The Weapon of Night

CHAPTER SEVEN Somewhere There’s A Someone

It was like an encore for the first alarm, except that this scene played itself in a darkness that was absolute, at first, and then sliced by searching flashlights. A siren shrilled and guards thundered busily about the place, not knowing what to look for.

“Here, take this,” said Nick, and thrust his pencil flash at Julia. “Beam it at the lock and let’s get out of here.”

He slid the small pistol shape from its waistband holster and aimed it at the locking mechanism. The safety catch clicked off and the pistol spat — not bullets, but a narrow ray of white-hot light that bit deep into the metal.

“Heavens, what will they think of next?” Julia said admiringly. “A little pocket-sized acetylene torch, no less.”

“Laser beam,” Nick said briefly. “Keep clear of it.”

Metal sizzled indignantly as the beam ate through it. The lock smoldered briefly and disintegrated. Nick doused the lethal ray and kicked sharply at the door, and this time it swung obediently to one side.

“Get over to those guards with flashlights and stay with them,” he told Julia crisply. “I’m going downstairs.”

His long, loping strides took him rapidly through the flickering ceriness of the vast room to the ladderway leading to the sublevel passages. Light blazed suddenly into his face and someone caught him by the arm.

“There’s no need to race around like a madman, Carter,” Pauling said angrily. “The lights’ll be on in a minute, so for God’s sake stay where you are before you fall downstairs and break your neck. We’ve had enough trouble since you got here.”

“There’ll be more if you don’t get off my back,” Nick said rudely, thrusting him aside. Pauling yelped and staggered back. “And don’t set any of your guards onto me, either,” Nick added over his shoulder, seeing one of the guards lunge forward, “or I’m going to wonder about your motives. Get him back!”

“All right, all right, go then!” Pauling growled.

Nick was already starting down the stairs, the thin beam of his flash piercing into the gloom. He spiraled downward swiftly, and then doused his own light as he saw the pool of brightness below that was moving rapidly toward him.

“Halt!”

“Oh, not again!” Nick groaned. The guard with the lantern-shaped flash had a gun trained on him. “Look — I’m doing a job, too, and I’ve got to get to the power room — fast!”

“Oh, you, I know you, yeah,” the guard said ponderously. But I got my orders from the Chief. He’s in there himself and he told me nobody — but nobody — goes up or down these stairs or through these passages until he says so. He don’t trust nobody, and that includes you, understand? Sorry, fella. But you stay where you are.”

“I, too, am sorry,” Nick said graciously, “and what’s more I don’t trust nobody neither.” His smile in the circle of light was sweet and cooperative, but the axe blade of a hand that shot out and sledgehammcred against the guard’s bulky neck was anything but. The man dropped with a quiet little sigh and a heavy thud.

Nick bypassed his fallen body and ran toward the power-control room. His pencil flash cut intermittently into the gloom, but only briefly; under the circumstances he preferred to glide unnoticed through the darkness. Through the passages leading off he saw other little circles of light and heard the tramp of feet, but in the corridor that housed the locked maintenance rooms and the elevator shaft there was nobody. He tried the doors quickly as he passed. They were still locked.

The beam of his flashlight played over the solid door of the power-control room. It, too, was closed and locked, presumably with Security Chief Parry inside.

He hammered on it thunderously.

“Parry! Let me in!” he called. “It’s Carter — open up.”

No answer. Nothing happened. He tried again. Still nothing.

He could have called a guard. But he was alone, and he liked to do things his way. Which was sometimes a mistake.

This time he did not use the laser beam but his lockpicker’s special, because unlike the electronically controlled elevator door this door had a lock that he could manipulate. He worked methodically, quietly, listening for sounds from within and from the corridors nearby, but he heard only the distant muttering of guards’ voices and an occasional footfall… except for one small clanking sound from within that he could not identify.

The door swung inward and he stepped cautiously inside.

Not cautiously enough.

His light beam probed the inner darkness for a split second while his right hand reached for the Luger in her hidden holster. And then the sudden swishing sound that whistled through the darkness ended suddenly with a vicious, exquisitely painful explosion in his head, and he saw a coruscation of shimmering lights where there had been no light before. He struck out once, savagely, with the Luger’s streamlined barrel, and felt it strike against something solid yet resilient; and then again his head exploded and he dropped.

Bright light and harsh sound pounded at his senses and he forced his eyelids open.

Lights blazed throughout the power-control room and in the corridor behind him. There was a uniformed guard at the bank of switches, and there was someone with him who looked like a mechanic.

And about time, too, Nick thought groggily, and as he dragged himself to his feet he saw Parry halfway across the room, rocking wearily on his haunches and holding both hands to his head. His face was bruised and bloody and his clothes were torn. There was a man hovering over him, possibly a medic, but Parry waved him off impatiently and lumbered to his feet. Then he saw Nick.

“Did you see him?” he cried. “Did you see who it was?”

“I didn’t see a damn thing,” Nick said shortly. “You got here first — what did you see?”

“That,” said Parry, and jabbed his finger at the massive switchboard. “Came in with a flashlight, had all the guards stand by and guard the passages so no one could get in or out, looked around and saw half the switches thrown. And not just thrown — damaged. Look at them!”

Nick looked. There was not much damage, but there was some. A strange kind of damage, as though some immensely heavy object had been slammed into the bank of levers and twisted a few of them slightly out of shape. A spanner lay on the floor nearby.

“Yes, and that, too.” Parry said, following Nick’s gaze. He was still in here, whoever he was and however the hell he got in. Don’t know if he used that spanner on the board, but he sure used it on me. Came at me in the dark just as the door swung shut behind me and I had my light trained on the panel. Skimmed me at first, caught the side of my face. I dropped the light, tried to go for my gun, grappled with him for a moment, and then — that was it. Spanner caught me, down I went. And then I suppose you came in just as he was trying to make a getaway.”

“Knocked out the stairway guard, too, on his way out,” said the man at the control panel. “Must know some way out of here that we don’t know —”

“What!” barked Parry furiously. “Why wasn’t I told of that at once? That means he must have gone up the stairs into the main —”

“You just came to, Mr. Parry,” the man reminded him. “And I already put out an all-stations alert.”

“I knocked the fellow out,” said Nick. Parry’s angry, startled eyes burned into him. “I had to — he was obstructing me. He said that you had given specific orders that no one was to be let in or out of here, including me. Now, why did you tell him that?”

“Oh, no, no, no, you’re wrong, Carter,” Parry said earnestly. “Of course I didn’t mean to include you. How could I —? The last I saw of you, you were stuck inside the elevator. Say… how did you get out?”

“Magic,” Nick said shortly. “Now, suppose we get on with the search and try to find this mystery man.”

“Mystery man,” Parry repeated, tugging at his beard. “This has to be an inside job, do you realize that? We have another Hughes on our hands — a guard, a mechanic, one of the engineers, any one of a hundred and seventy people. Christ, I don’t know who to trust! But all right, let’s get on with it.”

They got on with it. But the hours of searching and questioning turned up absolutely nothing. No one was reported missing — except Valentina. Everybody’s movements could be accounted for. No one was found hiding in any of the locked rooms.

There was one piece of news, and it was startling. Al Fisher reported it at the late-night session in the president’s office after returning in the helicopter.

“That’s right, in the Catskills,” he said patiently. “Obviously he’d had enough of a head start to swoop due east even before the alarm was given. We had hell’s own time finding him in all those trees, and it wasn’t the aircraft search that did it either — not to begin with, anyway. State Police got calls from local residents about what looked like a crash landing, and they passed the word to us. It’s a pretty inaccessible spot, so we had a little trouble. Here, I’ve marked it on the map.” He pushed the map across with stubby fingers. Nick barely glanced at it. By this time he was sure it would be no help.

“So we managed to land at last,” Fisher went on wearily. “It wasn’t far from a mountain road, and he may have been making for the little clearing that we dropped into. He didn’t make it. But the craft wasn’t in too bad shape, so it’s just possible that the plan went off more or less as scheduled. Except that he himself was in pretty bad shape. Like dead, to be exact. Look, I’ve been through all this before,” he appealed to Nick. “You’ve already got road patrols out. What’s to add?”

“One more time, Al,” said Nick. “As long as we’re all together I want everybody to get the complete picture. So the man was dead and dripping with blood. But not from the crash, you say.”

Fisher nodded. “Right. Two bullet wounds, one right through the gut and one skimming the side of the neck. Hours old. From the condition of the “copter I’d say he had control until almost the last minute. No bullet holes in the craft but blood all over the seat and controls, so it looks like he took his gut wound with him from takeoff.”

“My man on the roof,” Parry said intensely. “At least somebody put up something of a showing for us. But no sign of the woman! I don’t understand it. There must have been a car waiting on that road to take her off. But why didn’t they take Hughes?”

Al Fisher shrugged. “Guess he’d served his purpose. No point in dragging off a dead man. Incidentally, the condition of the brush and the road doesn’t prove anything. Somebody could have come through the trees; somebody could have driven off along the road. But it’s too dry in there to say anything for certain. And that’s about all I can tell you.”

“The face, Al,” Nick reminded him.

“Oh, yeah, the face,” said Fisher. “Like I told you, Hawk’s medics are giving him a going-over. But me, when I looked at him close-up, I saw a face that had been lifted. Tiny little scars near mouth and eyes, on the cheeks, and under the chin. Maybe surgery for an old face injury, I wouldn’t know. But they were there.”

Pauling gave a sudden bark of something that was not quite laughter.

“Hughes, with a face-lift!” he snorted. “What do you know! Why, I’ve seen the man around for years, and I never even suspected. None of us did.”

“Why should we?” the president said shortly. “It was his private business, I suppose.” His eyes narrowed suddenly and he turned a penetrating glance at Nick. “Or perhaps it shouldn’t have been.”

“Perhaps it shouldn’t,” Nick agreed. “Now let’s break this up and get what rest we can. You sure you want die first shift, Parry?”

The Chief of Security looked exhausted to the point of dropping, but he nodded vigorously.

“My responsibility,” he said crisply. “And I’ll have two men with me all the time. Three hours more isn’t going to kill me. Then you can take over. Take all your men down with you, if you like.”

“Thank you, but I’d rather have them at the exits,” Nick replied. “I take it you’ll give me a couple of standby men as well?”

“Sure will,” said Parry. “You’ll get a fresh pair when I go off.” He gave a short laugh totally lacking in mirth. “I hope they can be trusted. Still, I’m pairing them off as best I can and one man can watch the other. Same when Pauling comes On duty. And that should take care of the night. I’m off now. See you down below at two.”

He left the president’s luxurious office and headed for the power-control room. It was here, the joint session had decided, that further trouble was likely to occur if anything at all was going to happen. For the grim thought of sabotage was in the air.

The meeting broke up rapidly. Pauling and the president were to doss down on the couches in their respective offices, Julia was to sleep on a cot in the women’s First Aid Room and Nick would take a catnap in one of the “relaxation areas.”

Only it didn’t work out quite that way. The sofa in the big room with the color TV set was big enough for two, and two were using it. One small light burned dimly in the corner of the room.

“This is a helluva time to make love,” Julia said drowsily. “One large Russian dignitary still missing, one sinister stranger lurking darkly about the plant with God knows what evil thoughts in mind. And you —”

“And I have my own evil thoughts,” Nick murmured, feeling the softness of her lithe, bronzed body and loving her returning touch. “As long as we have time, let’s use it sensibly. I know our Valentina well, and she wouldn’t mind.” His deft hand removed a flimsy strap and Julia lay bare and beautiful.

“I don’t mind myself,” she whispered, helping him with a shirt button, “but shouldn’t we be doing something?”

“We are doing something,” Nick said softly. “And don’t you give a thought to mysterious strangers, Iuv. There aren’t any. It’s just a question of paying out a little rope — and waiting for the hanging.”

“Ah, so romantic,” she murmured ironically. “If that’s all you can talk about, don’t talk…

Neither of them talked, except to mouth the small, soft words of love and to speak each other’s name as if the name itself were a caress. They sought and touched and found what they were seeking, and then their bodies flowed together like a turbulent river.

“My love, my love,” Julia breathed softly, and her body melted under his. His hands slid over her and traced the velvety contours of her fluid beauty and his lips were fire against hers. There was a tension in them both that cried out for release and soon the slowly rocking movements and the tender touches became a frantic, unbearably delicious rhythm. He made it last, for both of them. He knew how; they had been there together more than once or twice before, and each knew how to thrill the other to the point of wild explosion.

Her dark hair was loose over her shoulders and her eyes were shining and with the sort of rapture that always made him want to give her the ultimate in pleasure, that always made his senses reel and all his nerve ends twang as though she was stroking each one of them with her electric touch. As now she was… but she was doing more than stroking and he was past the point of merely tingling. He was on fire, so was she; and they fused together in a long moment of soaring, burning happiness. And then they plunged, still joined, into a pillow-soft pool of release and floated languorously as if on a warm, receding summer tide.

They lay clasped together for a while in a silence broken only by their uneven breathing and the pounding of their hearts.

Neither of them had forgotten how they happened to be there, nor that there was a disappearance and several deaths still to be accounted for, but both of them were used to living on the edge of hell and taking their happiness when they could find it.

At last, Nick sighed and stretched.

“Not enough,” he murmured. “Not enough. A day and a night on some warm, sandy beach, that’s what we need. Or a couple of days in a meadow, rolling in the grass. Or a week or so in some nice, soft haystack…”

“It all sounds very public to me,” Julia said practically. “Also a little scratchy. I thought you liked beds?”

“I do, I do,” Nick said warmly, and trailed his lips over the softness of her breasts. “See how I like beds, and what comes with them.” He kissed her full on the lips and lingered there until his pulses began to quicken too energetically, and then he forced himself to roll aside.

“Ah, well, strange things are happening,” he said, “and I’d better go do something about them.”

He rose with one fluid movement of his whipcord body and began to dress.

“But you’re not on shift yet,” Julia said, watching him.

“That’s right,” he agreed. “And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we were seen coming here together and I’m not expected to emerge until it’s time for me to take over from Parry. So I leave here well ahead of time and I do my own little bit of snooping.”

Julia started to pull her own clothes on. “What did you mean — there aren’t any mysterious strangers?” she asked, her slightly slanting, catlike eyes gazing at him through the dimness. “We agree there’s an accomplice in the building, right? And certainly there’s still something damn peculiar going on. Someone’s causing it.”

“Right, on all counts,” Nick agreed. “But not a stranger. Don’t forget that Valentina recognized someone who was with us. And kick this around in your lovely head, sweetheart — don’t you think that Valentina-abducting and sabotage are a little too much for one day’s work? Why should the inside man, the accomplice, want to blow the power — hours after Valentina had been snatched? Seems pointless. There wasn’t much damage, and nothing significant happened during the blackout. What was it for? And I can’t buy coincidence. So I’m telling myself that the two things are directly connected. And I mean directly. I think we can definitely accept the idea of an accomplice who is still with us. Let’s not give Hughes too much credit for swiftness and resourcefulness and all that kind of thing. Let us assume a man who used a gas mask on himself, who manipulated the cages from below after Hughes had done his shooting on the roof and taken off, and who turned the gas off when the “copter had gotten a good head start. Because, you know, if Hughes had turned it off, we would have come around a whole lot sooner than we did. Okay, assume a man like that, and I think you must assume more than an accomplice. Certainly you have a man who’s no stranger to this place.”

Julia drew a comb through her mane of raven hair.

“All right, so he’s not an accomplice then,” she said agree-ably “but the master planner himself. Yet, I wonder why he didn’t go with Valentina.” Her cat’s eyes narrowed and darkened. “You don’t think she’s dead?”

Nick was silent for a moment. Wilhelmina the Luger slid into her usual holster. Hugo the stiletto slipped into his chamois sheath on Nick’s forearm. Pierre the gas pellet nestled innocently in Nick’s jacket pocket.

“I don’t think so,” he said slowly. “Hughes could easily have killed her and left her body in the cage. No, there’s a more elaborate pattern here. Too elaborate to take at face value. I think they must have decided she’s more valuable to them alive than dead, so they hijacked her instead. For… questioning.”

“Questioning,” Julia repeated with a little shudder. “But where? And who, and how?”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I think,” said Nick, “and I’ll tell you why I think so.”

He told her, briefly. Julia’s eyes widened as she listened.

“So I think you’d best come with me this time,” he finished. “And if I get caught napping again I want you to run like hell and scream your lungs out. You ready?”

“For anything,” she said, and her lovely lips were grim.

The lights in the main work area were blazing. The watchtower cage moved slowly up and down and the duty guards on floor and platforms patrolled in double force, but no one stopped them. Parry had given orders.

“We’ll use the stairs,” said Nick, and they walked unchal-lenged down the spiral stairway to the sublevel. Guards greeted them with nods as they entered the wide corridor that housed the workshops and the power-control room, and again they were not stopped.

Two men were on duty outside the closed door nearest the elevator shaft. They stood to either side of it, alert and armed and ready. And they looked surprised. One of them looked at his watch.

“Two hours to go before your shift, sir,” he said helpfully.

“I know — I’ve urgent news for Parry,” said Nick. “He’s inside?”

“Yes, sir. With his finger on the red button just in case he needs us.” The man smiled faintly. “But he won’t. We searched first, no one’s hiding. And no one can get past us.”

“I can,” said Nick. “I hope he told you that.”

“Well, he did say that you’d be coming on at two, sir, but—”

“But I’m here now, right?” said Nick. “And the lady and I have business with him. So open up, will you? You can come in with us, if you like.”

The guard shrugged. “Okay, you’re the boss. But we gotta stay out here according to orders. Like he told us, we been checking on him at twenty-minute intervals — we just done one check — and like he told us we stay outside the rest of the time until he calls us. So he ain’t gonna like —”

“He will like,” said Nick. “You’re in the clear. Orders from Uncle Sam. So open.”

“Yes, sir. Jerry — key.”

The second guard nodded and thrust a key into the lock. Then the chatty one took his own key and performed a second maneuver.

“For safety,” he explained. “Gotta use two keys, separate ones, kind of tricky, you have to know just how — Hey, wait a minute! Something’s jammed.” He pushed at the door and wiggled his key. “Jerry, you turn that key of yours again.”

Jerry tried again. “Mine’s okay,” he said.

“Well, Goddamn!” said the talkative guard. “Something’s stuck here, for Chrissake!”

“All right, quit that,” Nick said urgently. “And keep your voices down now. Lock all right last time you tried?” The laser pistol came out of its hiding place as he spoke.

“Sure it was — what the hell are you doing?”

“I’m getting in there. With the lady. And you two are going to stick to your posts no matter what happens.”

Metal spat and melted. The door around the lock curled like burning paper. A thin rim of light shone out at them through the opening, then a circle, then a sphere as the thick metal piece containing the lock dribbled into nothingness.

“The Chief won’t like this,” the chatty guard said nervously.

“No? But you’ll notice he’s said nothing yet. Now keep quiet and stay here. Julia — come with me. But stay a few paces behind.”

The door swung inward at Nick’s touch. He kicked it as far back as it would go and stared into the room.

The bent switches had been straightened and repaired. A sharp light bathed every corner of the room.

“No, Goddamn, that’s impossible!” blurted the guard. “Why, we were here —”

“Shut up!” Nick said furiously. “You’re supposed to be on guard at this door, so guard it and keep quiet!”

He stepped into the room and his gaze swept through it.

Like Valentina’s elevator cage after the gassing —

It was empty.

Chief of Security J. Baldwin Parry had disappeared.