"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.