"031 (B060) - The Majii (1935-09) - Lester Dent.palmdoc.pdbTXT" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

"Yeah," grunted the other. "But let Lingh do it. I don't want none of this Doc Savage."
The thick man laughed, but not joyfully. "Get wise to yourself. Lingh probably has us covered."
They seemed to think that over, and, judging from the expression on their features, it was not pleasant thinking.
"Why'd you fix the hack driver?" one asked finally.
"He knew they were headed for Doc Savage," said the thick-bodied man. "He might have identified their bodies, and told what he knew, and that would have got to Doc Savage."
The cab took a corner, tires sizzling.
"Where to now?" asked the driver.
"Times Square subway station," said the thick-bodied man. "We're gonna head off the Ranee and her four boys with rifles."
THE Times Square subway station is possibly the busiest in the metropolis, but even it has quiet moments, of which the present happened to be one.
Cars of the train, as it rumbled and hissed to a stop in the station, were full of bright light and had only a few passengers.
The thick-bodied man and his companions were separated the length of the two-block long platform, and they got on the train without excitement, two at one end, three at the other, after which they walked through the train, looking carefully into each coach before they entered it.
Thus it was that they converged at the ends of one certain car which held their quarry.
The leader said to the two with him, "Lingh wants the Ranee alive. Remember that."
"Wonder why?" countered one of the pair.
"Don't know," said the man. "Doubt if Lingh knows. Think his orders come from some one else."
"Let's go," the other grunted.
They walked down the aisle, hands in bulging coat pockets.
Ranged side by side on the cane-bottomed seat running lengthwise of the subway coach, the veiled woman and her gaudy, dark riflemen escort were very quiet, watchful. They seemed a little confused, too, by the roar and shudder of the underground train.
They stood up suddenly before the thick man and his companions were near. The uniformed escort held the rifles across their chests, soldier fashion, alert.
"Easy does it," snapped the thick man.
He put a hand on the veiled woman's arm. That started it. Her escort clapped rifle stocks to shoulders.
The thick man yelled, "All but the Ranee, guys!"
Pockets split open to let out flame and noise. The thick man's aides were using sawed-off, hammerless revolvers which would not jam in cloth, and they shot as rapidly as fingers could work triggers, calmly, confidently.
It was plain they expected to blast down the uniformed opposition with the first volley. That did not happen. The tall, cocoanut-headed guards staggered, but did not fall.
"Watch it!" screamed the thick man. "They're wearing some kind of an armor!"
After that, there was screaming and noise and death in the moaning subway. Two of the tall men with the gaudy uniforms and the heads remindful of cocoanuts crumpled where they sat. The two others got in front of the veiled woman, shielding her, firing, screeching in their strange, foreign tongue.
Five men, altogether, were on the floor, badly wounded, when some one who knew a bit about the mechanics of the car managed to yank an emergency lever and the train ground to a stop, half inside of a lighted station.
The two uniformed men with the veiled woman got out on the platform and ran. The thick man tried to follow, with his single companion who had survived, but was shot at and, frightened, ducked back.
The wounded and dying screamed and groveled on the car floor, and that seemed to remind the thick man of something, for he turned deliberately, saw that one of the uniformed foreigners alone had a chance of living, and shot the man in the head. Then he ran, with his companion, out of the subway.
The veiled woman and her two escorts had vanished.
THE episode of the subway was newspaper headlines before the night was over, and it was a very mystifying matter to the police, who admitted they failed to make heads or tails of it, beyond the fact that they had identified three of the dead as local police characters known for their viciousness.
The desk clerk of the Hotel Vincent, a small but rather ornate hostelry which charged exorbitant rates and got the patronage of show-offs and people of importance, was reading the newspaper accounts of the subway slaughter. The hour was near midnight.
The clerk came out of the paper to an awareness of impatient fingers drumming the desk. It chanced that he noticed the finger nails on the drumming hand at first. It was a woman's hand and the nails were enameled blue. The clerk glanced up.
The woman before him was an unknown quantity inside the folds of a black veil and a voluminous cloak. When she spoke, it was in an accent distinctly foreign.
"I desire to see Rama Tura," she said.
The clerk lifted his brows, then made a show of sifting through the guest cards.
"Very sorry," he said. "We have no one byЧ"
The folds of the woman's cloak shook a little, and the clerk's eyes grew round, for she had exposed the business end of an automatic pistol.
"You will take me to Rama Tura's quarters," suggested the woman. "I know he directs you to say he is not here."
Two tall men wearing topcoats came in from where they had been waiting outside. They had heads which made the clerk think of cocoanuts.
The clerk sized up the situation, and since he was neither a hero nor a fool, he came from behind the desk, and the veiled woman and her two companions followed him into the elevator.
They rode to the sixteenth floor, where the clerk served as guide down a deeply carpeted Moorish hall to a door that was strapped with ornamental iron.
The clerk was on the point of knocking when one of the tall, dark men reached out and knocked him back of the ear with a revolver butt. The other dark man caught the clerk, and they held him while they knocked on the iron-strapped door.
"What is it?" queried a sleepy foreign voice from behind the panel.
"Cablegram," said the veiled woman, making her voice low and hoarse, so that it sounded remarkably like a boy's.
The man who opened the door certainly belonged to the same race as the veiled woman's two companions. His head had the identical hard round lines, the same fibrous brown hair.
He uttered the beginning of a cry when he saw his visitors. The sound did not get far, being stopped by a gun barrel which glanced off his head. He, too, was caught before he fell.
"Harm him not!" snapped the woman. "He is only a servant!"
She spoke in English, probably due to excitement, but was not too rattled to translate it into the tongue which the pair with her understood.
Three doors opened out of the room. The woman had not been there before, because she opened two and found closets, then tried the third, and discovered it led into what seemed to be the bedroom of a suite.