High up, as far as the eye could see, were the rows of irregularly lighted windows. Thirty-four stories from the street, the building tapered to a single, monolithic tower.
Where the side portion of the building joined with the central edifice, a keen eye could detect a blank wall atop the thirty-fourth floor. It seemed a trivial bit of space, viewed from the street below. Actually it was eight feet high.
From the street, on this gloomy afternoon, that portion of the building was practically invisible in the gathering gloom and swirling fog.
A man sidled through the throng that was emerging from the building. His overcoat was muffled about his neck. In his hand he carried a large suitcase.
He was not the first who had thus entered the Royal Building during the past quarter hour. Like those who had gone before him, the man was inconspicuous in the crowd.
“Three — four — two — eight,” the man muttered.
He entered an express elevator, which had just discharged a load of living freight. In a few seconds, the man was whisking upward, to leave the elevator on the thirty-fourth floor, nearly four hundred feet above the street below.
He walked along a corridor, reached its end, and paused before a door which bore the number 3428. He tapped lightly. The door opened.
The man joined a group in the unlighted room. He threw aside his overcoat. The face of Bob Maddox showed dimly in the dusk.
THE men talked in low whispers. There were five in the room, now; five arch-plotters men of evil deeds and brutal methods.