Kenneth Robeson
Justice, Inc.
PROLOGUE
In the roaring heart of the crucible, steel is made. In the raging flame of personal tragedy, men are sometimes forged into something more than human.
It was so with Dick Benson. He had been a man. After the dread loss inflicted on him by an inhuman crime ring, he became a machine of vengeance dedicated to the extermination of all other crime rings.
He turned into the person we know now: a figure of ice and steel, more pitiless than both; a mechanism of whipcord and flame; a symbol of destruction to crooks and killers; a terrible, almost impersonal Force, masking chill genius and supernormal power behind a face ever as white and dead as a mask from the grave. Only his pale eyes, like ice in a polar dawn, hint at the deadliness of the scourge the underworld heedlessly invoked against itself when crime’s greed turned the retired adventurer, Richard Henry Benson, into— The Avenger.
CHAPTER I
Vanished!
Under the May sun, the Buffalo airport looked as peaceful as a pond in a calm. Like a pond it had its water bugs — planes, some standing, one coming onto the runway, several wheeling into position for a take-off.
Calm and peaceful in the late May sun. Looking back on it, Richard Benson found it almost impossible to realize that in that peace and orderliness had begun the fantastic thing of horror that was to change the whole course of his life.
Such things couldn’t grow from a germ of terror nesting in that peaceful spot. Such things couldn’t happen anyway! Not to Benson, who was known by all his friends as the luckiest man they knew.
But the seed of tragedy did sprout from that field. And the thing did happen to him.
A ten-passenger Douglas was one of the two planes with props idling for a getaway. It squatted on the runway receiving the last luggage of passengers into its maw. And Benson saw it from the window.
Benson was talking to the agent.
“I’ve got to get to Montreal at once! You understand? I’ve got to!”
The agent was listening respectfully. People always listened respectfully to Benson. His jet-black hair, framing a lean, square face, his pale-gray eyes, flaming with vitality and will, his erect, whipcord body and swift, sure movements, inspired respect on sight.
But just the same the agent shook his head.
“The Montreal plane leaving now is booked solid. Didn’t they tell you at the downtown office?”
Benson’s eyes were like pale-gray fire.
“They told me. But there has to be a place for the three of us. My wife’s mother is dying in Montreal.”
He put his hand — the kind of slim-fingered, long hand that is made up of steel wire and leather sinew — on the arm of Mrs. Benson, who added mute appeal to his out of soft brown eyes.
She was beautiful. Benson’s wife. Tall and lovely and slim, with soft gold hair and dark-brown eyes. She looked like a gold-crested gray dove in her tweed traveling suit. Benson’s face softened as he looked at her. It always did. And the hard flame in his gray eyes always softened when they rested on the dainty little figure beside Alicia Benson — his little daughter, as brown-eyed and gold-haired as her mother. A wife and girl to be proud of, those two!
The agent was shaking his head, looking sympathetically at the three.
“It simply can’t be done. There’s a plane at midnight—”
“Can’t wait that long,” snapped Benson. His face was a lean square of inflexible purpose. There was on it the look that had come there in his varied and adventurous past, when some problem unsolvable to ordinary men came up — and was solved by him.
“I’ll charter a plane. I don’t care how big—”
“We haven’t a plane on the field to be chartered,” said the agent. “I’m afraid you simply won’t be able—”
It was then that Benson looked out the airport office window and saw the Douglas wheeling to the runway.
Without a word to the agent he hurried to the door, with Alicia and little Alice coming after him.
“What are you going to do, darling?” Alicia Benson asked. Her voice was as lovely as the rest of her. In it was implicit trust in this gray flame of a man.
“I’m going to get us to Montreal at once if I have to—”
The banging door shut off his sentence. He hurried to the airliner.
At rest Benson compelled respect. In motion he roused something like awe. Only about once in a decade do you see a man move with the flow of easy power, the perfect co-ordination and the rhythm of intense vitality owned by Richard Benson. Yet he didn’t look particularly big. He was no more than five feet eight, weight about a hundred and sixty.
He and Alicia and little Alice got nearly to the plane. The double metal door was still open, the stairs still in place. An attendant came around the plane and stood in front of them.
“You the three who have the vacant seats on this plane?” the attendant asked.
He was tall and bony, with knobs of hands and with red, coarse skin. Sandy eyebrows were like sand ropes over his frosty blue eyes.
Benson stared at the man, eyes pale blazes of triumph.
“So there are three seats on that plane! Everybody said there was no chance to board her. Perfect conspiracy to keep us from getting aboard! But we’ll show ’em.”
“If you haven’t the tickets—” the attendant began, with a heavy Scotch burr.
“We’ll pay at the other end. Fix up the irregularity any way you please. Come on, sweethearts.”
Up the steps and into the plane. A roar of the props, slam of the metal door, which was locked into place, and then motion. And Benson looked around. He was doomed right then, though he didn’t know it.
There were six men and a woman in the plane besides the Bensons. The woman was young, pretty, but with a hard line around her mouth. One of the men was big and flabby with surplus flesh; another was big, but not flabby, and had pads of black hair on his hands; a third was short and stout, and chewed an unlit black cigar. The other three were just average, to be lost in a crowd.
“Comfortable, honey?”
Benson leaned forward in the seat and laid his hand on his wife’s shoulder. A perfect union was advertised in every movement of these two.
“I’m fine, don’t worry,” smiled Alicia Benson. And little Alice piped up, “I’m fine, too, daddy.”
Benson relaxed, body moving easily to the slight motion of the plane. Off to the west, at their tail, the late sim dipped under the horizon and purple dusk capped the landscape.
They were on a visit to a deathbed; but Alicia’s mother was old, and death comes gently to the aged. In spite of their errand, Benson could not help but feel almost happy as he dwelt on the great good fortune that was his.
He had the world by the tail — or so it seemed as the grim purple dusk lowered. A perfect family, a large fortune to lavish on them, comparative youth, and health—
The plane roared east and north. Underneath, the ebon surface of Lake Ontario was a black steel sheet under a starless sky. The short, stout man chewed his dead cigar and stared expressionlessly at Benson and the softly beautiful woman and the little girl. The big man with the pads of black hair on the backs of his hands looked out the window, paying no attention to anyone.
The stewardess, a girl of twenty or so, slim and attractive in the airline uniform, bent over Mrs. Benson to ask if she and the little girl were all right. And Benson got up, rubbing his hands together. They felt sticky. He wanted to wash them.
He started forward to the tiny men’s lavatory.