The Avenger 11 - River of Ice (5 page)

Lini Waller had been suspicious of everyone. Even of Wittwar and his fellow directors of the Foundation. She hadn’t told even them where she was staying in New York. Her address wasn’t on record anywhere at all. Therefore, it took The Avenger over an hour to locate her hotel, and another twenty minutes to get to it. And by then he was too late. Lini was gone.

Benson looked around the hotel suite. There was little luggage. The most conspicuous thing in it was a small but excellent radio. The radio was on, indicating that the girl had been kidnaped while she was listening to it. That she had been kidnaped Benson was sure. Something had happened to her even sooner than he had feared. And there was not one clue from which The Avenger could discover where she had been taken. He carefully noted the wave length to which the radio transmitter was set and switched the instrument off.

To make sure the girl’s absence wasn’t legitimate, if hasty, he phoned each of the Wittwar Foundation directors. Not one of them had heard from Lini since she had left the Kembridge Building an hour and a half ago. Downstairs, he had his worst suspicions confirmed. “Nope,” said the doorman when Benson described Lini, “nobody like that’s come out in the last two hours. Far as that goes, I know the lady by sight. Make it my business to know the hotel guests after they’ve been here a coupla days. She didn’t come out.”

“Have workmen carried any heavy bundles out of the building?” asked Benson. “Any crates, big boxes or anything like that?”

“Nope. Wait a minute. Yeah, a coupla guys carried out a roll of carpet. A big roll. That was about three quarters of an hour ago.”

Benson didn’t have to go to the management to know that there had been no authorization for the removal of a roll of carpet recently. In that bulky roll, Lini Waller had been carried unseen out of the building. Where she was now it would take a wizard to figure out. And The Avenger was not quite that, though enemies as well as friends sometimes thought he was.

At that moment Lini Waller was several miles away and across the Hudson River. She had arrived there in brisk time after leaving the hotel in a roll of carpet. She wasn’t aware of the manner of her exit, however. She wasn’t aware of anything till she regained consciousness, quite a while after being pricked with a hypodermic needle after the lights had been turned out in her room. It took Lini some time to snap completely out of the fog that seemed to envelop her. Whatever drug had been used to knock her out had lasting effects. First, she was aware of a vague sense of horror that she could not quite place. It didn’t concern her so much as someone else. Who? Then it began to seep back.

Brent! He was in some sort of danger. He had been talking about—of all things—the mastodon moving. Then he had yelled, “The mast—” and everything had gone dead.

“Brent.” she moaned, opening her eyes. She felt strange, as if she was back under the glacier. It was cold and the walls seemed to be icy. In fact, they looked like solid ice sheets. But she couldn’t be in the caves with Brent. The caves were thousands of miles away.

“She’s snapping out of it,” she heard someone say. She tried to move and couldn’t. Something bit into her ankles and wrists. She was bound. But she felt as if she were made of ice. There was one thing; she could move her head a little. She lifted it and gazed around dazedly. She was in what seemed to be a solid ice chamber with a big door also made of ice. There was one thing in the room—a wide bench, or low table, near the center. White light streamed down over the bench and over the room’s nakedness.

Near the ponderous door were five men. They were rats if Lini had ever seen rats; and she had seen many, in the course of traveling around with her active brother. Narrowed, heavy-lidded eyes, poorly-shaped heads, indifferently cruel features, flashy but cheap clothes, twisted mouth—
ugh!
It gave her the shivers to look at them. Here were five thugs who would stop at nothing.

“Yeah, she’s with us again,” drawled one of the five. He had practically no mouth, his lips were so thin. In his dark eyes were a mixture of sadism and lust as he stared at the bound girl. Lini writhed, trying to get her dress down farther over her bound legs.

“Do we pop her off?” said one of them lazily.

“Not if you know what’s good for you,” was the retort. “She’s supposed to stay alive. The boss needs her alive to go through with the sale and get the dough for that Indian stuff—or whatever she came to New York to sell. No girl; no pay. And he wants the pay.”

“Who
is
the boss?” said the man with the thin-lipped gash for a mouth.

The other speaker shrugged. “Far as I know, it’s Corny.”

“Yeah. Corny’s the guy that the smoothies, who don’t dirty their hands with hot work, get in contact with when they want something done. But Corny ain’t the real boss, and you know it.”

“All right,” shrugged the other. “So Corny ain’t the real boss. So what? I don’t care who is as long as we get ours. And we’ve got two thousand dollars apiece already with a lot more to come.”

Lini closed her eyes again. Her mind raced for a way out of this—and could not find one. She could think of but one thing to try. “You,” she said. “You men. Let me go, and I’ll give you more money than you could possibly get from whoever is paying to hold me here.”

The five looked at her, dead-pan, indifferent. “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars apiece,” said Lini hysterically. “Twenty thousand. I swear it!”

“We’ll get that much from the boss,” said one of the men.

“I’ll double any offer he makes.” Lini remembered an expression she had seen in the faces of men, similar to these, in gold fields she and Brent had visited. The yellow metal she knew, could do something to greedy men that even piles of currency could not do. “How would you each like to have more gold than you could carry? Well, if you’ll let me go, I’ll turn over to you more gold than you’ve ever seen.”

“Where would you get any gold?” jeered one of the men.

“You know something of what this is about, don’t you? I heard one of you mention Indian relics. Well, that’s what the person who hired you is after. And among those relics is a whole roomful of gold ornaments and statues. You can have the whole thing. I can still sell the rest of the stuff for enough to make my brother and me rich.”

One of the men moved uneasily. “Johnny, maybe there’s something in what the dame says. If there’s a roomful of gold to—”

The big door began to open, and the man promptly shut up. Lini’s heart sank. It had looked for a moment as if she might succeed in her bribery attempt. This interruption had ruined it. The door swung all the way open, and two more men came in.

One looked much like the other five, only a little more smooth. His face was as callous as any of theirs, but sleekly shaven and pink with massages. His clothes were as loud as theirs, but a little better in fit and quality. His eyes were as cold, but were bland and had more intelligence in them.

The other figure was one to make Lini wonder if she had quite recovered from the effects of the drug yet. It was the figure of a man in a long overcoat that hid his body. He had on a felt hat with a peculiarly drooping brim; and this down-drooping brim, plus the turned-up overcoat collar hid all of his face but nose and eyes. And over the eyes were dark glasses. The man seemed very old. His nose was that of an elderly person, and his hands were lined. Yet his step was firm and young. It was as if he were very old—yet, in a way, ageless. The skin of the man’s hands was nut-brown, with a faint hint of copper under the tint. Like the skin of an Oriental with Negroid blood. Or of an Indian.

“Hi, Corny,” said the man with the thin mouth to the first of the two who had come in. He and the rest stared furtively, in perplexity not unmixed with fear, at the second man. The man with the shielded face and dark glasses said not one word. He reached into the inner pocket of the overcoat and drew something out, a peculiar little hammer with a thin striking head and long, sharp prongs on the opposite end.

Corny was staring at his men. “Did I hear something about a roomful of gold as we opened the door?” he said. His voice was smooth and he was smiling a little. But the look in his bland eyes made all the men shake their heads promptly and vigorously. “No, Corny. Nothing like that,” said the thin-lipped hood. “We know what you’re thinkin’, but you’re way off.”

“I’m sure I am,” nodded Corny, still with the set smile on his lips. “I know none of you guys would want to sell out to anybody, at any price. In the first place, you’re all too honest to do a thing like that.” He smirked. “In the second, you’ll get a wad that’ll choke a horse for doing what you’re told. In the third—none of you’d live long enough to spend much sell-out money, if you were bats enough to take it.”

The curious figure in the long, loose coat was paying no attention to this pleasant chitchat. After taking the queer little hammer from his inner pocket, he reached into an outer one with nut-brown, lined hands and took out a roll of paper. The paper held a sliver of metal. Steel, from its sheen and color. It had been rolled in the paper to keep an excessively sharp point from sticking through the fabric of the coat. The man jerked his head toward the girl, and then toward the bench.

Corny got the wordless command. “Tie the dame to the table,” he said, without even looking at Lini. Two men picked her up. She screamed! The sound backed against her eardrums in a hundred echoes from the ice-walled room. None of the men paid any heed at all. She could scream as loud as she pleased, with no chance of the sound being heard outside.

They dumped her on the low table under the strong white light. The man in the loose overcoat came toward her! He hadn’t said one word since coming in, and continued to be absolutely silent, as if he were a disembodied spirit instead of a man. He held the steel splinter, which was much like a darning needle, and the hammer, in one hand. The fingers of the other began to explore Lini’s skull through the silky thickness of her hair.

She bobbed her head around wildly. The man’s free hand went into his overcoat pocket again and this time came out with a roll of two inch adhesive tape. The tape was passed over her forehead, down and under the bench. Now she couldn’t move her head a fraction of an inch.

The fingers took over their exploring task again and finally halted. The nut-brown hands parted the silky tresses and bared the scalp. The point of the slim steel length was placed lightly against that spot and held in the man’s left hand. The right raised the hammer.

He was going to drive the thing into her head! Again Lini screamed, and again no one paid the least attention. She fainted before the queer little hammer could drive down against the steel splinter!

The Avenger had his headquarters in one of the most curious buildings in New York City. It was on Bleek Street, which is only one short block long, and in effect, Benson owned the block. On the side where his headquarters were, he had all the buildings under long lease or straight ownership. The entire other side of the block was taken up by the windowless back of a huge storage warehouse.

Three dingy, old apartment buildings had been thrown into one, and their top floors had been made into one tremendous room. The Avenger and his aides were up in this room now with a map spread out on the great center table. Next to the table was a radio, the likes of which no commercial manufacturing company had ever seen, with a special radio-directional antenna. This had been devised by the man who was at the moment delicately adjusting the range-finder.

He didn’t look like a person capable of inventing anything at all. He was a giant, and his moon face appeared more good-natured than intelligent. But regardless of his looks, he was one of the finest electrical and radio engineers in the world. “No more’s coming over that wave length,” he said.

“Let me listen, mon,” said the man standing next to him, reaching for the special earphone in which every last bit of distant radio sound could be gathered and further amplified. “Ye couldn’t hear a gunshot on a quiet day if the bullet whizzed right past yer ear.”

“All right, smart guy,” said the giant.

The other man took the earphone. He was the tall, bony Scot, Fergus MacMurdie. “Thanks for the compliment, Algernon,” he said.

The giant flushed wrathfully. He had been christened Algernon Heathcote Smith, but folks who valued their health called him Smitty. Except for Mac, who sometimes could use the Algernon and get away with it.

Richard Benson had tuned the radio in on the wave length he had noted at the empty rooms of Lini Waller. Smitty had listened over the silent wave length for some time. Then a voice had sounded.

“Sis? You still there? Everything’s O.K. on this end. There was a little trouble, but everything’s all right now. Good night.”

After that, there had been no more sounds at all. But the few words that had been spoken enabled Smitty to swing his direction-finder to a point he felt sure was accurate. A line drawn on the map, along the direction noted, ended somewhere along the Pacific coast in northern British Columbia. But there was no telling from where, along the line, the radio had transmitted the words.