The Death Instinct Read Online Free PDF

fingertips came away red.
        'You don't look so good,' said Littlemore, looking in through the doorway.
        'I'm fine,' Younger replied. 'Might have been finer if you hadn't deprived me of my assistant medical officer. You said you only needed her for half an hour.'
        'Colette?' asked Littlemore. 'I did.'
        'You did what?'
        'I brought her back after half an hour. She was going to a drugstore.'
        Neither man spoke.
        'Where's a telephone?' Younger asked. 'I'll try the hotel.'
        Inside the Stock Exchange, Younger called the Commodore Hotel. Miss Rousseau, he was informed, had not been back since the early morning. Younger asked to be put through to her room, to speak with her brother.
        'I'm sorry, Dr Younger,' said the receptionist, 'but he hasn't come back either.'
        'The boy went out?' asked Younger. 'By himself?'
        'By himself?' said the receptionist in a peculiar voice.
        'Yes - did he go out by himself?' asked Younger, irritation rising along with concern.
        'No, sir. You were with him.'

Chapter Three
        
        The attack on Wall Street of September 16, 1920, was not only the deadliest bombing in the nation's hundred-fifty-year history. It was the most incomprehensible. Who would detonate a six-hundred- pound explosive in one of New York's busiest plazas at the most crowded time of day?
        Only one word, according to the New York Times, could describe the perpetrators of such an act: terrorists. The Washington Post opined that the attack was 'an act of war,' demanding an immediate counterattack from the United States Army. But war with what country, what foreign nation, what enemy? There was no answer. In this respect the attack on Wall Street was not only appalling, but appallingly familiar.
        Fifteen million souls had perished in the Great War - a number almost beyond human compass. Yet despite this staggering toll, the war had been fathomable. Armies mobilized and demobilized. Countries were invaded and invaders repelled. Men went to the front and, much ol' the time, returned. War had limits. War came to an end.
        But by 1920 the world had become used to a new kind of war. It had started a quarter-century earlier, with a wave of assassinations. In 1894, the President of France was murdered; in 1898, the Empress of Austria; in 1900, the King of Italy; in 1901, President McKinley of the United States; in 1912, the Prime Minister of Spain; and of course in 1914, a Hapsburg archduke, launching the great conflagration. Assassination as such was nothing new, but these killings were different.
        Most of them lacked any clear, concrete objective. They lacked even the erratic rationality of a festering grudge.
        All, however, were somehow the same. All were committed by poor young men, usually foreign, linked by shadowy international networks and sharing in a death-dealing ideology that made them seem almost to welcome their own demise. The assassinations appeared to be an attack on all Western nations, on civilization itself. The perpetrators were called by many names: anarchists, socialists, nationalists, fanatics, extremists, communists. But in the newspapers and in public oratory, one name joined them all: terrorist.
        In 1919, the bombings on American soil began. On April 28, a small brown package was delivered to the Mayor of Seattle, who had recently broken up a general strike. The return address said 'Gimbel Brothers'; a handwritten label promised 'Novelty - a sample.' Inside lay a wooden tube that was indeed a novelty. It contained an acid detonator and a stick of dynamite. The crude bomb failed to explode. But the next day an identical novelty, delivered to the home of a former United States senator, blew off the hands of the unlucky housemaid who opened it.
        The following evening, riding home from work in a New York subway, a mail clerk reading the newspaper realized that