The Avenger 22 - The Black Death (17 page)

Benson burst into action, then. He leaped for Suva, hands clawing for throat. Then he knocked Suva down and attacked the other two. After that, the leader’s gun found his neck again, bored in.

“I’d kill you for that, only I want you to die by television later— Ah!”

Moisture was on Benson’s forehead. He swayed as Cole had swayed back at Bleek Street.

“So the black death is beginning to work,” said the Voice. “And just at the proper time, too.” He stepped forward, eyes glaring at Benson through eyeholes in the hood, and began the broadcast. Benson staggered to a chair and collapsed in it.

The Voice dispensed with the buildup of the Black Wings’ shadow. There was no helper to perform the trick. All were out on guard. The leader opened abruptly.

“Members of the Black Wings, before you is a man doomed. You all saw him handed the black orchid at the previous broadcast. He evaded that death for a few hours, but he receives it, now, even as any of you who turn traitor and think to escape the death penalty will, in the end, die.”

A black-gloved hand picked up a black orchid from the bed. The hooded Voice strode to where Benson sat.

“I give you your sentence,” came the sonorous voice. And unseen members of the cult, looking at television screens in far places, must have gasped. “In less than five minutes—”

There was a scuffle outside the window, on the deck. As if in answer, there was a thudding sound, a curse cut off in the middle, at the stern of the boat. And then came a yell of terror from the pier.

“Beat it, boss!
The guy was telling the truth!
There’s a dozen cops or something—”

That voice stopped, too.

The hooded leader whirled toward The Avenger, his eyes red wells of hate in the eye slits. But there was still purpose in them.

He bounded to a dangling rope in the wall toward the pier. He yanked on this.

“That sends the cage with my prisoners in it to the bottom of the bay,” he snarled. “At least, there won’t be any witnesses—”

But there was no crash of the tiger cage shooting down the incline and through the loose boards at the end of the pier. The Voice glared at Benson.

“I tied the wheels,” said Benson calmly. “Whatever catch you released to let the cage roll down is useless. The cage is roped in place.”

“Damn you!” screamed the hooded man. “Then we’ll both go down—”

The Avenger was out of his chair and on the Voice before the latter had gone five feet. Benson got him just in time. His hand had flashed toward a lever in the inner wall. The Avenger pulled him back.

“That, I suppose,” said the man with the pale, deadly eyes, “sinks this boat. The water’s deep enough—forty feet—I measured it. But we’ll get along without that.”

The eyes glaring through the slits in the hood were so filled with wonder that, for an instant, there was hardly room for hate.

“You moved!” the hooded figure gasped. “You aren’t . . . you—”

“I’m not dying of the black death,” Benson finished for him. “No. I analyzed the cause, from the body of the guinea pig used at Hannon’s home for experiment. Also, I found an antidote. You did poison one of my aides with your orchids, but I gave him the antidote before we left. At the same time, I took an injection of it myself, to share the fate of my friend if I had unwittingly killed him. But I’m alive, and all right, so it seems the antidote is a success.” Strangling sounds came from the hooded man. His gloved hands moved in throttling sweeps. And then the door opened and Smitty, Josh, and Mac came in. Each dragged an unconscious gunman with him. Mac had Suva, and Mac’s knuckles were blissfully split with the soul-satisfying force of the blow to the jaw he’d given the crook.

“Thanks for smearin’ the men with phosphorus, Muster Benson,” the Scotchman said. “Made it verrra easy to find them in the dark.”

The hooded man stiffened as the memory came back to him of Dick’s “futile” struggle against his three men. He had rubbed a fluorescent substance on them that glowed betrayingly when they stepped out into the darkness.

His scream was like nothing human. Then he turned and sprang. He went headfirst through the window on the pier side. They heard him strike.

“After him,” snapped The Avenger. “Guard that cage out there!”

Then, alone in the room with the three gangsters sprawled at his feet, The Avenger turned to the television transmitter and completed the Voice’s broadcast.

“Members of this organization calling itself the Black Wings,” he said, in the vibrant, stirring voice that was one of the things making him such a leader among men. “You have been duped. Your leader, the cold-blooded killer who is ashamed to reveal his face but hides it always under a black hood, has told you that the Black Wings is an organization to help our country in a time of danger. That is not so. The Black Wings is a racket organization. It exists for just one purpose: to further the racket of this one man. I will tell you how.

“You members are chosen for one thing: you have access to laboratories or factories or other places where secret industrial or war processes are being experimented with. If the experiment is successful, you report it. Then you are instructed to conceal a television-broadcasting set—which, by the way, was invented by John Jay Hannon and stolen by this man—where it will send in detail the complete process.

“Finally, the hooded racketeer gets in touch with the man or corporation owning the process and blackmails this owner for a huge sum, threatening to make the secret process public if the demand is not met. The last blackmail demand was made on Stockbridge Chemical Corp., where, as you read, the building engineer, Frank Stanton, was killed by the black death. Stanton was no traitor. He obeyed the command, and was murdered for it to keep his mouth shut, as all of you would have died after performing your purpose. But this will not happen, now. The Black Wings order is disbanded. Your hooded leader is a prisoner at this moment. Members of the Black Wings, thank your stars that you have found out the truth behind your cult—and go and sin no more.”

Benson turned. There was the chair he had sat in when pretending to be in pain. He picked it up—it was a good, solid one—and brought it down on the television apparatus. Again and again, he smashed into the delicate array of tubes and coils. Then he went to the pier.

Smitty’s disconsolate voice came to him. “Chief? We didn’t find the guy with the bag over his head. I’m afraid he got away.”

The Avenger said evenly, “Josh? Mac?”

“Here,” came their voices. “We’re guardin’ this cage like ye said to,” added Mac.

“Good,” said Benson. “Because that’s where our man is. In that cage.”

Exclamations from within the cage greeted this.

And a puzzled silence from Benson’s aides. The Avenger’s flash rayed over the cage and its occupants—Schuyler Marcy, Dan Miller, Alicia Hannon, and still unconscious, John Hannon.

“In here?” repeated Marcy. “I don’t see how. No one has gotten out of here. The thing’s barred like a jail.”

“Say!” Miller said suddenly, mouth open with surprise. “There may be something in that. It’s pitch-dark out here. But just the same, a while ago, after Mr. Benson said he was here alone, I thought I felt someone crawl past me—and not crawl back again!”

Josh had been looking in the light of Benson’s flash. He said: “A trapdoor in the floor. At this end! And a hand could get through the bars and down to the catch, if that hand knew just where to feel under the floor for it.”

“So someone did get out, in the darkness!” Miller marveled. Then his voice broke, and he gasped, “Why—
Marcy!”

Marcy, sitting tailor fashion on the floor of the cage, had moved. The move revealed a black piece of fabric easily identified by the eyeholes as the Voice’s hood.

Smitty roared his rage, and he and Mac both moved angrily in to open the cage and get Marcy out. But Benson’s voice cut in, as calm and even as if this were all a dinner-table conversation.

“Save the acting, Miller. You put that hood there, when you slipped back into the cage a minute ago.”

“Me?” Miller’s voice hardened. “You’re insane!”

“Marcy was accounted for, during at least one of the broadcasts. He was at Bleek Street. He couldn’t have worn that hood. But there’s other proof, I think. At Gailord’s barn, with a blowgun, I spattered a chemical against your shoe that ought to put you in the electric chair.”

Benson put a lens to his eye and nodded. He handed it to Smitty.

Smitty looked and whistled. Over the whole side of Dan Miller’s left shoe was a dim blue-violet glow as seen through the special lens. It was a label of death.

“May I?” begged Marcy through set teeth. And he didn’t wait for permission. He turned on Miller in the flashlight ray and hit him so hard that his body bent a bar of the cage a trifle as it banged back against it.

“I’ve been hunting for weeks for the boy that deserved that blow,” he said. “As you discovered earlier, I was already in Gailord’s employ when he died. I was a sort of unofficial detective for him, watching him and his plant, and frequently hanging around the Bristal Airplane Co.’s plant to see that everything about the Gailord stabilizer was going all right. Then I noticed that Gailord was acting strangely. Something was wrong. I couldn’t find out what. Then he died, and I’ve been living only to get the man responsible for his death. If he manages to dodge the electric chair—”

“He won’t,” said Benson. “We have enough evidence against him to convict a dozen men.”

He stepped to the open side of the pier and flashed his light toward the sky. After a while, a plane motor sounded; then there was the long swish of the amphibian bomber, with Nellie at the controls, as it landed in the water nearby.

It was lucky the plane was big. It had a good load, now. Three gunmen, including Suva, lay bound. Near them, handcuffed and raging, was Dan Miller, with Marcy hopefully waiting a chance to slug him again if he tried any funny business. Alicia Hannon was with her father, who had recovered consciousness after a bit of The Avenger’s skilled ministration.

Smitty and Mac and Josh and Nellie were near Benson, who was at the controls. Nellie was still grumbling rebelliously at being left to fly a plane around in peaceful circles while everybody else was having fun.

Mac said, “This black death, Muster Benson. Ye say ye spotted it? What in the worrrld caused it, anyway?”

The Avenger was silent for several minutes. Then he answered thoughtfully, “I believe I’ll not even share that secret with you. I’ll turn it over to the war department, with the antidote, still a complete secret. Even Miller doesn’t know the answer. He stole the completed chemical from Hannon. But he had to kidnap Hannon, too, to make more for him when he ran out. That’s why Hannon’s still alive.”

“War department?” repeated Smitty. “You think Hannon invented it for war?”

“I think so. The drug is highly volatile if mixed with ethyl alcohol. Makes a gas which produces the black death when inhaled just as surely as the drug itself does on the end of a small sharp point.

“It’s a thing that attacks the red blood corpuscles. It is an element that combines instantaneously with the oxygen carried by each red corpuscle, producing combustion, burning that corpuscle to a black mass. It starts a chain process, each corpuscle passing the chemical flame to the next. When all are black, with all the surface blood vessels and arteries filled with them, you have the black skin and flesh we have seen. The black death! This terrible poison can be introduced to the blood stream directly, or through the lungs. It could be a ghastly war weapon, turning an invading army into rank on rank of black, stiff corpses. I hope the army will never have to use it.”

The lights of New York showed ahead—the lights of the place where Daniel Miller would be judged and exterminated, where John Jay Hannon could be nursed back to health by his resolute daughter, and where, as a few small signs had indicated, Schuyler Marcy might also be nursed by Alicia for the malady whose only remedy is the pill of romance.

Again, The Avenger had rendered a great service to his country and to mankind. But there was no triumph in his cold, pale eyes; no look of victory on his impassive face. It had been just another chapter in the life that could only be ended one of these days by violent death.

But till that end came, he would continue to serve mankind, unsung and mainly unknown, in perpetual vengeance against the underworld.

To the end—The Avenger!

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