The Avenger 6 - The Blood Ring (18 page)

She had used Ike, the throwing knife, well. Her own bonds were cut by the razorlike blade, and also those of the rest. And Mac and Smitty and Rosabel had regained consciousness, though continuing to lie with closed eyes. Josh had not recovered yet.

The Avenger stood near them, now, and near the cabinet housing Taros’ son. He took the disguising eyecups from his eyeballs. His colorless, infallible eyes glared at the oncoming mob. And in spite of themselves they slowed and halted.

But Taros, gaunt and vulture-skulled, came slowly on, hands outstretched.

“You shall die,” he said. “You and all your friends. It is the vengeance of Taros.”

The sepulchral voice of the thing from thousands of years in the past boomed like a death knell in the great museum room.

“Your friends, man called The Avenger, have not been marked by weapons in any way. That was because they are to be found dead, apparently by accident, in the morning—along with yourself.”

The emaciated form stopped, a dozen yards from Benson and his little group.

“Twice there have been collapses here,” Taros boomed.

“One fall was that of the pillars, taking some of the floor with it. The other was the collapse of a small section of roof. As far as the public knows, those were accidental. If a third occurs, that, too, will be held accidental.”

Nellie clenched her hands. She had guessed right in thinking that she probably lay near the danger spot of the trap.

“I shall not tell you the exact nature of the trap,” Taros rapped out. “Naturally, I would not do that. You and your friends are phenomenally quick. I shall not forewarn you. Suffice it to say that some hours from now all of you shall be found with tons of stone having crushed you down, and with no marks of knife or bullet on your bodies. Thus shall the vengeance of the tomb be complete—”

Benson’s icy voice cut across the theatrical booming like a stream of cold water.

“Vengeance of the tomb? Your act has turned into a pure joke, my friend.”

There was a hush—furious and puzzled on the part of Taros, bewildered on the part of all the other priestly forms. Benson, face and garments still those of Snead, turned to where Gunther Caine stood.

“Caine, will you stand there and see a slaughter, or will you stand with us?”

The question rang out like a pistol shot. Caine started and stared wildly at The Avenger.

“You might as well die, Caine, as continue to live in the center of a plot that has grown so monstrous against you. Disgrace faces you, however you act. Perhaps even the electric chair. You may save your life for a little while, but that saving will do you no good. Come, stand with us. And lead the thing with the face of your son, with you.”

Caine sighed deeply, and his shoulders sagged. He had gone beyond despair and into a resignation that numbed his will.

He went to the mummified form, which was standing like an automaton near Taros. He took the swathed, outstretched hand, and led the figure toward Benson.

Taros laughed harshly, making no move to stop this.

“You do not realize how much you are helping me, it would seem. Yes, Caine, stand with the others. And the mummy, too. Also, while you are about it, you may have our charming high priestess.”

The gaunt form turned to the girl in the gauzy raiment. Taros pointed. The high priestess followed the direction of his finger, walking till she got to the cabinet made for the mummy of Taros’ son. There she stood, docilely.

The Avenger said something then that made no sense at all to the tense group beside him, next to the mummy cabinet.

“And the other two with you, Taros. The ones with the faces of Marlowe and Blessing. Shall they live on? Or shall they share the fate of the rest of us?”

Taros stared from under hairless brows at The Avenger for a long time, while all in the room held their breaths. Something was occurring here that had no meaning for any but the man with the colorless, terrible eyes and the thing in the high priest’s robe.

Taros seemed almost to be listening for counsel from hell, or to brother spirits from the ancient past. Then he turned to the two named by Benson, and motioned them to the cabinet also.

“It is indeed desirable that they stand with you,” he agreed silkily, voice sepulchral and sardonic.

The Avenger’s aides couldn’t get it at all. But they got something else.

Benson’s left hand, hanging easily at his side, had been moving rapidly. The fingers were spelling out words in the one-handed shorthand sign language cultivated by adept deaf mutes.

The letters formed had spelled: Be ready to jump back—far back—when I give the word.

Now what did
that
mean? The farthest back they could jump would be about ten feet. Then they’d get to the wall. Wouldn’t it be far better, since they were stealthily freed of their bonds and their enemies did not yet know it, to make a surprise attack? True, they had been beaten down once by sheer weight of numbers. But a second time they might win.

However, no one of The Avenger’s aides had any idea of disobeying the sign-language command. Benson had said to be ready to jump back the few feet possible, and that was what they would do.

They made a strange group. There were Mac and Josh and Smitty, Nellie and Rosabel, lying seemingly bound but actually freed by Ike. There was Gunther Caine in his prosaic business suit, a hopeless, white-faced man. There was the mummy, like an automaton, and the forms in priests’ garb with the faces of Doctor Marlowe and Senator Blessing. There was the man who so bewilderingly had Snead’s face, but from whose made-up countenance glared the pale and awesome eyes of The Avenger.

Then, on the other side of the wide strip of bare stone floor, was Taros, stepped from an ancient tomb. And behind him, the mob of priestly underlings.

Mac suddenly checked an exclamation.

This was the first time they’d had a chance to observe these underlings for any length of time; and the things Mac now sensed about them lit a flare in his mind.

Mac hated men who looked like rats. And these men, Egyptian robes or no Egyptian robes, looked just like that. But there was more than intuition. Mac had twice seen one of their number reach a wistful hand toward an armpit—where a shoulder-holster would be if shoulder-holsters had been in vogue in Rameses’ days.

“Whoosh!” muttered the Scot. “So that’s how it is!”

Taros, perhaps, had come from the grave. But not these others. Mac suddenly knew that.

These others were simply modern gangsters looking uncomfortable and more than a little foolish in things like old-fashioned night shirts. And feeling lost because they had crumby-looking ancient weapons instead of nice modern automatics.

Benson’s voice suddenly cracked out.

“Drop it, Moen!”

The Avenger’s aides stared at each other with wide eyes. Moen?
Moen!
Where did his name figure in this? And why was it on the tongue of their chief?

Then they saw.

Some distance off, at the blank end of the wing, lay the suitcase brought by Gunther Caine and thrown there by The Avenger. Toward this suitcase had been creeping one of the horde of phony priests.

The man had almost had his hand on the case when The Avenger called.

He turned, snarling, toward Benson, keeping his face in shadow.

The rest gawked at him, with several murmurs of surprise coming from their ranks. Evidently, only to a few of the horde was the name of one of the three directors of the board of the museum known.

“Come out of the shadows, Moen,” snapped Benson. “Let your men see you and get acquainted with their real leader.”

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” growled the man who had tried to get away with the suitcase. “I ain’t—”

“You left your calling card at Shaw’s,” The Avenger said, voice as icy as his pale eyes. “You left it in one of the cases you looted in order to provide authentic weapons for your mobsters. This, Moen.”

And Benson held up the little golden egg he had found in Shaw’s private museum.

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.

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.