by John Creasey
Loftus folded the shares and tucked them into his pocket, where they made a large bulge in his coat. He ran through the other papers in the safe but found nothing of interest; mostly they were recent instructions from the States. The office, it seemed, was one solely of convenience, but Loftus was puzzled.
Why, for such a small flow of business, employ a comparatively large staff?
‘I think we’ve got all we’re going to from here. We’ll get along.’
‘I had hoped for fun and games,’ said Best.
‘It isn’t going to surprise me if you get them,’ said Loftus. ‘And a little more than we really want, old son.’ He re-locked the safe, then went through the outer room.
Best was dismantling a booby-trap made of chairs which must have collapsed if the door had been opened furtively, and so warned the others in ample time. He dropped a chair on his foot, and swore mildly. Loftus smiled absently, then, as the door opened, there came an unexpected sound; the telephone in the inner room rang.
The three men drew up.
Loftus said slowly:
‘A wrong number, I wonder?’
‘We’d better see,’ said Davidson. ‘Craigie might be wanting you.’
‘Ye-es.’ Best closed the door as Loftus went back into the private office. The telephone was still ringing, very loud in the silence. Loftus lifted the receiver and said in a quiet voice:
‘Who is that, please?’
Had they not been watching him, the others would not have recognised Loftus from his voice.
And then they saw him start, saw his fingers tighten about the telephone.
Standing very still, Loftus heard a suave, familiar voice—the voice which he had first heard from Lewis. That itself was startling enough, but the words made him clench his teeth.
‘If that is not Loftus,’ said Lewis. ‘I want to speak to him.’
There was a moment of utter silence in the office. Best and Davidson crowded the door, wishing they could hear what was being said. Loftus’s mind worked very quickly, and he decided that there was no object in maintaining any pretence. As he spoke he motioned to the others, to try to get the call traced from a line in the other room.
‘Well, Lewis? If you’ve got anything useful to say, say it.’
He heard the man laughing, and he did not like the sound.
‘I could say so much, but why should I?’
‘Then why ring?’ drawled Loftus.
‘To make you realise that I knew where to find you,’ said Lewis. ‘You have been carefully watched all day, Loftus, and your exceptional good fortune won’t be of any further use to you. I’m most glad you elected to visit Hoppermann’s office.’
Loftus said: ‘No one followed me.’
There was a short silence, and he believed it was because Lewis was startled by that statement. It was a reasonably accurate one; Loftus did not believe that he had been followed. His mind, working then at high pressure, was going through the only possibilities. The office buildings might have been watched, and thus his arrival seen, or else someone in the building might know that he had arrived there.
Lewis recovered himself quickly.
‘You’re quite wrong, Loftus, you have been followed all the time.’ His insistence on the point, an unnecessary insistence unless it was a lie he wished to make convincing, told Loftus that one of his two possibilities was fairly near the mark.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ve been followed. What then?’
‘Wisdom, but too late,’ said Lewis. ‘You see, Loftus, preparations were made at the office to settle Hoppermann’s account, and those arrangements can now serve for you. You won’t get away, neither will your friends.’
He paused. Loftus covered the mouthpiece with his hand, and said aloud: ‘Try the outer door, Wally.’ He uncovered it, then heard Lewis say:
‘You aren’t talkative? I can hardly believe it, Loftus, talking seemed to be quite a point with you. Today is Friday.’
‘And the day after tomorrow is Sunday.’
‘You won’t live to see it,’ said Lewis, and there was a disturbing note of certainty in his voice. ‘You won’t even live to see tomorrow. I expect Manfrey and the others have told you that I promised them results for today. They won’t enjoy them, but the results will come.’
Loftus said in a cold voice:
‘When is the demonstration at the Embassy due?’ He spoke as if he were quite sure that there would be a demonstration.
There was a short, tense silence, and he felt neither fear nor anxiety, but relief. So it was true. He waited a brief moment and then rang off.
He had heard the other telephone ring, and Wally speaking; he had also heard a banging at the door leading to the passage. He was not surprised when Martin Best came to the door, hard-faced.
‘It’s locked and blocked outside, Bill.’
‘That’s not unexpected,’ Loftus said. ‘Lewis is somewhere in the building, I fancy, or some of his people are. Can we get it down together, do you think?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘H’m Loftus was dialling Craigie’s number. ‘See what the windows are like, will you?’ He finished as Best went to obey, and heard Craigie’s dry voice.
‘The Embassy idea was a good one,’ Loftus said quickly. ‘And today, I think, will see the start of it. I’m still at Hoppermann’s office, and—’
He stopped speaking, abruptly.
He stared hard for a moment at the empty desk in front of him, knowing that the line had suddenly gone dead: there had been a click at the other end, or somewhere along the line, and he was not surprised when, after two attempts, he failed to get further word from Craigie.
A cut line, probably; and as likely as not inside this office block.
Best turned back from the windows.
‘Sheer to the ground,’ he said. ‘Let’s try the others.’
He and Loftus hurried into the outer office, but here too there was no possibility of escape.
Suddenly the light went out in both rooms. The utter darkness froze all men into total immobility—then Loftus put a hand to his pocket, saying:
‘Who else has a torch?’
‘Me,’ said Best.
‘I’ve a small one,’ said Wally faintly.
‘Good,’ said Loftus. ‘Martin, stand by the window and do that dot-dash business—we want help, and a fire-escape up to the window is probably the only way of getting it.’ He watched Best flicking his torch on and off towards the Strand; then, glancing at the door leading to the passage, he stiffened.
A bright light, red and lurid and straining the eyes, showed suddenly beneath the door, then disappeared. A moment later another flame, stretching ten feet into the room and singeing the carpet in front of their eyes, came in, to disappear like the first.
Before anyone could speak, a positive sheet of flame was coming under the door, running about the carpet as if in liquid form.
Loftus said in an odd voice.
‘Liquid fire, that’s nice. I wonder how long we’ve got?’
18
Lewis laughs
There was a momentary quiet in the room after Loftus had spoken, broken only by the hissing of the flames which were coming beneath the door with greater intensity, and darting about the room in small pools of fire. Both Loftus and Davidson knew that by then the passage outside must be an inferno, and there was no possible chance of getting away except by the windows.
Loftus looked quickly round the room.
‘There’s no water here, except a drop in a glass. Let’s have the carpet up, old son.’ He began to move the typists’ desks on to a stretch of bare board, and then with Davidson he pulled at the carpet, stamping out two or three patches where it had caught fire. When they had it in a roll, Davidson asked:
‘What’s next?’
‘We’ll get it as close to the door as we can, after putting the desks into the other room. The more we block the doorway the longer the fire will take to get through.’ Loftus
spoke simply and without undue excitement. ‘Martin, carry on flashing from Sell’s window, will you, while we barricade the door. Our one chance is from outside. I hope there’s someone about who can read Morse.’
They worked swiftly, until the outer office was denuded of furniture. Then, drawing the rolled up carpet as close to the door as they could while leaving a gap wide enough for them to get through, they went into the other room. The floorboards of the outer office were blazing, and the fire was running about the floor in little rivulets which threatened at any time to seep through into the inner office. But when it met the carpet its progress was delayed. Closing the door, Loftus and Davidson piled the furniture up, so that the flames would have even more work to do before they could begin the destruction of this room also.
‘Any luck, Martin?’
‘I thought I saw someone flash “O.K.”,’ said Best gruffly, ‘but I haven’t seen anything since.’ He shrugged.
It was growing unbearably hot. Loftus took his coat off, taking out the share certificates and stuffing them into his waist-band.
‘We mustn’t lose the evidence,’ said Wally, but despite the elaborate casualness of his voice Loftus could see he was feeling the strain.
Suddenly Loftus saw a flash of flame on a level with them, at a window opposite. Then came a ping! as a bullet struck the wall inside the room, opposite their own window.
All three men stepped hastily to the sides of the window as a stream of bullets came through from the building opposite. They could hear the thudding of lead against the piled furniture, and they could hear the roar of the fire in the adjoining room.
Loftus turned to the others. ‘Why don’t we have a shot at them?’
He took an automatic from his pocket and, when the shooting stopped, went into sight and fired four times. He did not know whether he had any luck—and he did not know that, as the gunman by the other window hastily backed out of the way, Lewis laughed.
It was the ‘second’ Lewis, the big and bulky Lewis. He was standing in a room opposite that of the Hoppermann Company, and he laughed loudly, until one of the gunmen with him muttered under his breath. Lewis did not hear what he said; he would have ignored it even if he had.
Between gales of laughter he called softly:
‘Getting desperate, Loftus? Enjoying it, Loftus?’
But of this Loftus knew nothing. All he could hear was the roaring of the flames, which was getting louder and louder.
The sound of a fire-engine bell would have given him and the others more pleasure than anything in the world, but there was no hint of it. It seemed that Best’s signals had not been understood, and that until the fire was seen there would be no possibility of escape—by which time it might be too late.
The three men were bathed in sweat, their throats parched, their mouths dry. The furniture they had so carefully piled against the door was now blazing, the flames no more than twenty feet away and already beginning to lick their way along the floor and the wainscoting. In a curiously detached frame of mind, Loftus estimated that they had no more than ten minutes grace.
And then they heard the bell.
It came clanging along the Strand, and they heard its engine roaring more and more loudly. Then it stopped, and Loftus went cautiously to the window. He withdrew his head quickly, for gunfire immediately started from the opposite building. He tightened his lips, knowing that however quickly the firemen worked the position remained hopeless while the gunmen still operated, and he saw no way of giving warning.
Was it possible that the shooting had been seen from the road?
It was not a thing to rely on, Loftus knew.
All at once his mind refused to work, refused to go beyond the logical acceptance of the likely conclusion to this fight with Lewis. It was peculiar to feel a certainty that he was at the end of his run, to react fatalistically to it, virtually resigned to losing. But he had managed to let Craigie know that the guess at trouble at the Embassy was right, and he believed that Craigie would be able to go on from there, that Lewis’s triumph would only be a temporary one.
It was insufferably hot.
Breathing was difficult, and he felt sweat running down his back. He saw the grotesquely smoke-blackened flame-illuminated figures of Martin Best and Wally Davidson, men who had been in the Department before he had joined. He wished he could say something to them.
Then Wally shouted: ‘Look!’
There was no need for the cry; the others saw as quickly as he the brilliant beam of light which shot from a building alongside that in which they were trapped, and shone for a moment on three men in the window opposite. Two whom Loftus did not recognise, and Lewis!
Lewis’s lips were parted, and he drew back out of the glare, his hand raised to cover his face. Then he turned, while from the building alongside Loftus there came the rat-tat-tat of a tommy-gun. The three figures disappeared, but whether they were hit or whether they had dodged back was uncertain. The tommy-gun continued to rattle, as the searchlight played its bright beam on the window at which they had been seen.
The fire-engine had stopped immediately below, and at once the escape-ladder was swaying outside the window of Hoppermann’s office. The three Department Z men stared down at it. But the flames were licking the floor just behind them, and their clothes were singeing. Their escape would be touch and go, even now.
It was a period of such concentrated tension that they lost all count of time.
Only vaguely did Loftus hear the stutter of a car engine far below, and the shouts of firemen and police trying to stop the driver from coming past. Loftus did not see the man, or the car. But the latter came on swerving alongside the fire-escape, scattering the little crowd gathered by the engine.
The helmet of a fireman showed beneath the window.
Leaning out, Loftus gripped his wrist to help him inside. The fire grew nearer, but he believed that the crisis was over, that in a few minutes they would be quite safe.
Then he heard the explosion.
He did not see the man in the car throwing a small object towards the fire-escape, nor hear the shouts of the men nearby. He did see the flash of the explosion; but suddenly the fire-escape swayed away, gathering speed as it swerved downwards, to crash in the street below. The bottom section had been blown to pieces.
The dead weight of the fireman fell suddenly on Loftus’s arm. It came so abruptly that it almost carried Loftus out of the window; it would have done had Martin Best not made a grab at his waist.
They heard the ladder crash, while Loftus held the man dangling full-length out of the window. They saw the car then and the shooting which followed it, the firing from the tommy-gun ranged on their side. Loftus had no time to think, time only to realise that what had seemed the certainty of escape had been snatched away from them.
He hauled the man up, laboriously.
‘Well, we can jump,’ said Wally Davidson in a muffled voice.
‘Jump, yes,’ said Loftus. He saw that the men below were spreading out the net to catch them, realising that there was no time to run up another escape-ladder. He wondered in a queer way why he had not thought of that obvious jump-and-hope solution before. He pulled the man in, wondering whether they would make it. Five tall storeys to go down, and they were all heavy men.
The fireman clambered into the room. By now the flames were licking as far as the window, and the back of Loftus’s coat had caught fire; Best beat it out.
The fireman, masked and breathing hard, gasped:
‘Can—get up. Roof.’
Loftus said: ‘Damnation, is that true?’
The question was rhetorical, nothing else, for promptly he put his foot on the window-sill and slowly steadied himself. He saw the ledge of the roof overhanging the window, and when he stretched up an arm he could grip the ledge with his hand. He put up his other hand, gripped again, and then pulled himself up.
Progress was agonisingly slow.
But it could be done, he realised, and h
e gritted his teeth, seeing everything above him very clearly in the lurid glare of the fire. He drew himself high enough to put a knee on the ledge, and then hauled himself onto the roof.
He saw another pair of hands gripping the ledge, and, going down on his stomach, leaned over and caught hold of the wrists, hauling Wally Davidson over. Best came next, the ends of his trousers smouldering. Loftus slapped at them, putting them out, while the fireman clambered after them.
Faintly they heard the cheering from below; and suddenly Loftus felt so light-hearted that he waved a hand to the crowd. Then all four men crawled along the edge of the roof, and after forcing a sky-light window, found themselves in a corridor on the top floor of the adjacent building.
By the time they reached the hall on the ground floor, Loftus could hear the hiss of water being directed on the burning offices, and through an open door saw a dozen or more men.
One separated from the others and came hurrying into the hallway.
‘Hallo, hallo,’ he said, grinning widely. ‘All safe and sound?’
Loftus stared. ‘Dunster!’ He almost shouted the word, for he was surprised beyond measure. Wally and Best stared equally, and Dunster’s grin grew a little embarrassed.
‘I know I should be asleep,’ he said, ‘but I felt like hanging around when I knew where you were, and so I did. Er—as a matter of fact, I—’
‘Out with it,’ said Loftus encouragingly.
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Dunster with an effort, ‘I saw the shooting on the other side and fixed it with a military unit to rig up the searchlight and the tommy-gun. It looked pretty grim, otherwise, and—’
He was interrupted by a warning shout from someone in the crowd.
There was a loud crack, a roar, and then an avalanche of tumbling debris from the top of the burning building. The men split up, suddenly aware again of danger. Best, Davidson and the fireman reached the roadway safely. Dunster followed them, Loftus a yard behind. A piece of masonry, not particularly heavy, but weighty enough, struck him a glancing blow on the head, and sent him pitching forward into unconsciousness.
It was daylight when he came round.