The Wrath of Fu Manchu and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

from military bases. I anticipate that we shall be reported once more as a ‘flying saucer’.”
    “Excellency, surely life is a flying saucer, a saucer in which we are whirled out of eternity into eternity…”
    * * *
    “It’s now quite evident,” Nayland Smith was saying, “that Orson must have been responsible for searching the stateroom of the woman you knew as Mrs van Roorden while she was at the purser’s cocktail party. No doubt it was Orson, too, who put her Burmese bodyguard to sleep. These typed notes wrapped around the jade baton make it clear that he had risen high in the Si-Fan organisation.”
    “What an amazing man!” Thurston exclaimed.
    “Amazing indeed. It’s to Selwyn Orson that we owed the first news of the Fort Knox conspiracy. At that time he was in Egypt, where he had been called to a personal interview with the president of the Si-Fan. Steps were taken here. And an attempt was made to find the Cairo headquarters of the society.” Nayland Smith snapped his fingers irritably. “Next to impossible to get action under the present Egyptian government.”
    He was pacing up and down the room like a caged tiger, smoking almost ceaselessly.
    “Do you mean,” Thurston asked, “that these people have agents in Egypt?”
    “All over the world! The Si-Fan has expanded enormously since I first came in touch with it. Orson seems to have posed as a Frenchman, which he could do very easily, as he had lived for many years in Paris. He was one of the deputies selected by the Si-Fan to attend a secret conference here in New York!”
    “But how do you suppose he discovered the real identity of Mrs van Roorden?”
    “I don’t think he
had
discovered it, until the night he burgled her cabin. He makes it quite plain in these notes, and in his earlier despatch from Cairo (which I have seen), that no officer of the Si-Fan knows another by sight. But he knows all the lesser members under his immediate control. He was evidently sent from Egypt to Java. The Si-Fan has been very busy there, rubbing out some of the leading Communists!”
    “What! The Si-Fan is anti-Communist?”
    “Somewhat!” snapped Nayland Smith grimly. “Orson, I believe, met Mrs van Roorden in Java, and then, later, on the
Lauretania
. He doesn’t state, here, what aroused his suspicion, but he
does
say that he was waiting for a chance to search her cabin.” He pointed to the jade baton. “This is what he found.”
    Thurston picked up and stared again at the sheet of thin parchment which the baton had contained. It was half covered with heavy, square writing.
    The message, in English, was in cramped script resembling old Black Letter. It authorised the bearer, referred to as “my daughter,” to preside at the conference in the unavoidable absence of “the President.”
    “I don’t understand,” Thurston said, “how such a conference could take place, if it’s true that no officer of this society knows another by sight.”
    Nayland Smith paused in his restless promenade, picked up the green mask and dropped it back in the bag.
    “Clearly, they all wear these things—not to frighten one another, but simply to conceal their identity. It’s not a new trick. It was used, in the form of hoods, by Inquisitors of the Holy Office in Spain and is still popular with the Ku Klux Klan.”
    Thurston was studying a sort of crest which served as letterhead:

    “What does this thing mean?” he asked.
    Nayland Smith glanced aside and then continued his pacing.
    “I have come across it only once before. Out of context, it really means nothing. But it could be construed to mean ‘The higher’ or ‘The one above’. it is evidently the sign of the Si-Fan.”
    The message bore no name; only the imprint of a seal on green wax:

    “And this seal?”
    “Is the seal of
Dr Fu-Manchu
…”
    The door-bell buzzed.
    “That will be Harkness.”
    Smith crossed the lobby and threw the door open. Raymond Harkness, of the FBI, came in, a slight man