"Do they have to get that close? The traffic isn't that bad!"
"That's right, it isn't," Nick said quietly. "Lean back and get your head down."
"What?" The horse behind them arched his head and neighed. Rita caught her breath. "You mean that's what's following us?" She laughed nervously. "But that's ridiculous! They won't do anything to us, surely. Not here."
"Better safe than sorry. Get that head down!"
She pulled herself lower in the seat. Nick closed his fingers around Wilhelmina's naked butt.
"Who are they?" she whispered.
"Don't you know?"
She shook her head. And then, suddenly, Nick's suspicions were terribly confirmed. All his experience in espionage had not prepared him for something so unthinkably blatant, so wildly improbable, as the behavior of the men in the second carriage.
Suddenly, a whip cracked with the suddenness of a pistol shot. A guttural voice commanded "Hiyar!" like a cavalryman in a western movie, and the carriage directly behind them swerved out of line and shot alongside as the horse reacted smartly to the lash. Their own horse shied. Nick threw himself across Rita's body and flung Wilhelmina up with lightning speed. For a second or two, the hansoms were perfectly abreast.
He saw it all in an ugly flash. The face of the man in the seersucker suit stared into his from the other carriage. His right arm was drawn back. The metallic, egg-shaped object clasped in his throwing hand was a grenade. The face was firm, purposeful, almost devoid of emotion. His eyes locked briefly with Nick's as the arm came forward.
Nick fired on the move. Wilhelmina spat viciously. There was a ghastly smear of crimson and the face twisted into its last expression. The arm holding the egg seemed to hang in the air. Then the carriage was whipping by, raced toward a turn-off lane that swung back toward the way they had come.
Nick flung his arms about Rita, cushioning her frightened face in the hollow of his shoulder.
The blast came with a violent, ear-shattering roar. The park volleyed with a burst of flying-shrapnel and shattered carriage parts, and the acrid fumes of cordite poisoned the air. A glance through the side window told the story. Nick leaped from his seat, leaving Rita shocked and trembling behind him. Their old driver sat like a man turned to stone, his hands riveted to the reins.
The second carriage was lying on one twisted side on a hillock of leafy ground, two wheels spinning crazily. The shattered frame of the coach was as perforated as Swiss cheese. The horse had broken free of a splintered wagon tongue and was rearing excitedly at the base of a tall, shuddering elm. There was no use looking for the man in the coach. A grenade exploding within those narrow confines was apt to be pretty final for anybody, even if a bullet had not found him first. But there was still the driver. Where in God's name had he gotten to?
Nick saw him too late.
In the darkness under the trees he had regained his feet and darted back to the other side of the carriage Nick had left. Rita screamed once, a high, piercing crescendo of terror that stopped with awful abruptness. The muffled, oldman's scream of Nick's driver was drowned out in a string of four or five horrifyingly rapid shots of automatic fire.
His heart squeezing with the agony of defeat, Nick tore back to his own carriage.
A tall, glowering figure loomed before him, the figure of the driver who wasn't. He had ducked back from his murderous work, looking for more. He saw Nick and his gun came up. An Army .45 — a heavy, powerful, mankiller of a weapon, designed for murder.
The park was alive with shouts and high-pitched yells.
Nick fired at the hand that held the .45 and at the knees and thighs that supported that killing-machine of a body. He kept firing until the thing in front of him lay riddled and bleeding. But a small, cool part of his brain told him to let the creature live a little longer. The shot that would have killed stayed inside the gun. After the burst of gunfire, there seemed to be a silence. But sound began to seep into his mind: the frightened weeping of an old coachman too terrified to run, the confused murmur of nearby motorists, the distant shrill of a siren.
Nick took one swift look into the dark interior of the coach.
Rita Jameson was no longer frightened and no longer beautiful.
The slaughtering .45 had butchered her face and bosom. She lay pinned to the upholstery, no longer a person but an outraged mass of pulpy flesh.
Nick closed off his mind to the horror and turned swiftly away to bend beside the man who had so nearly succumbed to Wilhelmina's charms. A fast frisk came up with — nothing. The enemy was going in wholesale for unidentifiable killers. Maybe Seersucker...
A new sound intruded into his consciousness. Hooves, sounding crisp and urgent on the road nearby. Park police.
Carter threw himself into the shadows and left it all behind, running swiftly through the trees, cutting across the measured lawns toward Central Park West. His world was one of ugliness and death, of running into trouble and running from it. Because if you were to live to fight another day, you had to keep out of the official spotlight. You had to run — even if it meant leaving messy corpses behind. Even the corpses of friends.
A siren swelled and stopped.
Nick slowed to a brisk walk, straightened his tie and combed his fingers through his hair. An exit showed through the tree-lined lane ahead.
The cops would have a dazed old driver, a pair of unsightly corpses, a mysteriously wrecked coach, and a dying man. And the enemy would know he had escaped again.
But Rita hadn't.
Whoever was behind this would have to pay for that.
And pay dearly.
It was ten-thirty when Mr. Hawk picked up his office telephone. Hawk seldom left the office until midnight. It was his home.
"Yes?"
"I'm asking for a fine cutting edge this time. Something that will take care of a lot of red tape."
Hawk's brows furrowed. It wasn't like N-3 to call so often in one day — something was very wrong.
"What do you have in mind?"
"A double-edged axe. The biggest. Jameson was driven out of this world tonight, and I don't think it was only because of me. I had to use Wilhelmina again. She barked, but she didn't finish biting."
"I see. And the one who was bitten?"
Nick told him rapidly, choosing the coded words with care, giving as much detail as he could but stressing the need for urgent action.
"Check back in two hours," said Hawk, and cut the connection.
Nick left the phone booth on 57th and zigzagged several blocks before hailing a cab on Third Avenue to Grand Central and a bar.
"Double Scotch."
He drank and thought.
If he had had any lingering doubts about Rita and her half-told story they had been shockingly dispelled when the driver of the shattered coach had deliberately sought her out first and pumped her full of hot lead. So someone was after both of them.
Plane explosion, pilot, frightened stewardess, knifer, watcher at the Plaza Fountain, coachman-killer. How did it make sense?
He ordered again.
More than an hour to kill.
He drank deeply and left in search of a phone booth. This time he called Hadway House.
The same female voiced answered, sounding tired.
"Miss Jameson, please."
"Miss Jameson went out and has not returned." The voice sounded final.
Hadway House was a hotel for career women, Nick suddenly realized. Of course those harpies would know who came and went, with whom and when.
"This is Lieutenant Hanrahan. We had a call from Miss Jameson earlier today in connection with a prowler."
"Not from my switchboard, you didn't," the adenoids said suspiciously.