President Fu Manchu

“I’m talking sense all right. And I’ve got something very particular to say to you.” The deep, gruff voice was menacing “Somebody got busy among my records last night while I was at a party. If I thought it was you, I’d steal you away from your girl friends, little man. Next time you wrote a love letter it’d be with a quill from an angel’s wing.”

At which moment Kern Adier’s line became suddenly disconnected.

“Hello there!” Hahn bawled. “You cut me off! What in hell——”

His protests were silenced. A guttural voice came across the wires:

“You have been put through to me—the President. . . . Paul Erckmann Hahn—I believe this is your name?—you possess a certain brute force which attracts me. You are crude; but you might possibly be used.”

“Used?” Hahn’s voice sounded stifled. “Listen——”

“When I speak, it is you who must listen. The person ‘who got busy among your records,’ as you term it, was one of my own agents—in no way connected with Kern Adier. I learned much that I had wished to know about you, Mr. Hahn . . .”

“Is that so?” came a bull-like bellow. “Then listen, pet!— You’re a Chink if I ever heard one. That tells me plenty. I’ve been checking up on you. The ‘G’ men are right on your tail, yellow baby. Centre Street has got your fingerprints, and Hoover knows your toenails by sight. You’re using an old hide-out in Chinatown, and there’s a blue-eyed boy from Britain on the trail. You’re in up to the ears, President. You’ll need me badly to save your scalp. Adier can’t do it. He’s out of print. Come up to date and talk terms.”

Long ivory fingers remained quite motionless upon the table. Dr. Fu Manchu’s eyes were closed.

“Your remarks impress me,” he said softly, sibilantly. “I feel that you are indispensable to my plans. By all means let us talk terms. The matter is urgent. . . .”

Mark Hepburn tried, and tried in vain, to sleep. The image of a woman haunted him. He had checked her up as far as possible. He thought that he had her record fairly complete.

She was the widow of a United States naval officer. Her husband had been killed in the Philippines three years before. There was one child of the marriage—a boy. In fact, the credentials with which she had come to Abbot Donegal were authentic in every way. A thousand times, day and night, he had found himself in an imaginary world sweeter than reality—looking into those deep blue eyes. He found it impossible to believe that this woman would stoop to anything criminal. He would not entertain the idea despite damning facts against her.

He wanted to hear evidence for the defence, and he was fully prepared to take it seriously. In all his investigations he hoped yet feared to come across her. He wondered if at last he had fallen in love—and with a worthless woman. Her flight on that night from the Tower of the Holy Thorn, the fact that she had been endeavouring to smuggle away the incriminating manuscript which explained the collapse of Abbot Donegal; these things required explanation. Yet the official record of Moya Eileen Adair, as far as he had traced it, indicated that she was a young gentlewoman of unblemished character.

She came from County Wicklow in Ireland; her father, Commander Breon, was still serving with the British navy. She had met her late husband during the visit of an American fleet to Bermuda, where she had been staying with relatives. He was of Irish descent; he, too, was a man of the sea, and they had been married before the American fleet sailed. All this Mark Hepburn had learned in the space of a few days, employing those wonderful resources at his disposal Now, tossing wearily on his bed, he challenged himself. Had he been justified in instructing more than twenty agents, in expending nearly a thousand dollars in radio and cable messages, to secure this information?

The fate of the country was kept spinning in the air by those who juggled with lives. Sane men prayed that the Constitution should stand foursquare; others believed that its remodelling as preached by Dr. Prescott would form the foundations of a new Utopia. Others, more mad, saw in the dictatorship of Harvey Bragg a Golden Age for all. . . . And the Abbot of Holy Thorn held a choir of seven million voices in check awaiting the baton of his rhetoric.

Bribery and corruption gnawed rat-like into the very foundations of the State; murder, insolent, stalked the city streets. . . And he, Mark Hepburn, expended his energies tracing the history of one woman. As he lay tossing upon his pillow the whole-hearted enthusiasm of Sir Denis Nayland Smith became a reproach.

Then suddenly, he sprang upright in bed, repeater in hand.

The door of his room had been opened very quietly. . . .

“Hands up!” he rasped. “Quick!”

“Not so loud, Hepburn, not so loud.”

It was Nayland Smith.

“Sir Denis!”

Smith was crossing the room in his direction.

“I don’t want to arouse Fey,” the incisive but guarded tones continued. “He has had a trying day. But it’s our job, Hepburn. Don’t make any noise; just slip along with me to my room. . . . Bring the gun.”

In silence, pyjama-clad, barefooted, Hepburn went along the corridor, turning right just before reaching the vestibule. In the room occupied by Nayland Smith the atmosphere was perceptibly cooler. The windows were wide open; heavy curtains were drawn widely apart; a prospect of a million lights gleamed far below; the muted roar of New York’s ceaseless traffic rose like rumbling of distant thunder.

“Close the door.”

Mark Hepburn closed the door behind him as he entered.

‘You will notice,” Nayland Smith continued, “that I have not been smoking for some time, although I have been wide awake. I was afraid of the glow from my pipe.”

“Why?”