Fram had touched his goatee gently with his middle finger. Then, after the car had rolled several blocks along Massachusetts Avenue, things happened in that front seat too swiftly for the driver to keep pace.
Dr. Fram’s left hand shot out and clamped over the driver’s neck — from the rear, instead of the front. That was because the hand was not concerned with throttling the driver, but with finding certain nerve cables there.
That the questing fingers found the right place, the driver could have testified, because in a second things began to go black before his eyes.
Dr. Fram’s right hand caught the wheel after the car had wobbled once, and kept it on a straight path. The driver slumped behind the wheel.
There was a deft exchange, in which the man with the neat goatee pulled the driver’s unconscious form out from behind the wheel and onto the floor, and then slid over himself.
But behind, the three men in the body of the ambulance did not know these things.
They had felt it when the car swerved, and merely thought that the driver was wheeling to avoid hitting something in the street. After that they felt nothing — except a sudden, overpowering sleepiness.
Burnside and the man in white let their heads nod with nothing but a dull wonder in their eyes that they should become sleepy at such a time. But birdlike little Dr. Sherman fought wildly against the slumbrous feeling. With his medical training, it had penetrated instantly into his numbing brain that something was very wrong.
The startled knowledge didn’t save him. His figure joined the other two on the floor. And the car rolled smoothly over Washington streets with three in the back who slept so deeply they might have been dead.
Burnside opened his eyes some time later to find himself in a small room that looked much like a standard bedroom, save that it had no windows.
He lay in bed, dazed, staring around. The door opened and a man with a neat goatee and a super-neat small mustache came in.
That stirred the Senator. He sat up with the dull-red of rage in his cheeks. “Fram!” he rasped. “You damned, double-crossing—”
He stopped. “Fram” was taking something curious from his eyeballs. Two small, tissue-thin glass cups with pupils painted on them like the pupils of Fram’s eyes.
The eyes that were revealed were not the eyes of the psychiatrist. They were like stainless steel chips in the emotionless countenance so cleverly resembling Fram’s face. They were — the eyes of The Avenger, otherwise disguised as Dr. Fram.
Man of a Thousand Faces, Benson was called. And once again he had proved his right to the title.
“I heard Dr. Sherman talk to your butler yesterday,” Benson said calmly. “I tapped your telephone wire. I heard the butler tell all about the way your gun went off ‘accidentally’ the other night, and I suspected something like this was in the wind. So I prepared for it. A substitution of Fram’s features for my own, a bit of gas for the men in the ambulance, and here we are.”
“You saved my life,” mumbled Burnside, eyes profoundly grateful.
“Perhaps not,” said Benson. “Perhaps you were only to be thoroughly frightened. But I couldn’t take a chance. I didn’t know.”
Burnside clutched The Avenger’s arm as his first fear came back. It was a good deal like clutching a length of tapering steel cable.
“You don’t think I’m insane, do you?” he implored. “You haven’t taken me — just to shut me up in a private sanitarium?”
“I think you are quite sane,” Benson said.
“Where am I?” said Burnside, relaxing again.
“In the storage room of an office suite I keep rented here in Washington. No one knows it is mine. You will have this room, and two outside, to wander in. But I don’t want you to leave the suite.”
“But you just said you didn’t think I was crazy.”
“I don’t. But others may. It would be safest for you to lie low here for a time.”
“I’m a busy man,” protested Burnside.
“When matters come up in the Senate making your presence there imperative,” said The Avenger, “you can go there from here, doubling on your tracks so that you can’t be traced. You can return the same way. But this hide-out must be your temporary quarters. I have assigned my two servants to take care of your needs.”
He nodded and went out, with authority and power so dominant in his average-sized body that even a man like Senator Burnside was left incapable of questioning it.
Outside, he drew Josh Newton aside. “You and Rosabel will tend the Senator’s needs,” he said. “Burnside knows something that he doesn’t seem to want to tell. I want you two to try to find out what it is.”
CHAPTER IX
Wings of Death
Nellie Gray was an excellent judge of character. She had talked quite a little with Nan Stanton, her fellow prisoner in the basement of the garage, and was sure Nan could be trusted.
The two girls had told a little about themselves to each other. Nan kept dwelling on the phrase the bony man had used to describe her.
“ ‘Dope from the front office,’ huh!” she repeated for the dozenth time. “Well, they’re right. I certainly was a dope.” She stretched slim, shapely arms. “It begins to look as if Dr. Fram sent me up to the New York office for the sole purpose of getting me grabbed off by those men.”
“So Dr. Fram’s a phony,” mused Nellie Gray.
Nan shook her sleek dark head doubtfully. “He’s not a phony — at least in his profession. That’s what makes it puzzling. He’s a bona-fide psychiatrist with a fine reputation. And his reputation has been earned. He is good.”
“It certainly looks as if he’s mixed up in this, somewhere,” shrugged Nellie. “Why would he want you kidnapped, though? What do you know about his business?”
“Not a blamed thing,” said Nan. “But I suppose he, or somebody, thinks I know something. I suppose he kept an ignoramus like me in the anteroom because I was a good front, and then suddenly decided I knew too much.”
“But you just said he wasn’t a phony, which would indicate that he wasn’t mixed up in anything crooked,” argued Nellie.
“I don’t know what I think,” Nan admitted.
Nellie cast back over The Avenger’s phoned command to her. Find out anything she could about the visits of the senators to Fram.
“Tell me about this sanity test thing Fram’s in Washington about,” she said.
“It’s a pet subject with Dr. Fram,” replied Nan. She repeated words she had heard often in his office. “Do you know that about one and a half percent of the population in the United States is doomed to insanity? Well they are. And usually they can be spotted by examination of their lives and their family history. Now, if all young people with doubtful streaks in their heredity could be kept from marrying, gradually the insanity rate would dwindle down to nothing. There would be no children with weak minds brought into the world.”
“You know,” said Nellie, “if enough cranks could pass enough laws designed to better the human race, in about a hundred years there wouldn’t be any human race left to better.”
“It sounds logical to me.”
Nellie shrugged again. “Maybe it’s logical,” she murmured. “But to me it sounds like the ‘so-what’ department. I find it very strange that Senators Wade, Hornblow, Burnside, Collendar and Cutten should call so often on Dr. Fram on such an uninteresting political issue. But they did call often, didn’t they?”
“Yes,” said Nan. She spoke slowly, and very thoughtfully.
Nellie Gray noted the slowness, and said, “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking,” responded Nan, “that more than once I thought I saw something in the eyes of those Senators that a sanity test bill shouldn’t have brought. That was — fear.”