"And then we will practice the back elbow thrust," Chiun corrected.
"That too," Remo said.
Chiun said nothing. But he looked pleased.
CHAPTER FIVE
Baron Isaac Nemeroff had rented the entire penthouse floor of the Stonewall Hotel in Algiers.
He had done it in a manner unusual for the man who owned the corporation that owned the corporation that owned the hotel. He had sent a telegram to the hotel management asking to lease the floor for six months.
He had sent telegrams to decorators and builders advising them that he wanted special remodelling work done on the penthouse floor.
He had sent a telegram to the telephone company requesting that a company representative discuss with one of his aides the phone service required to be installed, including special conference lines and scrambler devices.
By telegram, he had hired sound experts from Rome to make sure that the central section of the penthouse, which had been remodelled into a conference room, was absolutely un-bugged.
It had taken him three weeks to do all these things and at the end of the third week, a small news item appeared in the Algiers English-language paper:
What's on tap for the fabulously wealthy Baron Isaac Nemeroff? He's taken over the entire penthouse floor of the Stonewall Hotel, remodelled it and installed security devices that would do credit to the American Secret Service. Must be something big in the wind for the Baron. Hmmmm?
Baron Nemeroff saw the news item while eating his daily breakfast, which unfailingly consisted of orange juice, grape juice, four eggs, one chocolate eclair, and coffee with milk and four spoonfuls of sugar.
He sat on one of the patios of his gargantuan estate, high on a hill overlooking the interior city of Algiers, nodding his head in approval of the story. He folded the paper and placed it carefully on the table next to his empty juice glasses. He wiped his mouth and swallowed the last few flakes of éclair which he scooped up off the cake plate with his fingertips.
Only then did he laugh.
The baron's laugh was not a pleasant event. It sounded like a bray, and looked as if it should have been a bray, because it came from a face that was mule-like. Nemeroff's head was long and rectangular, with a jutting jaw and a sloped forehead. A thick shock of red hair flew backwards from the top of his skull. His eyes were big and seemed to be vertical ovals. The long, broad triangle of his nose was pasted grossly on a face whose skin was pale, freckled and testified to the anguish of sunburn.
Nemeroff was six-feet-eight niches tall, weighed 156 pounds, and he required six meals a day to keep his weight that high. A metabolic imbalance burned up energy as fast as he could take it in. His body was always moving; a foot shook as it dangled over his other leg, his hands drummed on the table, he waved as if to shoo off imaginary insects. His sleep was restless, troubled and twitchy, and could cost him five pounds of his weight.
Missing a meal or two could drop his weight ten pounds. He would starve to death within seventy-two hours.
So he stuffed himself like a caged goose being readied for liver pate.
And now he laughed; it was an evil, hectic laugh that shook his body and seemed visibly to burn up some of his store of energy.
He looked from his balcony toward the central city of Algiers, lying low before him, crowned by its tallest building, the Stonewall Hotel, and he laughed some more.
It had gone exactly as he had planned. The intelligence experts of nations around the world would spend their time breaking into, bugging, de-bugging, bugging each other's bugs, tripping over each other, trying to find out what was happening on the 35th floor of the Stonewall Hotel.
He brayed some more. They should have asked; he could have told them. Absolutely nothing was happening there.
The whole thing had been a front, a ruse to keep intruders away from his estate, where the Baron's real business would be conducted during the next several days.
He left nothing to chance.
And now, the moment of hilarity over, he looked at his breakfast guest, the sweating hulk of jelly who would soon be the president of Scambia.
Vice President Asiphar had been watching the baron intently, wanting to inquire into the cause of his good humour, but afraid it would be unseemly.
"It all goes well, my vice president," Nemeroff said. His voice was reedy and high-pitched. "Forgive my laughing, but I was thinking of how foolish are the men who would stop us, and how cleverly we will outwit them, you and I."
"And your guests?" asked Asiphar, who pushed away from in front of him the remnants of a Ry-Krisp cracker, which, along with black coffee, had been his breakfast.
"They will begin arriving in the next day. Come, let me show you our arrangements."
He stood quickly, and did not notice the look of disappointment on Asiphar's face. The vice president followed him to the edge of the balcony and turned his face in the direction of the baron's outstretched hand.
"You'll notice that there is only one road leading to this villa," he said. "And, of course, there are armed guards along its length. Every visitor must be approved by me. There is no other way for a car to approach."
Down came the arm, quickly, and up went the other, sweeping back and forth across the vegetation-shrouded hill that sloped away from them.
"There are men stationed all over those slopes," Nemeroff said. "Armed men, who will know how to handle any would-be intruders. And dogs, whose appetite for unwanted company leaves nothing to be desired." He brayed once, softly. "And there are electronic devices, electric eyes, infra-red television cameras, hidden microphones, that can detect and pinpoint the presence of any intruder immediately."
He turned away from the balcony. He shot both hands skyward, over his head. "And, of course, our helicopter fleet continually patrols the sky over the castle." Asiphar looked upward. One plane circled lazily over the stone pile that was Nemeroff's castle, its silhouette a deep red-almost black-against the washed-out blue sky.
Nemeroff turned from the rail and put his arm over the shoulder and around the massive back of Asiphar.
"So it is foolproof, my vice president. We shall not be disturbed."
Gently, he steered Asiphar toward the glass doors that led into the castle. "Come, I will show you our meeting facilities, and you must tell me of your flight from Switzerland. How were the stewardesses?"
He brayed and listened intently as Asiphar described the women on the plane. In great detail.
Nemeroff was dressed in white, from neck to toe and the white seemed more brilliant than the fine linen it was, against the backdrop of Asiphar's dark suit. The vice president had travelled incognito from Switzerland, and so had stored his uniforms away, wearing only a black silk suit. It was soaked through now with perspiration and under the arms were white granular rings where his sweat had saturated the suit, and then dried, leaving only the salt remains.
The two men stood in front of an immense oil painting of a Russian Cossack, in battle array, atop a black charger as Nemeroff explained "There are seventy rooms in the castle, more than enough for all our… business associates." He pressed a button, hidden in the wooden frame of the painting, and the painting silently slid aside, revealing a small stainless steel elevator compartment.
They stepped inside and Nemeroff pressed a button marked V.
Noiselessly, without even the sensation of starting, the elevator moved upward. Quickly, the door opened, and they stepped out into a giant room, fully one hundred feet long and forty feet wide. Its walls were hewn of the same rough stone of which the castle itself had been built.
The room was so large it dwarfed the giant mahogany conference table that had been set up in its direct center, but as Asiphar looked, he slowly realized that the table held chairs for forty men. The chairs were of soft red glove leather, and in front of each chair on the table was a desk blotter, a yellow pad, a silver tray of pencils, a carafe, and a crystal stem goblet.
"Our meetings will be held here," Nemeroff said. "In this very room, within the next three days, will be made the decisions that will make you president of your nation."
Asiphar smiled, his white teeth playing lighthouse in the night of his face.
"… and will make your nation a power among the powers of the earth," Nemeroff said, his arms gesticulating wildly.
"Imagine," he said, slowly walking Asiphar around the room. "A nation that is under crime's flag. A retreat for all the hunted of the world. The place where no power can touch them. And you will control that nation. You, Asiphar. You will be a man among men. The most powerful man in the world."
He smiled, a grim, thin-lipped smile that spoke more truth than his words, but Asiphar did not see his smile.
His eyes, instead, were drawn to an immense dome in the center of the room's ceiling, through which sunlight poured into the conference room. The dome was of stained glass, in carefully leaded sections worked into a symbolic Byzantine religious design.