“Just so,” said Ghalil. “Unfortunately, the banks have not had time to look through their records. I expect that information tomorrow.”
Laurie put her hand on Coghlan’s arm. Mannard said abruptly:
“You moved fast, Tommy! You and the lieutenant together. How’d you know to jump him when the lights went out?”
“I didn’t know,” admitted Coghlan. “But I saw him looking at that wristwatch of his, with the second-hand sweeping around. He showed me a trick today, at my apartment, that depended on his knowing to a split-second when something was going to happen. I was just thinking that if he’d been expecting the lights to go out last night, he could have been triggered to throw you down-stairs. Then the lights went out here—and I jumped.”
“It was desperation,” Ghalil interposed. “He has tried four separate times to assassinate you, Mr. Mannard.”
“You said something like that—”
“You have been under guard,” admitted Ghalil, “since the moment M. Duval showed me that book with the strange record in it. You had rented an automobile. My men found a newly contrived defect in its muffler, so that deadly carbon-monoxide poured into the back of it. It was remedied. A bomb was mailed to you, and reached you day before yesterday—before I first spoke to Mr. Coghlan. It was—” he smiled apologetically—”intercepted. Today he tried to poison you at the Sea of Marmora. That failed by means he did not understand or like. Moreover, he was frightened by the affair of the book. He considered that another conspiracy existed, competing with his. The mystery of it, and the unexplained failure of attempts to assassinate you, drove him almost to madness. When even the bomb failed to blow up my police-car—”
“Suppose,” said Mannard grimly, “just suppose you explain that book hocus-pocus you and Duval are trying to put over!”
“I cannot explain it,” said Ghalil gently. “I do not understand it. But I think Mr. Coghlan proceeds admirably—”
The door to the suite buzzed. Ghalil admitted a waiter carrying a huge tray. The waiter said something in Turkish and placed the tray on a table. He went out.
“A man was caught in the basement with a sweep-second wristwatch,” said Ghalil. “He had turned off the lights and turned them on again. He is badly frightened. He will talk.”
Laurie looked at Coghlan. Then, trembling a little, she began to uncover dishes on the tray.
Mannard roared: “But what the hell’s that book business, and Tommy’s fingerprints, and the stuff on the wall? They’re all part of the same thing!”
“No,” said the Turk. “You make the mistake I did, Mr. Mannard. You assumed that things which are associated with the same thing are connected with each other. But it is not true. Sometimes they are merely apparently associated—by chance.” Laurie said, “Tommy, I—think we’d better eat something.”
“But do you mean,” demanded Mannard, “that it’s not hocus-pocus? Do you expect me to believe that there’s a gadget that’s got a ghost? D’you mean that Tommy Coghlan is going to put his fingerprints under a memorandum that says I’m going to be killed? That he’s going to write it?”
“No,” admitted Ghalil. “Still, that unbelievable message is the reason I set men to guard you three days ago. It is the reason you are now alive.” He looked hungrily at the uncovered dishes. “I starve,” he confessed. “May I?”
Mannard said, “It’s too crazy! It’d be like a miracle! Confusion in time so there’d be all this mix-up to save my life? Nonsense! The laws of nature don’t get suspended—”
Coghlan said thoughtfully, “When you think of it, sir, that field of force isn’t a plane surface. It’s like a tube—the way a bubble can be stretched out. That’s what threw me off. When you think what a magnetic field does to polarized light—”
“Consider me thinking of it,” growled Mannard. “What of it?”
“I can duplicate that field,” said Coghlan thoughtfully. “It’ll take a little puttering around, and I can’t make a tube of it, but I can make a field that will absorb energy—or heat—and yield it as power. I can make a refrigeration gadget that will absorb heat and yield power. It’ll take some research . . .“
“Sure of that?” snapped Mannard.
Coghlan nodded. He was sure. He’d seen something happen. He’d figured out part of how it happened. Now he could do things the original makers of the gadget couldn’t do. It was not an unprecedented event, of course. A spectacle-maker in Holland once put two lenses together and made a telescope which magnified things but showed them unhappily upside down. And half a continent away, in Italy, one Galileo Galilei heard a rumor of the feat and sat up all night thinking it out—and next morning made a telescope so much better than the rumored one that all field-glasses are made after his design to this day.
“I’ll back the research,” said Mannard shrewdly. “If you’ll make a contract with me. I’ll play fair. That’s good stuff!”
He looked at his daughter. Her face was blank. Then her eyes brightened. She smiled at her father. He smiled back.
She said, “Tommy—if you can do that—oh, don’t you see? Come in the other room for a moment. I want to talk to you!”
He blinked at her. Then his shoulders straightened. He took a deep breath, muttered four words, and said, “Hah!” He grabbed her arm and led her through the door.
Mannard said satisfiedly: “That’s sense! Refrigeration that yields energy! Power from the tropics! Running factories from the heat of the Gulf Stream!”
“But,” said Ghalil, “does not that sound as improbable as that a gadget should have a ghost?”
“No,” said Mannard firmly. “That’s science! I don’t understand it, but it’s science! And Laurie wants to marry him, besides. And anyhow, I know the boy! He’ll manage it!”
The telephone rang. It rang again. They heard Coghlan answex it. He called:
“Lieutenant! For you!”
Ghalil answered the telephone. He pointedly did not observe the new, masterful, confident air worn by Coghlan, or the distinctly radiant expression on Laurie’s face. He talked, in Turkish. He hung up.
“I go back to 80 Hosain,” he said briefly. “Something has happened. Poor M. Duval grew hysterical. They had to send for a physician. They do not know what occurred—but there are changes in the room.”
“I’m coming with you!” said Coghlan instantly.
Laurie would not be left behind. Mannard expansively came too. The four of them piled again into the police-car and headed back for the squalid quarter of the city in which the room with the gadget’s ghost was to be found. Laurie sat next to Coghlan, and the atmosphere about them was markedly rosy. Ghalil watched streets and buildings rush toward them, the ways grow narrower and darker and the houses seemed to loom above the racing car. Once he said meditatively:
“That Appolonius thought of everything! It was so desperately necessary to kill you, Mr. Mannard, that he had even an excuse for calling on you to murder you, though he expected a street-bomb to make it unnecessary! It must be time for his forged check to appear at your bank! That letter was a clever excuse, too. It would throw all suspicion upon the engineers of the mystery of the ancient book.”
Mannard grunted. “What’s happened where we’re going? What sort of changes in the room?” Then he said suspiciously:
“No occult stuff?”
“I doubt it very much,” said Ghalil.