So the men grinned and watched Nellie’s body slacken as Nan’s already had.
But they stopped grinning when, in spite of the blue fog, they saw a lithe body suddenly squirm over the back of the front seat and plump down behind the wheel. And they drew guns and began cursing wildly and shooting about the same way when the purr of the idling motor rose to a scream, and the sedan began to shoot backward like a crab.
The car crashed the partition wall.
Planks flew like straws. The sedan caromed off a truck parked near the partition on the other side, straightened again and shot down a cleared lane between cars in the middle of the main, outer garage room, with the hose jerking off the exhaust pipe.
The sliding door in front was closed, too. And this was heavier. But three thousand pounds of car, made as automobile builders make cars nowadays, is a projectile taking a lot of strength to stop or put out of the running.
The garage door didn’t have that strength.
Still backing, the sedan hit it with a roar like that of a landslide, and the door slammed off its overhead rollers, rode the top of the sedan out into the street, and then dropped off as Nellie tore the wheel around.
The car, banged to bits in the rear, with the gasoline tank pierced and streaming, but able to run miles before all the fluid leaked out, tore down a street toward the East River.
With the little oxygen store in her handkerchief dangerously low, Nellie stopped. She banged at the shatterproof windows with a wrench, till they finally broke out of their frames, and let the fresh air pour in on Nan while she drove still farther away from the garage and the furious gangsters pouring out of it in other cars to follow.
“Boobs,” sniffed Nellie. “Did they expect me to lie still and choke obediently to death with a running motor in front of me?”
But she remembered reading of other carbon-monoxide deaths. Several, now, looked as if they had originated right in that garage. So others had choked obediently to death; others without the agile brain and fast, lithe body of Nellie Gray.
CHAPTER X
The Cryptogram
The Avenger never wasted energy in getting angry. He occasionally became coldly, glacially furious at a particularly rotten criminal act. But he never became plain angry, as other men do.
Had he indulged in such nerve-wasting emotion, he would have been angry, now, at the Washington police sergeant who had had charge of the wallet from Sheriff Aldershot’s pocket. The wallet in which the cryptogram had been found.
From the start, The Avenger had known that the cryptogram was incomplete. If it hadn’t been, he could have solved it. So, for that matter, could have the government expert, Drake.
But it wasn’t complete. There were a lot more numbers that should have been among the meaningless string on the folded bit of paper.
Benson had gone through that wallet with microscopic care, and found no trace of a key to the thing. Then the hapless sergeant had idly mentioned an odd fact — that three bills out of the several dozen in the wallet had been in a separate compartment.
After mentioning that, the sergeant had felt himself shrivel to pinsize under an icy, colorless stare that seemed to go through him like a couple of diamond drills. But Benson only said quietly, “What three bills?”
So the two, the five and the ten-dollar bills had been handed over to him. And with them, the key to the message. The serial numbers on the bills.
Benson had drawn up the code arrangement he was convinced had been used in the message.
It was one of the easiest of all codes. But it was a senseless scramble if a lot of the figures in a given message were held out.
Smitty was staring over The Avenger’s shoulder.
“You know how the code would work, of course,” said the man with the dead white hair and the pale, icy eyes. “A would be 16 or 61; B, 17 or 71. You can reverse the numbers now and then to mix it up more. Cat, for instance, would be 81 61 64. Or 18 61 46, if you preferred it that way. But take out some numbers and make it 1 1 6, or just 1 6, and it isn’t anything. Not till you put the missing numbers in. Which these bills do for this message.”
Benson had arranged the bills in the order that made sense out of their serial numbers.
The numbers on the cryptogram were:
7 7 6 39 4 7 3 2 7 7 9 0 0 0 7 7 9 82 46 38 10 1 9 47 6 7 7 84 0 1 1 50.
The serial number of the two-dollar bill was 43162993; of the ten-dollar bill, 23132322; of the five-dollar bill, 63133169.
“Now we’ll put them together,” said Benson.
The resultant figures were: 74 73 61 39 46 72 93 92 37 72 39 10 30 02 73 72 29 82 46 38 10 16 39 47 61 73 37 84 10 61 91 50.
The Avenger could read it almost like print. The message was:
SLANTING LINE OF LIGHT MEANS ALL READY.
Smitty growled disgustedly. “So we finally get the thing unscrambled,” he complained “and what do we have? Another cryptogram! Slanting line of light! What line, what light? And what is it that’s ready when the line of light slants?”
The Avenger’s prematurely white head shook a little. “I don’t know yet. But we’ll find out, Smitty. We’ll find out. Two men were killed for this. It must have importance.”
He got up. “Sheriff Aldershot probably intercepted that message. Then he took it, in his wallet, into the Capitol Building. But did he show it to Burnside and Cutten, or tell them anything about it? We’ve got to know.”
Burnside, in The Avenger’s own hideout, was most accessible for questioning. So Benson went to his secretly held office suite with the windowless storage room so conveniently fixed as a bedroom.
But he did no questioning. For Burnside wasn’t accessible after all.
Benson opened the door, started to go into the first room of the suite, and stopped with his icy eyes taking on their crystalline glitter.
On the floor of this room lay Rosabel Newton. The pretty negress was deeply unconscious. The cause of the unconsciousness was plain enough: it was a deep welt on the side of her head where she had been slugged.
There was no sign of Josh. Nor was there any trace of Senator Burnside.
Both were gone! The Avenger went swiftly through the two rooms and the storage room, and found that out in a hurry.
Gone! But where? Why?
He went back to Rosabel. From his pocket, the pale-eyed man who was as eminent in the field of medicine as in all other fields, drew a small hypodermic case. The needle went deftly into Rosabel’s arm.
In two or three minutes Rosabel’s soft dark eyes opened. They rested on the white, dead face of The Avenger. She struggled up with a cry.
“Josh! Where’s Josh?”
It was typical of Rosabel. The first thought of Josh Newton was for her — always. And that went double for Rosabel.
“Josh isn’t here,” said Benson gently. “What happened? Why are he and Burnside gone?”
“Some men came.” Rosabel closed her eyes in pain and moaned a little. “They must have taken Josh out with them. And Senator Burnside, too. But they hit me when they first came in; so I can only guess.”
“Some men?” repeated Benson. “But how could they have located Burnside here?”
“He telephoned,” said Rosabel.
“Telephoned!” Benson’s pale eyes were steely chips. “Why on earth did he do that? He was hiding out. Didn’t it occur to him that there was a big chance of this place being discovered by his enemies if he went phoning all around Washington?”