"You hear that, Smitty?" asked Remo.
"Yes."
"He heard, Chiun. Now leave it alone. Smitty's trying to think."
"Put Chiun on," Smith said in a suddenly urgent voice.
"Why?"
"I want to hear what he has to say," said Smith.
Shrugging, Remo surrendered the line to the Master of Sinanju.
"Repeat what you just said, Master Chiun," asked Smith.
"I saw the letters in the sky. They did not spell peace."
"What do they spell?"
"Nonsense. The P was not a Greek P."
"What was it?"
"It looked like a P. But an inferior p. The others were capital letters. The P was not. Its tail hung too low."
Remo said nothing. His face was a frown with cheekbones.
"The P is definitely lowercase," Harold Smith acknowledged.
"Big deal," said Remo. "Chiun found a typo. What does that prove?"
"Please stand by," said Smith.
"We are instructed to stand by," Chiun told Remo. Remo pretended to be interested in the low-hanging planet Mars.
AT FOLCROFT, Harold Smith purged his mind of all assumptions. He'd learned a long time ago that a fresh view could sometimes solve an otherwise intractable problem.
Three letters. Capitals M, N and lowercase p. Two of them seemed straightforward. That was an assumption, he realized. He frowned. What if the Cyrillic N was not what it seemed? What if it was exactly what it first appeared to be-a backward N?
Smith was looking at a digitized image of the photos the missing Travis Rust had taken seconds before the Reliant was destroyed. He had programs for everything. He initiated one that flopped the digitized image.
Instead of the Cyrillic letters meaning "peace," he got three ordinary English initials: "qNM"
It looked for all the word like a chemical formula. He wondered why the q would be lowercased like that.
Recalling that he had an open line to Remo and Chiun, Smith said, "I have flopped the image."
"Is that good or bad?" Remo wanted to know.
"It comes out qNM, but the q is lowercased."
"Makes sense. If it was a lowercase p before, it's a lowercase q now."
"I do not know what qNM could mean," said Smith. "It makes even less sense than 'Mir.'"
"You got me."
"But not me," said Chiun, taking the phone from his pupil's hand so swiftly Remo could still feel it even though it was no longer there.
"Emperor, before Pagan was liquidated, we carried to his ears a message from his wife."
"Yes?"
"An entity called QNM had called to increase his fee."
"QNM? Did she say what it was?"
"No, only that QNM had been calling incessantly."
Remo added, "She said it was over a consulting fee."
"Consulting! That means either media or a commercial firm," Smith said tensely. "One moment."
He was not silent very long.
"Remo."
"I am here," said Chiun, turning so Remo could not seize the phone.
"Listen," said Smith. "I have pulled up several QNMs. None are media outlets. But among the corporate names there is a company called Quantum Neutrino Mechanics. Their company logo is unusual. It features a lowercase q. "
"Why would it do that?" Remo asked.
"Trademark-registration concerns," Smith said flatly.
"Bingo!"
"qNM headquarters is in Seattle, Washington. Go there. Now. Remain in touch by telephone. I will dig deeper."
"On our way," said Remo, hanging up so hard the receiver cracked like an ice sculpture.
"Looks like we're back in the game," he told Chiun.
"That is not enough. We must be ahead of the game."
"Right now I just want to stay one step ahead of the next flock of stewardesses I meet," said Remo.
Chapter 43
It was a long way from sunny Massachusetts to rainy Seattle.
For Reemer Murgatroyd Bolt, of Quantum Neutrino Mechanics, it was almost exactly eleven years, three thousand miles and four career changes ago.
It had almost come to a crashing halt back at Chemical Concepts of Massachusetts on Route 128, the symbol of the Massachusetts Miracle. The Massachusetts Miracle had gone south somewhere around the time of the 1988 presidential elections, taking a certain Greek governor, the Bay State and America's Technology Highway with it, as Route 128 was known back then.
The DataGen and GenData and General Data Systems that had dotted 128 back in the booming eighties were gone now. As was Chemical Concepts of Massachusetts. As was Director of Marketing Reemer Bolt, who got out before the sky fell and it all came crashing down.
For a while, the entire world almost ended. And now history seemed to be repeating itself.
In his office, with the eternal rain pattering at the Thermopane windows that kept out the winter chill, Reemer Bolt shuddered as his mind went careening back to those heady days in which the planet Earth came perilously close to being incinerated. All because Reemer Bolt had charge of a product whose utility at first eluded even a marketing genius like himself.
It was called the Fluorocarbon Gun. It shot fluorocarbons, chemicals that had been banned by most industrialized nations because they ate away at the ozone shield high in the atmosphere. Holes in the ozone allowed dangerous solar radiation to penetrate. One hole accidentally knocked out a Russian missile battery, precipitating an international incident that almost ended the world-and Reemer Bolt's promising corporate career.
It was a huge marketing debacle. The biggest since the Edsel. ChemCon was forced into strategic bankruptcy.
Through it all, Bolt remained unscathed. In fact, his corporate future improved. On the strength of a new resume that showed he had been in charge of a fifty-million-dollar project with global ramifications; Bolt moved from director of marketing of ChemCon to president of Web Tech. He knew nothing about Web Tech and, when he left to become COO of Quantum Neutrino Mechanics three years later, he knew even less about Web Tech. It didn't matter. No one ever got fired or laid off or punished for screwing up a billion-dollar corporation. They were handed golden parachutes, stock options and golden handshakes and wished well by anxious stockholders delighted to be rid of them.
It was middle managers and workers who invariably ate failure in corporate America. Not the Reemer Bolts. No matter how high the tides rose, their necks always stretched farther and their chins always lifted over the lung-quenching flood.
It was true that the corporate-downsizing mania threatened even the Reemer Bolts of the world. Somehow he got himself involved in the military-industrial complex. He didn't realize it for several weeks until he walked in on a Web Tech management research-and-development conference and saw the scale-model tank.
"Who brought that toy in here? This is a place of business," he snarled, knowing that no one ever snapped back at a snarling executive, never mind questioned him. They were petrified for their jobs.
"It's our next project," he was told by a more than brave technician.
"Scrap it," Bolt told him.
"Why? The Pentagon has accepted it."
Bolt froze inwardly. This was in 1991. He knew that if there was one thing an executive never did, it was reverse a decision. No matter how disastrous. He had been caught. He could not retreat. To retreat showed weakness. Worse, it showed a complete and unforgivable ignorance of the product line. That simply would not do. Not in corporate America, where smiling, two-legged sharks circled the office water cooler hoping to take a bite out of an unwary coworker's ass.
"It has Failure written all over it," said Reemer Bolt. "Scrap it."
No one questioned the decision. It saved Reemer Bolt's high-six-figure salary and perks for three years, while Web Tech, six million dollars in development costs and a fat government contract down the drain, stumbled aimlessly until Reemer Bolt could smell the stench of decay seeping into his air-conditioned office and hired a head-hunting agency to find him a safer hole.