The Shadow (18 page)

How his life had changed since the aeolian harp had been delivered to his apartment. A misrouted package, a gift from a secret admirer . . . he had never learned who sent the thing. But it wasn’t New York’s winter wind that had played the instrument’s strings, but a distant wind from China—one that had spoken to him, informing him of his true identity and of the identity of the master he served. Not Reinhardt Lane, that was for certain. And not the government of the United States, either. In fact, an altogether different war department.

He chortled to himself and was about to resume his pacing when he heard a squeaking sound from below. Leaning over the catwalk’s pipe railing, he saw the hatch closing of its own accord.

Well, well, he thought. An intruder.

Claymore hurried down the staircase and rushed through the hatch. He couldn’t have been more than a minute behind his uninvited guest, but the domed, seamlessly sealed chamber appeared to be empty. That in itself was curious, since the sphere didn’t afford many places of concealment. Claymore’s eyes scanned the interior, nevertheless. It was, however, his ears that were offered the first clue.

“Farley Claymore,” intoned a sibilant, menacing voice that seemed to originate from all directions.

Claymore reacted as one might expect: he started and whirled. “Who’s there?”

Instead of answering, the intruder posed an unexpected question. “The beryllium sphere, Claymore. Where is it?”

“Sphere?” Claymore asked, still turning in circles. “What sphere? I don’t know what you’re talking about—whoever you are.” He scurried about the circular chamber in what seemed to be agitation, searching for the source of the voice. “Come out and show yourself.”

A taunting, contemptuous laugh answered him. “All in due time, Claymore. But first tell me how and when you fell under the spell of Shiwan Khan.”

Claymore stiffened. “I’ve never heard that name.”

“Claymore, you fool,” the voice barked. “You’re being manipulated. Your mind is being controlled through the power of remote hypnosis.”

With hidden purpose, Claymore began to sway on his feet. “My mind—controlled?”

The voice grew impatient. “The sphere. What have you done with it?”

“I—It’s not here. Someone took it away.”

The Shadow imitated Claymore’s ordinarily unctuous tone. “Take me to it—now!”

Claymore seemed paralyzed; then he shrieked with laughter. “Not likely!” He rushed to a series of control levers that protruded from the curved wall, and he threw one of them. A few feet above the floor, two diametrically opposed intake valves opened, admitting a violent surge of water.

“
No one
controls my mind, Shadow,” Claymore called out, as water spewed across the floor of the sphere. “I’m honored to work for my Khan. A new world order is on the horizon, and in it I’m going to rule as a king! Do you hear me—a king!” He whipped a revolver from his jacket pocket and aimed it toward the center of the room.

The Shadow laughed derisively. “And just who are you planning to shoot with that, Claymore?”

Claymore traversed the weapon. The water was already several inches deep and rising rapidly, running evenly across the floor—except for a certain area, where it swirled in two small eddies, each about a foot long.

Claymore grinned. “Khan told me you were arrogant, Shadow. Now it’s going to cost you!”

With a chilling laugh that mimicked The Shadow’s own, Claymore emptied the gun in the direction of the eddies—where two feet might be positioned. No taunts answered him this time; only the sound of rushing water. He squinted at a distant portion of wall, where the revolver’s rounds had left a row of evenly spaced holes, one every eighteen inches or so—save for between the third and fourth holes, where the hull of the sphere was intact for almost a yard.

Claymore lowered his eyes to the surging water below the target area. As he watched, drops of blood falling from thin air swirled in the water, staining it pink.

Claymore’s laugh was triumphant. He swung to the control panel and threw the remaining levers, opening additional intake valves high overhead. Foaming water gushed into the sphere from all sides.

“I may be back in a short while, Shadow,” Claymore announced as he was locking the levers. “But don’t hold your breath!”

Soaked to his knees, he moved to the hatch, then disappeared through it, bracing the wheel behind him, his exit punctuated by peals of deranged laughter.

Lying waterlogged and gunshot in rapidly rising water, The Shadow heard Claymore’s feet on the stairway leading from the hatch, then the sound of a truck, starting and accelerating toward Mari-Tech’s front gate. One of Claymore’s carefully placed shots had caught him in the left shoulder. But this was no arrow wound; the round was still inside him and he was bleeding profusely, enough to have already saturated part of the cloak.

Clutching his shoulder, he dragged himself to his feet and staggered through thigh-deep water to the control panel, knowing full well that Claymore had locked the levers but tugging on them just the same. He tried the wheel of the hatch, as well; even slammed his hand repeatedly against the thick glass of the porthole, all to no avail.

Weakened by blood loss, he sagged against the door, blacking out for a few moments. When his eyes blinked open, the water was at waist level and still rising.

The sphere was going to become his tomb if he didn’t do something soon.

He closed his eyes and thought of Margo.

“I need you,” he said weakly, and slumped against the hatch.

The water continued to fountain from the valves and billow around him, rising to his chest; then, his neck. Its faintly briny smell woke him with a start. With effort, he pulled off his hat and shrugged out of the cloak, becoming Lamont Cranston now: vulnerable, plainly visible, and trapped.

He kicked his feet and paddled with his uninjured arm, keeping himself afloat as the chamber filled. For a while he was able to float on his back and conserve his strength. But as the water rose toward the sphere’s flat circle of ceiling, there was no room for floating. At some point he dove for the hatch again and attempted to turn the wheel, thinking that perhaps the pressure of the water had loosened it.

It didn’t budge.

And by the time he regained the surface, there was little more than six inches of air between the water level and ceiling. He had to throw his head back and crane his neck to snag a breath of air.

The distance dwindled to four inches of space.

Then two inches.

Barely enough to accommodate his hawklike nose.

S
wallowing and wallowing and reswallowing gulps of deoxygenated air, Cranston felt as if he were about to implode. His shoulder wound had ceased to be a concern. Three minutes earlier he had managed a final nasal inhalation, but now the sphere was completely filled with water. Born of his desperate struggles to set a new record for breath-holding, however, had come an idea.

Submerged five feet above the floor, he began inspecting the neat row of bullet holes Farley Claymore’s revolver had punched in the aluminum-alloy wall. His forefinger probed each of the holes, searching for the one of largest diameter. When he discovered the one best suited to his purpose, he plugged it with his finger for a moment; then removed his finger to observe the action of the water as it reentered the hole. That action told him that Claymore’s shot had penetrated the wall.

A mere inch away was oxygen in abundance.

Cranston pressed his mouth to the hole, summoning the last of his air in a forced exhale to expel particles from the opening; then, with his mouth suctioned to the smooth wall, he inhaled slowly.

During his apprenticeship with Marpa Tulku, much attention had been given to breath control, and that training served Cranston well as he continued to nurse the bullet hole, wondering all the while just how long he could hold out.

Margo slid her maroon La Salle coupe to a halt in front of Mari-Tech’s test facility and raced from the driver’s seat to the structure’s recessed, round-topped hatch. Despite her coming closer and closer to him, The Shadow’s voice had been growing weaker the past few minutes. Her instincts told her that he was in grave danger.

She had been in City Hall, in the assessor’s office, when she had perceived The Shadow’s remote call for help.

As promised, his agents had rendezvoused with her there—the portly Rutledge Mann, and the handsome Harry Vincent, who had immediately tried to sweet-talk her—but neither of them had come up with any information on the vacant lot that had become something of an idée fixe with Cranston. Strangely, information on recent activities at 158 Second Avenue was missing from the primary records, and her only option had been to sort through the office’s backup records, which comprised stacks and stacks of blueprints and property documents waiting to be filed.

Luck had been with her, though, because she had managed to locate a promising file. She was hunched over a table spread with blueprints and ledgers when the force of The Shadow’s entreaty had thrown her backward into her chair, eliciting looks of concern from several office staffers seated at desks and standing at nearby file drawers.

The only experience she could compare it to was a time she had fallen off a swing as a child and had had the wind knocked out of her. Her first thought was that she was suffering an allergic reaction to the dusty shelves of the file room or to the stacks of yellowing paper. But with the joyous return of her breath came the clear sound of Cranston’s voice: not in the room, but inside her head, not unlike the soundless voice she used when she talked to herself, but more lucid, present.

I need you,
the voice said . . .

That had been twenty minutes earlier—the time it had taken to hurry from City Hall and to bend a number of traffic rules during the short drive to Mari-Tech.

Water was leaking around the edges of the hatch that accessed the sphere, as if some experiment was in progress. Could The Shadow be elsewhere? she asked herself. Had she somehow gotten her telepathic signals crossed? She was about to press her face to the brass-rimmed observation window that dimpled the hatch when Cranston’s own bobbed into view, his deformed features a clear indication that he was near drowning.

Ignoring the soaking she was taking, she began to tug on the door handle until she realized that the hatch was secured by a wheel, which itself was locked by a heavy bar with a T-handle. Extricating the bar from the spokes, she put her hands on the wheel and gave it a counterclockwise twist. It hadn’t gone a half turn when the hatch burst open, disgorging a raging cascade of water. Her hands fastened on the staircase’s pipe railing, but the torrent proved too much for her, engulfing and sweeping her face first down the stairs. Only moments behind came Cranston, rolling and tumbling onto the parking apron that fronted the sphere.

Drenched to the bone and coughing water, Margo sat up in the river’s delta. Remarkably, her hat was still on—though hardly at the same rakish angle—but the cashmere coat and black satin dress would never be the same. She spied Cranston’s inert form faceup in newly created mud a few feet away. Getting to her feet, she rushed to him, petrified that she hadn’t arrived in time to save him.

He coughed and regurgitated an enormous amount of water. But at least he was breathing. When she leaned over him and touched his face, his eyes opened, then blinked, fighting for focus.

“You called,” she said, cradling his head.

He showed her a weak smile. “You heard.”

Shiwan Khan’s imperial guard, greatly reduced in number, paid salute to their ruler, the sound of their triumphant hissing filling the throne room. Quickly sated on their praise, Khan silenced them with a raised finger.

“Yes, we are victorious. And, as victors, we are entitled to reap the spoils of war.” He gazed down at them. “Trust that I will remember each and every one of you.”

Khan stepped down off the throne to approach Farley Claymore, who stood proudly in the sunken center of the room, his creation resting beside him on a four-wheeled wagon with a long handle: an orb of burnished metal that shone like monel, three feet in diameter—Claymore’s beryllium sphere.

“Especially remembered will be my foreign agent,” Khan said, coming to Claymore’s side. “The only American possessed of sufficient intelligence to recognize my genius and to join me of his . . . own free will.”

Claymore shone as brightly as the silvery sphere. He used his handkerchief to polish a blemish from the orb’s reflective surface.

Khan regarded him for a moment, then gave the back of Claymore’s neck what began as an affectionate squeeze. “My loyal subject,” he said, tightening his grip, “who fancies himself a king in
my
kingdom.”

Claymore’s grin collapsed. “King?” he said in sudden alarm. “Did I say ‘king’? What was I thinking? Confronted with The Shadow, one tends to reach for words—”

Khan brought his left hand to Claymore’s face and squeezed, as if to crush his skull. “Indeed.” He twisted Claymore’s head to one side, impeding his breathing, then spun him in a circle.

“Actually, I was thinking prince—tops,” Claymore managed fulsomely. “Though I’d be more than happy with duke. Or baron. Whatever suits my Khan. The choice of title is of little consequence. I am honored simply to serve—”

Khan withdrew his hands, but held out a finger in warning. “Retrieve Dr. Lane and begin assembly of the bomb.” He moved to the stairs below his throne and spread his arms over the sphere. “Alert the press,” he told his guard. “The new order is at hand. Submit or perish. In the name of the new Kha Khan, Ruler of the Dwellers of all Cities, Emperor of Humankind, the Power of God on Earth!”

The five Mongols drew their sabers, raising some, lowering others, to form the sacred character of conquest.

The round that had found The Shadow had passed almost completely though his shoulder without striking bone. But the wound was serious, nonetheless. By evening an infection had taken root, and he was running a high fever, drifting in and out of delirium.