The Hate Master

CHAPTER XVI Death for President!

The way to the White House was clear for Edwin C. Ritter.

The papers had it all. Ritter for president. A grateful nation wanting to reward the man who had straightened financial and industrial tangles before they could become serious; a man with the ability to be a great peacemaker in a warring world.

“Yes, the way is clear for Ritter,” said Smitty. He shook his head. “But, my gosh, we simply can’t allow a thing like that!”

They all looked at The Avenger.

Dick Benson had said that there was one last thing they could do to stop this. One last resort, though he had added that it was a great risk to take, even for Justice, Inc.

The little band wanted to hear that last resort, now.

The Avenger’s almost colorless eyes were as coldly brilliant as pale jewels. He nodded his head.

“We’ll have to do it,” he said.

“Do what?” asked Nellie.

“Kidnap Ritter.”

It fell among them like a bombshell.

Kidnap Ritter!

Why, here was a man whose name at the moment was known around the world; who was the biggest figure in America. Kidnaping him would be like stealing the Statue of Liberty. And the Statue would be much easier to keep hidden than Ritter.

The implications of the thing kept growing in their minds.

“Suppose,” said Smitty, “we snatch the guy, and then get caught at it? And even Justice, Inc., would have to jump to keep ahead of all the police in the country.”

“We’d get the death penalty,” said Dick calmly.

“What good would it do if we did get him?” asked Nellie.

“We could keep him till we’d cleared up this affair of the hate serum and had definite proof to offer the nation,” said The Avenger.

“If we couldn’t clear it up?”

“Then we’ll just hold him till after the election,” said Dick Benson.

“He’d know precisely who was responsible and could turn us all in to the cops,” said Mac dourly.

“Yes,” nodded The Avenger, face as calm as ice, eyes unreadable.

“And that would mean the chair,” said Mac.

“Yes.”

“So when do we start?” boomed the giant. “If we win, we expose this political plot for the deadly thing it is. If we lose, we keep a murderer out of the White House, anyway, but go down on the records as criminals with the whole country raving for our deaths. But either way we save the country a great disaster. So — when do we start?”

Obviously, the others all had the same thought.

“We’ll start immediately,” Dick said. “There is no reason for delay. Ritter is at the Hudson River place. Josh contacted me a little while ago. I’ll speak to Josh again and see how things are out there.”

He stepped to the big master radio, moving as always with the fluid speed that spoke volumes about his lightning muscular co-ordination.

“Josh. Benson calling. Josh.”

“Yes, Mr. Benson.”

Josh’s voice was low. Evidently he was speaking into his tiny belt radio from some spot where he didn’t dare make too much noise.

“You’re at Ritter’s place now?” asked Dick.

“Yes. I’m up in a buttonwood tree about twenty yards from the house. Can’t talk any louder than this. Men all around. Can you hear me all right?”

“I can hear you. What are these men, Josh?”

“Guards,” said Josh.

“And there are a lot of them?”

“Twenty or thirty, I’d say. Tough-looking customers.” There was a pause. Then: “There are three cops and a squad car at the road gate detailed especially to guard Ritter.”

Smitty and Mac looked at each other and shook their heads at that.

“All right, Josh,” said Benson. “We’re coming out. Stay on duty.”

The Avenger turned to his aides, who had heard all Josh had to say.

“Ritter had a hunch something like this might be tried,” mused Mac.

“Naturally,” said Dick. “So he has gathered all his forces around him.”

“But that gang of his… er… eliminated itself back at the Vermont farm,” said Smitty.

There was no need to answer this. Thugs who can handle a gun are a dime a dozen. It would be easy for Ritter to hire a new gang, importing them from a distance so that they wouldn’t be known to the police detailed to watch his place.

“Those cops,” said Mac. “We can’t fight police, Muster Benson. We’ve always worked with the police.”

“We won’t fight them, now,” said The Avenger. “Come on.”

Dick took a big seven-passenger sedan. It was the largest and most heavily armored of his fleet of cars. It weighed nearly ten thousand pounds, but you wouldn’t know it; it looked like any other big sedan. Only the tires gave it away, with a careful study. The tires, slightly bigger than they should have been, were truck tires.

Mac sat in front with The Avenger. Smitty and Nellie were in the back. Josh would be in there on the return trip. And, with luck, Ritter. But there was still a vacancy.

“Cole ought to be with us,” sighed Smitty. “Was he any different last time you looked at him, chief?”

“Still in the coma,” said The Avenger, spinning the huge car through traffic as though it had been a motorcycle.

“Where do we go with Ritter?” asked Nellie. “We can’t go back to Bleek Street. It’s too well-known that Bleek Street is our headquarters, and there’s too much chance that something may go wrong enough for us to be linked up with this.”

“We’ll take Ritter to the Justine Building.”

“If we get him,” said Mac dourly. Mac was the pessimist of the band.

“We’ll get him,” said The Avenger quietly. “Rosabel will send Lila there, too, in a little while. We’ll all stay at the Justine Building for a time.”

There was silence, then, till they got near the estate of Edwin Ritter, presidential candidate.

The Avenger stopped the car. In that filing cabinet he had for a brain was a complete layout of this section of the country. He knew that the road gate to Ritter’s twenty-acre place was between a quarter and a half mile up the highway. He knew that a hundred yards ahead, around a bend, was a secondary road; that off the road to the left, four miles down, was a tiny woods lane that circled back once more to this main pike.

“We’ll get out here,” he said quietly. “No, not you, Nellie. You’re to get that squad car out of trouble.”

He took pencil and paper from his pocket and drew for Nellie the surrounding roads, from the map of his mind.

“When we have gotten around the bend, ahead, give us five minutes. Then fire this gun four times and scream. Make it good and loud. After that, drive around the bend, going slowly. The police will come in a hurry in that squad car to investigate the scream and the shooting. As soon as you see them, drive into this road, go till you hit the little woods lane, turn into that and circle back. Don’t let anything stop you because we’re depending on you to pick us up. And we’ll want to leave in a hurry.”

Nellie nodded her dainty blond head and took the wheel, looking smaller and more fragile than ever in the vast sedan.

The rest went on.

It was about seven minutes later that the shots and the scream rang out. In something like forty seconds, the wail of a police siren sounded, and the squad car from Ritter’s gate dashed by at seventy miles per hour or better.

Mac and Smitty and The Avenger emerged from behind a high hedge at the corner of Ritter’s grounds and went toward the house.

“Hey,” said Smitty uneasily, “there was something odd about that yelp of Nellie’s. It sounded like the real thing to me, instead of a fake.”

“She was supposed to make it good,” shrugged Mac.

“She wouldn’t really be in trouble back there, would she?” worried the giant.

“No time to think about that now,” said Mac. “Come on.”

They had timed it so that dusk was falling, now. Dusk, that tricky light, or half light, which is almost as easy to move in unobserved as the darkness of night itself.

The big house was before them, blazing with lights. At the door, they could see two men. A man swung around the corner of the house at a slow pace, walked like a sentry past the side of the place and disappeared around the other corner.

“I should say he has got the place guarded,” muttered Smitty.

The three stole to the side of the house, from bush to bush. They stopped under a big buttonwood tree. They said nothing now, not even wanting to risk a whisper. But words were not needed. The window here was their goal.

The Avenger felt at his pocket.

They had come with about all the equipment they had, to face this large crew of thugs guarding Ritter. One of the many small pieces was a glass-cutting gadget. Benson cut a small circle from the window with a diamond point and pulled it towards him with a tiny rubber suction cup so that it wouldn’t fall inside and rouse inquiry by breaking.

He reached in. Mac and Smitty were careless enough to watch him for a moment instead of their surroundings. They jumped a foot when there was a sudden smack almost at their elbows. The smack was followed by a double thud, then silence.

They all whirled. Josh grinned at them; and at his feet was a man, knocked cold. Smitty nodded silent thanks to Josh — and to Lady Luck.

They’d slipped up enough so that one of the many men around here had seen them at the window, had started to raise a yell, and then had been downed by Josh. He’d happened to stop under this tree and Josh had dropped and felled the man in his fall.

The Avenger raised the window, having bridged the alarm wire so there would be no signal when, an instant later, he cut it. He climbed into the house. Mac started to follow. And then a couple of armies came tumbling down around them and the night was split with shots and yells.

Somehow the alarm had been given, and they were caught!

But catching these three was a little like catching three grizzlies, as the men were soon to discover.

The shots didn’t bother the three. The slugs jolted and bruised when they were stopped by the bullet-proof celluglass garments, but that was all. The shouts were worse. They’d draw everyone from miles around, in the quiet country, in short order!

Smitty’s vast paws reached out. He got a throat in each hand and squeezed. Two professional gunmen went down. One would recover, a long time later.

He swung twice. Two more sank to the lawn. He tripped over one of them in the darkness and fell just as a shot ripped murderously where his head had been. There was no bulletproof shield there!

Mac, meanwhile, was using those bony fists of his to unbelievable effect. Like ivory mallets, they crashed cartilage and flesh; and the recipients of the blows usually stayed where they had fallen.

Josh was the least powerful of the doughty three, but he was a match for most two men, at that. He writhed and ducked and shot out blows like a black tiger. Then he was slugged and dazed by a gun barrel, and Smitty heaved powerfully under a knot of men that for the moment held him helpless.

“Mac!” Smitty’s voice sounded, under the heap. “The g-g-ga—”

That was all, but Mac heard it and understood. As a matter of fact, Mac hadn’t needed the urgent call. He had been trying right along to get a couple seconds of time to dig in his vest pocket for what Smitty had been reminding him of.

The gas!

He got out three glass pellets. Then he was kept busy ducking blows for half a minute. Finally he threw the pellets.

“Watch noses!” he yelled, warning Josh and Smitty.

You couldn’t see the vapor that rose when the pellets broke. You couldn’t even smell it. But you certainly felt it.

Half a dozen of the gang went down, out for at least an hour to come. As many more started staggering dizzily in circles. But somebody in the crew was brighter than crooks usually are.

“Back!” this one yelled, coughing, “They got tear gas or some—”

There were about ten who had the power to get back and away from the spreading vapor. It left Mac and Josh and Smitty unattended for the moment. Breathing through the lapels of their coats, they clambered in through the window The Avenger had entered moments before.

“The door!” bawled the bright guy outside. “Keep ’em in the house!”

Mac looked out the window and saw three men stand with guns out, guarding it. He saw men run to the front, and to the back doors.

And then, as he was thinking sourly what a nice little trap they’d fought their way into, he heard The Avenger’s quiet, icy-calm voice.

“This way.”

They went after the voice. Two figures loomed. But one was in the arms of the other. And it was not Benson who was being carried!

“You got him!” breathed Smitty. “You got Ritter!”

“Yes.”

“Fine.” Mac said. “Now all we have to do is get him out of here.”

Far off, a police siren was wailing. That squad car was coming back, after being lost by Nellie’s sedan.

“And fast, too!” said Mac.

They were following Dick as they spoke. They didn’t know where to, but they had followed him blindly before.

They went upstairs, to a back window. Down below was a roof — the garage. They dropped to that, handing Ritter down as if he had been a bundle of carpeting. The rear of the garage was almost in the water of the Hudson River.

They lowered themselves to the narrow strip between building and water. A man came around the end of the garage, but Josh fixed that. He leaped, struck; and the jaws that had been open for a shout clicked shut to a smack that would leave the victim unconscious for a good many minutes.

They circled through woods and shrubbery.

“How’d you do it, chief?” said Smitty.

“Ritter was leaning out a window, looking for the reason for the commotion.” The Avenger’s voice was as icily calm as his pale eyes. “The nerve pressure at the back of his neck put him out— This is where Nellie should be with the car.”

But Nellie wasn’t there with the car. The highway was deserted as far as they could see. And behind them began to swell the sound of furious pursuit, as men chased after the daring kidnapers of the nation’s No. 1 political figure.