“Where is Miss Waller?”
“She went directly from here.” It was Mallory talking, saturnine, thin and dry-looking. “There’s a private exit to the hall from here. See that panel? Pretty good job of concealing, isn’t it. Miss Waller wanted to leave privately; so we let her go out that way. She is to tell us this afternoon just how to get to the caverns, and will go with our men…”
Mallory’s voice dribbled into silence at the look in The Avenger’s pale glacial eyes. All four stared at him in awe, mixed with a little inexplicable fear, as he walked out of the room with his soft panther tread.
CHAPTER VIII
Icy Prison
Lini Waller was in deadly danger. Fantastic danger! The Avenger knew that. The nature of the danger was almost clear to him. But not quite. There was just one thing to be done now: trace the girl, who had gotten away for the simple reason that it had never occurred even to The Avenger that there might be a private, practically secret, door directly out of the conference room.
“Mon, how can ye trace her?” inquired MacMurdie gloomily. “Ye haven’t a thing to work on.”
“We have a few things to work on,” said Benson quietly.
“Such as?” said Smitty, almost as pessimistic as Mac.
“Lini has given us the key, I think.” Benson quoted her bemused words: “ ‘I was taken to the icy caves of the ancient race… A cave of ice, cold and bare, bright with the white light that has burned all these thousands of years.’ That was what she said.”
“How could a light burn thousands of years?” demanded Mac.
“That,” said The Avenger, softly, “is a highly interesting point. But it is not what we are concerned with at the moment. The thing that is more relevant right now is Lini Waller’s reference to ice caves.” The pale eyes were glittering with the flaming genius behind the paralyzed, white countenance. “She thought she had been taken to the caves discovered by her and her brother. Obviously that is impossible. So she must have thought that because of a similarity in the sites. Now, there are no ice caves in New York or vicinity. But there may be something like them. A refrigerating room. A cave of ice — ice walls.”
“A refrigerating room doesn’t have ice walls,” objected Smitty. “Unless it could mean white tile.”
“White tile doesn’t look like ice, ye overgrown lummox,” snorted Mac.
“Glass,” said Benson. “Glass blocks. They might be used.” He went on slowly with brilliant method. “One of the four Foundation directors… well, Wittwar’s business requires refrigerating rooms for meat packing. And Mallory is the head of that business under Wittwar.”
In an incredibly short time the three were zipping through the Holland Tunnel, under the Hudson River toward Jersey, where the newest and most modern of the Wittwar Packing Co. storage plants was located, in Newark. And in this plant, glass blocks had been used in walls between refrigerating rooms.
“If Lini Waller was kidnaped and taken to a Wittwar refrigerating warehouse,” said Smitty, as their car shot out of the New Jersey end of the tunnel, “then a Wittwar man would seem to be behind the crime. Wittwar himself, maybe.”
“I’d say ’twould be the man, Mallory,” Mac retorted. “But then it could be either of the others too. Just because the girl was held in a Wittwar building doesn’t mean that somebody else couldn’t have sneaked her in.”
They reached the new warehouse building. It was not quite noon. At that hour, trucks were pulling up to the loading platform empty, and rolling away from it loaded. Men in stained whites were as busy as ants. It was a common looking scene.
“Ye want to get in unseen, Muster Benson?” said Mac.
The Avenger nodded. “Yes. We’ll wait till noon.”
The twelve-o’clock whistle blew in a neighboring factory. At the warehouse, a last truck was loaded and pulled away. Then truck drivers got out their lunches and settled in their cabs to eat; or else they went to nearby restaurants. Warehouse workers did the same. In a little less than ten minutes Benson, Smitty and Mac slid in through the wide loading doorway with no one around to see.
Benson had talked with the architect’s office to confirm his guess about a glass-block wall in the Wittwar meat-storage building. He knew the layout of the warehouse. “Top floor,” he said. “The glass-block partitions are in a row of coldrooms designed for frozen meats. That row is on the third floor.”
They went up broad stairs, ducked off onto the second floor for a moment to avoid a man coming downstairs munching an apple, then went on up to the top story. There was no one up here; and at a glance they could see that only part of the top floor was used at all. The new warehouse still wasn’t needed in all its capacity.
“Now?” said Smitty, looking gigantic and gorillalike in the dimness of the top story. He had his coat collar up. It was cold up there.
“The row with the glass block walls is here on the side,” said Benson, leading the way to the right. There was a narrow corridor. On the right were many doors. They started looking for a refrigerating room that wasn’t being used. “Cold and bare,” the girl had said the “cave” was.
The fourth door they opened revealed an unused room. Mac looked sourly at the door. It was tremendous, as refrigerator doors tend to be. Thick with insulation, metal-paneled back and front, it was like the door of a bank vault. “I’d hate to have this door locked on me,” the Scot murmured dourly.
“Might be a good idea,” jeered Smitty. “You’re about as cheerful as a block of ice anyhow. A coldroom would be a swell spot for you to be locked in.”
As the door was swung open entirely, lights were automatically lit in the bare, icy chamber. The lights, white and cold, revealed only one thing in the place, a wide bench, or low table. And it revealed walls of glass block that did look remarkably like ice. The Avenger’s pale eyes went to that bench. And into them at last came a glitter of dawning knowledge. The presence of the bench tended to confirm that knowledge. He went to it, with the giant Smitty and the dour Scot beside him. He bent down, then nodded.
At one end of the bench were three long, silky dark hairs. They matched exactly the hair of Lini Waller; The Avenger knew it was an exact match because his rare eyes never failed to distinguish shades of color. Lini had been on that bench. This cold barren place had been her prison chamber…
There was a soft but heavy thud behind the three! They whirled. Richard Benson didn’t seem to move fast, even when he was in a hurry. That was because his movements were so perfectly coordinated. But he got to the ponderous refrigerator door almost before it had stopped closing. Almost, but not quite. There was a rasping sound outside as he tried to get his steel-strong fingers on some projection and swing the door open again. The rasping was the sound of the heavy lever being locked home.
And now there was hardly a crack showing where the massive door fit into the wall. On the inside of the door was no handle or projection at all. There was a place where there had been one, to comply with safety rules.
But it had been removed. The light had gone out with the door’s closing.
“Caught!” grated Mac, more in fury than in fear. “The skurlies! And we thought we were smart in sneakin’ in here without bein’ seen!”
“Ouch!” came Smitty’s voice in the next second. “I burned myself!”
“Burned yersel’, did ye say?” Mac snapped. “And how would ye burn yersel’ in a rrrefrigeratin’ room?” Only in moments of stress did the Scott roll his r’s.
“Anyhow, I burned myself,” Smitty insisted.
The Avenger’s flashlight went on. It was a powerful little thing, designed by Smitty in an off-hour, tossed off by a brilliant mind usually more engrossed with abstruse electrical problems than with things so humble as flashlights.