At the airport, the agent moistened his lips as Dick Benson approached, moving on the balls of his feet, eyes alert and sinister as a jaguar’s.
“You remember me?” said Benson, lips hardly moving in his paralyzed, linen-white face.
The agent gulped. “Yes, sir,” he said, staring hard.
“I came in here with my wife and little girl, a month ago, to get places for Montreal.”
The agent was shivering as if with palsy. But he shook his head.
“I don’t remember that. I only remember you. You came in alone. There was a phone call about that from Montreal, later. And I said the same thing. You were alone—”
His voice trailed off. His face was literally green, but there was no shaking his story.
Again Benson realized what a terrible force there must be behind this. This man knew better. He had remembered the brown-eyed Alicia and the girl, Alice. His eyes showed it. But something—something—had him so frightened that even with Benson’s pale and flaming eyes on him, he lied. And the cab driver had lied.
Benson went out to the field, leaving the agent white and cowering in the office. Again, he stared, straight ahead, with visions of his wife and child filling his world. So he did not notice the three men from the dark sedan who went furtively into the office after he’d gone.
“O.K., pal,” one said to the shivering agent. “You know what happens to squealers.”
“I didn’t squeal!” the agent sobbed. “I didn’t say a word. I swore he’d come in alone. That face of his!”
The man in the lead thrust a gun against the agent’s belly.
“Which scares you most, pal, his face or this?”
But the reaction was not quite what the gunman had bargained for.
“I don’t know,” the man shivered. “The face… is almost as bad… as a gun!”
Outside, Benson went to the nearest hangar. A group of men there watched him approach. They stared curiously at the dead face, looked uneasily at the flaming ice of Benson’s eyes.
He stared at them collectively, and each man flinched a little when the cold gaze struck him.
“A month ago,” he said, lips curiously immobile in his paralyzed face, “I took a plane from this field for Montreal. I got aboard with my wife and small daughter. Do any of you remember?”
Slowly, they all shook their heads. Benson felt as if he were fighting fog, pillows, and substance that made no resistance to his hardest blows — and yet barred him like a stone wall. However, it was possible that these men, at least, were telling the truth. He didn’t remember seeing any of them that day.
Out on the field near the broad runway he saw a bony, knobby figure of a man with ears that stuck out like sails on each side of a thick-skinned red neck.
He remembered that man and hurried toward him through a red fog of torment.
“You,” he said, to the field attendant who had put him and his family aboard that day. For a moment he could not go on. This was his last chance. If this man lied—
The man moved slowly off, away from the hangars — and from his white-faced questioner. Benson went after him. The last notch of his iron will had been reached. He was ready to tear this tall, bony figure apart. He was ready to rend and slash—
“Easy, mon,” the attendant said out of the corner of his mouth. “I know what ye’d be asking me, and I’m moving from the hangars so nobody can hear. We can’t talk here. The field itself has ears. What hotel are ye stopping at?”
Benson told him. “You… you—”
“I’ll have something to tell ye, soon as I can get away from here.”
Benson literally staggered. A crack in this dreadful blackness at last!
“Hotel Ely,” he said. “Come fast, for the love of God!”
He went to the gate. He didn’t see the three men there, either. They drew a little closer. One got out a gun, but a second caught his arm. The second stared meaningly around at the airport, with frequent figures on it, and shook his head. This was no place to use a gun, his gesture said.
Benson got into his cab, blind with relief, and started off toward the Hotel Ely. He had his man, now. There was something honest in that Scotchman’s narrow, bitter face, with its stony blue eyes. He’d talk. Benson could go to the police now—
But even as he thought that, he knew he couldn’t. It was this one man’s word against a dozen others. No police force would believe so bizarre a tale, on that lopsided witnessing, that a man’s wife and daughter could disappear from a speeding airliner.
No, he’d have to go it alone. He knew that. And his steely body yearned savagely for the fight, while his mind raced on ahead to the slight hope that he’d get Alicia and little Alice back—
A green sedan shot past the cab, angled in, and the cab driver applied his brakes with a squeal of tortured rubber. Benson stared out.
He saw that the cab was in a deserted spot, on the outskirts of Buffalo, in a marsh flat with distant factories bounding it.
The sedan had deliberately forced the cab to the roadside. Benson saw that in a flash, and reached for his gun. But he had no gun. It had been taken from him at the Montreal sanitarium.
“Ram that car!” he snapped to the driver.
The man, wild with fear, either didn’t hear or didn’t obey. The cab slowed still more.
Benson reached through the front window, curled his hand around the man’s throat and jerked back. The driver’s foot slipped from the brake. The cab bounded forward.
In the sedan, two of the three men had guns out and windows rolled down. The driver saw the cab careen toward them as the brakes were released. He swerved wide to avoid it. The two men swerved wide to avoid it. The two men with the gun were jerked sideways so that their shots went wild.
The cab hit the sedan with a grinding roar.
Benson was out of it almost before the noise had died away, and was leaping for the sedan. Not away from it, and its guns, but toward it. In his pale-gray eyes there was a savage, icy smile at the prospect of at last coming to grips with something solid.
That cold and awful smile in the gray flame of his eyes was later to become a hallmark of Dick Benson. With death closing in on him, with the odds hopelessly against him, the smile would appear in the gray ice of his eyes, as though he welcomed death, or at least did not care a snap of his fingers if it struck.
The sedan had rocked away from the cab, almost tipped, then rocked back again on four wheels. And while the three men inside were still fighting for their balance, Benson had the rear door open and was in it.
Just an average-sized man — Richard Henry Benson. Five feet eight, certainly no more than a hundred and sixty pounds. Not at all a big man.
But there is quality as well as quantity to muscle. Ounce for ounce, some muscle tissue is twice as powerful as the ordinary. Now and then you get a man like Benson in whom, ounce for ounce, sinew and muscle are packed with force beyond any scientific explanation. And these rare men do things that are incredible to the average mortal.
With his left hand still on the door lock of the green sedan, Benson’s right lashed out. There was less than a ten-inch swing behind it. But his fist hit the jaw of the nearest man like a knob of iron on the end of an iron lance. The man fell back against his pal as if he had been shot.
Benson caught the wrist of the driver, who was hastily poking a gun over the back of the front seat at him. The gun exploded, but tore a harmless hole in the top of the sedan. One-handed, Benson twisted the arm he held. The driver moaned, then screamed and slumped in the seat.