no sounds of consequence. He tried to move.

His arms came up. No bones broken. He brought them to his face. His fingertips hovered over his stiff throbbing features momentarily, as if afraid to touch the wounded flesh.

Remo brought them down.

Touching a rough but soft material, he felt around his face. Bandages!

Then he remembered. Smith's office. The ambush. Oblivion.

Remo bolted to his feet.

"Chiun! Goddamm it, Smith! Where are you?"

Outside, through a door or a wall, a worried voice cried, "Summon Dr. Smith. The patient has wakened."

Feet ran away, making the slippery sounds of soft shoes on polished tile.

Remo assumed he was in Folcroft, somewhere.

Sitting up on the side of his bed, he folded his arms and waited. He was not happy.

When the Master of Sinanju and Harold Smith finally arrived, they were accompanied by a doctor or a nurse. Remo couldn't be certain. His ears registered the unique heartbeats of Chiun and Smith, but the third was unfamiliar.

"How do you feel?" asked a self-assured male voice.

"Like breaking the necks of certain parties," Remo growled.

Harold Smith spoke up. "Would you excuse us, doctor?"

"Of course. I will be outside." The unfamiliar heartbeat went away.

"Remo," Chiun squeaked plaintively, "thank the gods you have survived your ordeal unharmed. When Emperor Smith informed me that he had gone ahead with this horrible thing despite our express wishes, I was stricken as never before."

"Cut the crap, Chiun. I know you were in on it."

"Never!"

" I didn't keel over in Smith's office because I caught a chill from the open window," Remo said bitterly.

"It is possible. One never knows," returned Chiun in a subdued tone.

"Smith, do you have anything to offer to this?" asked Remo tightly.

"The tumor has been successfully removed," said Smith.

"Then why am I tricked out like Claude Raines?" Remo wanted to know.

"Since you were under," Harold Smith explained in a voice that was not comfortable with itself, "we saw the necessity of going ahead with the surgical adjustment of your features." " I prefer to think of it as an improvement," Chiun sniffed. Behind his gauze mask, Remo's eyes widened in shock.

"You didn't! Tell me you didn't!"

"The procedure was done according to my express instructions," Smith said levelly.

"But I assisted," added Chiun pointedly.

"Smith, did you stay for the operation?" Remo demanded.

"Actually, no," Smith admitted. "I saw no need."

"Has anybody peered under these mummy wrappings and checked out my face lately?" Remo asked worriedly.

Smith replied, "The truth is, Remo, that you've been out for almost two weeks now. It was a precaution we felt necessary so that your face could heal more quickly."

"In other words," Remo said sourly, "for all you know, I look like Sonny Chiba."

"I hardly think that--"

"Emperor Smith," Chiun said loudly, "if my son has been burdened with the face of a Son of Chiba, I will insist upon a new doctor of plastics. This is not acceptable."

"Oh, no," Remo groaned. "You didn't tell the doctor what to do, did you, Chiun? Tell the truth."

"I . . . advised him," Chiun admitted slowly.

"He was under strict instructions not to do anything unorthodox," Smith insisted.

"I hope you got that in writing in case we have to sue for malpractice. "

Smith said nothing.

"You did get it in writing, didn't you?" Remo asked.

"Er, the doctor in question has already . . . departed Folcroft. "

"Covering our tracks, were we?"

"There were complications."

"To what?"

"To . . . the doctor."

"Why do I get the feeling that you're hiding something here?" Remo said edgily.

"Because we are not," said Chiun. "And your backward white mind predictably insists that we are."

Remo sighed into his bandages, smelling his stale breath. He had a fierce case of morning mouth. "When do the bandages come off?" he asked slowly.

"The attending doctor believes that the healing should have started by now," Smith told him. "The bandages can be changed. Of course, you should not expect complete facial mobility just yet. Even though your healing powers are quite accelerated."

"Okay, I guess we might as well get it over with."

Smith opened the door and called out into the corridor, "Ask Dr. Gerling to come here. The patient is ready."

Chiun piped up, saying, "You will like the new you, Remo. "

"So help me, Chiun, if I end up looking like a refugee from a Hong Kong chopsocky movie-"

"It is better than looking like King Kong, as you formerly did," the Master of Sinanju sniffed.

The doctor arrived a minute later and asked genially, "How is the patient?"

"Angry enough to chew nails," Remo said.

"Well, this should not take long."

Remo listened as the doctor rolled some kind of wheeled object probably a tray of instruments-up to the side of the bed.

"I am bringing a mirror up to your face," the doctor told Remo. "Is that all right with you?"

"Just let's get this over with," Remo said testily.

The doctor began to snip away the gauze, pausing often to unwind the long strips. As successive layers came away, Remo saw two patches of light emerge. He made his pupils compensate for the brightness. If he had not been lied to, it had been a while since they had been subjected to light.

More gauze came away. Finally the last layer was peeled from his eyes and Remo could see them reflected in the mirror.

Dr. Harold Smith and Chiun stood out of range of his vision, somewhere behind him, so they were unable to see Remo's face.

Only a patch of pale skin showed here and there through the gauze. The doctor continued snipping and unwinding busily.

The nose emerged. Then the rounded plane of one cheek. And the point of the jaw.

Finally, as if a key thread had been yanked, the gauze abruptly dropped away and Remo Williams was staring at his naked, dumbfounded face.

The silence in the room was thick.

All at once Remo threw his head back and began laughing uproariously.

"What is it, Remo?" Smith demanded hoarsely.

"He's hysterical," said the doctor.

"I must see this," cried Chiun.

Before anyone could move, Remo turned around, jumping off the bed. He spread his arms like a stage performer, saying, "Behold the new Remo!"

Harold Smith gasped and turned as pale as the walls.

Chiun's tiny mouth made a circle of shock, his eyes narrowing into walnuts of inscrutability.

And although it hurt like hell, Remo Williams grinned from ear to ear, enjoying their horror-struck expressions.

Chapter 18

The first thing that Antony Tollini did upon being ushered into the glowering presence of Don Carmine Imbruglia was to fall down on his knees and beg for his life.

"Anything you want," he said, his voice twisted with raw emotion. "I'll do it, Don Carmine. Please."

Tony Tollini shut his eyes. He hoped if they shot him, it would be in the head. Quick.

Don Carmine Imbruglia was seated at the Formica-topped table not far from the great black stove on which a tiny saucepan of basil cream sauce bubbled pungently.

"You cost me fuggin' money," he roared.

"I'm sorry," Tony said, squeezing his eyes. A single transparent worm of a tear crawled from one corner and scooted down into the relative safety of his mustache.

" 'Sorry' don't fuggin' pay the piper," pointed out Don Carmine. "I ask for repair guys, I get stiffs. I ask for better repair guys, and I lose wise guys. Then I lose the hard-on disk. Now I gotta fuggin' hard-on. And because you're Don Fiavorante's nephew, I can't whack you out, which is a perfectly natural thing to do under the circumstances."

"Thank God."

"But I can bust your balls," added Don Carmine. "Where's that testicle crusher?"

"Out bein' fixed," reported Bruno the Chef. "You broke it on Manny the Fink, remember?"

"That's right. I did." Carmine frowned down on Tony Tollini. "Okay, you can keep your balls. For now. But I gotta have satisfaction."

"What can I do to make it up to you?" Tony pleased.

" I owe Don Fiavorante forty G's. You got forty G's?"

Tony Tollini's black eyes snapped open. "Yes, yes, in my bank account. As a matter of fact, I have almost sixty thousand."

"Okay," said Don Carmine in a mollified voice. "I get all sixty."

"But you said forty!"

"That didn't include the money I can't collect from the dough I put out on the street at twenty percent on account of that fuggin' hard-on disk."

"Can I write you a check?" said Tony.

"After you gimme your watch," said Don Carmine.

Tony blinked. "Why?"

"You're a sharp fuggin' dresser. I figure you got a sharp fuggin' watch I can hock for another grand."

Morosely, Tony Tollini removed his Tissot watch and handed it over.

Don Carmine Imbruglia accepted the proffered tribute. He looked at it with blinking eyes.

"What the fug is this? A fuggin' joke?"

"What?"

"You holding out on me, you yubbie bastid?"

"No, I swear!"

Don Carmine held up the watch for all to see, saying, "Look at this watch! He palmed the fuggin' numbers. I never heard of anything so brazen."

"Numbers?" said Tony blankly.

Don Carmine passed the watch to his lieutenants. It was passed from hand to hand.

"Hey, it's made out of a rock," exclaimed Bruno (The Chef) Boyardi.

"What do you take me for?" snarled Don Carmine Imbruglia. "Stupid? Tryin' to hoist a rock off on me?"

"It's a Tissot," Tony explained. "It's supposed to be made from a rock. It cost me almost two hundred dollars."

Don Carmine took the watch back and looked at it again.

"You got rooked, smart guy." He tossed the watch back. "Here, I can't do nothing with this. The fences'll laugh me right out of town."

Tony Tollini caught the watch.

"You and I," said Carmine. "We're gonna make some money together."

"How?"

"You're a smart guy. You know computers. Don Fiavorante says you're gonna fix me up with the best computers money can buy. Only they ain't gonna cost me nothing."

"They ain't? I mean, they aren't?"

"Naw. 'Cause you're gonna filch 'em from IDC."

"Oh," said Tony, getting the picture.

Then Don Carmine explained his needs.

"I got runners, see? You understand runners and numbers slips? What can you do about that?"

"We'll bring in faxes," Tony said quickly.

"I don't hire queers. That's out."

"No, I said a fax. It's a telephone that transmits sheets of paper. "

Don Carmine looked blank.

"With the writing on it," Tony added.

"They got those now?" said Don Carmine, his beetling brows lifting in surprise.

"I can have this room filled with plain paper copiers, faxes, beepers, dedicated phones, word processors, and PC's equal to all your needs," said Tony Tollini, suddenly on familiar ground. Sales. "What's more I can get you fault-tolerant systems. They're completely bulletproof. You'll never have a hard disk failure again, Mr. Imbruglia."

"Call me Cadillac. Everybody does."

"Yes, Mr. Cadillac. "

"Now you're talkin' my language. Boys, help Tony here set this up."

They helped Tony Tollini off his knees. He made a call to IDC and ordered an open system.

"I want our best stuff," he told customer service. "And program everything to run LANSCII."

Within two days Don Carmine was on line. The Salem Street Social Club was crammed with equipment. He stood blinking at the big black fax that had been placed on a dead burner of the black stove for lack of a better place.

"Looks like a fat phone," he said doubtfully.

"I'll show you how it works," said Tony Tollini eagerly. "There's a restaurant near here that accepts fax orders. Here's the menu."

Frowning, Don Carmine looked over the folded paper menu.

"I'll have the clam chowder," he said.

"Great," said Tony Tollini, who typed a brief letter on the word processor, printing it out and sending it through the fax machine.

Don Carmine watched as the sheet of paper hummed in one slot and came out the other to the accompaniment of startled beeps.

He ripped the sheet free and looked at it.

Turning to Tony Tollini, he said, "It's still fuggin' here. What is it, broke?"

"Just wait."

Minutes later, there came a knock at the front door.

Instantly Pauli (Pink Eye) Scanga and Vinnie (The Maggot) Maggiotto drew automatics as Bruno the Chef answered the door.

"It's okay," he called back. " I got it."

He came back with a paper bag and handed it to Don Carmine.

"What's this?"

"Your eats, boss," said Bruno confidently.

Don Carmine broke open the bag and pulled out a plastic container. He lifted the lid, sniffed experimentally, and looked inside.

"This stuff is all white!" he roared.

Bruno looked.

"It's clam chowder. Ain't it?"

"This stuff looks like fuggin' baby puke. Where's the tomato soup?" ,

"They don't put tomato soup in clam chowder up here," said Bruno.

"Then what do they put in, fuggin' cream? Send this back. I want clam chowder with tomato sauce in it."

And as an expression of his wrath, Don Carmine picked up a heavy cellular phone and threw it at a nearby computer screen.

The glass cracked, seemingly sucking in the rows of amber columns. Silence followed.

Don Carmine turned to a cringing Tony Tollini. "What happened to bulletproof." he roared.

Eyes widening, Tony sputtered, "They're not literally bulletproof!"

"What other kind is there!"

"It's just a technical term," Tony bleated. "The system is built of arrayed redundant mirror components. If some break down, the others take over."

"Oh," said Don Carmine slowly. "Now I understand perfectly. "

"You do?"

"No wonder these computer things work like they're magic. It's all done with fuggin' mirrors."

His eyes sick, Tony Tollini swallowed his reply.

While Bruno ran the errand, Don Carmine demanded of Tony, "Got any other things you want to show me, genius?"

The phone rang then. The Maggot answered it. He called over to Don Carmine, "It's Don Fiavorante. He wants his money. "

"Tell him I got it."

"He wants it now."

Don Carmine frowned. His eyes lit up suddenly. "Ask him if he's gotta fax."

"He's says he does."

"Tell him to hang up. I'll give him his money in no time."

Don Carmine pointed to Tony Tollini. "You, genius. You write that check for forty G's now."

Tony sat down at the Formica table and pulled out his checkbook.

"Make the check out to Fiavorante Pubescio, the crook. Only leave out 'the crook' part, okay?"

Obediently Tony began writing.

When he was done, Don Carmine looked at the check and handed it back, grinning.

"Fax this to Don Fiavorante," he said.

Tony swallowed. "But I can't . . ."

"Why not? Won't checks fax?"

"They will, but . . "

"No buts. Fax the fugger."

An unhappy look on his face, Tony Tollini trudged over to the fax machine, inserted the check sideways, and dialed the number Pink Eye read off to him.

The check went in. And then it came out again.

Don Carmine plucked it free.

"You know," he said, pocketing the check, "modern technology is fuggin' wonderful."

He was so pleased with his new computerized office that when Bruno the Chef came back and said, "They say they don't know how to make tomato clam chowder up here,

Don Carmine simply shrugged and said, "Screw it. We'll go out to eat. Maybe we'll take over one of these joints. Make 'em do chowder right and join the fuggin' human race for a change. "

"Why don't I stay here?" said Tony quickly.

Carmine paused, his expression becoming suspicious. "Why you wanna do that?"

"Somebody should stay here to answer the phone," said Tony, who knew that Don Fiavorante was sure to call back about his nonnegotiable check.

"Good thinkin. You stay by the phone. We'll get you a doggy bag if you promise not to go on the fuggin' rug while we're out," Carmine said, laughing.

When Don Fiavorante did call minutes later, Tony Tollini was profuse in his apologies.

"I'm sorry, Uncle Fiavorante," he explained. "Don Carmine hasn't mastered the modern office system yet. I'll drive the check down tonight, okay?"

"You are a good boy, Tony. I trust you. Why don't you send it Federal Express?" Don Fiavorante's voice sank to an unctuous growl. "But if I don't have my rent money by ten-thirty sharp tomorrow morning, it will not be a good thing, capisce?"

"Capisce," said Tony Tollini, who called Federal Express the minute he got off the phone with his uncle.

In the weeks that followed Tony Tollini almost forgot he was in league with the Mafia.

Business hummed. Carmine Imbruglia hummed.

From the Salem Street Social Club, the bettor slips came in by fax. Tony logged them onto the PC system. Any incidental paper was destroyed once it had served its purpose or the information was entered into the LANSCII program.

There were a few incidents, to be sure, such as the time an odds list immolated itself while passing through the fax.

"What's with this fuggin' fax?" demanded Don Carmine. "It's trying to sabotage me."

"It's the paper," complained Tony. "I told you, you don't need to use flash paper anymore. Its outdated."

"What if the feds bust in?"

"You just erase the computer records."

Don Carmine squinted at the glowing amber lines on the PC screen.

"How do you erase light?"

"By typing star-asterisk-star. It wipes the hard disk clean."

"Star-asterisk-star," muttered Don Carmine, making a mental note to look up the spelling of asterisk. "Got it. Can I get it back afterward?"

"Maybe. Unlikely."

Carmine shrugged. "What the hell, it's better than twenty-five to thirty in the pen," he said philosophically. "We're making money hand over fist, although we're barely making rent. "

"You should think about expanding," said Tony, who, although he was still working off his debt to Don Carmine at thirty-six percent interest, felt a flush of pride in his work.

"Whatchu mean?"

"You need larger quarters. And you should think about incorporating. "

"You mean, go legit?"

"Not that exactly. But create a corporate shield around yourself. "

Don Carmine waved to his ever-present bodyguards, Pink Eye Scanga and Vinnie the Maggot.

"I got all the shield I need right here. Ain't that right, boys?"

"Whatever you say, boss."

"You know," Carmine said slowly, "I hear there's fast money in heroin up here. Maybe we should get into that."

"I thought the Mafia-"

"Hey! We don't use that word around here," Carmine snapped. "There's no such thing as the Mafia. This is just Our Thing. Got that?"

"Got it," said Tony Tollini. "I thought the, you know, didn't get involved in drug trafficking."

"What joik told you that?"

"My Uncle Fiavorante," said Tony truthfully.

"He was pullin' your fuggin' leg. If there's a dishonest buck in it, we do it. Now, how do we move drugs without it gettin' back to us?"

Tony Tollini considered this business problem seriously. "You could Fedex them, I suppose."

"Fedex? Is that like faxin'?"

"Not exactly. It's slower. Takes a day or two."

Don Carmine nodded sagely. "That makes sense. It's one thing to send paper through the telephone. Sending drugs is harder. We should start with cocaine, though."

"Why is that?" Tony wondered.

"What are you, retarded or somethin'?" Carmine jerked a nubby thumb at Tony Tollini. "Listen to this guy. He's askin' why we should start Fedexin' coke and not smack."

Don Carmine's underlings laughed on cue.

"You dink," said Don Carmine, lifting the fax receiver and holding it up to Tony Tollini's suddenly white face. "Cocaine is powder. Like salt. It's the best thing for sending through the little holes," said Carmine, stabbing at the receiver mouthpiece with a blunt finger.

"That's not how Fedexing works," said Tony woodenly.

Don Carmine looked at the phone receiver.

"You know," he said slowly, "I'm thinkin' maybe we should try Fedexin' salt first. You know, in case we dial a wrong number. It could be embarrassin', not to mention expensive. Coke ain't cheap."

There were no dissenting opinions to this observation. Tony bit his tongue.

The next day, Vinnie the Maggot showed up with a suitcase filled with cocaine in one-ounce plastic bags. The case was opened under Tony Tollini's eager eyes.

"Where did this come from?" Tony wondered.

"Got it off a guy," said the Maggot casually.

"Just like that?"

"Well, I had to shoot him first, of course."

"Oh."

"Okay," said Don Carmine briskly. " I got a customer to send it to. Get to Fedexin'."

Tony Tollini looked at the small lake of pure white coke under his nose.

"Maybe someone should sample it," he suggested eagerly.

"Good idea. We mighta got took. You wanna do the honors?"

"Gladly," said Tony Tollini.

He popped a bag and sifted a small pile of white powder onto the table. Unscrewing his solid silver ball-point pen, he emptied it of its ink reservoir and used the hollow lower end to inhale a line.

"Whew! Great!" said Tony, his eyes acquiring a shine.

"Good stuff?" asked Don Carmine gruffly.

"The best," said Tony, grinning.

"Great. You now owe me three hundred little ones."

The shine went out like a wet match. "Three hundred!"

"Street price. What-you think I'd give you a free hit? Hah, I don't give nothin' free out of the goodness of my own heart. Is that pen silver?"

"Yeah," said Tony unhappily.

Don Carmine snapped his fingers twice. "Give it here. My price just went up. Three hundred and a silver pen. Nice doin' business with you, joik. Now, get the phone number from Pink Eye and Fedex an ounce to the guy what lives there. "

" I need the address too."

"Makes sense," said Don Carmine. "You gonna move somethin' heavy like coke you need the address too. It's only reasonable."

Tony picked up the fax receiver.

Don Carmine watched him carefully. If he had to whack out this guy, he would want to know exactly how to Fedex coke.

To Don Carmine's surprise, Tony Tollini simply dialed a number, spoke briefly, and then hung up.

"It's all set," Tony said, turning to Don Carmine.

"Whatchu mean, it's all set? You never moved the coke. It's still fuggin' in the case there!"

"They pick it up."

Don Carmine pushed out a thick lower lip. "Who does?"

"The Fedex people."

"Oh. Oh. This I gotta see. What's their cut?"

"They usually charge about twenty dollars a delivery."

"Fine. It comes outta your end.

"Why?"

"On account of you didn't tell me first," Don Carmine snarled. "You wanna spend my money, you tell me first. The double sawbuck comes outta you. Consider it an object lesson. A cheap one."

Less than a half-hour later there came a knock at the door.

"I'll get it," said Bruno the Chef casually.

"Wait a minute, wait a minute," Don Carmine said with hushed urgency. "Everybody wait one fuggin' minute here. I smell a rat."

"What?" asked Bruno, dropping into a crouch.

"Check out the window. Look past the curtain. What d'you see? Tell me what you see."

Bruno stopped dead in his tracks and scrunched down. He looked over the green chintz curtain that blocked off the lower part of the storefront windows.

"I see a van," Bruno said, eyeing the street.

"Right. What's on the side of the van?"

"Words. I can make one out. Says 'Federal.' Wait a minute! 'Federal'!"

"That's just-" Tony Tollini started to say.

"The feds!" hissed Carmine Imbruglia. "You. Maggot. Toss me your piece."

A .38 revolver went sailing into Carmine Imbruglia's meaty hand.

"Cover me. I'll show those feds not to mess with the Kingpin of Boston."

"No, wait," Tony tried to say, waving his hands frantically.

"Shut him up," Carmine barked.

A hand went smack against Tony Tollini's face and he crumpled in a corner.

Carmine Imbruglia stepped up to the door, placed the stubby muzzle of the .38 to the wood panel, and fired twice.

The wood splintered in a long vertical line. Gunsmoke tang overwhelmed the close, garlic-scented air.

Triumphantly Don Carmine Imbruglia threw open the door.

"Get a load of this," he said in disbelief. "He's wearin' a uniform." Don Carmine craned his thick neck up and down the narrow street. "I don't see no backup. Musta come alone. Hey, check this out!"

His bodyguards in tow, Don Carmine Imbruglia ambled over to the white van that was marked "FEDERAL EXPRESS."

"Look at this!" he muttered. "It says 'Federal' plain as day on the side. Some nerve these feds got. They even advertise. "

"I never saw nothin' so stupid in all my life," clucked Pauli (Pink Eye) Scanga.

"Hey, what the fug, right? It's the nineties. We use computertry and the feds advertise. It's a whole new fuggin' ballgame."

Everyone had a good laugh, except the Federal Express deliveryman, who moaned and rolled on the sidewalk, clutching his stomach as the blood pumped out of two bullet holes near his navel.

"Drag the sumbitch inside," ordered Don Carmine. "We gotta lam outta here."

When Tony Tollini was revived by the simple expedient of having his head thrust into the cold water of the Salem Street Social Club toilet, he sputtered, "What happened?"

"We gotta lam," said Don Carmine. "I clipped a fed. Soon the whole place will be swarmin' with them."

"That wasn't-"

"Don't tell me. The fuggers got 'Federal' written all over their van. We busted in and found this."

Don Carmine shook a black electronic device in one thick paw. Tony recognized it as a Federal Express package-tracking computer.

"This was the bug he was tryin' to plant," explained Don Carmine. "Some balls, huh? Walked right up to the door to do it, too. "

"But-"

Don Carmine suddenly looked up. A smile lit up his brutish face.

"Hey, I just realized somethin'!"

"What is it, boss?" asked Bruno.

"I just made my bones. With a fed, too. Ain't that somethin'?"

"Congratulations, boss," said Pink Eye.

"You done great," added the Maggot.

"I feel like celebratin'. Let's get this junk outta here. We'll find a new place later. Tonight is our night to fuggin' howl."

Chapter 19

"I cannot fathom it," said Dr. Aldace Gerling as he examined Remo's new face with practiced fingers. "There is minimal scarring, virtually no sign of a recent operation." He turned to Harold Smith. "Yet you gave me to understand that this patient underwent extensive facial reconstruction only two weeks ago."

Harold Smith thought fast. He said, "That was what I understood. Obviously there has been some mistake."

"There has been an abomination," spat Chiun in disgust.

"Oh, I don't know about that," said Remo airily. "I kinda like it."

"Bah!" said Chiun.

Dr. Smith turned to his chief staff physician.

"Dr. Gerling, could you excuse us? Obviously your services are no longer needed."

"As you wish."

Dr. Gerling withdrew from the room. Smith closed the door after him. He faced Remo.

"I do not know what to say," he said, tightening the knot in his tie, which threatened his skinny Adam's apple.

Remo, rubbing his jaw and regarding his new face in the upright mirror, said, "Guess the joke's on you, Smitty."

"This of course cannot be allowed to stand."

Remo's new face hardened. It hurt as the muscles realigned the face, but he didn't care. "Smith, it stands."

The Master of Sinanju drew Harold Smith off to one side.

"Emperor, how is this possible?"

"There is only one explanation," Smith said tiredly. "As you know, Remo underwent several of these procedures in the past, each one intended to make him unrecognizable.

Previous to this surgery, and at Remo's insistence, we restored certain of his natural facial contours. Just enough to satisfy him."

"I can hear every word you two are saying," Remo reminded them with no trace of rancor. He was looking at his chin, and liking what he saw.

"Obviously Dr. Axeworthy inadvertently restored the remaining components of the original face," Smith continued. "It makes sense. Remo's facial contours had been reduced over successive surgeries, to their absolute foundation. Dr. Axeworthy must have realized that and gone in the only direction the procedure could go. Building up. He simply restored the final pieces of the true Remo.

"Damn good job of it too," Remo said proudly. "It's the old me. A little more mature maybe, but I can live with that. Maybe I'll start using my old last name too."

"You will not," Smith snapped. "And you know this is a serious matter."

Remo turned to Harold Smith. His face was serious but there was a humorous light in his deep-set dark eyes. He was enjoying Smith's consternation.

"Hey," he pointed out, "you wanted this, not me. You wanted the face that I had wiped out. You got it. And now you got this. It's been twenty years since I walked a beat. I have no family, and all my so-called friends from those days have probably forgotten me. They think I died in the electric chair anyway. I still look younger than I would have if I hadn't been dragooned into the organization. So you're covered and I get to keep my true face." Remo smiled. It was his old smile. "I'd say it worked out."

Smith stood fuming, saying nothing.

The Master of Sinanju, his hands in the sleeves of his pale ivory kimono, drew close to Remo. His aged head tilted one way, then the other, as he examined Remo's face critically.

"Ah," he said.

"Ah, what?" Remo asked suspiciously.

"The doctor did not fail entirely."

Remo blinked. "What do you mean?"

"Nothing," Chiun said innocently, abruptly turning away.

Remo blinked again. Suddenly he turned to the mirror. He looked at his eyes. They were set deep in his skull, above the pronounced cheekbones that had dominated his face since puberty. A familiar face. Good, strong, handsome, without being pretty.

The trouble was, the eyes were in shadow.

Remo pressed his nose to the glass.

It can't be, he was thinking.

He lifted his chin, bringing his eyes into the light. The trouble was, he couldn't look at his own eyes squarely.

Did they look slightly . . . oblique?

"Smith, come here a sec," Remo called.

Smith came up as Remo turned around.

"Look at my eyes," Remo said anxiously. "How do they look?"

"Brown," said Smith, who lacked imagination.

"Forget color. I mean the shape."

"What do you mean?"

"They don't look . . . ?" Remo swallowed, glancing in the direction of Chiun, who was making a show of sniffing a vase of peonies on a bedstand. "They don't look . . . slanty, do they?"

Smith frowned as he peered more closely at Remo's eyes.

"Tilt your face up. Now down. Sideways."

"Come on, Smith. Stop fooling around."

"I am sorry, Remo, but your brows are casting shadows. It is difficult to see clearly.

"What's so freaking hard about telling if I have Korean eyes or not!" Remo shouted.

"Can't you tell?" returned Smith.

"No," Remo said, frowning. He called over to the Master of Sinanju. "What about it, Chiun? What did you make that doctor do?"

"Nothing," Chiun said. "He did nothing. He has restored you to your former sad, round-eyed state." The Master of Sinanju sounded unconcerned.

"Are you playing head games with me? Because if you are-"

"The games that have been played are with your face, round-eyed one," said Chiun unconcernedly. He hummed. It was a happy hum. It was the hum of a person who had secured a minor victory in the midst of a defeat.

"I want that plastic surgeon back," Remo said. "I want my eyes rounded off!"

"I am afraid he is dead," Smith said tonelessly.

"What did he die of, anyway?"

"A round eye killed him," said Chiun. "Heh-heh. A round eye killed him."

"Shhh," said Smith suddenly.

"Are you in on this too, Smith?" Remo demanded hotly.

"No!"

"Then what is he talking about?"

"Please, please," Smith said. "I need you both. We have a crisis on our hands."

"What crisis?" Remo wanted to know.

"Have you forgotten the IDC matter, Remo?"

"Oh, right," said Remo, subsiding.

"You were correct, Remo. IDC and the Mafia are in cahoots somehow. After you went under the knife, Chiun rescued the hard disk."

"It was nothing. Any non-round-eyed person could have done it," Chiun said loftily.

"Har-de-har-har," snorted Remo.

"It seems that IDC has created a software specifically designed for Mafia purposes."

Remo shrugged. "So, we take it off the market."

Harold Smith shook his gray head. "Not so simple. We still do not know how this has come to pass. That will be your job, Remo. Penetrate IDC and learn the truth. Then we will take action."

"No problem. I have a new face. I'll just reapply to Tony Tollini. He'll never suspect it's me again."

"Tony Tollini has been missing for the past two weeks," Harold Smith said levelly. "As is a large amount of IDC office equipment, including faxes, dedicated phones, and other high-tech office material."

"Well, we know where to find them."

"No longer," said Smith. "The Salem Street Social Club has been vacated completely. The Boston Mafia has gone underground. We have no leads at present. It's as if it had ceased to operate."

"Maybe they had a power surge and their disk crashed again."

"Criminal activity in Boston has actually increased. We think they're up there. Somewhere. Maybe a lead can be developed at IDC."

"I'll give it a shot," said Remo, again looking at his face.

"These eyes are fine," he said doubtfully, as if trying to convince himself.

"I agree," said Chiun, sniffing a peony as if it were the most beautiful flower in creation.

Which caused Remo's eyes to fly back to the mirror. They were wide and round as they looked back at him. He realized that fright was making them that way. He squeezed his eyelids tight. Suddenly they looked definitely oblique.

Remo spent the next ten minutes trying to work his eyes into a natural shape, neither too round nor too narrow.

His face began to hurt again.

Chapter 20

Wendy Wilkerson was living in fear.

To be more precise, she was working in fear.

Ever since the disappearance of Vice-President in Charge of Systems Outreach Antony Tollini she had wondered if she would be next. She took the week following Tony Tollini's disappearance off.

No one had complained, which was not surprising. As director of product placement, she was even less important than the VP in charge of systems outreach-a position so new that no one at IDC knew what the person holding the job was supposed to do.

Since no one knew what Tony Tollini was supposed to be doing for Bold Blue, he had not yet been missed either.

After a week and a half, Wendy Wilkerson decided it was safe to return to work. She needed her check.

It was strange, thought Wendy, lunching on a peeled apple and plain yogurt in the relative security of her dimly lit office, how the higher-ups seemed oblivious to the entire mad mess.

She could understand how Tony's absence could go virtually unnoticed, his biweekly salary checks piling up on his secretary's desk. This was the south wing, where upper management never ventured.

But why, after two fruitless police visits, had the absence of the missing programmers and customer-service engineers not been questioned? It was as if as long as the bottom line remained relatively constant, the board of directors didn't care.

Wendy shivered inside her immaculately tailored business suit, wondering if Tony were alive or dead. She was sure he was dead. There was no other explanation for why they hadn't come for her too. Tony was a corporate weasel. He would have handed her up to the Mafia to save his own skin in no time flat.

As she pared a wedge out of a Granny Smith apple, there came a timid knock at her inner office door.

"Yes?" said Wendy.

"Miss Wilkerson, there is a man here who would like to speak with you."

"About what?" Wendy asked, her heart stopping. It was Tony's personal secretary.

"About . . . about Mr. Tollini."

The precise wedge of Granny Smith apple poised on the point of being swallowed, Wendy's mouth was suddenly dry. She tried to swallow the apple, her mind racing.

They were here!

Just as the apple wedge went sliding down her slippery esophagus, Wendy's throat constricted. The apple wedge wandered off-course, producing a sputtering paroxysm of coughing.

Wendy began hacking.

"Miss Wilkerson! Miss Wilkerson! Are you all right in there?" demanded the secretary.

"What's going on?" a hard male voice demanded.

"I think she's choking," cried the secretary, rattling the doorknob, which Wendy had taken the precaution of locking.

The door exploded inward, propelled by a cruel-faced man with dark recessed eyes and wearing an expensive silk suit.

His hard face tight and grim, he came toward Wendy with such ferocity of purpose that she tried to scamper into the safety of the desk well.

A hand got the shoulder of her tailored business outfit and pulled her back into her seat.

Wendy would have pleaded for her life, but she couldn't get anything past her spasming windpipe.

She wondered for a wild minute what would kill her first, the blocked airway or the terrible Mafia executioner who had come to rub her out.

With undeniable strength, the man lifted her up onto the desk and laid her across the blue blotter, upsetting her yogurt. He pulled her head straight back by her red-gold hair while his other hand reached for her midriff.

She closed her eyes, hoping the apple would kill her before she was violated. After she was dead, he could do anything he wanted. Just please, not before.

The sound was like a gentle slap. But it made Wendy's abdomen convulse so hard she saw stars. All the air spewed out of her lungs.

The apple wedge jumped from her yawning mouth and came down to splatter on her forehead.

"Okay," said the Mafia enforcer. "You can sit up now."

Wendy declined. The fact that she could breathe again only meant she was going to suffer at the mafioso's hands.

"I said, you can get up now."

"Perhaps she needs a drink of water," suggested the secretary helplessly.

"Go get some," said the Mafia enforcer, his voice less harsh now.

Wendy opened her green eyes. The face that looked down at her had the deep-set eyes of a skull. They were flat and dead, with no trace of warmth.

"What are you going to do to me?" she asked.

"Ask you some questions."

Wendy sat up. His voice was direct but nonthreatening. "Who are you?" she asked.

"Call me Remo."

Wendy leaned back again, shutting her eyes. Remo. Her worst fears were true. She shuddered.

A firm hand forced her upward again. Hard-as-punch-press fingers pried one of her eyes open.

"Why are you acting this way?" asked the killer called Remo.

"Because I don't know what else to do," replied Wendy truthfully.

High heels clicked near. "Here's your water."

The one called Remo accepted the water from the secretary and brought it up to Wendy's lips. Wendy took the paper cup in her hands and greedily gobbled down the cold spring water. It had never tasted so good, she decided.

"Will you leave us alone now, please?" said the man who called himself Remo.

"Of course."

"No!" said Wendy.

"Yes," said Remo.

The secretary hesitated. Remo plucked a yellow pencil from a Lucite holder and jammed it into an electric pencil sharpener. The motor whined. The pencil disappeared into the orifice. Complete.

As he reached for another, Remo said casually, "When I run out of pencils, I might start thinking about using fingers."

The secretary hid her hands behind her back and raced for the door, which she drew quietly closed.

Remo turned to Wendy and said, "Guess no one told her they make the pencil holes too small for fingers." He smiled. No lights of humor lit his flat deadly eyes, Wendy saw.

"Heimlich?" Wendy asked, touching her throat. Her esophagus felt like a balloon that had been stretched too tight.

"Call it what you want. I hear you were tight with Tony Tollini. "

"We were in the same boat together, if that's what you mean."

"Same boat?"

Remo eased Wendy off the desk and into her chair. She looked up at him. He looked exactly like she pictured the real Frank Nitti would look. She wondered if he was an enforcer.

She decided not to ask. No point in setting him off.

"We're both IDC orphans," she said.

The man's eyebrows drew together in perplexity. He winced as if the act of thinking hurt. Definitely an enforcer, she decided.

"This is the south wing, where they dump us," Wendy added.

The man looked around. "Nice office."

"Sure, if you like sixty-watt bulbs and eating from a brown paper bag instead of the subsidized company cafeteria."

"Tsk-tsk. How terrible. But enough of your problems. I want to know everything there is to know about Tony Tollini. "

"He's missing."

"I know."

"The Mafia got him."

"I know that too. But what I don't know is why."

Wendy frowned. "You don't know why?"

"Would I be wasting my breath if I did?" asked the man, shooting his cuffs absently. She noticed his shirt sleeves were too long for his jacket. Typical hood. All he needed was a snap-brim fedora.

"Aren't you from Boston?" she asked.

"Hardly."

"New York, then?"

"I sorta kick around, actually."

Wendy's frown deepened. Maybe he wasn't a typical hood after all.

She decided to take a chance.

"Are you from the board?" she asked.

"No, but I'm getting bored. And I want some answers or I'll try to replace that wedge of apple with another." He hefted the chewed Granny Smith in one hand menacingly.

Normally Wendy Wilkerson would not be frightened by a mere apple, but inasmuch as she had nearly succumbed to a piece of one, she found herself suitably intimidated.

"Why don't I start at the beginning?" she said quickly.

"Go," said the man, taking a ferocious bite from the apple.

Wendy took a deep breath and plunged in. "They transferred me here from accounting. I had misplaced a decimal."

The man stopped chewing. "Aren't they kinda common? Like paper clips."

"In an electronic ledger," Wendy explained. "It meant our bottom line was worse than had been thought. They . . " She hesitated. Her voice sank to a whisper. "They actually had to terminate some people to cover the shortfall in projected revenue."

"You mean lay off?"

"Shhh! Don't say that word around here!"

"Why not?"

"International Data Corporation never-repeat, never-lays off employees," Wendy explained. "They may terminate for cause, attrit positions, or deploy into the out-of-IDC work force, but we do not lay people off. In so many words."

"If you've been tossed out on the street," asked Remo, "what's the difference?"

"Ask Tony Tollini-if he's still alive."

"Meaning?"

"The week after I got promoted to director of product placement, Tony was promoted to VP of systems outreach."

Wendy Wilkerson looked away as if ashamed. She swallowed hard while trying to compose herself.

"Yeah?" Remo prompted.

"He was promoted because as director of sales he had had to let some staff go. Unfortunately, he used the L word."

"L?"

"Lay," said Wendy, "off." She said it as if enunciating two disconnected words not having any remote coincidence in nature or commerce.

"He used that word in public," she went on, "in a press release. When the board heard about it, they promoted him to the south wing so fast he was still in shock when they were moving his personal effects in."

"Time out. You say he screwed up, but then they promoted him?"

"At IDC," said Wendy, "if you screw up, one of two things happens. You get shipped out of Mamaroneck, never to be heard of again, completely derailed from the fast track. Or they promote you to the south wing, which is like a second chance."

"Other than the weak light, how bad can it be?"

Wendy sighed, giving her red hair a toss. "It's hell. First, they give you a title that has no meaning and no concrete job description. Then they ignore you, all the while expecting you to produce for the firm. If you don't, it's like being buried alive, fast-track-wise."

"But you get paid, right?"

"There's more to life than money, I'll have you know," Wendy said tartly. "I lost my secured parking spot and my secretary. I have no perks. The other wings pretend I don't even exist. And worst of all, I've been director of product placement for almost six months and I have no idea what I should be doing. What is product placement, anyway? Do you know?"

Remo frowned. "Isn't it where they sneak things like billboards and soda cans into movies? Kinda like hidden advertising. "

Wendy Wilkerson's green eyes went as wide as if they had detonated. She grabbed Remo's arms in shock.

"You know! I mean, are you sure? Where can I verify this? Oh, my God. In six horrible months you're the first person who has had so much as a clue."

Remo shook off the grasping claws and said, "Let's stick with the subject. Okay, you've been exiled to the dipshit wing of IDC. Where does the Mafia come into this?"

Wendy Wilkerson folded her arms under her breasts, hugging herself. "Tony was made VP of systems outreach. You should have seen him that first week, with a stack of dictionaries, trying to figure out his job description. Finally he gave up. He decided to make things happen, hoping something would click."

"And?"

"Nothing did. At first. We were having lunch one day in his office, just commiserating. You know?"

"Sure. I commiserate all the time. Keeps me from nodding off."

Wendy nodded understandingly. Remo rolled his eyes.

Wendy went on. "The firm had been taking a beating. They announced a new policy. Market-driven. It was revolutionary. Unprecedented. Before this, IDC created systems and then tailored them to customer needs. But the market was too soft to go on that way. The board decided that the customer should dictate his own needs and IDC should try to fill them. Amazing, huh?"

"Isn't that just another way of saying the customer is always right?" Remo asked.

Wendy blinked. "I hadn't thought of that. Maybe it wasn't so revolutionary, after all."

"Guess not," Remo said dryly.

"Anyway," Wendy continued, "Tony and I were discussing the impact this would have on us. I had been watching the Geraldo show that morning. He had on these horrid people from the witness-protection program. Former hitmen and informers. They all wore silly hats and wigs and fake beards."

"Sounds like every other episode," Remo remarked.

"Geraldo asked one if he wasn't afraid of the Mafia catching up to him one day, and the man laughed, you know. He scoffed at the idea. I still remember what he said. He said, 'The Mafia can't do nothing to me. They're still back in the fifties. They got no computers. They cant run license plates. They can't even file their taxes by electronic mail.' The man was very smug about it."

"You don't mean-"

Wendy's green eyes grew reflective as bicycle flashers. "As a joke, I repeated this to Tony. I said the Mafia is a hundred billion-dollar-a-year organization. They need computers. They need faxes. They need word processing. It was a joke, you know? I was just trying to break up the monotony of our corporate exile."

"Don't tell me-"

Wendy nodded. "Tony didn't think it was a joke at all. He immediately saw the possibilities. And he had this uncle, whom he barely knew.

"Uncle?"

"Uncle Fiavorante. He was big in California. Now he's in New York, running things down there."

"Not Don Fiavorante Pubescio?" said Remo, jaw dropping.

"I think that's the name."

"Let me get this straight. The Mafia didn't come to IDC. IDC went to the Mafia?"

"Shhh," said Wendy. "Not so loud. The board still doesn't know. "

"They don't?"

"They always ignore the south wing until it generates revenue or screws up completely. Tony went to his uncle, got an agreement to participate in a pilot program, and the uncle picked Boston as they first city to try out the program."

"LANSCII?"

"That's right." Wendy frowned in surprise. "How did you know? It's supposed to be a trade secret."

"Word is getting out," Remo said dryly.

"Tony had the programmers come up with a super-userfriendly software. It was kind of a joke. Easier to use than VMS. They named it after Meyer Lansky, the old-time mob financial genius."

Remo snapped his fingers. "I knew I'd heard the name before."

"Everything was going fine until the Boston hard disk crashed. It took all their bookkeeping records. Can you imagine those people? Not making backup copies? What could they have been thinking of?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Remo airily. "Maybe they didn't see it as data."

Wendy frowned. "What else would it be?"

"Evidence. "

Slow realization made Wendy Wilkerson's features go slack.

"Oh. That's right. They would see it that way, wouldn't they?"

"Up in Boston, you get hard time for possession of backup copies," Remo said.

"No need to get smart. This is serious."

"This is loony tunes," Remo snapped. "Let me see if I can piece the rest together. When the disk crashed, Tollini sent people to fix the disk. Only it wouldn't fix. And they never came back. How did he keep all those missing people from attracting too much attention?"

"He only sent south wing CE's. When they started to balk, he hired fresh faces off the street, and then shredded their resumes and denied they had ever shown up in the first place. What were the police to do? This is IDC."

"Their jobs, for one thing."

"Oh, I know it sounds horrible," Wendy said quickly.

"It is horrible. People have died."

Wendy threw up her hands. "I know. But what could we do? Tony hoped to get it straightened out, and then he was going to take the pilot program to the board. A foothold in a billion-dollar-a-year business enterprise. They would have made him a board member for sure."

"You don't mean to tell me the IDC board would have signed on to servicing the Mafia?" Remo asked.

"Why not? They're an untapped market and we're marketdriven. Besides, we have a saying here. IDC can do no wrong. Corporately speaking, of course."

"One last question and I'll leave you to the horrors of sixtywatts bulbs and brown-bagging it."

"You mean you're not going to rub me out?" Wendy said in surprise.

"Maybe next visit," Remo said dryly. "Any idea where this Boston outfit is now?"

"No. And I'd rather not know."

"Spoken like a true corporate tool."

"You probably consider that an insult, right?"

Chapter 21

Harold Smith sat in stunned silence as Remo Williams finished his account of Wendy Wilkerson's story.

Remo lounged on a long couch by the Folcroft office door, which was closed. Chiun stood off to one side, coolly ignoring his pupil.

"IDC actually approached the Mafia?" Smith blurted when he finally found his tongue.

"That's what she told me," Remo said. "I'd say that's reason enough to shut them down for good."

Smith shook his gray head. "No. Not IDC. They're too big. Besides, this is a clearly rogue operation. The board appears not to be involved."

"From what I heard," Remo said dryly, "the board doesn't exactly go out of its way to police their own backyard."

"We must locate the current Boston Mafia headquarters," Smith decided.

"What's the big deal? You've got your handy computer. Get on it."

"It is not possible, I am afraid. If I had a phone number, I could enter their system. But we have no idea where they are. And believe me, I have been searching. Wherever they are headquartered, it is not an obvious place."

"Okay. Then Chiun and I will go to Boston and start turning the town upside down. We fish out a few wise guys, shake them up, and get them to lead us to the main nest.

Smith fingered his immaculately shaven chin in thought. Behind the transparent lenses of his rimless glasses, his weak gray eyes were reflective.

"If we go in and destroy them, even to the last man, that would not be enough," Smith said.

"Of course it would," snorted Remo.

"Silence, round eyes," snapped Chiun, addressing Remo for the first time. "Of course it would not be enough."

"Oh, yeah?" Remo growled turning. "Since when are you against solving a problem by laying waste to an enemy?"

"When my emperor gleans a better way," Chiun retorted. "Tell the round eyes, Emperor. Bestow upon him the virtue of your brilliant sunlight."

"Oh, brother," Remo groaned.

Smith said, "From what you tell me, Remo, this is being sanctioned and directed by Don Fiavorante Pubescio, out of New York City. If we simply annihilate the Boston Mafia, Don Fiavorante will move the LANSCII pilot program elsewhere or rebuild in Massachusetts." Smith made a thoughtful face. "No, we must first so discredit the LANSCII system in Pubescio's eyes that he abandons it completely. Then we can swoop down on the Boston mob."

"I vote first a preemptive sweep," said Remo.

"I vote against," said Chiun.

"What's eating you anyway, Chiun?" Remo demanded.

"You never called me."

"Your freaking phone was busy! You were cooking up that plastic-surgery scheme with Smith, remember?"

"You obviously misdialed," sniffed the Master of Sinanju.

"Repeatedly?"

"Deliberately."

"Have it your way, then," Remo said disgustedly. He stood up. "By the way, Smitty, you were right. This flashy suit did the trick. Wendy thought I was a hood."

"The woman was obviously a canny judge of character," Chiun sniffed.

"You know," Remo said, lifting a silk sleeve to the light, "it's been so long since I've worn one of these, I'd forgotten what it feels like. These things are hot."

"Then remove the absurd attire," said Chiun.

"Please do not, Remo," Smith said sharply. "I am sorry, Master Chiun. But Remo's new face-"

"You mean my old face," inserted Remo, winking at Chiun. The Master of Sinanju flounced around in annoyance.

"-means that he is unrecognizable at IDC and in Boston," Smith resumed. "The suit will conceal his large wrists, making identification virtually impossible. He will need that when we begin to break into the inner circle.

"And how are you going to do that?" asked Remo, interested.

"Brilliantly," said Chiun.

"I see our campaign as having three prongs," explained Smith thoughtfully. "Infiltration. Confusion. And destruction."

"I'll take destruction," said Remo.

"Confusion is more appropriate for Remo," Chiun said quickly. "Let me have destruction, O Emperor."

Harold Smith raised a placating hand. "Please, please. We can sow confusion only if we can gain access to the LANSCII system."

"Any ideas?" Remo asked.

"Yes," Smith said. "I believe I do." He looked toward the Master of Sinanju. "And Master Chiun will be our Trojan Horse."

"That I'd like to see," Remo said.

"Of course I will be pleased to do my emperor's bidding," said Chiun, bowing formally. His slitted eyes flicked in Remo's direction. "If for no other reason than to show certain persons the true value of experience and wisdom."

"Here we go," said Remo. "I'm not old and everyone else can go on a guilt trip to Mars."

"How do you propose that I strike at these Roman thieves?" Chiun asked, straightening.

"By employing their own methods against them."

Remo and Chiun looked to Harold Smith for enlightenment.

"Beginning with extortion," said Smith.

Chapter 22

Walter Weld Hill, of the Wellesley Hills, sat at the top of a real-estate empire only slightly less shaky than thirty-seven soggy Styrofoam cups stacked one on top of the other.

For Walter Weld Hill had bought into the Massachusetts Miracle. True, he was an old-line Republican, and the previous governor had been a glowering troll of a Democrat, but business was business. And who could argue with roaring success?

As the Massachusetts state economy exploded like a hydrogen bomb detonating greed, money, and expansion in equal measures, driven by soaring real-estate values, runaway fiscal irresponsibility, and an economy fueled by the futuristic computer buildings that sprouted along Route 128 like radiation-bloated spores, Walter Weld Hill had plunged in with all twenty fingers and toes.

Hill Associates put up office parks, skyscrapers, and condos wherever there was a bare patch of dirt. Not that the lack of a patch ever got in their way. Perfectly sound skyscrapers were imploded to rubble in the middle of Boston's sprawling downtown, to be replaced with new structures whose chief advantage was that they were twice as tall and rented for five times the square footage of their predecessors.

Hill Associates had almost single-handedly plugged the gaps in the Boston skyline throughout the 1980's.

Now, early in the 1990's, Hill Associates teetered on the edge of bankruptcy in a state where employment was in double digits, the computer industry had gone west, and revenues had dried up like a tangerine in the Gobi.

From his office high in the Wachusett Building, not far from South Station, Walter Weld Hill, whose ancestors had come to the land of opportunity on the ship directly behind the Mayflower, watched, day by day, week by week, as the family fortune was sucked into the economic black hole that was the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Hill was going over bankruptcy papers when his secretary buzzed him.

"Yes?" he said tightly. It galled him to resort to the cheap dodge of bankruptcy. It was so . . . common.

"Mr. Marderosian on line two."

"Is it important?" asked Walter Weld Hill, who, while he had rebuilt Boston, did not sully his manicured hands with day-to-day building management. That was why he hired people like Marderosian to run Mattapoisett Managing. The Hills built. They did not manage. Other people managed.

"He says that it is."

"Very well," said Walter Weld Hill, depressing the linetwo button as he picked up the receiver.

"Mr. Hill, we seem to have a problem."

"Tell me about it," Hill said aridly, pinching the bridge of his nose. It helped relieve his sinus headaches, which were growing more bothersome by the week.

"I drove by the Manet Building this morning," he said, his voice odd.

"Which is that one?" asked Hill, who seldom bothered keeping a mental inventory of his properties when times were good, and could not care less now that they were not.

"The new one. Down in Ouincy."

"Oh, yes," said Hill, wincing. It was coming back to him. There had been a stretch of salt marsh along the Quincy side of the Neponset River, overlooking Boston. For a decade other builders had erected office buildings there that filled up within a week of the ribbon cutting. He had developed the last remaining plot at the tail end of the boom. But only after the other buildings had not sunk into the marshy soil, as he expected they might.

Now, three years after the ribbon cutting, not a single office suite had been rented and Hill Associates was paying a monthly maintenance fee in excess of forty thousand dollars.

Hill's voice lifted. "I don't suppose it has burnt to the ground, by chance?"

"No, Mr. Hill. But it's occupied."

Walter Weld Hill's bloodless fingers came away from his long nose. His blueblood-shot eyes narrowed in confusion.

"Occupied. When did this happen?"

"It never happened. We haven't shown the place to a potential leasee in over a year. But when I cruised by, there were lights on, people coming and going. Parking slots filled. From what I understand, this has been going on for over a week. "

"Squatters?" blurted Walter Weld Hill, to whom nothing that happened north of Rhode Island and south of New Hampshire was a surprise anymore.

"I don't know how else to explain it."

"You confronted them, of course."

"I was rebuffed, Mr. Hill. In fact, I was forcibly ejected."

"But you manage Manet!"

"That fact did not seem to carry any weight with the security staff of LCN. "

"Never heard of them."

"Neither have I. New England Telephone doesn't have a listing for them either. I checked."

"This is absurd. Have you been drinking, Marderosian? One cannot conduct business without telephones. Not even in this third-world joke of a state."

"But that's the point, Mr. Hill. NET claims they have no phone lines to the building, but I memorized a number on the reception-desk phone. It works. And they have all utilities-water, sewer, et cetera, but there is no record of any connections being made by the utility companies."

"How," asked Walter Weld Hill, "is this possible?"

"By bribery, I would assume."

"And who," went on Hill, "would have the money to bribe someone in this state?"

"LCN does, I guess."

"Give me that number," said Walter Weld Hill crisply.

When he had the number transcribed on a rag-paper notepad, Walter Weld Hill hung up and dialed the number directly. A low male voice answered on the first ring.

"LCN. We make money the old-fashioned way."

Walter Weld Hill blinked. He had heard that catch phrase before. At the moment, he could not place it, however.

"Please connect me with your most rarefied executive," he said firmly. "This is Mr. Hill of Hill Associates calling."

"Do you want our pharmaceuticals division, entertainment, loans, fencing, or waste disposal?"

"What on earth sort of firm are you running over there?"

"A successful one," said the strange voice. It sounded bored.

"I see. And who is in charge?"

"We don't use names, buddy. Company policy."

"Very well, since you seem determined to make my life difficult, please inform whoever is in charge of your rather diversified enterprise that the owner of the complex you are currently illegally inhabiting is about to call his law firm, Greenglass, Korngold, and Bluestone."

There was a pause. "Just a sec. I'll connect you with the CM."

"That is GM, you ninny." Walter Weld Hill smiled dryly as he listened to a procession of beeps and boops as the call was rerouted through the building that officially had no working telephone system. Mentioning his law firm invariably produced the desired result.

A moment later a gruff, raspy voice demanded, "Yeah. Whatcha want?"

"Er, I asked to speak with the individual in charge of LCN. "

"That's me talkin'. What's this about lawyers?"

"You are occupying my building."

"This crummy joint?"

"It is a superior structure," Walter Weld Hill said stiffly.

"If you ask me, it looks like it was made outta old sunglasses," the gruff voice snorted. "You ever see these windows? Dark. I never seen windows so dark. It's miracle we can see outta them. The only reason I took it was because it was empty and I didn't have time to evict anyone."

"Thank you for your opinion," Hill said aridly. "Whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?"

"Call me Cadillac. Everybody does."

"Quaint name. Well, Mr. Cadillac, I am afraid you have really stepped in it. Illegal occupation of a commercial dwelling is a felony in this state."

"No kiddin ?" The voice sounded surprised, like an intelligent ape discovering that a banana was peelable. "I got arrested for a felony once. They charged me with riot. I was only playin' Johnny on the Pony with a couple of guys who owed somebody a few bucks. On account of all the broken bones, the cops called it riot. Isn't that a riot?"

"I am not amused."

"Don't be. I wasn't makin' no jokes. So what's on your mind?"

"Since we seem so free with my building, I believe you owe me, in the very least, rent money."

"Rent! For this crummy place? I got news for you, bud. This place had no lights, no phones, and no water. I hadda hook em up myself. And believe me, it cost plenty. I figure you owe me for getting your joint together so good."

"Why don't we have my lawyers discuss the particulars with your lawyers, my good man?" suggested Walter Weld Hill.

"Lawyers? I ain't got no lawyers."

"Why am I not surprised?" said Walter Weld Hill with a dry-as-toast sigh.

"I guess we can't do business, can we? I mean, who are your lawyers gonna talk to if I ain't got lawyers of my own? My mailman?"

"Why don't I simply visit the premises with my lawyers?"

"How many you got?"

"I believe the firm of Greenglass, Korngold, and Bluestone is staffed by nearly a dozen trial attorneys and other functionaries."

"Greenglass, Korngold, and Bluestone!" exploded the gruff' voice. "They sound like fuggin' jewelers. You sure they're lawyers?"

"They happen to be the most eminent in the state," Hill said sourly, thinking: This man is a positive vulgarian.

"Okay, tell you what. I can see you're serious about this. Get your lawyers. Bring 'em over. All of them. Every last one. I'll get my people together and we'll do a sit-down. How's that sound?"

"Tiresome," said Walter Weld Hill, who had never before encountered a business person who did not turn to jelly at the names of Greenglass, Korngold, and Bluestone, Attorneys-at-Law. It appeared he would have to go through with it. In person.

"I shall be over within the hour," he promised.

"Great. I can hardly wait. Just ask for Cadillac. I'm the CM."

"I believe that is GM."

"Not here, it ain't. "

As Walter Weld Hill hung up, he pinched the bridge of his nose once more. This was such a comedown for the man who introduced the Palladian Arch to Boston.

Walter Weld Hill's white Lincoln arrived a fashionable seven minutes after the assorted vehicles of Greenglass, Korngold, and Bluestone had pulled into the parking area of the Manet Building, situated in the crook of a tentacular tributary of the Neponset River.

Sol Greenglass, senior partner, bustled up, his hand-tooled leather briefcase passing from hand to hand excitedly.

"We're ready, Mr. Hill," said Sol Greenglass, who, because he was not a Brahmin, was not allowed to invoke Walter Weld Hill's Christian name.

"Very well," said Walter Weld Hill, shading his eyes as he looked up at the gleaming silvery-blue mirrored-glass face of the Manet Building. He frowned. "Does this remind you of sunglasses?"

Sol Greenglass looked up. "A little. So what?"

Walter Weld Hill frowned like an undertaker. "Nothing. We had best get about this."

The other lawyers formed a train behind Walter Weld Hill as he strode toward the aluminum-framed foyer entrance.

Two paces behind, Sol Greenglass was almost literally rubbing his hands together with anticipation.

"When they see us sail in like this, en masse, they're going to positively plotz," he chortled. "I love it when they plotz."

"Yes," said Walter Weld Hill vaguely. He had no idea what "plotz" meant. It was one of those vulgar Jewish words. He took pains to remain unacquainted with them, just as he scrupulously excluded the forces of Greenglass, Korngold, and Bluestone from his social circle.

They passed into a rather garish lobby. At a curved desk a male security guard had his face buried in a racing paper. He pointedly ignored them.

The directory looked like the menu in a seedy diner, white plastic letters mounted on a tacky aquamarine board. Some of the letters were actually askew.

Walter Weld Hill read down the department listings.

There were no names. But between "Consiglieri" and "Debt Collection"-odd listings, those-was an odder listing: "Boss."

"How droll," said Walter Weld Hill, noting that the "Boss" held sway on the fifth floor.

They crowded into the spacious elevator together. It was filled with Muzak of a kind Walter Weld Hill, for all his varied social experience, had never encountered.

"My word. It sounds like opera."

"I think it's The Barber of Seville," said Sid Korngold.

"Eh?"

"Rossini," supplied Abe Bluestone.

"At least their taste is not entirely bankrupt," muttered Walter Weld Hill, wincing at his own use of a particularly painful word.

The elevator stopped, dinged, and let them off on the fifth floor.

Briefcases swinging, jaws jutting forward, the law office of Greenglass, Korngold, and Bluestone marched in lockstep behind their client as they negotiated the stainless-steel maze of corridors.

"What is that odd odor?" asked Hill, his long nose wrinkling and sniffing.

The collective noses of Greenglass, Korngold, and Bluestone began sniffing the air too. Finally a junior lawyer ventured an opinion.

"Pot," he said.

"What is that in English?" Hill asked Sol Greenglass.

"Marijuana."

"My Lord! Isn't that illegal?"

"Last I heard."

They discovered that the odor was coming from behind a section marked "PHARMACEUTICALS."

"How odd," murmured Walter Weld Hill. "One would think that physicians would not indulge in such distasteful medications. Remind me to report LCN to the AMA."

"Yes, Mr. Hill."

They passed to the end of a long white corridor from which emanated an even more disagreeable odor.

"What is that pungent smell?" asked Hill.

"Garlic. "

"Ugh," said Hill, holding his nostrils closed with finger and thumb. "Detestable."

Walter Weld Hill was still holding his nostrils against the offending ethnic odor when they came to a black door at the end of along corridor, before which two large men stood guard.

At first Walter Weld Hill mistook them for LCN lawyers because they wore pinstripes. On second glance he noticed that the stripes were rather broad even for the lax standards of the day.

And the men jammed into the suits looked rather on the order of dockworkers, Hill thought.

Sol Greenglass stepped up to one of the sentries.

"I am Mr. Greenglass of Greenglass, Korngold, and Bluestone, representing Mr. Walter Weld Hill," he announced.

One of the men stepped aside to reveal the block letters "CRIME MINISTER" on the blank white door. The other opened the door and stuck his head inside.

"Boss. Company. I think it's the lawyers."

"Great," boomed a gruff voice. "Wonderful. I love lawyers. Show 'em in. Show 'em right in."

The brute at the door signaled with the point of his jaw for them to enter.

Walter Weld Hill allowed the senior partners to precede him. It would make his own entrance all the more impressive. And he wished to get this ordeal over with as soon as possible. In all the generations of Hills, he had never heard of this happening before. Squatters in this day and age. What was the world coming to?

When Walter Weld Hill finally crossed the threshold, he found himself in a long conference room.

There were some odd appointments, such as the rather Catholic portraits on the walls, and over in one corner, a large black stove that belonged in the back of a low-class restaurant. On one wall was a sign that said:

WE MAKE MONEY THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY. WE STEAL IT.

"That's not correct," muttered Walter Weld Hill, his eyes going to the man rising at the far end of the table, just under the sign. He wore a sharkskin suit over a black shirt. His tie was white. A hopeless combination. Obviously unsophisticated.

"Come in, come in," said the man, gesturing broadly. "I'm Cadillac. Welcome to La Cosa Nostra, Incorporated."

Dead silence followed that statement. Every member of Greenglass, Korngold, and Bluestone froze in midaction.

The man in the sharkskin suit began chortling. "What?" he said. "You think I'm serious? It's a joke. I was just kiddin'. Honest. Just a little joke to break the tension. Don't be so serious all the time. Its bad for the digestion."

No one laughed, but everyone resumed normal breathing.

Sol Greenglass slammed his leather briefcase onto the conference table, saying, "Mr. Cadillac, I have here a summons to appear before the honorable judge John Joseph Markham of Dedham Superior Court."

"Hold your horses," said the man in the sharkskin suit. "Which one of yous is Hill?"

"I am Walter Weld Hill," said Walter Weld Hill disdainfullv.

The man bustled out from behind the conference table. "Glad to meetcha," he said, taking Hill's right hand and levering it like a water pump. "These your lawyers?"

"Of course," said Hill, attempting to disengage.

"Great. I never saw so many lawyers before in my life. They look like Jews. Are they Jews?"

"I believe they are. What of it?"

"Hey, I didn't mean nothin' by that. A lawyer is a lawyer, right? And Jews make great lawyers. They understand business. Know what I mean? That's good when you're having a sit-down. "

"I imagine their contribution will be profound. Are you now ready to comply with my wishes?"

The short brute of a man scrunched up his face, leaving a single eye to peep from the fleshy knot. "You gonna try to evict me?"

"No, I am absolutely going to evict you, you squatter. "

"Hey, I just happen to stand five-eleven. I'm not squat. Who you callin' squat? I resent that remark."

The man was flouncing around the room like a dancing bear, throwing up his blunt-fingered hands and gesticulating with every word. He reminded Walter Weld Hill of the maitre d' at Polcari's, an acceptable restaurant of the ethnic sort.

"Resent it all you want," he returned coldly, "but you are vacating these premises."

"Hey, don't use that language on me. I'm from fuggin' Brooklyn. You think I don't now what them words mean? You think I don't know what all these lawyers mean?"

" I am sure that you do," retorted Walter Weld Hill. He snapped his fingers. "Sol, the summons."

Sol Greenglass whipped out the legal document and presented it to the man who called himself Cadillac.

"This is a summons to appear-"

"Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you very much," said the man called Cadilliac impatiently, stuffing the summons into his suit coat. He beckoned toward Sol Greenglass. "You, come with me."

"What?"

"Here," said Cadillac, "lemme help you."

Sol Greenglass found himself being led out into the open side of the room. "The rest of yous, come on. I'm gonna show you all a little trick."

"We are not interested in your tricks," said Walter Weld Hill in his sternest voice.

"You'll be interested in this. You, stand there. The rest of yous form a line. Yeah, like that."

Under the prodding and pushing of the boss of LCN, the entire legal staff of Greenglass, Korngold, and Bluestone was made to stand along one side of the long conference table. At the far end, Walter Weld Hill stood frowning. What was the man up to? he wondered.

"Okay, okay, okay," said Cadillac. "Now, I want every one of yous to turn and face me. Humor me, okay? I like bein' humored. "

Reluctantly, grumbling, the lawyers turned.

Cadillac clapped his hands together. "Yeah. That's good. Hill, you still back there?"

Walter Weld Hill had turned as well. He stuck his head out from the twenty-deep phalanx of lawyers. "What is it?" he asked tightly.

"I told you I'm from Brooklyn, right?"

"Repeatedly. "

"Down in Brooklyn, we got a riddle that covers situations like this."

"I doubt that."

The man called Cadillac reached down under the end of the conference table. He did not take his tiny eyes off Hill.

"It goes like this," said the man, withdrawing a forty-five-caliber machine gun so old it sported a drum magazine. With both hands he shouldered the weapon level to the exposed chest of the first man in line, the junior litigator, Weederman.

Walter Weld Hill's heart skipped a beat. Then he realized he was protected by no fewer than the bodies of twelve of the finest litigators this side of Worcester.

" I am not afraid of you," he said primly.

"I ain't told you the riddle yet."

"If you must."

Cadillac beamed a smile as broad as his namesake. "It goes, 'How many lawyers does it take to stop a bullet?'" And then Cadillac cocked the old weapon.

At the sound of the charging bolt being pulled back, the sturdy phalanx that was Greenglass, Korngold, and Bluestone gave out a collective gasp and broke for every exit. They stumbled over one another in their mad rush to leave the room, in some cases stepping out of their own expensive shoes.

Suddenly Walter Weld Hill found himself staring down the maw of the Thompson submachine gun, his chest protected by nothing more substantial than his double-breasted suit.

He swallowed.

And as he swallowed, the man who called himself Cadillac growled, "The correct answer is, 'None.' 'Cause when the guns come out, the lawyers get lost. Any questions?"

"Actually, I must be going," said Walter Weld Hill, his knees shaking. "I have an appointment with bankruptcy court in less than an hour."

"Bankruptcy court? Gee. That's too fuggin' bad."

"Isn't it, though?" said Walter Weld Hill, walking backward to the open door behind him. He continued walking backward until he rounded a corner and the machine gun was no longer in view. Then he twisted around and ran for the elevator, vowing that if he survived the coming financial debacle, he would move Hill Associates lock, stock, and barrel to a more hospitable business environment.

Romania came immediately to mind.

Chapter 23

"And then I said, 'The correct fuggin' answer is none.' That's when I pulled the fuggin' tommy and stuck it in the first lawyer's kisser. You shoulda seen 'em scramble. You would have thought they was cockroaches when the lights come on."

Raucous laughter filled the corporate boardroom of LCN in Quincy, Massachusetts. The Maggot snorted. Pink Eye tittered through his sharp nose.

Don Carmine Imbruglia waved for silence and continued his story.

"That's when the stiff who owned this joint mumbles that he's late for bankruptcy court and, get this, he exits the joint backwards! Like if he turns around he's gonna pee his pants. His own joint, and he walks out of it backwards!"

The laughter returned. Don Carmine joined in it. His squat body shook with merriment until tears squeezed from his squinched-shut eyes.

It settled down only when Bruno the Chef ambled in carrying several bags of takeout food in his big paws.

"Chow's in, boss," he said good-naturedly.

"Great," said Don Carmine, rubbing his hands together. "I'm so starved I could eat an Irishman, washed or not."

Everyone laughed. Don Carmine watched as Bruno the Chef brought out the food. As it was served to him on china taken from a cupboard, Don Carmine's expression settled into the familiar lines of befuddlement it assumed when confronted with New England cuisine.

"Did I order this?"

"It's supposed to be seafood marinara. I asked for seafood marinara. With linguine."

"This ain't fuggin' linguine. It looks like egg noodles."

"Maybe it'll taste all right with the marinara sauce on it."

Don Carmine attempted a forkful. He spit it back into the plate. "Ptoo! You call this marinara sauce? There's no garlic. Only onions." He pawed through the remaining bags, extracting a cellophane package of sliced bread.

"This fuggin' looks like Wonder Bread," he complained. "I don't believe this. I can get better Italian bread down at the Cathay Pacific. This state in unbelievable. The chinks bake better bread than the wops. "

"Want me to take it back, boss?" asked Bruno the Chef.

"Later. Right now I wanna decent fuggin' meal. Go cook me somethin'. "

"Sure. What's your pleasure?"

"Clam chowder. Manhattan clam chowder. The red stuff. Fresh clams, too. And if I so much as chip a single tooth on a piece of shell, you're gonna hear about it."

"No sweat, boss," said Bruno the Chef, leaving the room to seek fresh clams.

As he was going out, Vinnie (The Maggot) Maggiotto was coming in, clutching a grayish, slick sheet of paper.

"I'm the fuggin' Kingpin of Boston and I cant get a decent meal," Don Carmine was saying. "What happened to the respect we once got? I was fuggin' born too fuggin' late, I guess." He spied the Maggot and asked, "What's that?"

"Fax from Don Fiavorante."

"Give it here," said Don Carmine. He fingered the slick paper unhappily. "You'd think a classy guy like Don Fiavorante would spring for better paper to write on," he muttered. "Stuff's always waxy."

"Maybe it gets that way coming through the phone," postulated the Maggot as Don Carmine read through the note carefully, moving his lips with every syllable.

"Listen to this," Don Carmine said suddenly. "Don Fiavorante wants to know how come our sports book is doing so well. Wait'll I tell him, huh?"

"You bet, boss," said the Maggot, producing a notepad and pencil.

Don Carmine scribbled a hasty note and said, "Fuggin' fax that. "

Obediently the Maggot walked over to a nearby fax machine and started to feed the sheet into the slot.

"Wait a minute!" Don Carmine roared. "What the fug are you doin'?"

The Maggot turned. "Like you said, boss."

"Like I said, my fuggin' ass. That's a business secret. You don't fax it open like that. The wire could get crossed and someone might hear what's written on it or something."

"Sorry, boss," said the Maggot, withdrawing the sheet sheepishly.

Don Carmine snatched it away. "You gotta watch yourself every step with this technology stuff. You guys have no conception how this works. No conception."

Don Carmine carefully folded the sheet into thirds and produced an envelope. He placed the folded note inside, sealing it with a tongue that belonged on a size-fourteen brogan, and handed it back to the waiting Maggot.

"There. Now you can fax it."

While the Maggot was studiously feeding the envelope into the fax machine, Don Carmine Imbruglia picked up the evening Patriot Ledger and turned to the sports page.

As Carmine's eyes settled on the race results, they narrowed reflexively. Then they expanded like blackened kernels of surprised popcorn.

"What the fog is this!" he howled.

"What is it, boss?" wondered the Maggot.

"Get Tony, that weasel. Haul his butt over to the Bartilucci yards. I'm gonna make him rue the fuggin' day he ever met me. "

"Gotcha, boss," said the Maggot.

Tony Tollini lived for the day when he had worked off his debt to Carmine Imbruglia.

The trouble was, that day looked further and further distant.

No matter how hard he worked, helping build LCN into a moneymaking operation, his own vig kept going up. At first it was because Don Carmine kept remembering new losses that had been logged on the stolen hard disk. Then it was for rent in the condo in which Don Carmine and his men had installed themselves.

It was the Windbreak condominium complex, on Quincy Shore Drive, barely a stone's throw from LCN headquarters. It had been deserted when they had all moved in. There were no other tenants. Tony had the impression that Don Carmine was not exactly paying rent to the owners, yet he insisted or adding a thousand dollars a week to Tony's mounting debt. And food. Don Carmine had it sent over every week. More than Tony could eat, much of it spoiled or out of code. That was four hundred a week.

"I'm never going to get out from under," moaned Tony Tollini one day as he was walking along Wollaston Beach. "I'm never going to see Mamaroneck again." Even the dimming memory of the IDC south wing made him nostalgic for his old life. He would cheerfully eat mashed-potato sandwiches from the comfort of his old desk if only he could somehow be transported back there, free of debt, free of LCN, and most of all, free of the knowledge that if he attempted to run for it, he would have not only Don Carmine after him but also his own Uncle Fiavorante.

Hands in his pockets, Tony Tollini trudged back to his condo apartment.

He got as far as the Dunkin Donut shop on the corner of Quincy Shore Drive and East Squantum Street when a long black Cadillac rolled up onto the sidewalk to cut him off.

Doors were flung open. Tony's hands came out of his pockets in surprise. Familiar chisellike fingers grabbed his elbows and threw him into the waiting trunk. The lid slammed down and the car backed off the sidewalk, jouncing, to rejoin the hum of traffic moving toward the Neponset River Bridge and Boston.

In the darkness of the trunk Tony Tollini could only moan two words over and over again: "What now?"

The first thing that Tony Tollini saw when he was hauled out of the trunk was a rusty white sign affixed to a chain-link fence. It said "BARTILUCCI CONSTRUCTION COMPANY."

They walked him around to the back of a long shedlike building of rust-scabbed corrugated sheet steel.

Don Carmine Imbruglia was waiting for him. He sat up in the cab of a piece of construction equipment that Tony had never seen before. It resembled a backhoe, except that instead of a plow, a kind of articulated steel limb ending in a blunt square chisel hung in front of the cab like a praying-mantis foreleg.

"What did I do?" asked Tony, eyes widening into half-dollars.

"Lay him out for me," ordered Don Carmine harshly.

They laid Tony Tollini on the cold concrete amid rusty discarded gears and other machinery parts, which bit into his back and spine. His face looked up into the dimming sky, which was the color of burnished cobalt. A single star peeped out like a cold accusing eye.

Machinery whined and the articulated limb jerked and jiggled until the blunt hard chisel was poised over Tony Tollini's sweating face like a single spider's fang.

Don Carmine's raspy voice called over, "Hey, Tollini. You ever heard the expression 'nibbled to death by fuggin' baby ducks'?"

Tony Tollini didn't trust his voice. He nodded furiously.

"This baby here's a nibbler. They use 'em to bust up concrete. You know how hard concrete is?"

Tony kept nodding.

"You wanna bust up concrete," Don Carmine went on, "you need brute force. This baby has it. Watch."

Machinery toiled and the nibbler's blunt implement jerked leftward. It dropped, almost touching Tony's left ear. The Maggot was holding down Tony's head so he could not move.

Then a stuttering noise like a super jackhammer filled Tony Tollini's left ear. The hard ground under his head vibrated. The lone star in the cobalt sky above vibrated too.

When the noise stopped, Tony's left ear rang.

Don Carmine Imbruglia's voice penetrated the ringing like a sword slicing through a brass gong.

"You been holding out on me, Tollini!"

"No, honest. You have all my money. What more do you want?"

"I ain't talkin' money. I'm talkin' the hard-on disk."

"Which one?"

"The one the Jap stole, what do you think? You told me you hired him right off the fuggin' street. Never saw him before. Right?"

"It's the truth, I swear!"

The nibbler jerked up. It moved right, like a mechanical claw in a grab-the-prize carnival concession.

"I'm from Brooklyn, right?" Don Carmine was screaming. "I don't know my fuggin' ass from yesterday's paper."

"You do! You do! I know you do!"

The nibbler slashed to the right.

Tony screamed and tried to avert his face.

The hard nibbler point only brushed the tip of his nose, but it felt like the cartilage had been yanked off.

The point dropped. It started hammering again, this time in Tony Tollini's right ear. He was crying now, loud and without shame. He was asking for his mother.

When the sound stopped and Tony could hear a resonant ringing in both eardrums Don Carmine was saying, "Tell me about the guy Remo. You hire him off the street too?"

"It's true!" Tony swore, blubbering. "On my mother. It's true."

"Then how come he breaks my computer and three of my best guys end up dead? That's a fuggin' coincidence, right?"

"I don't know."

"So how come the Jap is trying to con me into buyin' my own hard-on disk back?"

"I don't know what you're talking about!"

The nibbler jumped up. It moved leftward again. Tony tracked it with his eyes. The concrete on either side of his head was shattered. The only place left for it to go was his head, which suddenly felt as fragile as an eggshell.

When the point was poised over Tony's mouth, he shut it. The nibbler's engine started up. He could smell the diesel-exhaust stink.

The nibbler point retreated a few inches until it was over Tony's sternum.

Then it dropped.

The weight was like the Washington Monument on Tony Tollini's fragile chest. He couldn't breathe. But he could yell.

"I didn't do nothing! Ask Uncle Fiavorante. I didn't do nothing. On my mother, Don Carmine."

"You watch what you say about your mother, weasel," Don Carmine warned. "She is Don Fiavorante's sister. I won't have you defamin' the sister of Don Fiavorante with your fuggin cogsugger lies."

"Please. Don't kill me."

"Show him the ad, somebody," ordered Don Carmine.

A newpaper was thrust into Tony Tollini's field of vision. He blinked the blurry tears from his beady frightened eyes and scanned the crumpled page.

Smack in the middle of the racing results was a blackbordered notice. It read:

LANSCII DISK FOUND

WILL RETURN FOR PROPER REWARD CALL CHIUN 555-522-9452

"Chiun was the name the Jap gave," Don Carmine growled. He glared at Tony. "Your Jap."

"He's not my Jap," Tony moaned.

"You sent him."

"I hired him off the street, Don Carmine. Please don't nibble me to death like a baby duck."

"I own you, Tollini. If I wanna nibble you into the ground, I can. And you know why. Because I'm the fuggin' Kingpin of Boston, that's why. Now, tell me where the hard-on disk is."

" I don't know. I swear to God!"

"Okay, if that's the way you want it," said Don Carmine, jerking levers. The nibbler sank an eighth of an inch, but it made Tony Tollini's tortured sternum creak like a loose shutter in the wind.

"Had enough?"

"I swear," Tony sobbed.

The nibbler dropped again.

Now Tony could not breathe because his cracking ribs were compressing his lungs. His heart felt like it was about to burst.

He clicked his heels together and thought: There's no place like home. There's no place like home.

Abruptly the nibbler lifted. The pressure went away. When Tony opened his eyes, he could inhale again. He filled his lungs greedily.

A shadow crossed his face. He looked up. Don Carmine's brutish face was looking down at him. "Scared you, didn't I?" he said.

"Yes. Don't shoot me."

"I ain't gonna fuggin' shoot you." Don Carmine made motions with his paws. "Let him up, boys. Let him up."

Tony Tollini's head, wrists, and ankles were released, and he was hauled to his feet.

"What are you going to do to me?" he asked, his voice cracking.

"Nothin'. You're tellin' the truth. You gotta be. A weasel like you ain't man enough to be stand-up in the face of a nibbler." He swept his hands around to indicate the rusting

construction yard with its idle equipment and piles of metal. "How'd you like my latest acquisition?"

"You bought a construction company?" asked Tony, prying a rusty gear off' the back of his dirty Izod shirt.

"Naw. I just stuck a gun in the owner's face and he said it was mine. That's what I love about this state. Nothin's worth nothin' no more. So people don't put up a fuss when you take it away from them. I figure when things bounce back, I'll be in the driver's seat."

Tony found a hearty arm around his shoulders. He looked. It was Don Carmine's arm.

" I like you, Tony. Did I ever tell you I liked you?"

"No. "

"You're sharp. You got brains. You also got what we call intesticle fortitude." He shook a lecturing finger in Tony's miserable face. "This is a good thing to have."

They were walking toward the Cadillac now. Bruno the Chef opened the rear door. Carmine stepped in. Tony meekly walked around to the trunk and waited for the lid to be opened.

"G'wan," said Don Carmine. "Get in here. From now on, you ride up front with me."

Tony slid into the back seat. The others got in. The Cadillac pulled out of the construction yard.

"Something's up," said Don Carmine as they hummed south along Route One. Tony saw sights he had never seen before. A miniature golf course guarded by a twenty-foot-tall orange plastic dinosaur, strip joints with fruit names like the Golden Banana, the Green Apple, and the Pink Peach. Chinese restaurants sprouted along the roadside like deformed mock-bamboo mushrooms.

"What do you mean, boss?" asked the Chef.

"Something about this doesn't add up. Think about it."

Everyone thought. Even Tony Tollini, although thinking wasn't in his job description.

"Anything, any of yous?" asked Don Carmine.

"Nope."

"Naw. "

"I ain't got a thing," admitted the Maggot.

"Hah. That's why yous are all soldiers and I'm the kingpin. Listen up," said Don Carmine, ticking off points on his left hand with a stubby forefinger. "Tony hires this Remo character off the street. He breaks the box and whacks out Frank, Luigi, and Guido. Bing bang boom. Just like that. Dead. All three of 'em."

"Yeah?"

"What was the last thing I said before they dragged this Remo away?"

Everyone thought. The Maggot ventured an opinion.

"Scroom?"

"No, not scroom. I said, 'Get me a Jap.' Right?"

"Yeah. So?"

"You dummies. I say 'Get me a Jap' in front of this mook, Remo. He lams. I say 'Get me a Jap' to Tony here. And what happens?"

"He sends up a Jap."

"Right."

"So?" Pink Eye pointed out in a reasonable voice. "You're the Kingpin of Boston. Of course he sends up a Jap. Who wouldn't?"

"But follow my thinkin'. He wasn't any old Jap. He's a fuggin' thief. He robs me blind. Now he wants to sell me back my hard-on disk. What does that tell you?"

"Japs are crooks?"

"No. This is something new. There's someone on to us. You, Tony. This Remo. Why'd you send him?"

"I thought he would work out."

"You were wrong," Don Carmine snapped. "Why else?"

"Because he wrote that he would be the answer to my problems on his resume."

"Ba boom," crowed Don Carmine Imbruglia. "There it is. This guy's a plant. They were both plants. You were conned, Tony my friend."

"I didn't mean to be."

"It's okay. You're new at this. Someone's trying to muscle in on our operation. Okay, it happens. Now we know. They don't know that we know, but we know. That gives us the edge."

"So what are we gonna do, boss?"

"So far we're okay. They may be cops. We don't know. They may be feds. We don't know that. They may be the fuggin' KGB. We don't know that either. They don't know where we are on account of I shot that Fedex guy accidentally on purpose and we hadda relocate."

"It was a good thing we did, huh, boss?" said Bruno. "Otherwise they could find us anytime they want to."

"Damn right. It was a fate accompli. It was destiny. So now we're gonna buy back our hard-on disk and then we're gonna grab this Jap thief and whoever's with him. We're gonna grab him and we're gonna sweat him. Then we know. Once we know, we kill everybody." Don Carmine made a broad dismissive gesture. "End of fuggin' problem."

"You don't think it's that Japanese Mafia, do you?" Pink Eye wondered.

"How many times I gotta tell you? There's no Mafia. We don't use that word in my outfit."

"Not even a Japanese Mafia?"

"Okay, there's a Japanese Mafia. Everybody knows that. But no Italians. The Japs just purloined the word from us. Sure, this could be them." He snapped his fingers impatiently. "What do they call themselves? It's some Jap name. Kazoo or something."

"Yeah, Kazoo," said the Maggot, nodding. "I heard of the Kazoo. They cut their own fingers off when they screw up."

"And that's what we're gonna do to them when I get my hands on them," said Don Carmine Imbruglia fiercely. "I ain't afraid of no Kazoo. We're gonna give these robbers a call right after we eat."

"Oh, shit, boss," said the Chef.

"What?"

"I think I forgot to turn off the stove."

Chapter 24

One of the many phones arrayed around the office of Dr. Harold W. Smith began ringing at precisely 7:43 p.m.

Smith looked up from his computer. Remo looked around the room.

"Which one is it?" Remo wondered, trying to isolate the ringing.

It was the Master of Sinanju whose sharp ears picked out the correct telephone. He pointed. "That one." His smile was tight but pleased as Remo and Smith simultaneously lunged for the correct telephone.

Smith happened to be closer. He snatched up the receiver.

"Yes?"

He listened intently as Remo hovered at his elbow.

"Yes, I have your item. The price for its return is seventy-five thousand dollars. Take it or leave it."

Remo edged closer as Smith placed a hand over his free ear. "I am pleased we agree on its worth," he said brittlely. "Now, where do you wish to make the exchange?"

Smith frowned as he leaned into the earpiece.

"Yes. That is no problem. Midnight it shall be."

Smith hung up. "They want to take delivery at the Bartilucci Construction Company in Saugus, Massachusetts," he explained as he looked at a small black box attached to the base of the telephone. Every phone in the room was equipped with a similar box.

When he returned to his computer and input the telephone number the box had captured, Harold Smith pressd the Send key. He waited.

While the system hummed busily, Remo said, "That's it? All these freaking phones for a two-minute conversation?"

"Not exactly. I placed identical ads in every Massachusetts newspaper. A different phone number in each ad, a different phone for each number. It was a long shot. The Mafia prefers to conduct their phone business via pay-phone booths. But it should give us a geographical locale."

Smith waited for the automatic search localizer to read out the telephone number captured by the black box really a NYNEX Caller Identification box-and identify the locale.

"Ahh," he said. "A Massachusetts area code."

"Some breakthrough," Remo said sourly.

"The next three digits indicate the city of Quincy," Smith went on. "The northern section. Let us see if the final four digits represent a pay-phone location."

Smith frowned. "Odd. It's not a pay-phone. We may be able to trace this to a residence."

As Harold Smith's fingers flew, Remo glanced over to the Master of Sinanju. He was surreptitiously examining Remo's eyes. Remo put a hand over them and looked away. Chiun pretended to look out the two-way window.

"This is odd. This is very strange," Smith was saying.

"What is?" Remo asked, approaching Smith's terminal, his eyes curious.

"According to the phone-company data files, the number that answered the ad is not a working number.

"Is that possible?"

"If they are using pirated telephone connections, it is. It has been done before."

"So it's a dead end?"

Smith logged off. He brought up a wire-frame state map of Massachusetts and input the names "Quincy" and "Saugus."

"Hmmm. They are not remotely near one another at all. That may mean Quincy is a private residence." He looked up. "We will deal with this later. Master Chiun, I would like for you to meet these people at the place they named and give them back their hard disk."

"What of the seventy-five thousand dollars mentioned?" asked the Master of Sinanju.

"Of course, collect it if you can."

"There is no 'can' when Sinanju collects a debt," Chiun said loftily. "There is only 'must.' "

"You will of course return the money to me."

"Minus my finder's fee, of course," suggested the Master of Sinanju, his eyes twinkling.

Smith sighed. "Is ten percent acceptable?"

"Yes," said Chiun slowly. "I will allow you to retain ten percent. But only because you are my emperor. Otherwise it would be five.

Both Harold W. Smith and the Master of Sinanju glowered at Remo as he broke into gales of laughter.

Clearing his throat, Harold Smith returned to his computer. He had to finish maintaining the LANSCII hard disk before it was delivered to Saugus.

Chapter 25

It was supposed to be a simple errand, thought Nicolo "Nicky Kix" Stivaletta. Meet the Jap. Hand the Jap the payoff. Take the hard-on disk. Then whack out the Jap where he stood.

"Simple. In and out. Bing bang boom. And home in time for Hunter," as he told Vinnie (The Maggot) Maggiotto, who had earned his nickname because he'd once been arrested for the heinous crime of dumpster diving. The Maggot's hairless bullet of a head contributed to its longevity.

"What if the Jap ain't alone?" the Maggot wondered.

"Then you got somebody to clip too," said Nicky Kix, who had come by his street name because of his habit of kicking in the ribs and skulls of people after he had brought them down with a sawed-off shotgun.

"Okay, I got somebody to clip too," said the Maggot, who had often boasted to his fellow Deer Island inmates that he had clipped as many guys as he had fingers. In fact, the Maggot had never clipped anything. Including his nails. The Maggot was not renowned for his grooming skills.

The headlights of their Dodge raced ahead of them as they came off the Saugus exit of Route One, north of Boston. They threw the chain-link fence of the Bartilucci Construction Company into sharp relief as the car slid through the open gate.

"Okay," said Nicky Kix. "It's show time."

They got out.

"See anything?" Nicky asked uneasily.

"Nothing. Maybe he ain't showed yet. Maybe he ain't gonna show," the Maggot added, silently hoping he would not have to clip anyone.

Then a low, stern voice seemed to surround them.

" I am here, messengers of the dreaded boss."

"Where? Where is he?"

A figure detached itself from the shadow of the long storage building.

He stepped into the headlight beams, clad in a kimono of dull black silk, his eyes narrowing to slits, his hands unseen in the tunnels of his joined sleeves.

"Put your hands where I can see them," warned Nicky Kix, amazed that the old Jap wasn't blinded by the lights.

"Show me your ransom first," returned the old Jap.

"Okay," said Nicky. "Have it your way." He pulled a thick manila envelope from inside his jacket, fat with greenbacks.

He held them up to the lights so the edges of two twenties were visible. "All seventy-five grand," he added, keeping a straight face. There was actually less than fifty dollars in the envelope sandwiching a dollar-size sheaf of cut newsprint.

"Very well," said the Jap, bringing his hands into view.

One hand-the left-was clutching a black plastic box.

"That's it," breathed the Maggot.

" I know that's it," hissed Nicky. "Now shaddup and let me do all the talkin'. Okay," he said, lifting his voice. "Let's swap. "

The Jap advanced. As he loomed larger and larger in the light, seeming to make no sound as he moved toward them, Nicky Kix lifted the envelope with one hand and reached out with the other to accept the all-important disk.

"When I've got the disk," he hissed to the Maggot, "you shoot him. In the stomach, not the head."

"I thought the head was better," the Maggot breathed back, beads of dirty sweat popping up on his shiny forehead.

Nicky Kix was speaking through clenched teeth so it would look as if he were smiling.

"It is," he said. "If you wanna clip a guy right off. I just want him down so I can kick the shit out of him while he's squirming and bleeding."

"Okay," said the Maggot, swallowing hard.

The old Jap was now less that five feet away. Then four. Three.

He stopped with less than two feet separating him from the outstretched money envelope. The hard disk came up into the moonlight. Nicky Kix laid blunt fingers on it as longnailed fingers simultaneously snatched away the envelope.

To cover for what was about to happen, Nicky Kix said, "You don't need to count it. It's all there."

"You are Romans," said the old Jap. "I need to count it."

And to Nicky Kix's astonishment, the old Jap blatantly ignored underworld etiquette and riffled through the money.

"Now!" he hissed to the Maggot. "He's gonna catch on. Now!"

"But," said the Maggot, his eyes fear-sick, "I forgot to bring a gun."

That was all Nicky Kix needed to hear. He went for his own weapon.

It was a silenced .22 Beretta. He brought it out of a worn shoulder holster. He was going to put one in the old Jap's stomach and then kick him around the yard as Don Carmine had sanctioned.

Nicky Kix made the gun level with his belt, putting the barrel in line with the old Jap's stomach. As he began to caress the trigger, the old Jap's head came up angrily, his dark eyes flashing. He had discovered the newsprint. Too late now, you old riceball, Nicky thought savagely.

Nicky Kix pulled the trigger.

The resulting scream of terror was bloodcurdling.

A wolfish grin started to warp Nicky Kix's face. Until he realized that the scream had come not from in front of him, but to his immediate right. He looked right.

Vinnie (The Maggot) Maggiotto was doubled over on his feet, clutching his paunchy stomach. He was squirming and stamping his feet and making incomplete footprints in the blood that was dribbling down his pant legs to the ground. Then he fell over and began to kick and writhe like his hairless namesake.

Nicky Kix looked down. He saw that his .22 was pointed in a different direction than his brain had thought it was. A long-nailed hand had redirected it with such suddenness that Nicky never felt his own hand move.

Nicky Kix took a quick step backward, the .22 sliding from the light redirecting touch of the old Jap. He brought the muzzle back in line. And fired.

The old Jap twisted on one foot, the other suddenly stamping down in a different place.

Nicky knew he had missed only because his wayward bullet had struck a silvery spark at a fencepost behind the wily old Jap. He tried again.

The old Jap was quicker. He spun, feinted, and ducked.

Nicky thought he had followed every wily move. He was sure he had a solid bead when he drew back on the trigger. He felt the recoil, heard the dry pop of the cartridge separating, and was rewarded with the sound and spark of a slug ricocheting off the idle nibbler machine.

"You have what you want, cheater," intoned the old man. "Go now and I will let you live."

"Screw you," said Nicky, going for a lucky third shot.

He never got a chance to fire again.

From behind the nibbler a tall lean shape plunged.

Nicky Kix didn't stick around to figure out who this new guy was. He might be packing. And Nicky remembered that his job was first and foremost to get the hard-on disk to Don Carmine.

He jumped for the open door of his idling Dodge. Without closing it, he sent the car screeching into reverse, out the gate, and around and into traffic.

He floored the gas pedal, remembering to close the driver's side door only after he was on Route One.

Back at the Bartilucci Construction Company, Remo Williams watched the Dodge back out of the yard as if chased by a junkyard dog.

"Are you okay, Little Father?" he asked anxiously.

"Why do you ask?" said Chiun, stepping up to the squirming figure of the Maggot.

"I heard shots."

"They became excited," said Chiun, resting a sandal on the twisting head of the Maggot. "And are you not forgetting your duty? You must follow that one."

"I will, I will," Remo said impatiently. "I just wanted to be sure you were all right."

"Of course I am all right," said Chiun harshly, bringing down his foot. The Maggot made a cracking sound with his head and a kind of lamb's bleat with his last breath. A yellowish-red squirt of combined blood and brains jumped from each ear. "I am the Reigning Master of Sinanju. Not some doddering ancient."

"Okay, okay, I just wanted to be sure." Remo started off. He turned suddenly. "You'll be okay until I get back?"

"Be off, callow youth!"

Reluctance in every movement, Remo melted into the darkness.

Out on the street, Remo shook off his lack of resolve. He ran up onto the curving on-ramp and into the humming night traffic of Route One. He knew the fleeing car had to be going south, so he ran south.

Legs pumping, he seemed to float along the breakdown lane. Cars whizzed by, their headlights warming the back of his neck, practically his only exposed piece of skin.

Remo was wearing his silk suit and it was hampering every movement. Still, as he settled into a rhythm, he began to pick up speed. Soon the cars were no longer whizzing by. Remo was zipping past them. His eyes were peeled for the Dodge. He would recognize it from its plate.

A mile clicked by. Remo's hair was flying back, the wind in his face. His new face. No, strike that, he thought. His old face. His first face. He was feeling good. He was running at optimum speed and it was just a matter of trailing the thug's car to its destination.

Except for the Boston traffic, it would have worked.

Remo had gone less than three miles when he realized the occasional speeders and lane cutters were not the exception but the rule.

"They're maniacs up here," Remo growled as he was forced to enter the thick of traffic when a Porsche barreled up the breakdown lane as if it were marked off for his personal convenience.

"Screw this," Remo decided. Three cars behind the Dodge, he picked a flat-roofed yellow-and-silver MBTA bus and maneuvered behind it.

His breathing lowered to keep out noxious exhaust fumes, Remo matched the bus's lumbering speed, only a few inches behind the rear bumper.

When he knew the timing was right, he jumped.

Except for the fact that this was a highway, he might have been a kid back in Newark hitching a ride to the back of a trundling bus. Except Remo didn't stay on the bumper. He went right up the back to the roof.

Up there he stood braced on both feet, like a surfer negotiating the swells. The bus ran smoothly, and Remo had a good view of the Dodge. He grinned. This was going to be a piece of cake.

And because he was standing up in full view, he saw the Dodge take the Melrose exit simply by cutting in front of two lanes of traffic.

Over a dozen cars slammed on their brakes at the same time. Including the bus Remo was straddling.

Amid a cacophony of crumpling fenders and shattering safety glass, Remo was thrown off the bus roof as if pitched from a bucking bronco.

Normally he could have compensated for the centrifugal force of the bus's sudden change in direction. The shifting flow of air on his bare arms and his body would have triggered body reflexes before Remo became conscious of the impending shift in momentum.

But his arms were not bare. Remo, caught off-guard and lacking anything to grab hold of, lost foot contact with the bus roof and was thrown forward.

Turning in the air, he found his equilibrium and picked a ragtop to alight on. He bounced slightly and came down on the median strip.

Anxiously Remo looked for the off ramp. Maybe there was still time to catch up.

He put all thought of the slippery Dodge out of his mind when a frantic voice cried, "Help me, someone! My wife is trapped!"

Remo jumped over a sedan hood and pushed a man out of the way so he could get to the passenger side of a compact whose engine had been vomited from its shorn hood and was spilling licking gasoline-fed flames.

On the passenger side, a woman was hung up in the straps of her shoulder harness, her head down, a tributary of blood visible in the snarling orange glow washing her forehead.

Remo saw that the driver had escaped through his shattered window. The driver's door had been compacted in place. He was trying to wrench it open, sobbing and crying his wife's name.

Gently impelling him to one side, Remo stepped up to the gaping window and took hold of the jagged frame. He stepped back.

The door surrendered with a lurching groan. He set it aside and crawled in. The straps came free like cobwebs under his swift hard fingers. The woman slumped. There was no time to worry about broken bones. The flames were starting to roar.

Crawling back, Remo pulled the woman out like a dead cat. Only she was not dead. Her heart still beat.

He brought her to the side of the road and laid her there as her husband fell to his knees behind her, sobbing without words.

There were more injured, and Remo went to help them. He had no choice. He had screwed up. Not lying flat on the bus roof had spooked the mafioso. This had been the result.

An hour later, a tired Remo Williams limped back to the Bartilucci Construction Company yard.

"You failed," Chiun said after only a glance at his pupil's bedraggled clothes. His necktie was smeared with soot. Here and there, seams had burst.

"Don't rub it in, okay?" Remo said dispiritedly.

"You should have done your duty, not dallied like an amateur. "

"Hey! I was worried about you. Is that a crime?"

"Worry I will accept. Pity is unacceptable. You think I am too old to serve my emperor?"

"No, I do not," Remo said. Chiun glared. "Okay. Maybe a little."

"I will remind you that you were incautious enough to make an alarm sound when Smith sent you on a small errand."

"It was one of those ultrasonic alarms," Remo said sourly. "A fly can't get past them. And I'd like to see you handle one."

"Perhaps you will," said Chiun tightly.

"Great. Then you can teach me. Come on, let's give the bad news to Smith."

"I will leave it to you to inform Smith that the ransom was not properly paid," Chiun said tonelessly.

"Except that I saw you take the envelope. What're you trying to pull?"

"Nothing. Behold. There is no more than forty dollars in this envelope. The remainder is waste paper."

"Only forty?"

Chiun beamed. "Less my finder's fee, of course."

"That's too bad, Little Father," said Remo. "You get only thirty-six bucks."

"Smith will make up the rest, of course. For my fee was based on the ransom to be paid, not the ransom that was delivered."

Remo said, "Chiun, I can hardly wait to be the fly on the wall when you try to work that out with Smitty."

"Smith will not deny me."

"No," said Remo, jerking a thumb at the deceased form of Vinnie (The Maggot) Maggiotto. "If you hadn't eliminated that guy, we would have had a line on LCN headquarters."

"We will not speak of this one to Smith," Chiun said quickly.

"Only if you stop carping."

"I never carp. I enlighten."

"Try enlighting without carping, then," said Remo.

"Only if you will attempt to receive enlightenment," returned the Master of Sinanju.

They left the body to decompose in the dark as they walked to their waiting car parked behind the long shed.

Chapter 26

Don Carmine Imbruglia was soaking the postmarks off a stack of postage stamps he had steamed off the day's mail when Nicky Kix burst in with the bad news.

"I didn't whack the Jap."

"Scroom, then," said Don Carmine, adding a dollop more Lestoil.

"And I lost the Maggot."

"Screw the Maggot," snarled Don Carmine. "He eats garbage. Tell me somethin' important. What about the fuggin' hard-on disk?"

"Right here, boss," said Nicky Kix, producing the sealed disk unit.

"Beautiful," said Don Carmine, his mood instantly brightening. He kissed the disk. "Beautiful. Now I'm gonna make some money."

"You're already making money."

"Yeah, but I gotta pay tribute on it to Don Fiavorante. This stuff in here is all free and clear."

"Oh, I get it. Guess you gotta let Tollini off the hook, huh?"

"No chance. He don't know about this. And who's gonna tell him? You? Do that and you'll never eat pasta in this town again."

"Don't he gotta install it?" asked Nicky Kix.

This thought gave Don Carmine pause. "Yeah, but he don't have to know what it is."

"What about the Jap? There was a guy with him."

"He look like a fed?"

"No, he looked like a hood."

Don Carmine's disarrayed eyebrows bristled and squirmed in slow thought.

"I wonder who's tryin' to muscle in?" he muttered.

"Search me," admitted Nicky Kix, trying to look innocent. "Maybe it's Don Fiavorante. Gonna make a move on you."

This caused Don Carmine's bristly eyebrows to descend like relays closing.

"If it was, why'd he give back the hard-on disk?" wondered Don Carmine.

"Search me."

"Well; whoever it was, he was makin' a feudal gesture. Completely feudal. We got the disk and we got Boston. Nothin' can stop us now. We're makin' dough hand over fist."

"I am glad to hear this, Don Carmine," said a smooth-as-suntan-oil voice from the slowly opening door.

"Who's that?" growled Don Carmine, starting.

When his eyebrows had jumped up he could see clearly Don Fiavorante Pubescio's well-tanned features beaming at him.

"Don Fiavorante!" Carmine Imbruglia said brightly, his mood changing from suspicion to forced pleasure. He came out of his seat, wiping sweat off his hairy palms.

"So good to see you, Fuggin," said Don Fiavorante, reaching out to embrace his sottocapo.

Carmine Imbruglia returned the embrace, noting the two hulking Pubescio soldiers standing just outside the door. "They don't call me that up here. Up here I'm Cadillac."

"You were always the kidder, Fuggin," said Don Fiavorante. "I like this about you. I always have."

"Yeah, yeah. What can I do for you?"

"I am seeing my rent money come in like it was flowing from a tap, and I say to myself, this Don Carmine, he is one bright boy. I must see his sports book for myself."

"Didn't you get my fax?"

"Perhaps. I do not understand these machines. Many times the machine rings. I get the little light. I hear the loud beeps, but all that rolls out is blank paper."

"Wrong faxes. We get them too. There oughta be a law."

"Tell me, Don Carmine. Your sports book is outperforming Vegas. How do you pick your winners so perfectly?"

"Come on, I'll show you," Don Carmine said, urging Don Fiavorante away from the sealed hard disk with lifted hands that took care not to touch his don. "I got a brilliant new way to pick the winning teams. It's fuggin' phenomenal. Works on the ponies, on football, baseball, anything you want. It's based on a well-known law of human nature nobody but me has caught on to."

They were walking along a curving well-carpeted corridor.

"You use computers?" asked Don Fiavorante.

"Naw. Computers can't do that stuff. Believe me, I tried. First week I had one, I kept typin' in questions like 'Jets or Steelers?' All I got was error this and error that. The fuggin' computer musta thought I was talkin' baseball or somethin'."

"These machines, they are overrated," said Don Fiavorante.

They came at last to a door marked "ODDS MAKERS."

"Watch this," said Don Carmine, throwing the door open. He thrust his bullet head in, startling a quintet of unshaven swarthy-faced men seated around a big-screen TV. They were watching a hockey game.

"Who's playin'?" Don Carmine asked.

"It's the Bruins against the Canadiens," said one swarthy man in a strangely accented voice.

"Who you guys think is gonna win?" asked Don Carmine.

The quintet huddled. When their heads reemerged, the spokesman said, "The Bruins. Clearly."

"Everybody agree on that?" Don Carmine asked.

"Yes."

"Absolutely. "

"Of course."

"Great," said Don Carmine happily. "Thanks." He shut the door.

"The Canadiens," said Don Carmine Imbruglia confidently, "are gonna massacre them Broons."

"You are certain?"

"Absolutely," said Don Carmine. He jerked his thumb back in the direction of the closed door. "You see those guys back there? Palestinians, every one of 'em. They're never right. All you gotta do is ask 'em who'll win and then go with the other team. If they don't agree, that means it'll be a tie. I tell you, it's foolproof. Fuggin' foolproof!"

Don Fiavorante Pubescio placed both hands on the thick shoulders of Don Carmine Imbruglia and in his warmest voice said, "Don Carmine, you are a genius."

Don Carmine puffed out his barrel chest. His tiny eyes twinkled like proud stars.

"I know you will go far in Boston," added the don.

"Thanks, Don Fiavorante."

"And because I know great things lie before you, I am increasing your rent ten percent."

"Ten fuggin' percent!" howled Don Carmine.

"Retroactive to last Tuesday. With interest accrued."

"But . . . but . . . but . . ." sputtered Don Carmine, his face turning crimson. "What'd I ever do to you? I do everything you say. I give you no problems. Not one."

Don Fiavorante Pubescio held up a beringed hand.

"Do not consider this modest increase as a painful thing," he said broadly. "Look upon it as incentive. Let it spur you to new heights. You will make more money and so will I. None of us will lose."

"It's gonna fuggin' spur me into an early grave, is what it's gonna do," Don Carmine complained.

Don Fiavorante's genteel expression darkened. "It pains me to hear such ingratitude from one whose markers I carry without complaint. I would dislike having to call in those markers."

"Okay, okay," said Don Carmine through set teeth. "I'll try to look at it that way. But you gotta let me get on my feet a little more. The rent on this dump is killin me."

After Don Fiavorante had left, Don Carmine Imbruglia stood with his hands dangling down his sides. His fingers hung low enough to almost brush his kneecaps.

When the crimson tinge of his wide face slowly seeped away, Don Carmine growled, "Get that Tony. We gotta make more fuggin' money. Piles of it."

"We need somethin' big," Don Carmine was explaining to a frightened Tony Tollini, who had been hauled from his bed in the dead of night.

"But, Don Carmine, you have everything locked up in this state."

"There's gotta be somethin' we overlooked. Somethin' big. We need a big score. I could knock over banks, but the ones that ain't shut up are carrying our money. We'd be robbing ourselves. These ain't the old days, when you could launder

dough through the front door and carry the safe out through the back. Nowadays you hit a bank and it's liable to go under. There's no percentage in it anymore."

Tony Tollini's beady eyes narrowed.

"Come on," Don Carmine urged.

"Well," he said, "there are the Terrapins."

Don Carmine looked stung. "Bowling? Are you talkin' bowling?"

"No, Terrapins. Not Candlepins."

"Never heard of it."

"It's the biggest business operation in this state," Tony explained. "In any state. It's responsible for over a billion dollars a year in fees, licensing, video, movies, toys, and other revenue."

"How come I never heard of this thing?"

"They're global," said Tony Tollini.

"I don't know from fuggin' global," snarled Don Carmine. "I'm from Brooklyn. Come on. You can tell me about it while you're puttin' in a new hard-on disk. I picked up a real nice one on sale. That's the one great thing about this stupid state. Every day's a fuggin' fire sale."

Chapter 27

In his office at Folcroft Sanitarium, Dr. Harold W. Smith watched the dark computer screen as it displayed a single word in phosphor green letters.

The word was "WAITING."

Smith had been waiting half the night since receiving word from Remo and Chiun that they had delivered the disk. It was impatience on Smith's part that compelled him to stay long into the night, waiting for the hard disk to be installed and reach out through the telephone system via a hidden program he had installed in the disk.

The Boston Mafia would probably wait until tomorrow to install it, he concluded at last. He had been banking on the Mafia's basic psychology of distrust. They would typically check the disk as soon as it was back in their possession.

Smith dragged himself out of his comfortable chair, feeling his knees creak. He reached for his ancient briefcase.

The system beeped once, drawing Smith's gaze back to the dark screen. He sat down hard, his fingers coming up into the backglow of the single word floating in the electronic blackness.

Only now the word was "WORKING."

Smith's lips thinned in anticipation. He had been right, after all.

Then he got a screenful of silent letters. It was an alphanumeric program completion display. Smith tapped a key.

The word "LANSCII" appeared in large letters and Smith allowed himself a tight smile of satisfaction.

He worked swiftly, with assurance, knowing that the LANSCII disk had, once installed, immediately dialed his own computer, thus establishing a dedicated-line linkup.

Smith invoked the password. The Mafia disk had contained the password. It had not been changed.

Every bit and byte of data contained in the Mafia system-presumably a battery of linked PC's-was now at his disposal.

Raw columns of data and electronic spreadsheet programs began to scroll before his eyes.

The headings were varied: "GAMING," "VIGORISH," "CARTING," "BROADS." Smith stopped at "GAMING."

What he saw astonished him. According to the LANSCII files, the Boston Mafia had for over a week been predicting the winners of a wide array of sports events-even to the point of calling tie games. Their point spread was not consistently on the money, but their selections were utterly flawless.

"They cannot be fixing every sporting event in the nation," Smith muttered to his unhearing computer.

He moved on. There would be time to explore that aspect later. He paged his way to the bottom lines. Weekly the Boston LCN was generating a modest six figures of illicit taxfree income. This was unusual only in that its growth rate was virtually doubling from day to day.

"If this goes on . . ." Smith said, his voice trailing off. Smith found names and addresses of contacts in Boston and the Massachusetts state government. Payoff ledgers on crooked officials. Officers on the pad. The tentacles of the Mafia were insinuating themselves into the usual weak societal crevices.

Smith suddenly remembered that he had neglected to check the phone number of the line he had been connected to.

He engaged the back-trace program.

To his surprise, he got a non-working number, but a different one than had previously called in answer to the blackmail ad. The locale numbers were the same, however. North Quincy, Massachusetts. It was a significant clue. One Smith would return to later.

As he poked through the LANSCII data base, he came upon a new file being created hundreds of miles to the north.

As he watched, fascinated, duplicate letters were appearing before his eyes. A strange word completed itself:

'TERRAPINS.'

"What on earth?"

Silently, letter by letter, a second word appeared beside it: "SKIM."

"Terrapin skim?" said Smith dully.

He had to look the first word up on his electronic dictionary, and when he did, he knew instantly the next target of the Boston Mafia. And he knew how much money was about to pour into the LANSCII files, not merely from Boston, but from factories as far away as Hong Kong and Melbourne.

The Mafia was about to wrap its tentacles around one of the greatest enterprises of modern times.

Harold Smith reached for the telephone, his agile mind instantly recalling from memory the phone number of the Boston hotel where Remo and Chiun were staying.

There was still time to head off this new move.

Chapter 28

All Jeter Baird ever wanted out of life was to draw comic books.

It was a simple aspiration, a very American one. One which might never have come true for the young artist had an Amherst, Massachusetts, Backgammon pizza shop not been filled to overflowing on the Friday night after finals in late May 1984.

Artist Jeter Baird was balancing a shaky tray containing a provolone-and-sausage pizza and two jumbo Dr. Peppers as he looked about for an empty table. There were no empty tables. Jeter needed an empty table. He was so shy he couldn't stand not to eat alone. What if a girl struck up a conversation? He didn't know how to talk to girls. Jeter also needed the table space to accommodate the sketchpad tucked under his arm.

Since finals at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst were over, Jeter was looking forward to a long sultry summer of fevered sketching. Mostly of girls.

If only he could snag some table space in the tiny pizza shop that was jammed to the counters with his fellow students.

Finally a pair of long-legged blonds evacuated a round corner table.

Jeter Baird lunged for it, his tray held before him like a battering ram carried edge-on.

Simultaneously Devin Western lunged for the identical table, an identical tray slicing the air before him, a sketchpad of his own tucked under his arm.

They landed in their seats together.

"I saw it first," whined Jeter.

"No, I did," insisted Devin.

"Well, I need the whole table for sketching."

"Me too."

The impasse lasted only long enough for each budding young artist to register the fact that he was in the presence of another budding young artist. They glanced warily at one another's work.

"You published?" Jeter asked Devin, getting to the heart of the matter. He knew that no college art student drew comic book superheroes unless he aspired to publication.

"No. You?"

"No."

Silence filled the corner of the noisy room.

"But I'm working on a neat idea," said Devin. "Terrapin-Man."

"What's a terrapin?" asked Jeter.

"Kind of turtle that swims."

"Why not call him Sea Turtle-Man then?"

"Because CD Comics just published Master Turtle."

Jeter nodded in sad sympathy. "Yeah, Wonder Comics got Squirrel Woman into print while I was still designing the costume for Squirrel Girl."

"I like 'Squirrel Girl' better. It rhymes."

"Her true identity was going to be Doreen Green, because that rhymes too."

"Maybe we could collaborate," suggested Devin.

"Great! Can you write?"

"No. Can you?"

"'No."

More silence. Jeter Baird and Devin Western eyed their pizzas with a sad mixture of disappointment and hunger.

Popular culture stood at a crossroads at that moment, although neither artist knew it. Had they fallen to eating their cooling pizza in sullen silence, billions of dollars would never have changed hands, tens of thousands of craftsmen, assembly-line workers, shippers, and truck drivers worldwide would have gone without work, and millions of children across the globe would have grown up with lives somehow emptier and joyless, and no one would ever have known it.

It was then that Devin said, "I know. We'll both write and we'll both draw."

"Great," they said in unison, flipping open their sketchbooks to blank pages.

As their pizzas cooled and congealed, they swapped ideas.

"Terrapin Warrior," suggested Devin. "We'll make him a ninja. Ninjas are hot."

"That was last year. Androids are big this year. Personally, I think androids are too plastic to last. Mutants are good for another five years. We should do mutants."

"Mutants suck. They're always whining and complaining about being mutants. Besides, I don't want to be too commercial. I'm a serious comic-book artist."

"Yeah," said Jeter. "When you're too commercial, no one respects your work."

Marketing philosophies in synch, Jeter Baird and Devin Western brainstormed to closing. The trouble was, they found, all the great superhero character names were taken.

"Cow Princess," Jeter announced, holding up a pencil rough of a voluptuous Amazon with a triple-decker bosom. "She gores her enemies with her forehead horns."

Devin frowned with his mouth and ogled with his eyes.

"My mother would kill me if she caught me drawing a girl with six breasts," he said. "Besides, cows don't have horns."

They went back to work.

"Ira-dah!" Devin shouted. "Giraffe Boy."

"How will he get through doors with that neck?" asked Jeter critically, looking at the hasty sketch. "You know how much trouble Flaming Carrot has."

"Good point. Maybe we should get away from animals and fish. Be original. Go with. . . ."

"Fruit. "

"The Ultimate Pistachio," cried Devin, sketching up a storm. "See, he wears a giant kevlar-titanium pistachio shell over his face to conceal his true identity as a migrant worker. "

"Do pistachios have superpowers?" wondered Jeter.

Devin chewed his pencil eraser. "They're hard and salty," he ventured.

"so's Popeye the Sailor, and he hasn't been big since the fifties. "

"I still like my terrapins," Devin said forlornly, scribbling a quartet of happy reptilian faces.

"Mutant Terrapins!" Jeter shouted in triumph.

"No. We gotta be original. Can't call them mutants."

"Transformed Terrapins," suggested Jeter, adding a row of domino masks to his newfound collaborator's sketch.

"Good start," said Devin, grinning with approval. "How about giving them nunchuks?"

"How about Transformed Tae Kwon Do Teen Terrapins?" blurted out Jeter Baird, inadvertently coining a new industry.

"Yeah, yeah. It's fresh, it's original, and most if all it's not commercial."

"Right. No one will take us seriously if we're too commercial. "

Little did they dream.

By emptying their tuition funds, Jeter and Devin printed five hundred thousand copies of the first issue of Transformed Tae Kwon Do Teen Terrapins, and when the first shipment arrived at their dorm, they ripped open the boxes and reveled in the thrill of being published comic-book artists at last.

Then harsh reality sank in.

"This isn't as funny as I remember," said Devin.

"Maybe we should have hired a writer," muttered Jeter.

They looked at one another, going as slack-jawed as their creations.

"Will anyone buy these?" wondered Devin.

"Will we ever finish our education?" worried Jeter.

Their eyes widened in alarm as they realized that their mothers were going to kill them when they found out.

Jeter and Devin canvased every comic-book store and newsstand in Amherst, trying to sell Transformed Tae Kwon Do Teen Terrapins to anyone that would take them.

Where they weren't laughed at, they were spit upon.

" I can't tell my mother," wailed Jeter.

"Neither can I," moaned Devin.

It was Jeter who hit upon the thing that was to enable them to recoup their investment and make them millionaires many times over.

"There's only one thing we can do," he said.

"What that?"

"Get on the Tuckahoe show."

"How will that help?"

"It won't," Jeter admitted. "But both our moms watch him every day. It's better than having to watch them cry when they learn what we did."

They hitchhiked to New York City, a case of Transformed Tae Kwon Do Teen Terrapins number one under each arm.

It was surprisingly easy, they found. The research director of The Bil Tuckahoe Show had only to listen to their tale of woe once when she blurted out, "College students who squander their tuition money on comic books!" she cried. "It's perfect, and we can postpone that awful segment on monkey makeovers."

"But we didn't buy them," Jeter started to say.

"We had them printed," Devin finished.

"Don't say another word! Bil likes his guests to go on cold."

The next day, frightened and tearful, Jeter and Devin found themselves in front of a studio audience as the silverhaired Bil Tuckahoe fixed them with his sheepdog eyes and demanded, "You two boys are addicted to comic books, aren't you? Admit it. You'll do anything for a mint copy of The Fantastic Four. Lie, cheat, steal, sell your parents into slavery. "

They tried to explain. Devin started to cry. Jeter lifted a copy of Transformed Tae Kwon Do Teen Terrapins number one up to his face like a felon being hauled before a judge.

A camerman rushed in to capture the cover in his viewfinder, while a studio technician punched up a slugline graphic which read, "Deter Baird. Addicted to Comic Books."

The image of four fat masked sea turtles clutching Oriental weaponry was broadcast across the nation for the first time, electrifying preschool America.

Jeter Baird and Devin Western never sold a single copy of their comic book. They never finished college or got their marketing degrees.

They didn't have to. The cartoon, toy, and film offers began pouring in before taping ended on that day's edition of The Bil Tuckahoe Show.

Soon the images of the four terrapins was unavoidable from Manhattan to Madagascar. The money came in by the sackful. Every toy deal triggered another. Modest TV cartoons led to full-length movie deals. Everything the scaly cartoon creatures touched turned to gold.

It was an American success story of unprecedented proportions.

And, like all American success stories, it had a downside.

Jeter and Devin had enjoyed six years of exponential business expansion, moving directly from their cramped dorm rooms to a sprawling office park cum movie studio just outside of Amherst, when they realized the free ride was over.

They realized this when, during the filming of Transformed Tae Kwon Do Teen Terrapins III: Shell Game, a sniper killed the star, D'Artagnan.

D'Artagnan was not the actor's actual name. It was Sammy Bong, an out-of-work chopsocky actor running around the TM backlot in a polyurethane-and-foam-rubber anamatronic Terrapin costume.

D'Artagnan was about to run an evil ninja through with a fencer's sword when his polyurethane shell was split by a steel jacketed bullet and the green of his foam chest turned dark with blood.

The demand note came in the morning mail, while Jeter and Devin were still in shock.

The note said: "We get ten percent. Gross. Or Athos is next."

To add insult to injury, the note was made from words cut out of Terrapin toy ads and pasted onto a sheet of official Terrapin kiddie stationery.

"What do we do?" asked Devin in a sick voice.

"We pay. Next time it could be us."

The trouble was, the note forgot to say whom to pay.

They found Athos with his green throat slit and stuffed into a trash barrel on the backlot that very afternoon, his threetoed webbed feet dangling askew over the sides.

Nicky Kix Stivaletta showed up as the private ambulance was hauling the deceased Terrapin away under the wide unblinking eyes of the surviving Terrapins, Aramis and Porthos.

Nicky Kix stepped out of the work car and sauntered up to Jeter and Devin. He was flanked by two goons in pinstripes.

Devin, quicker on the uptake, hissed to the surviving Terrapins, "Swim for it!"

The Terrapins held their ground. They wanted to defend their honor.

"Or you're both fired," added Jeter.

The dejected terrapins slunk off to safety.

"You get my message?" asked Nicky Kix, rolling a toothpick around his mouth as he pushed the hard words out.

"Why'd you kill Athos? We were going to pay you!" demanded Devin, hot tears streaming down his cheeks.

Nicky Kix shrugged. "I like the smell of roadkill."

"Ten percent?" said Jeter.

"Cash. No checks."

"Can we get a receipt?" Jeter and Devin asked in unison, their incomplete business courses coming into play.

"No," said Nicky Kix in a bored voice.

Dejectedly Jeter and Devin led Nicky Kix and his muscular entourage to their joint office, pushing aside plush Terrapin toys, edging past Terrapin arcade video games and cardboard movie-lobby standees.

Jeter cleared a cardboard box containing breakfast-a pepper-and-onion pizza-from a chair so Nicky Kix could sit down.

"I'll stand," said Nicky Kix, eyeing the stained seat warily. He snapped his fingers impatiently. "Now, pony up. I ain't got all day."

In fact, Nicky Kix Stivaletta was destined not to have more than a minute and thirteen seconds remaining in his entire life.

He got an inkling of this when the office door suddenly banged open, upsetting a three-foot-tall plush Aramis doll.

Nicky's bodyguards whirled, hands going into coats, fingers wrapping around hard steel pistol grips.

Webbed three-fingered hands beat them to the draw.

One pair simply swept in for Sal (Toe Biter) Bugliosi's unprotected ears. He heard a thunderclap that kept his eardrums ringing until three days after his embalming. The air pressure scrambled his brain in its skull cavity and opened every fissure in the protective bone.

The other Terrapin-his purple mask and short stature marked him as Porthos-employed a high kick to break Pauli (Pink Eye) Scanga's pelvis like a soda cracker.

Pauli let go of his half-drawn pistol and grabbed his crotch, which was leaking all manner of body fluids, and tried to claw his lower body back into an erect position.

But his legs simply bent at ankles and knees and he made a messy moist pile where he had stood.

"Aramis!" blurted Jeter.

"Porthos?" gulped Devin.

"Bullshit," snarled Nicky Kix as he drew down on the advancing Terrapins with a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun he whipped out from under his coat.

He hauled back on one trigger.

The blast riddled Aramis. Unfortunately for Nicky Kix, it was the plush Aramis in a corner. It also cracked the arcade game screen and made a cheap plastic Terrapin alarm clock jangle discordantly.

Porthos was wide open, however. Nicky sent a blast of buckshot toward his sappy face.

The blast, however, made a kind of black spiral galaxy pattern in the dropped fiberboard ceiling.

Nicky Kix looked up. He saw the peppery hits. He looked down, where he noticed a green three-fingered hand holding his smoking shotgun barrels at an upward angle.

He was thinking: Where have I seen this shit before? when the shotgun was taken away from him rather harshly, and returned, stock-first, into his abdomen.

Nicky Kix said "Oof" and doubled over, still on his feet.

A spongy green hand grabbed him by his Brylereemed hair and led him over to a microwave parked on a corner table.

"In you go," said a casual male voice.

Nicky thought that he sounded nothing like the real Aramis. He also thought that he was in no danger. Sure, his head was in a microwave oven. But everybody knew they wouldn't work unless the door was closed. And this couldn't happen as long as his neck was in the way.

The male voice asked, "Care to do the honors, Little Father?"

"Normally I do not sully my hands with machines," said a strangely familiar squeaky voice, "but this one is guilty of cruelty to reptiles."

Then came the funny noises. Bangings and crunchings. A piece of the oven wall pierced Nicky Kix's unshaven cheek and he realized that the oven was being compacted. He couldn't imagine how. A steel shard embedded itself in his forehead next. His ears were mashed against the sides of his head. The noises wouldn't stop, and when Nicky reached out for the microwave to pull his head loose, it felt like he had got hold of a crashed sputnik.

"I'd say he's about ready, wouldn't you?" the guy said.

"Let us see if the device still functions," said the squeaky voice.

Despite his predicament, Nicky Kix managed a raucous laugh.

"You guys ain't shit, you know that? It'll never work. There's a contact in the door that has to touch another contact to complete the circuit."

"Thanks for reminding me."

He heard the scrape of a mangled timer dial and the tenative toiling of the timer mechanism itself. Then a sound like a coin dropping into a cigarette-machine slot.

Then Nicky Kix enjoyed the exquisite agony of having every water molecule in his cranium boil under an intense microwave bombardment.

He came erect as if impelled by a cattle prod.

He was dead before a three-fingered greenish hand slam-dunked the compacted microwave, Nicky's head and body following, into a trash barrel, incidentally yanking the plug from the socket.

"I thought those things wouldn't work unless the door was shut," said Jeter Baird, eyeing the dead body partially stuffed into a small Transformed Tae Kwon Do Teen Terrapin kiddie wastebaket.

"They will if you rip the contact off the door and jam it into the other contact," said the tall green figure of Aramis.

"Who are you guys?" asked Devin.

"You know how some people have guardian angels?" Aramis asked.

"Yeah."

"You two have guardian Terrapins. Congratulations."

This made perfect sense to Jeter and Devin, who had grown up on a steady diet of comic books.

"How can we ever repay you?" asked a relieved Jeter.

"You are allowed to tip," said the squeaky voice of Porthos.

"Don't listen to him," said Aramis. "We work for free. You won't be bothered again."

"Although we do not guarantee untipped work," Porthos added darkly.

Jeter and Devin hastily brought out their wallets and gave all their personal cash to their guardian Terrapin, Porthos.

"Pass," said Aramis when they offered him a plush D'Artagnan doll. "Just do us all a favor. Don't mention this to anyone."

"Not even our mothers?" asked Devin.

"Of course you should inform your mothers," said the squeaky-voiced Porthos. "One always tells one's mother of good fortune."

After the pair had gone, Devin turned to Jeter.

"You don't suppose it's true . . . "

"If you think about it," said Jeter, "we have been having an unusual streak of luck since this whole thing started."

For the rest of their days Jeter and Devin were never again visited by the guardian Terrapins. But they did discover the Hong Kong actors who usually played Aramis and Porthos. They were snoring, in full costume, in the back of the extortionists' car. They were unable to explain how they got there, nor why Aramis woke up wearing Porthos' head and vice versa.

Chapter 29

Dr. Harold W. Smith was attempting to do three things at once and was on the verge of succeeding.

He was monitoring the LANSCII file as distant defeated fingers wiped clean the "TERRAPIN SKIM" heading. He was attempting to take his Zantac, a prescription ulcer medicine, and he was listening to Remo's brief report through the blue contact telephone.

"Reptiles everywhere can snuggle in their shells in safety tonight," Remo was saying dryly.

"Er, yes."

"What's next?" Remo wondered.

The office intercom buzzed. Reflexively Smith reached for the switch, inadvertently spilling his medicine.

Suppressing his annoyance, he said, "Excuse me," as he depressed the switch while attempting to swallow a hot splash of stomach acid that had leapt up his esophagus.

"Yes?" Smith said sourly.

His secretary said, "The transfer patient has arrived, Dr. Smith. "

"Excellent. Thank you."

Smith returned to the blue phone. "Remo. Please ask Master Chiun to return to Folcroft."

"What about me?"

"I want you to go to New York City."

"What's down there? Besides muggers?"

"Don Fiavorante Pubescio. I want you to deliver a message to him."

"What's the message?"

"Cadillac Carmine Imbruglia is cheating on his rent."

"Who's Cadillac Carmine Imbruglia?" Remo wanted to know.

"The Boston don."

"How'd you find out his name?" Remo asked, interested.

"He foolishly listed himself on a payroll spreadsheet under the title of 'crime minister.' "

"Catchy. And your snooping computers caught him ripping off his own people, huh?"

"Not exactly," Smith said flatly. "Even as we speak, I am doctoring the LANSCII data base to show conclusive skimming of LCN profits for diversion into the Boston don's pockets."