Читать книгу Merchants of Disaster: A Doc Savage Adventure - Harold A. Davis - Страница 3
ОглавлениеA MYSTERY MESSAGE
Joe Goopy encountered it first. Two of his companions saw it happen. Those companions didn’t believe what they saw and took the attitude that it didn’t matter much anyway. Joe probably would have agreed with them. He was rather tired of living.
The three were making their way to the hobo jungles outside Washington. Not one of them was sober. Panhandling had been better than usual. They had bought some canned heat, squeezed the alcohol out and gulped it down.
That was one reason Joe’s companions believed their eyes had deceived them. They had seen strange things before when under the influence of canned heat.
It was just after dusk when it happened. Joe had plunged on ahead of his drinking partners, was weaving his way along the railroad tracks.
Joe’s once tall figure was bent. His faded blue eyes were blank. He kept putting one foot in front of the other only because his subconscious mind told him to do so.
Then he paused suddenly. His skinny arms beat the air about him and he tried to run.
Behind him, his two companions had halted, mouths open. There was a faint burning odor in the air, and a sight such as they had never seen before directly ahead of them.
A faint cry came from Joe. It was a strangled sort of cry, apparently for help. It shut off in mid-beat as if strong fingers had been applied to his neck.
His companions turned and ran. It was some minutes before their courage returned enough for them to come back and investigate.
When they did, everything was calm and peaceful. Even Joe looked calm and peaceful. There were no marks of violence of any kind on his body. But he was very dead.
The body was picked up later that same night. The deputy coroner who examined it did his job hurriedly. The death of one human derelict more or less meant nothing to him.
He did note on the record that Joe Goopy’s death was not homicide. Then he wrote “acute alcoholism” as the real cause, and let it go at that.
Being young and with a fair amount of curiosity, he wondered just what had killed the aged tramp, but he wasn’t curious enough to perform an autopsy. Had Joe’s companions told their story there might have been an investigation. As it was, the death was left a mystery.
Les Quinan was confronted with a mystery also—a minor mystery, he believed at first. And to begin with, he paid but little attention.
In fact, he had noticed the queer light-signals for several days before his interest was aroused. Even then he was only mildly intrigued.
That is, until he discovered he was the only one who saw the signals at all!
At that, he had no inkling of what he was about to discover or his actions might have been different. In which case the course of many lives would have been altered. A great number of those lives probably would have been saved.
Les Quinan didn’t know about the death of Joe Goopy, of course. But if he had he wouldn’t have connected that death with the queer light flashes.
The flashes, in themselves, seemed insignificant enough. Actually, they appeared only as long streaks of sunlight.
But sunlight does not originate in the fifth floor of a Washington office building. And besides, Les Quinan could not see sunlight anyhow. He was snow-blind.
Big, dark-colored glasses covered his eyes. He paced his office restlessly, unable to read, cursing the impulse that had taken him on a skiing trip and his own lack of caution which had resulted in the snow-blindness.
Les Quinan was a patent attorney, and a good one. But he needed his eyes to read law books and to draw up legal documents.
Those eyes were improving, but he still could barely see well enough to get around at all.
But he could see the queer light flashes!
The surprise of that was so great that unconsciously he yanked the dark-colored glasses from his eyes, trying for a better look.
Without the glasses he could see nothing at all!
When the significance of that penetrated, the lawyer almost forgot his irritation. He called his secretary to see if she could see the strange lights. She couldn’t.
There still would have been time for the attorney to have prevented much of what followed if he had obeyed his first surge of interest and investigated. He didn’t.
He might be excused for that. He had expected an important client to arrive several days before. The client still hadn’t appeared. Quinan was worried. He would have been more than worried had he known how much his client was involved in what was to happen.
It wasn’t until next day that he turned his attention back to the queer flashes. Then he noticed they were of different timing. Some were short and some were long.
For the first time he realized that signals of some kind were being sent.
Before he could do anything about it, the flashes stopped. But now, Quinan was fully aroused. He grabbed a handful of paper clips, paced back and forth flipping those clips absently at an old-fashioned cuspidor, but keeping his eyes on the fifth-story window across the way.
The flashes had seemed to shoot upward and out at a slight angle. They would, he estimated, miss all buildings, continue on up into the air.
A frown creased his forehead. He turned, tossed another paper clip and nodded with satisfaction as a metallic cling rewarded his effort.
If the flashes merely went on out into space, how could they be received at the other end, that is if they were really intended to be signals?
Still frowning, he spun back to the window. He could barely distinguish the outline of the building across the street, but light streaks suddenly shot before his eyes.
Those light streaks were going on and off with great rapidity.
A gasp came from the lawyer’s lips. He whipped a pencil out of his pocket, then swore helplessly.
The next moment and he had bellowed for his secretary. She came on the run. Her eyes opened wide as her employer began to dictate furiously. What he said apparently made no sense, but she obeyed orders and put down letters as Quinan barked them. The letters read:
QPWDZ BRHYZ BBOPD WICGH
WGBUF QXPUM WBEIE CHAUK
EBRQS LTGJP RINDU LYLMF
OETYM FINDP BDTCZ VPTQD
BMSSS
The flashes stopped. Les Quinan was fairly jumping up and down in his excitement.
“Transcribe that, write the letters out large, then read them over to me,” he barked.
Quinan had been a radio operator on a subchaser during the World War. He had found it easy to read the letters, being sent in international code. And during recent years he had become interested in cipher codes.
The one in which the message had been broadcast was a mediumly difficult one, but the first two words had caught his attention and had given him a clue. Those words were not in cipher and they were:
“Death Today!”
On the fifth floor of the building across the street, a tall, slender, well-dressed man turned away from a window. His features were almost handsome, his smile attractive, but his black eyes were hard.
“I believe you were right about that lawyer,” he said calmly.
His companion grunted, raised his eyebrows slightly.
The tall man nodded. “I’ll take care of it.” Still smiling, he left the room.
Les Quinan was unaware that his interest had attracted attention. He probably would have ignored it if he had known.
His secretary had repeated the sequence of letters he had seen several times. His mind was accustomed to grasping details.
Pencil in hand, making huge letters and trying hard to see more clearly, he was working with deep concentration. Slowly, word by word, he was piecing the message together.
His jaw dropped. Perspiration appeared on his forehead. Something was wrong, radically wrong. Yet no one would believe him if he tried to tell what he knew.
The message he had decoded was too horrible.
For a moment he wondered who that message could have been intended for. No one could see that light, flashed up into the air. Yet had it been directed at anyone close at hand, a personal call or a telephone would have served the purpose just as well, probably better.
Then he dismissed that problem from his mind. He had to call help, had to get someone to aid him. He could call police, or Federal men, but then, if this proved to be a hoax or false alarm, he would be the subject of ridicule.
But he knew instinctively this wasn’t a false alarm. And if it meant what it said the police and Federal men probably would be helpless anyway.
Les Quinan was unaware of the passage of time, did not realize that his secretary had gone to lunch, that he was alone in the office.
Inspiration had struck him. He would call Doc Savage—Clark Savage, Jr. A smile lighted his features. He should have thought of that before. Doc Savage was the one man for this job. For Doc Savage had fought mysterious forces before. He had been victorious, and conquered even when the odds were great.
The lawyer swung around, reaching blindly for a telephone.
He heard the door of his office open and close. Dimly, he made out a tall, lean figure approaching him.
“Busy! Can’t see you!” he almost shouted. “Come back some other time!”
His visitor’s slow, unhurried approach did not pause.
The tall man’s eyes flicked over the glasses the lawyer wore, noted the scribbled paper with its group of letters on the desk. He nodded, almost sadly, as if confirming something that pained him.
“Were you going to telephone someone?” he asked politely. His voice was low, refined.
“Get out, I said,” Quinan barked. “I’ve got to get Doc Savage. I’ve—” His lips shut firmly, as if he had said more than he had intended.
“Ah!” The other’s voice remained low. “So you were going to call the famous adventurer and mental marvel, the man who spends his life fighting evildoers. How touching.”
Les Quinan came to his feet. There had been a subtle change in the other’s tone, a touch of menace. For the first time the lawyer felt a touch of fear, realized the secret he had learned might be dangerous.
“Will you go?” he snapped. “I—”
The tall man moved, swiftly. Quinan saw the move but faintly. Instinctively, he tried to dodge. Then he swayed drunkenly for a moment and collapsed to the floor.
His visitor calmly drew a handkerchief, wiped a faint stain of crimson from a long, slender knife.
Still calmly, the tall man gathered up the papers on the lawyer’s desk, put them in his pocket. On his way out he gathered up the notebook Quinan’s secretary had used in taking his excited dictation.
