Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 122 - The King of Terror

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THE KING OF TERROR
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2002 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
Scanned and Proofed
by Tom Stephens
? Chapter I. THE PICTURE OF DEATH
? Chapter II. FRAULINO JONES
? Chapter III. TWO GOOD MEN
? Chapter IV. SLIP OF THE FOOT
? Chapter V. THE MASTER OF MEN'S DESTINIES
? Chapter VI. REPEAT PERFORMANCE
? Chapter VII. IMPOSTOR
? Chapter VIII. THE HANDSOME MAYFAIR
? Chapter IX. PO PIKI
? Chapter X. THE FRIGHTENING FACES
? Chapter XI. THE UNDECIDED WOMAN
? Chapter XII. TWO TO HELP
? Chapter XIII. TERROR FOR HIDALGO
? Chapter XIV. THE REPEAT DEVIL
? Chapter XV. AGAIN AND AGAIN
Chapter I. THE PICTURE OF DEATH
THEY killed Doc Savage on Saturday.
It was chilly that afternoon, with a little snow falling, and the snow as hard as salt particles. The wind had
a hissing strength; it pounced on pedestrians and shook their overcoats and flapped their hat brims.
Soldiers on the streets, and sailors in their winter-issue peajackets, blew steam on their fingers.
The man with the red hat and the blue armband with the yellow cross was not used to the cold, or to the
bite that winter has in New York, close to the sea. He cursed the weather fluently, with the slightly
accented voice of a man who can speak several languages.
His red hat and blue-yellow-cross armband, incidentally, was his own idea of a disguise. Dress in a
bizarre outfit, he believed, and people wouldn't be able to recognize you when you dressed in ordinary
clothes.
He crossed Fifth Avenue and went into a restaurant, one of those white-enamel-and-chrome quick-eat
places.
“Mug one and save the cow,” he told the waiter.
He grinned a little when he said that, for he liked to show his acquaintance with the local vernacular, in
any part of the world where he happened to be.
Soon after he got his coffee black another man came in. This fellow looked very much a gentleman. He
could have been a clerk in one of the insurance offices in the neighborhood, or a floorwalker in one of the
big department stores, or anything else genteel.
“Hello, Francis,” he said. He slid onto a stool beside the other. “Really, Francis, you look a holy horror in
that red hat and with that idiotic armband.”
Francis sugared his coffee. “Percy,” he said, “I have argued psychology with you before, so I will not do
so now. I will just ask you one question: Do you think you could tell a peacock from a chicken if they
both had no feathers?”
Percy sneered. “Give me a glass of milk,” he told the waiter, “with just a touch of chocolate in it.” His
sneer was polite. Everything he did was polite. He had a floorwalker's manner without ever having been a
floorwalker.
“It is a bitter day,” Francis said. “I thoroughly detest a climate like this.”
“Yes, it is very unpleasant,” Percy agreed.
The waiter went to the other end of the counter.
Francis said, “The new guns are in a car I rented, at the end of this block.”
“Have you tested them, Francis?”
“Oh, naturally. They are very good weapons. Better, even, I think, than the Thompson submachine gun.
They are of the same caliber as the Thompson, but I believe their reliability is greater since the mechanism
is simpler. It follows that it would be, don't you think?”
“True,” Percy said. He consulted his wrist watch. He showed Francis the time. “I believe we should be
going, don't you?” he asked.
“By all means,” Francis agreed.
THEY shot Doc Savage to pieces in the long narrow lobby hall of a midtown skyscraper.
The building was one of the tallest in the city, in the world in fact, and the decorative motif of its lobby
was subdued modernistic. The main lobby was a great vaulted room where chandeliers hung and where
dozens, actually dozens, of elevators operated for the benefit of the tenants.
But Doc Savage's private elevator was apart from the others. Once it had been in the same bank with the
other elevators, but lately it had been changed, being now placed at the end of a small corridor that was a
narrow thumb off the main lobby.
Percy and Francis took up a position at the mouth of this small blind hall, and there they waited.
“I do hope our calculations are sufficiently accurate that this will not be embarrassing,” Francis remarked.
“Yes, indeed,” Percy agreed. “It would be such a bother.”
They stood there, two fine, kind, polite, suave-looking gentlemen who wouldn't be thought to have an
idea more violent than what kind of a present to take the baby at home this evening, or, maybe, when
was the army going to get around to needing them.
“Oh, my, I feel conspicuous,” Francis declared. “Suppose we seem to conduct a bit of a business
transaction, by way of making ourselves less obvious.”
So they acted like two gentlemen with a transaction. They made it good, actually, with Francis selling
Percy an automobile which had three good tires, but one that unfortunately wasn't so good. They had a
good deal of give-and-take over the condition of the fourth tire, and what brand it was, how many miles
were in it, and then Doc Savage came out of the elevator.
It was very skillful the way neither Percy nor Francis seemed aware that Doc Savage was stepping out of
the private elevator.
“Ah, the time is one thirty,” said Francis.
“Mr. Savage's lunch hour,” Percy agreed.
“With the Scientific Club?”
“Yes, with the Scientific Club,” said Percy quietly. “"The Scientific Club members are going to be
disappointed, aren't they?”
Percy and Francis were dropping the innocent brown wrapping-paper sheaths off a pair of submachine
guns.
“Probably they'll be disappointed,” Francis agreed. “Am I right in believing Mr. Savage is president of
the Scientific Club?”
They were ready now. “You shoot high.”
“Right. You shoot low,” Percy said.
THE roar of the guns in the small hall, in the great lobby of the building, was thunder a thousandfold.
First burst of the weapons seemed to take Doc Savage in the upper chest. His coat front and shirt and
necktie got ragged, and his chest lost shape. The little machine guns could turn out seven or eight hundred
bullets a minute. They fired at Doc Savage in bursts for fully half a minute. Maybe two hundred bullets
from each gun. Four hundred in all. And not more than twenty-five or so missed his body.
Percy and Francis saw the bullets do to Doc Savage's body what that many .45-caliber bullets would do
to a body. Any single .45-caliber slug would kill a man, which was why as far back as 1909 the army
adopted the caliber as its official side arm.
They saw Doc Savage's arms and legs get joints where there were no joints, even before he had folded
to the floor. And after he was on the floor they saw the body kick and twitch as long as their guns
roared.
It was a hideous transformation from life to death. Doc Savage, when he had stepped out of the elevator,
had been before them as a fine physical specimen, a giant of a man bronzed by tropical suns, with strange
eyes that were like pools of always-stirred flake gold, and hair that was a bronze only a little darker than
his skin. Now he was something torn in a crimson puddle on the floor.
Francis and Percy stopped shooting.
They tossed their guns on the floor.
They noticed what seemed to be smoke around them. Percy fanned at this vapor.
“Bit of a fog,” he complained.
“Smoke, I imagine,” Francis agreed. “I don't recall smokeless powder making a smoke like that before.
However, the job seems to have been done well enough.”
They turned and walked out of the building. Both of them had produced handkerchiefs, and were
fastidiously wiping their hands.
The mangled figure of Doc Savage disappeared as soon as Francis and Percy were out of sight.
Literally and actually, the body disappeared.
A panel opened in the side of the hall; a panel which no casual observer would have noticed as a door,
and Doc Savage came out. Doc Savage was personally unharmed.
“Monk, Ham, you clean up this mess,” he said. “And be ready for a call.”
Monk and Ham came out of the opening that had been concealed by the ingenious panel.
“We better go along,” Monk said. He sounded hopeful.
Doc said, “No, stay here.”
Monk nodded, but not with enthusiasm. Monk liked excitement, and standing around here after the
excitement was over didn't appeal to him.
Monk's life was probably dedicated more to excitement than to any other one thing. Certainly he liked
trouble more than his profession, which was chemistry. Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair,
which was Monk's full name and title, was rated one of the great industrial chemists of the era. He didn't
look it. He was a short man, very wide, as wide as tall almost, as hairy as a baboon with rusty red hair
that resembled finishing nails, and with a face that would stop a clock if any face would.
Ham Brooks-who was, like Monk, one of a group of five men who worked closely with Doc
Savage-also had a title. He was Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks. He had fame in two
lines-law and clothes. In law, he was good enough that Harvard Law School was always pointing him out
as one of its better examples. And as for clothes, tailors who loved their work often followed him down
the street just to watch clothes being worn as they should be worn.
Doc was gone now. Presumably he was on the trail of Percy and Francis.
“Who were those two fellows?” Monk asked.
“The two with the machine guns?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I never saw them before in my life,” Ham declared.
“Then you wouldn't know what they wanted?”
“To anyone but you,” Ham said, “it would be fairly obvious what they wanted. But since it's you, I'll
explain. They wanted to kill Doc.”
“Thank you,” Monk said sourly. “I wouldn't have dreamed, of course, that they wanted to kill Doc. I'm
deaf, dumb, blind, and with my head cut off, so I wouldn't know.”
“Somebody must have given you that perfect description of yourself,” Ham remarked. “You surely didn't
make that up all alone.”
Monk grinned at the lawyer. “Someday I'm going to show you what the words 'sudden destruction'
mean.”
THEY examined the device, the gadget, by which Doc Savage had been able to make Percy and Francis
think they had shot Doc into a pulp.
The trick was ingenious, but there was nothing particularly new about its conception. An experienced
magician would have said, probably, that it was just so-so, good enough for its purpose. Good enough
for its purpose was good enough, though.
It was a movie projector, color film. It was concealed well back in the corridor, in the ceiling, shooting
from behind one of the light fixtures, so that it was hardly noticeable from direct inspection, and certainly
not at all discoverable from where Percy and Francis had stood.
For a screen, a polished-brushed, rather-metal panel that was part of the decoration on either side of the
elevator door. In fact the elevator door and the elevator interior were all the same material and would
serve as a screen.
Monk and Ham examined the damage the bullets had done.
Monk asked, “Who figured this gimmick out, Ham? And don't tell me you did.”
“It was Doc's idea,” Ham said. “And he had Long Tom fix the thing up. Long Tom has become a
home-movie fan recently, and spent a mint of money on equipment.”
Long Tom was Major Thomas J. Roberts, electrical wizard of the Doc Savage group of five associates.
Monk said, “Long Tom is in England, installing that new plane-detector system, isn't he?”
Ham nodded. “He fixed this up before he left. Made the films for Doc, with Doc doing the acting, of
course.”
Having squinted at the projector overhead, Monk pondered aloud, “I don't see how Doc made it stick
that way. That film he showed was a picture of him getting shot with a machine gun. Cut to pieces. I see
how you could fake such a picture in taking it. That ain't no trouble for a good movie photographer. But
suppose those guys would've had rifles, and just shot him once apiece, and ran.”
Ham laughed. “There's more than one movie projector up there, Monk. Each one has a different film.
There's one showing Doc getting shot once and falling dead. But you should see the one of him getting
blown up with a bomb. That's a daisy! This one of his getting shot with a machine gun was nothing
compared to it. All Doc had to do was take a look down the hall through the televisor, guess what was
up, and turn on the right film. When the gunmen saw Doc opening the elevator door they opened fire-at
nothing more than the clever motion picture.”
Monk was satisfied.
The machine-gun bullets had done considerable damage to the metal trim at the end of the hall, and to the
elevator-door jambs and even the elevator interior. An extended repair job would be necessary.
Then Monk stopped and clapped a hand to his forehead.
“That smoke!” he exclaimed. “What was it?”
“I'm surprised,” Ham said, “that you ever thought of the smoke.”
“It was something, then?”
“It was.”
MONK waited for Ham to give more information, but Ham remained silent. Monk scowled darkly. His
association with Ham Brooks was almost a continuous quarrel. Not that he didn't contribute his part to
the fussing.
“All right, you overdressed shyster,” Monk said. “I know that no machine gun shooting bullets loaded
with smokeless powder makes that much smoke.”
“It's the cartridges that are loaded with powder, not bullets-”
“Don't talk word technicality to me!” Monk yelled. “What made the smoke? If you know, tell me. If you
don't, shut up!”
Ham grinned. One of the things he enjoyed most was Monk in a rage.
“That smoke wasn't smoke,” he said. “It was some vapor, a chemical, which Doc discharged from vents
in the wall. He has different vents on separate controls, so he can squirt the stuff on anybody standing in
any part of the hall.”
“How's it work?”
“The vapor gets on the guys and enables Doc to trail them.”
“How?”
“I don't know just how.”
Monk said, “I'm surprised you'd admit not knowing everything.” The homely chemist gazed about the
corridor. “Doc sure went to a lot of trouble on this gadget.”
Ham nodded.
“I'd say it might be worth it,” he remarked. “Look how it pans out: Doc apparently dead. Whoever shot
him will go away satisfied. They won't be suspicious. And Doc is able to trail them. Makes a nice set-up
when something like this happens.”
“And it happens,” Monk said, “a little too regular to suit me. Sometime, somebody is going to get Doc.
But I wonder what kind of trouble has come looking for him this time?”
They pondered that mystery while they went hunting the head janitor in order to have a canvas screen
erected, closing off the little private elevator hall, and getting repairs under way.
Chapter II. FRAULINO JONES
DOC SAVAGE had had an overcoat over his arm when he went out of the midtown skyscraper on the
trail of Percy and Francis.
The overcoat was a flowing one which had pads to take the squareness out of the shoulders-instead of
putting it in, as customary in coats-and another pad to give a roundness to the back of the wearer. Doc
put it on. His character, as far as general appearance went, quickly underwent a considerable change. He
drew one of those you-can-fold-it hats from the overcoat pocket and put this on. It looked about as neat
as such hats generally look, and further helped change his usually neat appearance. He did not, then, look
so much like Doc Savage.
The cane had been hooked over his arm under the overcoat.
He kept watching the cane as he walked. The cane was a pastel shade of yellow. Occasionally it
underwent a quick change in hue, becoming blue. Whenever the cane started getting blue, Doc hastily
changed his course; hunted around, in fact, until the cane went back to its yellow tint.
The litmus cane, Long Tom Roberts had called it when they developed it.
Actually, it was superlitmus in effect, if the effect was litmus at all. Litmus is the coloring matter employed
by chemists for the detection of free acids and free alkalis. In true litmus, the coloring matter results from
the action of air and ammonia on orcin during the preparation of litmus from the lichens from which it is
made. Almost every high school and agricultural student has seen the action of litmus paper
demonstrated. And the general operation of this stuff was the same.
A chemical coated on the cane changed color when in the presence of vapor, even the most minute
quantity of vapor, of the type which had been released in the lobby corridor while Percy and Francis
were using their machine guns.
Enough of the vapor had clung to the clothing of Percy and Francis-they were actually sprayed with the
stuff-to leave an aura that could be detected by the cane.
The whole idea of this method of trailing had seemed fantastic to Doc Savage when he first began
working on it; but the thing had proved astonishingly feasible.
He found that Percy and Francis had entered a newsreel theater in the neighborhood. Doc took a back
seat and, after a while, spotted the pair.
FRANCIS and Percy enjoyed the newsreel thoroughly, and particularly did they like a cartoon feature
toward the end.
“That was good,” Percy said as they left the theater.
“It certainly was good,” Francis agreed heartily. “Beautiful and refined. The art of making animated films
certainly has advanced.” He shivered and pulled a muffler tighter about his throat. “I emphatically cannot
say the same for the weather.”
“I wonder if it would be advisable to take a taxi?” Percy pondered.
“That would be nice, wouldn't it? But don't you imagine that it might not be advisable? One of these
uncouth oafs of taxi drivers might remember our faces.”
They agreed this was true, and walked on uptown. Francis, having gotten on the subject of taxi drivers,
said some more on the point. He didn't seem to care for taxi drivers individually or as a class, in New
York or in Cairo. It developed that one of the profession, in London, had whacked the daylights out of
Francis in a dispute several years ago. Francis grimaced at the recollection. “And the police found his
body before I had planned, and almost caught me,” he finished. “That would have been beastly, wouldn't
it? Hanged for doing in a low fellow like a cabby.”
The hotel they entered was not the largest in the city, but it was one of the most expensive-and
supposedly, ultra-genteel. Percy and Francis became part of the suave atmosphere of the lobby.
“Mr. Francis and Mr. Percy to see Fraulino Jones,” they told the desk clerk.
“Fraulino Jones, to be sure.” The clerk was back in a moment, saying, “She is expecting you. Boy! Boy,
show Mr. Percy and Mr. Francis to the Fraulino Jones' suite.”
THE bellhop showed them to the seventh floor and rapped on the door for them. A maid opened the
door, an utterly perfect-looking foreign maid. Not a European, but some type of Asiatic.
The maid looked at Percy and Francis and fear jumped into her eyes, but she hid it by doing a little bow.
“I will tell the Fraulino you are here,” she said in English.
She left them in a vaulted parlor, a magnificent chamber, the kind of room that would make a Hollywood
interior decorator look around for the sound cameras. The furniture was fine, genuine, expensive.
Francis and Percy expanded with appreciation of their surroundings.
“Lovely,” Francis breathed. “So much more than one comes to expect of hotels.”
“The Fraulino has excellent taste,” Percy agreed.
Francis nodded. “By the way, I think it would be a shame to disturb her unnecessarily in connection with
the Doc Savage matter. The thought of deliberate, ruthless killing has a depressing effect on some people,
and I believe the Fraulino Jones is one of those.”
Percy considered the point. “Self-defense might be less offensive.”
“Oh, indeed. Self-defense has a righteous ring even to sensitive ears,” Francis told him. “I am sure it
would be a kindness to tell the Fraulino it was self-defense.”
Percy grinned. “And, of course, to speak bluntly, what she doesn't know won't hurt her.”
“Meaning that she needn't know Abraham Mawson gave us strict orders to kill Savage, regardless of
what the Fraulino told us to do?”
Percy nodded, then said, “Ah, the Fraulino is coming.”
She was.
THE Fraulino Jones entered. And, immediately, everything else in the magnificent room seemed ordinary.
She had all the things that beauty has, height and blondness, grace and curves in the interesting places.
But she had more than that, and some of what she had was not easy to define. It was a quality of the
spectacular. Just a little extra of everything, so that you looked at her and thought: Great grief, she can't
be that complete! And you looked for flaws, and did not find them.
Her frock was the kind of thing that would have come out of the Rue de la Paix, if the French had not
lost a war.
“Ah, you are lovely, Fraulino,” Percy said.
“Thank you,” she told him.
“Comment allez vows, mademoiselle,”
Francis said.
She returned the greeting in French that was flawless, and Francis smiled approvingly. He had been
testing her out on what foreign languages he knew, and so far he hadn't found a one which she could not
speak better than he.
They took cigarettes. The Asiatic maid brought them drinks of good brandy in little glasses. A bit to
warm them against the outer cold. They talked of the weather a little. Then Fraulino Jones confessed to
being a little piqued with the weather, but after all it was childish to expect better in New York, at this
season of the year. Spring, though, was lovely. For about six weeks it was lovely.
And finally she got around to saying, “By the way, you might wish to see the newspapers. Oga"-this to
the Asiatic maid-"Oga, will you bring us the newspaper you purchased, please?”
The black type on the front page of the newspaper was so big that it looked as if a horse had stepped in
black ink and then on the newspaper.
Doc Savage had been killed. Shot down in the lobby of the building which housed his headquarters.
The Fraulino waited until Percy and Francis had read the headlines.
“I think you had better visit an ear specialist tomorrow,” she said. Her voice had turned grim.
Francis and Percy looked puzzled, the latter saying, “I do not believe we understand.”
“Am I to take it you did not hear me say there was to be no killing?”
Percy and Francis now looked astonishingly distressed. They became so overwhelmed with regret that
they were abject. Percy actually had tears in his eyes. They were wonderful actors.
“It was a horrible accident,” Percy said in a low, emotion-ridden voice. “Mr. Savage grabbed my gun
and it was discharged without any intention of mine.”
Francis said, “No, Percy, tell her the truth. It was my gun he seized and which killed him. I will not have
you taking the blame for me just because I am your friend.”
THEIR argument was better than their acting.
Without lifting their voices, they reached pitches of emotional violence in telling each other that they
shouldn't sacrifice each other on the altar of friendship. They developed the friendship theme. They made
it sound like something lovely and sacred, a gentle treasure between them that was in danger of being
destroyed.
It was a tear-fetching thing. A horrible mistake, an accident between two friends, and each trying to take
the blame for it. Very touching, and all with a genuineness to it that was remarkable.
In five minutes Percy and Francis had the Fraulino Jones sympathizing with them and telling them that
they shouldn't talk about the terrible thing.
Percy and Francis then fell into a remorseful silence.
The Fraulino Jones took out a handkerchief and dabbed it to her eyes. Her emotion, however, was
genuine.
She took up the newspaper.
There was half a page of history of Doc Savage inside. Or, at least, as much of the history of the Man of
Bronze as the newspapers knew, for Doc was not one who sought publicity.
The item stated that Doc Savage was a remarkable individual who had been trained from childhood by
scientists who specialized in various lines. This, said the newspaper, was probably part of a modernistic
experiment in taking an ordinary baby and turning him into a superman. Actually, this guess was not
entirely true as to motive; the training had been directed and financed by Doc Savage's father, and its sole
purpose had been to fit Doc for a career of righting wrongs and punishing evildoers in the far corners of
the earth.
The newspaper article mentioned the bronze man's strange career, and stated in broad terms that he was
a man who'd had many fantastic adventures in his lifetime. It said that Doc Savage had contributed many
new discoveries in the fields of surgery-his specialty-and in electricity, chemistry and other sciences.
It named Doc's group of five associates-Monk Mayfair, Ham Brooks, Johnny Littlejohn, Long Tom
Roberts, and Renny Renwick. It gave these associates their full names and titles, so that just naming them
completely took a whole paragraph.
Three of the associates were now in Europe, according to the paper, assisting in the war effort. Only
Monk Mayfair and Ham Brooks were known to be in New York City, and these had not been reached
for a statement.
The Fraulino Jones was very pensive when she finished reading. “This makes me very sad,” she said. “It
was a sickening thing to have happen.”
“Very, very sad,” Francis agreed. “All that we needed to do was take him alive.”
The Fraulino nodded. “Taking him alive, and holding him a prisoner for a few weeks, or until our affair
was completed, would have been sufficient.”
“We are so sorry,” Francis said.
The Fraulino Jones looked at the newspaper a long time. Her voice was sad when she said, “A man
cannot take the chances Doc Savage has taken and expect to live forever. The law of averages has got
to come in somewhere.”
摘要：

THEKINGOFTERRORADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2002BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.comScannedandProofedbyTomStephens?ChapterI.THEPICTUREOFDEATH?ChapterII.FRAULINOJONES?ChapterIII.TWOGOODMEN?ChapterIV.SLIPOFTHEFOOT?ChapterV.THEMASTEROFMEN'SDESTINIES?ChapterVI.REPEATPERFORMAN...

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