The Frosted Death

CHAPTER XI From The Depths

Far up in the Maine woods, miles from even the smallest villages, there was a cleared glade that, from the air, appeared to be just what it was: a landing field.

The landing field was about a quarter of a mile from the Maine coast. It was in the heart of over a thousand acres of almost impenetrable timberland which was privately owned and hence seldom trespassed upon.

On each corner of this field, tonight, there was a landing light that was strong, but so shielded, that it merely glowed without sending rays up into the sky. Like four huge glowworms, they bounded the space.

A plane coasted for this space. Motors were cut off so that, with its minimum landing speed, it made hardly more noise than a gigantic moth. It hadn’t made any noise for quite a while previously, either. The pilot had started down from twenty thousand feet, and from that altitude you can coast silently for many miles with your motors cut.

At the controls was a man who was tall and lean, but otherwise bore the same stamp as the foreign-looking fellows with the phlegmatic countenances. His face wasn’t exactly cruel. It was simply hard, humorless, unhuman. He wouldn’t inflict pain just to get pleasure from it; he would inflict it because it seemed necessary, and because it simply didn’t occur to him to get excited about the pain others might feel.

In the passenger seat was Carl Veshnir.

The man at the controls spoke, and his tone brought out another fact about him. Whoever he was, he was very highly placed in some sort of occupation other than business. For he treated Veshnir, who was rich and usually kowtowed to, as if he were some sort of inferior errand boy.

“I hope, for the comfort of all concerned, that this will be soon successfully concluded.”

His English was precise, but his accent was guttural.

“We ought to be done in a week,” Veshnir said.

The man’s eyes took on a fanatic look.

“Let us hope you are correct. For if you are, you will be rich beyond your dreams. As for us”—his harsh voice took on a biting edge—“we shall change the course of history in a month!”

Veshnir stared at him, eyes genuinely puzzled.

“I can’t understand you fellows,” he said. “And I can’t understand what you hope to gain. Say you capture all the area you wish. The people originally owning it are still there. You can’t execute twenty, thirty, fifty million people. All you can do is hold them in slavery. But you can only hold them while your power is at its peak. The minute a flaw appears — and every system shows a weak spot somewhere, in time — your slaves rise and overthrow you. Then the map is as it was before, and eventually all the blood and steel you’ve spent is forgotten as if it had never been.”

The man’s eyes flamed in a way that made Veshnir a little sorry he had spoken his thoughts aloud.

“What we capture we shall keep — forever.” He stared ominously at Veshnir. “It makes some difference to you, perhaps, what we choose to do?”

“Oh, no,” said Veshnir hastily. “Not at all. You fellows have fought each other for two thousand years. I suppose you’ll do it for another couple of thousand. But it’s no concern of mine! It’s a long way from me.”

“I shall fly you back in say — three hours?”

“Right!” said Veshnir. “And there won’t be many more trips needed.”

He left the plane and the hidden landing field and struck off through the woods. There was a very faint path to follow, but he followed it easily. This was his path and his woods.

He emerged at the luxurious log cabin, bought and held in a phony name, and knocked on the door.

It opened, and a gun poked against his stomach.

“Oh! It’s you,” said Sangaman, putting the gun down.

He shut the door after Veshnir and followed him to a rustic divan. He sank down in it as if utterly exhausted. His hands were still trembling from the emotion roused by that knock on the door.

“I can’t take this life much longer,” he said. “I’m going back, give myself up. Better to be in jail facing a murder charge than here—”

“Two murder charges,” said Veshnir quietly.

“Two?” Sangaman fairly screamed it.

“And responsibility for many more deaths than that,” Veshnir nodded, his kindly face an incarnation of sympathy.

“I don’t understand—”

Veshnir told him, hand laid gently on the older man’s shoulder. Told him about the spread of the frosted death. Told him of August Taylor’s murder, and of the rubber gloves that implicated him. Told him of the public conviction that since he had murdered Taylor by means of the frosted death, he was therefore responsible for the deadly loosing and spread of the stuff.

“Why, this is incredible!” moaned Sangaman. “And hopeless. I thought I was in deep before. I’m in ten times as deep now, with all these things laid at my door!”

He stared swiftly at Veshnir.

“The death of Taylor releases a lot of badly needed insurance as capital for the corporation,” he said.

Veshnir shook his head.

“No, it doesn’t. Because everyone thinks you did it, and a beneficiary can’t profit from his own murder. Taylor must have been killed by somebody for a personal reason. And it puts a different face on the whole thing.”

The suspicion died in Sangaman’s lined face. He looked hopefully at the partner he had always distrusted because of his chiseling tendencies, but now regarded as his only aid.

“I saw you strike Targill down,” said Veshnir. “But this second murder, which you couldn’t possibly have done, suggests a very unusual, but possible thing. Suppose some employee of ours were on that top floor that night, with no one the wiser. Suppose he wanted Targill out of the way, and he managed to remove him by drugging you into a partial coma in which you killed Targill? Then, we will say, he wanted Taylor out of the way, too. So he killed him and again implicated you by leaving your rubber gloves in Taylor’s home.”

“But what motive would any employee have for killing Targill? Or Taylor?”

Veshnir shook his head.

“That’s something I can’t even guess at, for the moment. But it gives us something to work on — and something to hope for. I’m going to follow up that possibility with every private detective I can get my hands on. Meanwhile, it will be wisest for you to keep on hiding here. Now, more than before, it would be fatal for you to show yourself. And I mean fatal! I doubt if you’d ever get to a jail alive, if you were captured. Public opinion is rather strong against you at the moment.”

Sangaman had looked eighty years old when Veshnir came in. He looked ninety when Veshnir left.

Veshnir, on the contrary, walking back down the woods path, looked more contented — and benevolent — than he had when he came.

Everything was going perfectly, thanks to his quick, shrewd brain. In a week or less the whole thing would be over. At that time, Sangaman could be — eliminated, too. It could be done in such a way as to make him the goat in the final, most outrageous act of all.

Then Veshnir would go his way, enormously richer, above suspicion, with Sangaman shouldering the entire responsibility in his grave.

He veered from the path to the landing field, and went down an even fainter one to the left. He wasn’t going back to the plane for a little while yet. He had another goal in mind.

Not far from the landing field, on the coast, there was a small inlet that made a natural bay. On the shore was a remnant of a dock, where a fisherman had kept his boat till discovering that tides and storms made the bay unusable during too much of the year.

In this little bay, a black hulk rose furtively to the surface. First a periscope, then a conning tower, then a wedge-shaped black hull. Men swarmed out of the hatchway onto the deck of the submarine, and a small boat was swung up and set into the water. The captain of the undersea craft stepped into the boat without a word and was sculled ashore.