The Weapon of Night (10 page)

“Yet, there are keys,” said Nick. “And at some point during our knockout period the cage could have come down here. With a little luck and plenty of good planning, someone might have been able to haul Valentina out of the cage and drag her into one of these rooms without being seen. Suppose she did go down instead of up? Think of it, Julia.”

“I’m thinking,” Julia said. “And what I’m thinking is that all those rooms have been searched and she isn’t there.”

“So it seems,” said Nick. “And yet Valentina recognized someone. Not Hughes, secluded in that watchtower cage. She didn’t see him. Someone on the floor, with us. In our immediate group. It was only chance — I think — and the way the group kept milling about that made it difficult for her to tell me who it was. Goddamn!” He was suddenly savagely angry. “I must have been out of my mind to let her get into that thing alone. Especially knowing that she’d seen someone. But which one was it?
Who could it have been?
Weston, Parry, Pauling, the president himself? They’ve all been here for years — I know their histories. Oh, what the hell. Let’s go on up again and have that war meeting in the president’s office. Maybe the search flights will have come up with something by now.”

He ushered Julia back into the cage and pressed the ground-floor button.

“You know something?” said Julia, with a faraway look in her catlike eyes. “I did notice one small thing that I’m beginning to think was rather strange. At the foot of the stairway there’s a bank of little cabinets with pull cords, and above them there’s a sign saying, GAS MASKS. When I came to I saw that one of them was slightly open, as if someone had tried to make a grab for it at the last minute. But nobody said anything about that. And so far as I could see, nobody was close enough to do it.”

“So far as you could see,” said Nick. “But you were out for the count of ten — ten minutes. Suppose someone had known enough to hold his breath . . . Now that’s very interesting. Which one of the cabinets was it?”

The cage had stopped on ground-floor level, and through the metal latticework they could see the little doors beneath the sign saying, GAS MASKS.

“The one on the right,” said Julia, staring. “I swear it was open before! I
know
it was.” But now they were all closed.

“Then someone’s been doing a little tidying up,” said Nick, “that maybe he didn’t have a chance to do before. And what in the hell is the matter with this godforsaken door?”

He punched the button marked OPEN. Nothing happened. Across the floor, through the openwork of the gantry, he could see Parry and Pauling and a pair of guards looking back at him.

Parry took a step toward the cage and called out — “Carter! Is something wrong?”

And then the vast machine room was plunged into an inky blackness.

Nick mouthed a sibilant curse and flung himself at the door. It rattled slightly at his onslaught, but it held firm.

“How positively charming,” Julia murmured dryly. “Just you and me together in the darkness — trapped in a rat cage with a murderer on the loose.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Somewhere There’s A Someone

It was like an encore for the first alarm, except that this scene played itself in a darkness that was absolute, at first, and then sliced by searching flashlights. A siren shrilled and guards thundered busily about the place, not knowing what to look for.

“Here, take this,” said Nick, and thrust his pencil flash at Julia. “Beam it at the lock and let’s get out of here.”

He slid the small pistol shape from its waistband holster and aimed it at the locking mechanism. The safety catch clicked off and the pistol spat — not bullets, but a narrow ray of white-hot light that bit deep into the metal.

“Heavens, what will they think of next?” Julia said admiringly. “A little pocket-sized acetylene torch, no less.”

“Laser beam,” Nick said briefly. “Keep clear of it.”

Metal sizzled indignantly as the beam ate through it. The lock smoldered briefly and disintegrated. Nick doused the lethal ray and kicked sharply at the door, and this time it swung obediently to one side.

“Get over to those guards with flashlights and stay with them,” he told Julia crisply. “I’m going downstairs.”

His long, loping strides took him rapidly through the flickering ceriness of the vast room to the ladderway leading to the sublevel passages. Light blazed suddenly into his face and someone caught him by the arm.

“There’s no need to race around like a madman, Carter,” Pauling said angrily. “The lights’ll be on in a minute, so for God’s sake stay where you are before you fall downstairs and break your neck. We’ve had enough trouble since you got here.”

“There’ll be more if you don’t get off my back,” Nick said rudely, thrusting him aside. Pauling yelped and staggered back. “And don’t set any of your guards onto me, either,” Nick added over his shoulder, seeing one of the guards lunge forward, “or I’m going to wonder about your motives. Get him back!”

“All right, all right, go then!” Pauling growled.

Nick was already starting down the stairs, the thin beam of his flash piercing into the gloom. He spiraled downward swiftly, and then doused his own light as he saw the pool of brightness below that was moving rapidly toward him.

“Halt!”

“Oh, not again!” Nick groaned. The guard with the lantern-shaped flash had a gun trained on him. “Look — I’m doing a job, too, and I’ve got to get to the power room — fast!”

“Oh, you, I know you, yeah,” the guard said ponderously. But I got my orders from the Chief. He’s in there himself and he told me nobody — but nobody — goes up or down these stairs or through these passages until he says so. He don’t trust nobody, and that includes you, understand? Sorry, fella. But you stay where you are.”

“I, too, am sorry,” Nick said graciously, “and what’s more I don’t trust nobody neither.” His smile in the circle of light was sweet and cooperative, but the axe blade of a hand that shot out and sledgehammcred against the guard’s bulky neck was anything but. The man dropped with a quiet little sigh and a heavy thud.

Nick bypassed his fallen body and ran toward the power-control room. His pencil flash cut intermittently into the gloom, but only briefly; under the circumstances he preferred to glide unnoticed through the darkness. Through the passages leading off he saw other little circles of light and heard the tramp of feet, but in the corridor that housed the locked maintenance rooms and the elevator shaft there was nobody. He tried the doors quickly as he passed. They were still locked.

The beam of his flashlight played over the solid door of the power-control room. It, too, was closed and locked, presumably with Security Chief Parry inside.

He hammered on it thunderously.

“Parry! Let me in!” he called. “It’s Carter — open up.”

No answer. Nothing happened. He tried again. Still nothing.

He could have called a guard. But he was alone, and he liked to do things his way. Which was sometimes a mistake.

This time he did not use the laser beam but his lockpicker’s special, because unlike the electronically controlled elevator door this door had a lock that he could manipulate. He worked methodically, quietly, listening for sounds from within and from the corridors nearby, but he heard only the distant muttering of guards’ voices and an occasional footfall . . . except for one small clanking sound from within that he could not identify.

The door swung inward and he stepped cautiously inside.

Not cautiously enough.

His light beam probed the inner darkness for a split second while his right hand reached for the Luger in her hidden holster. And then the sudden swishing sound that whistled through the darkness ended suddenly with a vicious, exquisitely painful explosion in his head, and he saw a coruscation of shimmering lights where there had been no light before. He struck out once, savagely, with the Luger’s streamlined barrel, and felt it strike against something solid yet resilient; and then again his head exploded and he dropped.

Bright light and harsh sound pounded at his senses and he forced his eyelids open.

Lights blazed throughout the power-control room and in the corridor behind him. There was a uniformed guard at the bank of switches, and there was someone with him who looked like a mechanic.

And about time, too, Nick thought groggily, and as he dragged himself to his feet he saw Parry halfway across the room, rocking wearily on his haunches and holding both hands to his head. His face was bruised and bloody and his clothes were torn. There was a man hovering over him, possibly a medic, but Parry waved him off impatiently and lumbered to his feet. Then he saw Nick.

“Did you see him?” he cried. “Did you see who it was?”

“I didn’t see a damn thing,” Nick said shortly. “You got here first — what did
you
see?”

“That,” said Parry, and jabbed his finger at the massive switchboard. “Came in with a flashlight, had all the guards stand by and guard the passages so no one could get in or out, looked around and saw half the switches thrown. And not just thrown — damaged. Look at them!”

Nick looked. There was not much damage, but there was some. A strange kind of damage, as though some immensely heavy object had been slammed into the bank of levers and twisted a few of them slightly out of shape. A spanner lay on the floor nearby.

“Yes, and that, too.” Parry said, following Nick’s gaze. He was still in here, whoever he was and however the hell he got in. Don’t know if he used that spanner on the board, but he sure used it on me. Came at me in the dark just as the door swung shut behind me and I had my light trained on the panel. Skimmed me at first, caught the side of my face. I dropped the light, tried to go for my gun, grappled with him for a moment, and then — that was it. Spanner caught me, down I went. And then I suppose you came in just as he was trying to make a getaway.”

“Knocked out the stairway guard, too, on his way out,” said the man at the control panel. “Must know some way out of here that we don’t know —”

“What!” barked Parry furiously. “Why wasn’t I told of that at once? That means he must have gone up the stairs into the main —”

“You just came to, Mr. Parry,” the man reminded him. “And I already put out an all-stations alert.”

“I knocked the fellow out,” said Nick. Parry’s angry, startled eyes burned into him. “I had to — he was obstructing me. He said that you had given specific orders that no one was to be let in or out of here, including me. Now, why did you tell him that?”

“Oh, no, no, no, you’re wrong, Carter,” Parry said earnestly. “Of course I didn’t mean to include you. How could I —? The last I saw of you, you were stuck inside the elevator. Say . . . how did you get out?”

“Magic,” Nick said shortly. “Now, suppose we get on with the search and try to find this mystery man.”

“Mystery man,” Parry repeated, tugging at his beard. “This has to be an inside job, do you realize that? We have another Hughes on our hands — a guard, a mechanic, one of the engineers, any one of a hundred and seventy people. Christ, I don’t know who to trust! But all right, let’s get on with it.”

They got on with it. But the hours of searching and questioning turned up absolutely nothing. No one was reported missing — except Valentina. Everybody’s movements could be accounted for. No one was found hiding in any of the locked rooms.

There was one piece of news, and it was startling. Al Fisher reported it at the late-night session in the president’s office after returning in the helicopter.

“That’s right, in the Catskills,” he said patiently. “Obviously he’d had enough of a head start to swoop due east even before the alarm was given. We had hell’s own time finding him in all those trees, and it wasn’t the aircraft search that did it either — not to begin with, anyway. State Police got calls from local residents about what looked like a crash landing, and they passed the word to us. It’s a pretty inaccessible spot, so we had a little trouble. Here, I’ve marked it on the map.” He pushed the map across with stubby fingers. Nick barely glanced at it. By this time he was sure it would be no help.

“So we managed to land at last,” Fisher went on wearily. “It wasn’t far from a mountain road, and he may have been making for the little clearing that we dropped into. He didn’t make it. But the craft wasn’t in too bad shape, so it’s just possible that the plan went off more or less as scheduled. Except that he himself was in pretty bad shape. Like dead, to be exact. Look, I’ve been through all this before,” he appealed to Nick. “You’ve already got road patrols out. What’s to add?”

“One more time, Al,” said Nick. “As long as we’re all together I want everybody to get the complete picture. So the man was dead and dripping with blood. But not from the crash, you say.”

Fisher nodded. “Right. Two bullet wounds, one right through the gut and one skimming the side of the neck. Hours old. From the condition of the “copter I’d say he had control until almost the last minute. No bullet holes in the craft but blood all over the seat and controls, so it looks like he took his gut wound with him from takeoff.”

“My man on the roof,” Parry said intensely. “At least somebody put up something of a showing for us. But no sign of the woman! I don’t understand it. There must have been a car waiting on that road to take her off. But why didn’t they take Hughes?”

Al Fisher shrugged. “Guess he’d served his purpose. No point in dragging off a dead man. Incidentally, the condition of the brush and the road doesn’t prove anything. Somebody
could
have come through the trees; somebody could have driven off along the road. But it’s too dry in there to say anything for certain. And that’s about all I can tell you.”

“The face, Al,” Nick reminded him.

“Oh, yeah, the face,” said Fisher. “Like I told you, Hawk’s medics are giving him a going-over. But me, when I looked at him close-up, I saw a face that had been lifted. Tiny little scars near mouth and eyes, on the cheeks, and under the chin. Maybe surgery for an old face injury, I wouldn’t know. But they were there.”

Pauling gave a sudden bark of something that was not quite laughter.