"039 (B073) - The Seven Agate Devils (1936-05) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

Doc Savage suggested, "Perhaps the package you put in the bank vault will help explain."
Pell heaved up out of his creaking chair. "An excellent thought!"
Monk frowned at him, said, "You sound kinda relieved?"
"I can assure you," Pell murmured, "that I shall be very glad to get this affair off my hands. And that will be as soon as I transfer the package to you."
Doc Savage led the way out of the office into the hallway. Since the others were slow in following—Monk and Pell were still a bit dazed—the bronze man waited for a moment. His flake-gold eyes roved the corridor, searching everywhere. Doc had long ago found it necessary to make alertness habitual.
The bronze man's eyes steadied on a crack in the hallway ceiling.
A PECULIAR line, that crack. It was very long, wandering from a spot near Pell's door, across the hall ceiling, and down to the top of a door opposite the attorney's office.
Monk, Ham and Pell came out into the hallway. Doc Savage accompanied them to the elevator. They all rode down silently.
In the cheap and gaudy lobby of the building, Doc Savage spoke.
"Wait here," he directed.
The others looked blank. Monk began, "But what—"
Doc Savage was already gone, mounting the stairway which zigzagged upward near the elevator shaft. The bronze man climbed swiftly until he reached the level of lawyer Pell's office. He did not step boldly into the corridor, but paused, out of sight.
A bronze hand went into an inside pocket, and came out with an object that resembled a fountain pen. A tug at one end of this caused it to elongate, telescope fashion. There were detachable caps at each end. The ingenious contrivance became a telescope, microscope, or periscope, merely by altering the lenses.
Doc Savage employed it as a periscope, to examine the hallway. The periscope showed the figure of a burly man coming out of the door opposite Pell's office—the door to which Doc had noticed ran the rather unusual ceiling crack. There was furtiveness in the burly fellow's manner. He ran to a window at the end of the corridor, glancing frequently over his shoulder, but not discovering the periscope.
He was one of the pair who had tried to murder Monk and Pell in the basement garage.
He raised the window, scrambled through it and disappeared, probably on a fire escape.
Doc Savage ran forward, swiftly, soundlessly. He produced a penknife. By standing on tiptoe, he could insert the point of the knife in the ceiling crack. He pried. A fine wire came out. This wire led from Pell's office to the room across the hallway.
Doc Savage traced the wire. In Pell's office, concealed behind a picture, he uncovered a sensitive pick-up microphone.
The room across the hall held a small box of apparatus—a vacuum tube amplifier to which the wires from the pick-up microphone ran. There was also a telephone headset, for listening purposes.
Chapter III. THE SECOND CORPSE
DOC SAVAGE did not make further examination of the elaborate set-up by which the spy hidden in the room across the hallway must have heard every word spoken in Pell's office.
Doc Savage moved with an almost phantom soundlessness, down the hall to the window through which the thick-bodied eavesdropper had disappeared. Rows of metal bars, dimly visible outside, indicated the means of departure—a fire escape.
There was an alley below. Doc descended.
Reaching the alley, he gilded toward its mouth. He stopped for a moment, just before reaching the sidewalk, and used the periscope. His quarry was making swift progress down a side street. The fellow twisted his head frequently for a backward glance. He was nervous. That would not make trailing him any easier.
The man ahead turned into an all-night drug store at a corner.
Doc Savage did not abandon his caution, it not being entirely improbable that his quarry might have adopted the simple ruse of going into the drug store and watching through the show windows to see if he were being trailed.
The bronze man hugged the building fronts as he approached the brightly lighted window of the pharmacy, then used his periscope device again.
Inside, staring anxiously out of the window, stood the burly fellow whom Doc was trailing. Doc held the periscope tube perfectly still. The man had not seen it, and it was doubtful if he would, as long as it was not moved.
The man seemed to be watching something fixedly—something across the street. Doc drew back from the periscope tube and, turning his head only slightly, surveyed the street.
Across the thoroughfare, near the corner, a black coupй stood at the curb. Its engine was running, but so quietly that even Doc's trained ears could barely detect its purring. The car was dark.
It remained dark for only an instant. Then its interior was filled with a brief faint dab of light. This was followed shortly by a longer dab, also faint. The dome light in the coupй was being used to signal in the Morse code!
Of the appearance of the person in the coupй, switching the dome light on and off, little could be seen.
THE coupй suddenly went into motion. It traveled down the street and disappeared.
Doc turned his attention to the periscope and the man in the drug store. The fellow no longer stood at the window, but was going toward the back of the store. There was haste in his movements.
The drug store followed the current policy of dealing in everything from bathing suits to garden hose. The man purchased a package of stationery and some rather gaudy pink envelopes.
He carried his purchases to a telephone booth in the rear. He selected a sheet of the stationery, produced a pencil and began to write. He was not an accomplished scribe, but had difficulty with the composition.
He finally employed the telephone directory as a foundation on which to rest his paper while he wrote.
Tucking the single sheet of stationery into one of the pink envelopes, the man quitted the phone booth. He left the rest of the stationery and the envelopes behind in the booth. He departed from the drug store by a side door.
Doc Savage promptly entered by the front door. The bronze man made directly for the telephone booth, and grasped the directory which had been used for a writing pad. He ripped off the cover, folded the thick, heavy sheet and consigned it to an inner pocket of his clothing.
A moment later, Doc Savage was making a cautious survey from the side door by which his quarry had departed. The fellow was on a side street, running.
A nighthawking taxicab was parked at the distant corner. Doc's quarry reached this, yanked the rear door open and popped inside. The cab began to move.
Doc Savage glanced about in search of another taxicab. There was none in sight.
Small trees lined the sidewalk, making dark shadows. The bronze man took to this murk and ran. Doc, in perfect physical condition and in possession of muscles developed by a lifetime of intensive training, was a remarkable runner. He could travel at a pace which some adjudged as superhuman. Yet his ability to run was fabulous only when compared to the speed other men could make. Pitted against an automobile, he was distinctly outclassed. The cab began to draw ahead.
Three blocks distant, a traffic light was red. The cab obeyed the law and stopped. Doc began to regain the ground he had lost. The cab rolled on. Doc increased his speed—then the unexpected happened.
The quarry got out of the cab. Doc caught a glimpse of him as he sought shelter in the darkness along the sidewalk.
The cab turned around in the middle of the street and came back, passing under a street lamp. The driver had the pink envelope. Clutched with it was a wad of green paper. Money. What the combination of letter and money meant, was not hard to fathom: The driver had been paid to deliver the note.
THERE came the sound of a motor car approaching. Doc Savage saw the machine itself, an instant later. It was the same black coupй that had been parked before the drug store, the dome light winking.
The car came along the street and swung in, as if to pick up the man Doc was following.
In doing this, it was necessary for the machine to pass the bronze man; and Doc, peering intently, got a look at the face of the driver. The lower part of it was rubbery, line-gullied. The visage of another of the men who had escaped from the basement garage of the Western Building after attempting to kill Monk and the lawyer, Montgomery Medwig Pell.
Doc Savage hurtled out of the shadows, angling diagonally across the street toward the slowing machine and the man it was preparing to pick up. Doc made no attempt at concealment. He wanted to be seen. He even shouted.