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If Chiang Kai-shek had had him on his staff, the Communists would lie nowhere in China today. I have had several skirmishes with General Huan Tsung Chao, to give him his full name, but never won one yet!”
    “The whole thing drops dead,” Burke declared, “if any news has leaked about the slaughter in Room 113.”
    ”No leakage has occurred,” came Harkness’ gentle assurance. “No one saw the baskets taken out. The room remains sealed. I arranged for Mr Thurston to dine and spend the night with friends of mine in Bronxville, where there is gay company. He has driven there in one of our cars.”
    Nayland Smith’s grim face relaxed in a smile. It was a smile which betrayed the schoolboy who had never grown up.
    “Clean, smart, efficient work,” he commented. “Satisfied, Burke?”
    “I guess so. It’s up to us, now. We know that Fu-Manchu is playing for recognition. He figures that if performers with records like that old cross-talk act, Hitler and Mussolini, not to mention artists still with us, have been allowed a place in public life—why not Dr Fu-Manchu?”
    “And why not?” Nayland Smith challenged. “He has the brains of all of them rolled into one.”
    “Must have,” Burke agreed. “You’ve been down to Fort Knox and you know that a consignment of gold in one of the vaults, still in the boxes it was shipped in, has been turned into something that looks like lead!”
    “Quite so! In accordance with Fu-Manchu’s threat to Washington. Contents of the other twenty-seven vaults are still intact.”
    “But the Treasury’s nearly crazy,” Harkness said quietly. “Already, the loss is enormous. If the further threat of the Si-Fan to destroy the entire reserve is made good, the financial stability of the United States will lie in the hands of those people!”
    “And we can’t find out how it was done,” Burke groaned. “It sounds like a miracle. Fu-Manchu knows that such losses have to be officially denied. Otherwise we’d have a financial panic. He aims to
blackmail
Washington into recognising him.”
    “He wants to see the Si-Fan where the Nazis and the Fascists stood—where the Soviets stand today!”
    “When this conference assembles,” Burke pointed out, “even if we manage to grab the lot we shan’t know what we want to know.”
    “There’s another point.” Harkness fitted a fresh cigarette into his holder. “News of it might speed up the action we want to stop. Our information clearly indicates that Fu-Manchu won’t be present, and we may have no evidence whatever against the others.”
    Nayland Smith began to walk about restlessly.
    “The meeting must not be disturbed. It’s the best chance we’re ever likely to have of finding out what happened to that gold in Fort Knox, and of taking steps to see that it doesn’t happen again.”
    “But
how
?” Burke shouted.
    “Surely it’s obvious. They will all be masked. I regard it as highly unlikely—a hundred to one against—that Mrs van Roorden ever suspected Orson of being a Si-Fan deputy. What could be more simple… I’ll take his place.”
    * * *
    Mrs van Roorden leaned over the balcony, watching two streams of light, one north bound, the other south, which represented Fifth Avenue, below. No individual light could be picked out; just two long, luminous ribbons broken only when a red traffic signal checked their flow.
    She wore the green gown which she had worn at the purser’s party on the
Lauretania
. This, for two reasons: the first that she despised ideas of good and bad luck, the second, that it amused her to dress to the green mask she must wear at the Si-Fan conference.
    The unaccountable disappearance of Sha Mu, her Burmese bodyguard, was disturbing and ominous.
    But, whatever the explanation, she could do nothing at all about it—yet.
    No amount of interrogation would extract anything from Sha Mu. What little he knew was negligible and he spoke no language other than the Shan dialect.
    So that, whatever had