Remo knocked on the next room. Getting no answer, he forced it. The room was dark. Deserted. He hurried to the next room. A sleepy man answered.
"See anything of a man in white?" Remo asked
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earnestly. "With no face? We think he might have walked through your walls."
The door slammed in Remo's face and the guest could be heard angrily complaining to the front desk.
Working her way down the corridor, Robin knocked on doors. She was propositioned twice and had to slap one man who refused to take no for an answer.
They rendezvoused near the elevator.
"No sign of him," the SP reported. "Nobody fits the description the gas-station owner gave us. And he wasn't seen in the lobby."
"Then he's gotta be on this floor," Remo offered.
"Maybe he's a master of disguise," Robin suggested.
At the end of a half-hour they had marched every hotel guest out of his or her room.
"Repeat after me," Chiun was telling them. "Krahseevah."
"Krahseevah," they recited. Or those who remained conscious did.
"No, one at a time," Chiun said. "I wish to hear your accents."
One by one, the fifth-floor guests repeated the word krahseevah in accents ranging from a mellow Califor-nian warble to a midwestern twang.
"None of them is Russian," Chiun decided,
"Maybe he's a voice mimic," Remo suggested.
"We're wasting our time," Robin insisted. "He got away. Maybe down the stairs or the elevator."
"No, at least one of us was in the hallway at all times. He couldn't have taken the stairs or the elevator."
"But he's not on this floor. Unless . . . unless he's inside one of the walls."
"Then we will tear down every treasonous wall until we uncover the culprit," Chiun announced, to the horror of everyone, including Remo.
"What do you think?" Remo asked Robin.
"We gotta get this guy. Let's do it!"
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When the lobby switchboard lit up with frightened calls that the fifth floor was being systematically dismantled by maniacs, the police were called. Two patrolmen entered from the elevator with their service revolvers drawn.
Robin met them with a hard face and a resolute tone of voice.
"We have a report of a disturbance on this floor," one of the cops said in a dead monotone.
"Green, OSI," she said, flashing her ID. "We're confiscating this floor in the name of national security."
The cops hesitated. They examined her ID card carefully. Then they eyed her up and down, lingering wistfully on her bustline, which strained at her uniform blouse.
Finally they handed the card back to her. "Sounds like the hotel is being dismantled," one of them said while the other stared up and down the corridor.
"Just the walls on this floor," Robin said crisply. "We're looking for stolen military equipment we believe to be hidden in the walls."
The cops hesitated and went off into a corner to confer.
Finally they said, "We'll have to check with our superiors."
"Have them call Grand Forks AFB. But do it from the lobby. This floor is off-limits to civilians."
The police reluctantly departed. Robin found Remo and explained the situation to him.
Remo was tearing crumbling plaster chunks from the room the Krahseevah had occuped. "Can you really confiscate a hotel?" he asked, his hand crushing plaster like a jackhammer. "A tree I can understand. But an entire hotel?"
"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."
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