The New Adventures of Richard Knight Page 11

  Doyle nodded, then grabbed the man by the lapels and showed him the wall again. “Sure thing, knucklehead! You talk to me and I’ll make sure you can still walk after you’re done. Spill it!”

  “I already told the cops and the Feds! The Spanish girl landed here in that hired plane from out east. She asked for a cab. I got her one. She went off, was gone all day. Came back late that night and took off without even a word.”

  “You didn’t talk to her?” Knight demanded. “Did you see her up close?”

  “Knight, they identified her jewelry,” Doyle reminded his buddy.

  “Did you see her up close? Her face?” Knight insisted to the manager.

  The frightened man shook his head. “Like I said, it was dark. I dunno what the big hurry was, but she called that pilot she’d hired to come at once and they took off right away. No flight plan.”

  “What were conditions like?”

  “It was mild and dry, like now. Look, you can’t just…”

  Doyle shook the clerk again. “Listen, we lost a real swell gal when that plane went down, so when you tell us you’re too busy an’ important to help us then we get riled. You don’t wanna see me riled. You sure as hell don’t wanna see my buddy riled. Just answer our questions.”

  Knight had gotten a grip of his temper. That keen brain which made him the finest of Brett’s agents was working again. “How did you find out the plane went down?” he wanted to know.

  “One of our regular flyers spotted the wreck the next morning – yesterday. The debris was plastered all over the desert. She’d come down hard.” The manager swallowed. “The plane, I mean.”

  Knight and Doyle exchanged looks. “What cab company did you call?” Knight asked.

  ***

  The black cab drew up by a dilapidated shack outside Altadena. The cabin was battered and uncared for, its sun-bleached paint peeling away. “This is the place,” the driver announced.

  “Wait for us,” Knight told him. He climbed out of the car and examined the mailbox. “Look at this, Doyle!”

  “H. Hogan?” Doyle read.

  “Honey Hogan,” Knight supplied. “Marcy Alden married Frank Hogan. This is where the Senator’s missing granddaughter lives.”

  “So that’s what Benita was doing! She was checking up on the missing kid. Remember how she was asking questions at the funeral? About the gal not being there for her grandpa’s burial? It bugged her.”

  “And she has – she had the cash to chase all across the country on a whim to hunt Honey down.” There was a catch in Knight’s voice as he remembered he had to speak about Benita in the past tense.

  Doyle pretended not to hear it. He followed his friend up to the porch. Old insect screens were nailed to the rotting wood. The building looked just like its neighbors on either side, one more of a long row of cheap homes as far as the eye could see.

  Knight slipped the lock with no effort at all and went into the cabin. It was hot and stuffy. Flies played around a discarded plate of beans. There was nobody in the three-room hut.

  “What was this Honey Hogan doing out here so far from home?” the ex-Marine wondered.

  Knight took a brief look round. “Why do so many girls come to Hollywood? She wanted to make it in the movies.” He pointed to a sad pile of curled publicity photos showing an effervescent brunette, to the yellowed pile of scripts discarded in a corner, to the wall calendar with a mere two audition dates circled in red then crossed out.

  Doyle admired the glossy 6x10s. He was a connoisseur of dames and Honey Hogan was worth giving the time of day. “Was being an actress the scandal the General talked about? Or was there more?”

  Knight emptied out a desk drawer. He found a bank book. “There was more,” he guessed. He showed Doyle the regular monthly payments that had kept Honey ahead of the rent. “I think Honey had a backer.”

  Doyle looked around the seedy cabin. “Not much of one. This place is a pit!”

  “She was getting paid enough to afford something more upscale,” Knight admitted. He frowned. “There’s something about this…”

  He paused in mid-sentence. “Get down!” he shouted to Doyle, then grabbed the pug and dragged him to the ground. A second later the windows shattered in as the cabin was sprayed with machine-gun fire!

  Knight and Doyle reacted like the veterans they were, breaking and rolling to find better cover behind heavy furniture. Above them the walls were perforated with holes. Glassware and china shattered into fragments.

  Knight reached the door. He could barely glimpse a pair of men out front holding Thompsons, hosing the house. He pulled out a Magnum and returned fire.

  The gunsels evidently didn’t care for taking what they were giving out. They retreated quickly back toward a Sedan. One of them hurled something through the broken front window.

  “Grenade!” called Doyle.

  The two men in the cabin each leaped for a different exit. Knight rolled out through the door he’d been shooting from. Doyle dove through the wide window. The grenade went up, filling the interior of the shack with flame and hot metal.

  The cheap roof couldn’t take it. The whole cabin collapsed in like a house of cards.

  The black Sedan screamed away up the road, receding fast.

  Doyle raced to the cab. “After ‘em!” he ordered the driver before he realized that the man was dead. The whole front of the vehicle had been peppered with machine gun fire, rendering it useless.

  Knight came over, his eyes blazing. “So we know whatever happened to Benita wasn’t an accident. When we find those men, they’ll wish to God they’d never heard of her.”

  Doyle nodded, but he was distracted. the ex-marine had glimpsed the shooters as they'd fled. He'd seen their faces, covered in black carved masks like some medieval freak show.

  Knight rose from examining the dead man. “Somebody doesn't like us poking around,” he noted.

  “Somebody likes playing dress up when they go out to murder,” answered Doyle. He told his partner what he'd seen.

  Knight frowned. “This gets stranger.” He glanced at the burning cabin. It was a bare blazing frame by now. There was nothing left to examine. “Only one other place to look,” he said grimly. And he clenched his fists.

  Knight’s credentials were enough to get him the autopsy report on the bodies pulled from the crash, Benita and the others. The doctor hadn’t expected the G-man to demand to see the remains themselves.

  “Are you sure?” asked Doyle. “They were pretty burned up even before they were, well, scattered.”

  “I’m sure,” Knight said grimly. The jewelry was Benita’s alright, a necklace and bracelet she’d brought from the Lost Valley, their gold melted and deformed by the heat of the crash. Knight had to be sure of the rest.

  Doyle held back, watching his pal with concern.

  Knight unfastened the canvas bags hiding the remains of pilot and passenger. He forced himself to study them piece by piece, analytically. This wasn’t the time for guilt or remorse. That would come later – with vengeance!

  He held the small shattered skull that had once been a warm beautiful woman. He turned it over in his fingers. The jawbone was gone but some upper teeth were still intact.

  He paused, scarcely moving. “Doyle, come here. Look at this.”

  The Irishman came forward. “What’s up?”

  Knight broke loose a tooth from the charred skull and held it to the light. “See that cavity filling? That’s not right.”

  “I don’t know that Benita had fillings,” Doyle said, frowning to remember.

  “If she did they’d be silver or gold from the Lost Valley, not this cheap amalgam,” Knight replied. He let out a long breath. “Benita could be alive!”

  Doyle tried to keep up. “Hold it! If this ain’t Benita then who is it? The guy at the airstrip said he saw…”

  “Said he saw a girl looking like the one he expected to see, at a distance, in the dark, leaving fast. The last time anyone saw Benita for sure was
when the taxi driver watched her get out of his cab at Honey's place - Honey the actress. Nobody saw Benita leave. Nobody saw her up close at all after that.”

  “You’re saying Honey Hogan impersonated Benita, flew off, and crashed the plane with herself in it?”

  Knight shook his head. “Doesn’t have to be like that. Look, we know Honey was taking a paycheck from someone for something. Benita’s sharp. What if she stumbled onto it? So Honey calls her sponsor and Benita has to disappear. Honey’s ordered to go to the airfield, dressed in Benita’s clothes with Benita’s jewelry. She fools the pilot – it’s late and dark- or she bribes him. She orders him to fly to some rendezvous spot she’s agreed with her benefactor. There must be a hundred little airstrips round here.”

  “Nobody knows what time the Bellanca went down,” Doyle realized. “It could have detoured anywhere first!”

  “And anyone could have tampered with it wherever it went. Or maybe drugged the pilot so he passed out in the air.”

  Doyle looked at the sad bones. “So somebody decided to take Honey out of the picture as well and use her to cover a kidnapping. I guess she didn’t see that coming.”

  “Whoever it was went to a lot of trouble to keep Benita alive while we thought she was dead,” Knight pointed out. “I want to know who and why. And fast. Benita’s in a whole lot of trouble!”

  CHAPTER III

  THE EXPERIMENTS OF DOCTOR NADALMETZGER

  Benita awoke with a pounding headache and a cramp in her arms. As she returned to consciousness she found her upper limbs were pinioned in a thick padded canvas – a straitjacket!

  She opened her eyes. The cold stone floor her cheek rested on came into focus. The cell was small and irregular, carved from a chamber in natural rock. The only light came from a tiny barred window above a steel door.

  The Spanish girl tried to think how she’d got there. She remembered the ride out to Miss Hogan’s house, introducing herself to the wayward granddaughter, accepting a cup of coffee – then nothing.

  She struggled herself up into a sitting position. It wasn’t easy with pinioned arms. She inched her way over to the door.

  There was graffiti etched on the walls. Someone had carved a dire warning, with bloody fingernails and who knew how much patience: THEY WILL TAKE EVERYTHING FROM YOU IN THIS PLACE UNTIL THERE’S NOTHING LEFT.

  Even as Benita considered the horror and desperation behind those words the door clanged as it swung open. The girl scrabbled away as she saw two men in dark robes. Carved ebony masks obscured their faces.

  She couldn’t resist them. They hauled her up and dragged her out of the cell.

  That was when she saw the skulls. The chamber beyond was lined with them, hundreds of pale charnel relics covering the walls and arches. In the dim light of the electric bulbs ribboned from the roof the hollow eye sockets seemed to be weeping.

  Benita was pushed forward on bare stumbling feet through a skull-lined archway out into a much larger cavern. The girl couldn’t tell how far it went. There was a ledge and a drop. A cold irregular draft rose from the darkness below, far beyond the range of the feeble gas-filled bulbs to penetrate.

  A dozen ragged men and women and two children knelt on the edge of the abyss, staring in. They did not move. They showed no sign of even noticing her being dragged past them.

  The masked men prodded Benita to another archway, then down a corridor. She thought of protesting, or asking questions, or demanding explanations, but she knew that was what they were waiting for. They wanted her frightened and helpless. She tried to think what Richard would do.

  The passageway twisted and turned, following the natural flaws and tunnels under the mountain. Benita glimpsed a short stairway leading to iron cell cages and another down into what could have been a laboratory or might have been a torture chamber. Then her captors halted at a paneled wooden door and knocked politely.

  The brass plate on the office read ‘Dr Wolfgang Nadalmetzger – Director’.

  “Enter.” The voice was deep and cultured. With more experience of the outside world Benita might have detected the Germanic intonation.

  The masked guards hustled their captive into a book-lined study. A gaunt silver haired Teuton sat behind a leather-topped desk. As he saw Benita he closed the file in front of him and reached for another. “Senora Nayarre. Please have a seat.”

  Benita didn’t have a choice. The guards pushed her down into the chair opposite the Director. She noticed it was heavily reinforced. There were loops where restraint straps could be fastened.

  “I am Dr Nadalmetzger,” her host introduced himself. “Welcome to my Hostage Academy.”

  Benita’s fear and frustration welled up. “This is not how sane people welcome visitors,” she spat.

  “A Latin temper,” the doctor observed. He made a note in his file. “I understand that you grew up isolated from the modern world in a so-called Lost Valley. I look forward to examining the very unique psyche that must have given you.”

  Benita looked at the waiting men in their carved ebony masks and monkish robes, then at the gaunt Director who was regarding her with scholarly anticipation. “I suppose I had better ask the questions you expect of me. Where am I? Why am I here? What are your intentions?”

  Nadalmetzger made another annotation. “Excellent! You will be one of the interesting studies. I can already tell. To answer your enquiries, you are in the Hostage Academy, a unique programme that holds the loved ones of key politicians, industrialists, and military leaders to ensure those power brokers’ tractability. You are my guest because you stumbled upon one of our substitutions intended to prevent the kidnapping of our hostages becoming publicly known and because you are the dear ward of the Army’s Chief of Intelligence, a very useful asset indeed.”

  Benita shied back as the doctor leaned forward to brush her cheek.

  “As for my intentions, I plan to subject you to the same process that all our subjects experience here – a regime of discipline, psychological conditioning, and mental training designed to ensure your eventual willing obedience to the Academy.”

  Benita thought of the kneeling captives staring into the darkness. “I will resist you,” she promised.

  Another note. “I had hoped as much,” Nadalmetzger assured her. “Otherwise, where is the interest?”

  ***

  Benita wasn’t taken back to the stone cell. Instead she found herself thrown into one of the metal cages she’d glimpsed earlier. She dropped down onto the rotting straw. The barred door slammed shut on her.

  Even so the Spanish girl felt safer locked in a dingy box than she had under the cold inspection of Dr Nadalmetzger.

  Benita struggled to balance herself so she could scramble to her knees.

  “You have to do it calmly,” a voice told her out of the darkness. “Roll onto your back, bring your legs up slowly, use your shoulder as a pivot.”

  Benita stared into the gloom. “Who’s there?”

  “No one,” came the reply. It was a woman’s voice, young, quiet, without hope.

  “I can hear you. I know you’re there. I am Benita. Who are you?”

  “Names are not allowed here,” the speaker confessed. “They will take yours from you soon. I was Hostage One Hundred and Nine for a long time, but now I am Test Subject 109. Soon I will be nothing.”

  Benita took the girl’s advice and managed to scramble to an upright position. “What do you mean, nothing? I don’t understand any of this.”

  “You’re not meant to. I expect the Director placed you with me to see what you will become in the end. He did something similar with me when I first arrived.” A half sob. “I believed that I could resist becoming the poor sad broken thing that cringed in the cell next to me.”

  Benita wished her arms were free so she could reach through the bars and comfort the woman. “Don’t give up hope. I have friends. Good friends. They will not abandon me. We will be rescued.”

  “Your friends will think you dead. An accident wil
l have been arranged, even a body. They will mourn you and go on. Except for whoever it is in your life that they want to control – a father, a brother, a husband. He will learn of your true fate. He will know that his cooperation is the difference between you surviving here as a Hostage or dying here as a Test Subject. It is very easy to slip from one to the other.”

  “That doctor, he tries to brainwash his prisoners?”

  “Oh, the Director is a very clever man. A genius in his field. He has published learned papers. Some whisper that he runs this Academy not for the wealth from the stolen secrets his puppets bring him but to learn the secrets of the mind that can only be fathomed from shattering it. Deprivation, humiliation, pain, isolation… he has so many tools to pursue his terrible research.”

  Something in 109’s voice warned Benita not to ask further about the woman’s experiences of Nadalmetzger’s experiments. “There must be some escape.” Yet the looming void past the chasm’s ledge seemed the only way.

  “He will take everything,” 109 warned. “Your defiance, your dreams, your pride, your will. Each will be dissected and recorded neatly in his notebooks. Your whole life will be cut away slice by slice for his dissertation. And while he destroys you your loved one will damn himself. That is all that is left to you here… in the Hostage Academy.”

  CHAPTER IV

  ORDERS BE DAMNED!

  Brett tossed the folder back onto the desk and shook his head. “It’s an imaginative theory, Knight. No one’d like to see Benita alive and well more than me. But I can’t authorize you to go running off across the country on some mad chase for phantoms in black masks who you say swapped my ward for an actress.”

  Richard Knight jerked his finger toward the dossier. “Read the damned report, sir! We have forensics on the skull. The filling’s modern. The other bone measurements don’t quite match. That wasn’t Benita in the plane. And a close inspection of the wreckage actually found bullet holes in the fuselage! That Bellanca didn’t crash. It was shot down!”