"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 167 - Realm Of Doom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

Rigger had come from the telephone booth. Clip appeared at the lobby door, and
the two went into the dining room.


FOR several minutes, Cranston scanned the columns of an evening
newspaper.
Big type told of frenzied efforts to locate the abductors of recent kidnap
victims. The search, so the newspapers said, was nation-wide.
Five victims, in all, were missing; and when last seen, they had been in
places very far apart - such as Chicago, New York and Miami. True, most of
them
had been starting on journeys, but their destinations had been quite as varied
as their starting points.
In two cases, ransom money had been paid; but the victims had not been
returned. That seemed to be a well-settled policy on the part of kidnapers,
although it made their racket tougher, even for themselves. It had also
produced the conclusion that the snatches were the work of different parties.
Kidnapping, it seemed, came in waves - like other types of crime.
Whether or not Lamont Cranston agreed with those theories was something
difficult to tell; for he tucked the paper under his arm, inserted the
monocle,
and strolled into the dining room.
Rigger and Clip, at a table only a few feet away, had finished their soup
when Cranston sat down.
With a nudge of Rigger's arm, Clip said, "Pipe the monocle the guy's
using. The guy must be a duke or something!"
They watched Cranston in amusement, until he had finished with the bill
of
fare. Then their grins increased, as the fastidious diner adjusted his monocle
more carefully and began to study a card that he took from his inside pocket.
It was about the size of a postcard and was printed with tiny dots,
arranged in rows. Those black dots, smaller than the head of a pencil, formed
a
design that looked like a honeycomb. Engrossed in his study of the card,
Cranston was tapping a finger from one dot to another.
"What is it?" Clip asked Rigger, with a grin. "Some game the guy is
playing?"
"Looks like it," returned Rigger. "Say," he chuckled, "maybe it's a punch
board. He'll be pushing those dots with a match stick, if we watch him long
enough!"
Clip added a louder chuckle, and Cranston heard it. He looked about,
removed his monocle and stared haughtily at the two. Suppressing their
laughter, they resumed their meal.
The two men finished dinner and went from the dining room. With sidelong
gaze, Cranston saw them go out through the lobby. A faint smile appeared upon
his thin lips. Pushing aside his coffee cup, he again drew the card from his
pocket and adjusted the monocle to his right eye.
Under the powerful microscope, that card underwent a remarkable
transformation. Those dots, tiny blobs of black print to the naked eye, became
the size of silver dollars. Thus enlarged, they were dots no longer.