Читать книгу Dust of Death: A Doc Savage Adventure - Harold A. Davis - Страница 6

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Without turning, Long Tom rapped: “Why not touch it?”

“That man was killed by the Inca in Gray!” Ace Jackson shouted.

Long Tom spun around. “What?”

“The gray dust,” Ace Jackson snapped, “is always on his victims.”

Señorita Anita Carcetas said: “The death was meant for you, Señor Long Tom.”

“I know it,” Long Tom growled. “Only the coat on his arm was visible when he stood in the door. The killer thought it was me with my coat over my arm.”

The word exchange had taken but a moment. Long Tom whipped glances up and down the corridor. He decided the fleeing killer would have gone to the right toward the exit. Long Tom ran in that direction.

He reached the entrance and saw a uniformed military guard there, rifle alert. The fellow must have heard the death sound.

“Did any one pass?” Long Tom demanded in Spanish. The sentry said no one had passed and Long Tom turned back, trying doors to the right and to the left. There were cries, running footsteps from other parts of the hospital, these no doubt made by persons coming to see what the excitement was about.

It was in a big white operating room, banked with instruments, that Long Tom came upon an object of interest.

The object was a man; a rather small man who was attired in immaculate blue serge. He had Latin handsomeness and a mustache that was a dark neat line on his upper lip.

There was a distinct smear of gray dust on the right sleeve of his blue serge suit.

Long Tom rushed to the small man’s side. The fellow was struggling to get up, his writhing lips bending and unbending his black line of a mustache.

“A fiend—cloaked, masked,” he gulped. “He struck me down and fled.”

He pointed to an open window.

Long Tom whipped to the window. There was no one in sight. The ground below was sun baked enough not to hold footprints, and there was shrubbery enough about to have concealed a small army.

Long Tom shouted an alarm and a soldier appeared, began searching the grounds.

Going back to the neat little man with the mustache, Long Tom studied the fellow narrowly. Abruptly, Long Tom seized the man’s arm.

“Free me!” the other sputtered. “What is the meaning?”

“You were attacked,” Long Tom told him dryly. “But that’s your story. You haven’t got a mark on you.”

The man tried to speak. But Long Tom shook him, then marched him, angrily incoherent, back to the room where Ace Jackson had gotten back on his cot.

Ace Jackson’s eyes flew wide and he said: “Don’t mind who you manhandle, do you?”

“What do you mean?” Long Tom growled.

Ace Jackson pointed at the mustached prisoner. “No idea who this is?”

“I don’t get you,” Long Tom said.

“He is Señor Junio Serrato,” Ace Jackson advised.

“For the love of mud,” said Long Tom.

“Exactly,” Ace Jackson agreed. “Señor Serrato is war minister of this nation!”

Long Tom hurriedly released his captive. One did not drag war ministers around as if they were common culprits. For, in these South American countries, war ministers usually had more actual power than the president.

“I deeply regret my tremendous error, Señor Serrato,” Long Tom murmured.

That was diplomacy. Regardless of what one thought, one did not accuse war ministers of crimes which there might be difficulty in proving they had committed.

Long Tom was somewhat surprised when Señor Junio Serrato took it graciously.

“It is no indignity to be handled roughly by a man who belongs to one of the most famous little groups in the world,” he murmured. “I have heard much of Doc Savage and his five aides.”

Long Tom was trying to think of something equally polite when there was an uproar out on the hospital grounds. They hurried to the windows and saw the squad of soldiers who had been searching the ground had made two seizures. They were bringing the prisoners in.

The captives were a Jeff and Mutt pair in stature. Both were well dressed.

“The soldados have made a mistake,” war minister Serrato murmured at Long Tom’s elbow.

“You know the prisoners?” Long Tom queried.

“Oh, yes,” minister Serrato nodded.

“Count Hoffe is the tall one,” minister Serrato explained. “He is the representative of the European munitions concern which supplies our needs in arms and ammunitions.”

“The short one?” Long Tom suggested.

“Don Kurrell is his name,” advised minister Serrato.

“Another munitions salesman?”

“Oh, no.” The war minister smiled again. “Don Kurrell represents the company which holds the Santa Amoza oil concessions. He is interested in seeing the war ended. His oil wells, I regret to say, are in the battle zone. Unless our nation wins, his concern stands to lose its investment.”

The prisoners were ushered in shortly. The soldiers explained they had been acting suspiciously when caught.

Tall Count Hoffe removed his hat, displaying a close-cropped bullet head, and explained: “We were seeking shelter. We heard the excitement and feared there might be shooting.”

“Just why were you here?” Long Tom asked them.

The two looked at each other, then eyed minister Serrato, and they all glanced at Ace Jackson.

Ace Jackson said: “I think everybody has the same idea.”

“What is it?” Long Tom demanded.

“The thing I started to tell you,” Ace Jackson grunted.

“Shoot,” Long Tom invited.

“We want Doc Savage down here,” Ace Jackson said. “We want him to smash this devil, the Inca in Gray.”

There was talk after that, explanations of what was known of the Inca in Gray. But all of it added up to little more than Long Tom had already heard. The Inca in Gray was some mysterious power who was managing to keep the slaughter going for some unknown reason of his own.

“I’ll see about it,” Long Tom told them finally. “I’ll cable Doc,” and left.

Hardly more than one minute after Long Tom had taken his departure, Count Hoffe clicked his heels, doubled his long body in a smart bow and said: “Believe me, I am truly glad that Doc may come to Santa Amoza. This unending slaughter is a terrible thing.”

Then he took his departure.

Ace Jackson stared at the door after Count Hoffe had gone, and closed it. He muttered, “Sometimes I wonder about that guy. He’s the only one I can think of who stands to profit by having this war go on and on.”

“You mean that he might be the Inca in Gray?” murmured war minister Serrato. “That thought has occurred to me.”

“And to me, too,” broke in Don Kurrell. “That is why I have been palling up with the blighter. I am checking up on him.”

“Learn anything?” asked Ace Jackson.

“No,” said Don Kurrell.

Every one left.

Those in the room would have been greatly interested in the actions of a strange figure in a near-by park some moments later. Even a close inspection would not show whether this form was that of man or woman.

An all-enveloping cloak of gray material, with a hood which completely concealed the features, furnished an excellent disguise. This form glided through the shrubbery, keeping out of sight, and stopped under a tree which grew out of the shrubbery. This tree was very large and ancient.

The actions of the mysterious skulker became rather unusual. The figure sank beside the tree, took out a notebook from beneath the cloak, and wrote something in it. The notebook had pages of thin, onionskin paper.

The note was rolled, and one hand, gloved, carried it into a hollow in the bottom of the tree. If the strange individual had made any sound thus far, it was lost in the cooing of pigeons, numbers of which swarmed the ancient park at all hours of the day, picking up scraps, perching in the branches of the trees.

The individual in gray removed his hand from the tree, and slunk away, vanishing from view.

Only a few moments later, a pigeon arose from the top of the tree. It was only one pigeon among many, and there was nothing to indicate to any onlooker that it was a carrier pigeon, which had come up from the hollow trunk of the old tree from a cote concealed in the base. Nor was there anything to show an observer on the ground that the bird carried a note sealed in a quill.

Long Tom Roberts was also encountering pigeons, but they were only of the ordinary mongrel variety which hopped about in the streets and he paid no attention to them. Long Tom was thinking, mulling over in his mind what he was convinced was a fact, two facts rather.

The two facts were the two attempts on his life—the attempt of the beggar horde, and the strange incident at the hospital. Presumably, both attempts had been made by the Inca in Gray; and the motive was not hard to guess. Doc Savage was not wanted on the Santa Amoza scene.

This talk of the Inca in Gray was entirely new to Long Tom. But that was not strange. This war between Santa Amoza and Delezon had been going its bloody way for almost four years, yet it was quite possible that any number of people in New York had never heard of it. The newspapers, of course, had carried stories of the bigger battles, but almost nothing of the day-by-day fight. American editorials usually dismissed the affairs as sporadic squabbles over the jungle and desert tract that separated the two republics. Washington had, however, placed an embargo on the export of arms to the belligerents, hoping to stop the conflict.

“I’ll bet Count Hoffe liked that,” Long Tom muttered.

The electrical wizard turned into a cable office. He took a blank and wrote:

DOC SAVAGE

NEW YORK

EVENT VERY MYSTERIOUS STOP LEARN WAR BEING KEPT GOING BY MYSTERY INDIVIDUAL KNOWN AS INCA IN GRAY STOP MIGHT BE GOOD IDEA IF YOU CAME DOWN AND CLEANED UP

LONG TOM

Long Tom left the cable office and blissfully went his way, searching for a suitable hotel.

Some moments after Long Tom had left, when there had been approximately time for him to get out of earshot, a strange thing happened. A man came running wildly down the street with several others pursuing him. He turned into the cable office as if he thought it offered escape. There he picked up a chair and turned, at bay. The pursuers charged in. Promptly there was a mêlée. Furniture flew about. Desks were upset. The cable office attendants screamed for the police.

The police arrived eventually. But, by that time, the mysterious fighters had taken their departure. They had, in fact, joined the sinister figure which had dispatched the pigeon from the park tree.

“How did it come out?” the cloaked individual asked.

“Perfectly, master,” came the answer.

One of the gang who had staged the fight turned over a telegraph blank. It was the one which bore the message Long Tom had written.

The hooded one chuckled when he saw this.

“You left in its place the one I gave you?” he asked.

“We did,” said the other.

“It is well,” the cloaked one said. “Had we merely stolen the message the cable attendants might have missed it.”

“We did excellent work,” bragged one of the fighters.

“True,” said the cloaked one. “Your work is not done.”

The other seemed surprised, and made a question with his eyebrows.

“Long Tom Roberts is now to be gotten out of the way,” the cloaked one clipped shortly.

Long Tom had finally found himself a hotel.

“My luggage get here, señor?” he demanded of the clerk.

The clerk smiled, all but bumped his forehead on the desk in a bow, and passed over Long Tom’s room key.

Long Tom located the stairway and climbed to a hall which was dark after the brilliance of the sunlight outside. It took him a moment or two to locate the room that his key called for. He unlocked it and, his eyes still somewhat blinded, he swung the door open.

Two men had been busy over Long Tom’s open suitcase. They leaped to their feet. Knives came into their hands with grim suddenness.

Long Tom was afraid of no man with a knife. Anyway, there was a chair between himself and the pair. He could grab it, use it for a weapon.

But he did not reach the chair. The two over the suitcase had been there as bait to hold his attention. There was another man standing just inside the door. That fellow went forward, swinging an arm club fashion. His hand held a gun, held it by the butt. For nobody but a fool clubs with the butt of a gun.

The two, who had been over the suitcase, caught the electrical wizard’s unconscious form so that it would not make noise in falling.

A strange figure in a cloak now appeared, coming from somewhere outside. This individual examined Long Tom closely, making sure that he was senseless.

“Bring a trunk,” the cloaked one ordered. “We are going to take him away.”

“Is it safe, O Inca in Gray?” one asked.

“Keep your suggestions to yourselves,” uttered their fantastic looking chief. “Get this Long Tom Roberts to the place at the edge of the city where I shall meet you.”