"037 (B072) - The Metal Master (1936-03) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

"No. There wasn't no need."
Doc Savage picked them up. He did it perfectly easily, and carried them both as if they had no weight at all. His physical strength was great.
"Whatcha gonna do?" one gulped.
"That depends on you," Doc told him. "Plenty, probably. That is, if you are reluctant about telling what you know."
"Wait a minute!" said the man hastily. "Maybe we can get together."
"How?"
"We were just hired for a job. All we get out of it is our pay. We won't get that, now that we've been caught. So what's the profit in bucking you?"
"None," Doc agreed. "Start talking."
"We were hired," said the man. "Me and my pal here. We haven't been told much. We don't know what's behind this."
"Who hired you?"
"A big guy with black whiskers. He didn't give no name. Said it wasn't necessary."
"Can you find him again?"
They hesitated. One cleared his throat. The other spoke jerkily.
"We knowЧwhere he hangs outЧred-brick house in the Forties."
THE house was of red brick, right enough, and it was old, with boards over the windows on the ground floor. Doc Savage saw this from the taxicab in which he arrived with the two men.
"Get out," he told them.
"You're going to walk right in?" one demanded.
"Going to try it."
They got out. The street was deserted, for it was getting along toward morning. It was still sleeting. The feet of the two fake telegraphers skidded a little as they worked across the sidewalk.
Then they fell down. Fell slackly, heavily. But it wasn't the slippery pavement. They had been knocked down, knocked by bullets that arrived in a bedlam of noise.
A machine gun! It was firing, not from the house, but from a roof at the end of the block. Its cackle made the street hideous.
Doc Savage flung sidewise, hit the sleety walk, and slid. He smashed against a fire plug. That was what he wanted. A fire plug will not shelter much more than a man's head, but that was enough in this case. Doc Savage never went out without a garment of chain-mail under his outer clothing. Only the best of high-powered hunting rifles, shooting hard slugs, could perforate the mail.
The machine gun continued its gobbling. Slugs, hitting the bronze man's mail, threatened to knock him away from the fire plug.
The gun went silent.
Doc Savage lay where he was. The quieting of the gun might be a trick to see if he moved.
The two men who had been his guides were dying. One was already dead, in fact. The other was groaning his last, and raving a little.
"TrapЧdouble crossers!" this one was shrieking. "If we got caughtЧbring you hereЧthey would rescue usЧLiarsЧintended fix us so we wouldn't talkЧ"
His shrieking turned to a bubbling and with a few lusty coughs that sprayed crimson over the sleety sidewalk, he turned in his checks.
By now, Doc Savage had decided the machine gun was silent because the gunner was making a get-away. The bronze man heaved up and ran for the corner.
He heard a car engine start up. The machine went away fast.
DOC turned back to the taxi in which he had come. The driver was scared. He got out and ran for dear life in the opposite direction. So Doc drove the cab in pursuit of the fleeing car, and did not get to first base, which was not his fault, but the fault of a careless motorist who had failed to put on chains to run on the sleet.
The cab skidded uncontrollably. Doc Savage's driving ability, which was considerable, did not help enough.
He did not find the car he was seeking, for the cab lost its front wheels against the curb in an effort to avoid a smash.
Doc went back and examined the machine gun. It was a foreign military weapon. Small chance of it ever being traced.
Doc searched the house in which the two men had said he would find the big man with a black beard. There was no such man; and no others in the house. Probably there had never been such a man.
Searching the two victims, Doc Savage found the cablegram which had been dictated by the whispering leader over the telephone, the one which had been sent to Louis Tester, in Panama, Canal Zone. They had been careless and had not destroyed it.
Doc Savage lost no time in getting to a telephone and trying for a land-line-radio hookup to the airport in Panama. He wanted to get hold of Louis Tester.
But Louis Tester had landed, refueled and gone on North. Louis Tester was headed for the trap.
Doc Savage hurriedly got a telephone connection to Havana, Cuba. He spoke, when he had his party, ancient Mayan, a language which few outside his five aids and himself spoke. He talked for some time.
Doc Savage's regular bronze features were emotionless as he headed back toward his skyscraper aыrie. Whatever was involved in this mysterious affair must be tremendous.
The "Metal Master"! That was it, whatever it was.
Doc Savage knew something was wrong the moment he entered the lobby of his building. He ran to the elevators. The three attendants were inside.
They were not dead. But their heads had been thoroughly battered, probably with blackjacks. Not one was conscious. Doc ran his private elevator up to the eighty-sixth floor. He went through reception room and library into the laboratory. There, he stood still for some moments.
His strange, fantastic trilling noise came into existence and traced its eerie tremor for some moments. It was smaller, more exotic than usual, and after it faded away into nothingness, the echo of it seemed to persist, as the strains of enthralling music sometimes seem to hang in the air afterward.
The laboratory walls were of steelЧor had been. A bit of the steel had melted down on the tiled floor. Melted, it appeared, without any heat. A number of the secret compartments had been thus opened.
The one in which Doc Savage had left titian-haired, exquisite Nan Tester had been opened. She was gone.
Chapter IV. INTO THE TRAP
THE next development in the mystery of the Metal Master, as it came to be called, occurred in Havana harbor.
"Tops'l" Hertz, who was to act a grisly part in the matter of the Metal Master, was jumping about barking orders. He was trying to get his big two-masted schooner, Innocent, to sea in a hurry. He did a good deal of cursing.
Tops'l Hertz probably would not have been jumping about swearing had he known about Doc Savage. Tops'l became a cold customer when he was scared. Tops'l had heard of Doc Savage, but as far as he knew, the bronze man had never heard of him. On occasion, Tops'l had hoped he never would.