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

and it made his breath hiss softly when he breathed.
Slim was tall and gangling, had a protruding Adam's apple.

Mike Porter led the pair along the corridor to the death apartment. Quickly the two thugs
shouldered the bodies of Jane Purdy and Walter Roscoe, took them to the service elevator
and descended.
The bodies were put in the back of Roscoe's own sedan. The car was driven out of
Washington, through the suburbs. On a lonely road, whiskey was sprinkled over the corpses.
The three men got out. The car was set in gear, the hand throttle pulled down.
Quickly, the sedan burst through a frail fence, disappeared over an embankment. There
came a rending, splitting sound as the car crashed on boulders in the bottom of a dry creek
bed.

Just a couple of gay drunks on a joy ride! That would be the impression when the bodies
were found.
An unknown superspy had stacked the cards to cover a cunning crime. More crime was
planned. The peace and safety of the United States were about to receive their greatest
attack in years.

But there was the one fact on which neither the spy nor his criminal satellites had counted.
High in the black sky, midway between New York and Washington, a transport plane roared.


Aboard that plane was a quiet-faced man who was flying to Washington to arrange the
details of a pleasant vacation trip with gun and rod in the Rockies. He was completely
unaware of impending crime; but events would soon draw him into the midst of a murderous
intrigue fomented by a warlike foreign dictator.
Mike Porter would have been less complaisant when he returned to Washington, had he
known the true identity of that quiet gentleman flying swiftly toward the nation's capital.

It was The Shadow!

CHAPTER III. THE MILITARY CLUE
AN hour or so after the crash of the car containing the dead bodies of Jane Purdy and
Walter Roscoe, a plane skimmed earthward from the black sky and landed at the
Washington airport.
Lamont Cranston emerged with the other passengers. He was given prompt and courteous
attention. Officials recognized him as a prominent millionaire, a well-known sportsman and
traveler.

However, none of the attendants had any idea that the name and reputation of Lamont
Cranston cloaked the personality of The Shadow. Many people, of course, had heard of The
Shadow, knew of his grim and unrelenting warfare against organized crime. But only a few
desperate criminals had ever discovered the secret of who he really was. These few had
died swiftly in battle, before they could tip off their pals in the underworld.
The Shadow remained, as always, an unknown creature of darkness.

An airport official greeted Lamont Cranston as the millionaire passed the administration
building on his way to a taxicab.