"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 173 - Death's Harlequin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

along the deserted rear corridor. The fleeing figure slammed a door behind him and
vanished.
The next instant, Whelan appeared in the rear corridor. He had found his own gun in the
drawer of his desk. The Shadow snatched the weapon from him and ran toward the closed
door at the end of the hall.

"Come out," he ordered, "or I'll shoot!"
No answer reached his ears except a queer receding echo that seemed to rise from far
below. The Shadow sprang at the door and flung it open. The noise he had heard was the
distant echo of feet racing down the steps of an inclosed staircase.

The Shadow raced swiftly downward. But by the time he reached the bottom and threw open
a small metal door that opened on a rear street, his quarry was gone. All that remained was
the echoing roar of an automobile that had fled out of sight in the darkness.
THE blazing excitement faded from The Shadow's eyes. In an instant he became again
Lamont Cranston, a wealthy idler unused to crime or to violence. By the time the wildly
excited Jim Whelan arrived panting at the foot of the stairs, it would be hard to say which of
the two men seemed more unnerved by their unexpected brush with death.

Whelan's shrill comments on the efficient escape of the burglar proved what Cranston had
already suspected: The crook was someone familiar with the inside plan of the building. The
staircase down which he had fled was, according to Whelan, one used only by government
workers. The general public never used that rear corridor.

Cranston and Whelan hurried back up the stairs. The floor of Whelan's office was a mess of
scattered papers and documents, but the burglar's search had been centered on only one
object. That was the desk ordinarily occupied by Whelan's secretary, Miss Daley. It only
added to the grim perplexity of the mystery.
Where was Whelan's missing secretary? And why had her desk been the only spot that had
been ransacked?

Whelan searched through the rifled desk looking vaguely for the answer to the riddle. While
he was thus occupied, Lamont Cranston bent toward the floor near the spot where he had
first grappled with the gunman. He remembered how he had clutched at a shoulder and
chest. He knew he had torn something loose.

That something, he was certain, was a pin of some kind, for his finger was still scratched
and bleeding from a sharp point that had ripped across the skin.
He found the object he was looking for at the very edge of the office rug, close to the wall. He
palmed it quickly and slipped it into his pocket. A single glance had told him what it was.

It was a small band of rainbow colors, one color merging into another. The pin at the back
was badly bent and the clasp broken. The object itself was a military decoration, one that
was worn only by officers in the United States army!

Instantly, Cranston thought of something that happened earlier that night at the Washington
airport. A telegram had been sent to Jim Whelan by Colonel Henry Standish. Whelan had
gone there, only to find he had been misled.
At first, Cranston dismissed the happening as trivial, a misunderstanding of some sort. Now,
he was convinced that behind the affair of the false telegram, desperate and criminal plans