The Avenger 22 - The Black Death (7 page)

“You will,” Nellie replied. “And right after that, you’ll probably find more things happening than you ever dreamed could happen around one person in the same short span of time.”

They climbed into the car, down at the curb, and headed for Long Island.

John Jay Hannon’s Long Island place was not very elaborate, but it was quite big. The grounds were acres in extent, and most of it had been left to grow up in trees and bushes and underbrush as it pleased. It made a pretty wild tangle. Around the lot went a high mesh fence with a barbed-wire strand at the top. Not too high to climb; but, undoubtedly, it was hooked up with an alarm somewhere so that if someone tried to climb it, the trial would be recorded in the house.

The house, as far as could be seen from the barred gate, was in about the center of the estate, and there was another building almost as big. This had no windows; it was probably Hannon’s well-guarded laboratory and workshop.

The Avenger stopped his car several hundred yards from the place, and he and Cole Wilson finished the trip to the fence through underbrush on the other side.

At the fence, Benson said evenly, “I think it would be just as well if we got in with no one knowing about it.”

Cole nodded and raised a foot. The Avenger’s steel-strong hands went under it.

Cole leaped upward as hard as he could and was further catapulted by The Avenger’s great strength. There was an overhanging tree branch so high up that none but a tree surgeon’s special stepladder would have enabled an ordinary man to reach it. Cole just caught it with his fingertips, got a better grip and drew himself up. He dropped down on the other side of the fence and went to the gate.

After a moment’s search, he saw the burglar-alarm connection at the gate. It went to a small house a dozen yards along the drive. No one was in the little building. Cole entered and cut off the alarm.

He opened the gate for The Avenger, then connected the alarm after he’d shut the gate again. The two went toward the house, not along the drive but moving with effortless silence through the shrubbery. It would have taken a sharp eye to see them.

They went around to the rear of the house. There, The Avenger took from a pocket a thing like a small watch. There was a tiny battery in it, and an indicator needle on a calibrated face. As he held this next to the lock on the door, the needle moved, indicating current flowing through an alarm wire fixed to the lock.

They went around to the front again. Anyone concealed in shrubbery, watching the front door, would see The Avenger and Cole. But it was more likely that if there were a guard, he’d be inside the house.

Anyhow, they had to take a chance with the front door, since the main objective was to avoid sounding an alarm.

Dick held his clever little telltale to the front-door lock, and the needle did not move. He picked the lock; then he and Cole went into the house. They listened and heard nothing.

“Looks like nobody’s home,” whispered Cole.

The Avenger said nothing. He went to the kitchen.

The kitchen was almost hotel-size. It was spotless and looked as if unused for all the eight weeks the owner, John Jay Hannon, had been away. But in the butler’s pantry, Dick saw a bread board, and on this were several crumbs.

The crumbs were fresh.

Someone had hidden out in this house very recently, and long enough to eat at least one meal. Whoever it was, had been very clever. He had gone over the place meticulously to hide trace of occupancy. But these few crumbs had been left unnoticed.

The two went through the house but found no one. Cole, however, suddenly gave a low whistle while they were in the basement.

There was a heavy-lidded incinerator opening down there. Cole had opened this. Now, he pointed, and The Avenger looked.

There was a dead animal in the incinerator chute. It appeared that someone had thrown it in and hadn’t gotten around to incinerating it yet. Perhaps the intention was to wait till darkness when the smoke couldn’t be seen.

The dead animal was a guinea pig. And the pig was black.

It was not just the short, bristly hairs of the little animal that were black; the hide was black, too. It was the strange black death, applied this time to a small laboratory test animal instead of to a human being.

“It looks to me as though Hannon has been hiding out all these weeks in his own house,” Cole whispered excitedly. “It looks as if he’s near here, now; as if he’d experimented on this thing sometime today—or, at most, yesterday, because the body is quite fresh.”

Dick said nothing. He stared with icy, basilisk eyes at the blackened little body. Then he took things from various small pockets and set to work.

Rapidly, he took specimens of the guinea pig’s flesh, blood and lungs. These he carefully put into labeled little bottles. After that, he went up the basement stairs and through a covered passageway from house to laboratory building.

A heavy door shut the laboratory from the passage, but this opened at a touch. It was unlocked. The Avenger’s pale, glacial eyes seemed to burn brighter; but if he suspected a trap in the innocently unlocked door, he did not say so.

The two entered a room like a small garage—big, low, with no supporting pillars in the center. It was crowded with scientific apparatus, most of it pertaining to radio but a good deal to chemistry, too.

The Avenger busied himself in an examination of the chemical apparatus.

There was a beaker that had been cleaned till it had a crystal polish on the sides, but in the bottom were traces of some gummy stuff stubbornly clinging. He scraped some of this into a tiny envelope, sealed it.

All the lights in the big room snapped out, as someone at the doorway punched the light switch. Cole swore, then was silent. The Avenger made no sound from the start. He dropped swiftly to the floor in case someone started shooting in the dark.

There was no sound of a shot, however. Instead, there was a step. It seemed to be the light, clicking step of a woman or a girl—the sound made by dainty high heels.

Benson had located Cole in the blackness. It
was
blackness, too. There were no windows in this ultramodern little shop; all light was from fluorescent tubes. With those clicked off, the blackness was absolute.

The Avenger’s finger pressed Cole’s arm.

“Gas!”

Cole nodded. He had reasoned the same way: A woman alone switches out the light, then walks calmly and unafraid in the darkness toward where she last saw two men! It argued that for some reason she was entirely unafraid of them. That meant that she expected them to be helpless. About the only reason they’d be helpless would be if gas had been released in the big room.

Each had nose clips with little pads of chemical-soaked cotton devised by MacMurdie. They slid these over their nostrils. The clips would keep them from the effects of any gas for about twelve minutes.

They stayed silent, crouched in darkness. The light, clicking steps of the girl continued toward them. She was a cool customer, whoever she might be.

Cole felt a hand touch him, felt fingers begin to feel over his pockets in an impersonal investigation. His own hands darted up. He caught slender wrists. There was a muffled shriek of surprise and fright.

“All right,” Cole called to The Avenger. “I have her.”

In a moment, the light clicked on again, as Dick’s finger touched the switch. It revealed a tall, beautifully shaped girl struggling in Cole’s grasp. The girl had dark-brown hair. What her face was like, you couldn’t tell. The girl’s face had a gas mask over it, hiding it from forehead to chin.

She had been fighting Cole furiously in the darkness. Now, with the lights on, she redoubled her efforts to tear loose and get away. She kicked him in the shin and clawed at his face.

“Hey! Cut that out!” Cole said.

He could talk if he breathed out with the words through his mouth, and then breathed in again through the chemical filters in his nostrils. This would keep him from inhaling any of whatever gas it was the girl had released.

But the girl couldn’t talk at all, through her older-type mask. She could certainly scrap, though. And she did, till finally her lithe body went limp. She had fainted.

That is, it seemed as if she’d fainted. But it might be an act. Cole held her very tightly as he carried her toward the door.

“Shall we take her to the house and see what she has to say for herself?” he asked The Avenger, breathing out with the words.

Benson’s head with its thick, jet-black cap of hair, nodded affirmatively. They went into the covered passage from laboratory to house, Cole still carrying the girl.

This passage was little more than an outside hallway. It was cement-floored, brick-walled. A couple of windows gave light, and, overhead, a couple of bulbs would provide illumination at night. It was soundly built but was only a shell, a covered runway, allowing a person to walk between the two buildings in any kind of weather without being exposed to the elements.

There was no one in the runway when they stepped from the laboratory. It certainly looked innocent enough. But an instant later it did not look at all harmless.

They’d about reached the center of the thirty-foot expanse when there was a bang behind them. The laboratory door had thudded shut.

They’d left this heavy portal open when they came out. It had no spring hinge of any kind. There seemed to be nothing to shut it automatically. Yet, it had shut, after standing open for perhaps ten seconds.

Both The Avenger and Cole had turned in surprise at the sound of its closing. Now, they turned back and found the other end of the covered passage barred. But not only by a door.

Four men had come soundlessly from the house while the backs of the two were turned. They stood there, now, with submachine guns in their hands. The guns were lined with the careless ease of trained hands at the man with the pale, icy eyes and at the dark-haired man with the girl in his arms.

Cole and The Avenger tensed instinctively for action. Then they relaxed. Behind them was a door automatically shut and locked by some spring or electrical mechanism. In front was the little group of grinning gunmen. At the sides were brick walls with barred windows.

“Yeah,” nodded one of the men, reading the helplessness in Cole Wilson’s eyes. “Be smart and don’t try anything. You’re hooked, all right. Boy, with these two, we do have a nice net full of fish!”

Cole was still holding the girl in his arms. His dark eyes darted to The Avenger’s glacial, masklike face.

The words of the leader of these four men hinted that they’d already captured someone else—that Benson and Cole were but two more prisoners. He wondered who the others were.

He was to find out shortly.

“Follow us into the house,” said the leader of the murderous four. “Don’t come any closer than you are now. Keep your hands over your head—you with the white eyes. I’ve heard of the trick stuff you carry around in your clothes.”

The four backed from the passage into Hannon’s house. The room the passage opened into was a kind of library, very large, rather bare. Cole and The Avenger followed as ordered, keeping the same twelve- or fifteen-foot distance between them.

In the big room, the leader said to Cole, “Put the girl down on that couch.”

Cole lowered the girl to the leather divan. The leader took the gas mask off her face.

On the desk in this room was a picture of a girl. The pictured face was the same as that of the girl on the couch. Even if her familiarity with the tricks of Hannon’s laboratory hadn’t hinted at her identity, this picture of her on Hannon’s desk would have done so.

She was Hannon’s daughter. Also, she was the girl who had tricked her way into Mac’s drugstore and out again with the black orchid, not knowing that a television screen was recording her movements, blocks away in the Bleek Street headquarters.

Cole thought he saw a chance in his moving around the girl. The movements allowed him finally to twist his left arm sharply inside its coat sleeve.

The twist unzipped the pocket inside the sleeve just below the elbow. Three little spheres about the size of small marbles slipped down into his cupped left hand.

He straightened suddenly and threw them at the floor at the feet of the four gunmen.

There was a faint plopping sound, and, at once, as if the entire section of flooring had caught violently on fire, thick, greenish smoke billowed up.

The men yelled and fired wildly through the sudden smoke screen. Red flashes laced the green-black smoke. Cole, on hands and knees and crawling toward the door, wished he’d had access to gas pellets instead of smoke pills. But he hadn’t. All he’d been able to get at were the smoke grenades. He thought they’d be enough, however.

He was at the door. He felt around for The Avenger, and his fingers rested on a leg. That was all. Something smacked on his head like a falling telephone pole, and that was all Cole Wilson knew for quite a little while.

The Avenger reached the door an instant later.

Dick wasn’t caught that easily. He had an idea more men than the four coughing back there in the smoke were in this place, and that the yells of the men would have drawn them. So when his slim but steel-strong fingers touched a leg, he swayed back while a swung gun clipped past him, straightened up, and lashed out with his fist.