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.