CHAPTER XXII

STORM GOES GUNNING

It was not until they were about to leave the Thames Police Station that the absence of Blaythwayt was noticed. The little man, after being detected in the act of prying over Storm's shoulder, had faded self-consciously into the background; and, from that obscure retirement, he seemed to have sunk through the floor or dissipated into air. Certainly he had subsided completely out of the tableau, and Teal scratched his head in perplexity; for it was not to be expected that Joe, having at last succeeded in getting his nose on to an official scent, would make for home and a comfortable bed with a feeling of sensatory repletion. There is no bloodhound so hot and indefatigable on a trail as your enthusiastic amateur, whether he be a collector of postage-stamps or particularly gory murders, and the evanescence of Uncle Joe in those circumstances was provocative of thought.

"I only hope the little goop hasn't gone off to try and pinch the Apex himself," said Teal gloomily; but, knowing the sensational leanings of his friend, he was none too easy in his mind on that score.

No one was to know that, even as Teal voiced his prayer, an asthmatic and flustered Joe Blaythwayt was panting out instructions to a taxi-driver and scrambling into the cab to be driven swiftly westwards....

"Never mind Uncle Joe," advised Storm. "I guess he'll keep--and he's old enough to be loosed off without a chaperon."

They saw Malleson off in a taxi, and then hailed a second cab for themselves. Storm, nearly worn out, was making for the Albany and a long overdue rest; and Teal, beguiled by the promise of a strong nightcap, accompanied him. They hardly spoke on the drive back, for each was busy with his own thoughts. Teal's, it may be said, mostly ended in question marks, but nevertheless the detective had acquired a number of facts that night which opened up a maze of speculations and startling possibilities. As for Storm, he was wondering vaguely if he would get any sleep at all from then on until the Triangle had ceased to be--so far-reaching were the results of his investigations over the last two hours. His head still throbbed painfully from the concussion of the Piccadilly Circus explosion, but his mind had taken unto itself a new lease of energy. Everything had clarified suddenly, partly through the stimulus of those four photographs, partly because excessive weariness was already entering upon a reaction--that reaction which takes one to a quality approaching brilliance, when the whole body has become so tired that there are no restraints whatever upon the heights which may be attained by the feverishly soaring brain; a reaction which is very short and transitory, and which is followed by a long period of even greater lassitude than that which led up to it.

The taxi stopped in Piccadilly outside Albany Court Yard, and they got out. Storm paid off the driver, and, as the cab drove off, went after Teal, who had gone on ahead.

Teal was at the foot of the Albany steps, and Storm was well inside the Court, before either of them noticed an extraordinary thing. It was very dark, for the electric light mains had been wrecked by the land mine, and one almost had to grope one's way along, foot by foot. And then the moon came out from behind a bank of cloud and drenched everything under its eye in a flood of nebulous silver light, and Storm yelled a warning to Teal which made that slothful man spin round with the agility of an antelope.

_The deep shadows cast by the three walls of the Court were alive with men!_

Teal took in the situation at a glance. In a fraction of a second he had leapt up the steps, obeying Storm's shouted command, and as he sprang he jerked his automatic from his pocket. In those days, Storm did not rely upon one gun--he carried two, and both of them were in his hands now.

The promise of action had driven the last vestige of sluggishness from Arden's brain, and almost without conscious thought he had remembered the words of the Era advertisement and the orders of the Apex given over the loud-speaking telephone that night. Teal was to be killed, and he, Storm, was merely to be captured. Therefore Storm had roared to Teal to make for cover and not stop to give battle; and Teal, being a law-enforcing machine whose first instinct was obedience, had obeyed automatically before he even grasped the significance of the order.

_Crack!... Crack!..._

The enemy fired the first shots, and the din double-echoed resonantly in the confined space. Storm retaliated with one gun at each of the two flashes he saw, and a yelp of pain told him that at least one of his bullets had found asylum. Teal had halted at the top of the steps, and his gun blazed back at a third flash which barked in the echo of Storm's twin reprisal. By then, the detective's intelligence had made itself heard above the commands of discipline, and Teal was not the man to run away from a fight to save his precious skin and leave another man to face the music.

Teal's stance was simply asking for trouble. He stood exactly in the right place for the moonshine to pick him out as a beautifully illuminated target. Storm saw the danger and yelled another order as he raced across to join the detective. But the smell of battle and the sight of those sinister shadows closing in upon his chief had made Teal go pig-headed, and he stood his ground obstinately.

In Piccadilly a police whistle screamed.

Teal fired again into the murky shapes which rushed upon Storm from all directions. And then one of the shapes turned its course and shot back twice at the detective. Storm saw Teal stagger and go down.

An instant later Storm himself had other things to think of.

There must have been fully thirty men lying in ambush along those treacherous patches of blackness. The odds were hopeless. When he started running, Storm had been making for the Albany entrance; but there had been men hidden in the darkness on either side of the steps, and now these barred his way and their fellows hemmed his retreat via Albany Court Yard. There was only one horse to back. The fact that all the shooting had been aimed at Teal seemed to indicate that the order not to kill Kit still applied. Storm's only chance, then, was to bank on the men obeying orders and try to put the fear of God into them with merciless gunning from his own quarter. Storm took that chance. His two automatics rattled like machine-gun fire, and he saw one after another of the men in front of him go down before that leaden scythe until he had cut a lane through the blockade. Others were already closing in to fill the places of the fallen, but, running like a sprint champion, there might be a thin hope of breaking through before they could take up position.

What Storm hadn't--couldn't have--allowed for was the fact that there must always be men behind him. Therefore he didn't see the arms of the two men behind him swing up, didn't see the two skilfully-thrown sandbags hurtle through the air--only felt the dull, sickening impact of something heavy and yet yielding upon the back of his neck, before he crashed to the ground and everything vanished in a whirling infinity of blackness....

He came to on a sofa, with his head throbbing horribly, and his first surprise was to find that he was in his own flat. The second was the presence of a man he knew, who was binding up an ugly wound in Teal's shoulder.

"Terry!" called Storm. "How did you get here?"

Terry Mannering looked up and smiled, but the haggardness of that ordinarily cheerful young man made the grin unconvincing.

"That's all right, brother. You sit tight for a bit and get the bump off your cranium. Havin' a solid ivory skull, you're still livin' when by all rights you ought to be dead--in a large experience of sandbaggin' and divers kindred sports, I may say I've never----"

"Cut out the bedside manner, Terry, for the love of Mud!" snarled Storm weakly. "What's happened?"

He tried to sit up, and had to make several attempts before he could overcome the sick giddiness that the effort caused. Terry went on bandaging Teal, and tried to infuse flippancy into his tone as he gave the account.

"Havin' missed our tame policeman," he said, "the Triangle coves had rather come a mucker. Far as we can make out, the idea was to pip Teal first bang an' then grab you in the same bar, so to speak. Unfortunately, you two warriors put up such a scrap an' made such a row about it that half the Roberts in London were chargin' on to the field before you'd been downed and outed as per invoice. Therefore, realisin' that dispersion is occasionally the better part of valour, your adorin' playmates legged it through the Albany an' out the other side, where the Roberts ceased from troublin' an' the policemen were at rest. They got away, leavin' your bodies on the plain an' a number of short-winded bobbies pantin' in their wake. Really, you know, you want to enlist a few Olympic runners in your comic copper battalions, if you want to catch young Pegasi (or is it Pegasuses?) like our friends----"

"Oh, cut it out!" snapped Storm. "What brought you here?"

Terry gave the finishing touches to Teal's bandages, and then left the detective to put on his coat and himself lighted a long cigar and puffed thoughtfully.

"I suppose you'll have to know," he murmured at length. "Though, as a qualified physician whose disgustin' wealth has stopped him from practising I'll warn you that if you go dashin' off doin' anythin' silly you'll be knocked up for weeks. Well, to put it briefly, at home we thought you'd been knocked out in the firework display. An' Susan thought so too. You were on your way to St. George's Hospital, and had very kindly sent your 'bus round to bring the chief mourners to your deathbed. A uniformed Robert was drivin', so everything in the garden looked lovely--barrin', of course, your own impendin' demise..." Terry studied the end of his cigar intently. "D'you get me, little one?"

Storm sat still for some seconds. He might have been graven in bronze for all the emotion he displayed; and yet, behind that mechanical masquerade, he was suffering the tortures of the damned.... Susan, his Susan ... in the Power of the Dog.... "_Kill H..._" At that moment, for the first time in his life, he knew the meaning of utter hopelessness. Nothing mattered in the whole world, nothing existed but that hideous fact. The Triangle might blast London off the face of the earth, might blow to atoms a thousand more John Cardans--it wouldn't count a lonely Continental cuss. Susan was gone.... The only ray of hope came from the implied assertion that she'd been kidnapped instead of murdered on the spot, and even that knowledge was fraught with fears too horrible to contemplate....

Put into the balance in Storm's favour that in the last seventy-two hours he had had less than seven hours' sleep, and perhaps you will understand and forgive him for plumbing such abysses of despair. And that spineless despondency was only momentary. Before it could consolidate the position it had gained, Storm hurled up every supporting mote of fighting weight that was in him to hold the breach. With a clinched effort of will which racked and locked his nerves in positive physical anguish he focused all his strength upon the one object of getting his mind and body back to par. His face remained inscrutable and all his muscles were relaxed, but the sweat broke out in glistening gouts on his forehead. And, gradually, inch by painful inch, he scourged himself into cool, calm reason. Watching him, few would have known that in the fleeting of those few seconds he had gone down into Inferno and dragged himself back again into the world.

Storm raised his eyes. His hand went slowly to his pocket and drew out his cigarette-case. With leisured care he selected a cigarette, tapped it on his thumb-nail, and put it between his lips. Still with the same Alpine steadiness, he took a box of matches from his pocket, struck a light, and held it to the cigarette. He extinguished the match with one flourishing sweep of his hand and broke it into little tiny splinters, dropping them one by one on to the carpet. And then, sitting with his elbows on his knees and his hands cupped boyishly under his chin, he took the cigarette from his mouth and blew out a long blue trail of smoke.

"Yes?" he prompted, and his voice was as coldly level as a frozen tarn.

Terry fastidiously preserved the cone of ash that was accumulating on his cigar.

"Well, I offered to go with Susan, but she wanted to go alone. Still, I'd gathered from the Robert's not very snappy backchat that you were more or less lyin' on the banks of the Styx waitin' for the ferry; so, for the sake of old times, after allowin' Susan half an hour's start to get through the last fond farewell"--Terry grinned wryly--"I tottered along myself. Had the jolly old Sisters of Mercy heard of Captain Arden? They had not. Had the worthy chirurgeons? _Non plus_. I combed every ward myself, and when we hadn't located you I remembered the Triangle's interest in Susan and began to get a whiff of _Mus decumanus_, or the common rat. Toddlin' round to Scotland Yard, I was told you'd just left on a morgue tour along the Embankment. So I came toolin' on here to wait for you. _Et voila!_"

"I see," said Storm. "Can you get me some real eighty-over-proof dope? Snow for preference. I'm about done in, and my acquaintance with rest cures looks like being not yet."

Terry looked at him for a moment, and then nodded.

"I'll knock up a chemist myself," he promised. "But you'll try to get some sleep, won't you? Tumblin' into the arms of Morpheus, and so forth?"

Kit nodded.

"I can't do anything to-night, but God knows what I'll feel like to-morrow. I won't use the stuff if I can help it, but I want it for a stand-by. Push off now like a good fellow, and get Teal home right afterwards, will you?"

Terry went, and then Storm crossed to the telephone and called Scotland Yard. He was lucky enough to find the Assistant Commissioner still there.

"I want Prester John," said Storm. "Get him to my flat by nine to-morrow if it's humanly possible. And Birdie, if they can find him. Have men out after the two of 'em all night, and hogshave all search warrants! Also Snooper Brome--add him to the list. Got me?"

Then Storm went wearily to his bedroom. He wound his alarm clock and set the bell at 8.30; and then, only removing his coat, collar and tie, he fell into bed and was almost instantly asleep.

The buzzer awakened him after an all too short rest, and his first impulse was to shut the darn thing off, turn over, and sink back into the delicious Nirvana from which its clarion call had roused him. And then he remembered everything.... With a sigh he flung off the sheet and got up. His head ached appallingly, and for some unknown reason he was stiff in every limb. He undressed and made for the bathroom, and under the invigorating chill of a cold needle spray a good deal of the muzziness cleared away. A brisk rub down restored him still more; and, so great were the recuperative powers of his robust health, he finished dressing again with the feeling of being little the worse for the strain he had been through. A slight thickheadedness and a heaviness in the eyelids--that was all.

He burst into the sitting-room to be greeted by the yawning visage of Mr. Teal.

"Je-rusalem!" he said. "What're you about so early for?"

"I haven't been away," replied Teal, stretching his sound arm. "Your sofa's pretty comfortable, and I don't like being sent behind the lines when there's anything doing on the front."

Storm turned to his manservant, who was laying the table for breakfast.

"We'll start with a double Colonial breakfast," he said briskly. "And make your coffee black and strong!"

He was gulping a Horse's Neck into whose composition very little ginger ale had entered when the Assistant Commissioner arrived.

Bill Kennedy was alone, and the scowl which invariably disfigured his face before breakfast was more worried than usual.

"I haven't got either of your men," he confessed bluntly. "Prester John's left the country to make a new start in Canada, and Brome's vanished. We never knew much about Snooper, anyhow, and the lag who runs his fencing store in Kensington when Eddie's away hasn't seen him for days. What's the particular hurry?"

Storm told him in four words, and then--

"Did Mr. Mannering turn in that dope, Teal?" he asked.

For answer, Teal pointed to the cellarette, and Storm went over and opened the small parcel which lay there. He took a glance at the hypodermic syringe it contained, and the two phials packed into the metal syringe-case, and slipped the box into his pocket.

He carried writing materials over to the breakfast table and wrote while he made his meal. When he had finished there were five closely written pages which he checked over carefully and then sealed into an envelope, scribbling his initials on the flap.

He gave the package to Bill Kennedy.

"I put you on your honour not to open this unless I fail to report at the Yard by midnight," he said. "It gives you the identity of the Triangle and a string of substantial evidence against him--enough to hang an army! If I don't turn up you'll know what to do. Secondly, I'll bet you've had men put on to guard me after last night?"

"Yes." Bill nodded.

"Take 'em off right now! Bill, I guarantee that if I see anyone that looks like a nursemaid in trousers tailing me around when I leave here I'll wring his neck! I _want_ the Triangle to catch me--that's the only chance I've got left of cleaning up this mess outside of the Old Bailey. You put that right up inside the big bone you wear under your hat, and let it dig itself in!"

Even as he spoke Storm was stripping off his coat and shirt, and they had a chance to view his magnificent torso. The muscle just lay on him in slabs, writhing and cording under the satiny skin with every movement he made. He was ribbed out and sinewed up like a thoroughbred racehorse--he might have served as a model for a statue of Apollo, with his perfectly proportioned, splendidly supple and yet immensely powerful development. Storm was always trained to a hair; and, at that moment, as he stretched and limbered up, he looked fit to fight for a kingdom ... whereas he was going to fight for something which, to him, meant more than all the cities of the world and their glory----

He disappeared into his bedroom and returned a minute later with a heavy bundle in his arms.

Against each bicep, by means of straps fastened above and below the muscle, he fixed neat leather holsters which carried compact small-calibre automatics. Against his right calf he laid a small thin razor-sharp poignard which was held in place by his sock and sock suspender. Thus secretly armed, he pulled over his head a jerkin of pliant deerskin which laced up to the collar-bone; and over this he put on a singlet of the finest steel mesh.

Kennedy and Teal observed all these accoutrements with unconcealed interest, and Storm smiled.

"Courage gets medals," he remarked as he resumed his shirt, "but people who sail into typhoons without taking in canvas, battening all hatches, and rigging life-lines, just get what they deserve--and that's Hell!"

He completed his reclothing, slipped another automatic--to be found if and when he was searched--into his hip-pocket, lighted a cigarette, and picked up his hat.

"So far I've been the world's premier boob," he said--"the most paralytic fall-guy that ever wore pants. And I'm going to get even or bust!"

He was in high spirits. In spite of the ever-present fear for Susan which haunted the back of his mind, he was totally unable to repress his cheerfulness. The scent of battle always got him that way; and it was a trait of his which caused him great annoyance, for, when sparring and waiting about turned the corner into the straight run home of action, breathless and perilous, he seemed incapable of seeing things in their true values. But this callousness was only superficial. The real fact was that a high incentive whetted and honed the edge of his deep-rooted fighting instinct, making it seem predominant.

"Where're you going?" asked Bill Kennedy.

Storm paused at the door, and a reckless smile, reminiscent of the Viking warrior whose idea of heaven was a Valhalla where daily warfare provided eternal bliss, touched his lips.

"Looking for trouble!" he said grimly. "And I think it's coming good and fast!"