Val could see them as he pulled the chair around to sit down. But an instant later he heard Nancy gasp: “Catch me! I’m—I’m…”
And Val snapped the chair off the floor, whirled around and hurled it with every ounce of strength in his body. As he had planned, Nancy’s gasp had drawn Vollonoff’s attention for a second. Vollonoff sensed what was happening—too late. As he jerked his head back the edge of the chair seat caught him squarely in the face. The gun in his hand roared deafeningly, missing. And an instant later Val was on him, smashing his fist over the top of the falling chair.
The jar of the blow rocked Val’s arm clear to the shoulder. And it drove Vollonoff reeling backward, knocked out cold, the gun falling from his hand.
Val ducked into the protection of his body, caught Vollonoff under the arms and heaved him at the doorway. Stubbs, leaping into the room in confused surprise, caught the full impact of Vollonoff’s weight, and for an instant was tied up in confusion there in the doorway.
“Here!” Nancy cried at Val’s side. She thrust Vollonoff’s gun into his hand. She had seized it off the floor. Her eyes were shining, her voice thrilling in its disregard for danger.
“Get down on the floor!” Val rapped at her as his fingers closed over the revolver. A wave of confidence swept through him. No longer were his hands tied by futile helplessness. The very thought of the odds against them, and the consequences if he failed, brought strength.
The revolver leveled just as Stubbs hurled Vollonoff’s falling body back into the room and raised the automatic in his hand. Both guns spat at once. A cold, searing sensation raked Val’s side. He knew he had been shot there. But Stubbs reeled around, clasping a shattered elbow. And then dodged out of sight beside the door before Val could fire again.
* * *
—
A leap, a kick, and the door crashed shut. An instant later Stubbs poured a fusillade of shots through the door. But they all went wide, hitting no one.
Everyone had come to their feet. The negress began to shriek in terror.
“Shut up!” Val yelled at her, and when that had no effect he ignored her.
He heard Carl Zaken’s voice shout in the hallway. “What happened in there?”
And Stubbs replying shakily: “He knocked Vollonoff out with a chair, got his gun, and shot me in the elbow! I’ll bleed to death!”
“And good enough for you!” Zaken snarled. He broke off into French, cursing Vollonoff and Stubbs for ignorant fools. “Clumsy pig! Son of a goat!” Zaken shouted. “Watch that door! Don’t let them get out! They can’t get away! I’ll fix them! With gas!”
Nancy and Val both understood the words. The rest did not. Marcus asked uncertainly: “What’ll we do?”
“Gas!” Nancy whispered to Val. “It won’t be tear gas this time!”
“No,” Val agreed bruskly. “He’s gambling high tonight. He’ll slaughter the lot of us as quick as he can now.”
Nancy looked at him desperately. “What will we do? We can’t get out that door.”
“Here! Watch the door! Don’t waste the bullets! We’ll need them!”
Val grabbed up a chair, stepped to the great bay window and began to swing the chair vigorously. Glass crashed and fell away before it. A few seconds of that and the windows were cleared away.
* * *
—
Wraiths of fog swirled in. The croaking of the riverside frogs sounded very close. He judged the house sat almost on the river bank. He turned around and snapped at the others:
“Get out on that roof! Quick! Your lives may depend on it!”
Professor Long’s wife was still unconscious in her chair. Val picked her up and strode to the window. He had to wait a moment as Marcus and his girl friend and the two negroes scrambled through, ignoring the jagged edges of glass. None of them waited to help him. Val hadn’t expected it. Their nerves were too shattered by terror. He heaved his burden through and lowered her roughly to the roof below. She would have a measure of safety out there.
Norah Beamish and Nancy were at his side, waiting for orders. Norah’s eyes were shining too. “Young man,” she cried, “I apologize!”
Outside the door Carl Zaken’s voice snapped in French: “One side, pig!”
“Give me that gun!” Val husked to Nancy. He fired two shots at the door. Couldn’t see whether he had hit anything or not.
Vollonoff stirred on the floor just before he fired. The sound of the shots seemed to bring him out of his daze. He sat up groggily. And an instant later Nancy caught Val’s arm and pointed to the doorway.
“Look!”
Through one of the bullet holes in the door thrust the glistening point of a sharp needle. From its end a tiny spray of liquid spurted into the room. And that spray dissolved into a bluish vapor as they stared at it.
“Out that window quick!” Val urged. He whirled Nancy around himself, and started her with a shove.
And as he waited for them to get through to safety, Val saw a sight he never forgot. Vollonoff was staggering to his feet just in front of the door, his eyes on them with dazed surprise.
“Look out!” Val shouted at him. “Come over here, quick!”
Instead Vollonoff turned around to the door, obviously intending to escape. And the first dissolving wave of gas closed about him. Vollonoff’s hand shot to his throat. He strangled. Too late he realized what was happening and turned toward the window.
The gas cloaked him like an evil halo now. He staggered, his face turning purple and his eyes starting from their sockets. His mouth opened to cry out—and only a horrible strangling issued from it. Vollonoff took one lurching step toward the window, and then tumbled forward on his face, kicked and lay still.
Val ducked out the window, white-faced and shaken.
“God!” he husked to Nancy. “No wonder that steward couldn’t get out the door! Get down off this roof before it starts to drift out the window. One good whiff of it seems to be all that’s needed.”
* * *
—
He dragged Long’s wife to the end of the roof. She recovered consciousness as he did that. The negro was down on the ground. The negress slid off, hung by her hands a moment, blubbering, and then dropped the short distance to the ground and was caught by her companion.
“Pass her down to me,” Val ordered Nancy.
He dropped the same way. Nancy and Norah Beamish lowered the protesting woman and he caught her. Nancy and Norah followed. And while they did that Marcus and his girl companion made the drop successfully. They were all safe.
“Get back out of sight and stay there!” Val said to Nancy and Norah. “No more foolishness! I’ll see what I can do.”
He raced through the damp mist to the front of the house, gun in one hand and his flash in the other. The front porch was still and quiet. A wink of the flash showed the dead body lying where he had left it. The front door was closed.
But as he looked, it was jerked open from inside and the man who had opened it once before stepped out. Val shot at him and missed. The man jumped back inside, slamming the door.
Val waited tensely, wondering what would happen next.
It came from behind; running feet poked out of the fog and closed in on him. Val faced them crouching, wondering with a sick feeling if Carl Zaken had lied, and had more men out here in the night.
But a voice shouted: “That you Easton?”
It was Gregg. And as Val relaxed and lowered the gun, Gregg came running up with half a dozen men. “We heard the shouts,” he panted. “Having trouble?”
And all Val could think of at that instant was to say foolishly: “I thought you were going home to sleep.”
“Got to thinking that this was too important to leave up in the air till morning,” Gregg told him. “I called some of the men and started o
ut here to get the lay of the land myself, and station them. We saw your car back there by the gate and had started to look the ground over when we heard something that sounded like shots. And then we heard you shoot here again. What happened?”
“Two of you go around and watch there!” Val ordered before he replied. “Shoot anyone you see trying to leave. Anyone outside is all right.”
“Do that!” Gregg ordered hastily.
And as two of the men ran, Val hurriedly gave Gregg the highlights.
“Surround this house!” Gregg snapped to the rest of his men. “And shoot to kill. We’ve got one of the most dangerous men in the world cornered.”
The words were hardly out of his mouth when three quick shots barked at the back of the house.
Val sprinted for the front door, and Gregg pounded after him, gun in hand also. Val opened the front door and peered in cautiously. The hall was empty. Ramey’s body sprawled at the foot of the stairs. The interior of the house was still. Ominously still. Deathly still. But as he and Gregg stared in, the door at the back swung silently open. Carl Zaken leaped into the hall with a catlike movement, holding a gun in each hand.
He saw them at the same instant and jerked the two weapons up.
Val shot him first. Emptied the revolver in a tearing burst as fast as he could pull the trigger. Zaken went down, shooting wildly and futilely. He tried to rise on his two hands, dragging his guns with him. And slumped forward again. And then with a sudden movement he threw them weakly from him.
“Touché, Easton,” he called weakly, turning a ghastly, pain-racked face toward the doorway. “I told Vollonoff you were a dangerous man.”
And so it ended. Zaken’s other two men had been trapped at the rear of the house, where they thought no one was watching, shot seriously and captured. They found Professor Long upstairs in one of the bedrooms, half dead from fear rather than pain. A few moments later, downstairs, he thrust a roll of drawings in Val’s hand.
“Here,” he said weakly. “Keep these. I—I never want to see them again. I’ll take whatever the government offers for them.”
Gregg’s men, after performing hurried first aid, were already loading the wounded into their car, which they had brought up to the house and the body of Carl Zaken went with them.
Gregg was saying to Norah Beamish: “Want to ride back with us?”
“Nonsense!” Norah snapped. “I’ll go with Nancy and Mr. Easton. Nancy needs me.”
There was a slight inscrutable smile on Nancy’s face as she said: “I think I’ll be taken care of all right, if you want to go, Norah.”
For a moment the older woman looked at Nancy shrewdly. And then she, too, smiled, and sighed. “I’ll go with you, Jim Gregg,” she said. “I think I’m getting old after all. Nancy doesn’t need a mother tonight. Do you, Nancy?”
But Nancy was smiling at Val and didn’t hear her.
FREE-LANCE SPY
H. BEDFORD-JONES
ONCE KNOWN AS the “King of the Pulps” for his prolificity and popularity, Henry James O’Brien Bedford-Jones (1887–1949) wrote about 1,400 short stories and approximately 80 books under his own name and at least seventeen pseudonyms, including Allan Hawkwood, Gordon Keyne, and Michael Gallister, as well as various house names for publishers of boys’ books and pulps. He customarily wrote between five thousand and ten thousand words a day, but on occasion wrote a complete novella of twenty-five thousand words in a single day. He was the ultimate writer of historical adventure fiction and all its subgenres, including stories about pirates, the French Foreign Legion, big game hunting, sports, aviation, etc., while also producing an enormous body of work in the science fiction and fantasy fields. Although largely unremembered today except by historians and fans of the pulps, he was highly regarded in his day and sold to all the top magazines, including Argosy, Adventure, Blue Book, Munsey’s, and All-Story.
Born in Ontario, Canada, Bedford-Jones became an American citizen in 1908 and lived mostly in New York and California. As one of the highest-paid writers in America, even during the Great Depression, he owned several homes and enjoyed a flamboyant lifestyle, hindered in no way by his good looks (he was compared to the dashing Errol Flynn). One of his novels, Garden of the Moon, cowritten with Barton Browne, was serialized in six parts in The Saturday Evening Post (August 28–October 2, 1937) and served as the basis for an unlikely musical comedy in 1938, directed by Busby Berkeley, who was noted for his elaborate dance numbers, and starring Pat O’Brien, Margaret Lindsay, and John Payne.
The hero of “Free-Lance Spy” is Barnes, who appears in a series of stories in which he and his colleagues battle the spies of various countries. He belongs to a loose affiliation of spies that has no official connection to the United States government. One of the many women who are attracted to him called him the Sphinx because of his reluctance to discuss his cases, and he liked the appellation.
“Free-Lance Spy” was originally published in the March 30, 1935, issue of Argosy magazine.
FREE-LANCE SPY
H. BEDFORD-JONES
CHAPTER I
A NEW GAME
IN THE DARKNESS of a room overlooking the courtyard of the old Hotel des Anglais, in Nice, a slight sound broke the early morning silence. A warning bell, so thin and silvery that it might have been imagination. Day after day, night after night, Marie Nicolas had been awaiting this sound.
She swiftly flung back the covers, threw herself out of bed, and over her nightgown drew a padded bathrobe. In her hand glowed a tiny flashlight. The faintly reflected radiance showed a glimpse of her dark and lovely features, her wide, hurried eyes ablaze with excitement. Then darkness closed down again.
A large Bible was on her dresser. She snapped it open; the book, made solid with glue and cut out in the center, was a box. From this she took a set of head-phones. The tiny finger of light touched a mark on the wall paper. She inserted a plug, pushing it into the paper; the round points, so different from those of American plugs, shoved neatly home. In her ears leaped a voice.
“They are fools, these Americans. Smart Yankees! I’ll show you the truth, Truxon. I’ve taken care of them, all of them. I know everything about them.”
Excitement set her pulses hammering. She could visualize the scene in that room, only two doors away from hers. The speaker was Rothstern; fat, jovial, with gold teeth and a shining bald spot. One of the cleverest secret agents of all Central Europe. Who employed Rothstern? No one knew, positively.
He was identified with Germany, but he might be working for the Nazi party, for Hitler personally, for Poland, now the close ally of Germany, or for any other cause.
Truxon? Yes, she knew this lean, dark, savage man, this renegade Englishman who had been kicked out of the British diplomatic ranks. It was Truxon’s room yonder, his and Stacey’s. Another of the same sort was Stacey, but weak and vicious, diabolically crafty.
Now she crouched closer, listening intently. The dictaphone worked perfectly. She had been two weeks getting it in place, since learning that Truxon always occupied this same room when in the city.
“They’re not fools,” cracked out Truxon’s hard, smashing voice. “They’re smart. The smartest of them is that fellow Barnes.”
Marie Nicolas thrilled to the name, to the grudging admiration of this enemy.
“Barnes will be dead within the week,” and Rothstern laughed softly. “Let me explain two things to you: this American activity, and the general situation.”
“Damn the situation,” growled Truxon. “I work for whomever pays me.”
“I pay you.” Rothstern spoke with abrupt authority. “Listen. Certain Americans like Barnes are working for their government. Idealistic fools, who place themselves and their brains and money at the service of their country; they have no standing, they have no acknowledged connection with Washington.
“They are free-lances who prate of bringing a new deal into diplomacy, of fighting us here in Europe with our own weapons.”
The scorn in his voice was acid.
“Barnes is one. He pretends to be a fool, but is smart enough; however, he is in my hand. There’s Hutton in Vienna, Morlake in Berlin, McGibbons in Warsaw, Pratt in Moscow, Williams in London, Reilly in Paris; also, there are half a dozen less important ones who have no steady position. Every one of these men is under the most strict watch. So is this girl, Marie Nicolas.”
“What?” ejaculated Truxon. “But she’s working for Italy!”
Rothstern laughed, and at his jovial laugh, Marie Nicolas trembled.
“So you think; so others think. She is really one of these American amateurs, my friends. She is here, in this same hotel; she has been here for two weeks, ill with influenza, or so she pretends. She leaves her room only twice a day, to sit in the sun in the courtyard. Well, she is attended to. Now, here’s your pay for the next month.”
A rustle of paper as banknotes were counted out.
“You don’t care to go into the general situation?” Rothstern asked, with a note of mockery.
“No!” shot out Truxon. “Perhaps we know it as well as you do. We’re only interested in earning our money.”
“You shall earn it, I assure you. I have met this Barnes and know him well; he is open to bribery if rightly handled. But he’s not the fool he looks, as you’ve found to your cost. On next Friday he will be in Ostend; you’ll be there ahead of him, and so shall I. My work is to trap him; yours is to kill him. Understood?”
“Gladly,” and Truxon’s voice held a savage note of hatred. “But how?”
“How? Once and for all,” and Rothstern’s voice shook with laughter at his own jest. Then he sobered. “Now listen carefully. Next Friday evening, Ostend is to witness a gala performance of Beethoven’s Solemn Mass, with chorus and artists from Paris. The king will attend. From Paris come a number of diplomats to attend, among them the American ambassador, and also Grimaldi, the Italian ambassador.
The Big Book of Espionage Page 98