“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 Twenty

  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.