Huong Shu had led his men systematically through the lower levels, checking one room after another and securing the doors behind them, working methodically down the main corridor. They had gone through almost twenty rooms without incident, leaving the stockroom at the end of hall, against the kitchen. No odd shadows in sight, which was not promising.
#click#
Huong Shu paused and glanced back up the corridor. It seemed shorter than he remembered.
#click#
The hallways shortened again by another ten feet. The lights were switching off. The shadows were growing closer to the three remaining Mongols.
Huong Shu clicked his tongue, giving a coded order to his archers, who drew their crossbows and fired three arrows down the corridor, but of course, it was too dark to see if they had hit anything.
Another light switched off.
Huong Shu snapped a Mongolian command, and the soldier slipped into the stockroom, watching the door with held breaths.
Hammer blows hit the door, exploding into bullet holes, aiming blind from the other side.
The Mongols dove backward, firing their crossbows, the thin arrows speeding through the bullet holes into the hallway, the firing suddenly stopped. With another click of his tongue, the Mongols fell back into the room and found cover.
Only then did Huong Shu get a chance to glance around the stockroom, at the long rows of dust-covered shelves in the dimly lit room.
Farley jimmied the lock on the ballroom door and slipped inside, cautiously looking around for any sign of anyone watching. Surely The Shadow wouldn't think to look for him in here...and, maybe, neither would Khan. Maybe if he stayed here long enough, Khan would think he was dead, and he could escape before the bomb went off...
The doors slammed shut behind him. Farley whipped around, shining the light on the doors.
Nothing but a spotlight greeted his gaze.
"Did you think you wouldn't see me again, Claymore?" The Shadow's voice taunted from every corner.
Farley played the beam through the room, frantically looking for the source of that mocking laugh.
A fedora-wearing shadow suddenly stood in his beam. "I'm right here!" The Shadow told him, holding his arms up in a surrending motion.
Farley fired the Tommy gun.
The Shadow's shadow whisked away. Farley tried to follow it, only to see it waving from another corner as his light landed on it. "All around you..."
Farley fired again, and once more the shadow on the wall flittered away like a butterfly.
Farley found it again, showing its guns. "Everywhere around you..."
Farley fired. No, The Shadow couldn't be everywhere...he'd have to shoot everywhere...yes, shoot everywhere...
The Tommy gun emptied as Farley spun like a top, spiraling the light all around, shooting indiscriminately, laughing insanely. Even as he dropped the flashlight and the gun clicked out of bullets, he kept squeezing the trigger, trying to silence his tormentor.
Finally, the room got completely quiet. Farley looked around.
Nothing. Not a soul moved in the darkened room. Not a sound echoed through the still air.
Farley scoffed. "Coward!" he taunted. "Yellow! Chicken! Sissy!" He dropped the gun. "Come out and fight like a man!"
And at that moment, the darkness engulfed him.
Farley felt a suffocating vortex of black shadows swirling all around him, choking the life out of him, draining away every ounce of bravery left in his body. He fell to his knees...
...and a black-gloved hand grabbed him by his lapels and yanked him up off the floor.
The Shadow held Farley high overhead. Blue-green eyes practically glowing with dark power cut right through him, leaving him unable to do anything but babble incoherently.
A sneer appeared in the part of The Shadow's face Farley could see. "Why, Claymore," he pronounced disdainfully, "you're...drooling."
All Farley could do was shrug and drool helplessly.
"Claymore, you disgust me." The Shadow flung him aside. "Now get out of my sight!"
Farley got to his feet and took off running out of the ballroom, searching for an escape route, any escape route...
How odd. Farley would have sworn that the plate glass just outside the ballroom was a frosted art deco mural. But now, a neon sign with bright red letters spelling "EXIT" was gleaming right above it. "There's your exit, Claymore."
Farley was so happy to see the word that he ran full speed toward it, laughing gleefully.
As he smashed through the mural and fell three stories to crash through a glass coffee table in the lobby, The Shadow laughed in maniacal triumph. The traitorous henchman was gone, and Stephen and Peter had the warriors covered. Now, all that was left was Shiwan Khan.
He swirled into the darkness and headed off to battle once more.
Twelve floors below, the Mongols were still watching the door with open hostility.
The Shadow climbed steadily up the stairs toward the crow's nest penthouse. He'd stopped only momentarily on each of the other levels to make sure there were no more surprises, but the only other mind he'd detected in the building was Reinhardt Lane's hypnotically numbed one, right where Spiderman had told him it would be. He'd come back for Reinhardt later. Right now, he'd only be in the way. For just ahead, beyond the massive oak inlay doors that led to what was probably intended to be a rooftop restaurant or ballroom, was Shiwan Khan.
The Shadow swirled into visibility, then flung the doors open.
Khan was seated on his throne on a raised dais. He looked as if he'd been waiting for his enemy to arrive. The bomb hung about seven feet in the air in the middle of the room. A blue-and-gold tiled sunken floor formed a circle between the rivals.
The Shadow stepped cautiously toward his archenemy. There was something strangely disorienting about this room...the brightly-colored floor tiles were bothering his eyes, as if they weren't quite laid out flat and were thus reflecting the light oddly. He forced himself to look dead ahead at Khan.
Khan smiled and raised his hands in a concessionary manner, holding them out, wrists together. "Ah, Ying Ko," he said, his tone mock-friendly. "I surrender."
The Shadow wasted no time establishing who was in charge as he drew his guns. "You're finished, Khan," he snapped angrily.
Khan just smiled as he pressed a button on the arm of his throne.
Too late, The Shadow realized why the tiles didn't look like they'd been laid flat...the room was on an angle. More specifically, the round dance floor was apparently on a cantilever mechanism that was now angling even sharper and starting to rotate. He was thrown off his feet, and his guns went flying.
Khan laughed uproariously as the gigantic lazy susan spun and angled in ever-changing patterns, keeping The Shadow from getting his bearings and rolling him across the floor like a loose BB.
The Shadow grabbed an edge of one of the riser stairs that led off the dance floor and held on for dear life. He had to get his feet under him somehow, get off this crazy funhouse ride, get to Khan...
But Khan had other ideas. He looked to the gold and jeweled box off to the side of his throne.
The sleeping dragon face on Phurba's hilt opened its eyes as the knife raised up off its supports.
Khan pointed at The Shadow.
Phurba attacked.
Twelve floors below, the Mongols were still watching the door with open hostility.
The Shadow tried to duck aside from the incoming projectile, but Phurba impaled him through the left shoulder, right through the gunshot wound from the night before. The pain was excruciating. He grabbed the hilt with both hands and fought with the angry dagger desperately...
"Phurba!" Khan ordered, gesturing wildly toward the other side of the room.
Phurba yanked itself out of The Shadow's shoulder and flung itself toward the wall before The Shadow realized what was happening. He barely got his right shoulder turned in time to avoid slamming into the wall face-first. As it was, he nearly dislocated his shoulder in the impact.
Khan laughed heartily and pointed toward the other wall. "Phurba!"
The Shadow barely realized his right hand still had a grip on Phurba when it dragged him through the air to the other wall, slamming him back-first this time into a pillar. Then, the dagger drove itself toward his face.
The Shadow recovered his senses enough to grab his right wrist and force his arm backward. Pushing Phurba was no good, but maybe directing the hostile force elsewhere would keep the knife at bay long enough for him to figure out a way out of this mess. He dared not move or turn away--Phurba was just a half-inch now from his left eye and coming closer even as he pushed frantically...
Khan waved dismissively.
Phurba again changed directions and started to drag The Shadow across the room. But this time, The Shadow let go, and both enchanted blade and exhausted psychic crashed to the dance floor, lying still, as The Shadow's hat and scarf were knocked loose.
Khan looked disgusted. This was the all-powerful Ying Ko, the Butcher of Lhasa? He'd become corrupted by too many years of soft life in the West--he now lay like a child on the floor, gasping for breath, unable to move on his own. "Your powers are fading," he taunted. "Your mind is too weak. You are losing your concentration."
The Shadow's powers were indeed fading. Exhaustion took over his thought patterns. Now, Lamont Cranston lay face down on the floor, barely able to keep from passing out as pain seared through his body and fatigue engulfed his mind.
On the other side of the punctured wall twelve floors below, a wounded third-generation Shadow was doubled over in pain, holding his side. The Mongol's arrow proficiency shouldn't have come as any shock. Mongolian archers were uniformly brilliant. Genghis Khan's bowmen could hit an enemy at 500 yards while riding on horseback. And one of them had sliced a neat groove in the right side of Stephen's torso.
"Spidey?" he grunted into his radio. "I may need a hand in here after all. Don't let them see you."
Spiderman, who was webbing up the guards at the front door, tossed a webbed Mongolian aside and started climbing the wall. "On my way," he replied into the radio.
Oblivious to the war going on right in front of them, Moe Shrevnitz and Margo Lane huddled under umbrellas, standing by Moe's cab as the rain continued to pour down, staring at the corner of Second and Houston and watching the puddles rise. The sheer absurdity of standing in front of an empty lot in a raging thunderstorm hadn't escaped either one of them. But if The Shadow told them to do it, they'd have to do it until they caught their deaths of pneumonia. There had to be a reason for standing here, one that would become clear eventually. The Shadow was never wrong.
Moe looked over at Margo. "Know what I love about this job?" he deadpanned. "The excitement."
Margo nodded her agreement. But she didn't quite get it. "We're staring at an empty lot, Moe. We're standing here, in the pouring rain, staring at an empty lot."
Shrevnitz shrugged. He'd done stranger things through the years. "All part of the job."
Twelve floors above the street, a practically defenseless and badly weakened Lamont Cranston forced himself to raise up on his forearms and look around Khan's bizarre funhouse, trying desperately to assess the situation.
Across the floor from him, Phurba's dragon-claw arms uncrossed from their resting place on its hilt and used its forearms as leverage to raise its head up.
Lamont was intrigued. He'd never seen Phurba behave this way. The knife wasn't capable of exhaustion or even fatigue. Was Phurba mimicking him? Cautiously, he wiped blood from the corner of his mouth with the back of his right hand.
Phurba imitated the motion perfectly.
Of course, Lamont realized. My powers aren't the only ones that are fading. Khan's are stretched too thin, trying to keep the hotel concealed from the pair of eyes that I've had outside watching it all night, plus the vague looks of the entire city, including Lachlan and Maxwell, who are probably just waiting for a chance to strike. He hasn't been able to relax that suggestion in hours, and he still has to keep Dr. Lane under control, hold my mind at bay, and control Phurba. It's too much, even for him, and Phurba's responding to the strongest projector in the room...
Khan realized his attention was slipping and glared at Phurba.
The dagger sprang from the floor and attacked Lamont once more, diving for his throat.
Lamont rolled onto his back and grabbed Phurba before it could reach him, holding it above his neck, desperately trying to keep it from slitting his jugular.
Khan got up off his throne and stood on the edge of the dance floor, gloating over his fiercest rival. "Look at you," he said, his tone full of distaste. "You cannot even control yourself. How can you even hope to control Phurba?"
How indeed? Lamont could feel the sharp tip of the blade slicing a razor-thin line across his neck, even as he tried to hold it back. But he'd never been able to control Phurba, not even after months of training from Marpa Tulku. Phurba was just too complicated a task to master--it required a completely balanced adept, one with enough receptive force to blend with the creature's primitive mind and enough projective power to assert one's will over it. Lamont was way too projectively lopsided...
...but not at this moment. At this moment, his projective reservoir was nearly drained. But his nearly drained projective reservoir was still stronger than almost every other adept's filled one. For the first time in his life, he might be balanced enough to at least try. He closed his eyes and began forcing his receptive mind to open as wide as it could.
Phurba looked at him oddly, as if puzzled by the strange pull he felt coming from a man he viewed as his enemy, whose mind normally attacked instead of beckoned.
Lamont could feel something primitive tickling at the edges of his psychic defenses. He forced his mental barriers to open wider. The act left him almost completely vulnerable, but he didn't have a choice.
Khan could feel the change in the direction of Lamont's psychic energies. "What are you doing?"
Downstairs, The younger Shadow looked up sharply at something only he could hear and laughed wickedly. Things were about to turn around for everyone involved.
Spiderman was a good third of the way up the wall when he saw that one of the Mongols had regained consciousness and was rapidly cutting himself loose.
Biting his lip, Spiderman looked up, looked down, struggled with a decision for a moment more, then spoke into his radio. "Uh-oh. One of the rats is crawling out of the trap. Can you wait?"
Still hiding in the stockroom, The Shadow checked the wound in his side again. It wasn't as deep as he thought, just painful. He pulled off his shirt, then found an old tablecloth on a forgotten shelf and wrapped it hard around his side as a bandage, gritting his teeth as he did. If his grandfather could fight off an enchanted dagger that wanted his blood, he could surely push past a cut on his side to handle Huong Shu and his frightened warriors. "No... no rush," he reported as he pulled his shirt back on, then strode forward with fresh purpose.
Huong Shu was worried--the attack was taking too long to come. It was a bluff, it had to be. Clicking his tongue, the Mongols responded instantly, fanning out across the room, finding their way through the five rows of shelves.
Lamont tried to ignore the volume of incoming thoughts from the crowded city, fully aware that he was wide open to an assault from Khan, but he had to at least try to open his psyche enough to gain control over this weapon with a mind of its own...
Suddenly, something latched onto Lamont's mind. Something childlike yet ancient, loyal yet feral. Lamont slowly and carefully released his grasp on the dagger.
Phurba felt the welcoming pull of an open receptive mind and the firm grasp of a projective master engulf it as the once-hostile hands released it. It hovered in the air just above his neck. What is your wish, master?
Khan's eyes widened. "Stop!" he ordered, desperately trying to take control of the blade again.
Fear. Khan was afraid. Lamont seized that fear and felt his confidence rise tenfold. He opened his eyes and looked at the knife. "Shiwan Khan has defiled you and murdered your true master, The Marpa Tulku." He turned a piercing gaze to Khan. "Kill him."
Phurba flew across the room with the same speed as Lamont's sweeping gaze, impaled itself into Khan's stomach.
Khan shrieked and grabbed frantically at Phurba as pain disrupted his thoughts...and his every illusion fell away.
The rain had finally stopped. Margo Lane and Moe Shrevnitz lowered their umbrellas, shook them out, and were about to toss them into his cab for safekeeping when Margo saw something out of the corner of her eye. She looked toward the lot they'd been watching...and gasped in shock at what was now there.
Moe heard the sound and followed her gaze...and couldn't believe his eyes. "My God!" he shouted.
"That's what he saw!" Margo realized. "Oh, my God...Moe, we've got to get in there now!"
Moe popped open the trunk, retrieved a crowbar from a hidden drawer, and ran toward the fence, Margo hot on his heels.
The locked fence didn't stop them for long thanks to Moe's skill at wielding the crowbar, and they hurried past the two sleeping guards.
The moment they passed, one of them opened his eyes cunningly and finished cutting himself loose, getting to his feet.
Lachlan and Maxwell were two blocks away, trading mistrustful looks over diner coffee, when everyone in the whole diner started murmuring nervously to themselves. Maxwell looked up and saw a skyscraper simply appear out of nothing.
"My God!" Lachlan whispered.
Maxwell wasted no time on shock. "Now's our chance."
The harder Khan pulled on Phurba, the harder Lamont ordered the dagger to drive into his belly. He smiled coldly at the dying Mongol. Revenge had never tasted so sweet.
Two floors down, Reinhardt Lane felt as if he'd just come out of the longest nap he'd ever taken. But this wasn't his lab...and it wasn't his bedroom. He put on his glasses and looked around, desperate for some point of reference in this unfamiliar place. "Where am I?" he cried, completely confused.
Huong Shu gripped his sword's hilt with a white knuckled hand. His men had moved quickly through the stockroom, searching for anything they could use, but there were mostly bottles of wine and cans of food.
At the other end of the room there was a sound, and Huong Shu hurried to see something that chilled his blood. There was another door. It was swinging shut.
They were now trapped in the room...with The Shadow.
The now-freed guard was following Margo and Moe through the Lobby, sneaking closer when they reached the stairs. So intent at following the pair was he that he didn't see the dark shape that detached from the ceiling and clapped a hand over his mouth.
Margo and Moe didn't even notice, heading out of the ballroom.
Spiderman took the opportunity to toss his opponent over a plush couch, and instantly pounced, knowing better than to let his opponent catch his breath.
The Mongol drew a blade before even getting up, slashing it upward, forcing Spiderman to throw himself backward, bent over backwards, almost double, letting the blade pass over his head. In the same motion, the Mongol had drawn a sword, spinning in place, driving Spiderman back. Even Spiderman couldn't block a longblade with his bare hands.
Lamont had finally pushed Phurba too hard. The delicate balance between receptive and projective in his mind had shifted too far to the projective side again, and Phurba fell out of his control.
Khan shouted an angry Mongolian battle cry, letting out one last telekinetic blast as he leveraged what little mental strength he had left to yank the blade out of his belly.
The windows in the room shattered. Lamont was momentarily pushed backward.
Khan staggered out of the room.
Lamont got to his feet, retrieved his guns, and ran after him. "Margo," he mentally called. "You must find your father and get to the twelfth floor penthouse as fast as you can. Khan's bomb is hanging from the ceiling up here, and there is only an hour left before it explodes. I'm going after Khan."
Khan dove behind the curtains leading to his meditation chamber.
The Shadow's cloak and scarf, both knocked askew during the fight with Phurba, kept tangling around Lamont's legs as he ran, so he unlatched the cloak and unwrapped the scarf from his neck and tossed both aside as he chased after his archenemy. He whipped open the curtains.
Only Genghis Khan's holy silver crypt, standing upright like a displayed mummy case, greeted his gaze.
Lamont pried the edges of the crypt open.
Nothing but red jacquard-patterned silk looked back at him.
Lamont pounded his fist on the back wall in frustration. There had to be a hidden passage here--Khan didn't have enough mental energy left for a mind clouding trick. He stood in the center of the bottom panel and looked around.
A golden satin pullcord dangled from overhead to his right. He gave it a tug.
The floor opened underneath him.
Lamont fell onto a steel laundry chute and tumbled down God-only-knew how many stories before he finally landed unceremoniously on the huge pile of fabric remnants and leftover carpet scraps that the developers had thrown down the chute during the construction. But ten months with Marpa Tulku had given him sharp reflexes and quick reactions, and he sprang his feet, guns drawn, looking for Khan.
He spotted him running into the storage area, past stacked chairs and unhung chandeliers. "Khan!" he shouted, then fired.
The shot just missed, shattering several chandelier prisms into flying crystal dust.
Furiously, Lamont took off after his prey. The hunt was on. And once more, it was kill or be killed.
Margo and Moe hurried up the side stairs as fast as they could. Both of them were exhausted, and Margo's feet were killing her, but there were no working elevators in the place, and Lamont's message about the bomb on the twelfth floor told them that there was no time to waste. Margo was calling to her father on every floor, but so far there was no response. But he thankfully wasn't among the many bodies they kept encountering, much to their relief.
As they started to step onto the stairs to take them to the tenth floor, they encountered a familiar-looking man wandering down the stairs, looking totally lost. "Dad!" Margo shouted.
Reinhardt looked up. "Margo!" he called, relieved to finally see something he recognized in this deserted tower.
Margo threw her arms around him. "Oh, Dad," she practically sobbed.
Reinhardt looked disturbed and disoriented as he held onto his daughter. "Where am I? What happened?"
"Well, there's this guy, and..." Margo decided that now was not a good time for an explanation. "I'll tell you later." She turned to Moe. "Moe, go call the police."
"Gotcha," Moe replied, hurrying back down the stairs.
"Dad, come with me." Margo took her father's hand and led him up the stairs.
Huong Shu and his two guards were spooked by the near deafening laughter that rang through the storeroom.
The Shadow was only a few feet away, safely clouded, considering his options. His wound wasn't overly debilitating, but he had to wrap this up quickly, and these enemies were highly trained.
His first pick were the bowmen. The two of them were slowly patrolling the two shelf corridors to the left, carefully picking their way through the shelves and boxes, until they reached the end of the row.
The Shadow picked up a can from the boxes he was leaning on, and calmly tossed it over to the end of the shelf between them. The sharp clatter made both bowmen jump, turn and fire quickly, the arrows covering the two feet between them with brutal speed.
Huong Shu heard his men fall, and worked himself over to the wall, keeping it to his back.
A wisp of something clouded his vision, and the next instant a blinding pain hit him through his nose. The follow-up blows stripped his weapons away, the final smashed into his unprotected cheekbones, knocking him unconscious and unable to feel the hard twist of his neck that dealt the killing blow.
"Oh, my God," Margo said as she and Reinhardt came into the twelfth-floor ballroom.
The place was a mess. The floor sat at a crazy angle. Blood was everywhere. Scattered around the room were a black fedora, black opera cloak, and red wool scarf, which Margo made a mental note to retrieve later. And hanging above the floor was a massive beryllium sphere with a timer indicating 58 minutes left in its countdown. They carefully stepped forward onto the round floor, which felt shaky under their feet.
"Oh, this is magnificent!" Reinhardt marveled, admiring the sphere hanging overhead. "What quality workmanship! Who did this?"
Margo looked at him oddly. "You did."
Reinhardt raised an eyebrow. "I did?"
Margo sighed. Yet another thing she'd have to explain later. "Well, don't just stand there--deactivate it!"
Reinhardt looked back at the bomb. He didn't even remember building the thing--how could he possibly know how to deactivate it? "But look at the craftsmanship..."
"Dad!" Margo snapped, trying to focus him.
Reinhardt turned his attention to the sphere once more. He patted his pockets, looking for a screwdriver. He found an entire set of electrical assembly tools--screwdriver, wire cutter, forceps, even a spool of wire and rubber connectors. What the...?
"Tick-tock!" Margo said in an urgent tone.
Reinhardt turned his attention to the sphere once more. He found four screws and loosened the panel right below the vacuum tube display.
A small sheet of metal fell away, revealing a wiring breadboard.
Reinhardt looked completely confused. He'd never seen anything like it before, and it certainly wasn't anything he would have built. Probably something Farley stole, he decided. "Let's try cutting this and see what happens." He snipped a wire.
The digits on the display spun wildly.
"Oh, dear," Reinhardt said, realizing that wire probably wasn't a good choice.
"Oh, my God!" Margo shouted. "Dad, the timer...hurry..."
Reinhardt stripped the covering off the two cut ends of the wire and twisted them back together.
The digits stopped at "0:02:00".
"Two minutes left!" Margo gasped.
Reinhardt frowned. Old age was Hell--memory was never reliable, and some other things he couldn't think of immediately were also pretty bad. He looked at the board again. "Maybe it's this one..." He snipped another wire.
The breadboard sparked wildly. Reinhardt jumped backward.
The motion shook the bomb loose from its cabling, and it fell to the floor and rolled across the turntable and out the door, knocking the rotating motion all askew and Margo and Reinhardt off their feet.
Margo and Reinhardt scrambled off the platform and struggled to get to their feet. "After it!" Margo shouted, already heading for the door.
Reinhardt was right behind her.
They watched the bomb vanish from sight down a flight of stairs. They took off after it.
As they reached the next landing, they saw it rolling toward the center staircase. They anticipated its motion and headed down the stairs to the next level.
When they got there, though, there was nothing to be seen. They walked around carefully, looking for the bomb, curious as to where it could possibly have gone...
The sound of something thudding against the walls above them told them they'd guessed wrong about the center staircase. "Oh, dear God, it's upstairs," Reinhardt realized as he and Margo tore for the side stairs...
...just as the sphere came rolling down toward them.
Reinhardt dove aside, and Margo fell backward as the bomb rolled past them, ricocheted off the wall, and headed for the elevator cage doors.
"Oh, no!" Margo cried, certain they would lose it.
The Mongol had dropped his knife and drawn a wickedly curved scimitar, spinning like a tornado, flashing both sword blades all over the place, and driving Spiderman back.
Spiderman, done with dodging, allowed himself to be pushed back into a corner, planted his foot on the wall and back flipped over the Mongol, firing his webs into the Mongols blades, snatching them up as he flew.
The Mongol, somewhat confused as to how he suddenly had no weapons, with his back turned on his opponent, wasted no time on shock, swinging his left fist in a roundhouse punch.
Spiderman caught the fist in one hand and stopped him dead cold. "Do you see what I did there?" he asked politely, before giving a kick to the solar plexus that slammed his opponent into and through the wall behind him.
Feeling pretty good about the victory, Spiderman was about to deliver a webshot to close off the hole in the wall when his spider-sense surged a warning and his ears picked up the sound of someone barreling toward him. He leapt for the ceiling.
Moe ran into the room and rushed straight out again through the front door.
Spiderman shrugged. Annoying, but not dangerous...
And then his spider-sense let out another warning as a clanging sound came from the elevator shafts, accompanied by a woman's high-pitched screams. Barely even giving any thought to his actions, he pounced across the room, ripped open the elevator cage doors, and climbed the shaft as fast as he could climb.
As Lachlan and Maxwell snuck into the Hotel Monolith and headed for the stairs, neither could believe they'd gotten so lucky. It had just appeared out of nowhere, and now all the guards they'd seen earlier were gone as well "This is unreal," Lachlan whispered. "How is this possible?"
Maxwell considered the question. Despite Lachlan's assertions to the contrary, Maxwell had done a significant amount of research about this situation--and about the history of the corner of Second and Houston. He'd read the many urban legends about the mysterious Monolith, of how it seemed to appear and disappear as if it were a mere mirage. He'd scoffed at the idea previously, but now that he was here experiencing it, he realized the stories not only weren't legends, but had been significantly understated. This hotel really did just appear out of nowhere. Chances were it had something to do with the contents, specifically the bomb, and invisibility was a trait usually associated with The Shadow. The letter said that tonight was the night they would have to act. The Shadow was actively looking for them, and the building magically appeared here.
This is a trap, Maxwell realized. The only way out is to do this and get away...but I can't risk getting myself caught between two groups of enemies.
Without hesitation, he shoved Lachlan as hard as he could from behind, slamming his head into the wall, knocking him out cold. "Sorry, Professor," he said, "but one of us is expendable. And it's not going to be me." With that, he snatched the gun out of Lachlan's waistband and kept moving.
The elevator's cage doors had collapsed against the backside of the shaft, providing a shelf for the bomb and stopping it dead in its tracks.
Margo and Reinhardt raced over to it...and also stopped dead in their tracks as they realized they were looking ten stories straight down.
Reinhardt swallowed hard. There was only one way to get to the bomb--go out onto the shelf with it. He crawled across the cage door.
Margo crawled next to him, trying to help him stay balanced. "Careful, Dad," she cautioned.
The cage doors flexed as they were meant to do when inordinate pressure was applied to them. Margo screamed and grabbed hold of Reinhardt. Reinhardt grabbed hold of the bomb.
Fortunately, no one fell. But now the shelf was a trough, and the only thing holding them in place was the latch on the cage...and the masked man in spandex underneath, with his feet stretched across the shaft and his fingertips dug into the underside of the cage, trying desperately to hold the sphere up, struggling with the ungainly balance, and appreciating for the first time just how heavy an atomic bomb could be.
Reinhardt and Margo both pulled themselves over the top of the bomb. "Fifteen seconds!" Margo whispered.
Reinhardt looked over the breadboard. What little bearings he had over the thing were gone now that they were looking over it upside down.
Ten seconds. "Which wire?" Margo said, trying to focus his attention.
Nine seconds. "I...I don't know!" Reinhardt moaned, frustrated. "I just don't remember!"
Seven seconds. "Pick one!" she demanded.
Six seconds. "Oh, what the Hell," he shrugged. "It's usually green." He moved to cut a thick red wire.
Four seconds. "No!" Margo shouted in horror. "Green!" She grabbed the nearest green wire and yanked as hard as she could.
Margo got her wire out a split second before Reinhardt cut his--and the timer froze at "0:00:02".
Neither father nor daughter nor arachno-human moved for a moment. Then, when they were all sure it wasn't going to explode, Margo held up her wire in her father's face. "This is green," she said, her voice shaky, then pointed to the wire he'd cut. "That's red."
Reinhardt also looked very shaky. "I'll try to remember that," he promised.
The Lanes carefully and slowly crawled backwards off the elevator door, got to their feet, and hugged each other for a very long time. Then, they headed off for the exit from this madhouse.
Thus, they didn't hear the sound of a webshooter firing or notice the lithe form in red and blue spandex carefully slipping around the edges of the door to retrieve and begin dismantling the bomb.
Lamont was suddenly in danger of running out of ammunition. He hadn't brought any spare ammo clips, and Khan had led him into a hall of mirrors. There were dozen of Lamont Cranstons and dozens of Shiwan Khans lunging, dodging, and making lunatic feints toward each other, neither with any clue which of the other was real. If it were happening to anyone else, Lamont would have found it hilarious. But since it wasn't, he found it immensely annoying.
Twelve floors later, Maxwell had finally reached the penthouse and started looking around for the bomb. He didn't have his floor plans any more, but what he could remember of them indicated the bomb should have been hanging from the ceiling right in front of him...
"It isn't here any more," whispered a sibilant voice.
Maxwell looked up sharply to see The Shadow sitting on a massive throne at the end of the room, with curtains whipping about like monstrous versions of his black cloak as howling winds surged through the broken windows.
Maxwell fingered the gun in his pocket. "Doesn't bother me. That's not what I came here for."
"Looking for this, then?" The Shadow mocked, holding up a large square pad with numerous dials on it.
"Yes, we are."
Maxwell whirled around at the sound of that voice.
Standing in the doorway was Mark Lachlan with Farley Claymore's Tommy gun in his hands. "Nice try, Paul. But again, if you're going to do something, don't do it halfway. Should have killed me when you had the chance." He pointed the gun right at his traitorous lab assistant. "I would tell you to plan ahead next time, but there's not going to be a next time."
Maxwell leveled his gun as well. "You don't have the guts."
"Care to find out?"
The Shadow leaned back in his chair, amused. "So both of you are after the same thing. Fascinating. Did you get competing offers, or is this a case of the student wanting to best the teacher?"
Neither man answered, instead staring each other in the eyes for a long moment. Then each one squeezed their triggers.
Only Maxwell's gun actually fired.
Lachlan gasped as the bullet pounded into his abdomen. He started to say something...then let out a death rasp and fell to the floor.
"Looks like one of you planned further ahead than the other," The Shadow noted. "Only a fool would pick up a gun without checking whether or not it was loaded." He laughed, a ringing, mocking laugh that echoed like thunder.
Maxwell whirled around and leveled his gun on his new target. "Give it to me!"
The Shadow hit the button on the chair arm.
Maxwell slipped as the floor started moving again. He forgot about attacking the Shadow and crawled like mad for the edge of the floor. He got to it and pulled himself off the spinning platform.
Without hesitation, The Shadow hit the button again, stopping the spinning, and chased after him.
Maxwell dove behind the huge silver coffin, poked his gun around the side, and started shooting.
There was no cover in the room except for the coffin itself, so The Shadow darted across the room and hid on the other side, putting four feet of hollow silver between the two men.
Maxwell went left, aiming his gun around the side, as The Shadow darted to the right.
Maxwell heard the motion and hurried back the other way.
The Shadow matched him again, keeping the silver crypt between them.
Unaware of the eerily similar drama going on above them, Lamont Cranston and Shiwan Khan were keeping several dozen mirrors between them as each hunted for the other.
The battle was starting to frustrate Lamont. He'd dared not waste any more shots on mirrors because he hadn't brought spare ammo clips, so he and Khan would dart out for a moment, spot one another, and dart back, each trying to both move ever closer to and keep away from the other. It was like an intricate ballet, with visual patterns emerging like a kaleidoscope...a frustratingly endless kaleidoscope...
Find him! Kill him! Take him down! You're supposed to be powerful! Do it already! Kill! Kill!
Lamont clamped down on that annoying primal urge inside his head. He had to focus, had to be calm, but it was so hard...so difficult...especially when he knew he could just let loose. He'd been through many battles in Lhasa where he was barely conscious of anything going on around him...and yet he always came out the winner when he came back to earth. He could do it again...just once more...
Yes! screamed that angry voice. What could it hurt?! Kill him! Take him out!
"You are getting sloppy, Ying Ko," Khan taunted. "Surely such a powerful warlord such as yourself should not be thwarted in his battles by a few pitiful sheets of silvered glass..."
That did it. Lamont was growing tired of the mocking...tired of the taunts...tired of the illusions...tired of the hunt...tired of keeping himself under control...tired of the mirrors...very tired of the mirrors...
Khan noticed the intense glare Lamont was focusing on one of the mirrors. "What are you doing?"
Lamont didn't answer. He kept staring at the mirror.
It trembled...then vibrated...then bullseyed, like a projectile had been thrown into it.
Khan's eyes widened. No, surely he couldn't really be trying to destroy the whole room. Not even Khan had that kind of power except in short bursts. Not even Marpa Tulku could do that...
Another mirror shattered. Then another. Then another.
The room shook as Lamont drew upon every ounce of projective power he could summon from inside him, building the energy to incredible levels. This was not The Shadow subduing a criminal, or Ying Ko silencing a rival opium lord. This was Lamont Cranston, the strongest projective telepath to ever train at The Temple Of The Cobras, flexing his mental muscles. And nothing was going to stand in his way...especially not a few pitiful sheets of silvered glass.
More mirrors cracked under the strain. Khan tried to dodge the knife-like ribbons of glass in the air.
Lamont sent the pressure inside his psyche flying outward in an explosive burst.
Huge mirrors shattered into shards of glass as the wave shot across the room. A maelstrom of flying debris cut Khan practically to shreds as it was forced away from Lamont by telekinetic energy unlike anything Khan had ever felt in his life.
Twelve floors up, separated by a tower of silver, both Maxwell and The Shadow felt the building tremble slightly. Each looked around. "What the...?" Maxwell whispered.
The Shadow recognized the sound...and the remnants of the intense mental energy in the air. He gave a smile. Wow. Not even close, Stephen. Not even close. Keep dreaming. Maybe someday.
Then he let out a ringing laugh as he wrenched the coffin door open and took cover inside the crypt itself.
The massive wave of telekinetic energy stopped. Khan was bleeding badly, but recovered his senses enough to see Lamont standing directly across from him. Surely he doesn't have anything left, Khan thought, raising Phurba to throw it at his rival.
But he was wrong. Marpa Tulku had taught Lamont quite well how to use controlled releases, even when bursts were called for, to hold energy back in reserve. And he had just enough left to deal with Khan. His eyes scanned the floor, then found a phurba-like blade of glass at his feet. For you, Master, whispered Lamont to himself as he fixed his gaze upon it.
The blade of glass rose up off the floor at his mental command.
Lamont's gaze shot toward Khan.
The blade flew through the air and embedded itself into the Mongol's forehead, just above his left eye.
Khan screamed, then collapsed to the ground.
Lamont fell to his knees, utterly exhausted. It had been literally years since he'd been pushed that hard, years since he'd had to drain himself so completely, years since he'd felt this degree of relief from a victory. Marpa Tulku might not have been proud of his tactics. But Lamont had a feeling that his master would have been pleased with the results. It had taken everything he had inside him, but Lamont had not let his darkness overcome him. Instead, he'd used it as a weapon against his own dark shadow...Shiwan Khan. He looked toward the man he'd vanquished.
Khan was jerking spasmodically, and his psyche was going haywire. His thoughts were completely incoherent.
Ah, good, Lamont thought with a smile. It worked.
Sensing victory, Maxwell snuck around the side of the coffin, then tackled the door, slamming it shut. Then he pointed the gun and fired four shots into the crypt itself, punching holes all over it.
"Aw, what'd you do that for? That's a genuine authentic an-tee-queue."
Maxwell spun at the sound of that voice...
...and a red-gloved fist knocked him cold.
As Maxwell flew across the room and landed in an unconscious heap, Spiderman immediately ripped the doors off the coffin, terrified of what he would find...
...only to find that it was empty.
The rattling of the disposal chute got Lamont's attention. He reached out his mind to find out who'd dropped in on him...
...and touched the mind of his grandson.
Despite himself, Lamont smiled. "What kept you?"
"Had to take care of some loose ends," Stephen replied, making his way across the storeroom. He looked down at Khan. "Nice work. What do you plan to do with him?"
Lamont looked up at Stephen. "What should I do?"
Stephen considered offering a more definitive answer that might make things better in his own present, then realized that the whole point of this experience was to make sure the right things happened in the right order in this present. "That's for you to decide. You're the boss."
"At least for today."
Both men chuckled, shadowy laughs echoing in stereo through the room.
"All right, can the sound effects," a voice complained from above.
Both Shadows looked up to see Spiderman hanging from a web overhead. "While you guys were having a good old time laughing it up, some of us were cleaning up your messes." He held up a bundle of blueprints and documents. "Found some cool reading material." He then tossed Lamont a bundle of cloth. "I think these are yours."
Lamont caught the bundle and unwrapped it to reveal his scarf and hat stuffed inside his rolled-up cloak. "Thanks."
Spiderman nodded, then gestured with his head across the room. "And that one's yours, partner."
Stephen looked back to see the web-wrapped Paul Maxwell's unconscious body dumped unceremoniously on the pile of scraps and junk at the bottom of the chute.
"What do you want to do with him?" Spiderman asked.
Stephen frowned. He hadn't really given any thought to that. Lachlan was dead, so he wasn't likely to be a problem, but Maxwell had seen too much...it wasn't like they could just bring him along back through the time portal...heck, he hadn't even figured out how they were going to get back through the time portal...
Lamont looked at the cocooned figure and smiled cruelly. "I know what to do."
Stephen looked at his grandfather, then realized what Lamont had in mind. He began to laugh.
Lamont joined in the chorus as two victory laughs rang through the night.
Police sirens drowned out the sound of The Shadows' laughter as black-and-whites screamed to what had once been a deserted corner, shining car lights and portable spotlights on the structure to illuminate it. Alarmed citizens had gathered around, completely confused as to how a hotel had sprung up out of literally nowhere. Photographers snapped pictures. Reporters swarmed through the site, trying to interview anyone and anything standing anywhere close to the building...including Margo Lane, who was brushing them off and leading her father through the mob to her car.
A police staff car pulled up to the scene, and out of the back stepped Wainwright Barth. The police commissioner looked upward at the huge building that now loomed large in the night. "Where the Hell did that come from?" he asked.
No one had an answer as chaos built to incredible levels around him.
Wainwright shook his head and took a swig from the silver flask he had in his pocket. "Get somebody up there and find out what's going on," he ordered a nearby officer.
"Yes, sir," the officer replied, grabbing a team of men and hurrying away.
Margo watched the officers rush inside the building and realized in horror that she'd forgotten to go back for The Shadow's things. She couldn't let the police find them...she'd have to somehow get back inside...
"Already got them," a voice sounded in her ear.
She jumped, then looked around.
"Don't turn around. Remember, I'm not really here."
She forced herself to stand firm. But she just wanted to find him and hold him as tight as she could, never let him go...
"Later. I've got work to do first. Take your father home. He's had a rough few days."
She nodded discreetly, wondering where he was.
The honk of a horn got her attention. She looked toward it.
Moe Shrevnitz's cab was pulling away from the curb, and the cabbie gave her a wave.
Margo smiled and waved back...both at the driver and the unseen passenger in his back seat.
Reinhardt looked confused. "Who was that, dear?"
She smiled mysteriously. "Nobody, Dad. Nobody at all."
"And...cue the romantic music," Spiderman remarked dryly from his perch on a nearby rooftop as they watched Margo's car pulling away from the scene.
The younger Shadow laughed. "Just like in the movies."
"Except that normally the movie fades to black right about now, and I'm not wild about a fade-out while we're still trapped here. We still don't know how exactly we're supposed to get out of here."
"I know..." His voice trailed off.
Spiderman noticed. "What is it?"
The Shadow's eyes smiled at his partner. "My grandfather just invited us to spend the night at Cranston Manor...and to join him on a train ride to Washington, DC tomorrow."
"Why are we headed for DC?"
The Shadow gave an amused chuckle. "To check on the progress of a small science project codenamed 'Philadelphia'."
The first thought that entered Shiwan Khan's mind upon his return to consciousness was how much his head hurt. The second was how tight the bedcovers were...it felt like he couldn't move his arms at all. He opened his eyes and looked around.
He was in a tiny room, with no windows save the porthole-sized one on the door. It looked almost like a dungeon or prison cell, except that the walls were white and covered with a strange type of quilt. The bed was the same shade of white as the walls...and so was the strange blanket that covered him...
Wait a minute. This wasn't a blanket. It was some sort of restraining device. Khan's arms were crossed in front of him and fastened behind him, and he could feel leather straps rubbing against his skin. "What the...?" he began.
The door to the room opened, and a white-coated doctor came inside with a medicine tray and fresh bandages.
"You!" Khan demanded. "You!"
The doctor looked at his patient oddly.
"Yes," Khan said, focusing his gaze. "Sit down."
The doctor sat on the edge of the bed.
Khan looked at him intently. "Look into my eyes."
The doctor met his patient's dark gaze.
"Release me at once."
The doctor burst out laughing. "Oh, no, Mr. Khan, we won't have any of that sort of behavior today." He put a hand on Khan's head and turned it to the side. "Let's have a look at those stitches, shall we?"
"Stitches?" In the reflection off the doctor's glasses, Khan got his first look at himself since passing out at the Monolith--and saw a huge portion of his hair had been shaved away, and a large circle of stitches covered an incision over his left eye. "What have you done?"
"Saved your life, that's what." The doctor looked at the incision, which was healing nicely with no infection. "Of course, we had to cut away a small part of your frontal lobe to do it. But don't worry, it's a part no one ever uses."
Khan looked confused. Frontal lobe? Why did that sound so familiar? Then, for the first time, he realized his mental reservoir was empty. He had absolutely no telepathic energy left. He looked up at the doctor, horrified.
The doctor got up from the bed and headed for the door, then turned back to his patient. "Unless, of course, you believe in telepathy." He gave Khan a broad smile, then left the room.
Khan's eyes widened. Marpa Tulku had said the front of the brain was the focal point for psychic power...without it, he had nothing. "Wait!" he shouted insanely. "I am Shiwan Khan! The last descendent of Genghis Khan!"
The door slammed in his face.
Dr. Leonard Levinsky adjusted the silver fire opal ring on his left hand as he signed Khan's chart, then left the ward as Khan's cries blended with other inmates claiming to be Theodore Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, a physicist from the 21st century, and Henry VIII.
As darkness descended upon Washington, DC, the last of the engineers working at the War Department's Radio and Technology labs finally called it a day. The engineer checked the lock on the door, then pulled his coat around him and headed out into the cold December night.
Moments later, a coil of shadowy blackness whisked over to the door and checked the lock as well, pleased to see that the agent had done his job by making the lock appear engaged without actually engaging it. After opening the door, The Shadow swirled into visibility, then reached into his pockets and pulled out a pair of mirrors. Holding them back-to-back, he slipped them smoothly into the path of the knee-level electric eye beam just inside the doorway to reflect the two light beams back at one another. Then he slowly pushed them apart to create a walkway for himself.
"Don't stand up," a voice inside his head warned.
The Shadow stayed bent over for a moment and felt something #whoosh# over his head. Then he stepped through the gap in the electric eye beams, pulled the mirrors back out smoothly, and straightened up again. "You know," he told the time travellers who'd leapt in over him, "I'd have held the mirrors for you, too."
"Yeah," Spiderman responded, "but it's a lot easier to go over your head than under your legs when you're bent over like that."
The elder Shadow looked at the younger one. "Is he always this impertinent?"
"You get used to it," the younger one confessed. "Where to?"
The elder Shadow turned to the blueprint on the wall and studied it for just a moment, mentally comparing it to the notes from his agent. "That way," he pointed.
Once the three men found the magnetic coil room where The Shadow's agent had specified the Philadelphia Experiment was underway, all three dropped their disguises--or removed their mask, in Spiderman's case--as Stephen and Peter got to work transforming the 1930s-style control board to match the 21st century model that Peter had retrieved from Lachlan and Maxwell's room. "It's so small," Lamont marvelled at the futuristic circuit board. "Where are all the wires and tubes?"
"Semiconductors," Peter replied. "Remember the name." Then he caught himself. "And that's the end of my investment advice."
Lamont laughed. "If I actually took conventional investing advice, I'd be broke today. I've always shifted my money around ahead of the investment curve, thanks to advice from agents. That's how I survived the crash of '29--I got all my money out of the market a month ahead of the crash."
Stephen gave a chuckle as he continued to patch the older breadboard to match the circuitry layout on Lachlan's board. "For which I am eternally grateful."
"Why, so you don't have to try to hold down a real job?"
Peter laughed aloud as he held a capacitor into place on the board while Stephen soldered it down. "Yeah, the superhero life doesn't lend itself to the 9-to-5 workplace--something I can attest to personally." He eyeballed both sets of switches. "You missed a wire."
"No, I didn't," Stephen replied. "I deliberately left it unattached."
"Why?"
"Because hooking it up triggers the device."
"Ah. Good thinking there."
"I try." Stephen gave both boards a slightly more detailed appraisal.
"If you don't mind my asking," Lamont said, "how do you set the...um, arrival time?"
"We don't," Stephen responded.
Lamont raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"
Peter studied the original. "There doesn't seem to be any such control circuit on this device, either. But somehow it landed us back here without needing to be set."
"The closest thing to a control circuit I found is this," Stephen said, pointing to a spot on the original. "When we came in, they had the same circuit wired...but in the opposite direction."
"To go forward in time," Lamont realized.
"That's the theory." Stephen returned to checking the newly-wired breadboard. "And..." He gave each wire connection a wiggle to make sure they were properly engaged. "...that should do it." Then he paused, not certain why he felt uneasy by that realization.
Peter figured it out quickly. "Which means it's time to say goodbye."
"Yeah." Stephen stared at the board for a moment more, realizing that one wire was all that was keeping him in this moment in time that he'd only imagined in his dreams...an all-too-brief moment in time working alongside and learning from his grandfather.
"You have to go," Lamont finally said, not sounding very enthusiastic about the idea.
"I know." Stephen still didn't move. "We'll take our control box back with us through the vortex, but everything here will need to be destroyed. Completely. Along with the plans, so no one can ever recreate it again."
"I know," Lamont replied, realizing as he spoke the words that destroying the machine would separate the two generations of Cranston psychics forever.
The implications of what was about to happened hung over the room like a suffocating fog.
"You guys want a moment alone?" Peter finally suggested.
Stephen shook his head, then made eye contact with his grandfather.
In a fraction of a second, two entire lifetimes of emotions and experiences were exchanged. Both men smiled warmly.
Lamont turned to Peter and extended his right hand. "Good to meet you, Peter."
Peter shook Lamont's hand. "It's been a privilege." He turned toward the large magnetic coils and started toward the center of the room.
"Wait," Stephen called.
Peter stopped and turned around.
Stephen crossed the room and reached into the backpack to retrieve something. He then handed Lamont a blue-toned key and a 3x5 card.
Lamont looked confused.
"Those were in the letters that brought us here," Stephen explained.
"Ah," Lamont said, still not sure he understood but figuring it would become clearer later.
"Don't forget this," Peter noted, fishing Dr. Lane's implosive generator plans out of the backpack. "This needs to be destroyed, too. It's too soon for the world to know about nuclear fission."
"I'll take care of it," Lamont promised, taking the report from Peter. "Oh, and one more thing..."
"Yes?" both Peter and Stephen said simultaneously.
Lamont reached into Peter's backpack and retrieved a wad of cash.
"Oops," Peter whispered.
"You did notice," Stephen remarked.
"I actually noticed the first day," Lamont replied. "I went to get some pocket change and found a few stacks missing."
"So why didn't you confront us about it?"
"I wanted to see if you'd come forward about it first."
"Ah, a test," Stephen noted. "Did I pass or fail?"
"Pass, because clearly your mentor's safe-cracking lessons were well-learned."
"Crime does not pay," Peter mock-scolded his partner.
Both Stephen and Lamont laughed The Shadow's laugh, then let the laughter die out as they made eye contact once more.
There were no more words to say. Words would have been merely superfluous. The two men shook hands...and then pulled each other into a warm embrace that neither looked as if they wanted to release.
But release they did, and Stephen joined Peter at the edge of the barrier separating the work area from the magnetic coils. The 21st century heroes looked at each other for a moment, then together strode out of the protected area and into the center of the room. Each man pulled his disguise back into place, then turned to face Lamont.
Through the barrier's window, Lamont gave them a nod, then turned on the master power breaker for the room, found the remaining unattached wire, and connected it into place to complete the power circuit.
Four magnetic coils around the room came to life, and a swirling magnetic field caught The Shadow and Spiderman and spun them through the air like BB pellets in a tornado.
Then everything turned blue and got very bright...
...and then suddenly it was dark again, and two men came crashing to the floor of a room that was distinctly unlike the room they'd just been in a moment earlier.
Lamont closed his eyes and swept the room with projective sight, looking for any clue that the strange experiment had worked...
...and then deciding it must have, because there was no one left in the room but him.
He turned off the power breaker and pulled out the crucial connection wire to stop the reaction, then just stood there for a moment and let the pent-up emotions drain away, feeling everything from pride to loss, happiness to sadness, celebrating a connection to the vastness of the universe and mourning the loss of that connection that had abruptly left him totally alone.
Then, he resigned himself to his own place in this strange timeline...and his role in making sure none of this could never happen again. He pocketed the key and 3x5 card and searched the room for the plans for this world-changing device.
A binder on a desk caught his eye. He picked it up and looked at it.
The cover read "Unified Field Theory -- Project Philadelphia".
Lamont started to torch it, but then realized it had classified markings all over it, and setting a fire to destroy reliable intelligence was never a useful thing and could come back to haunt him later. He flipped through the pages, then jerked one out at random. Making a note of the page number, he leafed through Dr. Lane's report and found a page with the corresponding page number and inserted it into the document. Then he found a pot of cold coffee and doused the report with it, hopelessly smearing ink on several pages to make detecting the switch difficult to detect.
Satisfied that the report was now unreadable, he took a bottle of industrial-strength solvent from his pocket and poured it onto the breadboard.
The wires shrivelled up and disintegrated, and the breadboard contorted and melted.
Smiling to himself, he pocketed Dr. Lane's notebook and the pilfered page, set his hat on his head, pulled his scarf up over the lower half of his face, and swirled off into the shadows.
In a dark and dusty storeroom, The Shadow sat up slowly, putting a hand into the middle of his aching back. "I'm getting more than a little tired of crash-landings lately," he commented.
"You and me both," Spiderman agreed as he looked around. "This isn't Reliable Intelligence's labs--at least, not the one we were in when we started this little journey. Where are we?"
"Or when are we?"
"Yeah, there is that." Then he thought of something that could provide the answer and dug through his backpack...
...and found his cell phone, which was still showing an active phone call. He put it to his ear. "Hello?"
"Peter?"
Spiderman nearly dropped the phone. "MJ?"
"What happened? I was talking to Stephen, and I heard shots, and then some kind of loud whine..."
"What time is it?" Spiderman interrupted.
MJ paused. "It's about ten til eleven. Why?"
"What day?"
"The eighteenth of December, silly. What is going on?
Spiderman looked at The Shadow. "We're back!"
The Shadow let out a laugh of triumph. "Yes! It worked!"
Spiderman let out a whoop of joy. "Babe, you are not going to believe what just happened..."
His sentence was cut off by MJ's scream. And then the phone went dead.
"No!" Spiderman shouted.
"What?" The Shadow demanded.
"MJ's in trouble," Spiderman told him. "And they're in Washington..."
"And so are we."
"What?"
The Shadow turned the screen of his pocket-sized GPS navigator toward his partner.
A blip on the screen indicated their location. "Holy...," Spiderman began.
"Of course," The Shadow realized. "We left this era in Manhattan and landed in Manhattan. We left the 30s in Washington..."
"And landed in Washington. But where?"
"Reliable Intelligence." The Shadow pointed to the stencilling on the side of a crate in the storeroom where they'd landed. "Reliable Intelligence Research's DC facility. Which is where the girls are."
A chill went through Spiderman. "And where Khan's men would be waiting for Mark Lachlan or Paul Maxwell to return..."
"Where would they be?"
"Another storage room, probably..."
Without another word, both men sprang into action.
Sarah threw the bowling ball thing at the first guard, who fumbled it like a hot potato. She turned and bolted for the door, when the same warrior threw the bowling ball back, tripping her up.
When she hit the floor she looked back for MJ, and discovered the fiery redhead actually attacking the Mongols. The first she met with a sharp upper blow to the nose, the second the swung on with the heel of her hand, and when that failed to drive them back she simply went berserk, and Sarah found herself more than a little stunned. Sarah immediately took up the fight herself, grabbing a chair and striking back.
Sadly, the fury wasn't enough, and the women were finally driven back.
Sarah grabbed MJ's hand. "MJ..."
"Yeah?" MJ whispered in reply.
"Duck." She yanked her friend's arm hard as they fell to the floor...
...just as a jeep drove through the wall.
And then, a split-second later, the roof imploded.
The Shadow spun the jeep into a 180-degree turn, bringing it to a halt within eight feet of the battle, firing steadily out of the window. Spiderman rode the collapsing roof down and forced the Mongol forces to split their forces by striking from behind, flipping two of them left and right, immediately grabbing the nearest man and getting a grip around the back of his skull.
The Shadow snapped his aim square at the Mongol's usual leader, Shan Ruche.
Shan Ruche sized up the situation rapidly and immediately yanked MJ to her feet.
His senior bowman reached the same conclusion and grabbed Sarah off the floor, pointing the crossbow under her chin.
For a long frozen moment, nobody moved.
Shan and his bowman had MJ and Sarah hostage, crossbows pointed square for the kill blow. The Shadow had a bead drawn on Shan right between the eyes, and Spiderman had the third bowman by the throat and had contorted the man's wrists to aim his own crossbow at the one holding Sarah.
The other two Mongols were out cold.
Neither side had a clue what would happen next.
The Shadow decided to gamble. "Let them go, Shan."
Shan laughed. "Yes. I'm sure I'll be perfectly safe without your agents as a shield."
"You aren't getting out of here. You aren't getting the control panel."
Shan blinked. The Shadow knew about that? "The sounds will have drawn attention. Local law enforcement will be here soon. They will find us. You don't want that any more than I do. And if I go back to Khan without that control panel, the results would be unfortunate."
"And if I let Khan get the control panel, he will use it. The plans for the bronzium bomb he has, the fuel for the bomb he has, but what he doesn't have are the controls to manage, set, and control the power variables right up to detonation. If I let you leave, Khan will have a clean nuke that he will either use himself or sell to the highest bidder. I can't allow that, even if I have to lose a civilian or two."
"HEY!" MJ and Sarah shouted in unison.
Shan considered. "True. But alive or dead they work as shields, and dead shields won't be as hard to control." He nodded to his bowman, who stood poised to fire...
"STOP!" The Shadow bellowed. "I also have the control panel. And I've put about half a pound of very powerful explosive around it. Let them go, Shan. We will handle this alone, you and I."
Shan blinked. He thought about it long and hard as he saw The Shadow holding the control panel, covered in plastique..."Agreed."
His second dropped the weapon, releasing Sarah.
The Shadow nodded to Spiderman, who released his own prisoner.
"Out," The Shadow told them as he got out of the jeep.
Shan nodded to his men, who retreated slowly.
Spiderman helped Sarah to her feet and backed behind The Shadow, who held an automatic in one hand, and the panel in the other.
Shan still held MJ. "Give me the control panel. Put it down and back away."
The Shadow nodded to his partner. "That's smart. He doesn't want me to hand it to him."
Spiderman nodded. "He doesn't want you to get within reach. He knows that the closer you get to him, the more distracted he'll be."
"Which you could use to attack from another angle," The Shadow said gamely. "He's smart. You think he's a good catch?"
Even as he said it, The Shadow threw the control panel straight up.
Shan's eyes flicked to it involuntarily, and Spiderman struck out with his webs, grabbing the crossbow and throwing it aside.
MJ dropped sharply, forcing Shan to drop her so he could grab for the falling controls.
The Shadow struck, firing at the two rushing bowmen who had backed away.
Spiderman snagged the controls with a webline and swung it away from Shan's dive, then shot another web that wrapped around MJ's waist and allowed him to yank her away as well.
"Get them out of here!" The Shadow ordered.
Spiderman scooped up the women and sprang away with them.
The Shadow pounced on Shan.
The first strike was blocked, and the second landed but nowhere near The Shadow's intended target, almost bouncing off the armored breastplate.
Shan followed up with a sharp jab to The Shadow's wounded side.
As The Shadow sucked in a breath, Shan broke away and grabbed the control panel from off the floor.
The Shadow regrouped and flashed out a hand full of pearl-handled vengeance, just as Shan whipped up the control panel. The Shadow barely stopped himself from firing into the plastique.
That moment of hesitation was all Shan needed to kick The Shadow in the gut, throwing him back.
Shan turned to run for the door, when Spiderman dropped back through the hole in the ceiling.
Shan struck first with a thin knife.
Spiderman blocked it easily, swung back, and swung back a high kick that missed Shan completely.
Instead, it kicked the control panel from his hand, hurling it high into the air.
The Shadow reacted, snatching up an automatic and firing at the small bundle.
The bullet hit the explosive and set it off in a stunning fashion, made all the more stunning by the fact that it was indoors.
Everyone dove for cover.
When Shan raised his head, Spiderman decked him.
"Get down!" The Shadow ordered the ladies as he got into the jeep and floored it, taking the routes around behind the main entrances to avoid the onrushing guards.
Once they were safely out of the complex, Sarah reached forward from the backseat and swatted The Shadow hard across the back of the head. "Lose a civilian or two? Are we talking about me here?"
"Yes," The Shadow responded.
"O.K., that goes in the file," Sarah snapped.
"And how are you going to do that?" The Shadow mocked, reaching into Peter's backpack. "Since I've got..." He froze and looked again. "You've got to be kidding me!"
You lost it again?Spiderman snapped disbelievingly as he landed in the back of the jeep.
"I didn't lose it," The Shadow realized in frustration. "Lamont Cranston lifted it when he retrieved the money. This has not been a good week for me."
"Time must be gaining on you."
Both heroes cracked up, leaving the girls thoroughly confused about what they were talking about, what had happened already, and what the heroes were doing there.
Stephen was still thinking about the entirety of the events of the past few days when the Acela train arrived at Penn Station with the four of them. Even as they strode through the massive train terminal toward Eighth Avenue, Stephen could not get the whole thing out of his mind. He'd just spent nearly a week in December 1933, even though clockwise, it had only been a few hours since their departure from and return to their own time. Wow. His internal clock was going to be messed up for at least a week, he decided.
Moe Shrevnitz's cab met them at the curb. "Where to?"
"Home," Stephen and Peter said simultaneously.
After dropping Peter and MJ off at MJ's apartment and Stephen off at Cranston Manor, Moe pulled up to the front steps of Sarah's apartment building. "Last stop," he called.
"Thank goodness." She blew out a hard breath. "This may officially be the weirdest day in the history of mankind."
"Tell me about it," Moe agreed.
"Oh, I can guarantee you don't know the half of it," Sarah told him. "I mean, let's put aside this whole time travel thing, which admittedly is hard to do...but how did they end up in Washington, DC? They were in Manhattan, we were on the cell phone with them, then suddenly there's a bunch of Mongols descending on us, and the next thing I know, The Shadow's plowing through the walls with some military surplus truck...how did they get there so fast?"
"Even if I had an answer for that, you wouldn't believe it."
"Why do you say that?"
He reached under the seat and handed her a small box. "Because about three hours ago, my lawyer came to see me and gave me this package, with specific instructions to see that you get it. He said that his grandfather got this box on New Year's Day 1934 from one of his clients who ordered that it be held in trust until 10:50 PM last night. His client was my grandfather...and the package came from someone we all know."
Sarah opened the box to reveal a small bundle wrapped in oilcloth and tied with twine. She untied it, and out fell her notebook, heavily yellowed with age. "My God..." She hurriedly opened it...and found a message written on the next unused page.
"What does it say?" Moe asked.
"'The apple never falls far from the tree...Lamont Cranston, 22 December 1933'." She laughed. "Unreal."
"I'd say you have the proof that it's very real," Moe responded.
That made Sarah laugh harder. She patted the cabbie on the shoulder, then got out of the cab and headed up the stairs, still laughing at this amazing cosmic joke.
Stephen reclined on the sofa in Cranston Manor's spacious parlor, surrounded by family photo albums and Margo Lane Cranston's private journals, taking it all in with a newfound appreciation. It was hard to imagine that he'd actually sat in practically this same spot, talking to his grandfather just hours ago. And it was even harder to believe he'd actually gotten to meet his grandmother...and learned to appreciate her role in The Shadow's mission in ways he'd never considered. He opened yet another photo album and turned to a casual shot of Margo with her two sons at an Easter Egg hunt.
He marvelled at the photo for several long minutes, like he had most of the photos he'd found. She really was a beautiful woman, more elegant and regal yet tough and resilient than any picture could ever show. His desire to learn more about her was fuelled by the time he'd spent this afternoon reading through her journals voraciously, immersed in stories that were carefully phrased to keep his grandfather's activities secret, but clear enough for him to read between the lines.
"You found them."
Stephen looked up sharply to see his uncle standing in the doorway.
Each man looked at the other for a long time. Neither knew quite what to say.
"Hey," Stephen said finally. "When you'd get back?"
"About an hour ago. You?"
"Last night." He looked at the photo album. "She really was amazing."
"She was." Victor crossed to the chair across from his nephew and picked up one of the photos. "I never thought pictures did her justice. She was incredible in person. My father told me that everyone who ever saw her fell in love with her."
"I can believe that." Stephen glanced at another photo, this one a more formal portrait of Lamont, Margo, and the children. "I think I now understand why you and Marpa Tulku always held him in such high esteem. He was even more amazing than any story I ever heard growing up."
Victor nodded. "I never saw him in his 'prime' as The Shadow. But I did experience his unbelievable psyche firsthand. He had gifts and abilities far beyond anything I ever have or ever will possess." He looked over at Stephen. "Did you actually get to...spend any real time with him?"
"We did have a memorable mental tussle," Stephen confessed.
Victor actually smiled. "And I take it by the fact that you're still here that you were able to hold him off?"
"Just barely."
Victor laughed. "I remember that feeling all too well." He paused. "I'd like to hear about all of it later, when you've had a chance to put it all into perspective in your own mind."
Stephen smiled slightly. "I'd like that, too."
Victor nodded, then got to his feet, patted Stephen's shoulder, and left the room.
Safely ensconced in his mountain hideout somewhere in the wilds of Canada, Kuba Khan paced his throne room with agitation. His men should have been back with the control panel by now, if the vision he had seen in his dreams was true. Something must have gone wrong. And what that something could be was something he was beginning to have a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach about...
"My Khan..."
Khan looked up as a Mongolian servant came into the room and began grovelling much stronger than normal. This was likely not good news.
"A large crate has come from America, addressed to you," the servant continued.
Now Khan was pretty sure this really wasn't good news. Nevertheless, he followed his servant to the equipment storage chamber, in the center of which was a crate covered in stickers reading "This Side Up", "Perishable", and "Handle With Care", surrounded by other nervous-looking flunkies. "Open it," he growled.
Khan's flunkies opened it and found Shan Ruche tied up and gagged inside. There was a letter taped to his forehead.
Khan ripped the letter off Ruche's forehead, not bothering to untie his man.
The note, written in neat, precise, unembellished script and signed with a stamped Shadow insignia, read:
"My grandfather should have taken the killing shot when he had the chance. Come to think of it, so should I. But neither of us did, and we left both your grandfather and your greedy servant Paul Maxwell to die a madman's death in an institution nearly seventy years ago. Mark Lachlan died at Maxwell's hand, another victim of both Maxwell's greed and your mad lust for power. Be warned, Khan: Your time is close at hand. I promise you that."
Khan read it twice carefully and smirked knowingly. Then he looked at his bound second for a long moment, strongly considering various and sundry forms of punishment, then decided it would be more advantageous in the long run to calmly leave the room.
Which he did, leaving Ruche struggling against his bonds and screaming behind his gag.
"Penny for your thoughts," MJ asked her silent boyfriend.
Peter looked across the apartment at her. "I don't even know if they're worth that much," he finally said, still trying to sort through the events of the past few hours. Or days...maybe years...whatever...
"You can tell me," she urged, leaning against the kitchen sink, looking curiously at him.
He let out a sardonic chuckle. "I could, but it would probably make even less sense than it already does."
"Somehow I doubt that." She busied herself with putting a tea kettle on the stove, then dampened a sponge and wiped up nonexistent crumbs from the countertop while she gathered her own thoughts. "Would you have let him sacrifice me?"
"What?"
She tossed the sponge aside and got teacups out of the cabinet. "Stephen said he wasn't going to give up that whatever-it-was even if he had to lose a few civilians. Would you have let him lose me?"
He was confused. What brought this on? "No, of course not."
She let out a short of indignation. "Well, it's not like you were breaking any land speed records to save me when I had a crossbow to my neck," she said sharply.
Now he was really confused. What the...? "What was I supposed to do, Mary Jane? Even I can't move that fast!"
"So you decided to aim your guy's crossbow at the goon holding Sarah instead?"
"Stephen had your guy covered! What, was I supposed to just leave the other guy alone so he could shoot her head off instead?"
"She's not your girlfriend!" MJ snapped angrily.
"I know that!" Peter retorted equally sharply. Then he looked distressed. "Don't do this, Mary Jane. Please."
She turned to him. "I don't know what to do, Peter. I'm really not sure I can handle constantly being taken hostage or held at gunpoint or dangled over a bottomless pit by madmen and supervillains and anybody else who wants to take on Spiderman and/or The Shadow this week."
Peter looked at her, completely dumbfounded. It wasn't like this was the first time this issue had come up, but usually he was the one doing the doubting and she was the one doing the reassuring. He had no experience in playing a reversal of those roles. "I...I don't know what to say," he finally said aloud.
For a long moment, both of them just looked at each other with confused and hurting eyes, torn between screaming with anger and sobbing with pain.
And then the tea kettle whistled, breaking the silence.
MJ turned the stove off and sighed. "I don't want to talk about it," she said, almost seeming to be trying to convince herself more than reassuring Peter. "I'm probably overreacting, again."
"You're not," he responded.
She sighed, then crossed the room to him.
He took her in his arms and held her close.
They both clung tightly to that embrace, trying to shut out the horrors of the world around them.
The yellowed newspaper clipping showed a rare photo of Lamont and Margo Cranston in less than their usual socialite finery. Margo was all in black, looking sad and frail as her husband held her in his arms. The candid shot was attached to a newspaper article about the death of Reinhardt Lane, noted physicist, and the emotions the photo depicted pierced Stephen's heart. It continued to both amaze and frustrate him how little he had ever paid attention to this sort of family memorabilia before--if it hadn't directly concerned The Shadow's mission, Stephen had blithely ignored it in the past. Never again, he noted mentally. Never again...
A knock on the parlor door interrupted Stephen's emotional solitude once more. "Come in, Victor," he called slightly impatiently.
The door opened. "I'm not Victor--can I still come in?"
Stephen looked up. It was Sarah, dressed in a slit-to-the-waist-from-two-directions evening gown. He fought to keep his eyes from popping out of his skull.
She noticed. "You like it?"
He tried to find the right words. "You look great."
She smiled. "Thanks."
"You weren't wearing that this morning in Washington," he noted.
"You're quite the detective."
He smirked slightly at the barb. "What's the occasion?"
"Policeman's Orphans and Widows Fund Holiday Ball was tonight at the Cobalt Club. The Post sent me to cover it."
Stephen stared at her for a long moment. "Really."
"Yeah."
Stephen couldn't help but smile. It really was too perfect. "So what brings you here?"
"I wanted to see how you were doing. Seemed like there was more to what went on than you were telling us."
"Usually is."
"You want to talk about it?"
He mentally debated that question for about ten seconds. "You don't want to be late for your very important date."
"Late?" Sarah looked confused. "The ball ended a half-hour ago."
Stephen checked his watch. He'd lost track of the time completely. "Huh."
She cast her gaze upon the pile of books, photos, and papers. "Have you been here all night?"
Stephen nodded. "Catching up on family history."
Sarah came over to the sofa and picked up a photo of Margo on Lamont's arm, out for yet another night on the town as one of Manhattan's power couples. "Pretty lady."
"My grandmother."
"Really?" Sarah smiled. "You have her eyes."
Stephen looked at her. "You think? Everyone says I get my eyes from my grandfather."
She looked at the picture again. "You do look like him. You look a lot like him. And you certainly act like him, according to his notes."
Stephen looked at her oddly. "What notes?"
She reached into her small handbag and produced a worn, yellowed notepad. "Amazing what you leave behind sometimes." She flipped to the page in question and handed it to him.
He read it. "'The apple never falls far from the tree.'" He couldn't help but laugh. "Well, that's certainly true."
"There it is," she pointed out. "Right there. When you smile, you have her eyes."
"Huh." He shrugged. "I don't smile that often, so maybe that's why I've never heard that."
"Probably," Sarah agreed. She held out the photo for him to take. "What was she like?"
Stephen traded the photo for the notepad. "She was one in a million."
Sarah sat down in the overstuffed chair across from him. "Tell me about her."
Stephen smiled over at her. "It's a long story."
She shrugged. "Not like I have anyplace to be."
They looked at each other for a long moment. "People may talk," he cautioned.
She shrugged again. "Not like they aren't already."
He laughed aloud. "That's certainly true."
They looked at each other once more.
"I'm very high maintenance," he warned.
"I don't like taking orders I don't agree with," she answered.
"I believe a personal relationship with an agent is a very bad idea."
"I squeeze the toothpaste from the middle."
"I have problems expressing affection in public."
"I like Italian food."
"Children taste good with ketchup."
The silence stretched for about fifteen seconds before both of them finally burst out laughing.
"So," Sarah noted, "that's that."
Stephen nodded, fully aware of the ironic sense of deja vu he was now experiencing. "Indeed, it is."
Silence once more stretched.
"Is this a cognac discussion or a sherry discussion?" Sarah finally asked.
Stephen thought it over. "Cognac."
Sarah got up, crossed to the sideboard, poured two snifters of cognac, crossed to the sofa, handed one of them to Stephen, then sat back down in the overstuffed chair across from him. "So," she said, giving her snifter a swirl, "tell me about her."
He smiled. "I'd love to."