The Avenger 1 - Justice, Inc. (5 page)

MacMurdie was a practical man.

“What have ye got to fight with, Muster Benson?”

“I have a great deal of money, though few except the income-tax department know it.”

“Ye’ll have to have more than that.”

“I made the money,” said Benson, “in wild countries, and with men who make city gangsters look meek. I’ve located mines in the arctic. I’ve taken emeralds from Brazil. I brought a forty-thousand-dollar cargo of animals to the Cleveland Zoo from the Malay jungles. I held a crew in mutiny across the Pacific for twenty-three days. I don’t talk of these things much, but you asked me what I had to fight with.”

“You’re not so big,” said MacMurdie doubtfully.

Benson got up and went to him.

“Hit me,” he said.

“Whoosh!
I’m twice as big as ye!”

“Hit me. As hard as you can.”

The Scot could use his hands. He feinted cleverly with his left for Benson’s abdomen, then sizzled a right to Benson’s jaw that would have knocked him out.

And Benson swayed two inches, caught the flying knobby fist and bore down. The Scot turned almost a complete somersault and banged to the floor.

“Ye’ll do,” he said, getting up and blinking bewilderedly at the man with the set, still face.

“I have still another little weapon,” said Benson. “I seem to have acquired it with the shock of this thing.”

He turned from the Scot. There was a mirror over the dresser near the window. Benson looked into that, moving his hands over his face. Then he turned.

MacMurdie visibly started, then slowly whistled.

When Benson had turned from him his face was his own, well-cast and regular-featured though, of course, devoid of all expression. When he turned back, the transformation was startling. High cheekbones gave Benson a Chinese expression. The corners of the immobile mouth were turned down in a sinister fashion. The ears set forward a little. Even the forehead was altered, pressed into a narrower line with deep wrinkles where the smooth skin had been.

It was the face of another man.

“I wouldn’t know ye,” said MacMurdie, voice awed, “if it weren’t for the white hair.”

“I can wear a hat to cover that,” said Benson. “With a few outside aids, I think I can disguise more quickly and perfectly than any other man in the world today. And
that
won’t hurt any in our war on these murderers.”

He rearranged his face into its normal lines, flesh staying plastically in whatever outline his deft fingers prodded it.

“We’ve got to get a starting point for our investigations, MacMurdie.”

The Scot nodded slowly. “Yes, an’ I think we may have one, Muster Benson. ’Tis one more thing I thought of, and was going to tell ye when ye shocked me out of a year’s sleep by changing your face like that. Ye say your wife and little girl simply vanished from that plane?”

“Yes,” said Benson. His pale eyes were stricken at the mention of Alicia and little Alice, but his face was a mask. “They . . . just vanished. Though that’s impossible. The regular door can scarcely be opened on a plane in flight. There’s no other way for them to have gotten out. But . . . they disappeared!”

“Well, here’s somethin’ that may help ye,” MacMurdie said. “The Great Lakes Airline, owners of the plane ye took to Montreal, have bought some of their crates secondhand. One of ’em they picked up from the United States Coast Survey. It was a plane they used to make maps with.”

Instantly the flashing brain behind the pale-gray eyes got it. Comprehension glittered in their gray-ice depths.

“That same plane,” MacMurdie went on, “was used last year. ’Twas in all the papers. The airline sent it up to Hudson Bay with their best pilot—and they dropped food and supplies to a bunch of starving miners blizzard-bound two hundred miles from civilization.”

Once more Benson was on his feet, rising in the single surge of lithe, tigerish power.

“A trapdoor!” he snapped. “By all that’s holy—of course! A trapdoor!”

“An’ there,” nodded MacMurdie, “may be our startin’ point. Though a startin’ point to nothing but a slug in the pump for each of us, I’m thinkin’. We can’t win in a game like this. We’re bound to be flattened out.”

Later, Benson was to learn that the dour Scot was always a predicter of disaster. Nothing could possibly succeed; nothing gave the man any hope—until he was actually into battle. Then, and then only, did a sort of hard grin appear on his somber lips. Then, and then only, did he predict sure success where any other man on earth would have been convinced of failure.

“Then we’ll be flattened out,” said Benson shortly. “But we’ll flatten a few others first. What was the number of the plane I rode in, MacMurdie?”

“The S404. That’s the one with the door in its belly.”

“I’ll have a look at it,” said Benson. He began to write on a sheet of hotel stationery. “But on my way to the airport, I’ll make a few stops. Meanwhile, you take this note to an old, old friend of mine. On reading it, the friend will give you two things—something I thought I’d never have to use again, something I meant to keep out of my life since I retired with a fortune from adventurous money-making. You bring them back here. I’ll probably be back as soon as you are.”

“Right,” nodded MacMurdie. Then he looked curiously at the dead, white face that, no matter what the situation or emotional strain, could never express a sentiment.

“What stops do ye make on your way to the airport, Muster Benson?”

“I’m stopping at the best tailoring establishment in town. Also at a theatrical costumer’s. Also at a rubber-goods novelty shop. Be careful with those two things you get from my old friend, MacMurdie. It would be very hard to duplicate either of them.”

The agent at the Buffalo airport looked curiously at the man across the counter from him. He had a vague feeling that he’d seen the man before, somewhere—and yet he knew that he could not have.

The man was of average height, but seemed short because his shoulders were so broad and he was so stocky. He wore a flat-brimmed hat with a slightly Western look. His face was flat and broad, with deep, weather-bitten lines. He moved slowly, and looked almost sleepy, with his narrowed, expressionless eyes.

The eyes were very light gray, almost colorless.

“We don’t usually charter planes for so long, or to go such distances, Mr. Conroy,” the agent said. “You want it for work in Nevada, you say? Why don’t you get a plane from a Western company?”

“I told you,” said the man. “This work is to be kept secret. I’d rather have a pilot from two thousand miles away than do business with a local firm.”

He shifted slightly bowed legs under him as though lonesome for the feel of a horse on the open range.

“Like I said, I’m a prospector. I located this claim in a place where only prospectors and mountain goats can go. No chance of getting in machinery by burro. So I want a plane to drop a little light machinery by parachute. And I understand you have a plane with a trapdoor, which would be just the ticket.”

The agent hesitated quite a long time. Then he said:

“I’m afraid your information is incorrect. We have no planes with trapdoors.”

The man’s narrowed gray eyes expressed disappointment. His face remained dead-pan, expressed nothing at all.

“Oh. I understood you had such a plane. I’m sorry I bothered you. I’ll have to go somewhere else.”

He nodded and left the office.

It was dark, by now. Late dusk. Lights flooded the field, of course; but his figure could only dimly be seen as he went to the gate and the cab there. He got into the cab.

The broad shoulders were caused by rubber pads, that could be inflated, over the shoulder caps. Benson deflated them. The Western-looking hat held that shape because in brim and crown fine wire was laced in the felt, unseen.

Benson altered the hat till it was Homburg style. He prodded his face. It had been broad and rather flat, deeply lined. It now became subtly leaner, smooth and extra full around the lips. He slipped his spring topcoat off and put it on inside out. It had been gray, checked. Now it was solid brown with a narrow, formal velvet collar.

It had only taken thirty seconds to make the change, but that was enough for the cab driver, sitting stolidly in front and waiting for orders, to get impatient.

“Where to, boss?” he said over his shoulder, not bothering to look around.

“Ely Hotel,” said Benson.

And he slipped out the side of the cab opposite the airport gate. The cab drove off, empty. Benson went back into the field.

He was slim, dapper, younger-looking than his years. He no more resembled the “prospector from Nevada” than Jack Dempsey resembles Tom Thumb.

He went directly to the biggest hangar, in which the large airliners were kept. He walked with that curious air of authority which some men can acquire, and which causes people instinctively to let them pass even though sometimes ordinary mortals are not allowed to. Several mechanics and field men stared at him as he entered the hangar, but after a hesitation, did not offer to bar his way.

In the huge shed were two liners. One had the figures H61 on its bulging nose. And the other was numbered—S402.

S402! It was S404 that MacMurdie said that had the opening in the bottom. Benson stared at the figures with eyes that glittered disappointment, even though his face never moved in line.

Then those quick, pale eyes of his, trained in a hundred deadly ventures to see things normal eyes did not observe, noticed something.

The gray paint on the airliner’s fuselage was well-kept but not new.

The paint of the figures themselves
did
seem new.

The nose loomed far above him. But, standing under it and staring up with eyes like a hawk’s in their telescopic-microscopic powers, he made sure of it. The figures had been painted on that ship later than the fuselage. Quite recently, in fact.

“So they’ve prepared for investigation,” Benson whispered.

Someone might look at the ship in which two souls had fantastically and impossibly vanished. So somebody had switched numbers. It was the S404 that he had traveled in. It was the S404 that had the trapdoor. But this ship was numbered S402.

Benson moved to the side. He climbed up into the fuselage. Into the body of the big plane. Light from the hangar penetrated the airliner’s windows and gave him dim illumination.

There was a thick carpet on the floor. It seemed to run under the seats, but as he tugged at it a strip rose in his hands. He folded it back. And there, in the metal floor was an oblong crack six by three.

The trapdoor.

Benson was a strong man, to begin with. And he had been tempered in the fire of an almost unendurable tragedy till he was hardly a man; he was a machine of vengeance. But the sight of this thing brought back in a rush all the awful torture of his loss.

Through that oblong, gravelike in its dimensions, his Alicia and their wee Alice had been dropped. There was no doubt of it. It was the only thing to explain the bizarre disappearance.

Far over the grim black surface of Lake Ontario, those two he loved had been dropped. Slugged first, perhaps, to prevent outcry! Who knew? Equipped hurriedly with parachutes, just possibly, so they’d land alive? He tried fiercely to believe that—and could not. The only motive for such a thing would have been a kidnap plot against them. And he had received no ransom demand since the terrible trip.

Benson leaned forward. His forehead touched the back of one of the seats and rested there. His shoulders shook a little in the last extremity of torment.

And all the time—his face did not move a muscle. Not a line! It was a dreadful thing to see that dead face so changeless in spite of the raging tornado behind it.

Through that opening, into the black water thousands of feet below—

It was while he leaned shuddering there, for the moment as helpless as a child in his colossal grief, that the dark figure crept into the plane behind him from the hangar.

Ordinarily a thousand little nerves would have felt the tiny shift of the plane on its great landing wheels as a man’s weight was added to it. Ordinarily a sense of hearing miraculously keen would have caught the faint rasp of moving clothes. But coming up behind the steel-spring adventurer with the deadly cold eyes just now was as easy as approaching a blind man.

The figure behind Benson paused a moment. Then its arm went up. Light glittered on a heavy wrench. The arm came down—