The Shadow (22 page)

Three minutes and four flights of stairs later, he was even more bewildered to run into Margo, who was hurrying down a hallway, accompanied by a man wearing a peacoat and green corduroys. She rushed into his arms and hugged him.

“Margo, where are we?” Lane asked in obvious distress. “Please, tell me what’s going on.”

Margo took hold of his hand. “Well, see, there’s this guy, Shiwan Khan—” She stopped herself and swung to the unidentified man. “Shrevvy, you better go for the police.”

The man nodded and ran off. Lane gazed at his daughter in consternation.

“Dad, the whole story’s going to have to wait until later,” she told him. “But in the meantime, there’s something you’ve got to do—right now.”

Lane shook his head. “Do about what, dear?”

“About the atom bomb!”

The Shadow made a soft landing. He calculated that he hadn’t fallen more than thirty feet, and the fall seemed to have delivered him into an outsize laundry bin. Overhead was what could have been a laundry chute—three chutes, in fact, each with its own heap of delivered goods. On closer inspection, however, he realized that he hadn’t dropped onto soiled clothing, bedding, or tablecloths, but onto scraps of fabric and carpet remnants apparently pitched down the chutes during final construction of the Moonlight Café.

The Shadow scrambled down off the pile and planted his feet on the floor. His cat’s eyes made sufficient use of the dim light to define his immediate surroundings: the room was round and approximated the dimensions of Khan’s throne room. He reasoned that he was still within the Monolith’s cylindrical crown, possibly directly beneath the dance floor. Indeed, he could hear the humming of the complex mechanism that governed the floor’s spin and pitch.

The Shadow backhanded blood from one cheek and adjusted his hold on the handgun’s nacre grip. Ahead of him lay an assortment of objects he didn’t identify as tables until he was almost on top of them. There had to be at least sixty of them, assembled or in parts, scattered about, stacked up, leaning against one another. Further along were chairs, in pretty much the same state of disarray. Next came the pieces of a portable stage, column bases and capitals, lengths of hardwood flooring and arcs of treading for the stairs that surrounded the dance floor, curtain rods, fabric-wrapped cornices, panes of window glass, even bedframes, mattresses, and mirrors. The Shadow felt as if he were maneuvering his way through the world’s largest attic.

But neither sign nor sound of Shiwan Khan, only the wavering hum of electric motors and a gentle whirring of gears.

A few minutes of stalking delivered The Shadow into an aisle formed by a palisade of tall, brocaded curtains and a domino arrangement of full-length mirrors—some of them in freestanding frames; others of the sort typically found affixed to the backs of bathroom doors. At the end of the aisle, remote light gleamed from a faintly reflective surface.

Into which Khan suddenly stepped.

As if unbidden, The Shadow’s automatic spoke, and Khan’s image splintered, as The Shadow’s own had on the night Margo Lane had been sent to kill him.

The Shadow quickly determined where Khan must have been standing for his reflection to have appeared.

A violent sweep of his left hand parted the curtains, and he stepped through them into a veritable hall of mirrors: cheval glasses, girandoles, trumeaux, and wall mirrors standing on end. Manifold images of the would-be ruler of the free world were on hand to applaud The Shadow’s entrance. Concealed lights came up and Khan’s image moved, disappearing from one group of mirrors only to appear in another. The Shadow pivoted, hoping to suss out Khan’s true position, the magnum eager to speak.

Then, from behind him, Khan materialized, flesh and bone and wailing a Mongol battle cry as he charged, slashing for The Shadow with the raised
phurba.

The Shadow lurched to one side, but not nimbly enough to avoid the tapering, three-sided blade.

In the throne room, Reinhardt Lane was marveling at the suspended sphere that spelled doom for the city. In the hearts of the timer-display vacuum tubes glowed the numerals 1, 1, 1, 2, 6: one hour, eleven minutes, twenty-six seconds.

And counting.

“This is really most impressive,” he said to Margo. “Most impressive, indeed. Who built it?”

“You did,” she told him in a rush. This, despite the fact that it was the professor, in a dazed state, who had led them to the site of the bomb. “Now
un
build it!”

Lane was perplexed. “
I
built this?” He produced a pair of oval, wire-rim spectacles from the breast pocket of his jacket and slipped them on over the pair he was already wearing.

“Yes, Dad. So I’m sure you can deactivate it. If you’d only—”

“But just look at the craftsmanship.”

“Dad!” Margo yelled, taking hold of his shoulders and shaking him.

The ceremonial knife The Shadow thought he had tamed had sliced through his double-breasted coat, his shirt, and the skin of his chest. Khan was back to his funhouse tricks, his reflection shifting from one array of mirrors to the next. But The Shadow was still gunning for him.

“Come no further, Ying Ko,” Khan cautioned. “This is not an arena you wish to venture into.”

His usual risibility quieted, The Shadow ignored the warning, snaking his way through aisle after reflective aisle in an effort to close in on Khan’s voice. For all the maneuvering, however, The Shadow seemed to be getting nowhere fast. In fact, Khan actually appeared to be receding from view.

The Shadow came to a halt, thwarted vindication oozing from him. Khan’s reflections were undergoing a transformation; in their stead were resolving images of The Shadow himself—save that they belonged to an earlier incarnation . . .

To Ying Ko: who had brought destruction of many a highland village; who had laid siege to the sacrosanct Potola itself; who had dealt death to the cities of the United States and Europe; who had calmly ordered the execution of his trusted friend and adviser, Wu, merely to send a message to his competitors in the opium trade.

“Gaze into your past, Ying Ko,” Khan was saying. “Behold your former self, your true shadow, and tell me again why you refuse to become my willing ally in evil.”

Professor Lane muttered to himself while he labored to deactivate the timer. “Cut this wire, isolate this relay, reroute this circuit . . .” With a snip, he cut one wire and turned his attention to another.

Working with arms raised over his head, he had unscrewed and removed the timer’s curved access panel, which he had stowed in his jacket pocket. Tucked into the nacelle behind the panel was a wiring board composed of sixteen pairs of slot-head screws. The board was nested in a tangle of copper wires, sheathed in red, green, yellow, and blue braided cloth.

Margo, who had taken off her wool coat, was pacing nervously behind him, on what seemed to be a very unsteady floor, stopping every so often to monitor her father’s progress. Just now she heard the snap of his wire cutters and glanced at the timer display, gasping when she saw that the seconds and minutes were passing in a blur.

Fifty minutes, forty, thirty
. . .

“Dad!” she screamed.

He angled his head away from the sphere to regard the glass panel, which was suddenly displaying single digits:
ten minutes, nine, eight
. . .

“Oh, dear me,” Lane said.

Frantically, he spliced the wire he had cut only a moment earlier, and the timer resumed a normal countdown.

With only four minutes and seven seconds remaining to detonation.

D
epictions of his violent past continued to play across the dazzling faces of the mirrors—as they had so often in his mind’s eye: the beatings he endured and dished out as a youth; the vengeance he extracted on those who had dared to dishonor him: the viciousness he unleashed against a jealous cousin; the myriad sanctioned crimes he committed during the war; the bloody turf battles that were the order of the day in the Himalaya and the Hindu Kush; the redirected rage The Shadow brought to the city; the identity hoax he had perpetrated on the world; the dread he had induced in Margo Lane . . .

The images were never far from his thoughts. But now, to see them exteriorized was almost more than he could stand. The human in him sought to deny the truth, while the beast reveled.

Khan made good use of The Shadow’s inner struggle. His reflection streaking across the mirrors, Khan materialized within arm’s reach of his quarry.

More, within blade’s reach.

A leather-clad hand rose to stave off Khan’s overhand blow, and was pierced through its palm. The Shadow raged against the pain as Khan reared for a second attack. The Shadow’s other hand came up, only to be similarly impaled.

Bleeding profusely, The Shadow collapsed on hands and knees, snarling like a cornered animal.

Reinhardt Lane’s wire cutters severed a red-to-red connection.

Margo—standing off to one side of the dangling bomb, fingertips to her mouth—heard a worrisome
click!,
and looked up in time to see the hook that attached the sphere to the cable open.

“Wrong, again,” the scientist said, as the sphere disengaged.

It hit the circular floor with a hollow clang and rolled toward the perimeter below the throne, sending the floor into a sudden tilt. Lane pitched over sideways, tipping the floor in the opposite direction, and Margo’s feet came out from under her. The sphere struck the carpeted edge of the concentric ring of stairs and caromed at an acute angle, setting the floor rotating as well as tipping. The Lanes scrambled to their feet, fell once more, then rose and began to make desperate lunges for the sphere as it was rebounding off the stairs and pin-balling around the floor. The physicist almost succeeded in stopping it, but it rolled from his grasp, dropping him on his face. Margo was just getting up when the sphere bowled her over on its way back from the stairs.

“This is impossible,” Reinhardt told his daughter. “I can’t even stay on my feet!”

Margo, sprawled on the floor with her blue dress twisted around her, threw him a piqued look. “Yeah, well, try doing it in
heels
!”

The sphere kept striking and banking like some outsize billiard ball for what felt like ten minutes—though Margo was relieved to note—when she happened to catch a glimpse of the timer—that only a minute had elapsed. Just then, however, the floor tipped southward and the bomb rolled through the gap in the columned ring. Reinhardt had just about reached it when it shot between the Egyptian-figured doors and went tumbling down the stairs into the hallway.

Margo recalled that the display had shown three minutes remaining before detonation.

Weakened but back on his feet and eager for revenge, he asked himself why Shiwan Khan hadn’t finished the job. Did Khan still expect that they could forge a partnership?

Reading The Shadow’s thoughts, the villainous Asian suddenly manifested in the mirrors.

“Poor Ying Ko,” he said, with false sincerity. “You never could decide who or what you were. But now, Shiwan Khan will decide for you.” He raised the
phurba
over his head. “You will be
nothing.
I’m sick of you. I’m sick of both of us.”

The Shadow reached deeply into himself, draining the reservoir of his contained power. Veins leapt out in his taut neck and forehead; his face rippled and bulged. Blood seeped from one eye, then the other, coursing down over his ax-keen nose and throbbing cheeks. The object of his concentrated will—the room and its hundreds of mirrors—began to quake.

Khan eyed him with misgiving. Then, grasping that he had a time bomb of his own to disarm, Khan commanded The Shadow to stop. But the rumbling only increased.

The bomb thundered down the hallway, glancing off wainscotting and chairs, with the Lanes chasing after it. As if set on escaping, the sphere overturned tables and lamps—all of which the Lanes were forced to hurdle—then found its way to the stairway to the floor below.

Having taken several nasty falls on the dance floor, the professor had to be helped along by his daughter, who, quite unnecessarily, felt the need to urge him on. The two were only fifty feet behind the sphere when it rolled down the stairs, but Reinhardt’s limp slowed them considerably, so that by the time they reached the lower floor they no longer had the object in sight.

Although they could hear the bomb banging into furniture along its route.

Margo hurried around a bend in the hallway, then paused briefly at the top of another stairway to listen for sounds of damage. Hearing nothing in the carpeted hallway ahead, she concluded that the sphere had again found the stairs, and she and her father descended to the next floor.

They were rushing down a stretch of carpeted hallway when the professor heard a rumbling noise overhead. “It’s upstairs!” he exclaimed.

At the end of the hallway they came to a stairway that accessed the upper floor. The stairway curved around to the right in its ascent and was bordered below by a small garden of ferns and palms in earthenware pots. Side by side, the Lanes climbed, but they stopped short of the top when a threatening shadow appeared on the curved wall to their left—rounded and fast increasing in size.

The sphere rolled into view above them and came bumping down the stairs, sending Reinhardt front-flipping over the brass banister into the plants, and Margo rolling down the stairs to the floor. The sphere missed her by inches when it hit the hallway’s gray runner, its momentum carrying it directly toward the hotel’s sole elevator shaft. No car was visible, but the shaft was obstructed by only a retractable gate.

A somewhat shaken Dr. Lane was peering from between parted palm fronds when the sphere crashed forcefully into and flattened the gate, beyond which lay an eleven-story plunge to the lobby.

Strident discord shook the mirrored space where Shiwan Khan and The Shadow were faced off in a Manichean showdown. Amplified to an unbearable degree by the room’s circular design, the dissonance grew louder and louder until it was suddenly surpassed by another: the sound of shattering glass.