The Nemesis of Evil Page 9

  “Why ‘uncanny’?”

  The girl spread . her hands.

  “A lot of odd stories have been circulating for years, and all of them have to do with Mount Shasta. Curious lights have been seen moving to and fro about the summit of the mountain at night. A lot of those sightings have been reported by the UFO investigators ...”

  “Flying saucers, you mean?” asked Scorchy Muldoon, with more than a trace of skepticism in his voice.

  The girl flushed slightly. “I’m not myself an indiscriminate believer in the plethora of sightings and contact stories and tales of people meeting little green men from Mars who came popping up out of flying saucers,” she said defensively, “but stories of lights moving about the mountain peak have been circulating. And that isn’t all!”

  “What else?” asked Scorchy.

  “I’ve read reports by people who claim to have watched mystic rites on the top of Mount Shasta,” the girl said firmly. “Campers and forest rangers and other reliable, unconcerned witnesses. Some claim to have seen groups of robed men conducting odd ceremonies of some kind on the mountain, which they watched through field glasses ...”

  “Any pictures?” quipped Scorchy, unable to take this sort of thing very seriously.

  “Pictures?” Elvira Higgins repeated scathingly. “How many more do you want? You’ve got a pocketful of them right now!”

  Nick Naldini grinned satanically; Scorchy Muldoon looked glum.

  “You suggest, then, that Lucifer selected Mount Shasta because of its mysterious reputation among occultists?” Zarkon asked. The girl shrugged, then nodded.

  “Sure Strange things have been whispered about the place for years — long before this mad scientist arrived on the scene. It’s more than likely that he chose Mount Shasta, too, because the whole orientation of his phony mystic order is toward ancient Lemuria. That’s a mythical lost continent in the Pacific Ocean, you know, supposed to have been the home of an advanced civilization back in prehistoric times. One of the theories about Mount Shasta is that it and this whole part of the country is a surviving fragment of the legendary continent, which was not drowned when the rest of the land sunk. So I guess Shasta’s Lemurian connections worked in nicely when he decided to call his racket the ‘Brotherhood of Lemurian Wisdom.’ ”

  This was all news to Scorchy Muldoon, who listened closely to the girl’s sober account of these marvels.

  “Chief, any truth to this tale about Lemuria?” he piped up. “I mean, was there ever any such place out in the Pacific, or is it just the typical hooey?”

  Zarkon smiled one of his rare smiles. “The typical hooey, I believe, Scorchy. Doc Jenkins can give you the full story, but I believe geologists are of the opinion that there could not have been a major land-mass in the central Pacific at any point during the history of the human race on this planet. The notion was an invention of Madame Blavatsky, as I recall; obviously devised in imitation of the Atlantis legend, and picked up and elaborated in considerable detail by one of her followers, Scott-Elliot, and later borrowed and completely refurbished by a certain Colonel Churchward, who called it ‘Mu’ instead of ‘Lemuria.’ ”

  Nick Naldini had been ruminating on another side of the case, entirely. “Say, chief,” he spoke up, “you know, this doesn’t sound very typical of Sinestro at all, this phony cult, this occult mumbo-jumbo. The last time we tangled with this bird he was after the direct route to world power through wealth and influence over the government. This occult jazz just looks like too small potatoes for an ambitious gink like him.”

  “Why do you say that, Nick?”

  “Oh, you know! Where’s the money in this racket? Just bilking a few hundred gullible saps of their annual membership fees — it’s a fair living, I suppose, but it just doesn’t sound big-time enough to interest Sinestro.”

  “I believe that side of it was the least important,” said the Ultimate Man. “Power over the minds of men through their superstitions or religious beliefs is an insidious thing. Remember your history, Nick. Take the cult of assassins in the Middle East during the age of the Crusades. One cunning, unscrupulous fanatic, preying upon the ignorance and superstition of a semicivilized people, turned a minor schismatic splinter group of the Islamic faith into a dreaded invisible empire that dominated the political picture in Palestine for a generation. I refer to Hassan ibn Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain.”

  His voice became muted, his expression somber. “Power over men’s minds gives you control over their lives. Gordon Halleck said that Lucifer was intimidating wealthy and powerful and influential men, through terror and through the promise of miracle cures and healing powers. Wealth and secret influence, through such people, and an underground organization of fanatic, sincere, dedicated followers, led and captained, most likely, by veteran criminals ... there’s hardly any limit to what Lucifer could do. Swing one of his men into the governor’s mansion or the U. S. Senate or even the White House itself, perhaps? No, it’s the same Sinestro you and I fought once before. The difference is that this time he’s being more subtle in making his grab for power ...”

  His features, usually immobile, grew sad, and there was a haunted look about his probing, magnetic eyes. Scorchy and Nick said nothing, leaving him to lapse into grim silence. They were among the few living men on this earth who shared the incredible secret of his origin, and they knew that it was men like Sinestro, who strive to tyranny over men by preying upon their superstitious fears, that the Lord of the Unknown had been sent here to fight and to conquer.

  “There’s headquarters up ahead,” muttered Nick Naldini a few moments later. “I’ll pull up across the street.”

  Chapter 11 — The Death Secret

  Chief Orville Patterson was mighty pleased to see the Omega men and their mysterious leader. The fat, red-faced man swabbed his perspiring brow with a bright red bandanna and ushered them into the medical lab, where the bodies were already laid out.

  “I sure hope you can find somethin’, Prince,” he groaned. “This could just plain be the ruination of me, you know, if it gets out and the newspaper boys want to make a big thing of it! Four prisoners murdered in their cells, right under my dad-blamed nose! Worse thing that could possibly happen, and this an election year, too! With the governor steppin’ down and the field chock-full of hot-shot candidates, one of ‘em could grab on this as a law-an’order, police laxity issue, and run me right out of my job! Dang it all, I couldn’t get a job as third junior assistant dog-catcher, if they get ahold of this!”

  While Zarkon got ready to perform the autopsy, Robert Russell Ryan tried to console the unhappy state cop. “This sorry incident is only a minor part of a vast criminal conspiracy that caught everybody napping, Chief Patterson,” he murmured consolingly. “You, the city force, the DA, the feds — everybody! Nobody but an ignorant fool would hold you personally accountable for any laxity in this situation. We are pitted against a criminal mastermind, a criminal supergenius, says Prince Zarkon. My paper will take the lead in exonerating you from any conceivable charges of negligence, I assure you!”

  “That’s mighty comfortin’ to hear, Mr. Ryan,” grumbled the state cop. “Just let me get my hands on the bird behind all this, and you’ll see fast action! Any idea of who he is — or how he worked this blamed trick on me?”

  Zarkon had been working swiftly and unerringly, his hands as deft as those of the most skillful surgeon. In a remarkably brief time he had the answer. Cleaning his hands under the tap, he said: “The murderer used a poison known as gessarabya. A swift-acting poison that need only be dabbed on the bare skin to cause death.”

  “Never heard of it,” said the police surgeon, dubiously. Zarkon smiled.

  “I’m not surprised to hear it,” he said. “The New Guinea savages are the only people I know who ever use it. Undiluted, it kills instantly. You can bring down a full-grown tiger in mid-leap with it.”

  “But these guys didn’t keel over for quite a while after the phony lawyer left!” protes
ted Chief Orville Patterson.

  “Obviously, then, Lucifer employs a diluted form of gessarabya, or a minute, virtually microscopic amount of the poison,” replied the Man of Mysteries. “You say he shook hands with his pretended clients, and that he was wearing gloves at the time?”

  “That’s right.”

  “All he did, then, was to have a small sponge moistened with the poison in an insulated pocket, say in his jacket. Just before he entered the cell he must have unobtrusively slipped his hand into his pocket and surreptitiously dampened the tips of his specially gloved fingers against the sponge. He must have timed it to a nicety, having calculated well in advance just how swiftly the application would kill a grown man.”

  “But what about the death of MacAndrews?” protested Robert Russell Ryan. “According to the photographs MacAndrews took just minutes before he was murdered, Lucifer had bare hands.”

  “He may have worn flesh-colored gloves,” said Zarkon, “or he may have previously immunized himself so that he could apply the poison without harm to his own person. The pharmacopoeia contains a simple specific against the poison, developed years ago by British chemists troubled by uprising among the savages.”

  Chief Patterson scratched his head dubiously. “I don’t quite get it,” he said. “You say this reporter fellow was killed by the same dad-burned method? But he had a complete autopsy ... in fact, Mr. Ryan here had a whole planeload of medical big domes flown in from the medical college to check the corpse out from stem to stern, you might say. How come they didn’t find nothin’?”

  “Yes,” said the police surgeon, nodding vigorously. “The poison may be as rare as you say, sir — I really have no way of knowing without checking my library — but any foreign substance would have attracted their suspicions.”

  “Gessarabya leaves no residue in the body at all,” Zarkon assured him. “One of the common enzymes in the bloodstream acts as a catalyst, breaking down the poison, rendering it harmless. It becomes a simple colloid within minutes after death, and is thereafter impossible to detect.”

  The surgeon rubbed the bridge of his nose with the tip of one forefinger, still dubious.

  “Then may I ask, sir, how you detected it just now in the blood of these men?”

  Zarkon smiled. “Not in their blood, doctor; in the brain. The poison kills by rupturing the blood vessels in the forebrain. I simply looked for extraordinary lesions in the capillary system in that part of the body. You see, I know this man, Lucifer. I know something of his ways. He has an oriental biochemist in his employ, a Eurasian named Ching who, according to CIA reports, was active in Hanoi and in Peking before defecting to team with Lucifer. The man wrote his doctoral dissertation on native New Guinea poisons.”

  Removing his lab smock, Zarkon turned to the police chief and said: “I’m finished here, Chief Patterson. Shall we go into your office?”

  Chief Patterson fussed and fretted while Zarkon ordered coffee and sandwiches for his men, who had eaten nothing in hours and who now looked likely to go without dinner.

  “What can I do,” growled the state cop, “to stop this murderin’ maniac? Must be ‘ somethin’!”

  “There are several steps that should be taken at once,” said Zarkon, handing containers of coffee to his men and paying the boy. “The Brotherhood of Lemurian Wisdom has four branches — or lodges, as they are called. Our consultant on occult matters, Miss Higgins here, informs me that the Brotherhood has these centers located in Oakland, San Jose, and Los Angeles. Four of them in all, Los Angeles housing two of them, one of which is the so-called Mother Temple. And from MacAndrews’ notes on the case he lists four chief lieutenants to Lucifer, who are called Nergal, Pluto, Beelzebub, and Loki, after the gods of the underworld and of evil in various of the world’s mythologies. It seems very likely that each of Lucifer’s four lieutenants is in charge of one of the lodges. So I suggest the police co-ordinate a raid on all four lodges in order to arrest these four men, who are the most important of Lucifer’s confederates.”

  “Good idea,” sighed the police chief, wiping his forehead and sighing gustily. “Clever devil, that Lucifer! Did you catch the joke in the names? If these four chief hoods were recruited from the underworld, he’s really tipping his hand, naming them after gods of the underworld!”

  “I noticed the pun,” nodded Zarkon. “And I believe they were indeed recruited from the underworld, as you put it. One or more of them is likely to be on the FBI list, or in the ‘pink book’ the U. S. Attorney General maintains.”

  “So you think we oughts just move in and close ‘em down, eh? Gotta get warrants, though. What grounds do I use?”

  Zarkon suggested the four men would all probably be armed, or would have weapons in their private quarters, probably guns that were unlicensed. He added that the four lodges probably also contained illegal short-wave sending and receiving sets, according to data in MacAndrews’ notes. “But don’t just move in and jail the whole membership,” he advised. “I feel certain that by far the bulk of the membership of the cult is made up of decent, law-abiding citizens who would be astounded to learn that they belong to a criminal conspiracy.”

  Chief Patterson nodded and left the room briefly to give orders to his men regarding the raid on the regional branch headquarters of the Brotherhood of Lemurian Wisdom that Zarkon had proposed.

  “Chief, I thought MacAndrews said in his notes there were seven lieutenants, not four,” remarked Menlo Parker shrewdly. The Master of Fate agreed.

  “That is correct, Menlo. Besides the four in charge of the lodges there was MacAndrews himself, the fifth, who acted as a roving trouble-shooter to prove his commitment before being assigned a more permanent position of authority. The sixth was called Dis, and the seventh member, Shaitan; neither were present during the dawn conference at which Ahriman, or MacAndrews, received the death touch. Mr. Ryan, here, sent MacAndrews’ pictures to Washington via the teleprinter in his home. Washington called back while you men were loading the car. Brother Dis seems to be a Mafia deserter who went over to Lucifer with two crack teams of hit men ...”

  “Like Leo Martelli?” asked Elvira Higgins, excitedly. “The man I shot through the shoulder when their car forced Mr. Muldoon and me off the road?”

  “That is correct. Doc identified him at a glance, having committed the top-listed criminals on the FBI list to memory as part of his usual routine. Brother Dis is based in Las Vegas, having gone there just before the morning meeting on the mountaintop.”

  “That leaves Brother Shaitan,” mused Scorchy, rubbing his jaw. “Shaitan ... sounds like the Arab version of the devil.”

  “It is,” said Doc Jenkins in his thick, slow voice. “The Islamic equivalent of the Adversary of Jehovah in the Jewish mythology. The name is mentioned in the Koran —”

  He broke off as Chief Patterson came bustling into the room, growling and grumping. Rather incongruously, the fat, red-faced officer was carrying a slim black cane with a gold ball for its head.

  “That murderin’ sham lawyer skipped outa here in such a rush he left his fancy walkin’ stick behind,” he grumbled.

  Zarkon left his chair in a blur that made all present jump nervously. Flying across the room, the Ultimate Man snatched the article from the hands of the astounded officer and, whirling lithely on his toes, flung it directly through the window into the street below Chief Patterson’s fourth-floor office.

  “Out of the room, everybody!” Zarkon shouted. “Lucifer would never ‘forget’ something; if he left it behind, there was a good reas —”

  WHUMMPPH.

  In midair the walking stick vanished, blinking out of existence. A huge gasball swelled in its place, churning and seething. Tendrils of dull brown vapor seeped through the broken windowpane to wreathe about the shock-frozen form of Chief Patterson’s assistant, who stood nearest the window of them all.

  The man gasped and tumbled to the floor a fraction of a second later. Zarkon’s men, crowding toward the door, saw their chief hurt
le himself at Patterson’s desk, snatching up an electric fan and thumbing it into life. Holding the whirring fan directly before his face like a shield, the Man of Mysteries crossed to where the hapless patrolman lay sprawled, caught him by one leg, and dragged him to the door, moving backward and keeping the fan before him as he retreated.

  Once in the hall, Zarkon knelt and swiftly examined the limp officer.

  “He’ll be all right,” he rapped. “A potent but harmless anesthetic gas. Probably solidified into crystalline form, painted gold, and inserted into the head of that trick cane. Lucifer timed it so the crystalline substance returned to its vapor state about the time I would have finished the autopsy.”

  Two officers came pelting down the stairs from the floor above, yelling inarticulately and windmilling their arms. Before they could make themselves understood, the p.a. system came on with an ear-splitting crackle.

  “Attention, all personnel! Attention, all personnel! Unmarked helicopter attempting a landing on the roof of the headquarters building! Attention, all personnel! Break out riot guns and flak jackets from the wardroom on the double ...”

  “What the blazes is goin’ on now?” gasped Chief Patterson bewilderedly.

  “Lucifer’s men, arriving to take us away,” said Zarkon with a tight-lipped smile. “They think to find the occupants of the building gassed into unconsciousness. Come on, men!”

  He whirled and ran up the stairs toward the roof, with the Omega men at his heels.

  Chapter 12 — The Battle on the Rooftop

  Zarkon went up the two flights of stairs to the roof in long, easy, effortless strides, and reached the roof minutes ahead of the others, who came puffing and panting after, with the fat state cop, wheezing and blowing like a beached whale, far in the rear.

  Sprinting across the flat, open space, Zarkon crouched in the shelter of an air vent whose heavy sheet metal ought to be sufficient to deflect any bullets that might come his way.