The Avenger 6 - The Blood Ring (19 page)

“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.”

Moen had stopped trying to drown out Benson’s voice. He was glaring at The Avenger, with a growing look of cunning on his wolfish face.

“All the theatricals about ancient Egypt were to hide the blackmail motive. Moen’s use of this temple had a twofold reason: to have a meeting place to gather you men, and at the same time to advance his theatrical gag. The ignorant would be frightened away through superstitious terror. Those with courage enough to investigate would be killed by Moen’s dupes—these drugged victims—and you men, who were supposed never to know that man named Moen was involved, and who were to get just a few dollars out of the millions.”

The gang in uncomfortable priests’ robes began to mutter again. But even this did not disturb Moen, who continued to stare at The Avenger with the look of cunning spreading on his face. There was a foretaste of triumph there, too.

“If anything fell through, the drugged victims—and the rest of you—would be judged insane from the way you were cavorting around, and would take the rap. That rap would include the murder of a watchman and of Senator Blessing’s groundsman to renew the Ring of Power. You really believe in that, don’t you, Moen?”

The ex-football star glanced down at his hand, where the Ring of Power, quite pale now, glinted in the dim light.

“I wonder if you realize,” said Benson, “that the ring has not been dipped in blood for more than its accustomed forty-eight hours? That makes you vulnerable, Moen.”

Moen’s right hand was at his chest. His face was lowering a little toward the hand.

The Avenger went on. He was stalling for time, his aides knew. He was figuratively holding the hands of time back from the moment when their doom was to strike.

“Moen didn’t even let Caine know his identity. He made his blackmail request through the ‘talking’ mummy. The loser of the Taros charms was to get them back by paying for them with all his worldly goods! Caine knew what that meant, all right. He—”

The Avenger was a methodical genius at forestalling criminal action. But even he could slip, now and then. He did now! The slip occurred because he didn’t happen to think that there might be in existence other tiny radios much like those of Smitty’s design.

But there were. And Moen had one. The sets were nothing like Smitty’s. But they were small, and fairly good at short range.

Moen had a small transmitter under the robe at his chest. And the drugged puppets he had manipulated each had a perfected crystal set which was permanently tuned only to his wave length.

Benson had seen Moen’s chin sink toward his chest, but had not read the gesture correctly. And the light was too dim to permit even him to see that Moen’s lips were moving slightly.

Moving in a command—which was heard by the unwilling priestess, Anna Lees.

“Get the gold football from his hand!”

The Avenger’s attention had been riveted on the men in front of him—the enemy. Even Nellie’s quick cry was not enough to warn him.

There was a flashing move by the girl in the gauzy robe. Then the gold football had been jerked from his fingers and tossed to Moen.

Moen caught it deftly, and grinned murderously at Benson. He stared at Benson’s face, made up like Snead’s. And so he did not see Benson’s left hand.

It was signaling his aides: “Be ready!”

Smitty lying on his side and still pretending to be bound, was staring searchingly at his chief’s pale eyes. It seemed to the giant that Benson had lost the damning gold football a little more easily than was natural.

Moen was standing precisely where Shaw had stood when he started to raise gaunt arms in a death invocation and was creased by Mike.

Moen’s arms, too, started to go up. And without a word having been spoken, every person there knew that death was about to be loosed!

“You’re forgetting the ring, Moen!” The Avenger said, voice as hard and glacial as his colorless eyes. “The time of its renewal is past. You are vulnerable!”

Moen’s arms faltered. The man believed in the powers of the cornelian seal; believed in it to such an extent that two people had been killed so that the thing could be dipped in life-blood to make him omnipotent—even although his drugged dummy, Shaw, was wearing it to complete the masquerade.

A reminder that the ring, according to ancient legend, had now lost its power, shook Moen’s nerve for a moment.

But only for a moment.

His arms started raising again!

“You and those with you are the ones who will be destroyed if you try to destroy us,” prophesied Benson, as cold and composed as though peril were a million miles away.

Moen’s arms were straight up, as if bringing down on the group by the mummy’s cabinet some dread and mystic curse.

But it was something a lot more solid than that, that he was bringing down.

“Jump!”
Benson’s voice rang out.

The movement beside him was like magic to those who thought his aides were still bound.

Smitty took Blessing, Josh took Marlowe, and Mac caught up Anna Lees. They leaped straight back with them, flattening against the wall, where Nellie and Rosabel already were.

There had been a slight quiver through the building when Moen’s arms rose high. Then a whole section of the stone roof, from one end of the wing to the other, tore free.

“Chief!”
screamed Nellie.

The rest were staring in horror at Benson.

The Avenger had jumped with the rest—but not backward! He had leaped ahead, to the prone form of Shaw. He came back with it now, like a feather in his arms. It seemed that the falling roof held itself in suspension for an instant, over his racing figure, so swiftly did he move and so close with the timing.

He got to the wall and flattened there with the others, with Moen’s curses yelling in their ears. And as he got there, the falling mass hit the floor.

Tons of stone roof smashed onto even heavier stone floor! The floor gave way.

That was to have been the vengeance of Taros. That collapse in which everyone within six feet of the mummy cabinet should be buried in tons of floor and roof debris. But it didn’t work out that way.

For just an instant the group flattened against the wall on either side of The Avenger, staring across a twelve-foot abyss at Moen and his mobsters. Staring at the man who was cursing and raving because the ten-inch strip of flooring next to the wall was held from collapsing by the proximity of the foundation wall, just underneath.

But only for an instant did the scene last.

The building was still shaking from the fall of the roof, through the floor, to the basement. And it shook some more as the rest of the floor began to go.

It was on Moen’s side that it fell.

Under this, it could be seen now, was not the steel bracing normally there, but wooden beams in temporary shoring. And those beams gave way.

There was a second colossal roar, a screaming of many men that could be heard for blocks, and the whole area collapsed.

Moen and his gang fell twenty feet onto concrete basement floor. Tons of stone flagging and stone sarcophagi, and nearly half the ponderous stone statues, fell over them.

The screaming abruptly stopped, and the place, what was left of it, was very still. There was a wide slit in the roof where a girder the length of the wing had been deliberately pried loose and had fallen with a ten-foot strip of stone. There was a dust-smoking hole in the floor extending over two thirds of the wing. There was a narrow strip of floor, held up by the foundation wall, where The Avenger, his aides and Moen’s drugged victims stood.

Nellie’s eyes turned to the terrible, pale orbs of Dick Benson. There was accusation in hers.

Benson nodded.

“I finally discovered that it was the roof that was to fall. I saw a man hiding on the top of that end statue with a bar in his hand, ready to jack the roof-beam out of place when Shaw—or Moen—raised his arms straight up as a signal. I knew what apparently Moen did not know: the floor, weakened by the fall of the few roof slabs intended for my head a while ago, was temporarily shored up by timbers bound to go in a roof collapse. So I played, I’ll admit, with loaded dice. I knew that if Moen raised his arms, he would die by his own hand.”

Not one sound came from under their feet. But Benson and his aides could see—all too much.

“Look!” said Mac. “There’s the secret of the skurlies’ disappearin’ act! Their robes are lined with black, so in the night when they reversed them they melted into darkness and vanished.”

Benson was leading the way toward the door, edging along the narrow strip saved by the foundation wall. Smitty said:

“How’d this Shaw guy, playing Taros, knock me out by just raising his arms, chief?”

“He released a gas,” said Benson quietly. “I think it is the same type of thing as the hypnotic drug. In small doses it hypnotizes. In large doses it causes that feeling of the body being on fire all over, and then unconsciousness.”

Nellie was staring fearfully down at the wreckage beneath.

“At least the mummy of Taros’ son was in its case this time,” she remarked. “Look—those dusty bones—”

“The mummy never left the cabinet,” said The Avenger. “It was always in there, even when it seemed not to be.”

“But—”

“The glass of the cabinet lid had been molecularly treated, as I treated the water glass in my experiment. The molecules were so arranged that they became subject to radio excitation, and made the lid a large sound diaphragm when words at a distance were spoken in a certain radio-wave length. It talked, just as my tumbler talked.”