The Avenger 3 - The Sky Walker by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online Page B

Or, if you like, you can come down to the lobby.”
    Nellie decided on the first suggestion.
    “Come up, please.”
    The elevator boys, drilled by Smitty, had a code when they stopped at this top floor occupied only by Benson and his associates. When they brought someone up, they were to clang the door for every passenger in the car. They were to stop the cage just a bit off line, start to open the door, clang it shut and send the cage up or down a fraction to correct the mistake. It was easy and unsuspicious. One clang for a single visitor, two for a couple, three for more than that.
    Nellie heard the door clang only once. Then there were quick steps, and a tap at their door. Josh opened it. He had slid into his role of a sleepy, harmless Negro.
    “Yas, suh?” he said inquiringly.
    “To see Miss Gray,” came a man’s voice. Then the man stepped in.
    He was young and well dressed and blond. He looked like a bank teller or some such person. He turned quickly to Nellie Gray, hat in hand.
    “I’m John Carlisle, private secretary to the superintendent of the Catawbi Railroad,” he said. “I was sent here by Mr. Benson, with orders to come and get you and a certain chemical he wants, and return as soon as possible. He is out along the roadbed and needs it.”
    “The chemical?” Nellie asked.
    “Some concentrated sulphuric acid. He wants to make a rough analysis of the track steel. You’re to come, too, because he intends to stay in the town of Rosemont, nearby, overnight, and has work for all of you in the early morning.”
    Wherever Benson went, three large trunks went with him. In the trunks, which were miracles of compactness, were racks of chemicals and of delicate apparatus. It was a complete traveling laboratory.
    Nellie Gray hurried to one of the opened trunks and got a vial of the super-sulphuric mentioned by the man. It was deadly, terribly stuff, this concentrated acid.
    She glanced at Josh in indecision. His quick intelligence caught her unspoken question.
    “If Mistah Benson wants ever-body to be on hand early in the mohnin’,” Josh said sleepily, “mebbe me an’ mah wife oughta come ’long with Miss Gray.”
    Carlisle shook his head. “Mr. Benson said you were to stay and take any phone calls that might come.”
    “But if he wants all of us—”
    Carlisle seemed unconcerned.
    “I’ll leave that up to you. Mr. Benson said for you to stay. But if you feel you should join him, that, of course, is your lookout. I’m not familiar with his methods.”
    “You’d better stay, Josh,” Nellie said. She was hurriedly putting on a poker chip of a hat and thrusting the little vial of concentrated sulphuric acid into her purse.

    She caught up the sensational newspaper on the way out. At the elevator, she showed it to the man.
    “Has Mr. Benson seen this, do you know?” she said.
    Carlisle shrugged.
    “I don’t know. But I wouldn’t put much stock in it, myself. An enemy invasion! It seems pretty ridiculous.”
    They went down through the crowded lobby and to the street. Carlisle’s sedan was near the door. It was black, streaked with the dust of the dune region.
    “We’ll go by car to South Chicago and by speedboat from there,” Carlisle said. “That’s the fastest way. Will you sit in the back, Miss Gray?”
    Nellie nodded, and got into the rear of the car. Carlisle slid under the wheel, and the sedan began humming south over the boulevards. They got out to South Chicago in short order, and turned toward the lake.
    And suddenly Nellie felt herself growing overpoweringly sleepy!
    It was such a natural feeling of drowsiness that for a few seconds she didn’t question it. But after that, she felt wild alarm flood through her. Something was the matter! Something was happening!
    She tried to get up, and couldn’t. She fumbled weakly for the handle of the rear window, but her fingers fell from it after a bare touch.
    She saw that Carlisle, at the wheel, had the lapel of his coat up and that his