The Avenger 22 - The Black Death (16 page)

“But they didn’t think to do it,” chirped Nellie. “Oh, boy!”

They passed two lakes, with houseboats on them. The Avenger didn’t bother with either. All knew why. The Voice was dependent always on one factor: he must have something nearby to use as a camouflaged aerial for his broadcasts. Neither of these structures had such a thing.

Straight southwest. They passed over Camden, New Jersey, with sprawling Philadelphia beyond. There were a lot of houseboats here, and there was long study through glasses to see if any were suspicious. Several were, but intent study of their windows ruled them out. None had windows quite like the one they’d seen behind the chintz curtains.

The line took them toward Washington. Just at dusk, they sighted the maze of the Potomac. There were houseboats galore around there. There’s a housing shortage in Washington, and houseboats are popular as they’ve never been before.

Mac shook his head in dour despair, but even as he did so, The Avenger’s colorless, glacial eyes were centering on something.

Several miles down the river from the majority of the odd-looking boats, was one by itself. It was moored next to a sprawling structure, half fallen in, that could be recognized even from that altitude.

It was an old-time, wooden amusement pier, with dance space at its broad end entirely roofed over.

But one thing about it seemed in slightly better repair than the rest. That was its flagpole.

The pole was broken near the tip, but on it was still a sagging crossbar—which seemed hardly a necessary appendage on a flagpole—and a length of wire or rope still hung in an idle loop from the top.

The Avenger didn’t bother to keep his plane too far away. The army markings were camouflage enough. So many army bombers fly around the Potomac that even the most suspicious guard wouldn’t be concerned with the appearance of just one more.

He let the plane glide on, then circled slowly back while the dusk deepened. It was still light up here; but on earth, it was night.

He strapped a chute to his back.

“Keep watching through the quartz lens,” he said. “If you see a signal from me, come down at once. It will mean that this is what we’re after.”

The Avenger stepped out of the plane. For a moment, his chute was a black blob against the sky; then he was in the darkness, floating down toward the water.

The night was black; the water was black; the mushrooming chute was black. Dick had every reason to believe that his descent would be unnoticed, particularly since he had worked the lines to steer his dropping body to a spot at least two miles from the deserted pier.

Everything else seemed deserted in the place he’d picked as a landing spot. It was marshy, useless land along here. He got within thirty feet of the ebony-black water and dropped out of his harness.

He slid into the water, feet first, with a minimum of splash, and was swimming underwater many feet away when the chute settled down. He came up twenty feet from its outer rim and struck out for the pier. Far overhead, he got a last glimpse of the plane, circling idly as though on an army test flight. Then it could be seen no more.

The Avenger could swim with the silence of a seal. A quarter of a mile from the lonely houseboat, he sacrificed some of his speed for this silence and slipped in on the structure.

It was a standard-looking thing, with perhaps five small rooms in it, and was sturdy enough to be towed north and south along the inside passage if its owner wanted to follow the seasons. All the windows showed light but all were blank. The shades were tightly drawn.

The Avenger went around the blunt stern of the boat and into the shadow of the ruined pier. The night and the water were cold. An ordinary man would have been done in by now, but Dick’s physical condition was perfect enough to withstand the chill.

He was silent on a sagging crossbeam under the pier’s flooring. And above he heard a voice.

“Seems to me we ought to have heard something over the radio about it, by now.”

An answering voice said: “We might not hear a thing over the radio for days. The cops may be scared to let it out. Seven more black deaths? The whole country’d go nuts, it’d be so scared.”

The Avenger released his hold on the beam. He swam silently out a hundred yards from the pier and houseboat, then came silently back again. As he swam, he released a sort of metallic powder in his wake.

Up above, through a special quartz lens, one of his aides would see a violet-blue patch, dimly lovely, blossom on the water, though normal eyesight could not see it at all. It would tell them what they were waiting to hear:

“This is it. Join me at once.”

The houseboat was secured at the end of the dock. Benson dived silently at this point. He went down and down, about forty feet, he estimated it, before the chill ooze of the bottom touched his fingers.

He came up and went to the land end of the pier. There he lay in shallow water and held his breath while he listened. He listened for a long time, and at length was rewarded by hearing a faint sound of clothing.

He went to the spot, silent as the night itself. A man sat with his back against a rock. At the last minute, the man heard him; probably heard the water dripping from Dick’s clothing. But he heard too late. The Avenger’s cablelike fingers were at his throat.

Benson injected the anaesthetic drug, took the man’s dry clothes for himself and went to the pier. He believed the gang would not be numerous. It was probable that Suva had not yet recruited many to take the place of the eighteen rounded up at Austin Gailord’s stolen farm. But the man with the pale, infallible eyes used as much caution as if stealing into the midst of a regiment There was another guard at the land end of the pier, and a third at the center. It was these two who had been talking earlier. They were separated, now, at their proper stations.

Benson dealt with them, one at a time, as he had with the first man. He went on down the gloomy cavern of the pier to the roofed end.

Here he saw, in the dim light, one of the most diabolical contrivances he had ever encountered.

It seemed that this amusement pier had once had a lion or tiger among its attractions. The animal was long gone, but its cage remained. It was a standard oblong cage on wheels, like a circus cage. The thing was now up head-high on a timber platform. From this, a slanting incline led down to the end of the pier, where boards were loose.

The purpose was instantly apparent. At a suspicious visit, or a warning from the guards, this wheeled cage could be loosed and shot down the incline into forty feet of water, burying all in it and hiding the evidence of kidnaping.

All in it? The Avenger’s keen eyes had made out forms, but whose and how many he could not say.

“Miller?” he whispered.

There was startled movement in the cage.

“Who’s there?” came a voice.

“Marcy!”

“That’s right,” said the crawling voice. “I say! It’s Benson. Watch yourself. There are guards.”

A girl said, with a catch in her throat, “Oh, thank heavens! We’ve been in here for years, it seems, ready any minute to be sunk in the bay.”

“Is your father there?”

“He’s here,” came still another voice. Daniel Miller’s voice. Then he said, with grim humor, “You seem more pleased to see Mr. Benson than you have up till now, Alicia.”

“I couldn’t help him before,” came the girl’s low, tense voice. “You know that, Dan. You know they’d have killed my father if anyone got close in his investigation. So I didn’t dare help anyone—police or Justice, Inc., or anyone. I tried to fight by myself and, meanwhile, located father by myself.

“I took that black orchid and experimented on it, trying to isolate the poison and perhaps work out an antidote. I’m not a bad chemist, you know. But I didn’t find any of dad’s mysterious chemical in the flower, so it came to nothing.

“Then I pretended to throw in with the gang—even broadcast once—to get them to tell me where dad was held and maybe get them to turn him loose. They seemed to know from the start that I was acting; and when they told me to go to Gailord’s farm, it was only to trap me there and hold me a prisoner. I should have trusted Mr. Benson from the start, but I was foolish and didn’t.”

“Me, too,” came Schuyler Marcy’s voice cheerfully. The lad had nerve, at any rate. “I didn’t trust him at all. I saw that big television set of his, thought he was the real Black Wings leader, and tried to rub him out. Then I put on a peaceful act, to be allowed to stay with him and secretly work against him. All I found out, too late, was that he was on the level.”

The Avenger only said, “Is your father still unconscious, Miss Hannon?”

“Yes,” said the girl bitterly. “They’ve kept him bound and sometimes drugged for eight long weeks. It will be a miracle if he recovers. That is—if he gets a chance to recover! Are you alone?”

“I’m alone,” said Benson.

“I don’t see what one man can do against a whole gang,” sighed the girl.

Miller’s voice sounded, after a dull, tiny glow showed that he had looked at a luminous wrist watch.

“Six minutes to eight,” he said. “Those devils are having their next broadcast at eight o’clock.”

“Broadcast?” said Benson expressionlessly. His hands were busy in the darkness with the wheels of the cage.

“They send out their devil’s ritual at eight o’clock sharp, every other evening, just as if they were a regular broadcasting studio,” Miller said. “We’ve found out that much, while we’ve been held prisoner. There are extras, too.”

Alicia said, “Do you suppose you could stop them?”

There was no answer. She repeated the question, without response. The Avenger had faded back in the blackness of the covered pier.

Benson went to the houseboat, over the rotting floorboards. He had discarded shoes before jumping from the plane. Now, his sensitive feet felt wires, trailing to that flagpole. At the same instant, he heard a low hum as a motor started in the house. It was a generator, to deliver power for the broadcast.

There was bare deck between the boxlike house part of the boat and its bow and stern. Sort of a nautical front and back yard. Benson slid onto the front expanse and went to the nearest window.

There was a quarter-inch crack between drawn shade and window sash. But he didn’t put his eye to it. He took a small periscope attachment from his belt and looked through that, with only the tiny, wide-angle lens showing at the crack.

He saw Suva and two men fussing around a cabinet. He saw another man looking after the wires leading from it. He saw chintz curtains, oversized light bulbs. This was the room they had seen when the warning was given—

A cold ring touched the base of his skull.

“Stay perfectly still,” said a deep voice behind him. It was the voice of the Black Wings leader! A black-gloved hand reached over the shoulder of The Avenger, and knuckles tapped the window. Next instant, the three men inside were on deck, ringed around Benson. And the moment after that he was in the room with all of them.

The lithe figure with the black hood over its head looked at a watch placed on the cabinet.

“Three more minutes,” he said. “We can’t disappoint the customers by being late. The suckers, I should say.”

“How about this guy?” growled one of the men, prodding Benson with his thumb.

“He’ll be an object lesson in the broadcast,” said the Voice. “Somehow, he managed to escape the black death we promised him in the special broadcast. But not for long. The muzzle of the gun I poked into his neck is roughened—and it was dipped in old Hannon’s poison! In a few minutes, the esteemed Mr. Richard Benson will be as black as coal and very, very dead. The suckers can watch him and get the idea that even if you escape the Black Wings’ vengeance once, it soon catches up with you.”

“Nice going,” applauded Suva. He turned to Benson. “O.K. chump. Just stand without making trouble till you begin to feel it.”

“Two minutes and a half,” said the hooded leader. He said to The Avenger, “Did any others of your band escape the black death from Gresham Bros.?”

“All did,” said Benson evenly.

The hooded leader went rigid, then relaxed and laughed.

“Yes? But you said you were here alone. You’d hardly come alone if others of your aides were alive to come with you.”

“I said I was alone—then. And I was. By now, all the rest, save one at the controls of a plane, will have parachuted down near here. Perhaps they have surrounded the houseboat already.”

“Hey,” said Suva uneasily, “maybe this guy’s telling the truth.”

“I’ve learned always to tell the truth,” said The Avenger calmly. “Honest men trust you for it. Liars and crooks like yourselves never believe it, and so they doom themselves.”

The hooded leader laughed again and waved back Suva, who had stepped angrily up to hit Benson.

“Don’t bother with him. In a minute or so he’ll begin to turn black and be out of our way. Just about time, Suva. Is everything ready?”

“Yeah,” said the mob leader, weak eyes venomous behind his thick glasses.

“All right. You three go out on deck and keep watch, just in case this bluffer isn’t entirely bluffing.”