"Now what?"
"I'll figure out something."
"You won't have heard the last of him," she said. "He's going to come after you. He'll leave tracks. Keep your eyes open for his tracks."
"Thank you, I will."
Holly Broon stood up. She moved around the back of Corbish's desk. He had not yet examined her cleavage and that disturbed her slightly.
She leaned over the corner of his desk, toward him, so that the cleavage was unmistakable and unignorable. She had to give him credit; he tried to ignore it.
"I'm going to like working with you, together," she said, stretching out the "together" to emphasize its togetherness. "We can make some kind of magic here."
He smiled at her, and met her eyes, happy at the opportunity to stop looking at her bosom.
"I think you're right," he said.
"Congratulations on your impending elevation to the presidency of IDC."
"Thank you, Miss Broon. I really am sorry about your father."
"Call me Holly. And let's do ourselves a favor. Let's not crap each other. My father was a thick-headed bastard who inherited a corporation and wasn't quite dumb enough to ruin it. In fact, what I can't figure out is how he had enough sense to send you after CURE."
Gorbish looked at her, searching her eyes. "Frankly," he said, "neither could I."
Both smiled. "We understand each other now," she said. "One more question?"
"Yes?"
"Why is your wife an alcoholic?"
"She can't take corporate pressure. I think she expected me to be a pipe and slippers type."
"A man on the rise like you may need a more compatible helpmate," Holly Broon said.
"You may be right."
She stood up straight. "I'll have my father's funeral in three days. In the meantime, IDC'll roll along by itself. If any decisions are needed, you and I will make them. I'll call a meeting of the executive committee after the funeral, and we'll name you president. Anything wrong with that schedule?"
"No, Miss Broon… Holly."
"I'll talk to you tomorrow."
On the way back to her car, Holly Broon mused about how the structure of large corporations seemed to protect them from all kinds of managerial abuse. Her father had been a fool who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. Blake Corbish was younger, perhaps a little smoother, but not really any brighter. He thought the use of CURE would end with IDC's super-success. He had no greater ambitions. It was unfortunate, she thought, that his vision was so limited. With CURE in his pocket, a person could take over the world.
Check that, she thought. With CURE in her pocket, a woman could take over the world.
First she would have to take over Blake Corbish. The world was next.
Still she would have felt better if he had been more interested in her cleavage.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Holly Broon had misjudged Blake Corbish. Despite his deficiencies as a boob-man, he had no shortage of vision. One of his secrets was that he was singlemindedly ambitious without giving the impression of being over-ambitious and, therefore, dangerous. It explained the corporate corpses of a number of vice presidents that Blake Corbish had clambered over on his way to the top. The final corporate corpse was just that—a corpse—and Blake Corbish would soon be on the top of the heap. At least the top of the IDC heap.
There were other heaps to climb: the United States, the world.
Corbish now had no doubt about his ability to handle Holly Broon. Her clumsy pass at him was not much less than a proposal of marriage. It probably would be a good idea, too, solidifying his control of IDC through stock ownership, and it might solve the problem of his drunken wife.
Still, there was divorce to consider. The American people had grown more sophisticated, but were they ready yet to elect a divorced man as President of the United States?
Blake Corbish looked at the straight pen in the old-fashioned inkwell on his desk, which he had selected as a someday-publicizable idiosyncracy, and he pondered for a moment.
Divorce? Then he broke up laughing. Why divorce?
Why divorce when an accident would suffice? And he had at his control the world's finest lethal accident creator. Remo Williams. He stopped laughing abruptly and reached for the phone. But there were other things for Remo to do first.
"The first thing you've got to do," Corbish told Remo officiously, "is to find Smith."
"Just find him?" Remo asked.
"For the time being, just find him," Corbish said.
"That's not really in my field of strengths, activity-wise, corporately speaking," Remo said. "I'm more a doer than a looker."
"No one knows Smith better than you," Corbish said. "I thought you might have the best chance of tracking him down."
Remo shrugged, a small gesture of displeasure.
"Of course," Corbish said, "this problem would not have arisen if you had disposed of the Smith question when you first saw it coming up."
"All right, all right," Remo said. This eternal bitching was getting on his nerves.
"He called from Cleveland," Corbish said. "Ohio."
"I'm glad you straightened that out for me," Remo said. "I was thinking of Cleveland, Alabama."
"How will you proceed?" Corbish asked.
"I don't know. I told you I'm not much of a looker. I thought I might put an ad in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Tell Smith to turn himself in right away or have his credit cards revoked. How would I know how I'm going to proceed? I don't even know where he is, for God's sake. I can tell you one thing; he's not waiting for us in Cleveland."
"Where would he be likely to turn up?"
"The Ladies Sodality of the First United Wasp Church would be my guess," Remo said. "You know this room hasn't changed much at all since I was first here? That was, oh, ten years ago."
"Yes, yes," Corbish said impatiently. "Well, do what you think is best. Just get Smith. Are you taking the Chinaman with you?"
"The Chinaman? You mean Chiun?"
Corbish nodded.
"Do us all a favor," Remo said. "I don't want to have to deal with still another director. Don't ever call him a Chinaman to his face. Chiun is Korean."
"So?" Corbish said, demonstrating in one word his belief that Korean, Chinese, Japanese, it was all the same to him.
"Don't ever say it," Remo said.
"All right. By the way, that was a good performance on the T. L. Broon assignment."
"Thanks," said Remo, warming to the kind of praise he had never been able to draw from Smith.
"Well, that will be all," Corbish said. He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a plastic tag. "By the way," he said, handing the tag to Remo, "you might start wearing this. It will facilitate your entrance into the grounds."
Remo looked at the playing card-sized pieces of plastic embossed with his name and a long serial number. "You mean I should shlepp this around?"
"No. It has a pin on the back. Wear it."
"It seems kind of strange, considering the work I do and all."
"Leave the policy quanta to me. Do as you're told. And find Smith."
Remo left the office. Outside the room, he shredded the plastic tag in the palm of his right hand, and dropped it into a wastepaper basket. When he went outside, he scaled the twelve-foot high stone wall, and to cool off his anger, ran all the way into town and rented the first motel room he could find.
Later, in the room, he confided to Chiun, "I don't think this new guy is playing with a full deck."
"Aha, you see. Already Chiun's words are coming true. You now dislike your new emperor."
"I didn't say I dislike him. But can you imagine giving me an identification tag?"
"It is often done with children. So they do not get lost on buses," Chiun said.