Re-enter Fu-Manchu (22 page)

A faint sound broke the silence of the corridor.

Brian stood tense, almost holding his breath, listening.

The sound came from the stairway.

He pulled out the big revolver, readied it for action, and slightly turned his head, looking down. Soft footsteps were mounting the stairs. He raised the barrel, sighting it on the bend at which the person coming lip would appear.

No one appeared. But a crisp voice came:

“Don’t shoot, Merrick!”

It was Nayland Smith. A moment later he stood beside Brian.

“Phew!” Brian relaxed. “Glad you spoke.”

“So I see.” Sir Denis commented dryly. “But don’t relax your vigilance. We have the situation in hand, if—”

“If what?”

“If we’re not too late.” Nayland Smith spoke in a low tone. “First, We go to our own apartment. Don’t open your mouth while I try to call the penthouse. Remember, the room has been wired.”

Brian nodded, and they walked along to 2610. Nayland Smith unlocked the door, stood for a moment listening, and then went in. He crossed straight to the penthouse phone, lifted the receiver, held it to his ear a while, and then put it back. He frowned grimly, beckoned to Brian to follow, and went out of the apartment.

“Step as nearly like a cat as you can,” he whispered. “I’m going up to listen at the door. If I hear anything, we won’t go in alone. We’ll have to wait for reinforcements.”

Brian watched while Sir Denis quietly unlocked the door to the penthouse stairs. They stole up.

The stairs opened on a landing, and the door was nearly opposite, as Brian remembered. To their right was the elevator that normally served the penthouse, and, beyond, a second door.

Nayland Smith tiptoed forward, apparently with the intention of pressing his ear to a panel, then paused. Closer contact was unnecessary.

A voice was speaking, muffled by the intervening door, but still audible—a strident, sibilant voice:

“Do you imagine,” it said scornfully, “that your puny interference can check the wheels of the inevitable? The dusk of the West has fallen. The dawn of the East has come.”

Nayland Smith turned, a triumphant grin on his lean face, and pointed to the stairs. Brian followed him down. Sir Denis partly closed the door below.

“You heard him, Merrick—you heard him?” he whispered. “One of his favorite slogans. How often have I listened to it! That’s Dr. Fu Manchu!”

Brian’s heart jumped uncomfortably. “Who is he talking to?”

“I’m afraid to Lola Erskine.”

* * *

Brian went through hours of torture in the few minutes that it took to muster the party. Harkness had a search warrant, and two of the plain-clothesmen came from Homicide, for there was evidence to show that a murder had been committed on the top floor of the towering wing of the Babylon-Lido.

When duties had been allotted, Harkness and another FBI man joined Brian and Nayland Smith, and all four went up to the penthouse. Harkness and his assistant—his name was Dakin—were to deal with the kitchen entrance; Brian and Sir Denis concentrated on the other door.

They stood for a moment, listening.

Complete silence.

“Get the door open!” Brian gasped, quivering with suspense. “For God’s sake, open it!”

Nayland Smith, very grim-faced, put the key in the lock. But he never turned it.

“No, no!”
A stifled scream came from inside. “Don’t open that door! It’s the end of all of us if you do! Break in at the other end. But don’t open that door!”

It was Lola’s voice.

Sir Denis grasped Brian’s arm in a grip that hurt. He withdrew the key.

“I don’t know what this means, Merrick, but we must do as she directs. Come on!” They ran to join Harkness. “In through the kitchen!”

Harkness unlocked the door. The door swung open. Brian tried to hurl himself in. Nayland Smith grabbed him.

“Go easy, Merrick! We can’t be sure.”

An automatic in his hand, Sir Denis stepped warily into a well-equipped kitchenette. Brian followed. There were traces of that peculiar chemical smell which he had noted before, on the night of the demonstration.

They pushed on into what was evidently a dining room. But it didn’t appear to have been used as one. The only window was blacked out with heavy velvet drapes. On the buffet odd pieces of chemical apparatus stood, as well as a number of bottles and phials. There was very little furniture except a narrow table covered with green baize and a large chair. A green-shaded lamp stood on the table—the only light in the room.

Near the lamp was a cabinet the front of which consisted of a small switchboard.

“Some kind of radio control,” Nayland Smith commented.

He was looking at an open door at the other end of the room. And as he looked, there came a stifled cry:

“In here! Hurry!”

Brian, at that wild appeal, pushed past Sir Denis and burst in ahead of the others.

He stopped so suddenly that he was nearly floored by the rush from behind.

The room in which he had witnessed the extraordinary experiment carried out by the man calling himself Dr. Hessian seemed to swim before his eyes. The plan of New York City covered the whole of the top of the long table, but the rows of chairs had been removed. The metal containers that had hung from the ceiling were there no longer. The radio set that produced the “inaudible note” remained in its place on a bureau. A small box, which might have been the one used at the demonstration to represent a specially equipped plane, stood on one end of the table.

Nearby, in a heavy armchair, Lola was seated, white and wild-eyed. Her ankles were lashed to the front legs. Both wrists had been tied to the arms of the chair, but she had managed to free her right hand and to tear off the adhesive tape strapped across her mouth.

It had been done in frantic haste, for her lip was red and swollen.

Brian sprang to her side and began to unfasten her other wrist.

“Smash that thing!” she said, in a shrill, unnatural voice, pointing to the little box. “The
sound
comes from there! Smash it!”

Brian stood upright and, ignoring Nayland Smith, who had a hand on his shoulder, pulled out the police revolver and fired two shots into the flimsy framework.

There came a loud explosion, a crash of glass, splinters flew, and one bullet ricocheted to be buried in the wall beyond. Then the box burst, into flames.

Dakin acted promptly. Dashing out to the kitchen, he was back in quick time carrying a big pitcher of water. With this he dowsed the flaming fragments on the table. When Brian turned, Lola had fainted.

He carried Lola downstairs, using the kitchen entrance. Dakin came with him to unlock the door of the suite. All the other doors along the corridor were wide open, and sounds indicated that the search parties were at work, apparently without success.

As Brian laid Lola on the big couch, Dakin said, “She’ll soon pull out of it. She has the heart of a lion. If you have any brandy, I think—” he smiled—“I can leave the patient in. your hands. I’ll leave the key, too.”

Dakin retired, closing the outer door. Brian ran to the buffet and was looking for the brandy when he heard Lola’s voice.

“I don’t think I ever fainted in my life before.”

He turned, ran to her. She was sitting up.

“Lola, my dearest!”

“But I do believe a small glass of brandy would do me good.”

Brian ran back, found the brandy, and poured out a liberal shot.

He knelt beside her, his arm around her shoulders as she took the glass. Lola smiled, that fascinating, mocking smile.

“If I drank all this, Brian, I’d faint a second time.”

She took a sip of the brandy, and he drew her to him. “My lips are sticky from that awful tape,” she protested.

Brian held her very close, but kissed her gently. “I nearly went crazy when I heard you were missing.”

Lola took another sip and then set the glass down. “So you’ve found out about me.” She spoke softly. “You know what a little liar I am!”

“I know you have more grit in your little finger than I have in all my hulking carcass!”

“You mean you forgive me for what I had to do?”

“Forgive you!”

She raised her hand to check him. “Brian dear, go back now, and let me lie here for five minutes. I’ll be perfectly all right when I’ve rested—and cleaned the goo off my face. Then I’ll join you.”

“Leave you here alone! And Fu Manchu—”

“Fu Manchu is too far away to harm me.”

“But we heard his voice!”

“I know you did. He intended you to hear it. But he isn’t there. Go up and see for yourself. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

And when Brian, torn between his desire to stay with Lola and a burning curiosity, returned to the penthouse, he found the proper entrance door open. Harkness was bending over the cabinet that looked like a radio set, the back of which had been removed. Nayland Smith was pacing the room and pulling at his ear.

“How is she?” he asked.

“Fine. She’s coming up after a little rest. But where’s Dr. Fu Manchu?”

Sir Denis pointed to an open drawer of the bureau. “There—all we have of him! A tape recorder playing back our conversations in Cairo. If you and I had listened a while longer, we should have heard my voice as well. Brought over for the benefit of my successor. The cunning devil!”

Brian stared about the room incredulously, still half expecting to see the dark spectacles of Dr. Hessian—the only picture he had of the dreaded Fu Manchu—peering out from some shadowy corner.

“But the door! What was the danger of opening the door?”

“The danger’s on the table there,” Harkness called out “Three ordinary bell-pushers were under the carpet where anybody coming in couldn’t miss stepping on one of them.”

“Wired to the receiver you shot to pieces,” Sir Denis added grimly. “If Lola hadn’t lost her head—although God knows I don’t blame her—we might have disconnected them, and so had the secret of the Sound Zone in our hands!”

“Then the other thing”—Brian nodded toward the cabinet—“was connected all the time?”

“It was. One step, and Lola, as well as everyone else and everything breakable in the penthouse, would have gone west. Which reminds me of something you may be able to tell me… the French windows. You saw the demonstration. Why weren’t the windows blown out?”

Brian thought hard. He tried to picture this room as he had seen it then, and a memory came.

“I think I can tell you. I remember now that just before Dr. Hessian began to talk, the Japanese lowered what looked like metal shutters over the windows, and then drew those drapes over them.”

“The shutters are still there,” Sir Denis told him. “Couldn’t make out if they were a hotel fixture. Now I know they should be examined. Evidently made of some material nonconductive of the fatal sound.”

Harkness stood up from his examination of the cabinet and lighted a cigarette.

“Fu Manchu planned to leave no evidence, Mr. Merrick,” he remarked. “We found a small, but I guess effective, time bomb inside this thing. Dakin worked with a bomb-disposal squad in England during the war. He’s an expert. He’s out in the kitchen fixing it.”

“You see, Merrick?” Nayland Smith snapped. “I’m naturally proud of Scotland Yard, but your FBI isn’t without merit. What d’you make of that set, Harkness?”

“This is by no means an ordinary radio set, Sir Denis. It’s some kind of transmitter. Though what it transmits and where it gets it from are mysteries. We haven’t tinkered with it. That’s a laboratory job. But Dakin thinks it can convert all sorts of sounds into that one high inaudible note on which we had a report from Number One. Evidently this note doesn’t become dangerous until it has passed through the special receiver.”

“It’s the receiver that converts the sound,” a clear voice explained.

All three turned in a flash. Lola stood there smiling at them. Sir Denis was first with a chair. Lola thanked him and sat down.

“If you feel up to it, Miss Erskine,” he said quietly, “perhaps you would explain in more detail.”

“I feel up to anything. Particularly, I feet like an idiot for getting hysterical and then passing out. You see, Sir Denis, he”—she seemed to avoid naming Dr. Fu Manchu, as Nayland Smith had known others to do—“was good enough to give me all particulars before leaving me to be shattered. The transmitter, he informed me, is really a sort of selector, or filter. It picks up only certain high notes, vocal or instrumental. On an ordinary receiving set this would come through as atmospheric interferences. It was the thing that Brian blew up that converted the sound to what he called ‘the superaural key,’ which shatters everything within range.” She glanced up as Dakin returned from the kitchen.

“It’s harmless now, sir,” he reported to Nayland Smith. “We’ve saved
some
evidence.”

Another member of Harkness’ party appeared in the doorway.

“What now?” Harkness demanded.

“Doc Alex reports that he’s suffering from thundering concussion—but there isn’t a single bruise on his head!”

“Who’s this?” Brian asked.

“Sergeant Ruppert.”

“Sergeant Ruppert! Where did you find him?”

“In the apartment of our next-door neighbors,” Nayland Smith told him dryly, “while you were taking care of Miss Erskine.” He turned to the man at the door. “Does the doctor think he will recover?”

“He does, sir—and hopes there’ll be no complications.”

“They found a dead man in there, too. Mr. Merrick,” Harkness broke in. “You mightn’t recognize him, the way he looks now. But up till today we all mistook him for Sir Denis.”

“I know. But what about the man in the blue turban?”

“Prince Ranji Bhutani?” Harkness laughed. “He and his servant have vanished, of course. I don’t imagine the ‘prince’ was wearing his blue turban! They must have got away soon after strangling your double, Sir Denis. We had that pair under observation already and there’s a fifty-fifty chance we can pick them up.”

“If Sergeant Ruppert was found there, they evidently got him, too.”

Ray Harkness shook his head. “Four guests on your floor, Mr. Merrick, checked out earlier today. We don’t know if any of them belonged to the gang. Only one, Mrs. Nadia Narovska, has disappeared like the ‘prince’ and left her luggage behind. Said to be a very good-looker.”