Tales of the Red Panda: The Mind Master

by Gregg Taylor

  “I’m sure,” he said, turning back with renewed intensity to the oblong, multi-dialed device he held.

  “You’re really gonna make me ask, aren’t you?” she said at last, a little cross.

  “I really am,” he smiled. Kit felt her cheeks grow hot. He had been playing with her, and she had blinked first. It was so hard to tell sometimes.

  The Red Panda took up the stub of a pencil and made more quick notes on the clipboard on the seat beside him.

  “If the Empire Bank was robbed tonight, why am I racing hither and yon while you do your math homework?” she said with her nose wrinkled crossly.

  “It is a valid question,” he smiled as he wrote.

  “Those look like map readings,” she said, intrigued. “Directional co-ordinates.”

  “Right first try,” he said, enjoying the game more and more and showing it in spite of his best efforts.

  “Directional co-ordinates taken from three different locations,” she said, handing him a small map of downtown before he could reach for it himself.

  “Very good.” The Red Panda grinned as he began to mark the locations at which they had stopped on the map.

  “So you’re triangulating the location of something.” She was trying to stay cross and failing badly.

  “Yes,” he said, as he used his calculations to draw a line from the first of their stops across the map.

  “And since we’re racing around town without making a trip to the crime scene…”

  “I’ve been to the scene,” he said. “There was nothing of interest.”

  It took a moment for the silence in the seat next to him to make an impact. He looked up as he finished drawing the line from the second point on the map. She was holding her eyes frozen on him, her lips pursed in a crooked pout entirely of her own invention. He was, for an instant, completely distracted, a fact that she failed to notice, possibly due to the blank lenses in his mask that hid his eyeline at close quarters.

  “You went to the crime scene without me?”

  “I was just passing by,” he said, pulling himself out of the momentary spell. “I didn’t want to spoil your night off.”

  “You know how you spoil my night off?” she asked. “You go out crime-fighting without me.”

  “I swear to you, I fought no crime,” he said, drawing a third line on the map.

  “But you visited the scene.”

  “I did. Where I learned only that the robbery happened less than an hour after the bank had closed. A small, largely secret safe-deposit vault deep within the bank was compromised, and each of the drawers within was cleaned out. The locks were neither finessed nor forced, suggesting the participation of at least one bank employee, willingly or no. To say nothing of the fact that no one could have got in or out at that hour without encountering several armed guards.”

  “But instead of investigating the guards–”

  “An angle the police are surely pursuing for us,” he reminded.

  “–we’re driving around looking for… what exactly?”

  “The goodies,” he beamed.

  “The- you mean… the goodies, the loot?”

  “The mazuma, the dough, what have you. Yes,” he nodded.

  “I love it when you try to talk rough,” she purred.

  “Kit Baxter, behave yourself,” he scolded gently.

  “Yes, Boss.” Her cowl spread wide to accommodate her toothy smile. “You really think we can find the ill-gotten booty before we’ve found the ill-meaning baddie?”

  “Drive there,” he said, pointing to the spot on the map where the three lines intersected. “And we’ll find out.”

  The Flying Squirrel threw the car into gear and peeled away at terrific speed. She was still working it out.

  “Those were radio signals you were triangulating,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “What makes you think that the…,” she trailed off quickly. He knew at once that she had it. “These safety deposit boxes… you say they were secret?”

  “Well, fairly secret, yes. Not general knowledge, anyway.”

  “So they must have been reserved for the grand-high mucky-mucks.”

  He turned his head away as he smiled. “I suppose.”

  “And since the muckiest-mucks of them all in banking terms are ‘Old Money and Plenty of it’…,” she grinned, “one of those boxes was yours, wasn’t it?”

  “You know, I believe it was,” he said with a casualness feigned so well, one could almost believe they were not racing through the streets at dangerous speeds.

  “And this safe deposit box of yours contained…”

  “Oh, a few family trinkets and a small amount of cash.”

  “Small in this case being…”

  “Forty, fifty thousand,” he shrugged.

  She snorted a little in spite of herself, and he instantly felt a pang of guilt. He knew that his partner held the wealthy in a certain degree of contempt, and was never entirely certain that he wasn’t included in that company.

  “Perhaps of greater interest,” he said, changing the subject slightly, “is that one stack of bills had a false centre, which happened to contain a small device that emits an intermittent radio pulse, not unlike that used by radio buoys. Though on a much smaller scale, of course.”

  “Of course,” she smiled. “So as soon as the dough was moved, it started to cry for help.”

  “More or less,” he said, putting the radio receiver away.

  “So you must have thought that somebody would try this caper sooner or later, right? I mean, why else would you hide a tracker in a drawer full of loot?”

  “For fun,” he said with a smile, and held the map up with its three intersecting lines, showing the location of his device. “Isn’t this fun?”

  The heroes raced on, into the night.

  Six

  Thirty minutes later, the sleek, powerful black car sat abandoned, deep in shadows down a long alleyway. The streets of the warehouse district in the city’s west side were empty now. Only the low-hanging moon kept watch over the two masked figures on the rooftop of a derelict building.

  The Flying Squirrel crouched on the ledge and peered intently at the empty warehouse to the north through a tiny yet powerful pair of spyglasses. Her posture was one of deadly motion captured in a still moment. Her grey catsuit clung to her athletic form, her hair spilling out from the back of her cowl. Her silhouette against the moonlight was an image of danger and daring in an unmistakably feminine form.

  Behind her loomed a tall figure of a man, so stock-still he might have been a statue, an illusion only shattered by the slight motion of his long coat in the wind off the lake to the south. Together they set a perfect tableau of vigilance, which he finally shattered with a single, quiet word.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “Nada,” she said, folding the spyglasses back into their compact form and returning them to her belt. “If there’s as much as a mouse stirring down there, I can’t see hide or hair of him.”

  “This feels wrong,” he said at last.

  “Ya think so?” she smirked. “You just pulled off an impossible heist and got away with the baubles of a dozen fine old families. Your average baddie either looks for a fence or a party or both. And I don’t think either are going to be found in this rat emporium.”

  “Of course, your average criminal could never possibly pull off a job with this level of finesse,” he countered.

  “Right. But if he’s that talented, you’d think he’d have a better hideout.”

  He nodded and said nothing for the moment.

  “Any chance they found your radio transmitter?” she asked.

  “There’s always a chance,” he said. “But it’s only been a few hours. And even if they’d found it, I don’t know how they’d have known what it was, unless they expected to find it.”

  “We’re probably making too much of this,” she said, drawing herself up to her full height. Still standing on the ledge, sh
e faced him eye to eye, which made her dizzy in ways that their precarious perch never could. “They probably hid the swag here until the heat died down.”

  “Probably,” he nodded.

  “You really think so?” she smiled, her head tilted ever so slightly to the side.

  The Red Panda grinned. “No,” he said.

  “It did sound a little too good to be true, didn’t it?” she said, reaching up and pulling down the flight goggles that were on the top of her head. “Whaddya say I take the high road and you take the low road?”

  “Ah,” he said, pulling a Grapple Gun from his belt and aiming it across the open space. “Such strategy. Napoleon himself–”

  “–would tell you to stuff a sock in it,” she sassed. In a single, smooth motion she turned neatly in place, lifted her arms high to each side and made a gesture with her hands that tripped a mechanism within her costume. Before he could pull the trigger to fire his Grapple, she threw herself gracefully off the rooftop, just as the retractable gliding membranes built into her costume slid forth, filling the space between her hand and her foot on each side with a tough, lightweight filament. With the ease that comes only of long practice, she caught the wind as she fell and turned the motion into a slow, silent glide through the open space to the rooftop of the warehouse beyond.

  As she neared her target, she pulled her feet forward, pointed them at the roof and instantly made another motion within the gauntlets of her costume. There was a sudden spark that flew forth as she fired the remarkable Static Shoes which her partner had invented. Created originally to hold them to sheer surfaces with the power of static electricity, they had learned to use them with finesse in a variety of situations. In this case, she sent a wave of opposing power from the soles of her feet, not strong enough to repel her from the roof, but enough to slow her descent and allow her to land noiselessly.

  An instant later, she was across the rooftop and through the access door. She rolled in and along the catwalk in a double somersault and came up in an on-guard stance with a red boomerang in one hand and a throwing star in the other. For an instant she was totally still as her eyes adjusted to the pitch darkness, and she waited for any noise. Any motion.

  Nothing. She slid the throwing weapons back into her belt. If this were a bushwhack, there’d have been someone at that door. She listened intently for sound from below. There was nothing. She smiled. If the Boss were rushing the building, silence is what you might expect to hear, at least until he found someone. Then there was usually an unholy ruckus. Maybe they had been wrong about this after all.

  Quickly and quietly, she padded along the catwalk and down the metal steps that led to the warehouse’s second floor. She paused and adjusted a ring outside her glove on the right hand. The Red Panda had tuned her Radio Ring to the frequency of the miniature transmitter, and it was registering a strong signal from the building’s east end.

  The Flying Squirrel raced forward, watching both sides as she ran. There was no sound and no sign of life. Her heart almost jumped into her mouth when there was suddenly a motion right beside her, and she flipped back effortlessly head over heels to give herself room to react. An instant before she threw the first of what would have been a long and painful series of kicks she realized it was him. She froze in her stance, slightly embarrassed, her heart still pounding hard.

  “Hello,” he said quietly.

  “Hi,” she whispered.

  “All clear?”

  She nodded, and pointed towards the door at the end of the passage. It seemed to lead to a small office space, probably once used by a foreman. The smoked glass in the door was now broken, and the open space filled in with cobwebs.

  She glanced at her Radio Ring. “Gotta be in there,” she whispered.

  The Red Panda glanced at his own tracker and nodded.

  She peered through the cobwebs. There was clearly no one in the office.

  “It doesn’t look like anyone’s been in there for months,” she hissed.

  “No,” he agreed, “it doesn’t. But one way or another, someone must have opened that door in the last few hours.”

  “Which means someone went to a lot of trouble to make it look like nobody had opened that door in months,” she said, the sideways grimace returning to her mouth.

  “Which is the sort of thing you’d do if you wanted to make us feel safe opening the door,” the Red Panda added. “And I can only think of one good reason for that.”

  She nodded to a small window twenty feet away. “That one okay with you?” she asked. “For the inevitable dramatic exit?”

  “Fine,” he agreed.

  She pulled a small metal ball from a pouch on her belt and threw it carelessly through the cobwebs into the office. A second later, they heard the first hiss of a fuse as the motion detector was tripped, and they raced as one for the window she had indicated.

  An instant later the office tore itself apart in flames, and the shock waves brought the derelict warehouse down in moments. The deathtrap was brutal and massive in scale, consuming the entire building and threatening the block with its flames. A chaos of sirens descended upon the quiet streets, and of the two masked heroes there was not a single sign.

  Seven

  The wide wooden doors swung open and a sudden glare of natural light elbowed its way into the musty, open hall. The buzz of activity was constant, as a dozen men were busily engaged in using the gymnasium facilities within. Two were jumping rope on opposite sides of the large, open space. Several more worked with weights, and still others with a variety of punching bags, large and small, that hung from the rafters.

  In the centre of the room stood a full-sized boxing ring, where two middleweight-sized men stood opposite one another, trying to keep their eyes focused on each other while simultaneously absorbing the instructions being thrown at them by a large and seemingly very angry man outside the ring. The combatants were handicapped somewhat by the fact that the same trainer was shouting instructions to both of them at the same time. To say nothing of the fact that his instructions were often contradictory in nature, and that their confusion only made him both angrier and his already formidable Greek accent thicker.

  Slowly, the activity around the room began to trickle to a halt as the assembled crowd stopped to gawk at the newcomer standing in their midst, a tallish man with a strong jaw, a shock of blond hair and the uniform of a Toronto Police Constable. The man looked mildly sheepish at his reception, and tried to indicate with his smile that he was not there to make trouble for anyone. He caught the eye of the Greek trainer, who barked orders at the two pugilists and made his way towards the young police officer.

  “If you are going to keep coming to my gymnasium, you should maybe think about taking some lessons,” the trainer growled as be breezed past the officer in the direction of a counter set up near the front door, behind which stood the entrance to a small office.

  “I’m supposed to keep coming here, Spiro,” the policeman protested. “You’re my contact man.”

  The trainer stopped and took his head in his great, meaty left hand. He was a big man, more than sixty years old now, though clearly still strong as an ox. His name was Spiro Papas, and he had been relaying information and orders between the Red Panda and some of his many field agents for almost two years now. The mystery man had earned Spiro’s eternal loyalty by saving his son from a life of crime into which he had fallen, and his respect by doing it in such a way that the young man was able to put a troubled past behind him and make a new life.

  The boxing trainer’s son was free and clear and doing well for himself now, and his grateful father had become one of the most important links in the Red Panda’s network. But it was the green agents that always made his head swim a little. The ones who got so caught up in their new careers of adventure that they spoke out of turn, or drew attention to themselves, or worse, to Papas himself. This new charge of his, Constable Andy Parker, was just such a one.

  “And just how many people heard
you say ‘contact man’ out loud, Parker?” he growled.

  The young cop turned his head quickly. “Why, nobody did,” Parker replied.

  “And the time for looking around to see who is listening is before you speak! Before!” Spiro said as if for the hundredth time while pointing into his office with a stern, stabbing motion. Parker followed along sheepishly.

  Papas closed the door behind them and the smoked glass rattled slightly. “The uniform,” Spiro began again, “it attracts attention, Parker. The other agents, they can come and go and no one much minds them. The only reason for a policeman to keep coming in here is if he is taking lessons, or is shaking me down.” The trainer paused for effect as he loomed over Parker. “I am not so much a man that people might think could be shook down, am I?”

  “No,” Parker admitted. “But I’m not sure that boxing–”

  “Pah!” spat the older man. “To box is the best thing for boy like you. Put some meat on you. Lots of cops, they box. You come in Thursday after work.”

  “Fine,” Parker nodded with a smile. It hadn’t been long since he had been recruited to serve in the army of informants, spotters and active agents that worked under the Red Panda’s command, but already he had learned that there was no point in arguing with Spiro. And he had to admit that the old man had a point. He could come and go with greater ease if the regulars in Spiro’s gym accepted him as one of their own, up to a point.

  “Spiro,” Parker began in earnest, “I’ve got to get hold of the Chief.”

  Spiro’s laugh was almost a snort. “Listen, junior. The Chief, he trusts you. You keep your eyes open good and you use your head. Already you see twice as much action as other agents. But nobody gets hold of the Chief themselves.”

  “That’s why I came to you,” Parker protested.

  “Spiro is not your message boy! When he needs us, he sends for us.”

  “Then just let me leave a message with the reports for pickup, Spiro. I have information he needs on the Empire Bank job.”

  “He told you he needs this, yes?” Spiro squinted skeptically.