LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

from its sill. Only a fly could have found hand- or foot-hold, on that blank wall, and so far did the huge hostelry overtop the surrounding low roofs that the interior of the chamber could be observed only from the spidery structure of Brooklyn Bridge, a quarter-mile away, and then only by a powerful spy-glass.

      But the room’s occupants seemed to have great need of secrecy, for its door was locked, not only by its usual bolt but also by a contrivance that slid between door-edge and jamb and could be removed without trace. The crevices around the door and its keyhole were tightly stuffed with cotton batting, and the single light within was cast by a lamp whose shade was covered with a black cloth. Its illumination was thrown only downward to the table-top on which it stood.

      The rest of the room, therefore, was in semi-darkness enhanced somehow by the pale gleam of the bed’s coverlet and the darker shadows of two men seated opposite one another at the table.

      Only their hands were clearly visible.

      One pair clutched the edge of the small round table. They were big hands, their joints swollen, the tips and inner surfaces of their fingers calloused as only long, hard labor can harden a man’s skin. They were weather-tanned, but under the bronze there was a gray pallor oddly at variance with their evident strength. The palms were wet with cold sweat.

      The owner of these hands, one knew, was under a tremendous strain, was fighting hard to keep an appearance of steadiness and calm while he waited for some critical decision to be made by the other.

      The hands of that other, slim and effeminate, conveyed an impression of wily power, of sure dominance. Their skin was oddly tinged, the nails filed to queer long points, and at the base of those nails, crescents of deep blue, strangely exotic.

      These hands gripped the margins of the topmost blueprint of a pile spread over the top of the table. One felt, rather than saw, that the owner of those hands was intently absorbing every quirk and angle of the sharply defined white lines that patterned the cerulean sheet.

      Within the circle of illumination there were two other objects, both close to the hands holding the outspread plan. One was a bulky package of grimy-edged, rumpled envelopes held by a thick, black elastic. The other was a bull-nosed automatic, compact and vicious.

      For a while there was no sound in that mysteriously isolated chamber except the faint rustle of paper and the heavy, tortured breathing of the man who waited. Then his vis-à-vis spoke. “Yes,” he muttered, “These are what I wanted, Mister Lassiter. You have fulfilled your bargain.”

      “How about your end, then?” Lassiter asked hoarsely. “The letters—?”

      “Are yours,” The speaker’s hand moved swiftly, yet without hurry, to the automatic’s grip. It lifted the gun and pushed the bundle of letters across the table with its muzzle. They vanished in Lassiter’s capacious paw, now visibly trembling, “You may assure the lady her secret is safe.”

      “Damn it, Odon,” There was a wealth of bitterness in the response, “that’s the only way you’d have ever gotten those plans of the subway ventilating system from me. If they’d been my own letters I’d have told you where to go, but I couldn’t let hers get to—”

      “The person who would have been so very interested in reading them. No! We knew that, and used our information.” Odon was rolling the plans up dextrously, though one yellow hand still held the automatic. “I cannot quite comprehend your Occidental viewpoint.”

      “You wouldn’t. But I still can’t get it through my head why you went to so much trouble to get them. The principles are common knowledge, and your engineers—”

      “Are as good as yours. Yes.” Something vaguely mocking had come into Sato’s tone. “Perhaps you might be enlightened if I were to tell you that I represent not the municipality of our largest city but—our War Office.”

      “What!” Lassiter forgot caution in an astonished shout. “Your War—But why—?”

      “Why should that department be interested in your subway?” A chair grated as the alien rose. “Simply this, my dear sir. While our King and your President struggle to reach an approachment on the difficulties between our nations, we of the military prepare for the failure of their negotiations. New weapons are being forged on both sides, new methods of warfare. No longer will the uniformed forces alone bear the brunt of battle. The new strategy will consist of striking at the civilian population, and striking first. Gas and disease germs, will be munitions of the next war, their swift dissemination will constitute its tactics. With these maps we shall know just where to place our gas bombs, just where to release our death-dealing microbes so that they may spread through New York with the greatest rapidity. You see—”

      “You dog!” Lassiter’s chair crashed to the floor as he leaped to his feet, the table skidded sideways as he dove past it, his big hands fisted and flailing. “You yellow dog!” But the other’s ready gun cracked, its sound thundering here but inaudible outside the muffled room.

      A sudden blue hole appeared in the engineer’s right temple. Odon slid aside, catlike, watched Lassiter plunge past him and thud blindly against the wall. The big man clawed at the plaster; a sound burbled from his throat, something between a groan and a shriek. Then life was out of him and he had collapsed, a shapeless, sprawling heap on the dull maroon carpeting. Where the back of his head lay, a darker pool spread, seeped into the thick pile.

      Odon stood motionless for a moment, the faintest of smiles twisting his thin lips with cold cruelty. “So to the rest of his nation when the day comes,” he muttered in his own language. “And may it dawn soon.”

      He turned back to the table, put his murder-weapon down, and lifted the blueprint roll to stow it in a cunningly-contrived pocket of his dark jacket. “But I must rid myself of the weakness that urged me to taunt him with the fate awaiting his countrymen before I stilled his tongue forever.”

      His long fingers sought the light chain, jerked it. Blackness swept in to hide murderer and victim under a common pall, but there was a feel of movement in the room, the slither of the spy’s feet across the rug, the soft rub of cotton against wood as he pulled the muffling from the door cracks. The metal grated with the wee sound of well-oiled hinges. A widening gray line showed that the door was opening to let the spy out into the early-morning corridor with his burden of horrible death for New York’s teeming millions. His squat form was silhouetted against that dimness, and then—against a sudden blaze of white light from a flashlight lens. “Not so fast, Odon,” a cold, hard voice sounded. “Not so fast.”

      Low-toned as it was, that voice was keen-edged with threat of sudden death. The spy saw a gleam of metal next the steadily held flashlight, the snouting barrel of a revolver. His face froze, was an expressionless mask. His one hand tightened its hold on the doorknob till white showed over the muscle at the base of its thumb, and the other arm moved rigidly away from his side. “Get back,” the newcomer ordered. “Get back into that room.”

      Odon’s three rearward strides were stiff-legged, the newcomer’s advance noiseless as the foreigner’s own movements had been. The door thudded shut once more on taut drama within the drab hotel room.

      The torch-beam, reflected back from palely-enameled walls showed a vague, black-clothed figure ominously motionless. A gray felt was pulled low over his forehead, a gray mask hid nose and mouth, only his narrowed eyes were revealed, their irises a steely blue. Even the one visible hand that held the butt of his weapon was covered by a skin-tight glove. That glove pulled the killer’s glance to it. Concealed fear flickered in the oddly-round eyes that betrayed his race. For, although the rest of the glove was black, the finger curled around the gun’s trigger was a glaring scarlet, as if it had been dipped in fresh blood.

      The spy’s lips scarcely moved, but his words were sharp; “The Red Finger!” was what he said. “But I thought—”

      “That Reinhardt Gans had done for me? So he reported to his government, and your undercover man there read that report and sent the news on to you. Whereupon all you spies and saboteurs breathed a huge sigh of relief. It would be lots safer now, you thought, to carry

Скачать книгу