A little thing that was not quite like an egg, at that, because both ends tapered similarly. An object with four equidistant, depressed lines, to represent seams, from end to end; and with a small gold loop in its side to hold it to a gold chain.
A tiny gold football, given for merit on the football field, years ago.
Profanity like a steady, cold drip of acid came from the man near the suitcase. And then Nellie and Smitty and Mac found themselves looking at Taros again.
The high priest had been standing motionless through this encounter. In a way, he had been standing almost as the robot-like mummy was standing, without life of his own, without volition.
He stirred again, suddenly, as if waking from a trance.
“Enough!” he boomed. “The vengeance of Taros begins.”
His gaunt arms started to go up, in the dread invocation that had knocked Smitty, and several others, silly. But they never reached that gesture.
The Avenger’s right hand flashed to knee and back again. In it was Mike, the little special .22.
It whispered its vicious message from its silenced little muzzle. And Taros fell, with a shallow gash on the exact top of his hairless skull where Mike’s leaden pea had glanced from bone and knocked him unconscious.
Then there was silence for a moment, and a strange incomprehension on the part of the rest as to what in hell “Taros’ vengeance” really was, and how to start it working.
The silence was broken by the man at the far end of the wing. Moen, husky ex-football star, came bounding toward where Taros lay.
He faced Benson over the high priest’s prone body.
“All right,” Moen snarled, “you’ll get it in plain English instead of ancient Egyptian. You’re going to die, and the others with you. But first, toss over that gold football.”
“I see,” said Benson, colorless eyes glinting in the dead mask of Snead’s face. “Our bodies are to be found crushed by tons of debris. But this little trinket, linking you to the tragedy, is not to be found. Is that it?”
“Toss it here!” screamed Moen, insane with rage.
The Avenger stared at his distorted face, and then at the athletic charm.
“It had to be one of you three directors,” he said calmly, “or Gunther Caine. Only you four have keys to Braintree that would unlock those great doors at night so all this masquerade could take place. Gunther Caine, as victim, was automatically eliminated, leaving Spencer or Evans or Moen. Spencer and Evans are ordinary business men, much too ignorant of Egyptology to have the knowledge required for this pretense. So I didn’t need the football, Moen, to place you as the ringleader.”
“Throw me that thing, or I’ll come and take it!”
“I would like to have you try,” retorted Benson.
Moen swallowed some of his rage.
“I’ll have the men here take it. There are enough of them—”
He started to turn to the gang.
“Don’t,” The Avenger advised calmly. “I can easily swallow this. Then it would take you a lot of time to recover it, besides having a battle in which perhaps our bodies would be so marked that the police would know this was murder, in the morning, instead of accident.”
Moen was incoherent with the twist things had taken. He had had the game in his own hands, and suddenly it was a stalemate. His plans had literally laid an egg. A golden egg. He had to find a way to shift out of it.
CHAPTER XVIII
The Egg Hatches
The terrible predicament in which the members of Justice, Incorporated, found themselves was not, of course, changed by this delay contrived by The Avenger. Death yawned for them, somehow, at Moen’s fingertips. They knew that. And they knew that if he couldn’t figure out a way to get the gold football in advance, he’d send them to death, anyhow. The man dared not risk leaving them alive. Better to chance the discovery of the football with their bodies than that.
But meanwhile there was a short and baffled respite. And in it, Benson continued to push his slight advantage, respite. And in it, Benson continue to push his slight advantage.
“Do you men happen to know what is in that suitcase?” his clear, icy voice queried. The gangsters in priests’ garb stared harder at him.
“In the case,” The Avenger said, “are several million dollars in cash. This man”—he nodded toward Moen—“was going to walk off with that, and perhaps give you a few thousand for your work — through his dummy, Shaw — afterward.”
The men began to mutter, and stare at Moen.
“He lies!” Moen yelled. “There’s nothing like that in the case—”
Half a dozen of the mobsters were streaking for the suitcase.
“Stop!” screamed Moen. “You fools! Can’t you see this man is only trying to get you to fight among yourselves? I promise we’ll all share and share alike in this.”
The men continued after the suitcase.
“It’s a promise I’ll have to live up to,” argued Moen, white-faced. “Can’t you see that? You know who I am, now. I’ll have to be on the level with you. Leave the case alone till we get rid of this bunch, or we’ll all hang.”
The men stopped their greedy rush, and one shrugged. There was hard-boiled logic in the words. This newly-discovered leader was in no position to double-cross them.
But The Avenger, master psychologist that he was, was not through stirring them up.
“You’ve been dupes from the start,” he told the men. Moen was trying to talk, to exhort them, but Benson’s cold, powerful voice drowned him out. “From the beginning Moen has planned to get millions in blackmail, and to give you only a few crumbs. Then you, and others, were to take the rap if anything went wrong.
“An army of dupes.
“Harold Caine was made to steal the Taros amulets and ring because he was drugged, or hypnotized, or both. He was first exposed through his infatuation for Anna Lees, also a puppet of Moen’s.”
Nellie stared at the high priestess near her. Anna Lees was looking at Benson without a single glint of comprehension in her eyes — a machine answering only to the will of the one who held control of her conscious brain.
“With the Taros relics stolen, Moen proceeded to blackmail Gunther Caine. The loss was his sole responsibility. He could be ruined by it. He was to turn over all of his own large fortune, and as much of the museum’s million-dollar-a-year appropriation as he could lay his hands on. There must be nearly three million dollars in that suitcase.”
Beside him, Gunther Caine nodded heavily. In his fuzzy brown eyes could be read the certain knowledge of death. He was ready for it, and nothing else mattered.
“Caine refused to give in, at first. Then it was proved to him that his own son was the thief and could be prosecuted as such. That broke him, and he started getting the money together, and at the same time tried to call me off the trail.
“His son Harold didn’t really know whether he had stolen the things or not. His drugged trance was too deep. But he suspected something of the kind, and knew that Anna Lees figured in it somewhere. He went to see her, but she couldn’t explain anything. All she knew was that she’d been having odd headaches — from the hypnotic drug, though she didn’t know that.
“Moen had picked up other stooges. Shaw, chancing to look very much like old Taros, and Blessing and Snead and Marlowe, with Egyptian-type features, were rung in on the druggings, too. They obeyed Moen’s commands, and woke only to vague fears that something was terribly wrong, but they didn’t know just what. And they woke also to a conviction that they had better keep their trouble secret, because they might be doing unspeakable things in the deep sleep that was beyond their understanding.
“These four, and the girl, Anna, roamed the night, doing the will of Moen. But it seemed that Snead got too large a dose one night. He staggered out to find me — with the extra amount of the hypnotic drug acting as its own antidote and clearing his brain a little. He is still unconscious from it — perhaps will die.”