CHAPTER XXIII

1

DUNCAN MACLAIN manipulated his hands vigorously together in an attempt to restore circulation. Spasmodic cramps had seized his shoulder muscles and were traveling downward. He could feel small excruciating knots bunching up along each arm. He spread his elbows outward, twisting and writhing to get his manacled wrists up farther behind him. There was one position where the tightly locked handcuffs seemed looser, where the hampered blood could flow in his veins a little more freely.

The air about him was damp, penetratingly cold. Its smell, with an overlying trace of metal and oil, was reminiscent of fungus and mush-rooms. The Captain breathed it cautiously, keeping his lips tightly closed against the nauseating taste of adhesive tape which gagged him formidably.

Time had drifted by in a dark overpowering wave. He judged it better than most people. Years of sightlessness had instilled in his mind a faultless chronometer which ticked off pulse and heartbeats, dividing them into seconds, minutes, and hours with an almost fatalistic regularity.

His feet and legs were tightly bound. He lay face down, disdaining muscular struggle against obvious impossibility. Limp and inert as though anesthetized, he husbanded his strength, waiting for a moment when someone would come and set him free. Somewhere his carefully laid plans must have slipped.

He pressed his cheek down against the roughness of an unplaned board. Unhampered by any extraneous distraction, he reviewed the events of the past few days, checking each item from the time the man who he thought was Madoc brought him the instructions in Braille to the moment when Cheli Scott’s car was blocked by a truck on a deserted stretch of highway. He analyzed each move he had made, ruthlessly scrutinizing each weakness in the chain.

Duncan Maclain had been guilty of an unpardonable sin: carelessness. The price might be the life of Duncan Maclain. The enemy had moved too fast, had gone to work without wasting an hour. Never had he expected them to act with such precipitancy. Their move gave Spud no time whatever to receive his message, investigate the House of Bonnée, and get in touch with Colonel Gray.

The Captain had predicated his plans on the belief that he would be forcibly abducted some time during the following day. He intended to give his adversaries every chance, to put himself up as a bait. Saboteurs must have a base. Maclain’s taped mouth twisted into a grin. He had found the base, gotten himself unerringly into the headquarters of an airtight, organized band, only he had arrived there about twenty-four hours too soon to be of any use to the competent workers of the F. B. I.

“—And this one may end your career,” he thought bitterly, recalling the words of Colonel Gray.

He wormed himself sideways with maximum caution, trying to find a wall. His exploring feet encountered nothing. After a time, he decided he must be lying on a packing case a foot or two high. Inaction began to pall. He held his breath and listened. A water pipe dripped steadily. Not far away, some mechanism which might be a tiny motor ran with an almost inaudible purr. Maclain judged that he was close to an electric meter and that the noise he heard was the spinning of the recording wheel. Lights were on somewhere in his prison, although he felt sure that outside it was day. His entire body ached dolefully and he knew that he must have spent much time sleeping fitfully.

Taking a chance of injury, he swung his feet violently to one side and rolled off onto the floor. The drop was higher than he expected and it stunned him momentarily.

He eased his weight from off his hands and listened again. Small feet pattered flutteringly as a rodent scuttled away. Maclain was satisfied that no one had been in to look at him for some time. Otherwise a timorous rat would not have been so near.

He planned a tour of exploration. His only means of moving would be to bend his legs and shove himself along the floor. There were always identifying marks that his sagacious fingers might see, and if he ever escaped he wanted to know that place again.

By aiding himself with his elbows against the side of the packing box which had served him as a couch, he managed to sit erect. Awkwardly he rocked himself around to one end of the box. Sitting up as straight as possible, he went over the wood with his fingers, starting at the bottom each time and moving his hands upward from the floor.

The packing case was large. Nailed-down metal tape bound it at each end. The Captain had covered almost the entire surface when his fingers touched a series of small indentations. He went over them once, then sat unbelievingly with sweat staining his forehead as he traced them again more carefully. Underneath them, punched into the wood, was a tiny arrowhead.

The Captain left the box and began to inch across the floor. It was cluttered with debris. Pieces of old iron, several camshafts from automobile motors, and assorted junk of all description put hazards in his way.

He backed into a wall. It was damp and felt as though it had been whitewashed in the past. He moved along it until stopped by another packing case. It, too, was punched with the letters and the arrowhead. A trip around it brought him in contact with several more. He was certain then that, whoever his captors might be, they never intended him to leave the place alive.

The name punched into the end of the boxes was that of the great Eagle Munitions Works. The arrowhead was the stamp of the British Government. He was imprisoned in a storehouse filled with looted British supplies of war.

Behind him a bolt slid back in the door.

2

There were several people in the room. The Captain sat in a straight-back armchair with wooden arms and an upholstered seat. Adhesive tape held him motionless, binding his wrists to the arms of the chair. One man standing close beside him was breathing wheezily.

The Captain fought to divorce his mind from the asthmatic inhalations of the man beside him so that he might better judge how many men were in the room. He segregated them after a while and gave them numbers.

Number 1 was sitting down. Maclain placed him as being in charge and pictured him sitting behind a table. He had spoken once or twice in a velvety whisper which had sounded at a height approximately on a level with the Captain’s face.

Number 2 seemed to be a confrere. He was also seated, more to the right. Maclain had followed his footsteps across the room and acoustically watched him take a chair.

Number 3 had adenoids and was standing with his back to a door. Now and again he shuffled his feet uneasily, either touching the doorknob with his buttocks or moving it with his hand.

Asthma was Number 4.

Papers rustled. The Captain decided that Number 1 was reading, hence the silence. He followed the unmistakable crackle of fingered paper and the swish as each sheet was finished and laid face down on the table. Once the man with the velvet voice smothered an exclamation of annoyance.

A chair creaked slightly under shifted weight. Once again the Captain pieced together a sequence of sounds and divined that a single sheet of the paper had fallen to the floor, to be retrieved by Number 2, who handed it back to the reader.

The man with the velvet voice suddenly spoke aloud. “It’s to be infinitely regretted that a brave man and an officer should be put to such inconvenience, Captain Maclain.”

The words were spaced. They rolled out dispassionately, without rancor or any noticeable mark of emotion. Unctious with an olive-oil texture, they managed to be detached, and terribly impersonal. There was no patriotism behind them, no warmth. Neither was there any coldness or inhumanity.

The Captain was seized with hopelessness at their sound. Trained to estimate others by voice and cadence instead of appearance, it was brought home to him crushingly that he was face to face with a living body whose mind possessed no attribute subject to human appeal. He felt himself in the grip of the ultimate, as though cast by fate into some strange universe. He stood before Mars himself, the god of war and destruction. It would be futile to argue with a being whose voice had only beauty; as futile as to try to check a headlong rush of nations into ruin by casting himself bodily into the maw of their lancinating machine.

A hand materialized, seized the end of the adhesive tape which muzzled his lips, and tore it loose with a single pull.

“Your solicitude overwhelms me,” said Duncan Maclain. “I judge that I’m supposed to talk now that my lips are free.”

“Assuredly,” the Number 1 voice agreed in a single word of unaltered pleasantness. “We find ourselves in an age-old situation, Captain Maclain. I possess something which in your peculiar scale of values is rated most highly—the life of a fellow being. A woman. You possess something which in my peculiar scale of values is rated equally high—the knowledge of plans to defend five salient points in New York City. I’m offering you an exchange, Captain Maclain—one which is more than fair. I want the name and location of those five salient points, and I want to know what measures have been taken to make them safe. I’m offering you the life of a woman in exchange. I say the exchange is more than fair, because whether you decide to tell me or not, a little more work on the part of the organization I represent will inevitably make those points known to me. The defense plans might take longer to obtain. Nevertheless, I’d learn them eventually.”

Duncan Maclain lived in a world of sound. He knew each note in the scale of speech; how to make it ring deep with compassion and equally well how to make it pump blood to the face of a listener under the coruscating stab of jibe and irony.

He threw back his head, opened his mouth, and suddenly began to laugh. It came from his heart, mirthful and unfeigned, and struck against the confining walls with rolling peals of jollity. Immoderately and long he continued, shaking his pinioned body in the chair.

The hand which had torn the adhesive loose flashed out and struck him cruelly. Blood stained his lips and a single drop slid quietly down his chin.

“What are you laughing about, you fool?” asked the voice of Number 1.

“I’m laughing about nothing,” said Duncan Maclain. “I’m laughing at you. In my peculiar scale of values, I possess two things which you know nothing about. They go by the names of perspicacity and integrity. The perspicacity tells me that neither I nor the woman you’re holding will ever leave here alive no matter what I say; the integrity would silence me more effectively than a hundred yards of adhesive no matter how the woman or I might die. Add them both together, my friend, and you have the cause for my laughter. I’m blind and helpless, but I’m an American officer who lost his sight on active service and you’re a renegade plotting the downfall of the country you’re living in. It amuses me to know that you’re the fool and not I.”

“A blind man’s ears are sensitive, Captain Maclain. Certain steps have been taken to prevent this country you speak about so staunchly from manufacturing war supplies to sell to enemies of mine. Those steps will be felt from coast to coast, joining the bells on Christmas Day. Nothing you can do, or anyone else, can interfere. You can, however, save yourself the maddened screams of a tortured woman pounding against your receptive ears. Hours of them, Captain Maclain. Hours of pleading and entreaty from a woman unwittingly involved in this by you. When you meet death in the end, the thought of those screams will be your torture. Do you know of any more difficult way to die?”

“One,” said Duncan Maclain. “Giving satisfaction to a fool.”

The chair behind the table moved back and the pleasant voice said, “Perhaps we’d better give you a few hours to think it over, Captain Maclain.”