“Then you had better come here at once,” said Hawk. “Are you available?”
“I am packed,” said Hakim. He heard Hawk chuckle briefly.
“Then stay where you are. I’ll arrange transport. Give me Garvey for a moment, you’ll hear from me again within the hour.”
Hakim gave the hot line back to Garvey and went back to the other room to wait.
Ten minutes ticked by slowly.
There was a screaming in his ears that was as acute as a physical pain and a leadenness in his chest that weighed him down and choked him as if he had been buried alive.
Then through a wave of nausea he heard the running footsteps and the shouts, and he suddenly remembered.
Nick opened his eyes and pulled himself to his feet. He swayed as he clutched the stair rail and looked downward through a sea of mist. Guards were pouring through the passages toward the nightmare scene below. The sprawled figures still lay where they had dropped. Julia alone was getting up from the floor and gazing unsteadily upward at Valentina’s cage.
Nick turned dazedly and looked at it, too.
It was a little higher than when he had seen it last, but it was there, hanging immobile in its gantry midway between the floor and ceiling.
And it was empty.
He groaned involuntarily and swung toward the watchtower. Its cage, too, was pretty much where he had seen it last, and it also was still. But it was enclosed, and there was no way of telling what its occupant was doing.
Now the others were stirring — guards on platforms and civilians on the floor — and his eyes raked through them as if by some miracle he would see Valentina’s great bulk rising up among them. But no; she wasn’t there.
He turned and raced up the spiral stairway to the roof.
From far below he heard a voice cry, “Haiti” and Parry’s voice yelling, “Let him go — it’s Carter — oh, my God, she’s gone!”
Then he was on the landing and the big door slid open as he neared it. He stumbled out into the bright cold light of the autumn afternoon and sucked in his breath at the sudden shock of what he saw.
Johnny Thunder lay motionless a few feet in front of him. The blood clotting the back of his head was no longer flowing; the big heart had stopped beating.
And two uniformed guards lay sprawled face downward on the observation deck.
The first one was stone-cold-dead with a small hole in his gut and a big one through his back. The other one was stirring.
Nick raced toward him, running past a great double shed with one door open. Through it he glimpsed the shadowy form of a helicopter with an empty space beside it where the other one should have been.
That was the answer, then — or part of it. But what about those cages, still hanging down below…?
He flung himself down beside the second fallen guard. The man was shattered, dying, but still there was a spark. He groped feebly for the gun beside him and the eyes that peered dazedly at Nick were hard and hating.
“Carter of AXE,” Nick said rapidly. “I’m on your side. What happened?”
The dying expression changed and the fingers slid away from the gun.
“Hu… Hu… Hughes,” the man said faintly. “Cage.” He waved feebly at the watchtower. “Mad. Must be mad. Shot… us Ran… I tried to…” He drew a deep, shuddering breath and his eyes fluttered to a close.
“The woman!” Nick said urgently. “Have you seen the Russian woman?”
The head bobbed vaguely.
“When?” said Nick urgently. “Where? Did she come up here?”
Then it seemed to him that the man’s head shook from side to side; but he could not be sure, because the wobbling movement ended in a slump upon the deck, and the man was dead.
Nick leaped to his feet and ran. He was just about certain it was too late for running, but at the same time he had to make sure of the exact conditions on the multileveled rooftop.
Apart from himself there was no living being on it. But in the helicopter hangar there was a sense of warmth and a smell of fumes, and it was as clear as a printed message that one of the choppers had taken off within the last few minutes. He glanced at his watch as he made his rapid search of the observation deck and aircraft shed. It would be twelve, thirteen, maybe fifteen minutes since he had first started to climb the stairs and the gas had hit him. Hard to tell exactly, because he hadn’t been looking at his watch when the curtain fell, but anyway there would have been time enough for a chopper to have taken off and be out of sight by now. Time enough, too, for the operator of the watchtower cage to have pulled the switch or whatever it was that sent the gas pouring through the work area; then ascend, do his shooting — no doubt with a silenced gun — latch onto Valentina as she emerged from her cage; send both cages back down again to maybe gain an extra few seconds; take off with his captive in the helicopter. Captive, or corpse? Dead or alive, Valentina would be an uncooperative burden. Maybe there had been two men involved, the one from the cage and an accomplice on the roof, maybe waiting in the hangar out of sight.
He realized suddenly that he was taking it for granted that the watchtower-cage operator was also missing, was definitely involved. Yet, even if he was not missing, he had to be involved. Unless he, too, was going to turn up dead somewhere…
The roof erupted with activity as he stood staring down at a smear of blood near the open hangar door and talking into a tiny microphone in his breast pocket. “Fisher — up here on the roof as quickly as you can. Davis and Alston — get to your car, flash word to Hawk, Sichikova missing, apparently abducted by helicopter, request all-aircraft alert, then stay in car for further orders. Hammond and Julia — stay where you arc, keep your eyes and ears open for anything out of the way — anything!”
And then Pauling was at his side, face ashen and lips trembling. Guards poured out through the open door behind him, another three tumbled out of the cage so recently occupied by Valentina.
“Calamity, calamity!” moaned Pauling, and stared into the dimness of the hangar. “Oh, Christ, it is gone. The grounds guards said they’d seen it take off, thought at first we’d sent it up. Then the alarm signal went off in Control Center B and the emergency squad arrived to find we were sealed in. Out cold, the lot of us, when they came in, gassed like a bunch of —”
“They turned the gas off, did they?” said Nick. The watchtower cage, he saw, had arrived at roof level and was disgorging three more figures. Pretty soon there would be hardly anyone left below.
Pauling gazed blankly at him. “They—? Why, no, I don’t think so. Seems to me the ventilation system was already working by the time they called down the cage. By remote, of course. Because there wasn’t anybody in it. Wasn’t anybody in either of the cages!” He shook his head in utter bewilderment. “I don’t understand how — I mean, what could have happened to Hughes?”
“Hughes — that’s the cage operator, right?” said Nick.
Pauling nodded. “Top security man, one of the best. Why, he must have been snatched right out of the cage! Somebody must have been waiting on the roof — somebody must have —”
“Impossible,” I said Parry, coming up behind him. His neatly bearded face looked rock-hard, slit-eyed, angry. “Unless Hughes himself managed to smuggle an accomplice into the hangar, which seems extremely unlikely. Hughes must have set this thing up himself, for some unthinkable reason.” The second hangar door slid back as he spoke and he gestured to a man in pilot’s overalls. “You, Hunter — get that thing out of there and get going — fast! Guards reported seeing the craft heading north by northeast,” he added for Nick’s benefit. “We’ll chase. I’ve also sent out a State Police and border alert. You got any ideas?”