The Shadow of Fu Manchu

Shadows of Fu Manchu

by Sax Rohmer

Chapter I

“Who’s the redhead,” snapped Nay-land Smith, “lunching with that embassy attaché?”

“Which table?”

“Half-right. Where I’m looking.”

Harkness, who had been briefed by Washington to meet the dynamic visitor, was already experiencing nerve strain. Sir Denis Nayland Smith, ex-chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard, spoke in a Bren-gun manner, thought and moved so swiftly that his society, if stimulating, was exhausting.

Turning, when about to light a cigar, Harkness presently discovered the diplomat’s table. The grill was fashionable for lunch, and full. But he knew the attaché by sight. He turned back again, dropping a match in a tray.

“Don’t know. Never seen her before.”

“Haven’t you? I have!”

“Sorry, Sir Denis. Is she important?”

“A woman who looks like that is always important. Yes, I know her. But I haven’t quite placed her.”

Nayland Smith refilled his coffee cup, glanced reluctantly at a briar pipe which appeared to have been rescued from a blast furnace, and then put it back in his pocket. He selected a cigarette.

“You don’t think she’s a Russian?” Harkness suggested.

“I know she isn’t.”

Smith surveyed the crowded, panelled room. It buzzed like an aviary. Businessmen predominated. Deals of one sort or another hung in the smoke-laden air. Nearly all these men were talking about how to make money. And nearly all the women were talking about how to spend it.

But not the graceful girl with that glowing hair. He wondered what she was talking about. Her companion appeared to be absorbed, either in what she was saying or in the way she said it.

And while Nay-land Smith studied many faces, Harkness studied Nayland Smith.

He had met him only once before, and the years had silvered his hair more than ever, but done nothing to disturb its crisp virility. The lean, brown face might be a trifle more lined. It was a grim face, a face which hid a secret, until Nayland Smith smiled. His smile told the secret.

He spoke suddenly.

“Strange to reflect,” he said, “that these people, wrapped up, air tight, in their own trifling affairs, like cigarettes in cellophane, are sitting on top of a smouldering volcano.”

“You really think so?”

“I know it. Why has a certain power sent all its star agents to the United States? What are they trying to find out?”

“Secret of the atom bomb?”

“Rot! There’s no secret about it. You know that as well as I do. Once a weapon of war is given publicity, it loses its usefulness. I gain nothing by having a rock in my boxing-glove if the other fellow has one too. No. It’s something else.”

“England seems to be pretty busy?”

“England has lost two cabinet ministers, mysteriously, in the past few months.” All the time Smith’s glance had been straying in the direction of a certain party, and suddenly: “Right!” he rapped. “Thought I was. Now I’m sure! This is my lucky day.”

“Sure of what?” Harkness was startled.

“Man at the next table. Our diplomatic acquaintance and his charming friend are being covered.”

Harkness craned around again.

“You mean the sallow man?”

“Sallow? He’s Burmese! They’re not all Communists, you know.”

Harkness stared at his cigar, as if seeking to concentrate.

“You’re more than several steps beyond me. No doubt your information is away ahead of mine. But, quite honestly, I don’t understand.”

Nayland Smith met the glance of Harkness’s frank hazel eyes, and nodded sympathetically.

“My fault. I think aloud. Bad habit. There’s hardly time to explain, now. Look! They’re going! Have the redhead covered.

Detail another man to keep the Burmese scout in sight. Report to me, here. Suite 1236.”

The auburn-haired girl was walking towards the exit. She wore a plain suit and a simple hat. Her companion followed. As Harkness retired speedily, Nayland Smith dropped something which made it necessary for him to stoop when the attaché passed near his table.

Coming out onto Forty-sixth Street, Harkness exchanged a word with a man who was talking to a hotel porter. The man nodded and moved away.

Manhattan danced on. Well-fed males returned to their offices to consider further projects for making more dollars. Females headed for the glamorous shops on New York’s Street-Called-Straight: Fifth Avenue, the great bazaar of the New World. Beauty specialists awaited them. Designers of Paris hats. Suave young ladies to display wondrous robes. Suave young gentlemen to seduce with glittering trinkets.

In certain capitals of the Old World, men and women looked, haggard-eyed, into empty shops and returned to empty larders.

Manhattan danced on.

Nayland Smith, watching a car move from the front of the hotel, closely followed by another, prayed that Manhattan’s dance might not be a danse macabre.

When presently he stepped into a black sedan parked further along the street, in charge of a chauffeur who looked like a policeman (possibly because he was one), and had been driven a few blocks:

“Have we got a tail?” Smith snapped.

“Yes, sir,” the driver reported. “Three cars behind us right now. Small delivery truck.”

“Stop at the next drugstore. I’ll check it.”

When he got out and walked into the drugstore the following truck passed, and then pulled in higher up.

Nayland Smith came out again and resumed the journey. Two more blocks passed:

“Right behind us,” the driver reported laconically.

Smith took up a phone installed in the sedan and gave brief directions. So that long before he had reached his destination the truck was still following the sedan, but two traffic police were following the truck. He had been no more than a few minutes in the deputy commissioner’s office on Centre Street before a police sergeant came in with the wanted details.

The man had been pulled up on a technical offense and invited, firmly, to produce evidence of his identity. Smith glanced over the report.

“H’m. American citizen. Born in Athens.” He looked up. “You’re checking this story that he was taking the truck to be repaired?”

“Sure. Can’t find anything wrong with it. Very powerful engine for such a light outfit.”

“Would be,” said Smith drily “File all his contacts. He mustn’t know. You have to find out who really employs him.”

He spent a long time with the deputy commissioner, and gathered much useful data. He was in New York at the request of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and had been given almost autocratic powers by Washington. When, finally, he left, he had two names pencilled in his notebook.

They were: Michael Frobisher, and Dr. Morris Craig, of the Huston Research Laboratory.

Michael Frobisher, seated in an alcove in the library of his club, was clearly ill at ease. A big-boned, fleshy man, Frobisher had a powerful physique, with a fighting jaw, heavy brows—coal-black in contrast to nearly white hair—and deep-set eyes which seemed to act independently of what Michael Frobisher happened to be doing.

There were only two other members in the library, but Frobisher’s eyes, although he was apparently reading a newspaper, moved rapidly, as his glance switched from face to face in that oddly furtive manner.

Overhanging part of the room, one of the finest of its kind in the city, was a gallery giving access to more books ranged on shelves above. A club servant appeared in the gallery, moving very quietly—and Frobisher’s glance shot upward like an anxious searchlight.

It was recalled to sea level by a voice.

“Hello, Frobisher! How’s your wife getting along?”

Frobisher’s florid face momentarily lost color. Then, looking up from where he sat in a deep, leather armchair, he saw that a third member had come in—Dr. Pardoe.

“Hello, Pardoe!” He had himself in hand again: the deep tone was normal. “Quite startled me.”

“So I saw.” Pardoe gave him a professional glance, and sat on the arm of a chair near Frobisher’s. “Been overdoing it a bit, haven’t you?”

“Oh, I don’t say that. Doctor. Certainly been kept pretty busy. Thanks for the inquiry about Stella. She’s greatly improved since she began the treatments you recommended.”

“Good.” Dr. Pardoe smiled—a dry smile: he was a sandy, dry man. “I’m not sure the professor isn’t a quack, but he seems to be successful with certain types of neuroses.”

“I assure you Stella is a hundred per cent improved.”

“H’m. You might try him yourself.”

“What are you talking about?” Frobisher growled. “There’s nothing the matter with me.”

“Isn’t there?” The medical man looked him over coolly. “There will be if you don’t watch your diet.” Pardoe was a vegetarian. “Why, your heart missed a beat when I spoke to you.”

Frobisher held himself tightly in hand. His wife’s physician always got on his nerves. But, all the same, he wasn’t standing for any nonsense.

“Let me tell you something.” His deep voice, although subdued, rumbled around the now empty library. “This isn’t nerves. It’s cold feet. An organization like the Huston Electric has got rivals. And rivals can get dangerous if they’re worsted. Someone’s tracking me around. Someone broke into Falling Waters one night last week. Went through my papers. I’ve seen the man. I’d know him again. I was followed right here to the club today. That isn’t nerves. Doctor. And it isn’t eating too much red meat!”

“Hm.” Irritating habit of Pardoe’s, that introductory cough.

“I don’t dispute the fact of the burglary—”

“Thanks a lot. And let me remind you: Stella doesn’t know, and doesn’t have to know.”

“Oh, I see. Then the attempt is known only—”

“Is known to my butler. Stein, and to me. It’s not an illusion. I’m still sane, if I did have beefsteak at lunch!”

The physician raised his sandy brows.

“I don’t doubt it, Frobisher. But had it occurred to you that your later impression of being followed—not an uncommon symptom— may derive from this single, concrete fact?”

Frobisher didn’t reply, and Dr. Pardoe, who had been looking down at the carpet, now looked suddenly at Frobisher.

His gaze was fixed upward again. He was watching the gallery. He spoke in a whisper.

“Pardoe! Look where I’m looking. Is that a club member?”

Dr. Pardoe did as Frobisher requested. He saw a slight, black-clad figure in the gallery. The man had just replaced a vase on a shelf. Only the back of his head and shoulders could be seen. He moved away, his features still invisible.

“Not a member known to me, personally, Frobisher. But there are always new members, and guest members—”

But Frobisher was up, had bounded from his chair. Already, he was crossing the library.

“That’s some kind of Asiatic. I saw his face!” Regardless of the rule. Silence, he shouted. “And I’m going to have a word with him!”

Dr. Pardoe shook his head, took up a medical journal which he had dropped on the chair, and made his way out.

He was already going down the steps when Michael Frobisher faced the club secretary, who had been sent for.

“May I ask,” he growled, “since when Chinese have been admitted to membership?”

“You surprise me, Mr. Frobisher.”

The secretary, a young-old man with a bald head and a Harvard accent, could be very patriarchal.

“Do I?”

“You do. Your complaint is before me. I have a note here. If you wish it to go before the committee, merely say the word. I can only assure you that not only have we no Asiatic members, honorary or otherwise, but no visitor such as you describe has been in the club. Furthermore, Mr. Frobisher, I am assured by the assistant librarian, who was last in the library gallery, that no one has been up there since.”

Frobisher jumped to his feet.

“Get Dr. Pardoe!” he directed. “He was with me. Get Dr. Pardoe.”

But Dr. Pardoe had left the club.

The research laboratory of the Huston Electric Corporation was on the thirty-sixth, and top floor of the Huston Building. Dr. Craig’s office adjoined the laboratory proper, which he could enter up three steps leading to a steel door. This door was always kept locked.

Morris Craig, slight, clean-shaven, and very agile, a man in his early thirties, had discarded his coat, and worked in shirt-sleeves before a drawing desk. His dark-brown hair, which he wore rather long, was disposed to be rebellious, a forelock sometimes falling forward, so that brushing it back with his hand had become a mannerism.

He had just paused for this purpose, leaning away as if to get a long perspective of his work and at the same time fumbling for a packet of cigarettes, when the office door was thrown open and someone came in behind him.

So absorbed was Craig that he paid no attention at first, until the heavy breathing of whoever had come in prompted him to turn suddenly.

“Mr. Frobisher!”

Craig, who wore glasses when drawing or reading, but not otherwise, now removed them and jumped from his stool.

“It’s all right, Craig.” Frobisher raised his hand in protest. “Sit down.”

“But if I may say so, you look uncommon fishy.”

His way of speech had a quality peculiarly English, and he had a tendency to drawl. Nothing in his manner suggested that Morris Craig was one of the most brilliant physicists Oxford University had ever turned out. He retrieved the elusive cigarettes and lighted one.

Michael Frobisher remained where he had dropped down, on a chair just inside the door. But he was regaining color. Now he pulled a cigar from the breast pocket of his tweed jacket.

“The blasted doctors tell me I eat too much and smoke too much,” he remarked. His voice always reminded Craig of old port. “But I wouldn’t want to live if I couldn’t do as I liked.”

“Practical,” said Craig, “if harsh. May I inquire what has upset you?”

“Come to that in a minute,” growled Frobisher. “First—what news of the big job?”

“Getting hot. I think the end’s in sight.”

“Fine. I want to talk to you about it.” He snipped the end of his cigar. “How’s the new secretary making out?”

“A-I. Knows all the answers. Miss Lewis was a sad loss, but Miss Navarre is a glad find.”

“Well—she’s got a Paris degree, and had two years with Professor Jennings. Suits me if she suits you.”

Craig’s boyishly youthful face lighted up.

“Suits me to nine points of decimals. Works like a pack-mule. She ought to get out of town this week-end.”

“Bring her along up to Falling Waters. Few days of fresh air do her no harm.”

“No.” Craig seemed to be hesitating. He returned to his desk. “But I shouldn’t quit this job until it’s finished.”

He resumed his glasses and studied the remarkable diagram pinned to the drawing board. He seemed to be checking certain details with a mass of symbols and figures on a large ruled sheet beside the board.

“Of course,” he murmured abstractedly, “I might easily finish at any time now.”

The wonder of the thing he was doing, a sort of awe that he, the humble student of nature’s secrets, should have been granted power to do it, claimed his mind. Here were mighty forces, hitherto no more than suspected, which controlled the world. Here, written in the indelible ink of mathematics, lay a description of the means whereby those forces might be harnessed.

He forgot Frobisher.

And Frobisher, lighting his cigar, began to pace the office floor, often glancing at the absorbed figure. Suddenly Craig turned, removing his glasses.

“Are you bothered about the cost of these experiments, Mr. Frobisher?”

Frobisher pulled up, staring.

“Cost? To hell with the cost! That’s not worrying me. I don’t know a lot about the scientific side, but I know a commercial proposition when I see one.” He dropped down into an armchair. “What I don’t know is this.” He leaned forward, his heavy brows lowered:

“Why is somebody tracking me around?”

“Tracking you around?”

“That’s what I said. I’m being tailed around. I was followed to my club today. Followed here. There’s somebody watching my home up in Connecticut. Who is he? What does he want?”

Morris Craig stood up and leaned back against the desk.

Behind him a deep violet sky made a back-cloth for silhouettes of buildings higher than the Huston. Some of the windows were coming to life, forming a glittering regalia, like jewels laid on velvet.

Dusk was falling over Manhattan.

“Astoundin’ state of affairs,” Craig declared—but his smile was quite disarming. “Tell me more. Anyone you suspect?”

Frobisher shook his head. “There’s plenty to suspect if news of what’s going on up here has leaked out. Suppose you’re dead right—and I’m backing you to be—what’ll this thing mean to Huston Electric?”

“Grateful thanks of the scientific world.”

“Damn the scientific world! I’m thinking of Huston’s.”

Morris Craig, his mind wandering in immeasurable space, his spirit climbing the ladder of the stars toward higher and more remote secrets of a mysterious universe, answered vaguely.

“No idea. Can’t see at the moment how it could be usefully applied.”

“What are you talking about?” Michael Frobisher was quite his old roaring self again. “This job has cost half of a million dollars already. Are you telling me we get nothing back? Are we all bughouse around here?”

A door across the office opened, and a man came in, a short, thick-set man, slightly bandy, who walked with a rolling gait as if on the deck of a ship in dirty weather. He wore overalls, spectacles, and an eye-shade. He came in without any ceremony and approached Craig. The forbidding figure of Michael Frobisher disturbed him not at all.

“Say—have you got a bit of string?” he inquired.

“I have not got a bit of string. I have a small piece of gum, or two one-cent stamps. Would they do?”

The intruder chewed thoughtfully. “Guess not. Miss Navarre’s typewriter’s jammed up in there. But I got it figured a bit of string about so long”—he illustrated—”would fix things.”

“Sorry, Sam, but I am devoid of string.”

Sam chewed awhile, and then turned away.

“Guess I’ll have to go look some other place.”

As he went out:

“Listen,” Frobisher said. “What does that moron do for his wages?”

“Sam?” Craig answered, smiling. “Oh, sort of handyman. Mostly helps Regan and Shaw in the laboratory.”

“Be a big help to anybody, I’d say. What I’m driving at is this: We have to be mighty careful about who gets in here. There’s been a bad leak. Somebody knows more than he ought to know.”

Morris Craig, slowly, was getting back to that prosaic earth on which normal, flat-footed men spend their lives. It was beginning to dawn upon him that Michael Frobisher was badly frightened.

“I can’t account for it. Shaw and Regan are beyond suspicion. So, I hope, am I. Miss Navarre came to us with the highest credentials. In any case, she could do little harm. But, of course, it’s absurd to suspect her.”

“What about the half-wit who just went out?”

“Knows nothing about the work. Apart from which, his refs are first-class, including one from the Fire Department.”

“Looks like he’d been in a fire.” Frobisher dropped a cone of cigar ash. “But facts are facts. Let me bring you up to date—but not a word to Mrs. F. You know how nervous she is. Some guy got into Falling Waters last Tuesday night and went through my papers with a fine-tooth comb!”

“You mean it?”

Craig’s drawl had vanished. His eyes were very keen.

“I mean it. Nothing was taken—not a thing. But that’s not all. I’d had more than a suspicion for quite a while someone was snooping around. So I laid for him, without saying a word to Mrs. F., and one night I saw him —”

“What did he look like?”

“Yellow.”

“Indian?”

“No, sir. Some kind of Oriental. Then, only today, right in my own club, I caught another Asiatic watching me! It’s a fact. Dr. Pardoe can confirm it. Now—what I’m asking is this: If it’s what we’re doing in the laboratory there that somebody’s after, why am I followed around, and not you?”

“The answer is a discreet silence.”

“Also I’d be glad to learn who this somebody is. I could think up plenty who’d like to know. But no one of ‘em would be an Asiatic.”

Morris Craig brushed his hair back with his hand.

“You’re getting me jumpy, too,” he declared, although his eager, juvenile smile belied the words. “This thing wants looking into.”

“It’s going to be looked into,” Frobisher grimly assured him. “When you come up to Falling Waters you’ll see I’m standing for no more monkey tricks around there, anyway.” He stood up, glancing at the big clock over Craig’s desk. “I’m picking up Mrs. F. at the Ritz. Don’t have to be late. Expect you and Miss Navarre, lunch on Saturday.”

Chapter II

Mrs. F., as it happened, was thoroughly enjoying herself. She lay naked, face downward, on a padded couch, whilst a white-clad nurse ran an apparatus which buzzed like a giant hornet from the back of her fluffy skull right down her spine and up again. This treatment made her purr like a contented kitten. It had been preceded by a terrific mauling at the hands of another, muscular, attendant, in the course of which Mrs. F. had been all but hanged, drawn, quartered, and, finally, stood on her head.

An aromatic bath completed the treatment. Mrs. F. was wrapped in a loose fleecy garment, stretched upon a couch in a small apartment decorated with Pompeian frescoes, and given an Egyptian cigarette and a cup of orange-scented China tea.

She lay there in delicious languor, when the draperies were drawn aside and Professor Hoffmeyer, the celebrated Viennese psychiatrist who conducted the establishment, entered gravely. She turned her head and smiled up at him.

“How do you do. Professor?”

He did not reply at once, but stood there looking at her. Even through the dark glasses he always wore, his regard never failed to make her shudder. But it was a pleasurable shudder.

Professor Hoffmeyer presented an impressive figure. His sufferings in Nazi prison camps had left indelible marks. The dark glasses protected eyes seared by merciless lights. The silk gloves which he never removed concealed hands from which the fingernails had been extracted. He stooped much, leaning upon a heavy ebony cane.

Now he advanced almost noiselessly and took Mrs. Frobisher’s left wrist between a delicate thumb and forefinger, slightly inclining his head.

“It is not how do I do, dear lady,” he said in Germanic gutturals, “but how do you do.”

Mrs. Frobisher looked up at the massive brow bent over her, and tried, not for the first time, to puzzle out the true color of the scanty hair which crowned it. She almost decided that it was colorless; entirely neutral.

Professor Hoffmeyer stood upright, or as nearly upright as she had ever seen him stand, and nodded.

“You shall come to see me on Wednesday, at three o’clock. Not for the treatment, no, but for the consultation. If some other engagement you have, cancel it. At three o’clock on Wednesday.”

He bowed slightly and went out.

Professor Hoffmeyer ruled his wealthy clientele with a rod of iron. His reputation was enormous. His fees were phenomenal.

He proceeded, now, across a luxurious central salon where other patients waited, well-preserved women, some of them apparently out of the deep-freeze. He nodded to a chosen few as he passed, and entered an office marked “Private.” Closing the door, he pulled out a drawer in the businesslike desk—and a bookcase filled with advanced medical works, largely German, swung open bodily.

The professor went into the opening. As the bookcase swung back into place, the drawer in the desk closed again.

Professor Hoffmeyer would see no more patients today.

The room in which the professor found himself was a study. But its appointments were far from conventional. It contained some very valuable old lacquer and was richly carpeted. The lighting (it had no visible windows) was subdued, and the peculiar characteristic of the place was its silence.

Open bookcases were filled with volumes, some of them bound manuscripts, many of great age and all of great rarity. They were in many languages, including Greek, Chinese, and Arabic.

Beside a cushioned divan stood an inlaid stool equipped with several opium pipes in a rack, gum, lamp, and bodkins.

A long, carved table of time-blackened oak served as a desk. A high-backed chair was set behind it. A faded volume lay open on the table, as well as a closely written manuscript. There were several other books there, and a number of curious objects difficult to identify in the dim light.

The professor approached a painted screen placed before a recess and disappeared behind it. Not a sound broke the silence of the room until he returned.

He had removed the gloves and dark glasses, and for the black coat worn by Professor Hoffmeyer had substituted a yellow house robe. The eyes which the glasses had concealed were long, narrow, and emerald-green. The uncovered hands had pointed fingernails. This gaunt, upright, Chinese ascetic was taller by inches than Professor Hoffmeyer.

And his face might have inspired a painter seeking a model for the Fallen Angel.

This not because it was so evil but because of a majestic and remorseless power which it possessed—a power which resided in the eyes. They were not the eyes of a normal man, moved by the desires, the impulses shared in some part by us all. They were the eyes of one who has shaken off those inhibitions common to humanity, who is undisturbed by either love or hate, untouched by fear, unmoved by compassion.

Few such men occur in the long history of civilization, and none who has not helped to change it.

The impassive figure crossed, with a silent, catlike step, to the long table, and became seated there.

One of the curious objects on the table sprang to life, as if touched by sudden moonlight. It was a crystal globe resting on a metal base. Dimly at first, the outlines of a face materialized in the crystal, and then grew clear. They became the features of an old Chinese, white-moustached, wrinkled, benign.

“You called me, Doctor?”

The voice, though distant, was clear. A crinkled smile played over the parchment face in the crystal.

“You have all the reports?”

The second voice was harsh, at points sibilant, but charged with imperious authority. It bore no resemblance to that of Professor Hoffmeyer.

“The last is timed six-fifteen. Shall I give you a summary?”

“Proceed, Huan Tsung. I am listening.”

And Huan Tsung, speaking in his quiet room above a shop in Pell Street, a room in which messages were received mysteriously, by day and by night, from all over Manhattan, closed his wise old eyes and opened the pages of an infallible memory.

This man whose ancestors had been cultured noblemen when most of ours were living in caves, spoke calmly across a system of communication as yet unheard of by Western science . . .

“Excellency will wish to know that our Burmese agent was recognized by Nayland Smith in the grillroom and followed by two F.B.I, operatives. I gave instructions that he be transferred elsewhere. He reports that he has arrived safely. His notes of the conversation at the next table are before me.” They contain nothing new. Shall I relate them?”

“No. I shall interview the woman personally. Proceed.”

“Nayland Smith visited the deputy commissioner and has been alone with him more than two hours. Nature of conversation unknown. The Greek covering his movements was intercepted and questioned, but had nothing to disclose. He is clumsy, and I have had him removed.”

“You did well Huan Tsung. Such bunglers breed danger.”

“Mai Cha, delivering Chinese vase sent by club secretary for repair, attired herself in the black garment she carries and gained a gallery above the library where Michael Frobisher talked with a medical friend. She reports that Frobisher has had sight of our agent at Palling Waters. Therefore I have transferred this agent. Mai Cha retired, successfully, with price of repairs.”

“Commend Mai Cha.”

“I have done so, Excellency. She is on headquarters duty tonight. Excellency can commend her himself.”

“The most recent movements of Frobisher, Nayland Smith, and Dr. Craig.”

“Frobisher awaits his wife at the Ritz-Carlton. Nayland Smith is covered, but no later report has reached me. Dr. Craig is in his office.”

“Frobisher has made no other contacts?”

“None, Excellency. The stream flows calmly. It is the hour for repose, when the wise man reflects.”

“Wait and watch, Huan Tsung. I must think swiftly.”

“Always I watch—and it is unavoidable that I wait until I am called away.”

Moonlight in the crystal faded out, and with it the wrinkled features of the Mandarin Huan Tsung.

Complete silence claimed the dimly lighted room. The wearer of the yellow robe remained motionless for a long time. Then, he stood up and crossed to the divan, upon which he stretched his gaunt body. He struck a silver bell which hung in a frame beside the rack of opium pipes. The bell emitted a high, sweet note.

Whilst the voice of the bell still lingered, drowsily, on the air, draperies in a narrow, arched opening were drawn aside, and a Chinese girl came in.

She wore national costume. She was very graceful, and her large, dark eyes resembled the eyes of a doe. She knelt and touched the carpet with her forehead.

“You have done well, Mai Cha. I am pleased with you.” The girl rose, but stood, head lowered and hands clasped, before the reclining figure. A flush crept over her dusky cheeks. “Prepare the jade pipe. I seek inspiration.” Mai Cha began quietly to light the little lamp on the stool.

* * *

Although no report had reached old Huan Tsung, nevertheless Nayland Smith had left police headquarters.

He was fully alive to the fact that every move he had made since entering New York City had been noted, that he never stirred far without a shadow.

This did not disturb him. Nayland Smith was used to it.

But he didn’t wish his trackers to find out where he was going from Centre Street—until he had got there.

He favored, in cold weather, a fur-collared topcoat of military cut, which was almost as distinctive as his briar pipe. He had a dozen or more police officers paraded for his inspection, and selected one nearly enough of his own build, clean-shaven and brown-skinned. His name was Moreno, and he was of Italian descent.

This officer was given clear instructions, and the driver who had brought Nayland Smith to headquarters received his orders, also.

When a man wearing a light rainproof and a dark-blue felt hat (property of Detective Officer Moreno) left by a side entrance, walked along to Lafayette Street, and presently picked up a taxi, no one paid any attention to him. But, in order to make quite sure, Nayland Smith gave the address, Waldorf-Astoria, got out at that hotel, walked through to the Park Avenue entrance, and proceeded to his real destination on foot.

He was satisfied that he had no shadow.

* * *

The office was empty, as Camille Navarre came out of her room and crossed to the long desk set before the windows. One end had been equipped for business purposes. There was a leather-covered chair and beside it a dictaphone. A cylinder remained on the machine, for Craig had been dictating when he was called to the laboratory. At the other end stood a draughtsman’s stool and a quantity of pens, pencils, brushes, pans of colored ink, and similar paraphernalia. They lay beside a propped-up drawing board, illuminated by a tubular lamp.

Camille placed several typed letters on the desk, and then stood there studying the unfinished diagram pinned to the board.

She possessed a quiet composure which rarely deserted her. As Craig had once remarked, she was so restful about the place. Her plain suit did not unduly stress a slim figure, and her hair was swept back flatly to a knot at the nape of her neck. She wore black-rimmed glasses, and looked in every respect the perfect secretary for a scientist.

A slight sound, the click of a lock, betrayed the fact that Craig was about to come out. Camille returned to her room.

She had just gone in when the door of the laboratory opened, and Craig walked down the three steps. A man in a white coat, holding a pair of oddly shaped goggles in his hand, stood at the top. He showed outlined against greenish light. With the opening of the door, a curious vibration had become perceptible, a thing which might be sensed, rather than heard.

“In short, Doctor,” he was saying, “we can focus, but we can’t control the volume.”

Craig spoke over his shoulder.

“When we can do both, Regan, we’ll give an audition to the pundits that will turn their wool white.”

Regan, a capable-looking technician, grey-haired and having a finely shaped mathematical head, smiled as he stepped back through the doorway.

“I doubt if Mr. Frobisher will want any ‘auditions,”“ he said drily.

As the door was closed, the vibrant sound ceased.

Craig stood for a moment studying the illuminated diagram as Camille had done. He lighted a cigarette, and then noticed the letters on his desk. He dropped into the chair, switching up a reading lamp, and put on his glasses.

A moment later he was afoot again, as the office door burst open and a man came in rapidly—closely followed by Sam.

“Wait a minute! “Sam was upset. “Listen. Wait a minute!”

Craig dropped his glasses on the desk, stared, and then advanced impulsively, hand outstretched.

“Nayland Smith! By all that’s holy—Nayland Smith!” They exchanged grips, smiling happily. “Why, I thought you were in Ispahan, or Yucatan, or somewhere.”

“Nearly right the first time. But it was Teheran. Flew from there three days ago. More urgent business here.”

“Wait a minute,” Sam muttered, his eye-shade thrust right to the back of his head.

Craig turned to him.

“It’s all right, Sam. This is an old friend.”

“Oh, is that so?”

“Yes—and I don’t believe he has a bit of string.”

Sam stared truculently from face to face, chewing in an ominous way, and then went out.

“Sit down. Smith. This is a great, glad surprise. But why the whirlwind business? And”—staring—”what the devil are you up to?”

Nayland Smith had walked straight across to the long windows which occupied nearly the whole of the west wall. He was examining a narrow terrace outside bordered by an ornamental parapet. He looked beyond, to where the hundred eyes of a towering building shone in the dusk. He turned.

“Anybody else got access to this floor?”

“Only the staff. Why?”

“What do you mean when you say the staff?”

“I mean the staff! Am I on the witness stand? Well, if you must know, the research staff consists of myself; Martin Shaw, my chief assistant, a Columbia graduate; John Regan second technician, who came to me from Vickers; and Miss Navarre, my secretary. She also has scientific training. Except for Sam, the handyman, and Mr. Frobisher, nobody else has access to the laboratory. Do I make myself clear to your honor?”

Nayland Smith was staring towards the steel door and tugging at the lobe of his left ear, a mannerism which denoted intense concentration, and one with which Craig was familiar.

“You don’t take proper precautions,” he snapped. “I got in without any difficulty.”

Morris Craig became vaguely conscious of danger. He recalled vividly the nervous but repressed excitement of Michael Frobisher. He could not ignore the tension now exhibited by Nayland Smith.

“Why these precautions. Smith? What have we to be afraid of?”

Smith swung around on him. His eyes were hard.

“Listen, Craig—we’ve known one another since you were at Oxford. There’s no need to mince words. I don’t know what you’re working on up here—but I’m going to ask you to tell me. I know something else, though. Unless I have made the biggest mistake of my life, one of the few first-class brains in the world today has got you spotted.”

“But, Smith, you’re telling me nothing—”

“Haven’t time. I baited a little trap as I came up. I’m going down to spring it.”

“Spring it?”

“Exactly. Excuse me.”

Smith moved to the door.

“The elevator man will be off duty—”

“He won’t. I ordered him to stand by.”

Nayland Smith went out as rapidly as he had come in.

Craig stood for a moment staring at the door which Smith had just closed. He had an awareness of some menace impending, creeping down upon him; a storm cloud. He scratched his chin reflectively and returned to the letters. He signed them, and pressed a button.

Camille Navarre entered quietly and came over to the desk. Craig took off his glasses and looked up—but Camille’s eyes were fixed on the letters.

“Ah, Miss Navarre—here we are.” He returned them to her. “And there’s rather a long one, bit of a teaser, on this thing.” He pointed to the dictaphone. “Mind removing same and listening in to my rambling rot?”

Camille stooped and took the cylinder off the machine.

“Your dictation is very clear. Dr. Craig.”

She spoke with a faint accent, more of intonation than pronunciation. It was a low-pitched, caressing voice. Craig never tired of it.

“Sweet words of flattery. I sound to myself like a half-strangled parrot. The way you construe is simply wizard.”

Camille smiled. She had beautifully moulded, rather scornful lips.

“Thank you. But it isn’t difficult.”

She put the cylinder in its box and turned to go.

“By the way, you have an invitation from the boss. He bids you to Falling Waters for the week-end.”

Camille paused, but didn’t turn. If Craig could have seen her face, its expression might have puzzled him.

“Really?” she said. “That is sweet of Mr. Frobisher.”

“Can you come? I’m going, too, so I’ll drive you out.”

“That would be very kind of you. Yes,1 should love to come.”

She turned, now, and her smile was radiant.

“Splendid. We’ll hit the trail early No office on Saturday”

There was happiness in Craig’s tone, and in his glance. Camille drooped her eyes and moved away.

“Er—” he added, “is the typewriter in commission again?”

“Yes,” Camille’s lip twitched. “I managed to get it right.”

“With a bit of string?”

“No.” She laughed softly “With a hairpin!”

As she went out, Craig returned to his drawing board. But he found it hard to concentrate. He kept thinking about that funny little moue peculiar to Camille, part of her. Whenever she was going to smile, one comer of her upper lip seemed to curl slightly like a rose petal. And he wondered if her eyes were really so beautiful, or if the lenses magnified them.

The office door burst open, and Nayland Smith came in again like a hot wind from the desert. He had discarded the rainproof in which he had first appeared, and now carried a fur-collared coat.

“Missed him, Craig,” he rapped. “Slipped through my fingers— the swine!”

Craig turned half around, resting one shirt-sleeved elbow on a comer of the board.

“Of course,” he said, “if you’re training for the Olympic Games, or what-have-you, let me draw your attention to the wide-open spaces of Central Park. I work here—or try to.”

He was silenced by the look in Nayland Smith’s eyes. He stood up.

“Smith!—what is it?”

“Murder!” Nayland Smith rapped out the word like a rifle shot. “I have just sent a man to his death, Craig!”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“No more than I say.”

It came to Morris Craig as a revelation that something had happened to crush, if only temporarily, the indomitable spirit he knew so well. He walked over and laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Smith. Forgive my silly levity. What’s happened?”

Nayland Smith’s face looked haggard, worn, as he returned Craig’s earnest stare.

“I have been shadowed, Craig, ever since I reached New York. I left police headquarters a while ago, wearing a borrowed hat and topcoat. A man slightly resembling me had orders to come to the Huston Building in the car I have been using all day, wearing my own hat, and my own topcoat.”

“Well?”

“He obeyed his orders. The driver, who is above suspicion, noticed nothing whatever unusual on the way. There was no evidence to suggest that they were being followed. I had assumed that they would be—and had laid my plans accordingly. I went down to see the tracker fall into my trap—”

“Go on, Smith! For God’s sake, what happened?”

“This!”

Nayland Smith carefully removed a small, pointed object from its wrappings and laid it on the desk. Craig was about to pick it up, when:

“Don’t touch it!” came sharply. “That is, except by the feathered end. Primitive, Craig, but deadly—and silent. Get your laboratory to analyze the stuff on the tip of the dart.

Curari is too commonplace for the man who inspired this thing.”

“Smith! I’m appalled. What are you telling me?”

“It was flicked, or perhaps blown from a tube, into Moreno’s face through the open window of the car. It stuck in his chin, and he pulled it out. But when the car got here, he was quite insensible, and—”

“You mean he’s dead?”

“I had him rushed straight to hospital.”

“They’ll want this for analysis.”

“There was another. The first must have missed.”

Nayland Smith dropped limply into a chair, facing Craig. He pulled out his blackened briar and began to load it from an elderly pouch.

“Let’s face the facts, Craig. I must make it clear to you that a mysterious Eastern epidemic is creeping West. I’m not in Manhattan for my health. I’m here to try to head it off.”

He stuffed the pouch back into his pocket and lighted his pipe.

“I’m all attention, Smith. But for heaven’s sake, what devil are you up against?”

“Listen. No less than six prominent members of the Soviet Government have either died suddenly or just disappeared—within the past few months.”

“One of those purges? Very popular with dictators.”

“A purge right enough. But not carried out by Kremlin orders. Josef Stalin is being guarded as even he was never guarded before.”

Craig began groping behind him for the elusive packet of cigarettes.

“What’s afoot, Smith? Is this anything to do with the news from London?”

“You mean the disappearance of two of the Socialist Cabinet? Undoubtedly. They have gone the same way.”

“The same way?” Craig’s search was rewarded. He lighted a cigarette. “What way?”

Nayland Smith took the fuming pipe from between his teeth, and fixed a steady look on Craig.

“Dr. Fu Manchu’s way!”

“Dr. Fu Manchu! But—”

The door of Camille’s room opened, and Camille came out. She held some typewritten sheets in her hand. There was much shadow at that side of the office, for only the desk lights were on, so that as the two men turned and looked towards her, it was difficult to read her expression.

But she paused at sight of them, standing quite still.

“Oh, excuse me, Dr. Craig! I thought you were alone.”

“It’s all right,” said Craig. “Don’t—er—go, Miss Navarre. This is my friend, Sir Denis Nayland Smith. My new secretary, Smith— Miss Navarre.”

Nayland Smith stared for a moment, then bowed, and walked to the window.

“What is it, Miss Navarre?” Craig asked.

“It’s only that last cylinder, Dr. Craig. I wanted to make sure I had it right. I will wait until you are disengaged.”

But Nayland Smith was looking out into the jewelled darkness, and seeing nothing of a towering building which rose like a lighted teocalli against the skyline. He saw, instead, a panelled grillroom where an attractive red-haired girl sat at a table with a man. He saw the dark-faced spy lunching alone near by.

The girl in the grillroom had not worn her hair pinned back in that prim way, nor had she worn glasses.

Nevertheless, the girl in the grillroom and Miss Navarre were one and the same!

Chapter III

In a little shop sandwiched in between more imposing Chinese establishments, a good-looking young Oriental sat behind the narrow counter writing by the light of a paper-shaded lamp. The place was a mere box, and he was entirely surrounded by mysterious sealed jars, packets of joss sticks wrapped up in pakapu papers, bronze bowls with perforated wooden lids, boxes of tea, boxes of snuff, bead necklaces, and other completely discordant items of an evidently varied stock. The shop smelled of incense.

A bell tinkled as the door was opened. A big man came in, so big that he seemed a crowd. He looked and was dressed like some kind of workman.

The young Oriental regarded him impassively.

“Mr. Huan Tsung?” the man asked.

“Mr. Huan Tsung not home. How many time you come before?”

“Seven.”

The young man nodded. “Give me the message.”

From some pocket inside his checked jacket the caller produced an envelope and passed it across the counter. It was acknowledged by another nod, dropped on a ledge, and the big messenger went out. The young Chinaman went on writing.

A minute or so later, a point of light glowed below the counter, where it would have remained invisible to a customer had one been in the shop.

The envelope was placed in a tiny cupboard and a stud was pressed. The light under the counter vanished, and the immobile shopman went on writing. He wrote with a brush, using India ink, in the beautiful, difficult idiograms of classic Chinese.

Upstairs, in a room the walls of which were decorated with panels of painted silk, old Huan Tsung sat on a divan. He resembled the traditional portrait of Confucius. From a cupboard at his elbow corresponding to that in the shop below, he took out the message, read it, and dropped message and envelope into a brazier of burning charcoal.

He replaced the mouthpiece of a long-stemmed pipe between his wrinkled lips.

On a low-set red lacquer stool beside the divan was a crystal globe, similar in appearance to that upon the long, narrow table in the study adjoining Professor Hoffmeyer’s office.

Nothing occurred for some time. Huan Tsung smoked contentedly, reflection from the brazier lending a demoniac quality to his benign features.

Then the crystal globe came to life, like a minor moon emerging from a cloud. Within it materialized a gaunt, wonderful face, the brow of a philosopher, green, fanatical eyes in which slumbered the fires of an imperious will.

Below, in the shop, but inaudible in the silk-walled room above, a phone buzzed. The patient writer laid his brush aside, took up the instrument, and listened. He replaced it, scribbled a few pencilled lines, put the paper in the cupboard, and pressed the button.

Huan Tsung, with a movement of his hand, removed the message. He glanced at it—and dropped the sheet into the brazier. The face in the globe had fully materialized. Compelling eyes looked into his own. Huan Tsung spoke.

“You called me. Doctor?”

“No doubt you have later reports.”

“The last one. Excellency, just to hand, is timed 7.26 p.m. Nayland Smith left Centre Street at seven twenty-three. Our agent, following, carried-out the operation successfully—”

“Successfully!” A note of anger became audible in the sibilant tones. “I may misunderstand you. What method was used?”

“B.W. 63, of which I have a little left, and the feathered darts. I instructed Sha Mu, who is expert, and he succeeded at the second attempt. He passed the police car undetected and retired in safety. Nayland Smith was taken, without being removed from the car, to the Rockefeller Institute.”

Huan Tsung’s eyes were closed. His features were a mask of complacency. There was a brief silence.

“Open your eyes!” Huan Tsung did so, and shrank. “They think Professor Lowe may save him. They are wrong. Your action was ill considered. Await instructions to establish contact.”

“Excellency’s order noted.”

“Summarize any other reports.”

“There are few of importance. The Emir Omar Khan died in Teheran this morning.”

“That is well. Nayland Smith’s visit to Teheran was wasted. Instruct Teheran.”

“Excellency’s order noted. There is no later report from Moscow and none from London.”

Silence fell. The green eyes in the crystal mirror grew clouded, filmed over in an almost pathological way. The cloud passed. They blazed again like emeralds.

“You have destroyed that which might have been of use to us. Furthermore, you have aroused a nest of wasps. Our task was hard enough. You make it harder. A disappearance—yes. I had planned one. But this clumsy assassination—”

“I thought I had done well.”

“A legitimate thought is the child of wisdom and experience. Thoughts, like children, may be bastards.”

Light faded from the crystal. Old Huan Tsung smoked, considering the problem of human fallibility.

* * *

“This is stupendous!” Nayland Smith whispered

With Morris Craig, he stood under a dome which occupied one end of the Huston laboratory. It was opaque but contained four small openings. Set in it, rather as in an observatory, was an instrument closely resembling a huge telescope, except that it appeared to be composed of some dull black metal and had no lense.

Through the four openings, Nayland Smith could see the stars.

Like Craig, he wore green-tinted goggles.

That part of the instrument where, in a real telescope, the eye-piece would be, rested directly over a solid table topped with a six-inch-thick sheet of a grey mineral substance. A massive portcullis of the same material enclosed the whole. It had just been raised. An acrid smell filled the air.

“Some of the Manhattan rock below us is radioactive,” Craig had explained. “So, in a certain degree, are the buildings. Until I found that out, I got no results.”

Complex machinery mounted on a concrete platform, machinery which emitted a sort of radiance and created vibrations which seemed to penetrate one’s spine, had been disconnected by Regan from its powerful motors.

In a dazzling, crackling flash, Nayland Smith had seen a lump of solid steel not melt, but disperse, disintegrate, vanish!

A pinch of greyish powder alone remained.

“Keep the goggles on for a minute,” said Craig. “Of course, you understand that this is merely a model plant. I might explain that the final problem, which I think I have solved, is the transmuter.”

“Nice word,” snapped Smith. “What does it mean?”

“Well—it’s more than somewhat difficult to define. Sort of ring-a-ring of neutrons, pocket full of plutrons. It’s a method of controlling and directing the enormous power generated here.”

Nayland Smith was silent for a moment. He was dazed by the thing he had seen, appalled by its implications.

“If I understand you, Craig,” he said rapidly, “this device enables you to tap the great belt of ultraviolet rays which, you tell me, encloses the earth’s atmosphere a hundred miles above the ionosphere—whatever that is.”

“Roughly speaking—yes. The term, ultraviolet, is merely one of convenience. Like marmalade for a preparation containing no oranges.”

“So far, so good. Now tell me—when your transmuter is completed, what can you do with this thing?”

“Well”—Craig removed his goggles and brushed his hair back— “I could probably prevent any kind of projectile, or plane, from entering the earth’s atmosphere over a controlled area. That is, if I could direct my power upward and outward.”

“Neutralizing the potential of atomic warfare?”

“I suppose it would.”

“What about directed downward and inward?” rapped Smith.

“Well”—Craig smiled modestly—”that’s all I can do at the moment. And you have seen one result.”

Nayland Smith snatched the goggles from his eyes.

“Do you realize what this means?”

“Clearly. What?”

“It means that you’re a focus of interest for God knows how many trained agents. I know now why New York has become a hotbed of spies. You don’t appreciate your own danger.”

Morris Craig began to feel bewildered.

“Do try to be lucid. Smith. What danger? Why should I be in danger?”

Nayland Smith’s expression grew almost savage.

“Was I in danger today? Then tell me what became of Dr. Sven Helsen—inventor of the Helsen lamp?”

“That’s easy I don’t know.”

“And of Professor Chiozza, in his stratoplane, in which he went up to pass out of the earth’s atmosphere?”

“Probably passed out of same—and stayed out.”

“Not a bit of it. Dr. Fu Manchu destroys obstacles as we destroy flies. But he collects specialized brains as some men collect rare postage stamps. How do you get in and out of this place at night when the corporation offices are closed?”

“By special elevator from the thirty-second. There’s a private door on the street, used by Mr. Frobisher, and a small elevator to his office on the thirty-second. Research staff have master keyes. All secure?”

“From ordinary intruders. But this thing is a hundred times bigger than I even suspected. If ever a man played with fire without knowing it, you are that man. Russia,1 know, has an agent here.”

“Present the moujik. I yearn to greet this comrade.”

“I can’t. I haven’t spotted him yet. But I have reason to believe our own land of hope and glory is onto you as well.”

Craig, in the act of opening the laboratory door, paused. He turned slowly.

“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?

For that matter, what did he, Morris Craig, intend to do with it?

He had to admit to himself that he had never, from the moment of inspiration which had led to these results right up to this present hour, given a thought to possible applications of the monstrous force he had harnessed.

Brushing back that obstinate forelock, he dismissed these ideas which were non-productive, merely disturbing, and sat down to read two letters which Camille Navarre had left to be signed. He possessed the capacity, indispensable to success in research, of banishing any train of thought not directly concerned with the problem before him.

But, even as he picked up the typed pages, another diversion intruded.

A pair of black-rimmed glasses lay on the desk. He knew they were Camille’s, and he was surprised that she had not missed them.

He had often wondered what defect marred those beautiful eyes, and so he removed his own glasses and put hers on.

Craig’s sight was good, and he aided it during prolonged work merely to combat a slight astigmatism of the left eye. His lenses magnified only very slightly.

But—Camille’s didn’t magnify at all!

He satisfied himself that they were, in fact, nothing but plain glass, before laying them down.

Having signed the letters, he pressed a button.

Camille entered composedly and crossed to the desk.

“It was so stupid of me, Dr. Craig,” she said, “but I must have left my glasses here when I brought the letters in.”

Craig looked up at her. Yes, she had glorious eyes. He thought they were very deep blue, but they seemed to change in sympathy with her thoughts or emotions. Their evasive color reminded him of the Mediterranean on a day when high clouds scudded across the sky.

She met his glance for a moment and then turned aside, taking up the typed pages and the black-rimmed glasses.

“That last cylinder was rather scratchy, and there are one or two words I’m uncertain about.”

But Craig continued to look at her.

“Why wear those things at all?” he inquired. “You wouldn’t miss ‘em.”

“What do you mean. Dr. Craig?”

“Well—they’re plain glass, aren’t they? Why wear two bits of windowpane—in such perfectly lovely optics?”

Camille hesitated. She had not been prepared for his making this discovery, and her heart was beating very fast.

“Really, I suppose it must seem strange. I know they don’t magnify. But, somehow, they help me to concentrate.”

“Avoid concentration,” Craig advised earnestly. “I greatly prefer you when you’re relaxin’. I have looked over the letter—”

“I did my best with it.”

“Your best is perfection. Exactly what I said, and stickily technical.” He looked up at her with frank admiration. “Your scientific equipment is A-l wizard. Full marks for the Sorbonne.”

Camille veiled her eyes. She had long lashes which Craig felt sure were an act of God and not of Elizabeth Arden.

But all she said was, “Thank you. Dr. Craig,” spoken in a tone oddly constrained.

Carrying the signed letters and her glasses, she moved away. Craig turned and looked after the trim figure.

“Slip out now,” he advised, “for a plate of wholesome fodder. You stick it too closely. So long as you can give me an hour from ten onward, all’s well in a beautiful world.”

“Perhaps I may go out—although I’m really not hungry.”

She went into her room and closed the door. For a long time she sat there, the useless glasses in her hand, staring straight before her. . . He was so kind, so delicately sympathetic. He almost apologized when he had to give orders, masking them under that affected form of speech which led many people to think him light-minded, but which had never deceived Camille.

Of course, he was brilliantly clever. One day the people of the world would wake up to find a new genius come among them.

He was so clever that she found it hard to believe he had really accepted her explanation. She had done her best on the urge of the moment, but it was only postponing the evil hour. Camille had never, before that day, met Sir Denis Nayland Smith, but his reputation made discovery certain. And he would tell Morris.

Or would he? Meanwhile, Craig was tidying up prior to going out to join Nayland Smith. He arranged pencils, bowls of ink, and like impedimenta in some sort of order. The board to which the plan was pinned he lifted from its place and carried across the office. Before a large safe he set it down, pulled out a key-ring, manipulated the dial, and unlocked the safe.

He placed the plan inside and relocked the steel door.

This done, he returned to his desk and pressed a button on the switchboard.

“Laboratory,” said a tired voice. “Regan speaking.”

“I’m cutting out for some dinner, Regan. Anything you want to see me about before I go?”

“Nothing, Doctor.”

“Right. Back around ten.”

He stood up—then remained standing, for a moment, quite still, and listening.

The sound of a short, harsh cough, more like that of a dog who has swallowed a fragment of bone than of a human being, had reached his ears.

Crossing, he opened the office door and looked out. The landing was empty.

“Sam!” he called.

Sam appeared from somewhere, chewing industriously.

“Yes, boss?”

“Did you cough?”

“Me? No, sir. Why?”

“Thought I heard someone coughing. Stand by. I want you to come along with me in a minute.”

He returned took his jacket from a hook and put it on: then draped his topcoat over his arm. He was just reaching for his hat, when he remembered something. Dropping the coat over the back of a chair, he crossed to the door of Camille’s room, rapped, and opened.

She looked up in a startled way, glancing at the glasses beside her.

“Sorry—er—Miss Navarre, but may I borrow your key? Lent mine to Nayland Smith.”

Camille’s eyes appeared to Craig to change color, but that faint twitch of the lip which heralded a smile reassured him.

“Certainly, Dr. Craig.”

She pulled a ring out of her handbag and began to detach the key which opened both elevators and the street door. Craig watched her deft white fingers, noting with approval that she did not go in for the kind of nail varnish which suggests that its wearer has been disembowelling a pig.

And as he watched, the meaning of Camille’s repressed smile suddenly came to him.

“I say!” he exclaimed. “Just a minute. Pause. Give me time to reflect.”

Camille looked up.

“Yes. Dr. Craig?”

“How are you going to cut out for eats, as recommended, if I pinch your key?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter a little bit.”

“Doesn’t matter? It matters horribly. I’m not going to leave you locked up here in the ogre’s tower with no means of escape. I firmly repeat—pause. I will borrow Regan’s key.”

“But—”

“There are no buts. I want you to nip out for a speck of nourishment, like a good girl.”

He waved his hand and was gone

Camille sat looking towards the door for fully a minute after it had closed.

* * *

“It may be best,” said Nayland Smith, “if we dine in the restaurant here. I expect calls, too.”

“Must say I’ll breathe more freely,” Craig admitted. “I never expected to slink around New York as if crossing enemy territory. What news of Moreno?”

Smith knocked ash from his pipe with unusual care.

“Poor devil,” he said softly.

“Like that, is it?”

Smith nodded. “I went there after leaving you. His wife had been sent for. Nice kid, little more than a child. Only married six months. Maddison Lowe is probably the ace man in his province, but he’s beaten this time.”

“Have they identified the stuff used?”

“No. It’s nothing on the order of curari. And there are no tetanus symptoms. He’s just completely unconscious, and slowly dying. I suppose I should feel indebted to Dr. Fu Manchu. It’s evidently a painless death.”

“Good God, Smith! You make me shudder. What kind of man is this?”

“A genius, Craig. He is above ordinary emotions. Men and women are just pieces on the board. Any that become useless, or obstructive, he removes. It’s quite logical.”

“It may be. But it isn’t human.”

“You are not the first to doubt if Dr. Fu Manchu is human, in the generally accepted sense of the word. Certainly he has long outlived man’s normal span. He claims to have mastered the secret of prolonging life.”

“Do you believe it?”

“I can’t doubt it. He was elderly from all accounts when I first set eyes on him, in a Burmese forest. He nearly did for me, then—using the same method—as he has done for poor Moreno, now. And that was more years ago than I care to count.”

“Good heavens! How old is he?”

“God knows. Come on. Let’s get some dinner. We have a lot to talk about.”

As they entered the restaurant, to be greeted by a maitre d’hotel who knew Nayland Smith, Craig saw the steely eyes turning swiftly right and left. With the ease of one who has been a target for criminals all over the world, Smith was analyzing every face in the room.

“That table by the wall,” he rapped, pointing.

“I am so sorry, Sir Denis. That table is reserved.”

“Reserve another, and say you made a mistake.”

A ten-dollar bill went far to clinch the matter. There was some running about by waiters, whispering and side glances, to which Nayland Smith paid no attention. As he and Craig sat down:

“You note,” he explained tersely, “I can see the entrance from here. Adjoining table occupied. People harmless . . .”

Whilst Morris Craig attacked a honeydew melon, Smith covertly watched him. and then:

“Highly attractive girl, that secretary of yours,” he jerked casually.

Craig looked up.

“Quite agree. Highly competent, too.”

“Remarkable hair.”

“Ah, you noticed it! Pity she hides it like that.”

“Hides her eyes, too,” said Smith drily.

But Craig did not reply. He had been tempted to do so, and then had changed his mind. Instead he studied a wine list which a waiter had just handed to him. As he ordered a bottle of Chateau Margaux, he was thinking, “Has Camille gone out? Where has she gone? Is she doing herself well?” Yes, Camille had remarkable hair, and her eyes— For some obscure reason he found himself wondering who could have coughed in the office just before he left, and wondering, too, in view of the fact that, failing Sam, it was quite unaccountable, why he had dismissed the incident so lightly.

“The devil of it is, Craig,” Nayland Smith was saying, “that Fu Manchu, who has come dangerously near to upsetting the order of things more than once, is no common criminal.”

“Evidently”

“He doesn’t work for personal gain. He’s a sort of cranky idealist. I said tonight that I prayed you might never meet him. The prayer was a sincere one. The force which Dr. Fu Manchu can project is as dangerous, in its way, as that which you have trapped in your laboratory. Five minutes in his company would convince you that you stood in the presence of a phenomenal character.”

“I’m prepared to believe you. But I don’t understand how such a modern Cesare Borgia can wander around New York and escape the police!”

Nayland Smith leaned across the table and fixed his steady gaze on Craig.

“Dr. Fu Manchu,” he said deliberately, “will never be arrested by any ordinary policeman. In my opinion, the plant on top of the Huston Building should be smashed to smithereens.” His speech became rapid, rattling. “It’s scientific lunatics like you who make life perilous. Agents of three governments are watching you. I may manage the agents—but I won’t make myself responsible for Dr. Fu Manchu.”

* * *

Could Morris Craig have seen the face of the Chinese doctor at that moment, he might better have appreciated Nayland Smith’s warning.

In his silk-lined apartment in Pell Street, old Huan Tsung was contemplating the crystal as a Tibetan devotee contemplates the Grand Lama. Mirrored within it was that wonderful face, dominated by the blazing green eyes.

“I am served,” came sibilantly in Chinese, “by fools and knaves. We, of the Seven, are pledged to save the world from destruction by imbeciles. It seems that we are children, and blind ourselves.”

Huan Tsung did not speak. The cold voice continued.

“We betray our presence, our purpose, and our methods, to the common man-hunters. Had this purpose been achieved, we should have been justified. We need so short a time. Interference, now, can be fatal. But the method employed was clumsy. This victim of your blundering must not die.”

“Compassion, Excellency, is an attribute of the weak.”

The compelling eyes remained fixed upon him.

“Rejoice, then, that I entertain it for you. Otherwise you would have joined your revered ancestors tonight. I am moved by expediency—which is an attribute of the wise. In the death of a police officer the seed of retribution is sown. I must remain here until my work is done. If he dies, I shall be troubled. If he survives, the affair becomes less serious. In one hour from now he will be dead—unless we act. I am preparing the antidote. It is for you to find means to administer it . . . Take instant steps.”

The light in the crystal faded.

As a result of this conversation, just as Craig had begun on the sweet, Nayland Smith was called to the phone.

He was not away long. But when he came back, his face wore a curious expression. In part, it was an expression of relief—in part, of something else. As he sat down:

“A miracle has been performed in Manhattan,” he said.

Craig stared. “What do you mean?”

“What! Professor Lowe has won, after all?”

Nayland Smith shook his head.

“No. Professor Lowe was beaten. But some obscure practitioner, instructed by Moreno’s father, insisted upon seeing the patient. As the case was desperate, and the unknown doctor—who had practised in the tropics—claimed to recognize the symptoms, he was given permission to go ahead. Moreno would have died, anyway.”

“But he didn’t?”

“On the contrary. He recovered consciousness shortly after the injection which this obscure doctor administered. He is already off the danger list.”

“This was a brilliant bird. Smith! He doesn’t deserve to be obscure.”

Nayland Smith tugged reflectively at the lobe of his left ear.

“He must remain so. The physician whose name he gave is absent in Philadelphia. Officer Moreno’s father was not even aware of his son’s illness.”

Huan Tsung had taken instant steps. But Craig laid his spoon down in bewilderment.

“Then—I mean to say—if he was an impostor—what the devil’s it all about?”

“Perfectly simple. For some deep reason we can’t hope to fathom, Dr. Fu Manchu has decided that Moreno must live. I fear he has also decided that I must die. Granting equal efficiency, what are my chances?”

Chapter V

Sam was free until nine forty-five. He studied the menus displayed outside a number of restaurants suitable for one of limited resources, before making a selection. His needs were simple, it seemed, and having finished his dinner, he moved along to a bar, mounted a stool, and ordered himself a bourbon.

Seated there, in his short leather jacket, a cap with a very long peak pushed to the back of his bullet head, he surveyed the scene through his spectacles whilst lighting a cigarette.

“You’re with the Huston Electric, aren’t you?” said someone almost at his elbow.

Sam turned. A personable young man, of Latin appearance, had mounted the next stool and was smiling at him amiably. Sam stared.

“What about it?” he inquired.

“Oh, nothing. Just thought I’d seen you there.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Newspaper story. I’m a reporter.”

“Is that so?”

Sam eyed the reporter from head to heels, without favor.

“Sure. Laurillard’s my name—Jed Laurillard. And I’m always out for a good story.”

“Well, well,” said Sam.

“Push that back and have the other half. Just going to order one myself.”

“That’s fine. My name’s Sam.”

“Sam what?”

“Sam.”

“I mean, what’s your other name?”

“Tim.’

“Your name is Sam Jim?”

“You got it the wrong way around. Jim Sam.”

“I never heard of it before. How do you spell it?”

“S-a-m. I got an uncle the same name.”

For the decimal of a second, Laurillard’s jaw hardened. Then the hard line relaxed. He slapped Sam on the back and laughed, signalling the barman.

“You’re wasting your time,” he declared. “You ought to be in show business.”

Sam grinned, but made no reply. The second bourbon went the way of the first, apparently meeting with even less obstruction.

“This new thing Huston is bringing out,” Laurillard went on. “Breaking into the news next week, isn’t it?”

Sam held up his empty glass and appeared to be using it as a lense through which to count the bottles in the bar.

“Is it?” he said.

“You ought to know.” Laurillard signalled the barman again. “If I could get the exact date it would be worth money to me.”

“Would it? How much?”

“Well”—speculatively, he watched Sam considering his third drink—”enough to make it worth, say, fifty bucks to you.”

Sam looked at Laurillard over the top of his spectacles and finished his drink. He made no other reply. Laurillard caught the barman’s eye and glanced aside at Sam’s glass. It was refilled.

For some time after the fourth, the barman, who was busy, lost count.

“You know what I’m talking about?” Laurillard presently inquired. “This new lighting system?”

“Sure.”

“Some English scientist working on it.”

“Sure.”

“Well, when the story breaks it’s going to be big. Science news is a dollar a word these days. Hurt nobody if I got it first. You’re a live guy. I spotted you first time I was up there. Never miss one. It’s my business—see?”

Sam emptied his glass and nodded.

“Suppose you made a few inquiries. No harm in that. I could meet you here tomorrow. Any time you say.”

“What you wanna know, exac—xactly?” Sam inquired.

His glance had become oblique. Laurillard signalled the barman and leaned forward confidentially.

“Get this.” He lowered his voice. “I want to know when the job will be finished. That gives me a lead. It’s easy enough.”

A full glass was set before Sam.

“Goo’ luck,” he said, raising it.

“Same to you. What time tomorrow, here?”

“Same to you—mean, same time.”

“Good enough. I must rush. Hard life, reporting.”

Laurillard rushed. Outside, he looked in through the window and saw Sam raising the drink to his lips, sympathetically watched by the barman. What happened after that he didn’t see. He was hurrying to the spot where his car was parked.

He had some distance to go, but less than twenty minutes later the doorbell jangled in that Chinatown shop where a good looking young Oriental labored tirelessly with India ink and brush. He laid his brush aside and looked up.

“Mr. Huan Tsung?” said Laurillard.

“Mr. Huan Tsung not in. You call before?”

Laurillard seemed to be consulting his memory, but, after a momentary pause, he replied.

“Yes.”

“How many time?”

“Seven.”

“Give me the message.”

Laurillard leaned confidentially forward.

“The man from Huston Electric is taken care of. He’s too drunk to go far. What’s better, I’ve sounded him—and I think he’ll play. That’s why I came to see you.”

“I think,” was the cold reply, “that you are a fool.” The young Oriental spoke now in perfect English. “You have exceeded your instructions. You are new to the work. You will never grow old in it.”

“But—”

“I have no more to say. I will put in your report.” He scribbled a few lines in pencil, took up his brush, and went on writing.

Laurillard’s jaw hardened, and he clenched his gloved hands. “Good-bye,” said the industrious scribe. Laurillard went out.

In his report concerning Sam he had stated, quite honestly, what he believed to be true. But evidently he was mistaken.

Not three minutes had elapsed before the doorbell jangled again. A man came lurching in who walked as if on a moving deck. He wore a short leather jacket and a cap with a long peak. His eyes, seen through spectacles, were challenging. He chewed as he talked, using the gum as a sort of mute.

“Say—have you got a pipe-cleaner?” he inquired.

The young Oriental, without laying his brush down, slightly raised his eyes.

“Nohab.”

“What’s the use of a joint like this that don’t carry pipe-cleaners?” Sam demanded. He looked all around, truculently. “Happen to have a bit of string?”

“No string.”

Sam chewed and glared down awhile at the glossy black head bent over the writing. Then, with a parting grunt, Sam went out.

The young Chinese student scribbled another note in pencil.

* * *

Camille sat quite still in her room for so long after Craig had gone that she lost all count of time.

He had not quite shut the door, and dimly she had become aware that he was calling Regan. She heard the sound of voices when Regan came out of the laboratory; then heard the laboratory door closed.

After which, silence fell.

The work she had come here to do grew harder every day, every hour. There were times when she rebelled inwardly against the obligations which bound her. There were other times when she fought against her heart. There was no time when her mind was otherwise than in a state of tumult.

It could not go on. But where did her plain duty lie?

The silence of the place oppressed her. Often, alone here at night—as she was, sometimes—she had experienced something almost like terror. True, always Shaw or Regan would be on duty in the laboratory, but a locked iron door set them apart. This terror was not quite a physical thing. Camille was fully alive to the fact that spies watched Morris’s work. But it wasn’t any attempt from this quarter which dismayed her.

A deeper terror lay somewhere in the subconscious, a long way down.

Who was Dr. Fu Manchu?

She had heard that strange name spoken, for the first time, by Morris. He had been talking to Nayland Smith. Then—she had received a warning from another source.

But, transcending this shadowy menace, fearful as the unknown always must be, loomed something else—greater.

That part of Camille which was French, and therefore realist, challenged the wisdom of latter-day science, asked if greater and greater speed, more and more destructive power, were leading men to more and greater happiness. Her doubts were not new. They had come between her and the lecturers at the Sorbonne. She had confided them to a worthy priest of her acquaintance. But he, poor man, had been unable to give her guidance in this particular spiritual problem.

If God were a reality—and Camille, whilst not a communicant, was a Christian in her bones—surely such experiments as men of science were making today must anger Him?

In what degree did they differ from those which had called down a divine wrath on the Tower of Babel?

To what new catastrophe would this so-called Science lead the world? Morris Craig’s enthusiasm for research she understood. It was this same eager curiosity which had driven her through the tedium of a science training. But did he appreciate that the world might be poisoned by the fruits of his creative genius?

Often it had come to her, in lonely, reflective moments, that the wonderful, weird thing which Morris had created might be a cause of laughter in Hell . . .

What was that?

Camille thought she had heard the sound of a harsh, barking cough.

Before her cool brain had entirely assumed command, before the subconscious, troubled self could be conquered, she was out of her room and staring all around an empty office.

Of course, it was empty.

Regan, she knew, stood watch in the laboratory. The plant ran day and night, and a record was kept of the alternations (so far inexplicable) of that cosmic force which had been tapped by the genius of Morris Craig. But no sound could penetrate from the laboratory.

She opened the office door and called:

“Sam!”

There was no reply. She remembered, now, hearing Morris instructing the handyman to go somewhere with him.

A great urge for human sympathy, for any kind of contact, overcame her. She glanced at the switchboard. She would call Regan. He was a cynical English northcountryman who had admired her predecessor, Miss Lewis, and who resented the newcomer. But he was better than nobody.

Then she thought of her phone call, which had been interrupted earlier in the evening. A swift recognition of what it had meant, of what it would mean to make the same call again, swept her into sudden desolation.

What was she going to do? Her plan, her design for life, had not worked out. Something had gone awry.

She must face facts. Morris Craig had crossed her path. She could not serve two masters. Which was it to be? Once again—where did her duty lie?

Listening tensely, her brain a battlefield of warring emotions, Camille turned and went back to her room. Seated at her desk, she dialled a number, and went on listening, not to a distant ring but to the silence beyond her open door. She waited anxiously, for she had come to a decision. But for a long time there was no reply.

The silent office outside was empty. So that there was no one to see a figure, a dark silhouette against the sky, against those unwatching eyes which still remained alive in one distant tower dominating the Huston Building. It was a hulking, clumsy figure, not unlike that of a great ape. It passed along the parapet outside the office windows . . .

“Yes?” Camille had got through. “Nine-nine here.”

She had swung around in her chair, so that she no longer faced the open door.

“If you please.”

She waited again.

Silently the door had been fully opened. The huge figure stood there. It was that of a man of formidably powerful physique. His monstrous shoulders, long arms, and large hands had something unnatural in their contours, as had his every movement, his behavior. He wore blue overalls. His swarthy features might have reminded a surgeon of a near successful grafting operation.

“Yes,” Camille said urgently. “Can I see you, tonight—at once?” The intruder took one silent step forward. Camille saw him. She dropped the receiver, sprang up, and retreated, her hands outstretched to fend off horror. She gasped. To scream was impossible.

“My God!” (Unknown to herself, she whispered the words in French.) “Who are you? What do you want?”

“I—want”—it was a mechanical, toneless, grating voice—”you.”

Chapter VI

When Morris Craig returned to his office, it remained as he had left it, illuminated only by two desk lights. He glanced automatically at the large electric clock on the wall above and saw that the hour was nine-fifty-five. He took off his topcoat and hung it up with his hat and jacket.

He was back on time.

What had Nayland Smith said?—”You’re a pure fanatic. Some lunatic like you will blow the world to bits one of these days. You’re science drunk. Even now, you’re dancing to get away . . .”

Craig stared out of the window. Many rooms in that towering building which overtopped the Huston were dark now, so that he thought of a London coster dressed in “pearlies” from which most of the buttons had been torn off. Yes, he had felt eager to get back.

Was it the call of science—of that absorbing problem which engaged his mind? Or was it, in part at least, Camille?

If the latter, then it simply wouldn’t do. In the life of a scientist steeped in an investigation which might well revolutionize human society there was no place for that sort of thing. When his work was finished—well, perhaps he might indulge in the luxury of thinking about an attractive woman.

Thus, silently. Dr. Morris Craig communed with himself— quite failing to appreciate the fact that he was thinking about an attractive woman all the time.

Nayland Smith suspected this interest. Hard to deceive Smith. And, somehow (Craig couldn’t pin down the impression), he felt that Smith didn’t approve. Of course, recognition had come to Craig, suddenly staggeringly, of the existence of danger he had never suspected.

He moved among shadowy menaces. Not all of them were intangible. He had seen the hand of Dr. Fu Manchu stretch out, fail in its grasp, and then bestow life upon one given up to death.

Dr. Fu Manchu . . . No, this was not the time to involve a girl in the affairs of a man marked down by Dr. Fu Manchu.

Craig glanced towards the door of Camille’s room, then sat down resolutely and touched a control.

“Laboratory,” came. “Regan here.”

“Thought I’d let you know I’m back, Regan. How are the readings?”

“Particularly irregular. Doctor. You might like to see them?”

“I will, Regan, presently. Nothing else to report?”

“Nothing.”

Craig stood up again, and crossed to the office door, which he opened

“Sam!”

“Hello,boss?”

Sam emerged from some cubbyhole which served as his headquarters. He had discarded the leather jacket and the cap with a long peak, and was resuming overalls and eye shade.”

“Is there any need for you to hang around?”

“Sure—plenty. Mr. Regan he told me to report back. There’s some job in the lab needs fixing up.”

“I see.” Craig smiled. “You’re not just sort of killing time until I go home, so that you can dog my weary footsteps?”

Sam tried an expression of injured innocence. But it didn’t suit him.

“Listen, Doctor—”

“Sir Denis tipped you to keep an eye on me until I was tucked up safely in my downy cot. Did he or didn’t he?”

“Well, maybe he figures there’s perils in this great city—”

“You mean, he did?”

“I guess that’s right.”

“I thought so. Just wanted to know.” Craig took out his keys and turned. “I’m going into the lab now. Come on.”

Followed by Sam, he crossed and went up the three steps to the metal door. As he unlocked it, eerie greenish-grey light shone out and a faint humming sound, as of a giant hornets’ nest, crept around the office. A moment later, the door closed as they went in.

The office remained silent and empty whilst the minute hand of the clock swept the dial three times. There was an attachment which sounded the hours, and its single bell note had just rung out on the stroke of ten, when Camille came in.

She stood quite still for a moment one hand resting on the edge of the door, her slim fingers looking curiously listless. Then she came right inside and opened her handbag. Taking out the black-rimmed glasses, she stared at them as though they were unfamiliar in some way. Her glance wandered to the clock.

It would have seemed to one watching her that the clock had some special significance, some urgent message to impart; for Camille’s expression changed. Almost, she might have been listening to explicit instructions. Her gaze grew alert.

She crossed to her room and went in, leaving the door half open.

Then, again, silence fell. By ones and twos, the gleaming buttons imagined by Craig disappeared from the pearly scheme which decorated a nocturne framed by long windows.

When Craig opened the laboratory door, he paused at the head of the steps.

“Be at ease, Sam. I will not stir a yard without my keeper.”

He closed and locked the door, came down, and went straight across to the safe. Resolutely he avoided looking toward Camille’s room to see if she had come back.

From his ring he selected the safe key, and spun the dial. Not until he took out his big drawing board, and turned, did he see Camille.

She stood right at his elbow, in shadows.

Craig was really startled.

“Good Lord, my dear!—I thought I’d seen a ghost!”

Camille’s smile was vague. “Please forgive me. Didn’t—you know—I was here?”

Craig laughed reassuringly.

“Forgive me. I shouldn’t be such a jumping frog. When did you come in?”

“A few minutes ago.” He saw now that she held a notebook in her hand. “There is this letter to Dr. White, at Harvard. I must have forgotten it.”

Craig carried the board over to its place and fixed it up. Camille slowly followed. When he was satisfied, he suddenly grasped her shoulders and turned her around so that the reflected light from the drawing desk shone up onto her face.

“My dear—er—Miss Navarre, you have, beyond any shade of doubt, been overdoin’ it. I warned you. The letter to Dr. White went off with the other mail. I distinctly recall signing same.”

“Oh!” Camille looked down at her notebook.

Craig dropped his hands from her shoulders and settled himself on the stool. He drew a tray of pencils nearer.

“I quite understand,” he said quietly. “Done the same thing myself, lots of times. Fact is, we’re both overtired. I shan’t be long on the job tonight. We have been at it very late here for weeks now. Leave me to it. I suggest you hit the hay good and early.’

“But—I am sorry”—her accent grew more marked, more fascinating—”if I seem distrait—”

“Did you cut out for eats, as prescribed?”

Craig didn’t look around.

“No. I—just took a walk “

“Then take another one—straight home. Explore the icebox, refresh the tired frame, and seek repose. Expect you around ten in the morning. My fault, asking you to come back.”

* * *

Camille sat on the studio couch in her small apartment, trying to reconstruct events of the night.

She couldn’t.

It baffled her, and she was frightened.

There were incidents which were vague, and this was alarming enough. But there were whole hours which were entirely blank!

The vague incidents had occurred just before she left the Huston Building. Morris had been wonderfully sympathetic, and his kindness had made her desperately unhappy. Why had this been so? She found herself quite unable to account for it. Their entire relationship had assumed the character of an exquisite torture; but what had occurred on this particular occasion to make the torture so poignant?

What had she been doing just before that last interview!

She had only a hazy impression of writing something in a notebook, tearing the page off, and—then?

Camille stared dreamily at the telephone standing on her bureau. Had she made a call since her return? She moved over and took up the waste-basket. There were tiny fragments of ruled paper there. Evidently she had torn something up, with great care.

Her heart beginning to beat more swiftly, she stooped and examined the scraps of paper, no larger than confetti disks. Traces of writing appeared, but some short phrase, whatever it was, had been torn apart accurately, retorn, and so made utterly undecipherable.

Camille dropped down again on the divan and sat there staring straight before her with unseeing eyes.

Could it be that she had overtaxed her brain—that this was the beginning of a nervous collapse? For, apart from her inability to recall exactly what she had done before leaving the office, she had no recollection whatever, vague or other wise, of the two hours preceding her last interview with Morris!

Her memory was sharp, clear-cut, up to the moment she had lifted the phone on her own desk to make a certain call. This had been some time before eight. Whether she ever made that call, or not, she had no idea. Her memory held no record of the interval between then and Morris telling her she seemed tired and insisting that she go home.

But over two hours had elapsed—two lost hours!

Sleep was going to be difficult. She had an urge for coffee, but knew that it was the wrong thing in the circumstances. She went into the kitchenette and cut herself two sandwiches. She ate them standing there while she warmed some milk. This, and a little fruit, made up her supper.

When she had prepared the bed and undressed, she still felt wide-awake but had no inclination to read. Switching the lights off, she stood at the window looking down into the street. A number of darkened cars were parked on both sides, and while she stood there several taxis passed. There were few pedestrians.

All these things she noted in a subconscious way. They had no particular interest for her. She was trying all the time to recapture those lost hours. Never in her life before had such a thing happened to her. It was appalling . . .

At last, something taking place in the street below dragged her wandering mind back to the present, the actual.

A big man—abnormally big—stood almost opposite. He appeared to be looking up at her window. Something in his appearance, his hulking, apelike pose, struck a chord of memory, sharp, terrifying, but shapeless, unresolved.

Camille watched him. His presence might have nothing to do with her. He could be looking at some other window. But she felt sure he was looking at hers.

When, as she watched, he moved away, loose-armed and shambling, she stepped to the end of the bay and followed his ungainly figure with her eyes. From here, she could just see Central Park, and at the comer the man paused—seemed to be looking back.

Camille stole across her darkened room to the lobby, and bolted and chained the door.

A wave of unaccountable terror had swept over her.

Why?

She had never, to her knowledge, seen the man before. He was a dangerous-looking type, but her scanty possessions were unlikely to interest a housebreaker. Nevertheless, she dreaded the dark hours ahead and knew that hope of sleep had become even more remote.

Lowering the Venetian blinds, she switched up her bedside lamp and toyed with a phial of sleeping tablets. She had known many restless nights of late, but dreaded becoming a drug addict. Finally, shrugging her shoulders, she swallowed one, got into bed, and sipped the rest of the warm milk.

She did not recall turning the light out. But, just as she was dozing off, a sound of heavy, but curiously furtive, footsteps on the stair aroused her. There was no elevator.

The sound died away—if she had really heard and not imagined it.

Sleep crept upon her unnoticed . . .

She dreamed that she stood in a dimly lighted, thickly carpeted room. It was peculiarly silent, and there was a sickly-sweet smell in the air, a smell which she seemed to recognize yet couldn’t identify. She was conscious of one impulse only. To escape from this silent room.

But a man wearing a yellow robe sat behind a long, narrow table, watching her. And the regard of his glittering green eyes held her as if chained to the spot upon which she stood. He seemed to be draining her of all vitality, all power of resistance. She thought of the shell of a fly upon which a spider has feasted.

She knew in her dream, but couldn’t remember a word that had passed, that this state of inertia was due to a pitiless cross-examination to which she had been subjected.

The examination was over, and now she was repeating orders already given. She knew herself powerless to disobey them.

“On the stroke of ten. Repeat the time.”

“On the stroke of ten.”

“Repeat what you have to write.”

“The safe combination used by Dr. Craig.”

“When are you to await a call in your apartment?”

“At eleven o’clock.”

“Who will call you?”

“You will call me . . .”

She was exhausted, at the end of endurance. The dim, oriental room swam about her. The green eyes grew larger—dominated that yellow, passionless face—merged—became a still sea in which she was drowning.

Camille heard herself shriek as she fought her way back to consciousness. She sprang up, choked with the horror of her dreams; then:

“Did it really happen?” she moaned. “Oh, God! What did I do last night?”

Grey light was just beginning to outline the slats of the Venetian blinds.

Manhattan was waking to a new day.

Chapter VII

Nayland Smith crossed and threw his door open as the bell buzzed.

“Come in, Harkness.”

There was an irritable note in his voice. This was his third day in New York, and he had made no progress worthy of record. Yet every hour counted.

They shook hands. Raymond Harkness was a highly improbable F.B.I, operative but a highly efficient one. His large hazel eyes were ingenuous, almost childish in expression, and he had a gentle voice which he rarely raised. Of less than medium height, as he stood there peeling a glove off delicate-looking fingers he might have been guessed a physician, or even a surgeon, but never a detective.

“Any news?” rapped Smith, dropping restlessly into an armchair and pointing to its twin.

“Yes.” Harkness sat down, first placing his topcoat and hat neatly on a divan. “I think there is.”

“Good. Let’s have it.”

Smith pushed a box of cigarettes across the table and began to charge his foul briar.

“Well”—Harkness lighted a cigarette—”Mrs. Frobisher had an appointment at three o’clock this afternoon with Professor Hoffmeyer, the Viennese psychiatrist who runs a business on the top floor of the Woolton Building.”

“How did you know?”

“I’m having Falling Waters carefully covered. I want to find out who was responsible for the burglary there last week. Stein, the chauffeur-butler, drove Mrs. Frobisher into town, in their big Cadillac. When she had gone in, Stein’s behaviour was just a bit curious.”

“What did he do?”

“He parked the car, left his uniform cap inside, put on a light topcoat and soft hat, and walked around to a bar on East Forty-eighth.”

“What’s curious about that?”

“Maybe not a lot. But when he got to the bar, he met another man who was evidently waiting for him. One of our boys who has ears like a desert rat was soon on a nearby stool.”

“Hear anything?”

“Plenty. But it wasn’t in English.”

“Oh!” Nayland Smith lighted his pipe. “What was the lingo?”

“My man was counted out. He reports he doesn’t know.”

“Useful!”

“No, it isn’t. Sir Denis. But Scarron—that’s his name—had a bright thought when the party broke up. He didn’t tail Stein. Knew he was going back to his car. He tailed Number Two.”

“Good work. Where did the bird settle?”

And when Harkness, very quietly, told him, Nayland Smith suddenly stood up.

“Got something there, Harkness,” he rapped. “The job at Falling Waters may have been Soviet-inspired, and not, as I supposed, a reconnaissance by Dr. Fu Manchu. What’s Stein’s background?”

“Man at work, right now, on it.”

“Good. What about details of the bogus doctor who saved Moreno’s life? To hand, yet?”

“Yes.” Harkness took out a notebook and unhurriedly turned the pages. “It’s a composite picture built up on the testimony of several witnesses. Here we are.” He laid his cigarette carefully on the edge of an ash-tray. “Tall; well-built. Pale, clear-cut features. Slight black moustache, heavy brows; dark, piercing eyes.”

“H’m,” Smith muttered. “Typical villain of melodrama. Did he carry a riding whip?”

“Not reported!” Harkness smiled, returning the notebook to his pocket. “But there’s one other item. Not so definite—but something I wish you could look into personally. It’s your special province.”

Nayland Smith, who had worn tracks in more carpets than any man in England, was pacing the room, now, followed by a wraith of tobacco smoke.

“Go ahead.”

Harkness dusted ash into a tray and leaned back in his chair.

“For sometime before your arrival,” he said, “but acting on your advice that Dr. Fu Manchu was probably in New York, we have been checking up on possible contacts in the Asiatic quarter.”

“Maybe none. Fu Manchu’s organization isn’t primarily Chinese, or even Oriental. He’s head of a group known as the Council of Seven. They have affiliations in every walk of society and in every country, as I believe. The Communists aren’t the only plotters with far-flung cells.”

“That may be so,” Harkness went on patiently, “but as a matter of routine I had the possibility looked into. Broadly, we drew blank. But there’s one old gentleman, highly respected in the Chinatown area, who seems to be a bit of a mystery.”

“What’s his name?”

“Huan Tsung.”

“What does he look like?”

“He is tall,1 am told, for a Chinese, but old and frail. I’ve never seen him personally.”

“What!” Nayland Smith pulled up and stared. “Don’t follow. Myth?”

“Oh, he exists. But he’s hard to get at. Some sort of invalid,1 believe. Easy enough to see him officially, but I don’t want to do that. He has tremendous influence of some kind amongst the Asiatic population.”

Nayland Smith tugged at the lobe of his ear reflectively.

“This aged, invisible character intrigues me,” he said. “How long has he lived in New York?”

“According to police records, for many years.”

“But his remarkable habits suggest that he might be absent for a long time without his absence being noticed?”

“That’s true,” Harkness admitted.

“For instance, you are really sure he’s there now?”

“Practically certain. I have learned in the last few days, since I came up from Washington to meet you, that he has been seen going for a late drive—around eleven at night—in an old Ford which is kept in a shed not far from his shop.”

“Where does he go?”

“I have no information. I have ordered an inquiry on that point. You see”—he spoke with added earnestness—”I have it on reliable grounds that Huan Tsung is in the game against us. I don’t know where he stands. But—,,

“You want me to try to look him over?” Nayland Smith broke in. “I might recognize this hermit! I agree with you.”

He began to walk about again in his restless way. His pipe had gone out, but he didn’t appear to notice it.

“I could make the necessary arrangements, Sir Denis. You might try tonight, if you have no other plans.”

“I have no other plans. At any hour, at any moment, Craig may complete his hell machine. In that hour, the enemy will strike—and I don’t know where to look for the blow, how to cover up against it. Tell me”—Smith shot a swift glance at Harkness—”does Huan Tsung ever drive out at night more than once7”

Harkness frowned thoughtfully. “I should have to check on that. But may I suggest that, tonight—”

“No. Leave it to me. I’m tired of going around like an escorted tourist. I want my hands free. Leave it to me.”

* * *

When Nayland Smith left police headquarters that night and set out to pick up Harkness, he might have been anything from a ship’s carpenter to a bosun’s mate ashore. His demands on the Bureau’s fancy wardrobe had been simple, and no item of his make-up could fairly be described as a disguise.

Upon this, a sea-going walk, dirty hands, and a weird nasal accent which was one of his many accomplishments, Nayland Smith relied, as he had relied on former occasions.

He had started early, for he had it in mind to prospect the shop of Huan Tsung before joining Harkness at the agreed spot—a point from which that establishment could conveniently be kept in view.

Whilst still some distance from Chinatown proper, he found himself wondering if these streets were always so empty at this comparatively early hour. He saw parked vehicles, and some traffic, but few pedestrians.

The lights of the restaurant quarter were visible ahead, when this quietude was violently disturbed.

A woman screamed—the scream of deadly terror.

As if this had been a reveille, figures, hitherto unseen, began to materialize out of nowhere, and all of them running in the same direction. Nayland Smith ran, too.

A group of perhaps a dozen people, of various colors, surrounded a woman hysterically explaining that she had been knocked down and her handbag snatched by a man who sprang upon her from behind.

As Smith reached the outskirts of the group, pressing forward to get a glimpse of the woman’s face, someone clapped a hand on his back and seemed to be trying to muscle past. His behavior was so violent that Smith turned savagely—at which moment he felt an acute stab in his neck as if a pin had been thrust in.

“Damn you!” he snapped. “What in hell are you up to?”

These words were the last he spoke.

Strong fingers were clasped over his mouth; a sinewy arm jerked his head back—and the stinging in his neck continued!

Nayland Smith believed (he was not in a condition to observe accurately) that the assaulted woman was giving particulars to a patrolman, that the group of onlookers was dispersing.

Making a sudden effort, he bent, twisted, and threw off his attacker.

Turning, fists clenched, he faced a tall man dimly seen in the darkness, for the scuffle had taken place at a badly lighted point. He registered a medium right on this man’s chin and was about to follow it up when the man closed with him. He made no attempt to use his fists, he just threw himself upon Smith and twined powerful arms around his body, at the same time crying out:

“Officer! Come and lend me a hand!”

This colossal impudence had a curious effect.

It changed Nayland Smith’s anger to something which he could only have described as cold hatred. By heavens! he would have a reckoning with this suave ruffian!

But he ceased to struggle.

Those onlookers who still remained, promptly deserted the robbed woman and surrounded this new center of interest. The officer, slipping his notebook into a tunic pocket, stepped forward, a big fellow marked by the traditional sangfroid of a New York policeman.

He shone a light onto the face of the tall man, who still had his arms around Nayland Smith, and Smith studied this face attentively.

He saw pale, clear-cut features, a shadowy moustache, heavy brows, and dark, penetrating eyes. The man wore a black overcoat, a white muffler, and a soft black hat. Smith noted with pleasure a thin trickle of blood on his heavy chin.

Then the light was turned upon himself, and:

“What goes on?” the patrolman asked.

“My patient grew fractious. Excitement has this effect. I think he’s cooling down, though. Do you think you could lend me a hand as far as my car? I am Dr. Malcolm—Central Park South.”

“Poor guy. Do what I can. Doctor.”

But Nayland Smith smiled grimly. It was his turn.

“Listen, Officer,” he said—or, more exactly, he framed his lips to say . . . for no sound issued from his mouth!

He tried again—and produced only a sort of horrible, gurgling laughter.

Then he understood.

He knew that he was in the hands of that same bogus physician who had visited Moreno—that the man was a servant of Dr. Fu Manchu.

And he knew that the stinging sensation had been caused by the point of a hypodermic syringe.

He was stricken dumb . . .

The only sound he could utter was that imbecile laugh!

“Poor guy,” muttered the officer again.

“War veteran,” Dr. Malcolm explained in a low voice. The onlookers murmured their sympathy. “Japanese prison camp. Escaped from my clinic yesterday. But we shall get him right—in time—with care.”

During this astounding statement. Dr. Malcolm, overconfident, perhaps, in the presence of the burly patrolman, made the mistake of slightly relaxing his hold.

The temptation was too strong for Nayland Smith.

Tensing every relevant muscle in his body, he broke free. He had no foot room to haul off for a straight one, no time to manoeuvre, but he managed to register a really superior upper-cut on the point of Dr. Malcolm’s prominent jaw. Dr. Malcolm tottered—and fell.

Then, turning. Smith ran for his life . . . He knew nothing less was at stake.

A whistle was blown. A girl screamed. Someone shouted, “Escaped madman! Stop him!” Runners were hot on his heels.

The hunt was up!

No nightmare of the past, in his long battle with Fu Manchu, approached in its terrors those which now hounded him on. Capture meant death—and what a death! For he could not doubt that Dr. Fu Manchu intended, first, to interrogate him.

And escape?

Escape meant the life of a dumb man . . .

He saw now, plainly enough, how he had held the game in his hands if only he had kept his poise. Many things that he might have done appeared to mock him.

And throughout this time, all about him, hunters multiplied. Voices cried, “Escaped madman—stop him!” Police whistles skirled; the night became a charivari of racing footsteps.

All New York pursued him.

He tried to think as he ran.

Instinctively he had turned back the way he had come. He had a faint hope that, contrary to his orders, a detective might have been assigned to follow him. How he regretted those orders! What madness to underestimate the profound cunning of Dr. Fu Manchu . . .

Suddenly someone stepped out upon him and tried a tackle. He missed. Smith tripped the tackier (he admired his pluck) and ran on.

“Escaped madman! Stop him!”

Those cries seemed to come from all around. Once he tried to shout also, wildly anxious to test again his power of speech. Only a guttural laugh rewarded him. After that he ran in silence, wondering how long he could hope to last at that pace.

Some swift runner was hot on his heels, having outdistanced all others. But Nayland Smith had recognized a warehouse just ahead, the yard gate open, which he had passed a few minutes earlier. If he could reach it first, he still had a chance. Desperation had prompted apian.

Then, as he raced up to the gate, something happened which was not in the plan . . . A pair of stocky figures sprang out, one on either hand!

They had been posted to intercept him—the game was up!

The man on the left Smith accounted for—and he used his feet as well as his fists. The other threw him. He was a trained wrestler and gave not one opening. Then the pack came up. It was led by the big policeman who had muttered, “Poor guy.” His were the footsteps which Smith had heard so close behind.

As he lay, face downward, in a stranglehold, this officer took charge, speaking breathlessly.

“Good work! Don’t hurt him. The doctor’s coming.” Dimly Nayland Smith became aware of an increasing crowd. “Hand him over to me. I can manage him.”

He was lifted upright and seized skillfully by the patrolman. The two thickset thugs vanished into darkness outside a ring of light cast by several flashlamps. Smith retained sufficient sanity to observe that one of them limped badly. He thought and hoped that his kick had put cancelled to his kneecap.

He opened his mouth to speak, remembered, and remained silent.

“Take it easy, brother,” said the big officer sympathetically. He was still breathing hard from his run. “You’re not in Japan now. I don’t like holding you, but you surely can use ‘em, and I’m not looking for a K.O.” He steered Smith into the warehouse yard—that very haven he had prayed to reach!

“We’ll wait here. Hi! you!”—to the audience—”shift!”

A car came along. It pulled up opposite the gateway in which they were standing . . . and Dr. Malcolm got out! A second patrolman was with him. Dr. Malcolm’s voice sounded pleasantly shaky.

“Congratulations, Officer. I shall commend you for this.”

“All in the day’s work,” replied the man who held Smith. “Glad to see you’ve snapped out of it. A nifty one, that was. Shall I get the wagon?”

“No, no.” Dr. Malcolm stepped forward. “It would only excite him. Here is my chauffeur. He is used to—such cases. We can manage quite well between us. Just call me in about twenty minutes. Dr. Scott Malcolm, Circle 7-0300.”

Whilst this conversation proceeded, Nayland Smith made up his mind to play the last card he held—the one he had planned to play if he could have gained temporary shelter. One arm being semi-free, although the other was pinioned behind him, he managed to pull his wallet out and to force it under the fingers of the man who held him.

That efficient officer grasped it, but did not relax his hold. “Okay,” he said in a low voice, like that of one soothing a child.

“I’ve got it. Safe enough with me. Come along.”

Smith was led to the car by Dr. Malcolm and a low-browed, grey-uniformed chauffeur, who had the face and the physique of a gorilla. Dr. Malcolm took the wheel; the chauffeur got in beside Smith.

And, as the car moved away and excited voices faded, Smith’s brain seemed to become a phonograph which remorselessly repeated the words: “Dr. Scott Malcolm . . . Circle Seven—0-3-0-0 . . . Dr. Scott Malcolm . . . Circle Seven . . . 0-3-0-0 . . .

“Dr. Scott Malcolm . . . Circle Seven—”

Chapter VIII

It was on the following morning that Morris Craig arrived ahead of time to find Camille already there. He was just stripping his jacket off when he saw her at the door of her room.

“Hullo!” he called. “Why the wild enthusiasm for toil?”

She was immaculate as always, but he thought she looked pale. She did not wear her glasses.

“I couldn’t sleep. Dr. Craig. When daylight broke at last I was glad to come. And there’s always plenty to do.”

“True. But I don’t like the insomnia.” He walked across to her. “You and I need a rest. When the job’s finished, we’re both going to have one. Shall I tell you something? I’m at it early myself because I mean to finish by Friday night so that we both have a carefree week-end.”

He patted her shoulder and turned away. Pulling out a key ring, he went over to the big safe.

“Dr. Craig.”

“Yes?” He glanced back.

“I suppose you will think it is none of my business, but I feel”—she hesitated—”there are . . . dangers.”

Craig faced her. The boyish gaiety became disturbed.

“What sort of danger?”

Camille met his glance gravely, and he thought her eyes were glorious.

“You have invented something which many people—people capable of any outrage—want to steal from you. And sometimes I think you are very careless.”

“In what way?”

“Well”—she lowered her eyes, for Craig’s regard was becoming ardent—”I know Sir Denis Nayland Smith’s reputation. I expect he came here to tell you the same thing.”

“So what?”

“There are precautions which you neglect.”

“Tell me one.”

“The safe combination is one. Do you ever change it?”

Craig smiled. “No,” he confessed. “Why should I? Nobody else knows it.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Sam might have picked it up—so might you. But why worry?”

“I may be foolish. But even if only Sam and I knew it, in your place I should change it. Dr. Craig.”

Craig stared. His expression conveyed nothing definite, but it embarrassed her.

“Not suggesting that Sam—”

“Of course not! I’m only suggesting that, for all our sakes, nobody but yourself should know that combination.”

Craig brushed his hair back and began to grope in a pocket for cigarettes.

“Point begins to dawn, vaguely,” he said. “Rather cloudy morning, but promise of a bright day. You mean that if something should be pinched there from, it must be clear that neither you nor Sam could possibly have known how to open the safe?”

“Yes,” said Camille, “I suppose that is what I mean.”

Craig stood there watching her door for some time after she had gone in and closed it. Then, he crossed, slowly, to the safe.

He had come to the conclusion that Camille was as clever as she was beautiful. He could not know that she had forced herself to this decision to warn him only after many sleepless hours.

Having arranged his work to his satisfaction, Craig took up the phone and dialled a number. When he got through:

“Please connect me with Sir Denis Nayland Smith,” he said.

There was an interval, and then the girl at the hotel switchboard reported, “There’s no reply from his apartment.”

“Oh—well, would you give him a message to call Dr. Morris Craig when he comes in.”

As he hung up he was thinking that Smith was early afoot. He had seen nothing of him since they had dined together, and was burning with anxiety on his behalf. The delicate instrument which Craig called a transmuter had already gone into construction. Shaw was working on a blueprint in the laboratory. It remained only for Craig to complete three details, and for tests to discover whether his plant could control the power he had invoked.

In view of what failure might mean, he had determined to insist that the entire equipment be moved, secretly, to a selected and guarded site in the open country for the carrying out of these tests.

He was beginning to realize that the transmuter might burst under the enormous load of energy it was designed to distribute. If it did, not only the Huston Building but also a great part of neighboring Manhattan could be dispersed like that lump of steel he had used in a demonstration for Nayland Smith.

Craig, in fact, was victim of an odd feeling of unrest. He continued to discount Smith’s more dramatic warnings, and this inspite of the murderous attempt on Moreno, but he was unsure of the future. The feathered dart he had sent to Professor White at Harvard for examination, but so far had had no report.

He pressed a button, then sat on a corner of the desk, swinging one leg, as Sam came in, chewing industriously.

“Morning, boss.”

“Good morning, Sam. What time do you turn up here as a rule?”

“Well”—Sam shook his head thoughtfully—”I’m mostly around by eight, on account of Mr. Shaw or Mr. Regan come off night watch then. I might easy be wanted—see?”

“Yes,1 see. Reason I ask is I thought I saw you tailing me as I came along. If this impression was chimerical, correct me. But it isn’t the first time I have had it.”

Sam’s eyes, behind his spectacles, betrayed childish wonder.

“Me tail you, Doctor! Listen. Wait a minute —”

“I am listening, and I am prepared to wait a minute. But I want an answer.”

“Well”—Sam pulled his eye-shade lower—”sometimes it happens maybe I’m on an errand same time you happen to be going my way—”

“Enough! I understand. You are my Old Man of the Sea, kindly supplied by Nayland Smith. If Mr. Frobisher knew how you wasted time you owe to Huston Electric, he’d fire you. But I’ll have it out with Smith, when I see him.”

A curious expression crossed Sam’s face as Craig spoke, but was gone so quickly that, turning away, he didn’t detect it.

As Sam went out, Craig stood studying the detail on the drawing board, but found himself unable to conquer that spirit of unrest, an unhealthy sense of impending harm, which had descended upon him. Particularly, he was troubled by forebodings about Smith. And although Morris Craig would have rejected such a theory with scientific scorn, it is nevertheless possible that these were telepathic . . .

Less than nine hours before, police headquarters had become a Vesuvius.

Nayland Smith’s wallet had been handed in by the frightened patrolman to whom he had passed it. He had given a detailed description of the man posing as “Dr. Malcolm.” It was recognized, at Centre Street, to correspond to that of the bogus doctor who had saved the life of Officer Moreno!

Wires had hummed all night. The deputy commissioner had been called at his home. So had the district attorney. All cars in the suspected area were radioed. Senior police officers took charge of operations. What had been regarded, in certain quarters, as an outbreak of hysteria in the F.B.I, suddenly crystallized into a present menace, when the news broke that a celebrated London consultant had been swept off the map of Manhattan.

Prom the time that “Dr. Malcolm” had left with his supposed patient, nothing more was known of his movements. His identity remained a mystery. Feverish activity prevailed. But not a solitary clue came in.

An internationally famous criminal investigator had been spirited away under the very eyes of the police—and no one knew where to look for him!

But Manhattan danced on . .

Craig’s uneasiness grew greater as the day grew older. It began seriously to interfere with concentration. His lunch consisted of a club sandwich and a bottle of beer sent up from the restaurant on the main floor, below. The nearer that Shaw’s work came to completion in the laboratory, the further Craig seemed to be from contributing those final elements which would give it life. The more feverishly he toiled the less he accomplished.

Early in the afternoon he spoke to the manager of Nayland Smith’s hotel.

He learned that Smith had gone out, the evening before, at what exact time the manager didn’t know. He had not returned nor communicated. There had been many callers, and a quantity of messages, mail, and cables awaited him. The manager could give no further information.

Craig wondered if he should call police headquarters, but hesitated to make himself a nuisance. After all, the nature of Smith’s business in New York would sufficiently account for long absences. But Craig recalled, unhappily, something he had said on the night they dined together: “I fear that he” (Dr. Fu Manchu) “has decided that I must die . . . What are my chances?”

He tried again to tackle his work, but found the problems which it presented so bewildering that he was not resentful, rather grateful, when Michael Frobisher burst into the office.

“Hullo, Mr. Frobisher!”

Craig swung around and faced his chief, who had dropped into one of the armchairs.

“Hello, Craig. Thought I’d just look in. Don’t expect to be in town again this week. Picking up Mrs. F., who’s having a treatment, and driving right out. How’s the big job shaping?”

Frobisher pulled a cigar from his breast pocket, and Craig noted that his hand was unsteady. The florid coloring had undertones of grey. Sudden recognition came to him that Frobisher was either a sick man or a haunted one.

“Fairly bright,” he replied in his most airy manner. “Time you saw the setup in the lab again.”

“Yes—I must.”

But Craig knew that he would avoid the visit, if possible. The throbbing monster which had its being in the laboratory frightened Michael Frobisher, a fact of which Craig was aware.

“Getting quite a big boy now.”

Frobisher snipped off the end of his cigar. “What are the prospects of finishing by week-end?”

“Fair to medium. Mental functions disturbed by grave misgivings.”

Frobisher glanced up sharply. His eyes, under drawn black brows, reminded Craig, for some reason, of smouldering fires in two deep caves.

“What misgivings?” he growled, and snapped up his lighter, which had a flame like a burning oil well.

Craig, facing Frobisher, dropped the stub of a cigarette and began to grope behind him for a packet which he had put somewhere on the desk.

“I’m a sort of modern Frankenstein,” he explained. “Hadn’t grasped it before, but see it now. In there”—he waved towards the laboratory door—”is a pup of a thing which, full grown, could eat up New York City at one gulp. This brute frightens me.”

“Forget it.” Frobisher lighted his cigar.

“Imposs. The thought hangs on like a bulldog. How this beast can be tamed to perform domestic duties escapes me at the moment. Like training a Bengal tiger to rock baby’s cradle. Then, there’s something else.”

“Such as what?”

“My love child, the horror begotten in that laboratory, is coveted by the governments of the United States, of England, and of Russia.”

Michael Frobisher stood up. His craggy brows struggled to meet over a deep vertical wrinkle.

“Who says so?”

“I say so. Agents of all those governments are watching every move we make here.”

“I knew there was a leak! Do you know those agents?”

“Sir Denis Nayland Smith has arrived from London.”

“Who in hell is Sir Denis Nayland Smith?”

“An old friend of mine. Formerly a commissioner of Scotland Yard. But I don’t know the Washington agent and I don’t know the Soviet agent. I only know they’re here.”

“Oh!” said Michael Frobisher, and sat down again. “Any more troubles?”

“Yes.” Craig found his cigarettes and lighted one. “Dr. Fu Manchu.”

Silence fell between them like a curtain. Craig had turned again to the desk. He swung back now, and glanced at Frobisher. His expression was complicated. But fear was in it. He looked up at Craig.

“You are sure there is such a person?”

“Yes—moderately sure.”

For some reason this assurance seemed to bring relief to Frobisher. A moment later an explanation came.

“Then I’m not crazy—as that damned Pardoe thinks! Those Asiatic snoopers really exist. They seem to have quit tailing me around town, but queer things happen out at Falling Waters. Whoever went through my papers one night away back must have been working with inside help—”

“But I thought you told me that some yellow character—”

“He was outside. Saw him from my dressing-room window. No locks broken. Then, only last night, my private safe was opened!”

“What’s that?”

“Plain fact. I was awake. Sleep badly. Guess I interrupted him. But the door of the safe was wide open when I got down!”

“See anybody?”

“Not a one. Nothing taken. Doors and windows secure. Craig”— Frobisher’s deep voice faltered—”I was beginning to wonder—”

“If you walked in your sleep? Did these things yourself?”

“Well—”

“Quite understand, and sympathize.”

Michael Frobisher executed a shaking movement with his head, rather like that of a big dog who has something in his ear.

“Listen—but not a word to Mrs. F. I have had a gadget fixed up to record any movement around the house, and show just where it’s coming from. I want you to look it over this weekend.”

“Delightful prospect. I am the gadget king. And this brings me to my main misgiving. You may recall the bother we had fitting up the plant in the lab?”

“Don’t be funny! Didn’t we import workmen from Europe to make it in sections—”

“We did. And I have been my own draughtsman.”

“Then send ‘em home again and assemble the sections ourselves?”

“‘Ourselves’ relating to Shaw, Regan and me? I fail to recall any instance when you put your Herculean but dignified shoulder to the wheel. Still, you were highly encouragin’. Yes—well—to be brief, we shall have to do likewise once more.”

“What’s that?”

“I cannot be responsible for tests carried out in the heart of New York City. Some of my experiments already are slightly alarming. But when I’m all set to tap the juice in quantities, I want to be where I can do no harm.” Craig was warming to his subject; the enthusiasm of the specialist fired his eyes. “You see, the energy lies in successive strata—like the skins of an onion. And you know what the middle of a raw onion’s like!”

The tip of Frobisher’s cigar glowed ominously.

“Conveying what?” he growled through closed lips.

“Conveying that a site must be picked for an experimental station. Somewhere in wide-open spaces, far from the madding crowd. Little by little and bit by bit we shall transfer our monster there.”

“You told me you needed some high place.”

“There are high places other than the top of the Huston Building. I wish to avoid repeating, in the Huston Building, the story of the Tower of Babel. It would be spectacular, but unpopular.”

Michael Frobisher got up, crossed, removed the cigar from his lips, and stood right in front of Craig.

“Listen. You’re not getting cold feet, are you?”

Craig smiled, that slightly mischievous, schoolboy smile which was so irresistibly charming.

“Yes,” he said. “I am. What are you going to do about it?”

Michael Frobisher turned and picked up his hat, which he had dropped on the floor beside his chair.

“If you say so, I’ll have to get busy.” He glanced at his wrist watch. “Give me all the facts on Saturday.”

When Frobisher opened the office door, he stood looking to right and left of the lobby for a moment before he went out.

Craig scratched his chin reflectively. What, exactly, was going on at Falling Waters? He felt peculiarly disinclined to work, considered ringing for Camille, not because he required her attendance, but for the pure pleasure of looking at her, then resolutely put on his glasses and settled down before the problem symbolized by that unfinished diagram.

He was destined, however, to be interrupted again.

The office door behind him opened very quietly, and Mrs. Frobisher peeped in. Craig remained unaware of her presence.

“Do I intrude?” she asked coyly.

Craig, conscious of shirt-sleeves, took off his glasses, jumped from the stool, and turned.

“Why—Mrs. Frobisher!” He swept back the drooping forelock. “I say—excuse my exposed laundry.”

Stella Frobisher extended her hand graciously. She didn’t offer it;

she extended it. She was an Englishwoman and her pattern of life appeared to be modelled upon customs embalmed in old volumes of Punch. Her hair had been blond, and would always remain so. She had canary-like manners. She fluttered.

“I was waiting until Mike had gone. He mustn’t know I have been here.”

Craig pulled a chair forward, and Stella Frobisher’s high heels clicked like castanets on the parquet as she crossed and sat down. She was correctly dressed in full mink uniform and wore a bird of paradise for a hat.

“Highly compromising. When did your heart first awaken to my charms?” said Craig as he put his coat on.

He had learned that airy badinage was the only possible kind of conversation with Mrs. Frobisher, who was some years younger than her husband and liked to think he had many rivals.

“Oh, you do say the queerest things!” Stella’s reputation for vivacity rested largely upon her habit of stressing words at random. “I have been having a treatment at Professor Hoffmeyer’s.”

“Am I acquainted with the lad?”

“Oh, everybody knows him. He’s simply too wonderful. He has made a new woman of me.”

“Yes. You look quite new.”

“Oh, now you think I’m being silly. Dr. Craig. But truly my nerves had quite gone. You see, there’s something very queer going on.”

“Queer goings on, eh?” Craig murmured, hunting for his cigarettes.

“Most peculiar. I know you’re laughing at me. But truly I’m terrified. There have been the most uncanny people prowling about Falling Waters recently.” She accepted a cigarette and Craig lighted it for her. “I simply dare not speak to Mike about it. You know how nervous he is. But I have ordered a pack of Alsatians from Wanamaker’s or somewhere and insisted that they must be ferocious.”

“A pack, you say?”

“A pack,” Stella repeated firmly. “I don’t know how many dogs there are in a pack, but I suppose fifty-two.”

“Expect the pack this week-end?”

“I hope so. Of course, I have engaged a special man to look after them.”

“Of course. Lion tamer, or some such character.”

“I have had barbed wire installed, and I shall loose the dogs at night.”

“Sounds uncommonly attractive. Lovers’ paradise.”

“I wanted to warn you, because now I must be off. If I’m late at the Ritz, Mike will think I’ve been up to something—”

Craig escorted her down to the street and was rewarded with an arch smile. Stella’s smile was an heirloom which had probably belonged to her mother.

Chapter IX

Nayland Smith came to the surface from depths of an unfathomable purple lake. A voice, unpleasantly familiar, matter-of-fact, reached his ears through violet haze which overhung the lake.

“I trust you find yourself quite restored. Sir Denis?”

Smith strove to identify the speaker; to determine his true environment; to find himself.

“And don’t hesitate to reply. You are no longer dumb. The discomfort was temporary.”

The speaker was identified. He was Dr. Malcolm!

“I—I—why . . . thank God! I can speak’.”

Nayland Smith’s voice rose higher on every word.

“So I observe. You are an expert boxer. Sir Denis, for a man of your years a remarkable one. Myself, although trained in several types of wrestling, unfortunately I know little of boxing.”

Dr. Malcolm wore a long white coat. He was regarding Smith with professional interest.

“Too bad. You’ll miss it when I get loose!” Smith rapped.

But Dr. Malcolm retained his suavity.

“Pugnacity highly developed. You appear to feel no gratitude for your restored power of speech?”

He poured a vivid blue liquid from a beaker into a phial. The phial he placed in a leather case.

“No. I’m waiting for the later symptoms to develop.”

Dr. Malcolm reclosed his case.

“You will wait in vain. The first injection I administered was intended merely to paralyze the muscles of articulation.”

“Thanks. It did.”

“A second counteracted it.”

“Truly ingenious.”

“But,” Dr. Malcolm went on, “my duties in your case were not nearly so dangerous as in the case of the policeman, Moreno. I was subject to exposure throughout the time I remained in the hospital.”

“So I gather,” said Smith.

This man’s cool audacity fascinated him.

“Of course”—Dr. Malcolm locked his leather case—”Circle 7-0300 is the number of a well-known hotel. I don’t live there.” He showed strong white teeth in a smile. “Mat Cha was most convincing as the girl who had been robbed, I thought?”

“I thought so too.”

Nayland Smith glanced about him. The place proved to be more extensive than he had supposed at that strange awakening. It was a big cellar. Much of it was unlighted—a dim background of mystery.

“We had several key men in the crowd, of course. The police officer was an intruder. But I did my best with him.”

(“So did I!” Nayland Smith was thinking.)

“When you succeeded in knocking me out, I was indebted to this officer—and to a pair of our people placed to cover such a possibility—for your recapture.”

“Yes, you were,” said Smith conversationally. “All the luck lay with you.” As Dr. Malcolm picked up his case: “Must you be going?”

“Yes. I am leaving you now. I regret the incivility of putting you under constraint. You will have noted, since you are fully restored, that your arms are lightly attachéd to the bench upon which you sit. These thin lines, however, are quite unbreakable, except by a wire-cutter. A preparation invented by my principal. I bid you good night. Sir Denis. It is improbable that we meet again.”

“Highly improbable,” Smith murmured. “But lucky, once more, for you! By the way, how long have I been here?”

Dr. Malcolm paused.

“Nearly twenty-four hours—”

“What!”

“Not actually in this cellar, but under my care, elsewhere. You have been suitably nourished, and I assure you there will be no ill effects.”

Dr. Malcolm merged into the background. His white coat, ghostlike, marked his progress for a while and then became swallowed up. An evidently heavy door was opened—and closed.

Twenty-four hours!

Nayland Smith satisfied himself that he was indeed helpless. The slender, flexible threads, like strands of silk, which confined his arms were steel-tough. The bench was clamped to the floor. He peered into surrounding gloom. One light on the wall behind him afforded sole illumination. Outside its radius lay shadows ever increasing to complete blackness.

Somewhere in this blackness, almost defying scrutiny, objects were stacked against a further wall. Specks of color became discernible, vague forms.

Intently Smith stared into the darkness, picking out shapes, dim lines.

At last he understood.

He was looking at a pile of Chinese coffins . . .

The sound made by a heavy, unseen door warned him of the fact that someone had entered the cellar.

Long before a tall figure came silently out of the shadows, Nayland Smith knew who had entered. The quality of the atmosphere had changed, become charged with new portent.

Wearing a dark, fur-collared topcoat and carrying a black hat in one long, yellow hand, Nayland Smith’s ancient adversary faced him.

A tense, silent moment passed.

“I confess that I had not expected to meet you. Sir Denis.”

The words were spoken softly, the sibilants marked.

Nayland Smith met the regard of half-closed eyes.

“I, on the contrary, had hoped to meet you, Dr. Fu Manchu.”

“Your star above mine. The meeting has taken place. If it is not as you had foreseen it, blame only that blind Fate which disturbs our foolish plans. Because our destinies were woven on the same loom, perhaps I should have known that you would be here—to obstruct me when the survival of mankind is at stake.”

He stepped aside, and brought a rough wooden box. Upon this he sat down.

“You are compelled to remain seated,” he explained. “Courtesy forbids me to stand.”

And those words were a key to open memory’s door. Nayland Smith, in one magical glimpse, lived again through a hundred meetings with Dr. Fu Manchu, through years in which he had labored to rid the world of this insane genius. He saw him as an assassin, as a torturer, as the most dangerous criminal the law had ever known; but always as an aristocrat.

“You honor me,” he said drily. “How am I to die?” Dr. Fu Manchu fully opened his strange eyes and fixed a gaze upon Smith which few men could have hoped to sustain.

“That rests with you. Sir Denis,” he replied, and spoke even more softly than he had spoken before.

* * *

It is at least possible that the disappearance of Nayland Smith might have gone onto the unsolved list if any detective officer other than George Moreno (already back on duty) had been assigned to a certain post that night.

The shop of Huan Tsung, for which Smith had set out the night before, was being kept under routine observation. And at ten o’clock Moreno relieved a man who had been on duty since six. Chinatown was Moreno’s special stamping-ground, and his orders were to make a record of all visitors and to note particularly any movements of the the mysterious proprietor.

The small and stuffy room from which he operated put up a blend of odors uniquely sick-making. It was one of several in the house commanding an excellent view of part of the Asiatic quarter, and this was not the first time it had been used for police surveillance. But the dangerous days of tong wars seemed to be over. Chinatown was as gently mannered as Park Avenue.

He had been there for a long time when old Huan Tsung’s antique Ford was brought around to the front of the shop. Assisted by a yellow-complexioned driver of ambiguous nationality, and a spruce young shopman, the aged figure came out and entered the car. Huan Tsung wore a heavy, dark topcoat with a fur collar; the wide brim of a soft black hat half concealed his features. His eyes were protected by owlish spectacles.

The Ford was driven off. The shopman returned to the shop

Moreno knew that the journey would be kept under observation. But he doubted if any evidence of value would result. In all likelihood these drives were purely constitutional. The old man believed in the merit of night air.

After his departure, little more occurred for some time. Chinatown displayed a deadly respectability. Moreno, who had a pair of powerful glasses, began to grow restive. He learned that he could read even the smaller lettering on shop signs across the street. Faces of passers-by might be inspected minutely. But no one of particular interest came within range of the Zeiss lenses.

There were callers at Huan Tsung’s, Asiatic and Occidental, some, at least, legitimate customers; but none to excite suspicion . . .

A small truck drew up before the shop. The young Oriental opened a cellar trap and assisted a truckman to lower a big packing-case covered with Chinese lettering into the basement.

Evidently a consignment of goods of some kind. Moreno wondered vaguely what kind. Something uncommonly heavy.

The trap was reclosed. The truck went away.

Moreno, in the airless room, began to grow sleepy. Then, in a flash, he was wide awake.

A tall man had just come out of Huan Tsung’s. He wore a dark topcoat, a white scarf, and a neat black hat. He carried a leather case. Moreno, in the first place, hadn’t seen this man go in, therefore he instantly focussed the glasses on his face. And, as he did so, his hands shook slightly.

It was the first face he had seen when he had opened his eyes in the hospital.

The man was “Dr. Malcolm”!

Moreno was hurrying downstairs when Huan Tsung’s time-honored Ford returned, and the shopman came out to aid a darkcoated figure to alight. It had been driven away before Moreno reached the street—and Dr. Malcolm had disappeared.

* * *

“My mission,” said Fu Manchu, “is to save the world from the leprosy of Communism. Only I can do this. And I do it, not because of any love I have for the American people, but because if the United States fall, the whole world falls. In this task. Sir Denis, I shall brook no interference.”

Nayland Smith made no reply. He was listening, not only to the sibilant, incisive voice, but also to certain vague sounds which penetrated the cellar. He was trying to work out where the place was located.

“Morris Craig, a physicist touched with genius, is perfecting a device which, in the hands of warmongers, would wreck those fragments of civilization which survive the maniac. Hitler. News of this pending disaster brought me here. I am inadequately served. There has been no time to organize a suitable staff. My aims you know.”

Nayland Smith nodded. From faint sounds detected, he had deduced the fact that the cellar lay near a busy street.

“I appreciate your aims. I don’t like your methods.”

“We shall not discuss them. They are effective. Your recent visit to Teheran (I regret that I missed you there) failed to save Omar Khan. He was the principal Soviet agent in that area. Power is strong wine even for men of culture. When it touches the lips of those unaccustomed to it, power drives them mad. Such a group of power-drunk fools threatens today the future of man. One of its agents is watching Craig’s experiments. He must be silenced.”

“Why don’t you silence him?”

The brilliant green eyes almost closed, so that they became mere slits in an ivory mask. It is possible that Nayland Smith was the only man of his acquaintance who assumed, although he didn’t feel, complete indifference in the presence of Dr. Fu Manchu.

“I have always respected your character. Sir Denis.” The words were no more than whispered. “It has that mulish stupidity which won the Battle of Britain. The incompetents who serve me have failed, so far, to identify this agent. I still believe that if you could appreciate my purpose, you would become of real use to a world hurtling headlong to disaster. I repeat—I respect your character.”

“It was this respect, no doubt, which prompted you to attempt my murder?”

“The attempt was clumsy. It was undertaken contrary to my wishes. You can be of greater use to me alive than dead.” And those softly spoken words were more terrifying to Nayland Smith than any threat.

Had Fu Manchu decided to smuggle him into his far eastern base, by that mysterious subway which so far had defied all inquiry?

As the dreadful prospect flashed to his mind, Fu Manchu exercised one of his many uncanny gifts, that of answering an unspoken question.

“Yes—such is my present intention. Sir Denis. I have work for you to do. This cellar is shared by several Asiatic tradesmen, one of whom is an importer of Chinese coffins. A death has occurred in the district, and the deceased—a man of means—expressed a wish to be buried in his birthplace. When his coffin is sent there, via Hong Kong—he will not be in it . . .”

There was an interruption.

Heralded by the sound of an opening door, two stockily built, swarthy figures entered. One of them limped badly. Between them they carried an ornate coffin. This they set down on the concrete floor, and saluted Dr. Fu Manchu profoundly.

Nayland Smith clenched his fists, straining briefly but uselessly, at the slender, remorseless strands which held him. The men were Burmese ruffians of the dacoit class from which Fu Manchu had formerly recruited his bodyguard. One of them—the one who limped and who had a vicious cast in his right eye—spoke rapidly.

Fu Manchu silenced him with a gesture. But Nayland Smith had heard—and understood. His heart leapt. Hope was reborn. But Fu Manchu remained unmoved. He spoke calmly.

“The preparation for your long journey,” he said, “is one calling for time and care. It must be postponed. In the past, I believe, you have had opportunities to study examples of that synthetic death (a form of catalepsy) which I can induce. I hope to operate in the morning. This”—he emended a long-nailed forefinger in the direction of the coffin—”will be your wagon-lit. You will require no passport . . .”

Nayland Smith detected signs of uneasiness in the two Burmese. The one who limped and squinted was watching him murderously—for this was the man upon whom he had registered a kick the night before. Faintly he could hear sounds of passing traffic, but nothing else. The odds against his survival were high.

Dr. Fu Manchu signalled again—and the two Burmese stepped forward to where the helpless prisoner sat watching them . . .

The life of Chinatown apparently pursued its normal midnight course. Smartly dressed Orientals, inscrutably reserved, passed along the streets, as well as less smartly dressed Westerners. Some of the shops and restaurants continued to do business. Others were closing. There was nothing to indicate that Chinatown was covered, that every man and woman leaving it did so under expert scrutiny.

“If Nayland Smith’s here,” said the grim deputy commissioner, who had arrived to direct operations in person, “they won’t get him out—alive or dead.”

He spoke with the full knowledge which experience had given him, that practically every inhabitant knew that a cordon had been thrown around the whole area.

When Police Captain Rafferty walked into Huan Tsung’s shop, he found a young Oriental there, writing by the poor light of a paper-shaded lamp. He glanced up at Rafferty without apparent interest.

“Where’s Huan Tsung?’

“Not home.”

“Where’s he gone?”

“Don’t know.”

“When did he go?”

“Ten minute—quarter hour.”

This confirmed reports. The Ford exhibit had appeared again. Old Huan Tsung had sallied forth a second time.

“When’s he coming back?”

“Don’t know.”

“Suppose you try a guess, Charlie. Expect him tonight?”

“Sure.”

The shopman resumed his writing.

“While we’re waiting,” said Police Captain Rafferty “we’ll take a look around. Lead the way upstairs. You can finish that ballad when we come down.”

The young shopman offered no protest. He put his brush away and stood up.

“If you please,” he said, and opened a narrow door at the back of the counter.

At about the time that Rafferty started upstairs, a radio message came through to the car which served the deputy commissioner as mobile headquarters. It stated that Huan Tsung’s vintage Ford was parked on lower Fifty Avenue just above Washington Square.

Inquiries brought to light the fact that it stood before an old brick house. The officer reporting didn’t know who occupied this house.

Huan Tsung had called there earlier that night and had returned to Pell Street. He was now presumably there again.

“Do I go in and get him?” the officer inquired.

“No. But keep him covered when he comes out.”

This order of the deputy commissioner’s was one of those strategic blunders which have sometimes lost wars . . .

Police Captain Rafferty found little of note in the rooms above the shop. They resembled hundreds of such apartments to be seen in that neighborhood. The sanctum of Huan Tsung, with its silk-covered walls and charcoal brazier, arrested his attention for a while. At the crystal globe he stared with particular interest, then glanced at his guide, whose name (or so he said) was Lao Tail.

“Fortuneteller work here?”

Lao Tai shook his head.

“Here Huan Tsung meditate. Huan Tsung great thinker.”

“He’ll have to think fast tonight. You have a cellar down below. Show me the way in.”

Lao Tai obeyed, leading Rafferty through to the back of the shop where a narrow wooden stair was almost hidden behind piles of merchandise. He switched up a light at the bottom of the stair and Rafferty went clattering down.

He found himself in a cellar not much greater in area than the shop above. A chute communicated with a trap in the sidewalk overhead. Cartons and crates bearing Chinese labels and lettering nearly filled the place. It smelled strongly of spice and rotten fish.

One long, narrow packing-case seemed to have been recently opened. Rafferty examined it with some care, then turned to Lao Tai, who watched him disinterestedly.

“When did this thing come?”

“Come tonight.”

Rafferty was beginning to wonder. All this man’s answers added up correctly—for he knew that such a crate had been delivered earlier that night.

“What was in it?”

“This and that.”

Lao Tai vaguely indicated the litter around.

“Well, show me some ‘this.’ Then we can take a look at any ‘that’ you’ve got handy.”

Lao Tai touched a chest of tea with a glossily disdainful shoe, and pointed to a number of bronze bowls stacked up on a rough wooden bench. His slightly slanting eyes held no message but one of a boredom too deep for expression. And it was while Police Captain Rafferty was wondering what lay hidden under this crust and how to break through to it, that Huan Tsung’s remarkable chariot returned to Pell Street and the old man was helped out.

He expressed neither surprise nor interest at finding police on the premises. He bowed courteously when Raymond Harkness stated that he had some questions to put to him, and, leaning on the arm of his Mongolian driver, led the way upstairs. Seating himself on the cushioned divan in the silk-lined room, he dismissed the driver, offered cigarettes, and suggested tea.

“Thanks—no,” said Harkness in his quiet way. “Just a few questions. You are acquainted with a doctor; a European, I believe. He is tall, dark, and wears a slight moustache. He called here tonight. I should be glad of his address.”

Huan Tsung began to fill a long-stemmed pipe. He had extraordinarily slender, adroit fingers.

“I fear I cannot help you,” he replied in his courteous, exact English. “A European physician, you say?” He shook his head. “It is possible, if he came here, that he came only to make a purchase. Have you questioned my assistant?”

“I haven’t. The man I mean is employed by Dr. Fu Manchu.”

Not one of Huan Tsung’s thousand wrinkles stirred. His benevolent gaze became fixed upon Harkness.

“A strange name,” he murmured. “No doubt a nom de guerre. Tell me more of this strangely named doctor, if I am to help you.”

“It’s for you to tell me more. Will you tell me now, or will you come along and tell the boys at Centre Street?”

“Why, may I ask, should I drag my old bones to Centre Street?”

“It won’t be necessary, if you care to talk. You are an educated man, and I’m prepared to treat you that way if you behave sensibly.”

Huan Tsung went on filling his pipe. The illegible parchment of his features became creased by what might have been a smile.

“It is true. I formerly administered a large province of China, probably with justice, and certainly with success. Events, however, necessitated my departure without avoidable delay.”

“Did you know Dr. Fu Manchu in China?”

Huan Tsung ignited a paper spill in the brazier and began to light his pipe.

“I regret deeply that your question is a foolish one. I thought I had made it clear that I am unacquainted with this person.”

“Pity your memory’s getting so unreliable,” said Harkness.

“Alas, after seventy, each succeeding year robs us of a hundred delights.”

Heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs and Captain Rafferty came in.

“Listen—there’s a door down in the basement leading to some other place—another cellar, I guess. Let’s have the key, or shall I break it open?”

Huan Tsung regarded the intruder mildly.

“I fear you have no choice,” he said. “The door leads, as you say, into the storeroom of my neighbor, Kwee Long, whose premises are on the adjoining street. He will have gone, no doubt. The door is locked from the other side. I possess no key to this door.”

“Sure of that, Huan Tsung?” Harkness asked quietly.

“Unless my failing memory betrays me.”

The door in the cellar was forced. It proved no easy job: it was a strong, heavy door. The police found themselves in a much larger cellar, which evidently ran under several stores and was of irregular shape. Part of it seemed to be used by a caterer, for there were numerous cases of imported delicacies. They could find no switches and worked by the light of their lamps.

Then they came to the part where Chinese coffins were stacked.

This place struck a chill—to the spirit as well as to the body. The deputy commissioner had just joined the party. Their only clues, so far, led to Huan Tsung’s. Hope rested on the report of Officer Moreno, that the pseudo-doctor had been seen leaving there that night.

“No evidence anybody’s been around here,” Rafferty declared. “See any more doors any place?”

“There’s one over here. Captain,” came a muffled voice.

All flocked in that direction. Sure enough, there was, at the back of a deep alcove. The man who had found it tried to open it. He had no success.

“Smash it!” the deputy commissioner ordered.

And they had just gone to work with that enthusiasm which such an order always inspires, when Rafferty held his hand up.

“Quiet, everybody!”

Nervous silence succeeded clamor.

“What did you think you heard?” a hoarse whisper came from the deputy commissioner.

“Sort of tapping, sir.”

A silent interval of listening in semidarkness; then another whisper:

“Where from?”

“The coffins . . . Ssh! There it is again!”

Another pause for listening followed, in which the ray of more than one flashlamp moved unsteadily.

“Maybe there’s a rat in there.”

“Quiet! Listen!”

A faint, irregular knocking sound became audible. It was followed by one which resembled a stifled moan.

“Quick! This way! Open all those things. Down with the lot!”

A rush back to the coffin cellar took place. They pulled down five or six, and found them empty. Rafferty held up his hand.

“Stop the clatter. Listen.”

All became quiet. And from somewhere near the base of another pile not yet attacked they heard it again, more clearly . . . tapping and a stifled groan.

“It’s that thing with all the gilt! Last but one from the floor!”

They went to work with a will. To move the empty coffins on top was a business of minutes. And in the most ornate specimen of all, they found Nayland Smith.

His wrists and ankles were lashed up with what looked like sewing silk. But clasp-knives failed to cut it. A piece of surgical strapping was fastened across his mouth. When this had been removed:

“Thank God you heard me,” he croaked. “I could just move one foot. Don’t blunt your knives on this stuff. Get a wire-cutter. Lift me out.”

Two men lifted him out, and supported him to a bench set before the opposite wall. He smiled grimly as he sat there. The deputy commissioner produced a flask.

“Thank God indeed, Sir Denis. It’s a miracle you weren’t suffocated,”

“Air holes bored in coffin. Never mind me. What of Dr. Fu Manchu?”

“Not a sign of him.”

Nay-land Smith sighed, and took a drink.

“Yet he left here little more than half an hour ago.

“What! But it’s impossible! No one has left this area during that time who wasn’t known to be a regular resident.”

Smith shot him a steely glance.

“What about Huan Tsung? Doesn’t he wear a wide-brimmed hat and a heavy, fur-lined coat?”

The deputy commissioner and Captain Rafferty exchanged worried looks.

“He does, and he certainly went out again,” said Rafferty. “He went twice to a house on lower Fifth. But he’s back.”

“He may be,” Smith rapped. “But he only went there once. It was Dr. Fu Manchu, dressed like him, who came back and Dr. Fu Manchu who has just slipped through your fingers again! Have this Fifth Avenue place raided—now . . . But already it’s too late.”

Chapter X

Manhattan danced on tirelessly; a city of a thousand jewelled minarets, and not one mueddin to call Manhattan to prayer.

An enemy, one who aspired to nothing less than dictatorship of the United States, was within the gates, watching Morris Craig’s revolutionary experiments. London, knowing the hazard, watched also. Washington, alive to the menace, had instructed the F.B.I. And the F.B.I., smelling out the presence of a further danger, in the formidable person of Dr. Fu Manchu, had sent for Nayland Smith.

But no hint of the desperate battle waging in their midst was permitted to reach the ears of those whose fate hung in the balance. That hapless unit, the Man in the Street, went about his affairs never suspecting that a third world war raged on his doorstep.

Nayland Smith called up Craig the next morning.

“Thought you might be worried,” he said. “Had a bit of a brush with the enemy, but no bones broken. Watch your step, Craig. This thing is coming to a head. Hope to look in later . . .”

The mantle of gloom which had enveloped Craig dropped from his shoulders. His problems no longer seemed insuperable. Clearly enough, opposition more dangerous than that of commercial rivalry was in the field against Huston Electric. His science-trained brain, which demanded tangible evidence before granting even trivial surmises, had fought against acceptance, not merely of the presence, but of the existence, of Dr. Fu Manchu.

Now he was converted.

Ignorant, yet, of what had happened to Nayland Smith, he must regard the attempt on Moreno as the work of some enemy unusually equipped. The mode of attack certainly suggested oriental influence.

If, then. Dr. Fu Manchu, what of the Soviet agent?

He might reasonably suppose, although Smith had never even hinted it, that Smith acted for the British government. Very well. Who was acting for the Kremlin?

Certainly, his discovery (for which, in his modest way, Craig claimed no personal credit) had called down the lightning. But, in his new mood, there was no place for misgiving. On the contrary, he was exultant, for by that night, he believed, his task would be completed.

When Camille came in, he turned to her with a happy smile.

“Just heard from Nayland Smith. Thank heaven the old lad’s okay”

“I am glad,” said Camille, and Craig listened to the harp notes in her fascinating voice. “I know you were worried.”

“I’m worried about you, too.”

She started; her eyes seemed to assume a deeper shade.

“Why—Dr. Craig?”

“You’re overdoin’ it, my dear. It simply won’t work, you know. Because I’m sure you’re not getting enough sleep.”

“Do I look such a wreck?” she smiled.

“You always look lovely,” he replied impulsively, and then regretted the words, for a faint flush tinged Camille’s cheeks, and so he added, “when you don’t wear those damned glasses.”

“Oh!” said Camille—and he watched for, and saw, that adorable little moue, like a suppressed dimple, appear on her lip. “As you told me you didn’t like them, I only wear them, now, when I am working.”

“I didn’t say anything of the kind. I said I preferred your eyes in the nude, so to speak. There’s only one other thing you might do to add to my joy.”

“What is that. Dr. Craig?”

“Well—must you hide the most wonderful hair that ever escaped captivity in Hollywood by pinning it behind your ears as if you wanted to forget it?”

Then Camille laughed, and her laughter rang true.

“Really, you are ridiculous! But very complimentary. You see, I know my hair is rather—well—flamboyant. It waves quite obstinately, and I don’t feel—”

“It’s a display entirely in order for the office of a stuffy physicist? Well—I’ll let you off. But there’s a proviso.”

“What is the proviso. Dr. Craig?”

“That you unloose the latent fires as from tomorrow, when we disport ourselves at Falling Waters.”

“Oh,” said Camille demurely. “Am I allowed to think it over?”

“Yes. But make up your mind by the morning.”

Camille crossed toward the door of her room, then paused, and turned.

“I’m sorry. But I’m afraid I quite forgot to mention what I really came to ask you. Dr. Craig.”

“Remembered now?”

“Yes. Mrs. Frobisher was speaking to me on the phone yesterday, and we discovered we both suffered from insomnia. She called me this morning to tell me she had arranged an appointment with Professor Hoffmeyer. Of course, I should never have dreamed of such a thing. But—”

“You can’t duck it as the boss’s wife has fixed it? Quite agree. He’ll probably prescribe six weeks at Palm Beach. But pay no attention.”

“What I wanted to ask you was if it would be all right for me to go along there at eight tonight?”

“Eight?”

“Yes. An unusual hour for a consultant. I suppose he is fitting me in when he has no other appointments.”

“Between the cocktails and the soup, I should guess. Certainly, Miss Navarre. Why ask?”

“Well”—Camille hesitated—”I know you plan to work late tonight, and I’m often wanted to take notes—”

“Forget it. Proceed from the learned professor’s straight to your sleeping-sack. We make an early start tomorrow morning.”

“That’s very kind of you. Dr. Craig, and I am grateful But when I took this appointment I knew what the hours would be. I shall certainly come back.”

Camille went into her room, quietly closing the door. All her movements were marked by a graceful composure.

* * *

At a quarter to eight, when Camille set out, Craig was crouched over his work, a formula like a Picasso landscape pinned to a corner of the board and a pen in his mouth.

“I expect to return in an hour. Dr. Craig.”

Craig raised his hand in a gesture of dismissal and said something that might have been “Go to bed.”

Camille pressed the button of the private elevator, and when it arrived, opened the door with her pass-key and went down to the thirty-second floor. She closed the door there—they were all self-locking—and crossed the big office, in which a light was always left on, to a similar door on the other side. She knew the second elevator would be below, for Regan had gone down at four o’clock, when Mr. Shaw had relieved him.

She pressed the button, and when the signal light glowed, unlocked the door and descended to the main floor. There was a small, dark lobby which opened directly onto the street, a means of private entry and exit used only by the laboratory and Michael Frobisher. At the moment that Camille stepped out of the elevator and as the door closed behind her, she knew that someone was in this lobby.

She stood quite still.

“Who’s there?” she asked in a low voice

“Don’t be alarmed.” A flashlamp came to life. “It’s only me—or I, if you’re a purist!”

“Oh!” Camille whispered. “Sir Denis Nayland Smith—”

She could see his face now, framed in the upturned collar of a fur-lined coat. It was a very grim face.

“Wondering how I got in? Well, I’ll explain the great illusion. I have a duplicate key! Craig up there?”

“Yes, Sir Denis—and very busy.”

“Are you off for the night?”

“Not at all. I hope to be back in an hour.”

“Good girl!” That revealing smile swept grimness from his face as swiftly as a mask removed. “I have excellent reports of your keenness and efficiency.”

He patted her shoulder, passed her, and put his key in the elevator door.

Camille found herself standing on the street without quite knowing how she got there. Two men who gave her searching glances were lounging immediately outside, but, although her heart was racing, she preserved her admirable poise, waiting with apparent calm until a cruising taxi came along.

She gave the address, Woolton Building, and then tried to carry out advice printed on a card before her, “Sit back and relax.”

Useless to ignore the fact that she had reached a climax in her affairs. The tangled threads of her existence had tripped her at almost every turn. True, she had snapped one. But Camille found herself thinking of Omar’s words, “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ—”

Morris must be told. She had made up her mind to tell him tomorrow. Her crowning dread was that he would find out from someone else. She wanted him to learn the truth from her own lips . . .

Only one elevator remained in service at the Woolton Building. Most of the office staffs had left. Camille told the bored operator, “Professor Hoffmeyer.”

“Hoffmeyer? Top.”

She stepped out on an empty corridor. Directly facing her was a door marked, “Professor Hoffmeyer. Inquiries.”

It proved to be a well-appointed reception office.

No one was there.

Camille sat down on a cushioned divan. A clock above the desk told her that she was three minutes ahead of time. Morris’s words flashed through her mind, “Between the cocktails and the soup.”

On the stroke of eight, a Chinese girl came in through a doorway facing that by which visitors entered. She wore national dress and had a grace of movement which reminded Camille of a gazelle. Clasping her hands on her breast, she bowed.

“If you will be pleased to follow me,” she said.

Camille followed her, across a large salon decorated with miniature reproductions of classic statuary and paintings of flawless nudity. There were richly cushioned settees, desks provided with the latest periodicals, softly shaded lamps. She began to understand that Professor Hoffmeyer was a luxury reserved for the wives and concubines of commercial sultans, and to wonder if Mrs. Frobisher had any idea of her salary.

From here they passed along a tiled corridor between cubicles resembling those in a Pompeian bath. There were medical odors mingling with all those perfumes peculiar to a beauty parlor.

There had been no one in the salon, and there was no one in any of the cubicles.

The journey ended in an office which, unlike the other apartments, conformed with Camille’s idea of what a consultant’s establishment should be. There was a large, neat desk. One of the drawers was open, as if someone had been seated there only a moment before. A number of scientific books filled a heavy mahogany case. On the right of this was an opening which evidently communicated with another room.

Camille’s Chinese guide clasped her hands on her breast, bowed, and retired.

The place possessed a faint, sweetish smell. It awakened some dormant memory. Then a voice spoke, the voice of someone in the dimly lighted room beyond.

“Be so good as to enter.”

Camille’s mind, her spirit, rose in revolt. Suddenly she was fired by one impulse only—to escape. But she seemed to be incapable of attempting escape. Those words were a command she found herself helpless to disobey.

Slowly, with lagging steps, she walked in. Her movements made no sound on a thick carpet. It was an apartment Orientally furnished. There were arched openings in which lanterns hung. She saw painted screens, lacquer. But these were sketchy, a pencilled background for a figure seated behind a long, narrow table.

He wore a yellow robe; his chin rested on his hands, his elbows on the table. And his glittering green eyes claimed and owned her.

Camille stifled a scream, turned—and the opening through which she had come in was no longer there; only a beautifully wrought lacquer panel. She twisted back, fighting down hysteria. Her glance took in the whole room.

“Yes,” the sibilant voice assured her, “you are not mistaken. Miss Navarre . . . you have been here before.”

Chapter XI

“The greatest compliment ever paid to me,” said Nayland Smith grimly. “Dr. Fu Manchu considers I am more useful alive than dead!”

Morris Craig, seated, back to the desk, watched that lean, restless figure parading the office. Smith’s hat and topcoat lay on the settee, his pipe bubbled between his small, even teeth. He looked gaunt, but his steps were springy, his eyes clear.

“I can only repeat—it’s a miracle you’re alive.”

“I suppose it is. Mysterious news of the pending raid on Huan Tsung’s led to a postponement of the treatment prescribed. Otherwise, I should have been found, certifiably dead, in that ghastly coffin. Failing the raid, I should by now be on my way to China.”

“Do you think the headquarters of this thing are in China?”

“No,” rapped Smith. “In Tibet. In a completely inaccessible spot. Lhasa is not the only secret city in Asia—nor Everest the highest mountain. But leave that. I want certain facts.”

Craig lighted a cigarette which he had been holding for some time between his fingers.

“You shall have them. But there are certain facts I want, too. I’m not immune from human curiosity, even if I have harnessed a force new to physics. When the police found you last night, what about this fellow, Huan Tsung?”

Nayland Smith smiled. It was a smile of pure enjoyment. He pulled up, facing Craig.

“Huan Tsung, ex-governor of a Chinese province , and a prominent member of the Council of Seven, I had met before. He blandly denied any recollection of the meeting. As I had clearly been delivered at his shop during the evening in a crate, and taken into an adjoining cellar, Harkness and the commissioner proposed to arrest him.”

“I should have proposed ditto.”

“On what charge?” rapped Smith. “There are witnesses—including a police officer—to testify that he was not at home during the time I was being interviewed by Dr. Fu Manchu—”

“But you tell me he doubled with Fu Manchu—”

“Undoubtedly he did. But how can we prove it? A scholarly, elderly gentleman who claims to be French Canadian occupies the apartment on lower Fifth Avenue which Huan Tsung visited last night. They are old friends, it seems. They were discussing the political situation in China, and Huan Tsung returned to Pell Street for some correspondence bearing on the subject.”

“But Smith—you were found in his cellar!”

“It isn’t his cellar, Craig. Remember, the police broke into it. And the man to whom it really belongs is out of town! Lastly, the shopman, a cultured liar, produced an invoice for the contents of the crate in which I was brought there from wherever I had been before!”

“But you say you recognized Huan Tsung?”

“Certainly. But he blandly assures me I am mistaken. He had the impudence to point out that to the Western eye, Chinese faces look much alike. Had he had the privilege of meeting me before, he said, such an honor couldn’t possibly have escaped his memory!”

“Do you mean to say he’s going to get away with it?”

“For the time being, I’m afraid he is. Mr. La Fosse of lower Fifth Avenue, who is undoubtedly in Fu Manchu’s employ, declares that he never even heard of such a person. Of course, the police will watch them closely, as astronomers watch a new comet. Their lines are tapped already.”

“And what about those damned injections? Do you feel no ill effects?”

“None whatever. You must accept the fact, Craig, that Dr. Fu Manchu has a knowledge of medicine which is generations ahead of anything known to Western science. And now, waste no more of my time. Listen—”

The big clock above the desk sounded its single note. Eight o’clock. The office door opened and Regan came in. His dour face wore an odd expression.

“I may be mistaken,” he said, “but I fancy I saw a pair of tough-looking lads loafing outside the private door, downstairs.”

Nayland Smith laughed. “Part of my bodyguard!”

“Oh,” said Regan. “That’s it, is it?”

“We are invested,” murmured Craig. “A beleaguered garrison. Look well to your armour, gentlemen, and let your swords be bright.”

Regan nodded unhumorously, and going up the steps, unlocked the laboratory door. Eerie vibrations invaded the office. His figure showed outlined for a moment against green light. Then the door was closed as he went in.

“I want to know,” rapped Nayland Smith, “when you will be finished.”

“Tonight.”

“Sure?”

“Perfectly sure.”

“I thought as much. Even allowing an hour for dinner?” Craig brushed his hair back, staring.

“I’m stopping for no dinner.”

Nayland Smith smiled again.

“Craig, I begin to agree with Dr. Fu Manchu, who informed me that you are what he described as ‘touched with genius.’ I don’t want you to confirm his diagnosis by dying young. I have booked a table at a quiet restaurant. Until you are dragged away from that desk, your abstraction is deplorable. And there are many important things I want to tell you.”

“Won’t they keep?”

“No. And by the way, I miss the invaluable Sam.”

“The said Invaluable has twenty-four hours’ leave. His mother is ill in Philadelphia. Result, that for the first time in days I can go out for a drink without being tailed by a shadow in a peaked cap!”

“Oh!” rapped Smith, and gave Craig a steely glance. “Sorry to hear it.”

The laboratory yawned again, and Shaw stepped out. He stood at the top of the steps for a moment, looking down. The chief technician had the heavy frame of an open-air man who has come indoors, a mass of unruly blond hair, and a merry eye. “Just off, Shaw?” Craig called. “You don’t know my masterful friend, Sir Denis Nayland Smith? On my right, Masterful Smith; on my left, Martin Shaw.”

Shaw came down and shook hands.

“Free man until midnight,” he said. “Then back to the bloody Juggernaut that lives in there!” He turned to Craig. “If you had that valve detail ready tonight, I believe I could fit up the transmuter in time for tests on, say, Monday.”

“Do you?” Craig replied, and grinned like a schoolboy. “Has no thought crossed the massive brain to file a will before that date?”

Shaw nodded. “It has. Doctor. Rests with you. But if we can keep the cork in when we really fill the bottle, well—”

He went out, giving an imitation of a man under heavy fire. As the office door closed:

“Our convoy awaits!” said Nayland Smith. “Let’s move.”

“Stop ordering me about,” Craig exclaimed in mock severity. “Oh, I give up the unequal contest.”

He called the laboratory.

“Reganhere.”

“I regret to state, Regan, that I am being forcibly removed to some restaurant to dine—”

“Good thing, too.”

“Repeat.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Oh, Well, I shall be back at nine. Want to see me before I go?”

“No, Doctor. Enjoy your dinner.”

Craig carried his drawing board, and his notes, across to the safe. When they were locked away, he glanced towards the door of Camille’s room.

“She’s out,” said Smith drily. “I passed her as I came in.”

* * *

They were already speeding along in a police car, two F.B.I, men following in another, when Camille faced Dr. Fu Manchu across the bizarre study.

“You have been here before,” the harsh voice had said. And, in a moment of cold horror, which seemed to check her heartbeats, Camille knew this to be true. Her dream had haunted her so persistently that she had spoken to Morris, warned him to change the safe combination, for in her wastebasket she had found those fragments of a tom-up note. And although she had spent hours trying to piece the fragments together, and had failed, she knew that the paper on which the note was written came from the Huston Electric office.

Now—the man, the inscrutable, dreadful face of the man, every detail surrounding him, told her that the dream had been no dream, but a memory recaptured in sleep.

She had come to the appointment with Professor Hoffmeyer wearing her dark-rimmed glasses. At this moment the incongruity of her appearance in such an environment struck her forcibly.

One angle of the room was occupied by shelves filled with volumes, some of them large and faded leather bindings. Then came the lacquer panel. This, she knew, masked an opening through which she had entered. Beyond it a curtain partly concealed a recess. There was an arched doorway in which a silk shaded lantern hung.

A cushioned divan rose like an island in a sea of rugs. There were two strangely shaped mediaeval chairs.

A long black table bore books, open manuscripts, jars which apparently contained specimens of some kind, and a mummied head mounted on a wooden base. The dim light of a green lamp just outlined a crystal globe eclipsed in shadow.

And behind the table, hands with attenuated nails crossed under his chin, was the Man . . .

“Please sit down.”

His half-closed eyes glanced sideways in the direction of the divan. He did not stir, otherwise.

Camille, fighting a desperate battle for calmness, for sanity, remained standing. She stared challengingly at the motionless figure. Her throat was dry, but when she spoke, her soft voice did not betray her.

“I came to consult Professor Hoffmeyer. Who are you?”

He remained immobile. When he replied, Camille could not see that the thin lips moved.

“I am accustomed to asking questions. Miss Navarre, not to answering them. But I must make a concession in the case of a fellow scientist—and one whose courage I respect. I am known as Dr. Fu Manchu.”

“Dr. Fu Manchu!” she whispered.

“I believe you have been warned against me. I regret that, like the straying husbands, I should be so misunderstood, that the world should think badly of me.”

“But what are you doing here? If Mrs. Frobisher knew—”

“If Mrs. Frobisher knew what? That Professor Hoffmeyer is Dr. Fu Manchu, or that Camille Navarre is employed by the intelligence service of an alien government? To which eventuality do you refer?”

“What do you say? What are you suggesting?”

“I suggest nothing. I ask a question. Mrs. Frobisher made the appointment for tonight because I told her to do so—”

“You meant—that Mrs. Frobisher knows—?”

“Mrs. Frobisher does not know anything. Few women do. But I believe that her husband might react unfavorably if he knew you to be an agent of Great Britain.”

Camille’s heart was throbbing wildly, but she had been trained to face the worst.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it is true.” Slowly Dr. Fu Manchu stood up. “Your employers are within their rights in seeking to learn the nature of those experiments being carried out in the Huston laboratory. We live in a dangerous age. I admire them for their ingenious removal to a better post of Dr. Craig’s former assistant, and for providing you with the necessary credentials to take her place.”

He was walking around the comer of the long, narrow table, and coming nearer. He had a catlike step.

“My credentials are my own.”

“Indeed. And where did you acquire them?”

“Is that your business?”

Fear (the tall, yellow-robed figure was very close now) made her defiant.

“And where did you acquire them?” he repeated in a low, sibilant tone.

“I graduated at the Sorbonne.”

“I congratulate you. These are details I had no time to gather at our former interview. And did you carry out intelligence work during the war?”