“I myself may be jelly by the end of tomorrow night,” the first said moodily. “They know about us, don’t you understand? They are picking us off slowly, one by one. It is the Russian woman and that Egyptian Sadek. They have us marked for death.”
“Pah! You talk like a gibbering American yourself. How can they possibly…?”
But Nick’s ears had picked up something else.
There was a car approaching from somewhere beyond the glade of trees. As he listened, the sound of its motor grew louder. And then stopped.
It had to be Judas. It had to be.
Well, two was company. And four made two too many. He had been waiting for a long time to meet Judas again and he did not want the scenery cluttered up with extras.
He slithered silently around the tiny cabin. Seconds later the lockpicker’s special had done its work and the two men were locked in. He thought, but he could not be absolutely sure, that the trees in the grove were rustling with an extra sound.
The two voices were whining on. Not for long, Nick told them silently, and drew Pierre from his pocket. He gave the deadly little gas bomb one quick twist and dropped it lightly through the partly open porthole. It landed with a little click, and rolled.
“What was that?” The two men leaped to their feet. One went groping after Pierre and the other reached for the door. Nick closed the porthole quietly and waited. No doubt they would open it within moments, but that would not help them. He ducked down out of sight. No need to watch them die.
But they did it loudly, much too loudly. It took only slightly more than thirty seconds but in their dying throes they screamed in gurgling, high-pitched voices and hammered on the door. For a moment he thought the flimsy boards would shatter beneath their weight even though Pierre’s swift-acting poison was already gnawing their nervous systems, and he braced himself against the quivering door to hold it shut.
Was there, or was there not, a sound of footfalls coming through the trees? Hurry with your dying, damn you!
The screaming and the pounding stopped with a curious abruptness and there were two dull thuds. He counted slowly to ten and then rose to peer through the porthole.
Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two….
Nine little Red Chinamen, gone. The last two were dead heaps on the floor.
He ducked down low on the deck and crawled aft, past the hatch he had turned into a coffin. There was still one man to go. The tenth man, the biggest of them all.
A bird fluttered and squawked. And then the glade of trees was silent but for the soft sighing of the breeze. A thick bank of cloud obscured the moon. Everything was in utter darkness on the shore.
Nick crouched behind the shallow bulkhead screening himself from view. The blue light would make him a sitting duck if he so much as raised his head. And yet he could scarcely put it out at this stage.
A new sound began with a low trilling and” then built into a fluting bird call that rose and fell in the cool night air. It ended in tense silence and Nick went on waiting, mind racing and muscles taut. There was someone out there and it had to be Judas, and the sound was a signal of some sort. But what in God’s name was the answering signal?
The sound came again; rising, falling, dying away. Silence settled again.
He had to do something, answer somehow.
Nick pursed his lips. A low, trilling sound came out of them, a sound that built into a fluting bird call that rose and fell like the call from the glade, then drifted into silence.
There was a rustle. Something moved among the trees — moved away from him. Wrong answer!
He cursed softly and flung himself over the side to land lightly on the jetty in a running crouch. Harsh sound spat past his ear but he was ready for it. Wilhelmina spat back as he zigzagged rapidly along the sagging pier and flung himself toward the boathouse, then around it toward the grove of trees and the sound of running footsteps. The splat of fire came back at him and Wilhelmina answered sharply, aiming at the little burst of flame.
Then suddenly the bursts of flame were gone and he could no longer even hear the sound of footsteps. He paused for a moment, tuning eyes and ears into the silent darkness, and then he heard the unmistakable sound of a car door opening. A motor raced, and he ran toward it with Wilhelmina nosing out in front of him and his feet picking out a path between the trees. Judas’s car, of course, and Judas was making a getaway!
The first shot sang past his ear before he even saw the car — the first shot of a fusillade that sent him belly-down to the ground and pumping shots into the dim shape of a streamlined sports car that stood there with motor running, lights out, and windows spitting bullets in all directions.
He pumped lead into the tires and guts of the car before he realized with a shock of horror that the bullets were still spewing wildly in all directions and also that the car was not moving so much as an inch. Then he crawled toward it frantically, beneath the aimless spray of bullets — and saw that the car was empty. No Judas! Nick swore again, this time out loud, and snaked his way below the spray of fire in search of the other cars he knew must be there somewhere.
He found them both, after a minute or two. First, a bug-shaped Volkswagen, deep in the trees, and empty, then a large sedan, also empty.
That left Judas — but what did it leave Nick?
The decoy shots from the rigged sports car stopped suddenly, and again there was absolute silence. Nick turned and tore out of the glade like a demoniacal hunter after his prey, his mind racing. If Judas had intended to use one of the other cars he would have done so already, while Carter was shooting back at the decoy fusillade. But he had not. So that left Judas with a choice of two things to do: One. Get out of here on foot — and that was crazy. Two. Use the lake — and that made sense.
It made such inevitable, awful sense that he was hardly surprised to hear the sound of the cabin cruiser’s motor churning as he rounded the corner of the boathouse and ran like a madman toward the jetty. He was still running when the boat pulled away from its moorings and tore off half of the ancient jetty behind it, and he fired off his last two shots as he ran along what was left of it. The slugs slammed into the wheelhouse and the man at the wheel ducked quickly, then turned around, and laughed wildly. The face could have belonged to any rather ugly man — but it was the face of Hakim’s sketch. And the compact body, one arm outstretched and blazing fire, was that of the elusive Judas.
Shots skimmed past Nick’s head and searing flame burned through his shoulder but he hardly felt it through the blaze of his own rage and frustration. Yards ahead of him the motor picked up speed and the wake of the boat rocked what was left of the rotting pier.
There was still a chance — one desperate chance. Nick plunged into the water and began swimming furiously. The motor coughed and surged and the wake rolled over him in billowing waves. He buried his face in the water and kicked mightily, pounding his way powerfully through the darkness like an avenging torpedo. For a moment it seemed that he was gaining. And then the engine roared triumphantly; the boat shook and heaved and sped away from him as if jet-propelled, and left him in a maelstrom of seething waves and spray. He trod water, grimacing as he watched it go. It skimmed away with incredible speed, and through the exultant sound of its departure he thought he could hear the peal of high-pitched laughter.
For a moment longer he watched it shrinking into the distance. And then, seething with anger, he churned his way across the inlet in his waterlogged clothes and dragged himself, dripping onto the shore.
Nine down, and one to go.
The morning brought with it a gruesome story of an ancient cabin cruiser abandoned on the Canadian side of Lake Erie with two dead men in its tiny cabin. But of the man who must have piloted the vessel there was no sign even through the search for him had started very soon after his escape across the lake.