Nick Carter - Killmaster 002 - The China Doll, page 6
part #2 of Killmaster Series
He decided.
"I have a better way. What happens to you if you don't come with me?"
She stared into the steel gray eyes that pierced into hers.
"Nothing. They would kill me if they knew I was with you and had told you anything. But they do not know that yet."
"Won't they blame you for letting me go?"
She shrugged expressively. "It was Ka Tanaki's job to stop you. And there are others waiting to take over. They do not expect me to do their killing for them."
He refrained from making the obvious comment and asked, instead, another question. "If I manage to get out of here can I count on you to contact me later and give the help that you have promised?"
"Please let me come with you, San. I hate these people and this place."
"Taka, you can't." He shook her shoulder urgently. "They will certainly kill you if they see us together. Each of us will be better off alone. But I want you to meet me later. Will you do that?"
She nodded. "I will do that, if I can."
It was taking a hell of a chance. But something told him that time was running out and this was no time to make complicated plans. He'd just have to be on guard.
"All right. I'm at the Diplomat Hotel. Henry Stewart, 515." He started pulling towels down off the shelves. "Wait 'til the commotion dies down, then call me. We'll arrange a meeting place."
Taka stared at him. "What are you doing?"
"Getting out of here."
Hot Time in the Old Town
The towels formed a tangled pile on the floor, topped with shredded and crumpled shelf paper. Nick surveyed the rumpled pyre. It reached from the shelves to the door, a very satisfactory arrangement. He searched around for anything else he could use: odd bits of tissue and wrappings, plastic and celluloid containers, a couple of cardboard soap boxes.
Then he carefully shook most of his cigarette lighter's fuel on the towels, saving a drop for another purpose.
Taka watched with interest, realization spreading over her face.
Nick turned a screw on the kerosene lamp and again allowed most, but not all, of its fluid to pour over the tinderbox pile. He put back the screw cap and threw a couple more towels over his shoulder.
"There has never been a fire here before," said Taka "You will let me out, won't you? You would not let me stay here burning?"
Her eyes were beginning to show fear. For all her brave talk about walking out with him and dying, Nick realized she did not relish the idea of death. Certainly not by fire.
He was unkind enough to grin at her.
"Do you think I would? No, Taka. I am not like your friends."
"They are not my friends!" Now she was angry again.
He finished his preparations and slid the key into the lock, talking to her softly and swiftly as he did so.
"I will light this. Then I will open the door and you will walk quickly but naturally toward the stairway. If anyone asks about me, you will be surprised that I have not been found. Whatever happens, react normally. Understand?"
She nodded.
The dying lick of the cigarette lighter applied to his carefully constructed pyramid did the trick. The first slow creeping of smoky flame became a hungry leap of fire.
"Okay. Open that door and get out fast."
She did. Nick poked his head cautiously out after her. There was no one else on the landing. Fine. He fanned the flames. He took up the kerosene lamp and stepped past his bonfire into the corridor and hurled the lamp against the corridor wall. It burst noisily; flaming liquid spewed. He grabbed a burning towel from behind him and tossed it toward the lamp, following it with the two spare towels he had over his shoulder. Simultaneously he shrieked: "Fire! Fire! Help! Fire!"
The oldest trick in the book worked.
Startled heads thrust out of suddenly opened doors; half-naked men bobbed into sight, clutching huge towels around them; attendants squealed and screamed. The tiny room behind Nick was producing a hellfire of smoke, flame and confusion. The blazing lamp in the corridor was doing its job most effectively, too. A dozen garbled voices rattled off a stream of Japanese interspersed with the penetrating voices of American tourists taking the treatment. Half-clad people pushed past him without even seeing him. Heavier feet thundered from the direction of the stairway. An alarm bell of some kind sent a frenetic whhhrrr of noise through the building.
Nick tore open his jacket and rumpled his shirt as he started to run, throwing himself into the whirlwind of bodies that swept down the hall. The main lobby bulged with the clientele of the bathhouse, clutching towels and odd bits of clothing and screaming out their panic. Nick, fully dressed, joined the mob which bolted out through the main entrance with almost complete disregard for their state of undress. He clutched his pants and feverishly buttoned his jacket, as if he were one of the fortunate few to have been almost ready to leave. He was damned if he was going to put on a more dramatic act and leave his clothes behind him. He could scarcely go running naked around Tokyo with a bunch of killers after him.
Tokyo was sunny, serene — and waiting.
Something else was waiting, too.
As the swarm of people poured from the building, Nick spotted Ka Tanaki's reinforcements. There was no mistaking them.
A small plaza of cherry trees enhanced the entrance of the bathhouse. Two sides of it were lined with parked cars belonging to the bathhouse clientele. Beyond it, Tokyo Boulevard was alive with traffic and pedestrians — energetic citizens, tourists with cameras, sailors with girls. The fleet was in again. But so was death.
A line of four taxicabs, each with a driver and a fare, was waiting across the plaza. Each cab started moving very slowly as the crowd poured out of the bathhouse.
The flurry of excitement generated by the fire had served its purpose. Nick was outside the death trap. It should be fairly easy to slip away now. He moved along the front of the building, picking his way through the mob toward the parking lot away from the direction in which the cabs were heading. Then, suddenly, the crowd deserted him. The strange instinct that impels a group of strangers to move as a single being drew the crowd back toward the entrance and left him as isolated and obvious as a flashing beacon on a rock. He started running, intending to cut through the parking lot and aim for the busy boulevard.
Even as a fire engine screamed its way on to the scene, its compelling voice cutting a path through the traffic, the four cabs wheeled in a sharp U-turn and headed back toward him.
A run-down. The familiar Al Capone trick of the thirties, when a line of black cars would race past a shop or the home of a rival and rake it with machine gun fire on the theory that what the first car missed the second would hit, and so on right down the line.
The first car turned into the parking lot. Nick ducked and ran in a crouch toward the boulevard. A burst of automatic machine gun fire tore above his head. There was an agonized cry from someone in the crowd behind him.
Dodging and weaving, he cut across the open reaches of the Plaza toward the remaining three cars. There was a stone bench on the plaza that would have to do. At last, a stroke of luck.
The stone back of the bench ran all the way to the ground. He ran, bullets screaming above his head, and dropped to his knees behind the bench that faced the deadly avenue of taxicabs. Wilhelmina leapt into his hand. All he had to do was hold out. The first cab was already out of sight.
A hail of machine gun bullets raked the bench. Chips flew, and the second car was by. Nick hugged the ground. Another burst of fire came from somewhere behind him, zinging over his head into the back of the bench just above his left shoulder. The second car, cutting through the parking lot, was firing parting shots at his exposed rear. Christ! He'd have to guard both ends at once.
The third car passed. Machine guns chattered. The bench seemed to tremble on its moorings, but it held. Nick ducked alongside the bench to shield himself from rear attack. Now the fourth murder car faced Nick. He raised Wilhelmina for the kill. A face stared directly into his over the deadly weapon whose single blast would tear his body to shreds. Wilhelmina spat viciously. Her first answer to the assault exploded in the hateful face. One machine gun fell into the street. The car swerved slightly but kept going, heading for the parking lot. Nick raised his head gingerly, leveled Wilhelmina, and fired at a fleeting profile even as the taxi turned.
His aim was worthy of the brilliant record he had run up on the ranges at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Even the cold-eyed FBI instructor, who had noted Nick's perfect score in the legendary Hogan's Alley, would have permitted himself a nod of satisfaction.
Wilhelmina's final message bore into the driver's skull. The man jerked like a puppet. The wheel flew from his dead fingers and the taxicab swerved crazily. Nick was on his feet and running toward the corner when the cab slammed headlong into a telephone pole at the far corner of the narrow lot.
There was a wild gulp of flame, and then the gas tank exploded, filling the air with flying metal and flesh. From bathhouse and boulevard came screams of fear and horror.
There was nothing to wait for. The other three cabs had not reappeared. Yet. People were converging from all sides. How in hell to explain all this to the Tokyo Police? And how in hell get out of here? Maybe, again, one of the oldest of all gambits was the best.
He ran toward the flaming wreck and stared at it with well-simulated horror. The pedestrians coming toward him from the boulevard could not have seen him shooting. He had to act quickly. He stood for a moment as if stunned, then turned to a small knot of approaching onlookers and waved them on to see the horror for themselves.
"Police! Police!" he stammered, his hands flapping helplessly. "My friends. Gotta get ambulance, police!" Distraught, he pushed his way through the gathering crowd and crossed the boulevard. Then he ducked into a cross street, walked very swiftly for a block, then made another turn.
There was no hue and cry behind him, no taxicabs with murderous fares. No one was hurrying after him.
Not hurrying at all. At least, not any faster than he was.
The big figure in the kimono blended with the pedestrians, keeping a discreet distance and a moderate pace.
Nick's room at the Diplomat was a haven after all the commotion. He locked his door, checked the windows, noted the nearby fire escape with displeasure, and sat down to prepare a coded report for the Tokyo drop. It would be an involved story about Japanese industry and American auto parts, but it would make another sort of sense to those for whom it was intended.
Eventually he sealed and addressed it for delivery, then made preparations for a brief absence from the hotel. Precautions had not been necessary during his first days at the Diplomat, but now they were. He pulled the window down to within four inches of the sill and jammed it fast, then arranged certain personal items in such a way that he would know at once, upon re-entering, whether he had had a visitor while he was away. He locked the door and left the hotel for a journey to another part of town.
This time his progress was so devious that the man who saw him leave found him impossible to follow. But it didn't really matter. The man had something else to do.
It was more than an hour later when Nick Carter came back to the hotel. He went in through a side door and walked with his light, quick step to the fifth floor and room number 515. He opened the door with care and stepped cautiously inside. No one had come in through the door before him. He doublelocked it behind him and inspected the small traps he had left. Everything was as he had left it. Nothing had been touched.
His taut nerves eased. Somehow he had expected an intrusion, but it had not come. He wondered how Taka was faring at the bathhouse and when she would — if she would — contact him.
Then, as he had done so many times before during these past few days, he stripped to his shorts. This time he did not step out of them into a steaming bath, but squatted on the floor and began his Yoga exercises. The first of them were physical, and he enjoyed the feeling that every muscle in his body was being stimulated. Then he progressed to the breath retention exercises that had paid off for him so many times in terms of safety. The practice of these aspects of Yoga had become second nature to him over the years. They were an essential part of the conditioning that kept him at physical and mental peak.
In spite of his concentration he found himself wondering about CLAW and what his course of action should be. He would be exchanging radio messages with Hawk later this afternoon, but Hawk could only tell him to play the cards as they were dealt to him. Perhaps there would be a way of using Taka — if he ever saw her again. Pity he hadn't been able to take her out of the bathhouse with him…
He did not see the snake until it was too late to run. Too late to reach for Wilhelmina and strike before the trap was sprung.
He was squatting crosslegged in the center of the room, facing the window, when the glittering length slithered across the floor from the dark recess under the bed. It came soundlessly, tongue darting, head rocking.
King cobra.
His heart seemed to stop.
CLAW had arranged this! How? Through Taka, of course.
His mind focused on one thought: Cobra. It was poised a scant five feet away from him, eyes glistening like little diamonds in the fan-shaped head.
Cobra. The hooded snake of India, Ceylon and Africa. One of the most venomous of the vipers. When disturbed or excited, expands the skin of the neck and head into a hood-like shape.
The fan of the cobra's head was only slightly dilated. So far, it had little to be excited about.
Nick held his breath and forced his body to remain still. How did it get in? Window. Pushed in from the fire escape.
The cobra's shiny tongue flicked. Nick's eyes centered on the deadly hooded head. The rest of the room dissolved. There was nothing there at all but Nick and the deadliness of the cobra. The coiled shape undulated and the head rose higher. It was inches closer to him now. Nick's body tensed, in spite of his control, against a sudden move of any kind. The tight structure of his physique revealed a sheen of perspiration. He forced himself to relax.
There was no way out. One false movement and the cobra could sink its vicious incisors into him so swiftly that he would not feel it until the poison began to choke his blood stream. There would be swelling, and unthinkable pain.
It was a terrible way for a man to die.
The only salvation was utter rigidity. It is movement which triggers nearly all combat in the world of beasts. And then there is the scent of fear. Like movement, it offends, it has to be attacked.
Nick forced fear from him. His body began to feel the strain of this useless and enforced inaction.
The cobra hung poised, tongue questing, eyes gleaming. The atmosphere was expectant, imminent, deadly.
Street noises were suddenly loud. Car horns barked. A woman's laughter climbed five floors from the sidewalk. A radio voice crooned in a nearby room. And all the while, the cobra and Nick stared at each other.
S! The flicking, darting tongue rustled in the silent room. Nick's heart thumped. He thought of making a wild leap for the bed, of jumping up and grabbing a chair to throw. But he knew no movement of his would be fast enough. There was nothing he could do but sit it out — and hope.
The slightest of sounds came from the door behind him. Nick saw the snake's head sway ominously. But it did not strike. It seemed to listen. Then there was no sound.
A snake in front and God knows what behind. He must be a greater threat to them than he knew — they were really going to the most incredible lengths to get rid of him.
Another very tiny sound. The cobra's hood was bigger now and its head swayed high. Nick willed himself into absolute immobility. If the door was opened he would have to make some kind of desperate move. Jump. Duck. Throw himself at the gleaming coils, or backwards out of the door. Roll over. Die.
He did not realize that the door was open until he felt a tiny draft on his back. The snake's head swelled, the tongue flickered angrily. Its hood seemed to be growing, fanning out like a rising tide of rage.
This was it.
But still there was no sound, no movement.
Moments passed.
No attack.
Absolute stillness in the room.
Then there was an apologetic cough of sound, light and low, from somewhere above and behind his right shoulder. Before Nick's eyes the head of the cobra swelled and burst. The body jolted, the hood deflated, the twitching body stilled. Dark, ugly fluid stained the rug. Its menace died with it.
Nick took a deep breath and raised himself stiffly to his feet.
A tall man in a conservative, rather short-jacketed dark suit was standing at the doorway pushing the door shut behind him. His right hand held a snout-nosed automatic fitted with a silencer. As Nick watched, the man holstered the gun and double-locked the door. Only then did he lock eyes with Carter.
"Ordinarily I prefer people to knock," Nick said lightly. "This time I'm just as glad you didn't."
"They move fast, the swine," the man said in a barely accented voice. "You are Stewart, of Detroit?"
Nick nodded. "Mind if I get dressed?"
"Please do."
Nick reached for his clothes. "Do you always come calling with a lockpick and a silencer? Oh, please sit down. I'm not complaining, understand. I don't like to think of what would have happened if you hadn't shown up."
The man with the gimlet eyes and placid face squinted at Nick and laughed. He stepped over the dead cobra and selected a chair.
"You have a cool head, Mr. Stewart. You must have thought the end had come when the door opened and you felt the breeze. Nasty things, snakes. Hate them."
"And you have a good eye, Mr… uh…" Nick pulled his jacket on, liking the feel of Wilhelmina in her holster. He was far from ready to trust his rescuer. "What name should I use? Guren?"
The man's eyes narrowed. "Why that? And what does it matter? I am sure your name is anything but Henry Stewart."
"Don't be too sure of that," Nick murmured. "And I'm not too sure of you. Suppose I call you Comrade. Would that suit you?"
