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.
That was about the time Bolt snapped out of his fascinated daze and mustered the presence of mind to scream.
The trouble was his lungs were the consistency of dead liver and there was nothing to scream with.
His eyes saw their own reflection, then they were swallowed by the desk drawer and the drawer was slammed shut with a finality that failed to register on Reemer Murgatroyd Bolt's dead, squashed brain.
REMO LOCKED THE DRAWER and told Chiun, "Assignment done. Time to call Smith."
Harold Smith sounded relieved. "You are positive the device is inoperative?"
"We got R.M., his technician and everything that looked electronic."
"I have finished reading the e-mail files. This is a rogue operation. qNM is not corporately responsible. Exit quietly."
"Will do," said Remo.
Then Smith's voice turned sharp. "One moment." Smith's voice became raw. "Remo, I am looking at a real-time-feed visual of the device. It is opening again."
"So? Maybe that means it's dying. Don't animals relax when they die?"
"This is a machine. It was in shutdown mode. Now it is unfolding again."
Remo said to Chiun, "Uh-oh."
"What is that?" asked Smith.
"Nothing," said Remo.
Then Smith said, "It is deploying."
Silence made the line hum.
Then Harold Smith said hoarsely, "Remo, it just emitted another burst of concentrated heat. Stand by."
It was the longest twenty minutes of Remo's life.
Smith came back on the line. "Remo, it has struck Baldar Mountain in the Asgard Range."
Remo groaned. "There goes Norway."
"No. Antarctica. We were fortunate. It is uninhabited. Thousands of pounds of ice are now steam. That is all. But the ParaSol 2001 is not folding up. It's still tracking. It may strike again."
"Probably a last gasp," Remo said hopefully.
But it wasn't.
"Another burst!" groaned Smith. "It is out of control."
"Well, just shoot it down."
"That is the problem. We cannot fire missiles into space."
"Well, you can't just let it run amok."
"I must contact the President at once."
Chiun spoke up. "There is another way."
"What's that?" asked Remo and Smith at the same tine.
"A Master of Sinanju must ascend into the Void to deal with this scourge that is a sun dragon. So Salbyol foresaw."