Free A Korean Tiger by Nick Carter Page B

apologies if he got caught by some fat German businessman and his wife:
"Verzeihung, mein Herri
A thousand pardons. The wrong room, you understand!
Falsch Zimmer!
I have come to repair the plumbing,
Herr.
I was told this room was empty and —
Ja, mein Herr.
I am going at once!"
    He turned the key. The lock gave with the faintest of oily
clucks.
Nick waited, listening, not breathing. He had been too long in the corridor. He must get in, out of view, prepared for anything. He moved his wrist and the stiletto dropped down into his palm. He put the blade between his teeth, transferred the Luger to his right hand, and with his left slowly turned the knob. The door swung inward without a sound. The room was dark. Killmaster slipped in and closed the door softly behind him. Prepared for anything.
    Prepared for anything but the smell that met his nostrils. A rank powder smell. Guns had been fired in this room. Quite recently.
    Nick acted on instinct, not conscious thought. He dropped to his hands and knees and moved away from the door, to his right along the wall, feeling cautiously ahead of him. He breathed softly through his mouth. And listened. Listened with every ounce of intensity he could muster, his face a few inches off the carpet. After a moment he took a deep noiseless breath and held it until his ears began to pop and his lungs hurt. He held his breath for nearly four minutes; at the end of that time he was sure that there was nothing, no one, in the room with him. No live thing.
    Nick let himself collapse softly on the carpet, relaxing the tension. The Luger was in his left hand, the stiletto in his right. There was no danger in the room. Not now. He was sure of it. But there was something else in the room — he could feel its presence — and in a moment or two he would have to face it.
    He breathed deeply, listening to faint outside sounds, letting his nerves come back to normal. A tug bleated somewhere on the Rhine — the great river was close by — and a car whirred through lonely streets. From far off a police klaxon sounded. He heard the faint rustle and stir of heavy drapes and at the same moment felt a waft of breeze on his cheek. There was a window open someplace. The breeze smelled faintly of the river, of docks and quays, of coal and oil and gasoline. Then the breeze was gone and he could smell the gunpowder again.
    His body was safe for the moment and his brain took over. Racing like the fine computer it was. Guns had been fired in this room; there had been no alarm, no police — the porter would have told him — so that meant the guns had been silenced. Silencers meant a particular sort of trouble, his kind, the kind he understood best. The police, hoodlums, ordinary robbers, they did not use silencers. Sometimes Nick did. So did his opposite numbers in the service of other countries.
    Nick Carter made a wry face in the dark. It wasn't going to be as easy as he had begun to hope. It never was, of course. It had been crazy to dream of getting Bennett and getting out of Cologne by dawn! He sighed and pushed himself off the carpet. Best get on with it.
    He put his hand squarely into a man's face. The flesh was still faintly warm. Nick ran his hand down the man's arm to the wrist, picked it up and flexed it. No rigor yet. Could it be Raymond Lee Bennett? Had the Berlin man, had Avatar, seen a chance and taken it? Done the job and gone? Or was this Avatar now cooling on the floor?
    As Nick crawled back to the door he found his thinking a bit ambivalent. If the Berlin man had gotten Bennett it was all to the good — the job was done — and yet it had been, primarily, Nick's assignment. Professional jealousy? Nick grinned in the dark. Hardly that. It was just that when he started a job he liked to finish it.
    He found the door and locked it. Bolted it and slipped on the safety chain. He found the light switch and flipped it. It wasn't really much of a risk. Not after a gun battle had gone unnoticed.
    The