Muttered words—and two men came in!
The first was a thick-set Oriental whose coarse, brutal features and abnormally long arms were simian rather than human. The second Brian recognized; a slender, elegant man wearing a blue turban—in fact the man whom a waiter had reported to be an Indian prince!
They lifted the body and carried it out. The communicating door was closed, and Brian heard the click of a lock.
“Don’t speak!” The words were hissed in his ear. “This room is wired!”
The new Sir Denis crossed to the recently closed door and locked it. He turned and beckoned Brian to follow him. In the lobby: “Say nothing,” he whispered, “but take your cue from me.” Brian nodded. Nayland Smith opened the outer door;
shut it again noisily. “Hullo, Merrick! Before your time.” He spoke, now, in a loud tone. “Anything wrong? You look under the weather. Go and lie down. I’ll bring a drink to your room.”
Brian crossed, rather unsteadily, to his own room and went in. Sir Denis’s extemporized “cue” wasn’t far from the truth. This experience had shaken him severely. Even now he couldn’t get the facts into focus.
Nayland Smith rejoined him, carrying two drinks on a tray. He quietly closed the bedroom door behind him.
“I need one, too, Merrick,” he confessed. “That premature entrance nearly resulted in a second murder—yoursi”
“But——”
“Wait a minute.” Sir Denis held up his hand. “Let’s get the important thing settled first, because there’s a lot to say and not much time to say it. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t wonder which of us is the real Nayland Smith. I had a fair chance to study my double—and I felt like a man looking in a mirror. Hark back to the time I stayed in Washington. Ask me something about your home life that nobody could know who hadn’t lived with you.”
Brian tried to force his bewildered brain to think clearly, and presently an idea came.
“Do you remember Father’s dog?” he asked.
“Do I remember Rufus!” Nayland Smith smiled—and it was the smile Brian had known, the boyish smile which lifted a curtain of years. “Good reason to remember him, Merrrick.” He pulled up his left trouser leg. “There’s the souvenir Rufus left me when I tried to break up a scrap he was having with a Boston terrier. Rufus thought my interference unsporting! It was you yourself who phoned the doctor, and damn it! He wanted to give me Pasteur injections!”
And, in that moment, all doubt was washed out. Brian knew that this was the real Nayland Smith, that the man he had been employed to work with was an impostor—and a miraculous double!
He held out his hand. “Thank God it’s you that’s alive!”
“I have done so already, Merrick, devoutly. I have passed through the unique experience of witnessing my own execution. I was desperately tempted to rush to the aid of my second self. But to do so could only have meant that the super-criminal, the most dangerous man in the world today, would have slipped again through my fingers. So I clenched my teeth when the thug sprang out on him and said to myself, ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes Nayland Smith’!”
“Who is—who was—the man impersonating you? It was a star performance. Even the British Embassy in Cairo fell for him! So did my father.”
Nayland Smith pulled out the familiar pipe and began to load it.
“So would my own mother, if she had been alive. . . . You’re staring at my pipe? Fortunately I had a spare one with me. The poor devil who was strangled probably has the other in his pocket. I don’t know who he was, Merrick. But he must have been a talented actor, with a nerve of iron.”
“His nerve began to fail.”
“I don’t wonder. They had news of my escape. There wasn’t room in New York for two Nayland Smiths!”
He rapped out the words like so many drum-taps, and at a speed which Brian realized that his impersonator had never acquired.
“He had every intonation of your voice, Sir Denis! All your gestures, every mannerism. Even that trick of twitching at the lobe of your ear! And I believe he smoked more than you do.”
Nayland Smith smiled. “Sounds like overacting! Poor devil. He probably played for big stakes. He had several weeks to study me, Merrick, while I was a prisoner in that damned house in Cairo.”
“In Cairo! Then it must have been you, yourself, I saw in a room with barred windows—the house of the Sherif Mohammed!”
Sir Denis stared for a moment, and then: “This is news,” he admitted, “but probably right. You can tell me later. We have little time, and you’re entitled to know the truth.”
He lighted his pipe, stood up and began to walk about.
“I had been on a mission behind the Bamboo Curtain. We had information that Dr. Fu Manchu was operating with the Red Chinese. Knowing the Doctor intimately, I doubted this. He controls a world-wide organization of his own, the Si-Fan. And if anyone succeeds in taking over China it won’t be the Communists!”
This was so like what the false Nayland Smith had told him, that Brian listened in growing wonder . . .
“On my way back, by sea (secretly, as I thought) I walked into a trap in Suez which I should have expected an intelligent schoolboy to avoid, and a few hours later found myself a prisoner in the house of the Sherif Mohammed. The Si-Fan had traced me. I was in the hands of Dr. Fu Manchu!”
“How long ago was that?”
“Roughly, two months. I had secured evidence that Fu Manchu had recently been in China, for his chief-of-staff, a brilliant old strategist, General Huan Tsung, was operating under cover right in Peiping. Some highly important scheme was brewing, and I scented that it would be carried out, not in the East, but in the West. I was right!
“It became clear from the beginning of my imprisonment that Fu Manchu hadn’t planned to kill me. For some reason, he wanted me alive! My ancient enemy was there in person, in the house of the Sherif Mohammed; and at first I had easy treatment. I was well fed and allowed to exercise in a walled courtyard. But for several hours every day I was brought to a room, two windows of which were barred, as you state, and put through a sort of brain-washing by Dr. Fu Manchu. He spoke to me from behind an iron grille high up in one wall——”
“I have seen it!”
“Remarkable. Details later. He argued on ideological grounds, tried to convert me to the theories of the Si-Fan. Sometimes, he taunted me. He worked over me, Merrick, like a skilled performer playing on a stringed instrument. And not for a long time did the fact dawn that every move I made, every word I spoke, some other person, hidden behind the grille, studied, watched, listened to!
“He betrayed himself once only, but from that moment I knew he was always there—and a hazy idea of the plot began to appear. Someone was being trained to impersonate me! The scheme wasn’t a new one. I believe Fu Manchu had had it in mind for several years; probably searched the world for my near-double. I suspect, but may be wrong, that tape recordings of these conversations were made on a hidden microphone, to help my understudy to perfect his impersonation at leisure.”
“It beats everything I ever heard! Of course you tried to make a getaway?”
Nayland Smith checked his restless steps and stared grimly at Brian.
“During the day relays of Fu Manchu’s professional stran-glers had me covered. You saw two of them just now. At night there was a hidden microphone in my room. It not only recorded my slightest movements, but could also be used to transmit a note inaudible to human ears. Its production is Fu Manchu’s secret, as he was good enough to tell me. Its effect would be to kill me instantly by inducing haemorrhage of the brain!”