Blue Smoke and Mirrors td-78 Page 8

"So which one?" Remo asked, pocketing the twenty.

  "Ned's Cab. We don't have no real cab companies out here. Ned's the only hired driver you can get."

  "Got his number?"

  "Business card's taped to the pay phone. See for yourself."

  "Great," Remo said, hopping out of the jeep. "Thanks."

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  Remo went to the pay phone. He dialed Ned's Cab. Ned himself answered.

  "You picked up a Russian at Ed's Filling Station," Remo said. "Do you remember where you took him?"

  "He wasn't no Russian," Ned insisted. "Told me he was a Czech."

  Remo sighed. "Did he wear a white coverall suit?"

  "That's the one."

  "Now we're getting someplace. Where'd you take him?"

  "I dropped him off at the Holiday Inn on Interstate Twenty-nine."

  "Great. Appreciate it."

  When Remo rejoined the others, Ed asked, "Ned help you out?"

  "He did. Thanks," Remo told him.

  "Good. Because if he didn't, I woulda boxed his ears. Ned's my twin brother."

  "Thanks," Remo said as he climbed back into the jeep. He nodded to the driver and they drove off, Ed waving an oily rag in farewell.

  As they tore along the road, the sun came up, turning the distant sky orange.

  "He was dropped off at a Holiday Inn," Remo told the driver. "Know it?"

  "Sure. All the .local hookers work out of that one."

  "Good. Take us there."

  "You don't think you'll actually find him there, do you?" Robin demanded. "Wouldn't he have switched to a car or another cab?"

  "One halting step at a time," Remo said.

  The desk clerk was extremely helpful. He told them that he would have to speak to the manager before he could answer any questions about the hotel's guests.

  Robin Green, putting on a charming if strained smile, leaned over the desk and whispered something low and breathy.

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  The clerk leaned forward, his brows growing together as he concentrated. His eyes fell to Robin's ample chest.

  "I didn't quite catch that, miss," he began.

  Then Robin yanked his face down onto the shiny countertop and stuck a cocked automatic in his left ear.

  "I said if you're hard of hearing, I got just the thing to clean the wax out of your ears," she shouted.

  The desk clerk looked to Remo with wild, pleading eyes.

  "I'd answer her," Remo said seriously. "She's been like that all day." He smiled. The clerk's face sagged like hot taffy

  "Foreign accent? White coveralls?" he said quickly. "Room 5-C. Been here two weeks. He's registered as Ivan Grozny."

  "Thank you," Robin said politely, releasing the desk clerk."You've been very helpful. Anything else you care to tell us?"

  "The elevator's around the corner."

  They started for the elevator. Remo paused to have a word with the desk clerk. "If you're thinking of giving the room a buzz to warn anyone, don't. We know where you work."

  "My break starts in five minutes."

  "Why not get a head start on it?" Remo suggested pleasantly. "You probably don't want to be on duty when the fun starts."

  They exited the elevator on the fifth floor. Remo led them to the room marked 5-C. He waved for them to stay back, and slipped under the door peephole. No sense in taking any chances.

  Remo put his ear to the door. He heard the unmistakable beeping of a Touch-Tone telephone at work. Good, Remo thought. He's preoccupied. Remo got down on the garish red-and-blue rug and tried to peer under the crack in the door. He was in luck. He saw

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  the legs of assorted furniture. And near a circular lampstand stood a pair of white plastic boots. They were sharp and clear this time. Not fuzzy-looking at all. And they didn't glow.

  Remo took that as a good sign. He eased himself to his feet and joined the others.

  "He's making a call," Remo told them. "This is perfect. Chiun and I will go first. You stay back until we subdue him. If we can."

  "Try to stop me!" Robin said, waving her automatic.

  Remo calmly relieved Robin of her weapon. He held it up and shoved his index finger down the barrel. The mechanism cracked. The slide fell off.

  "I meant it," Remo warned, leaving Robin to stare at her maimed weapon in wonderment.

  "Ready, Chiun?" Remo asked. They placed themselves on either side of the door. Chiun nodded silently.

  "Okay," Remo said."One ... two ... three!"

  Remo cracked the lock with a short-armed blow while Chiun pulverized the hinge-supporting wood with hammerlike blows. The door felt in like a ramp.

  They jumped in. And stopped dead in their tracks.

  The room was empty. The telephone receiver dropped to the rug with a soft thud.

  "Damn!" Remo snapped. "He's made his move. Search everywhere."

  Chiun pulled open the bathroom door. It was empty. Remo checked the closet. Also empty. They looked out the window. The parking lot was deserted.

  Remo lunged into the corridor. "He slipped through one of the walls," he shouted. "Knock on every door. Someone must have seen him. You, airman. Call the front desk. Keep an open line. I want to know if he tries to escape through the lobby."

  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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  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

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  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."

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  "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.

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  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.

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  "Then," he went on, "I felt myself slow down. Something tugged me back. I did not want to leave light. I was dead. I knew it in my heart. I was dead and yet I did not fear death. I wanted to be with light. I think"-he lowered his voice and fixed Rair with his renewed eyes-"I think this light was God."

  "No one believes in God anymore, dedushka," Rair had said. He was fourteen and thought he knew more than his seventy-year-old grandfather.

  "Hush, Kroshka," he said, using a nickname- "Crumb"-Grandfather Brashnikov used when he wished to remind Rair that he had once played on his grandfather's knee. "Let me finish my story. I felt myself drawn back. The light faded in the distance. When I opened my eyes once again, your father-my son-was beating on my chest." He laughed ruefully. "My ribs still ache. I am happy to be with family, but I feel sad too. For I ache for that light the way I used to ache for my dead wife, Saint Basil preserve her."

  Rair never forgot the story of his grandfather, who lived another ten years but came away from being dead with a lighter step and joy-filled heart. He was a man who had faced death and found it an experience filled with hope, not gloom.

  The dark walls of the tunnel flew past Rair. He looked to see his body, but he had none. He was part of the darkness. He looked ahead of him, seeking the pure clean light that had once stirred his grandfather's soul. But he saw nothing like it. Only the snaking, whizzing walls of the tunnel through which he passed, no more substantial than a beam of light himself.

  So this was death, Rair thought. It was not so bad. Certainly preferable to facing a KGB firing squad, which had nearly been his fate.

  As he raced along, Rair Brashnikov reflected on the events that had brought him to his death.