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Updated: June 7, 2025
There was no more hesitation: Ekstrom obeyed, if with the sullen grace of a wild beast that would and could slay its trainer with one sweep of its paw if only it dared. For the first time since leaving the girl Lanyard relaxed his vigilant watch over the man long enough for one swift glance through the window at his side. But she was already vanished from the cafe. He breathed more freely now.
His delight, indeed, in discomfiting his dupe was chilled by apprehension that it were madness, simply because the spy had proved unexpectedly docile, to consider the affaire Ekstrom closed.
"It is true, I were a better foe to Germany if I kept my counsel and let Ekstrom continue to play double." The music ceasing, to be followed by the inevitable clamour for more, Lanyard offered an arm upon which Sophie rested a detaining hand. "No wait. We dance this encore. I have more to say." He submitted amiably, the more so since not ill-pleased with himself.
Like a blazing thunderbolt one word rent the slumbrous web of sentience: Ekstrom! Galvanised by the flood of hatred unpent by the syllables of that name, Lanyard began again to swim, flailing the water with frantic arms as if to win somewhither by the very violence of his efforts. This the one cogent reason why he must not, could not, die....
A signal possibly indicating that Ekstrom had arrived They met at last, those two, and discreetly confabulated, the maitre d'hotel betraying welcome mitigation of that nervous tension which had heretofore so palpably affected him; and, as the other stepped back into the elevator, Lanyard saw this one's glance irresistibly attracted to the table dedicated to the service of the Princess de Alavia.
There was a yell from the guard, not of pain but of fright. Apparently he executed a von Hindenburg retreat. Without more opposition Ekstrom gained the platform. In the same breath Lanyard stood up. The lowermost girder of the "L" was immediately overhead. He grasped it, doubled his legs beneath him, swung clear. The omnibus shot from under him, the roadster convoying.
But for that damning evidence against him of the stolen necklace in his pocket he might have had his will of Ekstrom, and justified himself when discovered by proving that he had merely done justice to a thief who sold what he had stolen and stole back to steal again what he had sold. Self-contempt attacked self-conceit like an acid.
"My secretary," Stanistreet explained, "was present at the interview, and is naturally interested." "And very good of him, I'm sure," Lanyard agreed. "I was about to explain, Mr. Blensop, that Ekstrom, alias Anderson, was killed in the course of a raid on the Prussian spy headquarters in Seventy-ninth Street this morning." "Amazing!" Blensop gasped.
"I don't recall the man among the passengers, but he may have been in one of the boats, a fellow of about my stature, with a flowing beard...." He sketched broadly Ekstrom as he had seen him in the Stanistreet library. Her eyes quickened. "One such escaped in our boat, the second steward; I think his name was Anderson." "Doubtless the same." "Then it is gone!"
This time Lanyard did not wait for him to come back for punishment, but closed in, catching him as he strove to rise, meeting each fresh effort with ruthless accuracy, battering him into insanity of despair, so that Ekstrom came back again and again without thought, animated only by frenzied brute instinct to find the throat of his tormenter, and ever and ever failing; till at length he crumpled and lay crushed and writhing, then subsided into insensibility, was quite still but for heaving lungs and the spasmodic clutchings of his broken and ensanguined fingers....
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