Benson stepped to the door of Conroy’s apartment. The door was unlocked. The Avenger’s white head nodded. It would be unlocked so that, in case of an alarm, those within could make a quicker getaway. He opened this door an even smaller distance than he had opened the one down the hall. In through the crack, he inserted a dime-sized mirror on the end of a slim metal rod. It was very much like a tiny dentist’s mirror.
The mirror caught the reflection of a man standing just inside the doorway. This place was being guarded closely, very closely. Benson tilted the mirror till it caught a tiny segment of a man’s head. The back of his head. He had his back to the door. However, he was so close to it that if it were opened another two inches it would touch his body and give the show away. And if that happened — if he let out one whoop to warn the rest — Nellie…
Smitty shuddered and gnawed at his lip. But The Avenger had the answer. Very softly, he shut the door again. Then he tapped on the panels, hardly more than a touch. He flattened against the wall next to the door as he did so.
The man inside turned. With his marvelous hearing, Benson could catch the stir of his clothes through the panel. Then the door opened, and he poked his head out. “What’s—”
He never concluded the question he thought he was asking his pal outside. Benson’s steel-strong left hand went over his lips, while the wire-cable fingers of his right pressed at the back of his neck! The man flopped a little, then slumped. Benson laid him on the floor, careful that his shoes didn’t scrape and make a warning noise. The Avenger stared down at him for a moment, icy eyes as impersonal and calm as if he were looking down at nothing but the floor itself.
Smitty felt a bit like shivering himself. Never, in danger or rage, crisis or thought, could that face move. The paralyzed muscles made a permanent mask of it. The result was often bizarre. At a time of action, when anyone else would have shown extreme emotion, Benson showed none. It made The Avenger, at times, seem more like a vitalized, white-masked statue, a machine, rather than a thing of flesh and blood.
Benson went on down the hall of Conroy’s apartment. A thing with horns over her, in a room with beamed ceilings. And Conroy’s library, the room in which he had been killed by having a needle driven into his brain, was in the rear.
The door down there was wide open. Evidently the men in the room were so sure that no one could get past three guards in a row, that they hadn’t even bothered to close the door, let alone watch it. So Benson and Smitty looked in without hindrance. Looked in — and saw sheer horror!
There was Nellie, bound so that she could move nothing but her fingers, on the divan that a short time ago had been Conroy’s bier. There was the horned head above her, like the head of a god of sacrifice. And over Nellie bent a man with a hammer in his hand! Two other men watched the scene with as much intensity as the fellow with the hammer watched the bound girl. None of them thought of the door.
Nellie bound and a man with a queer small hammer in his hand! Smitty catapulted into the room as if he weighed thirty pounds instead of nearly three hundred. The three yelled and turned. But they had no chance.
Smitty dove at the nearest, swooping down under a gun that had been frantically drawn and inaccurately aimed. He got the man by the legs and half-straightened up, dumping him hard. But he didn’t let go. He whirled him around toward the other two! They went down as if hit by a steel ram. Smitty whirled again, and let go. The first man went head on, bodily, through the air. Went against a wall, and hadn’t the time to get his arms up. He hit head on, and there was a snap that was audible even over the rush Smitty was making toward the remaining two.
He got his vast right hand on the shoulder of the beady-eyed fellow who still held the hammer, and his left hand at the nape of the other man’s neck. The fellow with the hammer was flailing out with it, trying to hit Smitty on the head. The other man was jerking his gun around in a too-limited area and firing with every jerk!
Smitty’s teeth were showing in a sort of stark grin. A grin of death! The two men were dashed together, as the giant’s shoulders gave a convulsive heave. Their heads hit; and the sound was dreadful.
Benson walked to Nellie. Eight seconds ago there had been three live rats in here. Now there were three dead ones. And that was all of that.
Nellie shook her blonde head when The Avenger had released her from the divan and was working at the cords on her wrists and ankles. She stared at Smitty with wide eyes. “When you have a job to do, you don’t play around with it, do you?” she breathed, staring at the three hideously twisted shapes.
The Avenger stared sharply at her. The question had been about the type you’d expect from the honey haired bombshell at such a moment; but somehow Nellie’s tone was different than usual. It seemed dull, without her usual vivacity. And when she stood up and moved, her movements seemed just a little wooden.
Benson’s pale, infallible eyes went over the room. There was the queer little hammer — either one just like the hammer he had seen concealed in Mallory’s office, or the same identical one. There was a compass, with which you could measure an exact segment on a human skull. But the third thing he could not see.
The needle, the slim metal wedge to be driven into a brain according to the marvelous and diabolical directions of an ancient race. There didn’t seem to be any needle around!
“Those shots’ll draw a lot of people here,” said the giant, with a vast arm protectively around Nellie’s slim shoulders for an instant. “And that’s going to mean delay. We’d better beat it, hadn’t we?”
Benson nodded, and they went down the stairs. The Avenger went first. He didn’t waste time with the man at the door who, it appeared, hadn’t heard the shots down all those floors. Benson creased him with Mike, and the three went back to Bleek Street.
They got into the big top-floor room just in time to hear a faint crying, like the far cry of seagulls. But the cries didn’t come from any bird. They came from the big radio near the end window, which was always on and was always tuned to the crew’s own wave length.
Smitty got to the thing in a half dozen great strides. “It’s Josh!” he exclaimed. “Yelling something. He and Mac… in trouble—”
The sound merged into a far-off crackling, as if a berry crate had been stepped on. Then there was no sound at all, just the low-power hum of the radio itself.
CHAPTER XIV
Forced Landing
The plane, outside of the professional, almost wingless speed ships, was about the fastest thing in the country. It headed west at such a clip as to make a perceptible lengthening out of the sunrise. The sun just seemed to hang still in the east, as if it never would clear the horizon. This was partly imagination, but partly due to the plane’s speed of over three hundred miles an hour almost due west.
In the sealed fuselage were five people. The Avenger was at the controls because he wanted to make all possible time in answer to the cries of Josh Newton from the caves on the Pacific coast. Benson was quite sure the alert Negro and the methodically intelligent MacMurdie had found the Wallers’ caves by now.
Sitting behind the man with the pale steel eyes was Smitty, looking as if he would make the plane go even faster by sheer will power. Then there were three girls — Nellie Gray, Lini Waller and Josh Newton’s wife, Rosabel.
Rosabel was like Smitty: looking as if she were concentrating on making the ship go even faster. Josh was in danger! Her Josh! That had been enough to transform the pretty Negress into a tigress, quietly biding her time, and to make her insist on going west with them.
Lini Waller had turned up once more at Bleek Street just as the four were leaving. Benson had seized her shoulders and stared into her strangely vacant eyes. “We are going to the place where you left your brother. You understand? The caves. Where your brother is.”