Nick Carter - Death of the Falcon

Crossing the hall, I walked through another open door into what I guessed from its size to be the master bedroom of the house. The woman I was hunting had been neat; the clothes were tidily arranged on hangers and her shoes were in boxes stacked on the floor of the large double closet. Apparently, she and her partner had maintained a strictly business arrangement despite living together for about a year. Only one of the two bed pillows was rumpled. It suddenly struck me that the spread on the bed was tucked in on only one side. She must have been making it up when the gunman got to the second floor.

Dropping to my knees, I looked under the bed. Blind eyes stared back at me from a face that must have been pretty before a bullet tore away part of the jaw, splattering blood over long black hair that fanned out on the floor. She was wearing a quilted yellow housecoat and the front of it was caked with clotted blood where the second shot struck her.

I dropped the bedspread and got to my feet. Moving swiftly through the rest of the upstairs, I checked out a third bedroom and the master bath, both of which testified further to the neatness of the CIA housekeeper. Hidden behind a stack of towels in a linen closet, I found a powerful two-way radio, set on a frequency which I recognized as one assigned to the CIA. It probably was operated only when the safe house was being used. There was little need for direct communication with the intelligence agency’s super-secret headquarters near Langley, Virginia, except at such times. I flipped the receiver switch but no noise came from the set. Feeling behind the cabinet, I picked up some wires that had been pulled loose and cut.

Going back downstairs, I stood in the front foyer and listened intently for some sound that might indicate the Sword and Abdul Bedawi, hopefully Sherima and, probably two of the three assassins from the camper still were in the house. Only the ticking of an old Seth Thomas beehive clock on a sideboard in the dining room broke the silence.

I tiptoed back to the kitchen and found a door that had to lead to the basement. I tested the knob and found that it was unlocked, so I eased it ajar. A slight hum came through the crack, but no human sounds carried up the flight of about ten steps I saw as I pulled the door open wide.

The basement light was on, however, and below I could see a linoleum-covered floor. As I inched down the steps, a washer-dryer combination came into view against a far wall. An oil burner and water heater were off behind the stairs. Almost at the bottom of the steps, I stopped short, suddenly realizing that only about one-third of the basement was exposed; maybe less, I decided, recalling the rambling rooms upstairs.

A concrete block wall cut off the remainder of the cellar. A wall obviously added long after the house had been built, because the gray blocks were much newer than those that formed the other three sides of the area I had entered. Quickly estimating the size of the house itself, I calculated that the CIA had created a hidden room, or rooms, with a total area of about fifteen hundred square feet. This, then, was the safest part of the safe house, where friends — or enemies — needing protection might be sheltered. The interior is probably soundproofed, too, I guessed, so that if someone were hiding out there, no noise would betray his presence if neighbors should unexpectedly call on the resident agents.

My assumption that no sound would penetrate the walls and ceiling of the secret hideout convinced me that Sherima and her captors were inside, too. Waiting for something or someone, I suspected, but didn’t know what or whom. Certainly, not for any signal on the radio upstairs, for its usefulness had been destroyed by whoever had cut the wires. There was a good chance, though, that the message to Adabi—”The Sword is poised to strike”— had been transmitted from here before the radio was put out of commission.

There didn’t seem to be any entrance into the concrete-sheathed room, but I moved to the wall for a closer look. The CIA had created an excellent illusion; probably, when an explanation of the unusually tiny basement was necessary, should the “young couple” have to admit meter readers or utility repairmen to the basement, they would say, perhaps, that the people from whom they bought the house had not finished the cellar for lack of funds, and had just closed off the remainder of the excavation. I could almost hear the pretty raven-haired woman telling a curious electric company man: “Oh, we’re going to finish it ourselves someday when mortgage money is easier to come by. But we got such a good buy on the house because it didn’t have a full basement.”

Near the furthest point on the wall from the stairway, I found what I was looking for. A slight crack in the blocks outlined a section about seven feet high and maybe thirty-six inches wide. It had to be the door to whatever lay beyond, but how did it open? The glare from the unshaded bulbs overhead provided plenty of light as I hunted for some sort of switch or button that would open the concealed door. There didn’t seem to be any such device on the wall itself, so I began looking around in other parts of the cellar. I had to get inside that door fast; time was running out on me.

I searched for ten frustrating minutes without finding anything. I was just about to begin pressing on the individual concrete blocks in the wall, hoping that one of them might be the key. As I stepped back toward the hidden door, I passed one of the large supporting beams, and there, from the corner of my eye I saw what had been in front of me all along — a light switch. But what did this switch turn on? The one at the top of the basement stairs obviously controlled the only two bulbs, and they already were on.

I checked the wiring that led from the switch. Perhaps it had something to do with the laundry equipment or the oil burner. Instead, the wire went straight up to the ceiling and across to a point near the crack that marked the entrance to the secret room. With my Luger in one hand, I flicked the switch with the other. For a moment, nothing happened. Then I felt a slight vibration in the floor under my feet and heard a muffled scraping as the section of wall started to swing outward on well-oiled hinges, obviously powered by an electric motor somewhere behind it.

Gun in hand, I stepped through the opening as soon as it was wide enough to admit me. The scene that greeted me would have rivaled the cover of one of the old pulp magazines.

Tied spread-eagle to the far wall opposite me was Sherima. She was completely naked, but I didn’t have time to appreciate the lush curves of her tiny figure. I was too busy looking at the man standing beside her, and in covering the others in the room with my Luger. Abdul was standing close to Sherima, and I could tell from the expression on her face that he had been doing something distasteful that was interrupted by my arrival. Seated at a desk in the large open area that had been created by the CIA was a well-dressed Arab, whom I felt certain was the man Abdul had picked up at the Adabian Embassy — the one Hawk and I had figured to be the Sword. Apparently, he had been working on some papers; he lifted his head from his paperwork to stare at me and the gun.

Two other Arabs were lounging in another corner of the hideaway. One was seated on the bed normally used by the CIA’s temporary guests. An automatic rifle lay beside him. Its twin was in the hands of the last of this group of occupants of the government hideout. He had started to raise the rifle as I stepped into the room, but stopped as the muzzle of my pistol swung in his direction. None of them seemed surprised to see me, except Sherima, whose eyes had widened, first in astonishment, and then registered embarrassment at her nudity. I was certain that I had been expected when Abdul spoke: