The Avenger 35 - The Iron Skull (7 page)

Cole looked at himself. “By golly,” he said, “I never thought I’d get to see myself as others see me. And there I am.”

The Iron Skull chuckled, deep in his partially metal throat. “I thought you’d be impressed.”

Standing against the wall of the white-walled lab was a robot which was a perfect replica of Cole Wilson. It even had the mocking grin touching his face now. The mechanism was dressed in a fashionable gray suit.

Taking a few steps back, Cole made a frame of his hands and studied the robot with cocked head. “Seems to me I wear my clothes with a bit more verve, but not bad . . . not bad.”

“Glad to hear that, old man,” said the robot. “It’s part of the code of the Wilsons to be natty.”

Cole’s eyebrows went up. “Ah, he’s already finished, is he?”

“Except for a few more tests, yes,” said the Iron Skull.

“Fit as a fiddle, old fellow,” said the robot, grinning at Cole.

Cole turned his back on him. “I can see why some people don’t take to me immediately on first meeting,” he said. “What’s the purpose of this clockwork wonder?”

“I haven’t yet decided,” said the Iron Skull. “I can’t repeat the MacMurdie gambit . . . unfortunately.”

“I’ve been underground for a bit,” said Cole. “Did you construct a Mac robot, too?”

“There is a robot duplicate . . . a doppelganger . . . for every member of Justice, Inc.”

“You don’t say? Even little diminutive pixie Nellie Gray?”

“Yes,” said the Iron Skull. “You see, Wilson, one of my purposes is to destroy Justice, Inc. completely.”

“Hate to spoil your fun, but other deep-dyed villainous chaps have had a go at that,” Cole said, taking a quick peek at his robot double over his shoulder. The robot winked at him. “The score so far is Justice, Inc. six, deep-dyed villainous chaps, zero.”

“Yes, until now,” said the Iron Skull. “But I can assure you that you and your cohorts and Richard Henry Benson himself have never met an opponent like the Iron Skull before. Those I employ may at times fail . . . but I never fail!”

Smitty had two small devices on the car seat beside him.

One was a tracking device of his own invention. It was telling him, by way of its gauges, which way the two men he’d tangled with in the old warehouse were going.

The giant had attached a tiny tracking bug to the underside of the coat lapel of one of the thugs during the recent struggle. That little bug was now sending a signal back to the brick-size box which was riding beside Smitty.

Smitty’d decided to let these two go, figuring they were small fish who wouldn’t know much. Let them go and then trail them to whoever it was they were working for.

“Could be they’re going to report to the robot maker himself,” reflected Smitty. “Or maybe just the middle man. Either way, I am getting closer . . . and, I hope, closer to Mac.”

Snow was falling more heavily down across the gray afternoon. The trail of the two hoods was taking him out of the town of Terryville and into the sparsely settled sections of Westchester. Nothing around now but rolling snow-filled fields and black, leafless trees, rail fences and, far off the road, a lone roan horse standing, forlornly, near a tumble-down stone well.

“Wonder if Josh and Cole have dug up anything yet. Got to ask Dick if he’s got any news from them.”

The windshield wipers scraped snow from the windshield, ticking patiently back and forth.

“Kind of like to be the one who finds Mac. Course, it don’t really matter who, long as somebody does and we spring him from wherever he is,” the giant thought to himself. “Still, I’d rather it was me than Cole. Not that I don’t like Cole, even though he’s always razzing Nellie and she seems to like it. Yeah, he’s not a bad guy, except . . .”

He checked the tracking box, noting that the men had made a turn to the east. They might be heading across, into Connecticut.

The other object on the seat next to the giant was a miniature radio, another of his own concoctions.

“Just about time to catch it on the afternoon rebroadcast,” he said. “Missed it this
A.M.
” He turned the tiny radio on.

“. . . for the heartaches and triumphs of
The Romance of Mary Joyce, M.D.
The everyday story of a lovely surgeon who must face . . .”

“Ah,” said Smitty, “I ain’t going to miss it.”

“. . . remember lovely Mary’s brilliant mind was in a state of turmoil yesterday when she learned that the mysterious young man fished out of the icy waters of Long Island Sound by good-hearted old Captain Goodwagon and his happy-go-lucky son, Dickie, was none other than handsome playboy Bruce Duffly. What must the lovely lady surgeon have felt? She had believed all these long, lonely months that Bruce had perished when the yacht of wealthy man-about-town Collin Clark had sunk in the storm-tossed seas off Bermuda. We’ll join Mary, stern old Nurse Sloccum, and little Jerry on their perhaps ill-fated sleigh ride across fashionable Westchester County in exactly one . . .”

“Geeze,” said Smitty. “It keeps getting more and more complicated. I thought Brace Duffly was for sure dead and gone. And if little Jerry is on the sleigh ride I guess they must have fished him out of the cistern okay. I got to start listening to this thing every day.”

The Romance of Mary Joyce, M.D.,
was at the moment Smitty’s favorite radio show. Cole, who preferred stuff like Fred Allen, kidded him about his taste in radio. The giant persisted in his loyalty to the soap opera.

“. . . ladies, they’ll ask you if you bought the cake at an expensive professional bakery. That’s how moist and fluffy and delicious it’ll be. You can fell them that with new improved Korno Shortening in your recipe you . . .”

“C’mon, c’mon,” urged Smitty. “Let’s get on with the gosh darn show.”

The tracking box began to hum.

“Oops! Those bozos have stopped.” Smitty eased up on the gas pedal. “Yeah, not more than a couple miles ahead.”

Smitty surveyed the scene. Downhill from where he’d concealed his car, and on the other side of a stand of evergreens, rose a brick wall. About six feet high and crusted with twists and twirls of dead ivy, the wall boxed in a four-acre stretch of land. Far from the wall, surrounded by squat dry trees, was a sprawling brownstone mansion.

From his coat pocket the giant extracted a pair of small but very powerful binoculars. “That’s got to be their jalopy sitting in the open garage,” he decided. “Yeah, you can see the fresh tracks in the snow.”

A bronze plaque next to the oaken door of the mansion repeated the legend which Smitty had already noted on the iron gates out front. Steinbrunner Ear, Nose & Throat Hospital. Private.

Even though he might have done some damage to the ears, noses, and throats of the two hoods, Smitty didn’t think they’d come to the private hospital for medical attention.

Very quietly, especially for someone of his bulk, he moved down into the stand of trees. A gray squirrel went skittering across his path and up into a tree, shaking yesterday’s snow down on Smitty.

“Huh, looks like more company’s coming.”

The front gates had rattled open, and a dark sedan was driving around the curving driveway toward the garage.

Smitty watched its progress through his binoculars.

The automobile pulled in beside the hoods’ car. There was only one man in it, a plump man in a checkered overcoat. He got out and went hurrying toward a rear door of the mansion.

“Let’s get a little closer look,” Smitty told himself. “Got a hunch this guy is the boss of the other two.”

He began working his way closer.

The Avenger gave his belt-buckle radio one more try, then shook his head negatively.

Nellie parked their car across the street from the white concrete building which was their destination. “What do you think, Dick?”

“It may be Cole and Josh are in a situation where they can’t respond.”

“Neither one of them has reported in since yesterday,” the little blonde said.

“Yes, which is why I’m beginning to worry.” He stepped out of the auto, and walked around its nose to open the door for the girl.

“Think somebody’s grabbed them? The same way they grabbed Mac?”

“We don’t know for certain anyone has kidnapped Mac.” Benson took her arm and they crossed the street.

“Seems a logical conclusion.”

“That it does.”

A heavyset man just inside the glass door of the white building said, “Let’s see some identification, folks.”

The Avenger showed him a card from his wallet.

“Oh, sure, Mr. Benson. Agent Early’s waiting for you down that hall to the left, in office 26.”

Early was standing beside a wooden table on which was stretched out the Kirby Macauley robot. “This is an interesting gadget,” he said as the Avenger and Nellie came in. “Apparently it’s possible to deactivate it from a distance. Thing’s not functioning any more.”

“Any bombs inside?” Nellie asked.

“Nope,” replied the clean-cut young agent. “Did find a nice radio sending set, very compact and efficient.” He reached out to tap the robot’s chest. “Right in here, about the spot where his heart’d be if he were human.”

“What we’re on to,” said Benson, “seems to be a very elaborate and ambitious scheme to find out all about the United States’ anti-rocket defense plans.”

“That’s my guess,” said Early. “We’ve known for a long time that the Axis powers have perfected a long-range missile. Bases for launching the things are already showing up along the French coast.”

“England is a more likely target,” said, the little blonde.

“Sure, but you know darn well Hitler’d like to use them on us, too,” said Early. “So we’ve been operating on the premise that they may have, or may eventually work out, a way to deliver a rocket all the way across the Atlantic. Men like Kirby Macauley and Edward Kessell, top scientists and industrialists, have been meeting very secretly for the past few weeks to map out a defense for America in the event that rockets are used against us.”

“I’ve known about the project for nearly a month,” said the Avenger. “The security, however, has been very good. There hasn’t been a hint of the anti-rocket undertaking drifting around the rumor circuits.”

“So we thought,” said Early.

“Then how did our robot maker know all about it, know who was being consulted and where and when the meetings were being held?” asked the Avenger, frowning at the now deathlike robot.

Nellie said, “Either the security isn’t as hot as you surmise or—”

“No, that’s not possible,” said Early. “You’re suggesting there’s a leak within the project itself.” He shook his head. “The top men on this thing have been checked out and screened eight ways from Sunday. One very good man we wanted to use was dropped simply because he had a drunken driving violation on his record from back in 1934 when he was a senior in college. No, I really don’t think—”

“Okay, so how does our puppet master do it?” persisted Nellie.

“Can’t tell you,” admitted the government man.

The Avenger had opened a panel in the side of the robot. As he examined the intricate workings, he said, “I think it might be a good idea, Don, to make another check of your top project people. The people who made this robot know a great deal about what’s been going on. The most likely conclusion is, as Nellie suggests, that they have a man on the inside. Not only that . . . this gadget here must have taken considerable time to construct.”

“He had all of Macauley’s mannerisms down pat, too,” added Nellie.

“Meaning,” said Benson, “that they must have known that Macauley and Kessell were going to be on the project practically from the moment they were selected, from the first meeting weeks ago.”

“Maybe,” said Early. “Since we don’t know how these things are manufactured, we can’t positively say they haven’t got a way to whip one up in a couple days.”

“This robot took time to construct,” said the Avenger. He probed its interior a bit more. “Same kind of components as were used in the MacMurdie simulacrum. Smitty has been checking on the possible sources of those. Nellie, maybe you better check him out.”

“Righto.” She carried her two-way radio in her purse. Activating it now, she signaled Smitty’s particular receiver and indicated she wanted to speak to him.