“You may assure the lady her secret is safe.”
“Damn it, Odon,” There was a wealth of bitterness in the response, “that’s the only way you’d have ever gotten those plans of the subway ventilating system from me. If they’d been my own letters I’d have told you where to go, but I couldn’t let hers get to—”
“The person who would have been so very interested in reading them. No! We knew that, and used our information.” Odon was rolling the plans up dextrously, though one yellow hand still held the automatic. “I cannot quite comprehend your Occidental viewpoint.”
“You wouldn’t. But I still can’t get it through my head why you went to so much trouble to get them. The principles are common knowledge, and your engineers—”
“Are as good as yours. Yes.” Something vaguely mocking had come into Sato’s tone. “Perhaps you might be enlightened if I were to tell you that I represent not the municipality of our largest city but—our War Office.”
“What!” Lassiter forgot caution in an astonished shout. “Your War—But why—?”
“Why should that department be interested in your subway?” A chair grated as the alien rose. “Simply this, my dear sir. While our King and your President struggle to reach an approachment on the difficulties between our nations, we of the military prepare for the failure of their negotiations. New weapons are being forged on both sides, new methods of warfare. No longer will the uniformed forces alone bear the brunt of battle. The new strategy will consist of striking at the civilian population, and striking first. Gas and disease germs, will be munitions of the next war, their swift dissemination will constitute its tactics. With these maps we shall know just where to place our gas bombs, just where to release our death-dealing microbes so that they may spread through New York with the greatest rapidity. You see—”
“You dog!” Lassiter’s chair crashed to the floor as he leaped to his feet, the table skidded sideways as he dove past it, his big hands fisted and flailing. “You yellow dog!” But the other’s ready gun cracked, its sound thundering here but inaudible outside the muffled room.
A sudden blue hole appeared in the engineer’s right temple. Odon slid aside, catlike, watched Lassiter plunge past him and thud blindly against the wall. The big man clawed at the plaster; a sound burbled from his throat, something between a groan and a shriek. Then life was out of him and he had collapsed, a shapeless, sprawling heap on the dull maroon carpeting. Where the back of his head lay, a darker pool spread, seeped into the thick pile.
Odon stood motionless for a moment, the faintest of smiles twisting his thin lips with cold cruelty. “So to the rest of his nation when the day comes,” he muttered in his own language. “And may it dawn soon.”
He turned back to the table, put his murder-weapon down, and lifted the blueprint roll to stow it in a cunningly-contrived pocket of his dark jacket. “But I must rid myself of the weakness that urged me to taunt him with the fate awaiting his countrymen before I stilled his tongue forever.”
His long fingers sought the light chain, jerked it. Blackness swept in to hide murderer and victim under a common pall, but there was a feel of movement in the room, the slither of the spy’s feet across the rug, the soft rub of cotton against wood as he pulled the muffling from the door cracks. The metal grated with the wee sound of well-oiled hinges. A widening gray line showed that the door was opening to let the spy out into the early-morning corridor with his burden of horrible death for New York’s teeming millions. His squat form was silhouetted against that dimness, and then—against a sudden blaze of white light from a flashlight lens. “Not so fast, Odon,” a cold, hard voice sounded. “Not so fast.”
Low-toned as it was, that voice was keen-edged with threat of sudden death. The spy saw a gleam of metal next the steadily held flashlight, the snouting barrel of a revolver. His face froze, was an expressionless mask. His one hand tightened its hold on the doorknob till white showed over the muscle at the base of its thumb, and the other arm moved rigidly away from his side. “Get back,” the newcomer ordered. “Get back into that room.”
Odon’s three rearward strides were stiff-legged, the newcomer’s advance noiseless as the foreigner’s own movements had been. The door thudded shut once more on taut drama within the drab hotel room.
The torch-beam, reflected back from palely-enameled walls showed a vague, black-clothed figure ominously motionless. A gray felt was pulled low over his forehead, a gray mask hid nose and mouth, only his narrowed eyes were revealed, their irises a steely blue. Even the one visible hand that held the butt of his weapon was covered by a skin-tight glove. That glove pulled the killer’s glance to it. Concealed fear flickered in the oddly-round eyes that betrayed his race. For, although the rest of the glove was black, the finger curled around the gun’s trigger was a glaring scarlet, as if it had been dipped in fresh blood.
The spy’s lips scarcely moved, but his words were sharp; “The Red Finger!” was what he said. “But I thought—”
“That Reinhardt Gans had done for me? So he reported to his government, and your undercover man there read that report and sent the news on to you. Whereupon all you spies and saboteurs breathed a huge sigh of relief. It would be lots safer now, you thought, to carry on your filthy work in the United States, each for his own nation, getting ready for the time you all dream of when America will have to fight the World. But Gans was mistaken. Too bad, isn’t it?”
Odon shrugged, fatalistically. “Very much too bad. We will have to take steps to repair Gans’ mistake.”
“I don’t doubt that you will try. But in the meantime, the plans, please, for which you killed Lassiter. Put them on that table.” The voice of the Red Finger was suddenly diamond-hard. “And only the plans. You know well enough that if your hand comes out with a gun in it my lead will be in your belly before you have a chance to use it.”
The spy’s thin lips tightened, a straight gash across his face. “Take them,” he defied, “if you can.”
“I’ll take them from your dead body, you rat,” Red Finger snapped. “In ten seconds. One—”
“No you won’t. Look.” Odon’s stiffly-extended left arm twisted, so that the palm of its hand was turned toward the other. Held loosely between thumb-ball and palm a half-inch crystal ball glittered. “If my hand relaxes this will drop. It contains quintol, our new explosive, sufficient to blow everything in this room to atomic fragments. How about it, Red Finger, will you shoot?”
The American paused almost imperceptively. “Two—,” his count went on, “Three—”
Odon’s queer eyes glowed. “That isn’t all,” he resumed, smoothly. “On my body is a thin-walled vial in which is a virulent culture of the bacilli of the bubonic plague. Shattered by the explosion, they will scatter—hundred, thousands in this city will die horribly—”
Red Finger had continued steadily through this pronouncement. “Six— Seven—”
What manner of man was this? The villain was not bluffing, that much was certain. Nor could he be bluffed; fanatic eagerness to die for a cause is a notorious trait of his race. Was the Red Finger about to sacrifice deliberately hundreds of lives for momentary triumph, a triumph he himself could not live to savor? “Eight—”
The contemplated use of the plans he determined would be hardly more damaging than the result of his shot. “Nine—” The American’s face was hidden, but Odon’s glistening features, flat-faced, high cheek-boned, was set, fish-scaly beneath
