"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 001 - Man of Bronze" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

Death was a man.

He seemed to have the adroitness of a cat at finding his way in the dark. Upward, he crept. The girders
were slick with rain, treacherous. The man's progress was gruesome in its vile purpose.

From time to time, he spat strange, clucking words. A gibberish of hate!

A master of languages would have been baffled trying to name the tongue the man spoke. A profound
student might have identified the dialect. The knowledge would be hard to believe, for the words were of
a lost race, the language of a civilization long vanished!

"He must die!" the man chanted hoarsely in his strange lingo. "It is decreed by the Son of the Feathered
Serpent! Tonight! Tonight death shall strike!"

Each time he raved his paean of hate, the man hugged an object he carried closer to his chest.

This object was a box, black, leather-covered. It was about four inches deep and four feet long.

"This shall bring death to him!" the man clucked, caressing the black case.

The rain beat him. Steel-fanged space gaped below. One slip would be his death. He climbed upward
yard after yard.

Most of the chimneys which New Yorkers call office buildings had been emptied of their daily toilers.
There were only occasional pale eyes of light gleaming from their sides.

The labyrinth of girders baffled the skulker a moment. He poked a flashlight beam inquisitively. The glow
lasted a bare instant, but it disclosed a remarkable thing about the man's hands.

The finger tips were a brilliant red! They might have been dipped an inch of their length in a scarlet dye.

The red-fingered man scuttled onto a workmen's platform. The planks were thick. The platform was near
the outside of the wilderness of steel.

The man lowered his black case. His inner pocket disgorged compact, powerful binoculars.

ON the lowermost floor of a skyscraper many blocks distant, the crimson-fingered man focused his
glasses. He started counting stories upward.

The building was one of the tallest in New York. A gleaming spike of steel and brick, it rammed upward
nearly a hundred stories.

At the eighty-sixth floor, the sinister man ceased to count. His glasses moved right and left until they
found a lighted window. This was at the west corner of the building.

Only slightly blurred by the rain, the powerful binoculars disclosed what was in the room.

The broad, polished top of a massive and exquisitely inlaid table stood directly before the window.
Beyond it was the bronze figure!