The Shadow (23 page)

Khan hurled himself to the floor as the mirrors fragmented, as if struck by wrecking balls. Shards of slivered glass ripped through the room, launching for the ceiling, swooping and cycloning . . . Jagged edges sliced at arms, legs, and face. One particularly willful piece left a deep, red furrow across the back of The Shadow’s neck; others spiraled around Khan.

The two were slowly being cut to ribbons.

All the while, The Shadow had been scanning for the single, most bloodthirsty shard of the swarm and, now having located that one, he was giving it his undivided attention. It was a long, slender piece that tapered to a sharp tip, already speckled with The Shadow’s own blood. Seemingly placid amid the frenzy, it was hovering not far from where The Shadow knelt, readying itself for guided flight.

Shiwan Khan spied the deviant shard and screamed—unintentionally enabling it. Fully tasked and targeted, it streaked across the hall and buried itself three inches deep into the right side of his forehead, driving him backward to the floor.

The Shadow waited a moment, then got up and went over to him, a triumphant laugh already escaping him.

Knocked flat by the sphere, the elevator gate was horizontally wedged in the shaft with the bomb sitting on top of it. The Lanes had tested the soundness of the gate before putting their weight on it, but no sooner had they crawled onto it than it had altered its lie, dropping three feet before coming to a solid rest.

Margo’s heart was pounding in her ears. Not only from the gate’s sudden shift, but from the vertigo that had gripped her when she had chanced to look down the dimly lighted shaft.

The sphere had ended its journey with the timer and display pressed against the rear wall of the shaft. Wire cutters in hand, Dr. Lane was bent over the bomb, struggling to disable the final relays. Margo crouched beside him, shivering in the cold updraft, her eyes glued to the upside-down display, which was counting down from thirteen seconds.

All at once her father’s hand began to falter. “I don’t know which wire Farley ran to the timer and which one he ran to the implosion detonator.” The wire cutters were poised over a maze of fabric-sheathed, copper wiring, in which two stood out: one red, one green. He looked at Margo. “I just don’t know.”

“Choose!” she screamed at him.

The numeral filaments in the vacuum tubes showed 0, 0, 0, 1, 0.

“Hurry!”

Lane showed his daughter a determined look; then he positioned the jaws of the cutters around one of the wires. “It has to be this green one.”

Margo followed his gaze
—to a red wire
!

The timer was counting down from five seconds when her left hand shot out to restrain her father’s hand. At the same time, her right yanked at the green wire, but the damn thing was fastened beneath one of the wiring board’s slot-head screws!

Finally, she managed to get her entire hand on the wire and she tugged. The wire snapped at the screw head and came free in her hand.

In the depths of the vacuum tube furthest to the right, a red 1 glowed.

Spent, Margo collapsed atop the defused bomb and regarded her father with weary disbelief. She pointed to the wire she had disconnected, then the one he had almost severed.
“This
is green,” she said. “
That’s
red.”

Lane sagged against the beryllium sphere. “Not to these old eyes.”

The storm had abated. But what with the knot of black-and-whites, yellow cabs, and interlocked delivery wagons and trucks, the scene outside the reappeared Hotel Monolith was chaotic.

Police Commissioner Barth, wearing a trenchcoat and a new fedora, worked his way through an astonished throng of policemen, fireman, and onlookers. Just inside the gated entrance to what only an hour before had been a vacant lot, he stopped to gape at the building, removed his hat, then putting it back on. He was staring at the structure’s winged figure when he observed Margo Lane and an elderly professorial type exit through the front doors. Surmising that the man was Lane’s missing father, he signaled to a police lieutenant that the couple should be brought to him.

“What in the world has been going on in there, Miss Lane?” he asked when she arrived. “And where did this building
come
from?” Before she could even respond, his expression turned hard and suspicious. “I know this has something to do with Shiwan Khan’s threat to blow up the city. But I want the full truth: was that maniac The Shadow involved in this?”

Margo gave him her best glare. “The Shadow is hardly a maniac, Commissioner. In fact, The Shadow is—”

She caught sight of Moe Shrevnitz standing at the edge of the crowd and bit back her words. As their eyes met, the hackie gave his head a slow side-to-side shake, and he pressed his forefinger to his lips. Then he winked and backed into the crowd, disappearing from sight.

Barth had swung around to follow her gaze, but now he was eyeing her once more. “You were about to tell me something about The Shadow, Miss Lane. The Shadow is
what,
precisely?”

She looked at him and smiled thinly. “A myth, Commissioner. Only a myth.” She put her arm around her father’s waist, and they began to move off.

Barth’s face fell. Covertly, he took a flask from the inner pocket of his trenchcoat and took a quick swig. He knew that Margo Lane was lying. But he decided that it was more comforting to take her at her word than to believe otherwise.

S
hiwan Khan, vaunted descendant of the Ruler of All Peoples Living in Felt Tents and present landlord of the subterranean Mongolian city of Xanadu, on the shores of the sacred river Alph, awoke from what seemed a dream in which his arms had been pulled from their sockets by teams of wild horses.

He found it curious, however, that even in the waking world he couldn’t move his limbs.

His eyes—sunken, rimmed with red, and a shade paler than they had been a week earlier—snapped open and surveyed his surroundings: the padded, white walls of his tiny room, the narrow cot that was the room’s sole piece of furniture, the straightjacket that lashed his arms to his body . . .

He waged a brief but futile struggle against the jacket’s three leather belts. Then he looked behind him, hoping that his eyes had missed something during their initial survey of the room. Centered in the rear wall was a small, barred window.

The door to his cell opened while he had his back to it. Turning, Khan watched a bald man enter, carrying a tray that held a bowl of broth. Attired in white trousers and a white jacket, the man didn’t strike Khan as an attendant or an aide. He suspected that this bespectacled infidel with pens in his breast pocket was a doctor of some sort.

“You,” he intoned, in his command voice. “Look at me. Look deep into the eyes of Kha Khan.”

The doctor set the tray down on the foot of the bed and did as he had been commanded—though Khan seemed to detect a hint of something disingenuous in the man’s expression.

“Release me at once,” Khan told him.

The doctor actually
laughed,
humoring him.

“Now, now, we’ll have none of that, Mr. Khan.”

Worse, the doctor laid his hands on the right side of Khan’s head, which had obviously been shaved from crown to ear. “Let’s just have a look at those stitches, shall we?”

Khan scowled at him. “Stitches? What have you heathens done to me?”

“Saved your life, I suspect.”

The doctor’s fingers probed what Khan understood to be a circle of large sutures, a good two inches in diameter.

“We were forced to excise a small portion of the frontal lobe of your brain,” the doctor was saying. “But, believe me, you won’t miss it. It’s a part that no one uses—unless of course if you happen to be a practitioner of telepathy.” He laughed, and continued laughing all the way to the door.

Khan began to explore his own mind, his eyes widening with horror. “Wait!” he screamed. “You can’t leave me like this!”

But the doctor simply whistled to himself as he closed the door behind him. In his final glimpse of him, Khan noticed a familiar red ring adorning the third finger of the man’s right hand.

Khan rose from the cot and stumbled to the door, pressing his face against a window covered with wire mesh. “You can’t do this to me! I am the descendant of Temüjin himself—Genghis Khan!”

He gazed into a starkly lighted corridor with blue-white walls, where doctors with pointed white beards were blithely going about their business, and orderlies were minding patients strapped into wooden wheelchairs with caned backrests.

“I am the descendant of Genghis Khan!” Khan repeated.

He listened for a moment, certain that his declaration would bring someone scurrying to him. But, instead, all he heard was the voice of someone in an adjoining cell.

“
I
am the descendant of Genghis Khan,” a man said.

“No,
I
am,” yelled a second man.

“The hell you are!
I
am!” said a third.

Soon, the declaration had been taken up by every inmate within earshot—an asylumful of Shiwan Khans.

Though now only one of them was screaming in panic—and for dreams of conquest unfulfilled.

Lamont Cranston and Margo Lane were a handsome couple; he, in black overcoat and homburg; she, in a fur-trimmed jacket and matching hat. People they passed on the sidewalks of Times Square regarded them with a mix of envy and admiration. Made for each other, some surely told themselves.

Minutes earlier they had stopped to observe a game of three-card monte, where an obvious out-of-towner had been in danger of losing the farm in his efforts to choose the upside-down “lady”—the elusive red queen—rather than either of the two black tens she was partnered with. While Cranston and Margo watched, the man surrendered close to five hundred dollars to the swift-handed dealer, whom Cranston had spotted as a sharp. When, despite entreaties from his wife, the man had laid his watch, his wife’s wedding ring, and the remainder of his cash on the dealer’s milk crate, Cranston had intervened. Not in a physical way, but by discerning something about the dealer’s technique which he then wordlessly conveyed to the bettor.

The dealer and his shill’s dismayed incredulity was palpable when the man selected the right card. Winning
big . . .

“I still don’t understand,” Margo said while they were walking away. “I was sure the queen had a bent corner when the cards were being shuffled. But then when that man finally found the queen, it was one of the tens whose corner was bent.”

“A Mexican turnover,” Cranston explained. “The dealer straightened the queen’s corner and crimped the ten while he executed his hype—his overthrow move—that landed the queen in the middle, when it seemed as though it should have been on the right.”

“You got that by reading the dealer’s mind?”

“I didn’t have to. But I did offer a suggestion to the dealer’s intended victim.”

“I didn’t hear you offer anything.”

“Maybe you just weren’t paying attention,” he said.

Margo remained silent for the next couple of blocks.

“I’m ravenous,” Cranston said. “Where should we eat?”

Margo rocked her head from side to side. “How about that Chinese restaurant you took me to the night we met?”

Knowing that he was being teased, Cranston cut her a look. “What would you say to Italian this time?”

She smiled and was about to agree when Cranston suddenly stopped at the entrance to a brick alley, bordered on one side by a dealer in second-hand jewelry and on the other by an embalmer’s. She understood that it was the alley they had been headed for on the day she had told him about Farley Claymore and Mari-Tech—the alley that led to The Shadow’s hidden sanctum.

Margo put a hand on Cranston’s arm as if to restrain him. “Lamont, even The Shadow needs to take a holiday. Shiwan Khan isn’t a threat anymore. You won, and the world’s safe from madmen who want to rule it.”

He looked at her uncertainly, “is it?”

“Of course, it is.” She brightened for his benefit. “After all, Lamont, this is the twentieth century.”

He frowned dubiously. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, Margo?”

“You tell me.”

They locked eyes and kissed, deeply and lingeringly. But while she was exiting his embrace, she felt him slip a ring onto the third finger of her left hand. Margo stared at the ruby-red oval, then at Cranston’s own. She wanted to ask him if the ring was being given by The Shadow or by Lamont Cranston, but she never got the chance.

Cranston’s ring had began to pulsate, as if in dire warning, and he was already turning away from her. She followed him a few steps into the alley, then stopped when he did.

“If needed, you will receive instructions,” he said.

She shook her head in sudden confusion. “But suppose I’m not home, suppose I’m out somewhere. How will you know where to find me.”

“I’ll know,” he told her, and was gone.

J
AMES
L
UCENO
has made ends meet as a rock musician, general contractor, astrologer, travel consultant, scriptwriter, and pseudonymous coauthor of a bestselling mega-space opera series.

His first novel,
Headhunters,
was published in 1980, and was followed after a long hiatus by
Rió Pasión, Rainchaser,
and
Rock Bottom
(all published by Ivy Books) and
A Fearful Symmetry, Illegal Alien
and, most recently,
The Biq Empty
(published by Del Rey Books).

When not writing, he can be found tramping the lowlands of Guatemala’s El Petén.