The Avenger 1 - Justice, Inc. Read Online Free PDF Page B

fuselage. Quite recently, in fact.
    “So they’ve prepared for investigation,” Benson whispered.
    Someone might look at the ship in which two souls had fantastically and impossibly vanished. So somebody had switched numbers. It was the S404 that he had traveled in. It was the S404 that had the trapdoor. But this ship was numbered S402.
    Benson moved to the side. He climbed up into the fuselage. Into the body of the big plane. Light from the hangar penetrated the airliner’s windows and gave him dim illumination.
    There was a thick carpet on the floor. It seemed to run under the seats, but as he tugged at it a strip rose in his hands. He folded it back. And there, in the metal floor was an oblong crack six by three.
    The trapdoor.
    Benson was a strong man, to begin with. And he had been tempered in the fire of an almost unendurable tragedy till he was hardly a man; he was a machine of vengeance. But the sight of this thing brought back in a rush all the awful torture of his loss.
    Through that oblong, gravelike in its dimensions, his Alicia and their wee Alice had been dropped. There was no doubt of it. It was the only thing to explain the bizarre disappearance.
    Far over the grim black surface of Lake Ontario, those two he loved had been dropped. Slugged first, perhaps, to prevent outcry! Who knew? Equipped hurriedly with parachutes, just possibly, so they’d land alive? He tried fiercely to believe that—and could not. The only motive for such a thing would have been a kidnap plot against them. And he had received no ransom demand since the terrible trip.
    Benson leaned forward. His forehead touched the back of one of the seats and rested there. His shoulders shook a little in the last extremity of torment.
    And all the time—his face did not move a muscle. Not a line! It was a dreadful thing to see that dead face so changeless in spite of the raging tornado behind it.
    Through that opening, into the black water thousands of feet below—
    It was while he leaned shuddering there, for the moment as helpless as a child in his colossal grief, that the dark figure crept into the plane behind him from the hangar.
    Ordinarily a thousand little nerves would have felt the tiny shift of the plane on its great landing wheels as a man’s weight was added to it. Ordinarily a sense of hearing miraculously keen would have caught the faint rasp of moving clothes. But coming up behind the steel-spring adventurer with the deadly cold eyes just now was as easy as approaching a blind man.
    The figure behind Benson paused a moment. Then its arm went up. Light glittered on a heavy wrench. The arm came down—

    At the Hotel Ely, MacMurdie waited in the lobby. He had gone to the address of the friend given him by Benson. Under his arm was a small but heavy package. MacMurdie did not know what was in the package. He was waiting for Benson to come and take it, and tell, if he pleased, what he’d found out at the flying field.
    But Benson did not come. And MacMurdie’s dour blue eyes went more coldly blue than ever.
    Something in the man with the dead, white face from which the pale eyes peered so icily, had got under the skin of the lonely Scot. He was as worried by Benson’s continued absence as he would be if he’d known the man for ten years instead of as many hours.
    There was a commotion at the desk. MacMurdie looked in that direction. A taxicab driver was arguing with the clerk.
    “—looked back into the rear, and the guy wasn’t there. All the way to the airport and back on the meter. I want my dough.”
    MacMurdie got up and walked toward the desk. The clerk said something he couldn’t hear.
    “He’s said to come here to the Hotel Ely. He must be registered here. Naw, I don’t know his name. But I want my dough for that trip to the airport and back.”
    MacMurdie’s knobby, mallet-like hand came down on the driver’s shoulder.
    “Who are ye talking about, mon?”
    “Some guy, looked like he was from the West. Picked