Read Online The Avenger 11 - River of Ice by Kenneth Robeson - Free Book Online

Avenger’s pale glacial eyes. All four stared at him in awe, mixed with a little inexplicable fear, as he walked out of the room with his soft panther tread.

CHAPTER VIII

Icy Prison
    Lini Waller was in deadly danger. Fantastic danger! The Avenger knew that. The nature of the danger was almost clear to him. But not quite. There was just one thing to be done now: trace the girl, who had gotten away for the simple reason that it had never occurred even to The Avenger that there might be a private, practically secret, door directly out of the conference room.
    “Mon, how can ye trace her?” inquired MacMurdie gloomily. “Ye haven’t a thing to work on.”
    “We have a few things to work on,” said Benson quietly.
    “Such as?” said Smitty, almost as pessimistic as Mac.
    “Lini has given us the key, I think.” Benson quoted her bemused words: “ ‘I was taken to the icy caves of the ancient race . . . A cave of ice, cold and bare, bright with the white light that has burned all these thousands of years.’ That was what she said.”
    “How could a light burn thousands of years?” demanded Mac.
    “That,” said The Avenger, softly, “is a highly interesting point. But it is not what we are concerned with at the moment. The thing that is more relevant right now is Lini Waller’s reference to ice caves.” The pale eyes were glittering with the flaming genius behind the paralyzed, white countenance. “She thought she had been taken to the caves discovered by her and her brother. Obviously that is impossible. So she must have thought that because of a similarity in the sites. Now, there are no ice caves in New York or vicinity. But there may be something like them. A refrigerating room. A cave of ice—ice walls.”
    “A refrigerating room doesn’t have ice walls,” objected Smitty. “Unless it could mean white tile.”
    “White tile doesn’t look like ice, ye overgrown lummox,” snorted Mac.
    “Glass,” said Benson. “Glass blocks. They might be used.” He went on slowly with brilliant method. “One of the four Foundation directors . . . well, Wittwar’s business requires refrigerating rooms for meat packing. And Mallory is the head of that business under Wittwar.”
    In an incredibly short time the three were zipping through the Holland Tunnel, under the Hudson River toward Jersey, where the newest and most modern of the Wittwar Packing Co. storage plants was located, in Newark. And in this plant, glass blocks had been used in walls between refrigerating rooms.
    “If Lini Waller was kidnaped and taken to a Wittwar refrigerating warehouse,” said Smitty, as their car shot out of the New Jersey end of the tunnel, “then a Wittwar man would seem to be behind the crime. Wittwar himself, maybe.”
    “I’d say ’twould be the man, Mallory,” Mac retorted. “But then it could be either of the others too. Just because the girl was held in a Wittwar building doesn’t mean that somebody else couldn’t have sneaked her in.”
    They reached the new warehouse building. It was not quite noon. At that hour, trucks were pulling up to the loading platform empty, and rolling away from it loaded. Men in stained whites were as busy as ants. It was a common looking scene.
    “Ye want to get in unseen, Muster Benson?” said Mac.
    The Avenger nodded. “Yes. We’ll wait till noon.”
    The twelve-o’clock whistle blew in a neighboring factory. At the warehouse, a last truck was loaded and pulled away. Then truck drivers got out their lunches and settled in their cabs to eat; or else they went to nearby restaurants. Warehouse workers did the same. In a little less than ten minutes Benson, Smitty and Mac slid in through the wide loading doorway with no one around to see.
    Benson had talked with the architect’s office to confirm his guess about a glass-block wall in the Wittwar meat-storage building. He knew the layout of the warehouse. “Top floor,” he said. “The glass-block partitions are in a row of