The Shadow, page 17
Khan was wrong: Ying Ko had learned to control the phurba. But the passive, yin state in which control was achieved had become a stranger to him. Magic and sorcery had little place in the two-fisted, gun-blazing world of vengeful derring-do, where physical prowess mattered above all. That didn’t mean, though, that The Shadow couldn’t find his way to that calm center again.
Across the room, Khan halted, seeming to sense in The Shadow’s sudden composure what was occurring. “What are you up to now, Ying Ko?” he started to say, as The Shadow’s hands loosened their hold on the dagger.
And by then it was too late. The phurba hung suspended for a moment; then it moved away from The Shadow’s neck, gathering speed as it flew, tumbling across the room, and thrust itself deep into the left side of Shiwan Khan’s abdomen.
Wide-eyed and gasping in agony, Khan staggered backward.
For almost an hour, Margo and Shrevnitz had been standing in teeming rain, waiting for something to happen. They were under the awning of a luncheonette across the street from the vacant lot but had their umbrellas open just the same. Shrevnitz was holding a book entitled How to Improve Your Psychic Ability, a sequel to the one he figured he had already mastered.
“You know what I love about this job, Miss Lane?” he said. “The excitement.”
Margo nodded without taking her eyes from the lot. That Shiwan Khan had hypnotized the entire city into believing that the Hotel Monolith had been torn down was one thing, but it was quite another that the raindrops themselves seemed to be ignoring the building. Shouldn’t it look like someone had opened a huge, invisible umbrella above the lot? Magic operated by different rules, she decided.
“Shrevvy, we’re staring at a vacant lot,” she said, heaving a sigh of sodden bafflement. She turned her head to look at him. “We’re standing here in the rain, staring at a vacant lot.”
Shrevnitz shrugged, as if to say that it was all part of the job.
And all at once their patience was rewarded.
Concurrent with Khan’s stabbing, the citywide spell began to lift, revealing the Hotel Monolith in all its glory. White, with vertical stripes of blue-glaze tiling, a shimmering example of what had been termed “Industrial Moderne,” it soared twelve stories to a tall, cylindrical crown, which itself was capped by a 360-degree frieze of naturalistic arabesque. Any sense of squatness was mitigated by symmetrical setbacks at three-story intervals; and central to the façade stood a two-story-tall mythological figure with outstretched wings.
Margo’s mouth had dropped open. “That’s what he saw! It’s unbelievable!”
For blocks in every direction, pedestrians braving the storm were voicing similar exclamations, gesturing in arrant disbelief to the structure that had suddenly sprang up in their midst. Taxicabs and other vehicles slid out of control on the wet streets, slamming into light poles, mailboxes, and one another. With the city under a threat of imminent death by an Asian madman, was the building’s appearance a sign of the end—a kind of precatastrophe mass hallucination?
Margo and Shrevnitz hurried into the street, weaving their way through a jumble of cars and their stunned occupants. The hackie made a quick side trip to the Cord for a crowbar, which he used to snap the lock from the fence gate. Then he and Margo dashed across a mud-slicked marble apron for the hotel’s triple set of front doors.
In the throne room, struggling to rally from their wounds, Shiwan Khan and The Shadow eyed each other across the tottering, counterclockwising floor. Khan was certainly the worse off, and yet he managed to yank the phurba from his body and release a roar that blew out all the glass in the curving north wall. The sky fulminated. Rain and wind whipped at potted palms and ferns that sat by the floor-to-ceiling windows.
The bloody dagger in hand, Khan staggered across the dance floor and up the few stairs to one of the columns. Supporting himself there for a moment, he angled for a section of the east wall, where gold silk curtained the entrance to his meditation chamber.
The Shadow got to his feet and followed, nourishing one of the retrieved magnums with a fresh clip. He raised the weapon and ripped the curtains to one side. But instead of finding his adversary or some secret exit, there was only a towering, upright coffin—the silver coffin of Temüjin, which Khan’s henchmen had stolen from the Museum of Art and Antiquity a day earlier.
The Shadow dropped what was left of his cloak and undid the five dragon’s-foot latches that secured the coffin’s sculpted doors. Throwing them open, he shoved the automatic forward. But the coffin, too, was empty.
Cautiously, he began to run his hand over the moiré inner lining. Then, finding nothing peculiar, he stepped inside, ultimately allowing the doors to close behind him. Something clicked in the dark, and the bottom panel of the coffin gave way.
Wounded, Khan had lost his hold on Reinhardt Lane as well.
The professor came to his senses in what he quickly recognized was an expensive hotel room—though he couldn’t for the life of him recall how he had gotten there. The lamps on either side of the double bed were on, and he was standing fully dressed, opposite a wall mirror centered over the couch. Gazing out the window, he determined that he was at least ten stories above the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
He went to the door and peeked into a lighted hallway, elegantly decorated, with gray carpeting, and antique chairs, canopies, and commodes. The odd thing was, he seemed to be the floor’s sole guest.
Three minutes and four flights of stairs later, he was even more bewildered to run into Margo, who was hurrying down a hallway, accompanied by a man wearing a peacoat and green corduroys. She rushed into his arms and hugged him.
“Margo, where are we?” Lane asked in obvious distress. “Please, tell me what’s going on.”
Margo took hold of his hand. “Well, see, there’s this guy, Shiwan Khan—” She stopped herself and swung to the unidentified man. “Shrevvy, you better go for the police.”
The man nodded and ran off. Lane gazed at his daughter in consternation.
“Dad, the whole story’s going to have to wait until later,” she told him. “But in the meantime, there’s something you’ve got to do—right now.”
Lane shook his head. “Do about what, dear?”
“About the atom bomb!”
The Shadow made a soft landing. He calculated that he hadn’t fallen more than thirty feet, and the fall seemed to have delivered him into an outsize laundry bin. Overhead was what could have been a laundry chute—three chutes, in fact, each with its own heap of delivered goods. On closer inspection, however, he realized that he hadn’t dropped onto soiled clothing, bedding, or tablecloths, but onto scraps of fabric and carpet remnants apparently pitched down the chutes during final construction of the Moonlight Café.
The Shadow scrambled down off the pile and planted his feet on the floor. His cat’s eyes made sufficient use of the dim light to define his immediate surroundings: the room was round and approximated the dimensions of Khan’s throne room. He reasoned that he was still within the Monolith’s cylindrical crown, possibly directly beneath the dance floor. Indeed, he could hear the humming of the complex mechanism that governed the floor’s spin and pitch.
The Shadow backhanded blood from one cheek and adjusted his hold on the handgun’s nacre grip. Ahead of him lay an assortment of objects he didn’t identify as tables until he was almost on top of them. There had to be at least sixty of them, assembled or in parts, scattered about, stacked up, leaning against one another. Further along were chairs, in pretty much the same state of disarray. Next came the pieces of a portable stage, column bases and capitals, lengths of hardwood flooring and arcs of treading for the stairs that surrounded the dance floor, curtain rods, fabric-wrapped cornices, panes of window glass, even bedframes, mattresses, and mirrors. The Shadow felt as if he were maneuvering his way through the world’s largest attic.
But neither sign nor sound of Shiwan Khan, only the wavering hum of electric motors and a gentle whirring of gears.
A few minutes of stalking delivered The Shadow into an aisle formed by a palisade of tall, brocaded curtains and a domino arrangement of full-length mirrors—some of them in freestanding frames; others of the sort typically found affixed to the backs of bathroom doors. At the end of the aisle, remote light gleamed from a faintly reflective surface.
Into which Khan suddenly stepped.
As if unbidden, The Shadow’s automatic spoke, and Khan’s image splintered, as The Shadow’s own had on the night Margo Lane had been sent to kill him.
The Shadow quickly determined where Khan must have been standing for his reflection to have appeared.
A violent sweep of his left hand parted the curtains, and he stepped through them into a veritable hall of mirrors: cheval glasses, girandoles, trumeaux, and wall mirrors standing on end. Manifold images of the would-be ruler of the free world were on hand to applaud The Shadow’s entrance. Concealed lights came up and Khan’s image moved, disappearing from one group of mirrors only to appear in another. The Shadow pivoted, hoping to suss out Khan’s true position, the magnum eager to speak.
Then, from behind him, Khan materialized, flesh and bone and wailing a Mongol battle cry as he charged, slashing for The Shadow with the raised phurba.
The Shadow lurched to one side, but not nimbly enough to avoid the tapering, three-sided blade.
In the throne room, Reinhardt Lane was marveling at the suspended sphere that spelled doom for the city. In the hearts of the timer-display vacuum tubes glowed the numerals 1, 1, 1, 2, 6: one hour, eleven minutes, twenty-six seconds.
And counting.
“This is really most impressive,” he said to Margo. “Most impressive, indeed. Who built it?”
“You did,” she told him in a rush. This, despite the fact that it was the professor, in a dazed state, who had led them to the site of the bomb. “Now unbuild it!”
Lane was perplexed. “I built this?” He produced a pair of oval, wire-rim spectacles from the breast pocket of his jacket and slipped them on over the pair he was already wearing.
“Yes, Dad. So I’m sure you can deactivate it. If you’d only—”
“But just look at the craftsmanship.”
“Dad!” Margo yelled, taking hold of his shoulders and shaking him.
The ceremonial knife The Shadow thought he had tamed had sliced through his double-breasted coat, his shirt, and the skin of his chest. Khan was back to his funhouse tricks, his reflection shifting from one array of mirrors to the next. But The Shadow was still gunning for him.
“Come no further, Ying Ko,” Khan cautioned. “This is not an arena you wish to venture into.”
His usual risibility quieted, The Shadow ignored the warning, snaking his way through aisle after reflective aisle in an effort to close in on Khan’s voice. For all the maneuvering, however, The Shadow seemed to be getting nowhere fast. In fact, Khan actually appeared to be receding from view.
The Shadow came to a halt, thwarted vindication oozing from him. Khan’s reflections were undergoing a transformation; in their stead were resolving images of The Shadow himself—save that they belonged to an earlier incarnation . . .
To Ying Ko: who had brought destruction of many a highland village; who had laid siege to the sacrosanct Potola itself; who had dealt death to the cities of the United States and Europe; who had calmly ordered the execution of his trusted friend and adviser, Wu, merely to send a message to his competitors in the opium trade.
“Gaze into your past, Ying Ko,” Khan was saying. “Behold your former self, your true shadow, and tell me again why you refuse to become my willing ally in evil.”
Professor Lane muttered to himself while he labored to deactivate the timer. “Cut this wire, isolate this relay, reroute this circuit . . .” With a snip, he cut one wire and turned his attention to another.
Working with arms raised over his head, he had unscrewed and removed the timer’s curved access panel, which he had stowed in his jacket pocket. Tucked into the nacelle behind the panel was a wiring board composed of sixteen pairs of slot-head screws. The board was nested in a tangle of copper wires, sheathed in red, green, yellow, and blue braided cloth.
Margo, who had taken off her wool coat, was pacing nervously behind him, on what seemed to be a very unsteady floor, stopping every so often to monitor her father’s progress. Just now she heard the snap of his wire cutters and glanced at the timer display, gasping when she saw that the seconds and minutes were passing in a blur.
Fifty minutes, forty, thirty . . .
“Dad!” she screamed.
He angled his head away from the sphere to regard the glass panel, which was suddenly displaying single digits: ten minutes, nine, eight . . .
“Oh, dear me,” Lane said.
Frantically, he spliced the wire he had cut only a moment earlier, and the timer resumed a normal countdown.
With only four minutes and seven seconds remaining to detonation.
21
Rolling Thunder
Depictions of his violent past continued to play across the dazzling faces of the mirrors—as they had so often in his mind’s eye: the beatings he endured and dished out as a youth; the vengeance he extracted on those who had dared to dishonor him: the viciousness he unleashed against a jealous cousin; the myriad sanctioned crimes he committed during the war; the bloody turf battles that were the order of the day in the Himalaya and the Hindu Kush; the redirected rage The Shadow brought to the city; the identity hoax he had perpetrated on the world; the dread he had induced in Margo Lane . . .
The images were never far from his thoughts. But now, to see them exteriorized was almost more than he could stand. The human in him sought to deny the truth, while the beast reveled.
Khan made good use of The Shadow’s inner struggle. His reflection streaking across the mirrors, Khan materialized within arm’s reach of his quarry.
More, within blade’s reach.
A leather-clad hand rose to stave off Khan’s overhand blow, and was pierced through its palm. The Shadow raged against the pain as Khan reared for a second attack. The Shadow’s other hand came up, only to be similarly impaled.
Bleeding profusely, The Shadow collapsed on hands and knees, snarling like a cornered animal.
Reinhardt Lane’s wire cutters severed a red-to-red connection.
Margo—standing off to one side of the dangling bomb, fingertips to her mouth—heard a worrisome click!, and looked up in time to see the hook that attached the sphere to the cable open.
“Wrong, again,” the scientist said, as the sphere disengaged.
It hit the circular floor with a hollow clang and rolled toward the perimeter below the throne, sending the floor into a sudden tilt. Lane pitched over sideways, tipping the floor in the opposite direction, and Margo’s feet came out from under her. The sphere struck the carpeted edge of the concentric ring of stairs and caromed at an acute angle, setting the floor rotating as well as tipping. The Lanes scrambled to their feet, fell once more, then rose and began to make desperate lunges for the sphere as it was rebounding off the stairs and pin-balling around the floor. The physicist almost succeeded in stopping it, but it rolled from his grasp, dropping him on his face. Margo was just getting up when the sphere bowled her over on its way back from the stairs.
“This is impossible,” Reinhardt told his daughter. “I can’t even stay on my feet!”
Margo, sprawled on the floor with her blue dress twisted around her, threw him a piqued look. “Yeah, well, try doing it in heels!”
The sphere kept striking and banking like some outsize billiard ball for what felt like ten minutes—though Margo was relieved to note—when she happened to catch a glimpse of the timer—that only a minute had elapsed. Just then, however, the floor tipped southward and the bomb rolled through the gap in the columned ring. Reinhardt had just about reached it when it shot between the Egyptian-figured doors and went tumbling down the stairs into the hallway.
Margo recalled that the display had shown three minutes remaining before detonation.
Weakened but back on his feet and eager for revenge, he asked himself why Shiwan Khan hadn’t finished the job. Did Khan still expect that they could forge a partnership?
Reading The Shadow’s thoughts, the villainous Asian suddenly manifested in the mirrors.
“Poor Ying Ko,” he said, with false sincerity. “You never could decide who or what you were. But now, Shiwan Khan will decide for you.” He raised the phurba over his head. “You will be nothing. I’m sick of you. I’m sick of both of us.”
The Shadow reached deeply into himself, draining the reservoir of his contained power. Veins leapt out in his taut neck and forehead; his face rippled and bulged. Blood seeped from one eye, then the other, coursing down over his ax-keen nose and throbbing cheeks. The object of his concentrated will—the room and its hundreds of mirrors—began to quake.
Khan eyed him with misgiving. Then, grasping that he had a time bomb of his own to disarm, Khan commanded The Shadow to stop. But the rumbling only increased.
The bomb thundered down the hallway, glancing off wainscotting and chairs, with the Lanes chasing after it. As if set on escaping, the sphere overturned tables and lamps—all of which the Lanes were forced to hurdle—then found its way to the stairway to the floor below.
Having taken several nasty falls on the dance floor, the professor had to be helped along by his daughter, who, quite unnecessarily, felt the need to urge him on. The two were only fifty feet behind the sphere when it rolled down the stairs, but Reinhardt’s limp slowed them considerably, so that by the time they reached the lower floor they no longer had the object in sight.
Although they could hear the bomb banging into furniture along its route.
Margo hurried around a bend in the hallway, then paused briefly at the top of another stairway to listen for sounds of damage. Hearing nothing in the carpeted hallway ahead, she concluded that the sphere had again found the stairs, and she and her father descended to the next floor.
