The Avenger 16 - The Hate Master (10 page)

Smitty decided not to wait to find out.

“You want us to get down in
that
thing?” he said, rebelliously.

“That’s right, big boy,” said the machine gunner.

His pals were bunched around him in a knot. All except Morel. Smitty had had no second glance of the inventor, missing for so long. It began to look as if the scientist had slipped out the back of the building as the two were marched in the front.

“Go on! Down!” snapped the machine gunner.

Smitty stooped, and his hands gripped the length of car rail as if to lift it aside from the stairs. But he didn’t do that.

He snapped erect with the rail in his vast hands and plunged like a human tank toward the machine gunner and the knot of men!

Few men can lift a length of rail, even light-weight material for streetcars. Smitty not only lifted it; he ran with it—and made time, too. He must have been an awesome spectacle, indeed, as he plunged for the gang. As he came, he yelled at the top of his lungs. And right after him, zigzagging to confuse aim, raced Josh.

“Crack down on him, you dope!” screamed one of the men.

The palsied machine gunner opened up! But it was too late. There were only a few yards between the men and the pit. They’d kept at close range to be sure and hit the two if they rebelled. Now, Smitty had covered this too-short distance in half a dozen bounds, with the iron rail held horizontally before him in his two vast paws.

Some of the slugs hit. And they hurt. But they did not penetrate. The Avenger and each of his aides always wore bulletproof garments of a substance called celluglass, which Benson had invented. It was as strong as steel and much lighter.

These garments saved Josh and Smitty, though they left bruises that would remain for many a day.

Then the bar smashed against the men, with all the force of its own weight and of Smitty’s three hundred racing pounds behind it.

Several of the gang had automatics out. These dropped as the men were mashed against the brick wall behind them. The machine gunner doubled over the bar and dropped his weapon—

“Josh!” roared Smitty.

But there was no need to call. Like a black streak, Josh was after the gun. He got it, leaped back a few paces, and leveled it. Then Smitty dropped the rail. The fact that a few toes were in the way was just dandy with him.

“Now,” he said pleasantly, “
you
guys can get into that pit, and my partner will hold you there with the gun while I go to Knightstown for a flock of deputies—”

There was an ear-shattering roar. Half the rear wall folded and began raining down its individual bricks. The great roof sagged.

Josh yelled and whirled around. Smitty glared toward the rear, too. Morel! It looked as if he hadn’t gone away, after all. He had exploded part of the building to rescue the gang.

Shots jerked the giant around again. Josh was just sending hasty slugs at the last of the gang, who was limping out the door and running to the right, where the corner hid him from sight.

The two leaped to the front. The men were in the woods, running in all directions. They’d thought they had cornered this giant and this black tiger, and they had been cornered themselves. They were having no more of them.

Smitty ran for the rear, where no more bricks were falling. There was no sign of the scientist. Morel had provided a distraction, during which the men had gotten away, and right afterward had fled himself.

“Hell!” said Smitty, looking at the empty bag they were now holding.

They went back to their car and Smitty got out his radio transmitter. If conditions were right, he could just get New York.

Conditions, it seemed, were right. A tiny voice came through the earphone. “Benson talking.”

“Chief,” said Smitty, “we found the hangar where that blimp was kept. And we had a bunch of prisoners and Morel, but they got away—”

“What?” came The Avenger’s voice, so electrically that Smitty jumped. It was rarely that that voice was raised. “You said Morel?”

“Yes. He was here, but he got away with the—” Smitty was talking to nothingness. There was no more from The Avenger; no sign of any kind. He had left the New York receiving end without a further word.

There was an excellent reason why The Avenger burst into action without even waiting for Smitty to finish his report.

The phone call from Morel, some hours ago!

The scientist had called from the Maine laboratory, it seemed, through the nearest exchange which was Kinnisten, Maine. He had said he was safe, but couldn’t take time to explain anything and would probably have to leave right away for the West.

Now, the very first thing that had happened after that call, of course, was Lila’s urgent request that she be allowed to rush up there and see if she could catch her father and have a few words with him before he left for another indefinite and unexplained period.

Benson had rather reluctantly agreed and had sent Mac along to guard her.

There seemed no reason not to do this, though Dick had been instinctively uneasy. After all, from the first, there had been no proof that Morel hadn’t left the clearing of his own free will.

Smitty’s work with the thermocouple showed how a kidnaping might have occurred from the air, where at first glance such would seem impossible.

But there was no proof of such a thing, and Morel’s call had cast further doubt upon it. And it had been Morel! Lila knew her father’s voice without a shadow of a doubt. So it had seemed all right. A man wouldn’t mislead his own daughter.

Now, Morel had been seen in Michigan, hundreds of miles from the spot from where he had ostensibly phoned. And many things had clicked into place in Benson’s brain.

The queer monotony of Morel’s voice over the phone! The way he had kept right on talking in spite of Lila’s questions and exclamations! Morel had answered none of those questions; had replied to none of her statements. The voice had just gone on.

Why? Because it wasn’t Morel! That phone call had been a recording of Morel’s voice, played in advance and run before a telephone in Maine when the owner of the voice was nowhere near there.

“Nellie!” The Avenger called, eyes like pale ice with cold flame behind them.

The elaborate scheme meant only one thing—a trap!

Their enemy had decided, for reasons of his own, that Morel’s daughter must know too much and must be killed. Morel had been drugged or tricked into making that phonograph record because the gang was shrewd enough to know that the girl’s first move, after hearing from her absent father, would be to hurry up and try to contact him. In which case she could be murdered at leisure.

“Nellie!”

“Yes, chief.”

The diminutive blonde appeared in the doorway. Her satin-smooth cheeks were pink, and in her blue eyes was the light of excitement.

“Mac and Lila Morel have left for Morel’s Maine laboratory, near Kinnisten,” said Dick.

“Yes, I know.”

“I find out now,” The Avenger went on, “that it is almost certainly a trap. They’ve been drawn up there by a false telephone call. Take the fastest plane and go after them.”

“And just bring them back?” said Nellie, looking disappointed.

“By no means!”

Dick Benson’s colorless eyes were something to scare the most hardened of crooks. A trap! Very well, Benson had a way with traps. Never avoid them, was his motto. Always walk right in, because in traps, you are apt to learn something you might otherwise have no opportunity to discover.

“Lila Morel and Mac will fall into the trap, as has been planned for them. Only—you will be Lila Morel.”

Nellie nodded complete comprehension.

“She’s quite a bit taller than I am, though,” she said.

“Take inch-and-a-half lifts and your highest-heeled shoes,” said Benson. “Put them on in the plane, don’t bother with anything, now. They may already be there. In that case—”

He didn’t have to finish. It is one thing to walk into a trap open-eyed. It is quite another thing to fall in unwarned.

And Mac and Lila were unwarned!

Nellie didn’t even stop to acknowledge orders. She was gone from there. It was a normal eight minutes fast driving to the river where, in an old loft building, some of The Avenger’s planes were secretly kept. She made it in five.

The fastest plane, Dick had said. That was a silver bullet with stubby wings and an impossibly big motor. An amphibian. It ripped up the water for a hundred yards, lifted, soared off.

“Mac, Nellie calling. Mac! Mac!”

She kept calling into the transmitter of her radio. And she kept hearing no answer.

“Mac. Come in. Nellie calling. Mac.”

She set the robot pilot and, while the plane shot north automatically guided and kept on an even keel, she put on a dark wig she had grabbed from the make-up kit and which somewhat resembled Lila’s hair in hue. She also put on a pair of shoes with ridiculously high heels and, in addition, inserted the maxim shoe lifts she could handle.

When she was through, she had the sensation of wearing stilts. But she had trained herself to walk naturally in such circumstances.

“Mac. Nellie calling. Oh, Mac, thank Heaven, I got you in time!”

“In time for what?” came the Scot’s burring voice, tiny in the receiver.

“Mac, the chief has found out you and Lila are walking into a trap. Where are you now?”

“Halfway from Kinnisten to Morel’s laboratory, on foot, goin’ through the thickest woods ye everrr saw.”

“Go back to Kinnisten. I’ll meet you there. I’ll be there before you will, I think.”

“Wait a minute!” growled Mac’s voice. “Back to Kinnisten is six miles. Through this underbrush, that’s no little hike to take just for the fun of it. Oh, all right! There’s an old mill half a mile north of the town with a wheatfield next to it. Ye can use it for landin’.”

Nellie was there first, all right. But about ten minutes after she had set the plane down with an expertness that would have commanded the respect of an army flier, Mac and Lila came.

Lila was pale and trembling.

“A trap!” she said, when she saw Nellie. “You’re sure? Then—that means Dad
is
in trouble. Are we going back to New York?”

“No,” said Nellie. “We’re going to walk into the trap.”

Lila started to say something. Nellie said swiftly:

“Your dress. Take it off, please.”

“I don’t quite understand—”

“If somebody did all this to get you up to the lab,” Nellie said impatiently, “they probably had a man posted near Bleek Street to see if you actually started. That man would describe the clothes you wore in his report to the rest. So I’ll change dresses with you, also hats.”

Mac turned his back and looked glumly at the stream babbling past the old mill building while the transfer took place.

Nellie had a thought as she moved around. She had said “they probably had a man posted at Bleek Street” to tip off the gang as to what Lila wore. There was another possibility. Packer, the perfect servant with the kindly smile. He could have given that information, too. But that, she decided as she finished the change of clothes, was ridiculous.

The fit wasn’t very good. Nellie’s blue dress on Lila ended appreciably above Lila’s attractive knees. And Lila’s dress on Nellie was too long in spite of the extra high heels and the shoe lifts. Nellie took it up at the shoulders and put on Lila’s hat. In the night, she could pass for Morel’s daughter, all right.

“Wait here,” Nellie told Lila. “Don’t move out of the building. And if anybody comes around—anybody at all—hide instantly.”

Then she was gone, with Mac’s bony height towering over her, through the woods in the direction of that laboratory in which something monstrous had been hatched. A plot which might affect the entire history of the United States if The Avenger and his band failed in their quest.

The two went the miles afoot to the lab a lot more quickly than Lila and Mac had been going.

Nellie was a trained woodsman with muscles, under her dainty skin, like silver springs. She had gone on many an archaeological expedition in jungles with her father, dead now; murdered by crooks who wanted to get from him the secret location of ancient gold. So she made even Mac puff a little to keep up as she slid through night and forest.

With the laboratory less than half a mile ahead of them, Mac said:

“Did Muster Benson have any idea of what this trap would be like?”

Nellie shook her head, so different from its normal blondness because of the dark wig.

“There was no clue to that. He only knew there was a trap. We’ll just have to keep our eyes open, that’s all.”

Then they were in sight of the clearing, through the trees in the moonlight. They began creeping forward like Indians, taking advantage of every bush and tree for cover.

Because the woods’ growth went right up to the gate, they could be morally sure that if anyone were hiding in the building, they couldn’t have seen them.

Lila had told Mac how to open the gate. There was a little lever at ground level next to the portal, hidden in grass and leaves. You pulled that up, then pushed it down again in the opposite direction. That shut off the current in the fence wire and released a massive set of bolts which secured the gate.