risked my neck to get him here?” It was a sound argument in its way; and, “I begin to see,” Brian admitted, “some reason for all the precaution.” “Particularly now that Dr. Fu Manchu has traced him!” “I still don’t understand where Dr. Fu Manchu comes in.” “Then I’ll explain. I was retained by the United States government to get Hessian out of the hands of the Communists, to enable him to use his phenomenal brain for the side he belongs to. Dr. Fu Manchu has been retained by the Communists to see that he doesn’t do it!”
Brian was reduced to stupefied silence for a moment. He remembered saying to Lola, “All I know is that it’s something very big.” How big he hadn’t dreamed! Nayland Smith went on pacing about like a caged animal.
“Can you tell me one thing more, Sir Denis?” Brian ventured. “If you’re sure that agents of Dr. Fu Manchu are actually in New York, why don’t you have them arrested?”
Sir Denis turned, fixed him with a penetrating stare.
“Have you any idea, Merrick, how long I tried to trap Fu Manchu himself during the time I knew, as all Scotland Yard knew, that he was in London? Six years! And he’s still free! As for his unidentified agents, New York is an even tougher problem than London.” He knocked ashes from his pipe into a tray. “Dr. Fu Manchu is president of an organization known as the Si-Fan. It has members throughout the East, Near and Far. It has agents in every city in Europe and every city in the United States. Its power is second only to that of Communism if not equal.”
He began to stuff some sort of coarse-cut mixture into the hot bowl of his pipe. Brian said nothing.
“Its greatest strength, Merrick, is in its secrecy. Few people have even heard of the Si-Fan. As a result, there’s never been any concerted action against it. If they can’t have Hessian’s invention themselves, the Reds don’t intend to let anyone else have it. Heaven knows what they’ll try. But it’s our job to guard Hessian until he passes his plans over to the United States. ...”
Chapter
10
In Egypt, not long afterwards, on a night when there was no moon in Cairo, something happened designed to have an important bearing upon affairs in New York.
A small, lean man, very dark-skinned, was discarding his cloak upon the doorstep of the house in which Brian had once taken shelter from the student rioters. When he stepped out on to the narrow street he wore only a black loin-cloth and a small, tightly-wound black turban.
The quarter had sunk into silence. Except for the distant sound of a pipe and the barely audible thud of a drum, nothing disturbed its stillness. The little man glanced once to right and left, then crossed the narrow street to the gate of the courtyard opposite. He peered through the bars. He could see the house opposite. He peered through the bars. He could see the house of the Sherif Mohammed, its projecting windows outlined against starlight. The windows were dark. Nothing stirred.
He clasped the metal bars, bare toes and fingers, and with the agility of a monkey climbed to the top. He dropped lightly on the other side, moved across the courtyard and surveyed the front of the building. Hesitating for a moment, he ran to the end and looking up, saw what he wanted.
A sturdy bougainvillaea covered the south wall. On the floor above were several windows. He mounted to the first of these at incredible speed, but found it securely fastened. He swung to another. It was slightly open. He held his ear against the narrow opening, listening intently. Then, inch by inch, he raised the window and dropped noiselessly inside the room.
Motionless, he lay where he had dropped. But there was no sound. From his loin-cloth he pulled out a small flash-lamp;
lighted it for a moment. His acute hearing had told him there was no one in the room. He was looking for the door. He found it.
In a matter of seconds he was out on a tiled corridor. Again he stood still, listening. He moved to the left, attracted by a sound of snoring; peered into an ante-room richly furnished, for it had a large window and the starlight was enough to enable this strangely endowed visitor to see all he wanted to see.
A fat man lay asleep on a cushioned divan—the man who had first come to the gate when Brian called to demand an interview with the Sherif Mohammed.
It was the ante-room of the women’s quarter, the
The keen eyes of the little dark man detected a doorway on the right of this ante-room. He crossed to it, went through, and found a descending stair. It led to another corridor.
Here, for the first time, he was at fault. But after cautiously opening several doors again, he found what he was looking for: another stair. He went down at extraordinary speed for one running in the dark—and found himself in the paved entrance hall of the house.
Now that his eyes were accustomed to the dim light he could evidently see as clearly as a cat. And he seemed to know just what he was looking for.
With complete assurance, and making no sound, he moved around the walls of the large and lofty apartment, and presently, near the entrance door which opened on the courtyard, he found what he sought. At the back of a small room intended for a porter’s lodge there was a strong teak door, iron-studded, the woodwork bleached with age. A bunch of old-fashioned Arab keys hung on a hook beside it.
And the largest of these fitted the ancient lock.
A stone stair led the midnight intruder to the cellars. Here he used his flash-lamp without hesitation. He found stores of various kinds, including casks of wine which no True Believer would expect to find in the cellars of a descendant of the Prophet.
Pressing on farther he came to a smaller cellar, long and narrow. There was nothing in it. But on one side were two more of the heavy teak iron-studded doors. They differed from that at the top of the stair in one respect. Each had an iron grille in it. He had thrust the bunch of keys in his accommodating loin-cloth; was about to pull them out, then stopped dead, as if stricken motionless—a trick of many wild animals when surprised.
Quite still he stood, and listened.
The sound was very faint, but this man’s senses were super-normal.
Someone was sleeping behind one of the doors!
He remained still for nearly a minute, debating what he should do. Then he crossed to the grille from behind which the sound came, peered in, could see nothing, and so shone a momentary ray from his lamp into the blackness.
“Who’s there?” came an instant challenge.
The little man switched the light off and glided from the cellar, silent as a phantom. He fled up to the porter’s lodge, relocked the door as he had found it, making more noise than he cared about, and came out into the entrance hall.
Here he stood still again to listen.
No sound.
In niches of the mosaic-covered wall were many rare porcelain pots and other beautiful objects. On some of those the little man shone brief flashes from his lamp . . .
He began to examine several windows facing on to the courtyard, selected one of them, opened it slightly, and slipped through like a lizard. Once outside, he succeeded in partly closing it again.
He was over the gate and across the street to the doorway where he had left his cloak with a silent agility more like that of some nocturnal animal than of any human being. . . .
* * *
Mr. Lyman Bostock, United States representative in Cairo, twirled a cigar between his finger and thumb and stared reflectively across at Sir Nigel Richardson, his British confrere, who lay in a split-cane lounge chair with an iced drink beside him in the hollow of the chair-arm provided for that purpose. Mr. Bostock’s study opened on to a balcony and the balcony over-hung a pleasant garden, shadowy on this moonless night.
“I’m only just finding it out,” Mr. Bostock remarked, with his soothing drawl; “but you’re a queer bunch, you Englishmen.”
“I happen to be Scotch.”
“Maybe that’s worse. But what I’m coming to is this: I hand it to you that there’s not much about this country you don’t seem to know—including all the crooks in Cairo!”
“That’s base ingratitude, Bostock! I’ll let you into a secret, Murdoch, whom you’ve met with me (he has
