“What on earth do you mean?”
“I mean that London can’t afford to let this thing fall into the hands of Moscow—nor can Washington. And none of ‘em would like Dr. Fu Manchu to get it.”
“Dr. Fu Manchu? I imagined it to be a mere name to frighten children. If a real person,1 thought he died long ago.”
“You were wrong, Craig. He is here—in New York! He is like the phoenix. He arises from his own ashes.”
A sense of unreality, not unmixed with foreboding, touched Morris Craig. He visualized vividly the fate of the man mistaken for Nayland Smith. But when he spoke, it was with deliberate flippancy
“Describe this cremated character, so that if I meet him I can cut him dead.”
But Nayland Smith shook his head impatiently.
“I pray you never do meet him, Craig.”
* * *
Camille Navarre, seated in her room, had just put a call through. She watched the closed door all the time she was speaking.
“Yes . . . Nine-nine here . . . It has been impossible to call you before. Listen, please. I may have to hang up suddenly. Sir Denis Nayland Smith is in the laboratory. What are my instructions?”
She listened awhile, anxiously watching the door.
“I understand . . . the design for the transmuter is practically completed . . . Of course . . . I know the urgency . . . But it is terribly intricate . . . No—I have quite failed to identify the agent.”
For some moments she listened again, tensely.
“Sir Denis must have told Dr. Craig . . . I heard the name Fu Manchu spoken here not an hour ago . . . Yes. But this is important: I am to go to Falling Waters for the week-end. What are my instructions?”
The door opened suddenly, and Sam came lurching in. Camille’s face betrayed not the slightest change of expression. But she altered her tone.
“Thanks, dear,” she said lightly. “I must hang up now. It was sweet of you to call me.”
She replaced the receiver and smiled up at Sam.
“Happen to have a pair o’ nail scissors, lady?” Sam inquired.
“Not with me, I’m afraid. What do you want them for?”
“Stubbed my toe back there, and broke the nail. See how I’m limpin’?”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Camille’s caressing voice conveyed real sympathy. “But I think there are some sharp scissors in Dr. Craig’s desk. They might do.”
“Sure. Let’s go look.”
They crossed the empty office outside now largely claimed by shadows except where the desk lights dispersed them. Camille discovered the scissors, which Sam examined without enthusiasm but finally carried away and promised to return.
Camille lingered until the door had closed behind him, placing two newly typed letters on the desk. Then she took off her glasses and laid them beside the letters. Her ears alert for any warning sound from the laboratory, she bent over the diagram pinned to the board. She made rapid, pencilled notes, glancing down at them and back at the diagram.
She was about to add something more, when that familiar click of a lock warned her that someone was about to come out of the laboratory. Closing her notebook, she walked quickly back to her room.
Her door closed just as Nayland Smith and Craig came down the three steps.
“Does it begin to dawn on your mind, Craig, why the intelligence services of all the great powers are keenly interested in you?”
Morris Craig nodded.
“Which is bad enough,” he said. “But the devil who tried to murder you today is a bigger danger than any.”
“My dear Craig, he didn’t try to murder me. If the man who did had been caught, he would never have heard of Dr. Fu Manchu.”
“You mean he’d have said so?”
“I mean it would be true. Imagine a linquist who speaks any of the civilized languages, and a score of dialects, with perfect ease; an adept in many sciences; one with the brains of three men of genius. Such a master doesn’t risk his neck in the hands of underlings. No. We have to deal with a detached intellect, with a personality scarcely human.”
Nayland Smith fell silent—and Craig knew that he was thinking about Moreno, the man who had suffered in his place.
“Suppose, Smith,” he said, “you give your problems a rest for a while and dine with me tonight?”
“I shall be glad, Craig. Let it be at my hotel. Join me there in, say, an hour from now. But let me point out it isn’t my problem. It’s yours! When you leave, get the man, Sam, to have a taxi waiting— and keep him with you. I take it he hasn’t gone?”
“No. He’s somewhere about. We’re night birds here. But what good is Sam?”
“He’s a witness. You’re safe provided you’re not alone.”
“Safe from what?”
“Abduction! Being smuggled out by the mysterious subway which has swallowed up other men of use to Fu Manchu.”
“Where do they go? What use can he have for them?”
“I don’t know where they go,” rapped Nayland Smith, “but I suspect. As for their use—the use that the ant has for the aphides. Except that Dr. Fu Manchu milks their brains.”
Unnoticed by either, the door of Camille’s room had been slowly and silently opening for some time.
“You’re beginning to get me really jumpy. Smith. You don’t intend to go out alone?”
Nayland Smith shook his head grimly, putting on the topcoat which had brought disaster to poor Moreno.
“I have a bodyguard waiting below—a thing I never dreamed I’d stoop to! But Dr. Fu Manchu doesn’t want my brains. He wants my life!”
“For heaven’s sake, be careful. Smith. The elevator man goes off at seven o’clock. I’ll see you down to the street.”
“Save yourself the trouble. You have work to do. I know the way. Lend me your master key. Whoever stays here on duty can do the same for you. And remember—stick by Sam until you get to my hotel.”
The door of Camille’s room began to close.
Chapter IV
And that night Manhattan danced on, merrily.
Restaurants were crowded with diners, later to proceed to equally crowded theatres, dance halls, bars. Broadway, a fantasy invented long ago by H.G. Wells, but one he never expected to come true, roared and glittered and threw up to the skies an angry glare visible for miles—as of Rome burning.
Whilst on top of a building taller than the towers of those early seekers, the priests of Bel, a modem wizard from Merton College, Oxford, trapped and sought to tame the savage powers which hold our tiny world in thrall. His spells were mathematical formulae, his magic circle rested on steel and concrete. Absorbed in contemplation of the purely scientific facets of his task, only now did it begin to creep upon his consciousness—an evil phantom, chilling, terrifying—that under his hand lay means whereby the city of New York might be reduced to “one with Nineveh and Tyre.”
“But directed downward and inward?” Nayland Smith had asked. Morris Craig realized, in this moment of cold lucidity, that directed downward and outward, the secret plant so lovingly and secretly assembled in the Huston laboratory might well obliterate, utterly, a great part of Manhattan.
Manhattan danced on.
Craig studied his nearly finished diagram with new doubt — almost with distaste, m the blind race for domination, many governments, including, according to Nayland Smith, that of Great Britain, watched every step of his experiments. And Dr. Fu Manchu was watching.
The Huston Electric Corporation was not to be left in undisputed possession of this new source of power.
Assuming that these unknown watchers failed to solve the secret, and that Washington didn’t intervene, what did Michael Frobisher intend to do with it?