The board stared stonily. Bolt sweated.

  "And best of all," he added quickly, "it's the most gigantic advertising billboard in human history."

  With that, Bolt pressed a remote switch, and the scale-model ParaSol 2001 opened up like a dark, unfolding flower to reveal the qNM logo in neat black letters right down to the lowercase q which had been the first-year suggestion that earned Reemer Bolt his initial salary hike. He was very proud of it.

  "Our logo. Twice as big as the moon in the evening sky. The PR value will be stunning."

  This won over the board. They had just one question.

  "Will it hurt the ozone layer?"

  "Don't worry. I already thought of that," said Reemer Bolt, who felt an old, cold fear trickle down the gully of his back. After all, he was directly responsible for the 1987 Montreal Protocol Treaty, which called for reducing fluorocarbon emissions by the year 2000. Even if he couldn't exactly put in on his resume.

  Now, many months later, that sweat was back and it was very very hot. The board was screaming. They didn't care anymore about planetary defense or the global marketing footprint or Pentagon generals. They wanted Reemer Bolt. And they wanted answers. Was that thing up there ours or Russia's?

  Working his desktop system, Bolt checked his e-mail.

  To: RM@qnm.com From: RalphGaunt@qnm.com Subject: Where are you? Am in Cancun. Hotel says you checked out. Urgent we meet. Where are you?

  Bolt typed out a reply:

  To: RalphGaunt@qnm.com From: RM@qnm.com Subject: Whereabouts Sorry. Did not receive sent message. Had to fly to Paraguay to debug ParaSol 2001. Will return to States in forty-eight hours. All will be explained.

  The reply came back almost instantaneously: "Remain in Paraguay. En route."

  "Perfect," Bolt said, "I didn't get that message, either."

  Then he settled down to do the final damage control. It was pretty bad out there. The press was full of Martian fever and war-scare talk with Russia. As long as the Martian fever stayed hot, maybe the Russians would remain cool. But he couldn't trust to fate. He had to take action-smart executive action. If Reemer Bolt could save the planet, it might be possible to salvage his career.

  As he started pounding out a message to Meech down in R ered, "This is almost as bad as that ozone mess back in '85. Why does this crap keep happening to me?"

  Chapter 44

  Seattle was wreathed in an early-morning fog when the jetliner descended toward the airport. A steady winter drizzle drummed on the fuselage as their landing wheels whined out of their wells.

  In coach, the Master of Sinanju stared out of the window, unable to see the wingtips in the fog.

  Then, in the near distance, a great saucer of steel and glass became visible, floating above the fog.

  "We are too late, Remo," he squeaked.

  "What?" asked Remo, returning to his seat after having just locked a hysterical stewardess in the rear rest room.

  "The star chariots of the Martian invader have landed. Behold the certain sign of their arrival on earth."

  Ducking his head, Remo looked past the Master of Sinanju's concerned face. "Oh, that." He sat down.

  "Do not dismiss the evidence of your eyes. It is a flying saucer."

  "It's the freaking Space Needle, Chiun."

  "And a more fearful spectacle I have never seen. See how it hovers over the vanquished city? Note its chilly grandeur, its utter fearlessness from attack. Tell the pilot to turn around. We will not land in occupied Seattle, lest we, too, fall into Martian hands."

  "The Space Needle is a building. You just can't see the part that's holding up the saucer in all this fog."

  "It is a trick," said Chiun.

  "No trick. Now settle down. We have to hit the ground running."

  "Never fear. Our foe is doomed."

  "That's the problem," said Remo. "We still don't know who we're supposed to doom."

  "We will leave no one standing."

  "That could take all day, and there's no telling what that thing up there could hit next."

  HAROLD SMITH HAD breached the firewalls protecting the computer links for Quantum Neutrino Mechanics. The difficulty was, there was nothing on the qNM local-area network that referenced the thing in orbit, or ParaSol.

  Smith refused to accept defeat. There had already been too many dead ends in this situation.

  Downloading the entire qNM file system from hard drives to the magnetic-tape records, he initiated a massive unerase program.

  It would take time to process. There was no guessing what it might or might not uncover. But if a corporate cover-up was already under way, this was the only way to unlock it.

  THE 747 TOUCHED DOWN. Once they reached the terminal, Remo checked in with Harold Smith by pay phone. By mistake, he fed it a kopeck and had to move on to the next booth when it refused U.S. coin.

  Smith's voice was urgent. "Remo. I have uncovered e-mail files that explain much. The man you want goes by the initials R.M. That is all I have. He signs his e-mail 'RM,' but I find no one owning those initials in the qNM personnel files."

  "So how do I find him?"

  "He interfaces with R uld be 'Research and Development.' Start there."

  "Sounds like we're cooking."

  Hanging up, Remo told a waiting Chiun, "We're looking for someone, initialed 'R. M.'"

  "Ruber Mavors. "

  "Coincidence. I hope."

  "We shall see," said the Master of Sinanju.

  They ran for a taxi and were soon being whisked through the eternal Seattle rain.

  BARTHOLOMEW MEECH WAS sweating bullets. It had been three days of no rest, no sleep and too many paper cups of Starbucks coffee.

  On the research-and-development floor of Quantum Neutrino Mechanics, he moved from console to console, monitor to monitor, tracking the ParaSol 2001. It was approaching the South Pole now. He wished it would just crash there.

  A beep yanked his thin face to the interoffice computer system.

  "You have mail!" the system flashed.

  And deep inside, Bartholomew Meech groaned.

  Accessing the file, he brought up another communication from his immediate superior:

  To: R From: RM@qnm.com Subject: Project termination. CNN is reporting Pagan fried. Now is the prudent time to shut down the project before Gaunt gets back from Paraguay.

  Here are your instructions:

  Target French, Chinese and Japanese space centers, then shut down the project.

  Furiously Meech pecked out a reply.

  To: RM@qnm.com From: R Subject: Are you insane? We're getting in deeper. More people are going to die. When does this stop?

  To: R From: RM@qnm.com Subject: Shut up! It stops after you've programmed in the next target string. Then destroy the controller array and get your resume in order, just as I'm doing with mine. There are greener pastures out there. And once Gaunt parachutes in, you're dead at qNM anyway.

  Remember-the corporate shield protects us. If anyone lands on the corporation, it won't be for months. We'll be elsewhere. New guys will take the heat.

  Bartholomew Meech stared at the screen. "God damn," he muttered. He hated the way this was turning out. There was no way he could score a benefits package as generous as qNM's ever again. He hit the key that erased the email message and turned to do his corporate duty.

  Meech felt the cold shadow on his back before he actually faced the two silent presences.

  One was a tall thin man with wrists like I-beams. The other was a short Asian in native costume and very old. Both looked as if they were having a bad day and looking for someone to blame.

  The tall one asked, "Who's R.M.?"

  "Don't know what you're talking about. Where are your access badges?" asked Meech, pushing his glasses back on his nose.

  "Lobby guards wouldn't give me one," said the tall man.

  "Why not?"

  "Because," answered the short Asian, "they did not want us to enter this place."

  "So how did you get past them?"

  "We went over their heads," said the tall one.

  "Those we did not break over our knees," added the other.

  There was something in the cold eyes of the duo that made Bartholomew Meech feel creepily cold in the brightly lit R Quantum Neutrino Mechanics world headquarters.

  "So where do we find R.M.?" asked the tall one, flashing FBI ID. When Meech hesitated, he shoved it in his face, saying, "Hurry up. We have a lot of bones to splinter."

  "I want immunity," Meech blurted.

  "Earn it."

  "R.M. is two floors up on eleven."

  "Then why is he talking to you by computer?" asked the tall thin one.

  "Deniability."

  The Asian slipped behind him and asked, "What is your role in this matter?"

  "I'm technical project manager of the solar mirror."

  "I was right. It was solar."

  The old Asian nodded with grim satisfaction. "Yes. A sun dragon."

  "We call it a Soletta. It's a gigantic mirror of aluminized mylar. It collects solar energy, focusing and beaming it out as a superconcentrated ray of heat."

  "To kill people," said the tall one.

  "No! That wasn't it at all. It was for the good of mankind we built it. And for the publicity."

  "How does frying patches of the planet translate to 'for the good of mankind'?" asked the tall thin one.

  "It's not supposed to fry terra firma. It's designed to hit rogue asteroids threatening Earth."

  "Huh?"

  "It's true. The planet stands stark naked against an incoming asteroid. Look at what happened to Jupiter. Or the dinosaurs. The ParaSol 2001 was designed to lock on to an incoming asteroid and zap it. Small impactors would be vaporized to nothing. Big extinctors we figured could be deflected from Earth-harming trajectory by vaporizing parts of them. The jets of escaping gases and metal would act like propulsion rockets, redirecting their path."

  "Sounds like a giant magnifying glass."

  "Exactly."

  And the tall one gave the short one a see-I-told-you-so smile that the short Asian pointedly ignored.

  "It would have worked except we got tripped up by feature creep. We wanted it to point to Earth in case the Pentagon needed to rent it as a weapon in some future war. Some idiot vendor sold us a defective computer chip, and it was installed in the guidance system, screwing up the orbital orientation. It ended up pointing Earthward, not spaceward. Useless for the original mission. And to make things worse, the company logo was displayed backward."

  "So why hit the BioBubble?"

  "We didn't know it was pointed backward. We just test-fired blindly, figuring we wouldn't hit anything important up there."

  "What about the Reliant and Baikonur?"

  "The shuttle was melted to feed Pagan's Martian theory. Then, by some fluke, the qNM logo came out spelling 'Mir' in Russian, and we hit Baikonur so the U.S. wouldn't attack the Russians by mistake and the Russians who launched the ParaSol wouldn't give us up to Washington."

  Meech wiped his perspiring brow and licked his sweaty palm clean. He closed his eyes like a man in pain. "After that, it was all we could do to cover our asses between corporate and the media and that damn Cosmo Pagan."

  "You hit him to shut him up?"

  "Yeah. I mean, no. That was R.M. Everything was him. He gave the orders. I only executed them."

  "Like a good little corporate Nazi."

  "That's not fair. I never shoved anyone into an oven."

  "No. You just fried them where they stood," said Remo.

  And suddenly Bartholomew Meech felt a sharp pain in his back. "Did I just get stabbed in the back?" he asked, afraid to turn around.

  "Why does that surprise you?" asked the squeaky voice of the little Asian. "Have you not betrayed your own country?"

  "I just did what the corporation said."

  "And now you get to die for it," said Remo.

  "I don't feel like I'm dying. . . "

  "It'll catch up. I have a final question."

  "What?" Meech asked dazedly. He weaved on his sneakered feet.

  "Which of these things shuts the mirror down?"

  "I have to do it myself."

  "You don't have time."

  "Whatever you do, don't-" And eyes rolling up to show white, Bartholomew Meech fell over dead. Schlump!

  "Damn," said Remo.

  Chiun fluttered fingernails about the room. "It does not matter. We will destroy the good machines with the bad."

  "He said there was something we shouldn't do," Remo said worriedly, gazing around the instrument-packed confines.

  "And whatever it is, we will not do it. We will merely break everything in sight."

  Remo considered this, shrugged and said, "Can't cause any more trouble than we already have."

  And they went to town. Their hands and feet flashed from console to mainframe to devices they didn't even recognize. Metal and plastic fractured and caved in. Wires came sputtering out like aroused vipers, hissing blue-green sparks.

  With a grim ferocity, they transformed the big room into a litter of glass and transistors and circuit boards and shattered, inert machines.

  "That's done," Remo said firmly. "Next Stop. The eleventh floor."

  ON THE ELEVENTH FLOOR, Reemer Murgatroyd Bolt was told by his secretary, "Two men to see you, Mr. Bolt."

  "What men?"

  "I don't recognize them. They asked for R.M., as if they know you. Mr. Bolt, they're not wearing qNM employee badges."

  "Ask them what they want," said Reemer Bolt as he was clearing out his desk.

  "They said you're the last loose end."

  "Loose end of what?"

  "They refuse to say, Mr. Bolt."

  "Tell them to make an appointment, Evelyn."

  "Yes, Sir."

  A moment later, Evelyn's screaming came through the door, then the door came off its hinges to impress itself into the opposite wall, knocking assorted framed Maxfield Parrish prints off their hooks.

  Reemer Bolt came out from behind his desk, paling. "Who are you?" he blurted.

  "Exterminators," a man with unusually thick wrists said.

  "Exter-"

  "We do maggots, silverfish and cockroaches."

  "This office is clean."

  The tall one looked to the old Asian and asked, "This guy look roachy to you?"

  The Asian shook his head. "No, he is a maggot."

  Reemer Bolt got a very bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. Exactly the same feeling had come over him the last time he was terminated.

  "I can't imagine what this is about," he said lamely. A pair of glasses landed on his desk. Bolt looked at them quickly. They looked exactly like Meech's glasses, down to the broken bridge repaired by white tape.

  "He told us everything."

  "The mindless nerd. I explained how the corporate shield protects him."

  "Not against us."

  "Nonsense. Everything that happened was an accident. A combination of product failure, feature creep and defective chips supplied by outside vendors. In fact, I've memoed the board that we sue the chip supplier. This is all their fault. It's not the firm's. I will testify to this in court."

  "The e-mail's been unerased. We have the whole story."

  "You do?"

  The tall one nodded. "We do."

  "In that case, you will have to take the matter up with legal. They are on the thirteenth floor. This is their department. I'm only management."

  "Sorry. We work outside the law."

  Reemer Bolt was surrounded now. There were only two of them, but he felt exactly as though he were surrounded by twenty-two.

  "You are forgetting the corporate shield. It protects men like me."

  "Show us this shield," asked the ancient Asian.

  "Show? It's not a tangible shield. It's a-a . . ."

  "A what?"

  Bolt snapped his fingers. "A concept."

  The tall one with the dead-looking eyes shook his head in a very final way. "Too bad. We work with our hands. You want to hide behind a shield, it's gotta be real."

  "It is real. Ask legal. They will fill you in. I'll call them up right now."

  Reemer Bolt reached for the desk telephone, and the one with the wrists reached out ahead of him.

  He said, "Uh-uh." It was a very serious uh-uh. Dead serious.

  And the one with the nails inserted Bolt's forearm into a desk drawer he had been in the process of clearing out.

  A natural question occurred to Reemer Bolt. "Am I being terminated?"

  "Bingo!"

  "I'll go quietly," Bolt said hastily. "I just have to finish collecting my personal effects."

  "That's nice of you, but you won't need them," the tall one said in a very reasonable tone of voice.

  What happened next was so bizarre, so incredible, and happened so fast that Reemer Bolt found himself watching it with a sick fascination that gave way to a growing concern much too late to reverse the procedure.

  The one with the wrists shoved Reemer's arm all the way into the open drawer. Of course, it wouldn't fit. It was too long. So he folded it at the elbow joint. Unfortunately he folded it the wrong way.

  Crunch. Then he hammered Bolt's shoulder into the drawer. It didn't fit, either, so the other one laid two hands on the shoulder while Bolt vainly tried to keep his face from smushing into the desk's very hard edge.

  The shoulder collapsed into suet under kneading fingers.

  Then they took hold of his legs and bent them around so viciously he could feel a splintery cracking in the vicinity of his pelvis.

  Reemer Bolt found himself staring out the window as the pair systematically pulverized his lean musculature and healthy bone into pockets of flesh-covered bonemeal and hamburger.

  In the reflection of his office window, Bolt could see what was happening to him.

  It was if he were a master contortionist and were fitting himself into a space too small for an ordinary human. Except that Reemer Bolt had absolutely nothing to do with what was happening to him. It was like having an out-of-body experience. Only it was more of a body-into-drawer experience.

  He saw his torso, accompanied by the grinding of shattering ribs, slide in and then he was looking at his head sticking out of the drawer with its stunned-face reflection just as the one with the wrists laid a cold hand on his hair and began forcing it into the drawer.