The Avenger 22 - The Black Death (10 page)

The Avenger went down these and into a moist tunnel. The minute he did so, he heard voices, scraps of conversation and a queer whirring.

He went forward.

Under the tool house floor, but with no passage upward to it, he found the rock crypt of the television scene! The underground room from which that devilish broadcast had been made which they accidentally saw on Smitty’s scrambler.

In the crypt, now, was a big television cabinet much like Smitty’s own, but with enough changes to show that it had been put together by a different man. The screen was glowing with a moving scene; from it, came the conversational scraps Dick had heard.

The picture seemed to show the inside of a laboratory somewhere. It was taken from straight upward, as if the recording lens was in a ceiling. Two men in white coats moved in and out of focus. Now and then, they talked in fragmentary fashion as men busy on the same task will talk.

The whirring sound Dick had heard came from a camera placed in front of the television screen. A moving picture camera recording in film the action on the screen. A man was working the camera, eyes intent on his job. Benson stole up behind him.

In another instant, the man would have been down, never knowing what hit him. But at that precise second a voice came rumbling down the tunnel.

“Ray! Ray—”

The man at the camera cursed and kept on grinding. Then the screen went blank, though the power was still on. The man straightened up and turned toward the tunnel opening. The Avenger moved with him, and behind the man’s back managed to reach the oblong block of stone, like an altar, that had shown in the first scene.

He crouched behind it. In a moment, two men entered the crypt.

“Look, Ray!” said one angrily. “How many times do you have to be told to shut that door in the lawn when you come down here?”

“I did shut it,” protested the cameraman.

“Like hell you did. We nearly fell into the tunnel while we were makin’ a search around to see if that guy, Benson, is still near the place. The door was wide open.”

“I was sure I shut it,” said the cameraman.

“You better be more sure next time, pal.” The man’s tone changed. “Through for this time?”

“Yeah.”

“O.K. Come along, then.”

The three lugged the cumbersome camera and equipment out of the crypt.

“Would have
sworn
I shut the trapdoor,” came the cameraman’s voice once more.

There was complete darkness in the crypt. The Avenger left the shelter of the stone block and moved soundlessly to the door of the tunnel. He let ten minutes go by; then he went down it to the trapdoor.

There, a flash of his light showed the release catch, and he pressed it back. Just above him he heard a faint whistle. His hands went to his pockets, came out, and he thrust the trapdoor up.

He emerged into a glare of light from the outdoor bulbs strung in back of the grounds. And he emerged into a ring of men glaring murder at him, with guns in their hands!

He couldn’t go back. In the underground pit, he would be helpless. Without an instant’s hesitation he kept on upward, shut the door, and stood in the ring of men.

“I told you I shut that door!” That was the cameraman.

“Why, it’s only Harry,” someone else said.

The Avenger, hands clenched by his sides, looked calmly around the grim circle, taking the hundred-to-one chance that he could still get by on his disguise.

But that chance didn’t work out.

“Harry, my eye!” said a man in a hoarse, agonized whisper. “This the guy said he was socked in the neck? Only one guy around here got a knock in the throat. That’s
me!
That ain’t Harry! Look at his left hand. There’s no scar on the back.”

“Then if it ain’t Harry, it’s—”

“Yeah! It’s the guy with the white eyes. Benson! And we got him dead to rights—”

The Avenger’s clenched hands opened.

The whistle he had heard before emerging had obviously been a signal. It wasn’t a very bright thing for the whistler to do, since it had warned Dick as well as the other men.

When, after hearing the whistle, Dick’s hands had gone to his pockets, they’d come out closed over a dozen tiny smoke grenades. Now, their opening released them.

The pillar of smoke that instantly rose might have come from a burning garage, it was so dense and so big. It hid The Avenger so that a battery of battleship searchlights couldn’t have picked out his form. And immediately Dick moved in its cover.

Straight ahead of him he had methodically noted that two men stood near together who were shorter than the rest. Toward this spot, The Avenger leaped. Just before reaching the cursing pair, he took off in a high jump with all the force in his extraordinary legs.

It was done in perfect form, with body straight and horizontal at the zenith of the leap, as if an imaginary bar were being hurdled. He must have cleared the heads of the two with a foot to spare; he couldn’t see in the smoke.

He lit running. Toward the other outbuilding on the place—the garage.

The gang could have seen him, now, if they’d looked. But they didn’t look. The Avenger was supposed to be still in that circle of men and smoke. They moved in on themselves, clubbing around at random. A lot of yells showed that they were giving each other some trouble in the fog.

The Avenger slipped into the garage. Two cars were there, in the four- or five-car space. He started to get into one, a heavy coupé, when he heard voices.

There was a man’s voice and a girl’s voice. They came from the other car, a sedan almost as big as the limousine in which Smitty and Nellie and Wilson had been driven almost to their deaths.

Dick went soundlessly to this car.

In the back seat were Alicia Hannon and Daniel Miller.

Miller had blood down the side of his face, and Benson remembered Nellie’s words about how he had been left for dead when she and Smitty were captured.

Alicia was in a queer robe, almost like that of an ancient priestess.

“What kind of an animal are you, anyhow?” Miller was saying, with contempt in his voice. “The idea of working with the very gang that killed your father!”

“Dad isn’t dead—yet,” said the girl.

“Well, you should know,” said Miller cuttingly. “You seem to have the complete confidence of this cutthroat crew. They’d tell you the truth, I suppose.”

“Will you get out of this car?” snapped Alicia.

“I will not. I’m going to hide here till I see a chance to get away. And why, may I ask, did I find you here? Were you going to slip away, too? Double-cross your nice pals?”

“I was looking for you. I was sure you weren’t dead—only knocked out. So I did find you, here, trying to get away.”

“And you mean to say you’re going to turn me in to that bunch of killers?” Miller’s tone softened. “Alicia, we were good friends once, when I worked for your father. Maybe we were more than friends. At least, I hoped so. Now—”

The Avenger had looked over the car’s locks while he was listening. He saw that they were fashioned as were the locks on the limousine: they could be secured from the outside.

He locked them, softly, and crawled into the front compartment. A short search with deft fingers found the button that snapped shut the heavy glass between front and rear compartments. This car was made to trap people by the consistent Hannon, just as the other was.

The Avenger pushed the button and the glass slid shut with a solid bang.

“Hey!” came Miller’s startled voice. Alicia screamed, too, but Benson paid no attention.

The ignition was locked and there was no key, but it took The Avenger only a few seconds to connect the wires below the dash, working surely and swiftly by feel. Behind him, hell was being raised. But he could hear only dimly the cries of the trapped two. The rear compartment was pretty well sealed.

The car motor sounded. The Avenger got into first gear. He warmed the motor an instant, then gave it the gun.

Like a tank, the car plowed ahead, tearing the garage door off its hinges. The door slid off the hood after a dozen feet, and the sedan leaped down the drive.

Near the tool house, the men had discovered that once more, somehow, Benson had given them the slip. They all saw the car at once, after the rending crash of its exit from the garage. Yelling, they ran after it. They didn’t withhold the bullets, now. They poured slugs at the machine!

Splintered stars formed all over the bulletproof glass of the windshield and windows. Dents leaped into the metal of the body. But no bullets got through. The car was almost as well proofed as one of the Avenger’s own machines.

Calmly, Benson went for the gate. He went fast, to give himself a few seconds there. He didn’t think the car could take a collision with those iron bars and remain unharmed.

The gate guard came running from the lodge house. The Avenger threw a tiny gas grenade. The man stared glassily at him, and fell, with the gun he had drawn discharging its bullet into the ground.

So fast that his body seemed a blur, Benson leaped from car to gate and back again. With the gate open, he drove the sedan through. The following men were so close that two almost caught the bumper, but the car got away clean.

A good getaway. The Avenger headed for the Bleek Street headquarters with his two sudden guests. But as he drove, grim fury showed in his pale, deadly eyes, clear now of the disguising lenses.

He’d gotten away. But this was defeat!

The Avenger had meant to steal out, get all the members of Justice, Inc., and perhaps a dozen picked city detectives besides, and come back here and round up the entire gang.

The gang would scatter, now, with this warning. They would go to a new hide-out, and the pursuit would have to begin almost from scratch again. The way they’d let loose with their guns told that they’d not try to use this place as a headquarters any longer.

Benson had saved his life, but the murderous members working under the shadow of the Black Wings had won the battle. It remained to see if they could also win the war.

Josh had some reporting to do when Benson got back to Bleek Street. At the urgency in the colored man’s face, The Avenger took that report before he did anything else.

“We got another of those television broadcasts,” Josh said tensely. “It was about three hours ago, several hours after you left here for Hannon’s home.”

“Like the first?” said Benson evenly.

“Just like it, except for one thing. The shadow of the wings deepened as it did before. The shadow left and showed a figure, like before. The figure put out a lot of high-sounding stuff about the members of the Black Wings being safe as long as they followed the instructions of the Voice, and being in terrible danger if they disobeyed. And—just as the first time—a man’s death was predicted. Or else it was accomplished right then and there; I don’t know.”

The Avenger’s pale eyes were like polar ice in moonlight. They seemed to burn and freeze like pale, liquid oxygen.

“The victim this time was a man named Edwin Maller. The same ritual was gone through. A figure stood in the underground stone crypt and was supposed to represent Maller. It was of wax, I think, not a living person. This figure was given a black orchid. Shortly afterward it shriveled and fell. And it had turned black.”

The Avenger remembered the swiftness with which the black death had struck Gailord after that first accidentally witnessed Black Wings scene.

“And this man, Edwin Maller?” he asked.

“In half an hour the police teletype carried the news about him,” Josh said. “He had just fallen over dead, in his home. The corpse seemed a little shriveled. and it was black! Just as Gailord’s corpse was. Maller,” Josh Newton added, “was a foreman in the Bidloe Locomotive Works.”

“Gailord—owner of a factory turning out bomber stabilizers,” murmured The Avenger, pale eyes lambent. Maller—foreman in another factory. There is a parallel. But you said there was one thing different about the television scene.”

“One thing
very
different,” Josh nodded. “In the first, the figure talking was a hooded man. His was this Voice they babble about. In this second broadcast, the talking figure—the central figure—was a
girl!
And she was not hooded as the man had been. You could see her face very plainly. She was the girl we saw take the black orchid from Mac’s store.”

The Avenger turned to Smitty. Dick had come up by himself, fast, from the basement of the building where the Justice, Inc., cars were garaged.

“We have two guests,” he said to the giant. “They are in the rear of Hannon’s car I came here in. Better bring them up.”

A moment later, Daniel Miller and Alicia Hannon were in the big top-floor room. Miller was fuming like a wet firecracker.

“Who do you people think you are, that you can keep me a prisoner like this? It amounts to kidnaping. It—”

“I thought I was rescuing you from that gang at the Hannon home,” The Avenger said evenly.

“You did. And I certainly appreciate it. But did you have to keep us penned up in the back of that car?” Miller got sore again. “The least you could have done was to turn Miss Hannon and me loose as soon as you got away from Long Island.”