The Magic Talisman

by John Blaine

  “Mr. Ewing, Captain. I found him at the police station inBayonne .”

  “Thanks.” The officer picked up the phone. “Hello, Bill.Ed Douglas at Whiteside. How would you Federal types like to have us poor country boys hand you the counterfeiting operation you’ve been hunting, all wrapped up in ribbons?”

  The phone erupted with excited sounds.

  “Nope.No joke. You’re inBayonne , so you can be here in twenty minutes. Want to come over and get the dope first hand?Just a sec, Bill.” He turned to Mysto. “Can you wait?” At the magician’s nod, he spoke into the phone again. “Come on over.”

  The Captain hung up and asked, “Can you give us all the details offhand? Locations of doors, possible traps, escape routes, and so on?”

  “Of course.There are two entrances to the shelter. One is through the downstairs recreation room and the other is a secret entrance under one of the statues in the garden. It was the outside entrance they used for their comings and goings. The watchman was easy to evade. If he’d turned his dog loose instead of keeping him on a lead, Carl and friends would have had a problem.”

  Rick spoke up. “How can we be sure the gang is inside?”

  “The Talisman,” Jan said instantly. She shuddered. “I can tell you if the nephew is there. I’m sure he’s the one I felt. He was so hateful, so wrong-feeling and vicious.Just as Mr. Wayland described him.”

  Mysto shook his head. “Jan, you didn’t tell me you had sensed Carl, although I should have known it.”

  “Yes, twice strongly and a couple of times less so.The night you gave me the Talisman, he let go with a Page 90

  blast that almost knocked me down. It was awful. Rick had to hold me up, and I dropped the Talisman.”

  Mysto took a deep breath. “I’m so sorry you had to be exposed to that creature. As I said, he’s a powerful, angry personality who emits bursts of temper. What’s more, he’s as strongly in resonance with me and the Talisman as you are-which means you’re in resonance with him, too. No, Jan, you will not use the Talisman. In your life you will come across evil, because it exists, and some of it will be attuned to the stone, which I intend for you to have eventually.But no more of Carl for you, my dear. I’m your pointer, captain.”

  “Very good, Mr. Wayland.”

  Rick decided now was the time to make an important point. He addressed the captain. “Sir, it was the four of us who got Mr. Wayland out of the estate, and sort of solved the mystery. Now, I know some of the Federal law officers want no part of ordinary people hanging around while they perform. So, if you please, we hope you will be our protector-or maybe advocate-so we can be there at the finish.”

  “For certain, Rick.What do you have in mind?”

  “Well, Scotty and I can be wherever Mr. Wayland is, and the girls could have a view out over the garden, if Mr. Wayland would tell you which room would be safe, with no secret entrances. Then maybe you could station a rifleman with them in case of a break. I imagine you’d want a long gun looking down on the garden, wouldn’t you, sir?”

  Captain Douglas chuckled. “You make your point nicely, Rick. I would station a rifleman, or maybe two, where the view is best, and if the girls happened to be visiting the Camerons, putting them with my men would be a natural thing to do for their protection. Of course, you and Scotty would be visiting, too, and when Bill Ewing finds out what your part was in this, I doubt he’ll object, anyway.”

  “Thanks, captain. But don’t exaggerate our part. We’ve never accomplished so little. All Scotty and I managed to do was hang around in the darkness. Our role was mostly just being there.”

  “You undervalue your services,” Mysto reproved. “True, it was Jan who was the most in resonance with me and the stone, but would she have continued to come to the house without you and Scotty? The Millers wouldn’t have allowed it, and your folks wouldn’t have permitted Barby such freedom of movement were she not in your care. Also, my trust was in you, as well as in the girls. I would never have come out if they had been there alone.”

  “Thanks for those kind words,” Scotty said. “But, as Rick said, mostly we were just there.”

  “Nonsense.It was your persistence that finally helped me get free. I’ve never seen a better team. Without Barby, Jan would not have been there to take the Talisman and call me out. Without you two in easy reach the girls wouldn’t have dared to invade the house by night. You were all necessary, and my gratitude is to all of you.”

  “He’s right,” Jan said firmly.

  Barby said, “Of course, he’s right. When do we do this, captain? Will it be a long wait before you and the Federal people move?”

  “I’m going to push for tomorrow morning, Barby. Just to give us enough time to cover all bases and get our troops ready. Meanwhile, I’ll sew up the place so tightly a mouse couldn’t get through.”

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  Jan linked her arm through Rick’s, and Barby’s eyes went from boy to boy. “We’ll go for it tomorrow, as a team, right?”

  “As we should,” Scotty finished.

  CHAPTER XV

  The Heartbeat

  On the morning following the visit to Captain Douglas’ office, Rick, Scotty, the girls, and Derek sat in the kitchen of the House of Illusion, having soft drinks and cookies. The chef and his staff were having a day off, because, in show business talk, “the house was dark.” The next dinner show was three days away.

  Elsewhere in the house were the Captain, Mysto, Jerry Webster, David, and Karen. Jerry’s presence was due to a few of Captain Douglas’ less pleasant memories of operations with Federal officers.

  Somehow, when local or state police made a major crime break jointly with Federal agencies, the role of the locals managed to get lost in the press and TV reports.

  As the officer said privately to the boys, “I trust Bill Ewing completely. He’s a good man. But if Jerry’s there and the Record files his story with the Associated Press, I’ll know the credits are reported accurately.”

  Rick was impatient as always. He knew that, just inside the estate fence, state troopers were getting into position to block all possible escape routes. Others would be arriving any minute. He was anxious to see them all assembled, ready to move in on Carl Cleary and company.

  The others were talking about the mystery of the Mirella estate, and how only Mysto had all the answers. Rick observed, “Not quite all the answers. There’s still at least one puzzle. We know Mysto and Carl’s gang had been around the house, but you told us the dust was thick and undisturbed.”

  “I’ve thought about that,” Derek admitted, “and we were wrong. What we thought of was footprints in the dust, or signs of it being disturbed, and there were none. What didn’t occur to us until later, was that some of the rooms had no dust on the floor. As I look back, there was none in the recreation room or the kitchen. Of course the office and entrance hall are carpeted.”

  Mysto arrived in time to hear Derek’s comment.“Naturally. I was using the kitchen, and it had been cleaned up. Carl isn’t stupid. He would have cleaned the rooms he needed to use so any footprints wouldn’t lead to his hideout.”

  Barby asked, “Are you sure we can’t be overheard?”

  “Very sure,” Mysto replied. “I know all there is to know about this place. There’s no way Carl could know that we’re here unless he comes out through the recreation room, and he won’t do that by day.”

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  Captain Douglas came in with David and Karen.“First load coming up the driveway.”

  A truck arrived, turned, and backed to the loading platform at the rear of the house. The truck was emblazoned with the picture of a loaf of bread, and it carried the name of a famous bakery.

  David opened the double doors and six troopers filed into the kitchen. At the captain’s signal, they arrayed themselves around the wall and waited for instructions.

  A second truck arrived on the heels of the first. This time it held four men in civilian clothes. Rick and his friends knew one of th
em, Agent Bill Ewing. The others were also Secret Service agents, because, in addition to protecting the President of theUnited States , the Secret Service is charged with protecting the nation’s money against counterfeiting.

  Ewingasked Mysto, “Are you sure your nephew is in the shelter?”

  “Positive.”

  Captain Douglas rose. “Shall we get to it? Barby, Jan, and Karen, you know where to go. Nagorski and Peters will go with you.” The two carried rifles.

  Jan and Barby both had delighted smiles for the boys as they went with Karen and the troopers to the room Mysto had designated.

  Two troopers, two Secret Service men, and Captain Douglas went downstairs to the recreation room, where Mysto had earlier shown the secret of the shelter door. The five carried pistols, and the captain had a walkie-talkie. A loose nail in the baseboard was withdrawn and pushed into an innocent appearing nailhole .

  Mysto,Ewing , and the other officers moved to the doors that opened into the formal gardens. Rick, Scotty, and Jerry let the leaders widen the gap and then followed, not talking or calling attention to themselves in any way. This was at the captain’s instructions. He didn’t wantEwing to have a chance to object to observers. Derek and David took up positions in the doorway, from which they had an excellent view.

  The boys circled quietly around the massive statue of Thor with its non-operating fountain. Mysto had told them Thor’s hammer was actually the shelter’s vent, with the air intake well screened in the base.

  The fountain would flow when summer came.

  Mysto went to a statue of Diana, Goddess of the Hunt, complete with bow and arrows and two hunting dogs. Silently he showed that a bronze clasp on the front of Diana’s quiver moved, then pointed to a flagstone in front of the statue.

  Ewingtook his walkie-talkie out of the belt holster and held it to his lips. “We’re in position, Ed.”

  Rick heard faintly, “Attention. We move in on a five-count.Counting now. One, two, three...”

  Mysto had his hand on the metal clasp.“Four, five!” He turned it. The flagstone dropped, exposing a shaft with steel rungs leading downward.

  Ewingwas down the ladder in a flash, the other officers close behind. There was a sudden yell from below, muffled by earth and shaft, then a shot.

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  The boys hurried to Mysto. They were under orders not to follow the invading lawman, and Rick chafed with impatience; he wanted to know what was going on.

  Suddenly Mysto groaned. He squeezed the Talisman tightly in his hand. “They haven’t got him!”

  “How do you know?” Rick asked quickly.

  “I felt fright, then anger, and just then a strong feeling of relief. He got free somehow. I don’t know how.”

  Scotty grabbed Rick’s arm in a grip that hurt. He pointed. Rick looked just in time to see a foot vanish behind a statue of the god Pan. He shot a glance at the window behind which the girls and troopers were watching and saw a rifle barrel project over the sill.

  “Let’s go,” he gasped and motioned to the left. Scotty was off on the instant, and Rick sprinted to the right. He saw the trooper stand, rifle ready, and knew he had been seen.

  The boys arrived simultaneously from opposite directions as they rounded Pan. Just as he dove headlong in a flying tackle for the legs, Rick saw the face of a big, beefy man contorted in rage. At the same moment, Scotty’s flying body hit the man above the waist. It was a well coordinated example of the old adage, “You hit’m high and I’ll hit’m low.”

  The stranger went down with a crash like a redwood falling, striking Pan a direct blow. The satyr god teetered wildly and Rick scrambled for cover. Pan held a pan pipe, a reed syrinx cast in stone and held in place by a copper pin that had eroded. The god rocked as Carl Cleary tried to scramble to his feet, fell into the statue again, and left it rocking. He whirled and got to one knee, teeth showing in berserk rage, and was reaching for Scotty when about ten pounds of stone pan pipe made a perfect landing on the back of his head. His eyes glazed; he fell forward on his face.

  The boys stood up as Mysto arrived, followed by troopers who had rushed in from the perimeter. The magician bent and rolled his nephew part way over. His nose and forehead were bleeding freely from the impact with the flagstone under the statue’s edge.

  “Well, Carl,” Mysto said softly, “it looks as though the Dark Ferrash has struck you at last.”

  Rick had done some catching up on Omar Khayyam, and he recognized the reference to the Angel of Death.“No, sir. He’s just knocked out.”

  A trooper verified the statement and handcuffed Carl’s hands behind his back.

  Derek and David joined the boys, and in a moment the two troopers with rifles brought Jan, Karen, and Barby into the garden. As Jan came up, she met Rick’s eyes. “He’s the one I felt.The hateful one. I felt another awful blast from him when Mr. Ewing dropped into the shaft and when you hit him.”

  “I’m glad you weren’t holding our Talisman,” Mysto told her. “It’s bad enough that you could feel him without it. With the stone in your hand you would have been sickened.”

  “What’s happening below?” Scotty demanded.

  A trooper answered. He held up his walkie-talkie.“Just got the word. The others are being herded Page 94

  upstairs in the house. There are only two more. One man let fly a shot that missed before one of the troopers grabbed him.”

  “Carl’s a shrewd one,” Mysto said, shaking his head. “He must have installed another exit just in case of something like this.”

  “He couldn’t have gotten beyond the fence anyway,” Barby pointed out. “There were troopers all around. But I’m glad Rick and Scotty got him. And Jan, Karen, and I had grandstand seats.” She put her arm around her brother and squeezed.

  “You had the best view of all,” Rick agreed. He gave her an affectionate smile.

  Jan took his hand. “Do you suppose we can go below, now?”

  “Let’s just do it,” Scotty said. “I’ll lead.”

  The girls followed Scotty down, then Mysto followed Karen. Rick looked around for the twins, but they had gone into the house to greet the officers and their prisoners. He went down the steel rungs into a huge room made of reinforced concrete. It was well equipped with furniture, including four day beds.

  Against one wall was gear that Rick recognized instantly as an offset camera, plate-making and other equipment, and a printing press. Away from the wall were tables, some stacked with reams of paper.

  One held an industrial type paper cutter.

  Rick’s friends were clustered around a separate table. He walked over in time to hear a Secret Service agent say, “I’d guess these stack up to about a million.Maybe a bit more. And look here.” The agent pointed to another stack. “These are not cut yet.” The twenty dollar bills had been printed six to a sheet.

  “Their lab was set up in the bathroom over there.” The agent pointed. “They were just getting ready to cut these. The big guy made a dive behind that couch over there, but we didn’t worry because he couldn’t hide, we thought. Take a look.”

  Behind the couch was a drape that concealed a hole chiseled in the concrete, an exit big enough for even Carl Cleary. From the opening a short tunnel ran to the base of a ladder.

  Captain Douglas arrived through the recreation room door. “Mr. Wayland, your nephew is conscious again. Want to talk to him?”

  “No, Captain. He and I have nothing to say to each other. Rick, Scotty, and a stone syrinx said it for me.”

  “Very well.Bill and his men are loading the prisoners right now. Some of my men will escort them toNewark and jail.”

  “Where’s Jerry?” Rick asked. He had just missed his friend.

  “Here he comes.” Scotty pointed to the recreation room door.

  Jerry was grinning widely. “I just took some shots of the prisoners being put in the truck. Do you guys know I fired just as you hit Cleary? It should be a beautiful action shot. Now I want a couple of the press an
d the bills I see on that table and I’ll be gone.”

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  Rick walked over to the press with him. The metal table on which it rested had been wired to a water pipe, probably both for stability and to ground it. No wonder the thumping had been audible. It had been transmitted through the piping in the house all the way to the gate house.

  “There’s no printing plate on it,” Scotty noted.

  The agent laughed. “You didn’t think we’d let you print some of your own, did you?”

  “No,” Scotty retorted, “and I’ll bet we don’t get any samples of that finished pile, either.”

  “We may get some in change, sometime,” David suggested.

  The agent shook his head. “Not unless you travel toTimbuktu or someplace like that. The stuff is very good, but not good enough for very wide distribution here. They’ve been smuggling it to soft currency third world countries where people aren’t usedto many American bills and how they look and feel.

  We’ve known about it for some time, and we think we have the outlets pretty well blocked. We’ve worked hard to trace the phony bills back to their origin, but these people had such an elaborate system of distribution that when we finally got back to a small firm in Bayonne, it turned out that they didn’t know the counterfeiters and never saw the people who left bundles of counterfeits in a new place every time. They’d get a phone call and a place. They paid the counterfeiters by bank transfer of money to a numbered account inLiechtenstein after taking their cut.”

  “So this ties up the whole thing?” Jan asked.

  “It does. And believe me, we’re grateful for the help. It’s been a long hunt.”

  “I want to try the press,” Rick told them. “I don’t care about the plate. I want to hear the sound.” He found the switch and threw it.

  The press cylinder rolled. Though he looked he couldn’t see the parts that made the noise, but the familiar rhythm was there, thump-THUMP, thump-THUMP.

  Scotty laughed. “There beats the mysterious heart of the House of Illusion.”

  “We’ll be taking all of the equipment out, including the press,” the Secret Service agent told them.