"It's just this floor. And between you and me, I have no idea what my jurisdictional limits are in a situation like this. I just want this guy any way I can nail him."
"Well, I have some good news for you," Remo said. "Check out the closet."
Robin looked. On the floor of the closet was a heap covered by a sheet. Under the sheet was an assortment of circuit boards and other mechanical devices, two pairs of Calvin Klein blue jeans, and a Styrofoam cooler crammed with porterhouse steaks.
"Bingo!" Robin Green said. "Now all we need is the thief himself."
But they turned up no trace of the Krahseevah. They finally gave up after reducing the inner walls of the fifth floor to skeletal supports. Chiun suggested that the outer wall be demolished too. But Remo prevailed upon him that those walls were too thin to contain a human being, and besides the hotel might collapse. Chiun reluctantly concurred.
"He's done it again," Robin said as they stood in the room they had chased the Krahseevah to. "Now what?"
Remo happened to notice the telephone receiver. It was lying on the floor where the Krahseevah had dropped it when they surprised him.
"He was making a call," Remo said. "Let's see if he completed it. Might lead us somewhere."
"What if he was just sending out for Chinese?" Robin asked.
"Let's not sink into total despair. We haven't done too badly so far."
Robin Green looked around the fifth floor. It was a shambles in which identical furniture arrangements surrounded them like some Daliesque repeating image.
"I wish to God I knew how I'm going to explain this," she said weakly. "I'll have to write a report as thick as the Yellow Pages."
9
Down in the iobby, Remo asked the switchboard operator if she had any record of an outgoing call from room 5-C.
Even though Remo did his best to be polite, the operator quailed from him as if from a polar bear lumbering into her cubicle. It was the plaster dust on his face and hair that frightened her. She had fielded the frenzy of calls during the early-morning hours when it looked as if the hotel was about to come crashing down.
"One . . . one moment," she said jerkily. She called up a file on her terminal screen.
"One call was made at five-oh-two," she told him. "It lasted less than a minute."
"What's the number?" Remo asked.
"It's this one," she said, placing a trembling pink-painted nail on a line of green glowing digits.
Remo memorized the number.
"Okay. Now get me an outside line."
When the operator handed him her headset, Remo took her by one elbow and eased her out of her chair.
"This is private," he said gently but firmly. "Take a coffee break. I won't be long."
Remo dialed a number. It rang a chiropractor's office in Santa Ana, California, and then was routed through the switchboard of radio station KDAD in
93
94
nearby Riverside, finally ringing a phone on the desk of Dr. Harold W. Smith in Folcroft Sanitarium, the cover for CURE.
"Smith? Remo here. We're making progress. I don't have time to explain it all right now, and maybe you wouldn't believe me if I did, but we traced the thief to a Holiday Inn. Recovered some of the stuff he filched. But he slipped away.'"
"Where?" Smith's lemony voice inquired.
"Into the Twilight Zone, for all I know. Look, it's complicated. I'll fill you in later. Just trust me. Here's a phone number. Can you tell me who he was calling? It's our only lead."
"One moment, Remo," Smith said.
At Folcroft, Smith called up the reverse telephone directory data base. It was an electronic version of a telephone-company publication few knew existed. It listed all phone numbers in numerical order by region, cross-referencing each one to the subscriber's name and address.
Smith keyed in the area code-which he recognized as Washington, D.C.-then the exchange, and finally the last four digits.
"Oh, my God," he said hoarsely, staring at the answer.
"Yeah? What've you got?" Remo asked.
"It's the Soviet embassy in Washington."
"Great! It fits, Smitty. The thief spoke Russian."
"He did? Remo, if the Soviets have been systematically looting LCF-Fox, there's no telling how much damage they could do-have already done."
"Maybe it's time Chiun and I paid a courtesy call on the embassy," Remo suggested.
"No. Don't. Things are bad enough. This could escalate into a major diplomatic incident. This requires careful planning. If the trail is cold, you will both return to Folcroft for debriefing at once. I will decide how to proceed once I speak with the President."
95
"You're the boss, Smitty. See you soon."
By the time Remo left the switchboard desk, the lobby was filled with local police officers and a contingent of high-ranking Air Force officers and SP's from Grand Forks Air Force Base.
Robin Green was excitedly attempting to explain the ruined state of the fifth floor.
"I'm telling you," she flung at them, "I didn't steal any of that stuff. It was the Russian. And he's probably hiding inside one of these walls laughing at us. But you turkeys are so afraid of lawsuits you won't check it out."
Chiun stood back from the tight knot of uniforms, his face as innocent as a child's.
Remo sidled up to him. "What's going on?"
"They are badgering that poor girl," Chiun told him.
"They're going to want to talk to us next," Remo said. "And Smith is recalling us to Folcroft. Let's slip out the back."
"Oh, they will not bother us. I have already told them I do not even know that poor unfortunate girl whose ravings are plainly the product of a deranged mind."
"You said that?"
"Of course. How could I keep Emperor Smith waiting?"
"But you didn't know that Smith wanted us back until I told you just now."
"Nonsense," Chiun said as they slipped out a fire exit. "I knew you were calling Smith and I knew Smith would call us home. For what else can we do here?"
"I wish there was something we could do to help Robin," Remo said as they got to the waiting jeep.
"I am sure they will find a nice quiet place for her to rest in," Chiun said.
"That's what I'm afraid of," Remo muttered as he
sent the jeep out of the parking area. "Still, that voice does get on the nerves after a while, doesn't it?"
Chiun nodded. He idly picked up a leaf that had blown onto his lap and held it up to the wind. The wind tore it away. "She complains too much," he sniffed.
Remo gave Chiun a sidelong skeptical glance and shook his head slowly.
10
Captain Rair Brashnikov knew he was dead.
All the signs were there. He felt light, disembodied, and he was moving through a dark tunnel at incredible speed. He swished. It was exactly as his grandfather, Illya Nieolaivitch Brashnikov, had once described it to him back in Georgia, USSR, when he was a boy.
Grandfather Brashnikov had been driving his ancient Ford tractor when he suffered a heart attack. He was still sitting in the hard seat, his face slate blue, when the front tire bumped a rock and tipped over. Rair's father was the first on the scene. He had tried reviving his father with artificial respiration, and when that didn't change the blue-turning-gray color of his face, he pounded on his father's chest in frustration.
It was the pounding that did the trick. Grandfather Brashnikov coughed up phlegm and was carried hacking and spitting to the family house, adjacent to the collective potato farm where they all toiled.
That night, over dinner, Grandfather Brashnikov described his experience.
"I was in vast tunnel," he explained, a joyful gleam in his old eyes. "Beyond tunnel were stars, the most scintillating stars ever imagined. I felt myself being hurled through tunnel toward wonderful clean light. That is only word I know to describe this light. It was silvery. Pure.