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listening.
    “We enter upon the last phase, Sir Denis…”
    The guttural voice ceased. Smith replaced the receiver, sprang up, turned.
    “That was a cut-in on the line,” he snapped. “Quick, Hepburn! the nearest phone in the neighborhood: check up that call if you can.”
    “Right.” Mark Hepburn, his jaw grimly squared, buttoned up his coat.
    Sarah Lakin watched Nayland Smith fascinatedly.
    “Hell-for-leather, Hepburn! At any cost you must get through to Abbot Donegal tonight. Dr. Fu-Manchu warns only
once…
”

CHAPTER SEVEN

SLEEPLESS UNDERWORLD
    M ark Hepburn replaced a tiny phial of a very rare re-agent on a shelf above his head and, turning, stooped and peered through a microscope at something resembling a fragment of gummy paper. For a while he studied this object and then stood upright, stretching his white-clad arms—he wore an overall—and yawning wearily. The small room in which he worked was fitted up as a laboratory. Save for a remote booming noise as of distant thunder, it was silent.
    Hepburn lighted a cigarette and stared out of the closed window. The boom as of distant thunder was explained: it was caused by the ceaseless traffic in miles of busy streets.
    Below him spread a night prospect of a large area of New York City. Half-right, framed by the window, the tallest building in the world reared its dizzy head to flying storm clouds. Here was a splash of red light; there, a blur of green. A train moved along its track far away to the left. Thousands of windows made illuminated geometrical patterns in the darkness. Tonight there was a damp mist, so that the flambeau upheld by the distant Statue of Liberty was not visible.
    A slight sound in the little laboratory on the fortieth floor of the Regal-Athenian Tower brought Hepburn around in a flash.
    He found himself looking into the dark, eager face of Nayland Smith.
    “Good Lord, Sir Denis! You move like a cat—”
    “I used my key…”
    “You startled me.”
    “Have you got it, Hepburn—have you got it?”
    “Yes.”
    “What?” Nayland Smith’s lean face, framed in the upturned fur collar of his topcoat, lighted enthusiastically. “First-class job. What is it?”
    “I don’t know what it is—that is to say I don’t know from what source it’s obtained. But it’s a concoction used by certain tribes on the Upper Amazon, and I happened to remember that the Academy of Medicine had a specimen and borrowed it. The preparation on the MS., the envelopes and the stamps gives identical reaction. A lot of study has been devoted to this stuff, which has remarkable properties. But nobody has yet succeeded in tracing it to its origin.”
    “Is it called
kaapi
?”
    “It is.”
    “I might have known!” snapped Nayland Smith. “He has used it before with notable results. But I must congratulate you, Hepburn: imagination is so rarely allied with exact scientific knowledge.”
    He peeled off the heavy topcoat and tossed it on a chair. Hepburn stared and smiled in his slow fashion.
    Nayland Smith was dressed in police uniform!
    “I was followed to headquarters,” said Smith, detecting the smile. “I can assure you I was not followed back. I left my cap (which didn’t fit me) in the police car. Bought the coat—quite useful in this weather—at a big store with several entrances, and returned here in a taxicab.”
    Mark Hepburn leaned back on a glass-topped table which formed one of the appointments of the extemporized laboratory, staring in an abstracted way at Federal Officer 56.
    “They must know you are here,” he said, in his slow dry way.
    “Undoubtedly! They know I am here. But it is to their advantage to see that I don’t remain here.”
    Hepburn stared a while longer and then nodded.
    “You think they would come right out into the open like that?”
    Nayland Smith shot out his left arm, gripping the speaker’s shoulder.
    “Listen. You can hardly have forgotten the machine-gun party on the track when an attempt was made to