Puzzled and impatient, Don Winslow paced up and down the large, luxuriously furnished room. He liked to plan his moves in advance. Instead, ever since he had met Lotus in the dining room of the Empire, he had been facing one unexpected situation after another, in bewildering succession.
Whether Suzette, the French Secret Service operative, had any definite plans he could not tell. As for Lotus, he wanted another talk with her out of range from any concealed dictaphone.
A soft click of a latch behind caused him to whirl. There stood the girl herself, laughing, her back against the innocent-looking panel through which she must have entered.
“Excuse me, please!” she cried, coming swiftly toward him. “But your expression was so funny—as if I had stuck a pin into you. These hidden panels and underground corridors make you nervous, don’t they, Commander?”
At Don’s warning, “Sh-h-h!” Lotus shook her head.
“It’s all right, if we speak very low,” she reassured him. “I disconnected the dictaphone at the other end. Besides, there’s no one trying to listen now. Cho-San has other fish to fry just at this moment.”
“What’s that?” Don asked quickly. “A moment before you came in a buzzer sounded and he acted as if it were a fire alarm!”
“It was a sort of alarm,” the girl replied, seating herself in one of the deep arm chairs. “Dr. Skell got a telephone message from the garage. It seems that two of our city agents caught someone snooping about the place, and wanted to know what to do with him. Not that it matters much, but Cho-San will probably want to look him over.”
It mattered a great deal to Red Pennington, however, that he had let himself be caught by such a simple trick. As he sat now in the back of a strange car, under the muzzle of a thug’s pistol he understood only too well what had happened.