The Shadow (14 page)

He tried to toss himself outside of the beam, but the dartlike, leather-fletched arrow found the shoulder of the cloak and pinned it to a section of wall, which was papered with a Periodic Table. Encouraged, the bowman nocked a second arrow, adjusted his aim slightly, and fired once more, not only catching the cloak but a piece of The Shadow himself.

The Shadow grunted, then laughed shrilly. The Mongol’s proficiency hadn’t come as any surprise. Genghis Khan’s bowmen were said to have been able to hit a man at a distance of 400 meters—on horseback.

By now the other Mongols had scrambled to their feet, praising Hoang Shu for his cleverness. But instead of partaking in the victory shout, one of the warriors was gesturing wildly to the wall, where The Shadow, weakened, was resolving into full visibility, pinned to the Periodic Table between Barium and Radon, like some insect specimen to a collector’s tray.

Agog, Hoang Shu shouted a battle cry and nocked the bow’s final arrow—the one apparently meant for the heart of his prey.

But The Shadow was also in motion, confident of his prowess. With the deftness of a gunslinger, his gloved hands crossed and dove beneath his cloak, reappearing an instant later clutching fistfuls of nickel-plated vengeance. The bowman froze, the war cry caught in his throat. Then the pumping muzzles of The Shadow’s guns tongued their deadly hail, and two of the warriors fell. Hoang Shu and two others managed to dive for cover as the sledging automatics continued to spit hot lead and spew casings.

The Shadow uttered a whispered laugh. The superiority of bullets over arrows was once again proven.

Hearing the clicking of the depleted guns, Hoang Shu and another Mongol rose and made a mad dash for Reinhardt Lane and the encased implosion device. Even with fists, arrows, and bullets flying around him, the professor had stood passively throughout the fray, but he snapped to on Hoang Shu’s frantic clicking and once more took the carrier in hand. The two Mongols grabbed him by the arms and began to hurry him toward the door.

The smoldering weapons reholstered, The Shadow tore himself free of the bodkin-tipped quarrels and was hot on the heels of the abductors when the sole remaining warrior tackled him, driving him sideways out the balcony doors.

The Shadow landed hard on his back but scurried to his feet in time to see the Asian lunging toward him with a raised dagger. The Mongol had lost his helmet in the lab, but a folded crossbow was still slung over his back. The Shadow ducked as his opponent rushed in, then threw him over his shoulder, sailing him out over the balcony wall.

The Asian, however, had managed to hook on to The Shadow’s right arm and was nearly successful in pulling him off the balcony as well. It was only The Shadow’s left hand that had saved him by latching on to the inner edge of the wall.

Facedown on top of the wall, his cloak unfurling in the wind, The Shadow’s right arm was fully extended, his hand clamped on the Mongol’s right wrist. Too, the dangling Mongol had the Shadow by the wrist. This time there was no eagle to break the fall.

The warrior twisted about, as if to drag The Shadow over the top. “Hold on,” The Shadow told him. “Hold on or I’ll let you die.”

The Asian looked at him and grinned. “Die, yes,” he said in guttural English. “The better to serve my Khan.” Adopting an expression of blissful serenity, he relaxed his grip on The Shadow’s wrist.

The muscles of The Shadow’s hand and forearm flexed, but there was no holding onto the man. The Mongol worked himself free and plummeted, screaming, toward the street.

Twenty-five stories below, Shrevnitz was leaning on the rounded, right front fender of the Cord, wondering what was taking The Shadow so long. Moments earlier he thought he had glimpsed something on the eagle statue just below the top-floor balcony. But when he looked again, he saw nothing.

It was then he’d decided to push a bit further into the gift Shirl had given him for his birthday, a slim book called
Developing Psychic Ability.
The book was a series of exercises designed to bring out latent powers of telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and something called remote viewing. Shrevnitz was up to the exercise on clairvoyance, which involved closing your eyes, emptying your brain of everyday thoughts, and waiting to see what thoughts filled the empty space.

Just now he had his eyes closed in intense concentration when he heard a
whooshing
sound that he couldn’t ignore. “Hey, I sense something coming,” he said aloud.

But for some reason his eyes wanted to look up, directly over his head . . .

Where something was falling straight for him.

Shrevnitz flung himself out of the way at the last instant as an object crashed onto the street and fragmented into dozens of pieces. He walked over to the largest fragment and bent down to examine it. It was a piece of wood—walnut, maybe—from a bow of some kind.

While he was turning it about in his hand, a second object slammed to the sidewalk on the far side of the cab. Slammed with a viscous thud and a jangle of what sounded like chains.

Cautiously, Shrevnitz edged around the nose of the car. On the ground was the body of a man who could have stepped from a museum exhibit on ancient warfare. Shrevnitz glanced at the pieces of the bow, then back at the man. A shiver of dread ran through him, and he pulled his coat tightly to his neck as he made for the driver’s seat.

He was just settling himself behind the steering wheel when a raspy voice from the rear said, “Drive.”

Shrevnitz jumped and twisted around, finding The Shadow slumped in a corner, visibly drained and perhaps wounded. The hackie aimed a trembling forefinger in the direction of the sidewalk. “What the hell is that, boss?”

“A Mongol warrior. Strong, well trained.”

Shrevnitz leaned toward the passenger-side window to regard the body. Then he shook his head, as if to clear it, and dropped the car into gear.

“Too bad they don’t fly so good,” he told The Shadow.

Shiwan Khan slouched sullenly in his throne, listening to Hoang Shu’s report of the skirmish in Lane’s laboratory. Five of his best men had been lost, reducing the imperial guard to a little better than half its former strength. The thought of importing additional warriors left him cold.

“It could only be Ying Ko,” he said, rising. “None other could have cloaked himself as he did.”

Hoang Shu bowed his head.

Khan mulled it over as he came down the stairs. When he finally spoke it wasn’t to his lieutenant, but to the still transfixed Professor Lane, who was standing between Hoang Shu and a second Mongol, from whose hands hung the carrying case.

“You must begin work at once. I want the device readied in forty-eight hours.”

“Yes, my Khan,” Lane said, reaching for the case.

Khan regarded him for a moment. He had first learned of Lane’s research from a physicist in China. That same scientist had speculated that Lane’s search for a new energy source was nothing more than disinformation perpetuated by America’s War Department. Surely, Lane was at work on a bomb, which lacked only a suitable fuel—one that China’s own desert wastes could supply in abundance to Shiwan Khan. Lane, however, was only half the answer.

The professor had turned to leave the throne room when Khan bade him stop. “Before you go, there’s something I need you to do.”

Lane straightened obediently.

“I want you to make a telephone call.” Khan narrowed his gaze. “And be certain that my instructions are followed to the letter.”

Margo tapped her foot impatiently as the elevator rose slowly to the twenty-fifth floor of the Federal Building. She had just walked into her apartment when her father had phoned to say that he needed to see her. He’d said he was fine, but he hadn’t sounded it. Especially when he added that he needed to see her at the lab—immediately.

That was close to an hour ago, and ever since she had been trying to fight down gnawing concern. But at least he was willing to see her. Which meant that Commissioner Barth was wrong about the War Department having issued the “no visitors” restrictions. And he wasn’t speaking
Chinese.

First, Lamont Cranston storming out of the Cobalt Club for no apparent reason; then that “Ying Ko” business on the sidewalk; and now a call out of the blue from her father. It was shaping up to be quite a night.

The elevator chimed, and the doors slid open. Margo hurried into the hallway only to stop dead in her tracks several doors short of 2512. The two Marine sentries were dead—with arrows projecting from their chests!

She put her hand to her mouth and forced herself to keep walking. And to step over the bodies.

“Dad?” she yelled, coming through the open door to the lab.

Even in the faint, flickering light she could see that some horrible struggle had taken place. There were two more bodies on the floor, riddled with bullet wounds. Then another body—strangely costumed in Oriental silk and armor. But no sign of her father.

“Dad, where are you?” she said in rising panic. She went to the open balcony doors. “Please be here,” she said to herself.

The balcony was empty, save for a sword and a bulky crossbow. She stared at the weapons in dismay. What in god’s name had gone on? Where was her father?

Something drew her attention to the Llama billboard on the building across the street. She walked to the wall and spent a long moment watching the smoke rings. What with the lights and all, the rings could produce an almost hypnotic effect if you stared at them for too long . . . Her eyes refocused on the face of the contented smoker himself, but the face had undergone a change. It was an Asian face that seemed to be gazing at her.

She wanted to turn away, but she couldn’t convince her legs to move. Then a voice made her look at the sign again. The lips of the Asian were moving.
“Margo Lane,”
they were saying.
“You have been living a lie . . .”

I
n his bedroom in the Cranston mansion, The Shadow, wearing a sleeveless white undershirt, dressed the arrow gash in his shoulder. In his years of battling crime he had sustained wounds from handguns, chatterboxes, brass knuckles, saps, fists, feet, and the lumpy foreheads of assorted gunzels and gorillas; but an arrow wound was something new. The short-shafted quarrel had cut a three-inch-long groove in the top of his right deltoid, shallow but somewhat ragged around the edges. Nothing, however, that would require the services of Dr. Rupert Sayre, recruited by The Shadow after being rescued from the clutches of “The Master of Death.”

The manse was quiet, the staff asleep in their quarters. Cranston had most of the lights turned off. He was seated in amber light, in an armchair next to a round table, with the dressings beside him. If he chose to, he could watch himself in the full-length looking-glass directly across the room.

Marpa Tulku used to be able to close his wounds with the power of concentrated thought. For one trained, blood could be directed to or away from an infected or wounded area as need be; warmth could be brought to bear, the body temperature locally increased. Cranston made some use of those techniques now.

At the same time he considered his position regarding Shiwan Khan, now that Professor Lane had been abducted. When men such as Khan plotted evil, innocent persons often became their tools.

The session with Tam had established that bronzium could be used to fuel a bomb, and Lane was apparently working on an implosion device that could be used in detonating such a bomb. The coin toss had been Khan’s way of furnishing him with a clue. But Khan probably hadn’t counted on The Shadow showing up at Lane’s laboratory. Or had he? Assuming that Khan had had him under surveillance for some time, didn’t Khan also know that Cranston and Margo Lane were acquainted, and that she might eventually let something slip about her father’s research work? More importantly, was Khan’s scheme really as diabolical as it appeared? Was he in fact attempting to fabricate an atom bomb?

The thought never reached completion. Cranston heard the familiar creak of the main staircase’s twelfth step, protesting weight being applied to its carpeted tread. The duration of the sound told him that it wasn’t one of the servants. To begin with, they wouldn’t use the main staircase, and even if they did, they would have no cause to do so with such obvious second-story furtiveness. He was, however, going to have to speak to them about household security.

Cranston sharpened his ears. Whoever it was, was moving down the hall toward his bedroom. He glanced at the door’s pewter handle in time to see it angle down to its unlatched position.

The door opened a couple of inches and the muzzle of a pistol poked through the crack. The gunman fired, and Cranston’s mirror image spider-webbed. The round was well placed, in the neighborhood of the heart.

The door opened forty-five degrees, and Margo, dressed as she had been in the Cobalt Club, shuffled into the room, the pistol stiff-armed in front of her. Waiting to see what she would do next, Cranston watched her for a long moment. When she did nothing but stand there, as transfixed as her father had been earlier that same evening, he stood up and circled her, assessing the depth of her trance. The foot-long pistol he eased from her grasp was an eighty-year-old Chinese-made dueling pistol, with an elaborately carved stock. Cranston placed it on the mantel and lowered Margo’s arm.

He listened to determine if any of the servants had heard the shot; then, when no one came running, he put a few feet between himself and Margo and said, “Margo Lane.”

She blinked and gazed around in utter disorientation. “What are you doing here?” she asked when she saw him.

“You’re in my home,” he told her sharply. “Who sent you?” When she didn’t respond, he moved toward her, threateningly.
“Who
sent you?” He had a pretty good hunch, but it was important to gauge how she handled the question.

Margo had retreated to the closed door. “I don’t know,” she threw back at him in the same harsh tone, glancing at the square of gauze tapped to his shoulder. “There was a . . . voice. Over and over in my head. It said I had to kill . . .
The Shadow.
” She put her back to the door and faced him, wide-eyed with fear and confusion. “I had to kill The Shadow.” She glanced nervously at her hands, as if they should have been holding something. “And I came here.”