This problem occurred to a Master of Sinanju in A.D. 427 (by western dating) when a Himalayan prince put his brothers as guards above and below him, and arranged it so that his son hated the prince's brothers, so that the brothers knew that if the prince died, his son would become prince and slaughter them all. This was known to the Master of Sinanju, the reigning assassin in an ages-old house of assassins whose labors went to support a tiny village in cold bleak North Korea.

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The Master knew that people worked with their fears instead of their minds. Because they were afraid of heights, they thought others would be. Because they slipped on smooth stone walls, they thought others would. Because they moved with noise, they thought others did and their ears would be protection.

The fortress sandwich was always open in the middle and that Master of Sinanju had taken less than a minute to realize he had only to move up the wall and enter at the level of the prince's room to complete his duty, and thus win that year, as it was written in the records of Sinanju, food and grain for ten years from a grateful enemy prince. Also a bust of that king, which Remo had once seen stored in that peculiar domicile in the village of Sinanju, a town he did not intend to return to ever again no matter how many generations of master assassins it had produced, none of whom had ever given one more minute of thought to wondering about how to penetrate the fortress defense.

And Remo didn't either.

He found the hotel and didn't even bother to look up.

Hastings Vining, one of the major commodities brokers, owned the hotel and lived in the top two floors. Remo didn't even bother to figure out whether he was sleeping in the twenty-third or twenty-fourth floor. It was the twenty-fourth. It was always the highest floor.

People always equated height with safety and assumed that people would first try to enter from below or then from above. They worried about helicopters and parachutes and even balloons, but