“He will,” Nick said shortly. “Julia. At the elevator, please.”
Her perfume brushed past him like a soft caress.
The watchtower cage was rising slowly to match Johnny Thunder’s climb.
Nick watched and waited. Johnny climbed. The watchtower cage rose slowly, pacing him. Valentina watched impatiently. Julia stood nearby, waiting like the rest.
“I must say I find your precautions a bit excessive, Carter,” Pauling said softly.
“No, he’s dead right,” Parry said gruffly. “Mustn’t take any chances.”
Johnny reached the landing, and the upper door opened. The watchtower cage, still pacing him, disappeared from view.
The door closed behind Johnny.
Valentina stifled an enormous yawn.
“I’ll start,” said Nick.
He took the first lap slowly, one eye on Valentina waiting in her gantry and the other on lookout for the returning watchtower cage.
There was a sixty-second pause. Then the watchtower cage glided slowly downward and halted several feet above the floor.
“Now, Parry,” said the company president.
Parry pressed a switch outside Valentina’s cage. It rose reluctantly, as if unaccustomed to such weight.
Nick raced up the spiral stairway. By the time Valentina’s elevator reached the top he would be on the inner platform to follow Johnny through that door. He saw her only feet below him, rising like a hippo in a tank, and yards away, across the huge work space, the watchtower cage glided smoothly up its gantry, pacing Valentina. Pauling and the president were climbing up behind Nick. Julia stood below, oddly flattened as he glanced down upon her, with one hand on the gantry and the other waving gracefully in the air as if in answer to some question. Parry and Weston stood there with her, watching Valentina’s rising cage.
Nick looked across at Valentina.
He paused for a moment to let her cage draw level with him so that he might call across to her. But in that moment there was an outcry from behind him, and as he turned to find its source he felt his head swimming as with an early morning hangover.
He saw Pauling drop upon the stairs, his hand clutching at his throat. He saw the company president grab at the stair rail, miss it, fall and clatter downward. His senses swirled. Through the thick mist that he somehow knew was within him rather than outside him he saw Parry, Weston and Julia slump down on the floor, and when he tried to clamber up the stairs to pace Valentina’s rising cage he felt as though he were wading through thick mud that grabbed at his legs and filled his mouth and nostrils.
Gas! he thought frantically. Got to reach the top! Got to… Valentina… must get to the door…
And then the mud tugged at him, flowed through him, drowned him, and he dropped.
His last blurred view was of a massive female figure slumped grotesquely in a cage, a cage that seemed to climb inexorably beyond his reach…
The one man who had held his breath stayed quietly where he was until he was absolutely sure that no one else was moving. Then he gave himself a further count of ten, for safety’s sake, and looked around him. The safety doors were scaled. Guards lay slumped on floors and platforms. So did the Brass and the Very Important Visitors.
He smiled grimly to himself and took the one precaution needed for the critical few minutes to follow. Then he fingered the controls with his expert touch and went about his business.
Two elevator cages moved through the stillness of the gas-filled room.
CHAPTER SIX
Life Is Full Of Ups And Downs
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Hamilton Garvey. “And what’s more I don’t know anything about you. Am I to assume you’re asking me to put you through to the Central Intelligence Agency?” The First Secretary of the American Embassy in Cairo stared at his visitor with distaste and suspicion.
Hakim Sadek sighed with exasperation. American officialdom gave him a pain in the traditional place; in his experience nearly the whole damned lot of them were hide-bound, unimaginative stiffnecks. No wonder the Americans had so much trouble making themselves understood abroad.
“Once again, then,” he said patiently. “My name is Hakim Sadek and I am a professor of criminology at the University of Cairo. I am also attached, as a consultant, to the local Department of Police, and I am currently investigating the murder of a German surgeon named von Kluge. I have information which I have been requested to turn over to an American agency called AXE. Not the Cee Ai Ay. AXE. Ah, Ex, Ee. One of their agents, classified D5, was to contact me to receive this information. He was murdered even as we met. It is now even more essential for me to contact his superiors, his colleagues. I have much to report, and it is urgent. Make contact any way you like — do your own talking, scramble it, fry it, code it, use Hindustani or pig-Latin — but for the sake of Allah, make contact!”
Garvey pursed his lips. He knew about D5 — something about him, anyway. AXE had hot-lined an inquiry about the fellow’s whereabouts. It seemed that he was missing. And now it seemed that he was dead.
“But why come to me?” he asked quietly, still disliking this repulsive-looking fellow. “What makes you think that I can make contact at all? Oh, we shall write, of course —”
“No, we shall not write,” Hakim said with icy calm. “We will place a call on the hot line to AXE headquarters in Washington, and we will speak with Hawk or the agent classified N3, also known as Killmaster. And I know that you can make contact because N3 told me so himself when I was working with him on a previous occasion. Every American embassy, legation and consulate in the world has such a hot line for emergencies. Is that not so? And this is an emergency. Hawk himself sent D5 to me, and now D5 is dead. Now, will you kindly place that call?”
Garvey pushed back his chair and got up, very slowly. Sadek seemed to know a lot about AXE — about Hawk, N3, D5. And he was right about the hot line.
“Very well,” he said at last. “I will. Wait here, please.”
He stalked from his desk to an inner office door and closed it behind him.
He was back within three minutes, wearing a look of astonishment on his broad face.
“I have them on the line. Come this way, please,” he said.
Hakim followed him into the small back room and spoke into the receiver.
“Sadek here,” he said. “Carter?”
There was a slight pause, due perhaps to hesitation or perhaps to the process of unscrambling. Then a dry voice spoke clearly in his ear.
“Carter’s a little busy at the moment,” said the voice. “This is his assistant. Name of Hawk.”
At the other end of the line Hawk smiled faintly to himself. It amused him, for the moment, to play second fiddle to Carter.
But his amusement fled as he heard Hakim’s story.
About D5. About the face that Hakim had remembered. About the pictures, contact prints, found in a secret drawer in von Kluge’s house.
About the artificial hands.
“Any more threats on your own life?” asked Hawk at last.
“Intermittent,” Hakim said. “Sometimes I am able to work in disguise, sometimes not. Whenever I appear as myself things come flying through the air and people skulk on corners. They are after me, all right.”
“A pity. And no chance of turning tables on them?”
“But regrettably, no. They have the trick of instant suicide. Also they are more cautious now, operating always from a distance. Perhaps they are running low on personnel.”
“Perhaps. I hope so. And you say you have no picture of the tenth man?”
“No. Nothing. Nothing at all. I have no evidence at all that he is connected with the others. Only a little circumstantial pattern that I have built up in my head. And a memory of the way he looked.”