Читать книгу Empire of Terror: Phantom Detective Saga - Robert Wallace - Страница 4

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Lowering purplish storm clouds had hovered menacingly over New York City all day, seemingly caught and held stationary by the sharp spires and pinnacles of the towering skyscrapers. At three o'clock in the afternoon the storm hadn't broken yet, and the spasmodic rumble of thunder was just beginning to become annoying over radios in crackling static.

But it wasn't storm interference that broke in upon the swing music floating from the hidden radio in the large Moorish reception room of the stately Fifth Avenue residence of Mr. Frank Havens, the nationally known publisher. It was the announcer's smooth voice cutting in from Radio City:

"Ladies and gentlemen, through the facilities of the National Broadcasting Company, you are about to hear the President of the United States speak from Rock Canyon Dam, Arizona, where he will formally open the largest irrigation system in the world. One moment, please—"

As the fading strains of the National Anthem, played by the U. S. Marine Band, swelled into the big, gaily crowded reception room, Muriel Havens stopped dancing and smiled whimsically up into the lean, tanned face of Richard Curtis Van Loan.

"Something official like that would have to break into my afternoon tea-dance," she protested with a little laugh, and started to signal a butler to dial in another program.

Dick Van Loan stopped her with a quick shake of his head and moved with her nearer the wide window where the radio was camouflaged in a flower-covered wall table.

"Mind if I listen to him?" he asked politely, and added, "The daughter of Frank Havens should be able to inflict the President's voice on her guests for a few min—"

His bantering words broke off abruptly as his sharp eyes flicked to the window.

Out across Central Park, rising high above the skyscrapers of the Roaring Forties to the south, blinking red lights on Frank Havens' towering Clarion Press Building gleamed now, flashing warningly, vividly against the purplish background of foreboding storm clouds.

The Phantom's signal! Neither exclamation nor tremor betrayed the vitalizing shock that whipped Dick Van Loan's nerves into tensed alertness. His signal—from Frank Havens—Around him the gay party went on, heedless and merrily ignorant of the dire call. Even Muriel Havens, the nationally powerful publisher's beautiful daughter, had no inkling of the grim Phantom drama being signaled in by those rapidly winking lights atop her father's Clarion tower.

Dick Van Loan's cryptic smile gave no hint of the driving turmoil seething within him as he deciphered that flashing code message:

Calling the Phantom—Come to my office—

Hurry—This is a murder call—Havens—

Calling the Phantom—

The dots and dashes kept on winking ominously, would continue to blink that secret message until the Phantom himself contacted Frank Havens. Van Loan damned himself mentally. He'd been idling here, dancing, unalert to that urgent message.

But before his brain could hit upon an acceptably logical excuse to offer Muriel Havens for an abrupt departure, the familiar voice of the veteran radio announcer, Mort Lewis, broke in upon his consciousness:

"—From Rock Canyon Dam—The President of the United States!"

Then the President's warm voice: "My friends—"

Dick Van Loan's eyes narrowed at the sharp click that interrupted the President's kindly greeting.

The next instant, as the first chilling words of that strange unannounced metallic voice came brassily over the air, Van stooped low over the radio table, his tensed fingers twisting off the volume. He motioned Muriel Havens away, dialed the icy flow of words until he alone in the room could hear:

"—the Imperator of the Two Americas speaking for the Invisible Empire. Rock Canyon Dam will be destroyed in—one hundred seconds. Future public disasters will follow—Sixty seconds—I, the Imperator, have spoken!"

Grimly, his knuckles white against the dial, Dick Van Loan spun the volume on full as the icy metallic voice stopped with a brittle snap that was like glass broken by a hammer blow. But now only a vague rumbling sound and the crackle of distant static came from the suddenly stilled station.

Tight-lipped, Van turned down the power to normal volume, dialed in a dance orchestra on a minor local station, and rose to face Muriel. No use disrupting her afternoon party with this new, grimly spectacular radio mystery. Damage enough, that millions of listeners had heard that dire, threatening voice.

"Something went wrong with the President's address," he said to her with a convincing smile of apology.

"I'm a very hard-boiled stockholder in that broadcasting company, so you won't mind. Muriel, if I run off from your very pleasant soiree to see what's happened?"

How much she minded was evident in her gently veiled, disappointed gaze as she let him go. But it was not a polite lie that Dick Van Loan used to excuse himself from the Havens home.

He did own stock in the National Broadcasting Company. In a number of other industrial corporations, too. And in Frank Havens' coast-to-coast chain of newspapers, including the New York Clarion. Richard Curtis Van Loan was wealthy, but not cumbersomely so.

But the tall, athletic Park Avenue clubman and man-about-town had cleared his mind of Muriel's tea-dance before he reached the curb. And he had no intention of driving first to Radio City, as he jumped into his fast, powerful coupe. South of Central Park, the Clarion tower lights were still flashing their urgent secret code for the Phantom.

And the Phantom was answering that call! Answering it now in the fast run of Dick Van Loan's dark blue coupe down Fifth Avenue and across town to Eighth.

He parked a block from the towering Clarion Press building, but did not immediately get out of the car. Instead, bending low in the coupe's seat, he produced from a panel beneath him a small, compactly equipped make-up kit.

Working rapidly, with swift glances of caution at the hurrying pedestrians passing a few feet from the car windows, he began the familiar task of disguising his features. It was an old story with him, this quick change of character.

Always, when the inevitable Clarion call came to war on crime, it was Van's deft, experienced fingers that brought the Phantom into being again—as those sure, artistic fingers had done in the beginning. For the Phantom was Dick Van Loan's own creation, a product of his restless energy, his fearless demand for action, and his determination to put his wealth and talents to the best use.

Van hated crime and criminals instinctively. But it was Frank Havens, a far older man, who had shown him that always, behind the scenes of every series of modern crimes, some one brain, some one man, was the ruthless guiding genius, untouchable by the usual forces of law or the police.

The Phantom was Richard Curtis Van Loan's answer to the death challenge of lawlessness. The Phantom, a sinister figure without name, without identity—more untouchable and grimly mysterious than the slipperiest of those crooks and killer geniuses of crime whose ravages he was fighting.

It was the Phantom's real identity, the identity of Richard Curtis Van Loan behind the varied character disguises of the Phantom, that had to be ultimately and desperately protected. Without that complete anonymity, all the aids he used—the different character roles, the three hideouts, his gift of ventriloquism, even the red code lights still signalling him from the pinnacle of the Clarion Building—went for naught.

Dick Van Loan slid the make-up case under the seat into its trick compartment. But it wasn't the Park Avenue clubman who sat upright in the coupe now.

The lean, tanned face had disappeared, replaced by a square featured, sallow-skinned man twenty years older than Van Loan. The hair was combed unbecomingly on the opposite side of the greying head, and the eyebrows curled upward belligerently.

A twist of the necktie, a slip of two notches in the soft leather belt, and an awkward, ill-fitting hitch of the grey suit coat, rounded out the convincing picture of a rugged, aggressive but personally sloppy and rather shopworn character of no particular qualifications.

What unknown talents the character possessed, were added to by a shoulder-holstered Colt .38 automatic, a carefully pocketed black silk mask, a pencil flashlight, and a peculiarly designed platinum and diamond badge.

It was seventeen minutes after three o'clock in the afternoon, and the delayed storm was just beginning to spatter the pavement with the first big drops of a heavy rain, when the Phantom, alias Jim Doran, jammed a crumpled panama low over his eyes and faded down the street away from the locked coupe.

He paused abruptly at the corner of Eighth Avenue, lighted a cigarette as he listened to an announcer's tense voice cracking from a loudspeaker in a radio shop doorway:

"Flash! The giant government irrigation project at Rock Canyon Dam, Arizona, has just been destroyed by a series of devastating explosions. The entire dam has been demolished and the canyon itself is a raging torrent. Loss of life is estimated at well over a thousand, with the toll mounting.

"Property damage will be incalculable until the water now sweeping the whole Arizona valley spends itself. The President of the United States was saved by quick action on the part of his Secret Service guards and members of his staff. This report comes by telephone from Phoenix, all radio facilities at Rock Canyon having been destroyed by the disastrous explosions.

"A mysterious voice, cutting in upon the President's dedicatory address at the dam a few seconds before the series of blasts, threatened this fatal national disaster and others to follow.

"Federal investigators are flying to the scene. This is the first report that has been received. More details will be broadcast as they are relayed to us."

The voice stopped, and people on the street stared blankly at one another, stunned, heedless of the increasing rain.

Jim Doran's squarish face became rocky, his keen grey eyes smoldering as he strode grimly a half block north. He ducked into a subway kiosk, came up into the Clarion Building on the other side of the wet street.

The Phantom was reborn.