The Avenger 9 - Tuned for Murder (15 page)

“Must he talk to me at midnight?”

“He has come at this hour to preserve the secrecy of his mission,” said Jenner.

“I’ve had a hard evening, Jenner,” came Cranlowe’s voice wearily. “A rotten thing happened to me. I won’t go into it. But—if I must see him—”

Cranlowe gave the appropriate order to the guard at the gate. Jenner and Benson were escorted to the iron-studded front door, through the glare of many floodlights.

Lights blaring over the lawn inside the iron fence of Cranlowe Heights. Lights blaring over the bare hill slopes outside the fence. A lighted fortress.

Inside the grounds, The Avenger walked, empty-eyed, beside Jenner. Outside, beyond the range of the floodlights, two cars approached the hilltop, one from the east and the other from the west. The one from the east got to the bottom of the hill first. From it stepped Kopell and four men.

On the other side, the second car stopped and five men got out: the young fellow with the old eyes, the jolly-looking fat guy, the man with the narrow jaw, the big ape who looked like Gargantua and the mixed-breed chap with the slanting eyes.

The five made a silent way around to where Kopell waited. He nodded, without words, in greeting.

Everything converged on Cranlowe Heights. Like a lone king on a chessboard, Cranlowe was being slowly and methodically surrounded by the entire opposite force. There had been one subtle, ruthless move after another designed to wring that formula out of him. Now, this final, concerted effort against him.

He didn’t know about it yet, of course. But he was very shortly to be informed!

Kopell looked at his watch, while his nine choice thugs looked at him. It was ten minutes past midnight. He kept looking at it, and then at the floodlighted expanse between himself and the gate, till five minutes passed.

At a quarter after twelve, as if the thing had happened by clockwork, the floodlights went out.

“Up to the gate,” said Kopell in a low tone.

There were cries from the fence up there.

“The lights! What’s the matter in there?”

“Get those lights on!”

“Must have been a fuse—”

In the sheltering darkness, Kopell and his men ran silently up the hill to the big gate. They knew the lights wouldn’t go on again for a long time. Trillo, in there, had orders to wreck the fuse socket of the floodlight line so it couldn’t be fixed in a hurry.

Sheltering darkness, favorable to a crook’s plan. But darkness can shelter more than crooks. And it was doing so in this case.

One more car had crept up from the east. It had followed Kopell’s at a long distance. The giant, Smitty, was at the wheel. With him in the car were Josh and Mac. Smitty had been trailing Kopell for a long time, waiting for some such move as this. A half-hour before, when the underworld leader had set the nose of his car for Cranlowe Heights, Smitty had collected Mac and Josh and gone after him at once. Now he was very glad of it.

“Looks like they’re going to shoot their way in,” whispered Josh, as the darkness continued and the men ahead made their way to the dim shadow of the iron fence.

“And it also looks as if they had a partner on the inside,” observed Mac.

“I wonder,” said Smitty, not replying to either, “where the chief is?”

Benson, at that moment, was in the library of the inventor, Cranlowe. And on his lips were sentences that had been drilled into him on the way out to the Heights with Jenner, who started the ball rolling now that they were with Cranlowe.

“Mr. Benson is here with the entire authority of the war department,” he said smoothly. “There was a conference in Washington when you released that newspaper statement, and it was finally decided to send him because you, as well as everyone else acquainted with him, must know he is to be trusted completely.”

“I am sure of that, of course,” said Cranlowe, with weary politeness. He had looked over Benson’s credentials.

“I came to see you,” said Benson, “on your new war invention, of course. Your government wants to buy it.”

Cranlowe’s lips were tightening, as they did with every mention of the new weapon. He was shaking his head even before Benson was through speaking.

“My invention is not for sale, even to my own government,” he said. “I am as patriotic as anyone, I think, but my motive is a larger one than patriotism. I mean to stop all wars—”

“Yes, I know,” Benson said. “It is a laudable motive. But a situation has arisen, known only to our Secret Service, which makes patriotism come first. There is an urgent reason why you must sell it to the United States at once.”

“And that?” said Cranlowe skeptically, lips tighter and more stubborn than ever.

“The United States, itself,” said Benson, “is about to be invaded.”

There was silence in the library, broken by a well-rehearsed gasp from Jenner.

“Benson! You didn’t tell me that.”

“I am telling you, now,” said Benson. “And Cranlowe.”

“I can’t believe it,” said Cranlowe, paling. “It is impossible! Who would invade us—and how?”

“We are to be invaded from Guatemala. Air bases have been secretly constructed by the dozen, down there. Thousands of planes have been assembled, waiting only for the signal.”

Cranlowe stared hard at Benson with his deep-set, tired eyes.

“I’m sorry. I simply can’t believe such a thing. An endeavor like that would be instantly known. You can’t hide all knowledge of dozens of air bases and thousands of planes.”

“As I have said, our Secret Service knows of it.”

“More than that would know,” insisted Cranlowe. “Such a large maneuver would become public property before it could be completed. Indeed, it would never be allowed to be completed. Our navy would see to that.”

“It is our policy now not to send armed forces to the Latin American countries—” began Jenner.

“Policy be hanged,” said Cranlowe. “No policy would hold in the face of such a threat.”

“You mean—you think Mr. Benson is lying?” exclaimed Jenner in an outraged tone.

“I mean,” said Cranlowe, “that I think even my own government might connive a little to get such a weapon as I possess—with no thought of using it save in self-defense, I am sure. Nevertheless, they may want it badly enough to stretch the truth a little.”

“You’re a very suspicious man, Cranlowe,” said Jenner with a sigh.

“You would be too, Jenner, in my shoes.”

“Am I to go back to Washington and say that you refuse to co-operate in the face of such a grave emergency?” asked Benson.

Cranlowe looked troubled, and desperate.

“It sounds so fantastic,” he said. “Invasion from Guatemala! If I thought it was really threatening, I’d send you back with the formula tonight, of course. But—I simply can’t accept that on your bare word. With all your prestige and reputation, Mr. Benson, I simply can’t.”

Cranlowe was an intelligent man. He was silent a moment, then said.

“We can do it this way. You go back to Washington to tell our President how I feel. Ask him to get in touch with me in person. If he assures me that what you have said is the truth, I’ll turn my formula over.”

There was a little pause after that, and on Jenner’s face, a hardening, frustrated look. It was going to take something more than logic to answer this all-too-logical thrust!

“Suppose we are invaded in the meantime?” said Benson. “Cities bombed, thousands killed—”

But Cranlowe was shaking his head. No argument could shake the rocklike will of this man with the big-domed skull and deep-set eyes.

“That’s enough,” said Jenner. “Cranlowe is too stubborn and stupid to—”

From out of the night came a weird baying. On the lawn inside the iron fence, the big dogs were howling as if at the moon.

Or as if sensing death in the air.

“The floodlights!” cried Cranlowe, staring out the study window. “They’re out! What on earth—”

Out there, in the darkness by the fence, Kopell and his nine men crouched, dim shadows near the gate. Kopell left the others and went up to the right-hand gate post. He stood there, hidden by it from anyone on the inside.

Beyond the gangsters’ sight, Mac and Josh and Smitty were mere dim shadows in the night. Smitty had a pair of binoculars in his hamlike hands. They had special lenses, worked out mathematically by The Avenger. The lenses were ground to an optical formula, as yet known to no others, which gathered a maximum amount of light where it would seem there was no light to be gathered.

With these exceptional night glasses in his hands Smitty could dimly see the gang leader at the gate, through Josh and Mac couldn’t see him at all.

Smitty saw Kopell take something out of his pocket, and stand with it in his grasp. He couldn’t, of course, see what it was. And if he had seen the black disk Kopell held, he still would not have known what it signified.

From the gate came the voices of two men.

“Stick on this gate hard, Pete. There’s something screwy about those lights burning out the fuse. There’s never been any trouble like that before.”

“You bet,” said the other man. “And you and the rest better walk a fast beat around the fence. Wait. Is the charged wire on top all right?”

There was a short pause, then a blue flash from the top of the fence. The man had thrown something up there to see if the current was dead, and had found it was not.

“O.K.,” said Pete. “I guess—”

That was all that was said. At least by Pete. His voice trailed off uncertainly, and he stood like a statue.

And two dogs near him suddenly began to howl in a weird death bay.

“Pete!” Smitty heard the other man say, voice perplexed. “What’s eatin’ you, man? Pete!
Pete—”

There was a roar like that of a small cannon. A roar that was hideously muffled, as a sawed-off shotgun exploded its terrible charge into a man’s middle at short range.

And now Pete was alone at the gate.

Smitty, still stunned by the astounding knowledge that one of Cranlowe’s guards had suddenly whirled and shot another in cold blood, heard Kopell’s voice. He just barely made out the words:

“Go after the rest, pal. And the dogs. Don’t forget the dogs!”

At the same time, Smitty saw Kopell’s hand slide inside the gate bars, and then saw the gate begin to open outward.

The treacherous guard had opened the gate to the enemy. And yet—Smitty had a wild and baseless hunch that something more than treachery was afoot here.

Pete screamed. It was a high, unearthly wail, a lunatic outcry. And there was another shot, and again it was hideously muffled.

There were yells all over the Cranlowe grounds, now.

“Get Pete! Get him! He’s gone nuts!”

Wild shouts and the excited baying of the dogs. Then another shot, and one of the deeper bell-notes of a dog abruptly ceased as a shotgun blew its head off.

“He’s over there, in the corner. For Heaven’s sake, get
him!”

Kopell had beckoned silently. His men came up to him. One by one they slid into the grounds, under cover of the hell that had broken loose with the berserk charges of a madman with a shotgun in his hands. They started toward the house.

“This is it,” whispered Smitty to Josh and Mac. “The payoff. I don’t know how in the world they managed to do that to the guard. But—come on!”

The three crept in through the opened gate at a safe distance behind Kopell’s mob.

The wild commotion was at the back of the house, now. For probably the first time since Cranlowe had announced his invention, felled all the trees and hired the guards, one whole side of his place was left vacant and unattended.

Kopell’s gang got to the iron-studded door, with Smitty and Mac and Josh forty yards behind. The gang had not the faintest notion that they were being trailed.

Nor had Benson’s three aides any idea that
they
had a silent follower. But such was the case.

Behind the three came one more figure, slim, silent, head down. The trailers were being trailed!

In the study, Cranlowe had leaped toward the door with the sound of the shots. And Jenner had interposed his bulk. Cranlowe drew back, knowing something terrible was up, ready to charge the plant president.

“Benson!” snapped Jenner. “Get him. Get Cranlowe.”

The Avenger stepped, like a docile robot, toward the inventor. Cranlowe yelled and tried to run. Benson was on him with one quick move. He hurled Cranlowe to the floor, and looked up at Jenner for further orders.

“Tie him up, Benson.”

Panting, raging, Cranlowe struggled. But he was a child, of course, in those steely white hands. Benson took the window drapes, torn down and tossed to him by Jenner, and bound Cranlowe with them.

“So you’re a man of honor,” Cranlowe raged to the man with the white hair and the dead face. “And you, Jenner, are my lifelong friend! Is every one in the world against me, just because I tried to save the world?”

Jenner didn’t even bother to reply to that one. He came and stood over Cranlowe.

“The formula, Cranlowe,” he said, voice level and emotionless. “I want it. At once.”

“You won’t get it. Nothing will make me give it up.”

“Nothing?” said Jenner. “I wonder. We have still another ace to play, my friend. Your son! Do you think much of your son?”