He too checked purse and flowers.

She smiled again. She pushed through the swinging door into Wesley Pruiss's room. The small arms expert was on the fire escape, looking down and up and around in a never-ending cycle of vigilance.

Wesley Pruiss was still asleep when she entered the room and Theodosia smiled when she saw the gentle, almost boyish look on his placid face. And then her eyes widened in shock.

There was a yellow tag on the front of Pruiss's pajamas. It had writing on it. She moved quickly to the side of his bed and looked down at the tag. It was the inside of a matchbook from which the striker had been torn. The note had been written with a black felt-tipped marker that lay alongside Pruiss's bed with his notepad.

The note read: "Your bodyguards stink." And there was a telephone number after it.

The note had been clipped to the lapel of Pruiss's pajamas with a safety pin and when she removed it, Pruiss woke up and saw her.

She pushed the yellow cardboard into her purse.

"Morning, love," Pruiss said.

She bent over to kiss him, then handed him the flowers. Without even a glance, he dropped them on the table next to his bed.

"I'm sorry I woke you up," she said.

"All right," he said. His voice was deep with despondency. "What else have I got to do but sleep?"

"Don't say that, Wesley. You're going to be as good as new."

"Yeah. As good as a new cripple can be," he said bitterly.

He turned away. When he looked back, he saw her still smiling at him, very bravely. As a reward, he smiled himself.

"Did you sleep well?" she asked.

"Why not? With all those guards you've got around here, who could wake me up?"

"No one came in to bother you?"

"No," Pruiss said. "I just wish somebody had. I wish that guy with the knife had come back and finished the job."

"I won't hear that, Wesley," said Theodosia, her face flushed with anger. "You're an important man. You're going to be even more important. The world can't afford the loss of a man like you."

"It's lost half of me already. The leg half. Don't kid me, Theodosia. I know hopeless when I see hopeless. So do the doctors. Spinal injury. Cripple."

"What do those doctors know?" she asked. "We'll get more doctors. Better doctors."

He thought about that for a moment, looking out the window at the bright sky.

"Maybe, you're right," he said. "You know, there are times when I feel that there's some life in my legs... like I could almost move them. Not much and not often. But once in a while."

He looked at Theodosia for some expression. He caught a brief flash of sorrow on her face that she turned into a smile as she said, "See. You never can tell." But her face told him a different story. It was hopeless and she knew it. He was a cripple, doomed to be a cripple for the rest of his life.

He closed his eyes and said nothing more. He opened his mouth to take the pain pills she gave him and he had nothing to say when she began arranging for an ambulance to take him from the hospital back to the country club where his master bedroom had been converted into a hospital room. But it felt good, even if he wouldn't admit it to her, to be out of the hospital and back to his home, even if it was a new home and one he had not yet had a chance to get used to.

When she went out in the early afternoon, Theodosia left the three bodyguards in his bedroom with orders to leave under no circumstances.

Before leaving the building, she fished the piece of yellow cardboard from her purse and telephoned the number on it.

Remo was lying on the bed in Room 15 of the Furlong Budget Value Dollar Motel when Theodosia rapped firmly on the door.

When he opened it he looked her up and down and asked, "Who are you? Not that it really matters all that much."

"You're the one who left the note?" Theodosia asked.

"Right. That's right," Remo said. "I saw you on television. Ambrosia or something."

"Theodosia."

"Come on in."

He went back to the bed while Theodosia sat on the couch.

"How did you get into that hospital room?" asked Theodosia.

"Don't answer that, Remo," Chiun said as he appeared in the doorway connecting Room 15 and his own Room 17.

"Why not?" Remo asked.

"Because she has not paid you anything and even if she had, we do not give our secrets away. We sell our performance but not knowledge of our techniques."

"Very wise," Theodosia said.

"Actually, it just sounds wise," Remo said. "Even if I told, you wouldn't understand the techniques."

"Try me," said Theodosia. There was a small smile on her face, the smile of a woman who had been underestimated many times before by men who thought that because she had enough chest for everybody, it automatically followed that she didn't have a brain in her head.

"All right," Remo said, holding back a smile of his own, "We saw the guard on the fire escape, the one in the stairwell, the one outside the door. Plus the slug guarding the front door. We only wanted to go into the room, not hurt anybody. So we didn't go any of those ways."

"So mystically we appeared, masked in the cloak of invisibility," said Chiun, with a warning glance at Remo.

Theodosia smiled at him. Chiun smiled back.

Remo shook his head. "No. We figured you had all the openings to the room covered but you didn't cover the non-openings, so we turned a non-opening into an opening."

He nodded to her.

"The windows," she said. "You got in through a window."

"You'll never know that," Remo said. "Now that'sa secret."

"But how did you get to a window? The roof is sealed off and there's only one fire escape up the side, and that one's guarded."

"Secret," Remo said.

"Yes," said Chiun. "Remo is right. It is very secret. We would like to tell you, young lady, but if we tell you, you will tell someone else and he will tell someone else and before you know it, everyone will know how to climb the sides of smooth walls and remove steel plates from over windows and then replace the plates on the way back down. So we cannot tell you."

"Thank you, Little Father," Remo said, "for not telling."

Chiun nodded his appreciation.

"How much?" Theodosia said.

"What are you paying those three blocks you've got now? I guess the cop on the front door is free."

Theodosia nodded. Chiun cleared his throat.

"A thousand a week each," Theodosia said.

"That means two thousand a week," Remo said.

Chiun cleared his throat again. Remo ignored him. "That's a total of six thousand a week," Remo said. "Since we're incalculably better than they are, we can't apply a percentage to it. But let's say, ten thousand a week."

"Too much," Theodosia said.

Chiun cleared his throat again and Remo looked at him in annoyance, before glancing back at the woman.

"Suit yourself," Remo said. "We can always go to work for the people who want to get rid of him."

"You know who they are?" the woman said warily. She had a pencil in her hand but she jabbed it angrily against her small note pad as she asked the question.

"No, but it shouldn't be hard to find them if we'd a mind to," Remo said. Chiun cleared his throat again.

"You think so?" said Theodosia.

"I know so," said Chiun, before Remo could answer. The old Oriental looked confidently at the young dark-haired woman.

"All right. Ten thousand a week. Guard Wesley and find out who's responsible for that attack on him."

Chiun raised a finger. "Not quite," he said, "Who pays for these hotel rooms?"

Theodosia looked around at the worn bedspread, the walked-thin carpet, the water-stained wallpaper near the door.

"All right," she said. "I'll throw in the rooms too."

"Fine," said Chiun. He looked triumphantly at Remo, then leaned closer to him. "See," he said in Korean, "how easily it all goes if you leave the negotiating to me."