Lamont Cranston had come home to Cranston Manor alone, as usual, his duties as The Shadow dispatched and his dinner companion dropped off at her Murray Hill brownstone. He started a fire in the parlor fireplace to ward off the early winter chill, poured himself a snifter of cognac, and dropped into an overstuffed velvet armchair to relax. The crackling flames and rich cognac combined to soothe the kinks out of his overworked psyche, and he soon drifted off to sleep, clutching a tapestry pillow to his stomach as a kind of security blanket.
But telepathic minds dream vividly, and Lamont's was no exception. His eyes darted back and forth under his eyelids as his internal barriers released pent-up mental energies, swirling them outward from him, bringing back psychic impressions in strange echoing patterns...
The parlor was dark except for the light from the fireplace. Images of the dancing flames began to take on lifelike forms.
Suddenly, a huge fireball erupted from the fireplace and shot out toward him, stopping just inches from his face. Cackling, wicked laughter mingled with the roar of the fire, and the flames formed themselves into the face of an Oriental warlord.
The remaining contents of the snifter in Lamont's right hand burst into flames as the fire reached ever closer, ready to consume him...
Lamont jolted awake and sat up suddenly, shaking with fear. He looked at his right hand.
The snifter had shattered, and scorch marks tinged the edges of the stem he still held between his fingers.
Lamont gasped. His psyche still vibrated with the vividness of that dream. He hadn't felt anything like it in almost a decade. The raw power that surged through the room had him gulping for air.
"Someone's coming," he whispered to himself, then jumped up from his chair and grabbed his coat.
Paul Maxwell was the first to regain his senses. He grabbed Mark Lachlan by the arm and helped him to his feet. "Come on...we've got to get out of here..."
Spiderman shot a web to block their path of escape.
Maxwell turned around and fired twice at Spiderman to make him dodge away, then dragged Lachlan down another hallway.
Spiderman started to go after them, then realized his partner was a little slower to get up than usual. He sprang over to help The Shadow...
...who definitely needed help, because he'd crashed into a glass partition that Spiderman would have sworn was not in this room earlier. Come to think of it, none of this stuff had been in this room earlier--they were in what looked like a hotel lobby, except it was dark and closed off and looked to be completely unused. Spiderman looked around the antechamber filled with art deco decor, and was completely taken aback by how different it looked than the stark laboratory where they'd been just seconds earlier. "Where are we?" he whispered.
And then it hit him that he may have asked the wrong question. "Or when are we?"
"'When' is likely the more appropriate subject of that question."
Spiderman turned around to see his partner forcing himself to a sitting position. "You O.K.?" he asked as he came to The Shadow's aid.
"Peachy." The Shadow staggered to his feet, grunted in pain, and felt his side. His hand came away wet and bright red. "But I think I may need medical attention."
Spiderman caught his partner as the man's knees buckled. "I suppose calling Shrevnitz is likely out of the question?"
"That depends on where--and when--we ended up. Let's get out of here."
Spiderman nodded, then hoisted his partner over his shoulder and headed for the doorway. But just as he was about to head out the front door, his spider-sense sent out a surge of danger signals, and he looked all around for their source.
And that was when he spotted them--the backs of two burly guards clad in what he recognized all-too-well as Mongolian battle armor.
The Shadow saw the triggers for his partner's danger sense and felt his blood run cold. "Oh, my God...I know both where and when we are now..."
"Tell me while I look for another way out," Spiderman said, hopping up onto the wall and crawling upward toward the lobby's four-story-high ceiling.
"We're in a hotel."
"Congratulations. Even I figured that one out."
"Not just any hotel, Spidey. We need to get out of here so I can find out for sure."
"Tell me where."
"Pick a room, any room. They all have windows."
Spiderman hopped from the wall to the third-floor landing and headed for a rear window. The locks were stiff, but he pried them open and climbed out onto the exterior wall. "Br-r! It wasn't the dead of winter last time we knew where the Hell we were..." Then he looked around in shock.
The streets were dark, a very unusual sight indeed in the heart of the Manhattan that Spiderman was more familiar with swinging through. There were very few cars, and the ones he saw were late 1920-era LaSalles and Packards and Fords. "My God..."
"I know," The Shadow's mental voice whispered, its strength ebbing slightly. "Over the fence, quickly. We need to get to the Sanctum."
Spidey leapt off the wall, then fired a web to swing them across the street. "It would help if I knew where we are now so I can get us to where you want to go," he said as they alighted onto another wall.
The Shadow looked behind him, looking up and down at the building, feeling a mind-clouding suggestion trying to penetrate his brain. "Do me a favor and look back at where we just left."
Spiderman did so...and suddenly realized he could see nothing but a fenced-in lot strewn with trash and overgrown with weeds. "What the...are you doing that?"
"No. But Shiwan Khan is." He gestured with his eyes at the street sign. "This is the infamous corner of Second and Houston streets from my grandfather's files."
Spidey looked at his partner. "But Second and Houston was where Reliable Intelligence's labs were. That was where we just were..."
"In our time." He looked around him once more to make certain his own eyes weren't playing tricks on him. "But in this time, it's the location of the Hotel Monolith."
Spiderman shook his head. "No. No way."
"Yes, way. Unfortunately, I now know exactly when and where we are. It's mid-December 1933 in Manhattan, a week and a half before Christmas...and just days before Shiwan Khan and Lamont Cranston will be clashing head-to-head in the crow's nest restaurant atop the abandoned Hotel Monolith to stop Khan from using Reinhardt Lane's implosive generator as the heart of the first atomic bomb." He felt himself beginning to get very light-headed. "And as much as I'd love to give that time to sink in, I think we need to find a safe place to spend the night before I bleed to death. So you need to make your way to Times Square."
Spiderman shrugged. "Yeah, that probably hasn't moved in the last seventy years."
As the two men swung away, they missed the emergence of another armor-clad Mongol warrior from a cab that had stopped nearby.
Several swings later, Spiderman was having a lot of unexpected trouble getting to Times Square. "Never realized how few skyscrapers there were in the '30s," he commented as he made another building-to-building leap in their trek toward the Sanctum, unable to find buildings tall enough to make the long swings he was used to making.
The Shadow let out a grunt as the impact caused his torn side to ache more. "The early '30s was when the skyscraper boom began," he reminded his partner. "The Empire State Building is just two years old in this time. It's also the heart of the Great Depression, and real estate development is understandably very depressed."
"Wonderful," Spiderman groused as he made another leap. "Thanks for the history lesson."
They landed again, and The Shadow hissed again, getting progressively weaker. "I've got an idea--let's take a cab."
"We're not exactly dressed for a cab right now. And even those clothes in the backpack don't look anything like '30s fashion. Plus we don't have any money that won't be suspicious because of the futuristic date..."
The Shadow gave a chuckle. "You've been around me long enough to know by now that those sorts of things are not going to be a problem."
The cab driver made no move to accelerate into traffic at the sight of the man in the red and blue suit in his back seat. A fare was a fare, true, but this guy was something else entirely, even if he was a circus performer like he'd claimed to be. But something inside the cabbie's head told him not to ask too many questions, so he started on his way to Times Square.
"Have you given any more thought about how we're going to pay for this little ride?" Spiderman whispered to his unseen partner. "Remember, our money's not the right vintage..."
"Leave that to me," The Shadow's voice whispered in his head.
The cab pulled to a stop at Times Square. "That'll be $3.50, Mac."
The Shadow swirled into visibility in the back seat and glared at the mirror. "He paid you when he first got into the cab."
The cabbie's expression changed instantly, and he looked very apologetic. "Sorry, pal. Forgot you paid when you got in."
"You'll cover the shortfall from the overcharges you've gotten from your altered meter, which you will get repaired to city specifications immediately. And you will forget either of us were ever here."
The cabbie's eyes glazed over.
By the time he came to, his cab was empty once more.
"Let me see if I've got this straight," Peter said as he stitched up Stephen's side with equipment from Lamont Cranston's medical cabinet in the Sanctum. "It's mid-December 1933."
"Yes," Stephen replied as he lay on his stomach on the chaise lounge, trying to relax both body and mind enough to allow some of his strength to return.
"Even as we speak, your grandfather is alive and well and doing your job at your age."
"About eight years older, but yes, he's the reigning Shadow."
"And any day now, on the corner of Second and Houston, Shiwan Khan will be plotting to take over the world with an atomic bomb invented by your great-grandfather."
"Yes."
"What part of this doesn't sound completely insane?"
Stephen actually laughed slightly. "Ask me something I don't already know the answer to."
"O.K., I will. What do we do now?"
"That, my friend, is a very good question...one for which I wish I had an answer."
Peter shook his head. "I feel like Doc Brown's going to come rushing in here any second."
"Great Scott!" Stephen wisecracked in his best Christopher Lloyd impersonation.
Peter laughed. "You do realize we're in the middle of a massive time paradox, right?"
Stephen sighed. "I've been painfully aware of that all day today."
"Doesn't a time paradox mean destroying the universe?"
"You're going to be quoting Back To The Future a lot, aren't you?"
"Well, it's not like it doesn't fit. See, this is like in the first movie where Marty goes back and runs into his parents."
"Neither set of our parents are alive in this time."
"Yeah, but we know for a fact that your grandparents are, and if I remember my Shadow history correctly, they meet this week for the first time."
"But we haven't yet run into them."
Peter gave his partner a wow, you're dense today look as he clipped the last stitch. "Stephen, we are sitting in the man's private office...I mean, that is why you guys call this place 'The Sanctum'. You've practically invited yourself to have cocktails with him."
"It still doesn't fit, Peter."
"O.K., then maybe this is sort of like 12 Monkeys, where everything happens no matter what the time travellers do."
"Maybe it's not like a movie at all," Stephen suggested. "Maybe it's not like anything we know."
"You're probably right." But Peter still couldn't shake the comparisons and questions from his mind. "Why 1933?"
"What do you mean?"
"Why, out of all the moments in history, did we end up in the middle of your grandfather's first fight with the Khans? Why now?"
Stephen shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that MJ and Sarah found Dr. Lane's plans in Dr. Lachlan's office."
"But why would Lachlan want to come back here and now?"
"Maybe he didn't want to. I got the impression that they were as surprised as we were."
"No. That other guy--Paul, I think Sarah said his name was--sounded pretty sure that pushing the button and activating the field would work, and he seemed to know where to go when I cut off his escape path."
"So what are you suggesting?"
"I'm suggesting that we may be in the middle of a time paradox within a time paradox, and whatever we do, we need to be very careful, because whatever we could do here could affect the future. Especially with a family as tight-knit as yours."
Stephen sat up and pulled his non-Shadow clothes out of the backpack they'd managed to remember to hold onto in the confusion. "There is another consideration," he remarked as he pulled his shirt on, wincing slightly as he did.
"What's that?"
"We are here now. And seventy years ago, from our perspective, we were here as well."
"Your grandfather's letters do seem to imply that," Peter agreed.
"So obviously there is some sort of interaction needed, something we did here." Stephen gave the walls a sweep with both his eyes and his mind, then crossed the room, pushed back a tapestry on the wall, and unveiled a safe.
"What are you doing?" Peter asked.
"Getting us some much-needed Depression-era supplies." He put his ear to the safe as he carefully spun the dial, then opened it up.
"You're stealing from your grandfather?"
"Borrowing. And he'll never miss it. The man has assets worth eighty million dollars, which is more than some countries in this time." He pulled out two stacks of bills, flipped through each one, then pocketed one and handed the other to Peter.
"Fives," Peter wisecracked. "Wow. I feel rich."
"You should. $5 is a fortune in this time period. Which is probably why they're here--even The Shadow occasionally needs pocket change."
"Remind me never to tell you where I stash my spare cash," Peter joked.
"In the back of the cabinet above your fridge, not that it matters right now."
Peter rolled his eyes. "Did you read my mind or search my condo to get that information?"
"Does it matter?"
"Not really." Peter sighed. "So you really think we need to be interacting here and not just watching things happen?"
"I'm sure of it. Lamont Cranston wouldn't have put it in writing for us if we weren't meant to know it." Stephen paced the room, trying both to think this whole thing through and resist the temptation to immerse himself in every detail of the place. "He knew our names, Peter. This is two years before he married Margo Lane, at a time when, by his own admission in his own journals, he had no desire to ever marry or have a family. And even if he had, even if the man had some kind of precognizant vision of his own future, it does not explain why he would know about you...unless he met you. So it could be that whatever happens in the future happens because we are here."
Peter nodded. "Kind of like The Terminator movies, where everybody's actions in the past not only don't stop the future from coming, they actually cause it to happen."
Stephen stared. "When do you find time to watch all these movies?"
Peter started to respond with some wisecrack about time machines being good for something when his spider-sense went off practically full-blast.
Stephen was about to ask what was wrong when he heard the door gears grinding. He pointed to the ceiling and faded from view.
Peter nodded, then leapt into a dark corner and pressed himself as far into it as he could to get out of sight.
Halfway down the steps to his Sanctum, Lamont Cranston froze in his tracks at the sight that greeted him--a ransacked medical kit, bloody strips of cloth on the floor, a strange knapsack or pack lying off to the side of the chaise lounge. Someone had clearly breached the underground lair's security, and security breaches never failed to set his nerves on edge. He cautiously moved the rest of the way down the steps, then pressed a switch on the wall to shut off the lights and reached out with his mind to allow projective sight to find the intruders.
Two men. One across the room, the other...hanging from the ceiling? He took a second to make sure of the location of both figures, then stepped on a hidden floor switch.
A pocket in the wall opened.
Lamont reached into the pocket and pulled out a mother-of-pearl-handled revolver, then fired up at the ceiling.
The unseen figure above him sprang across the room toward the staircase.
Lamont quickly moved across the room to block the stairs and flicked on the lights, hoping to catch the intruder in motion...
...only to instead reveal the other man, a man standing in the sitting area who looked like a younger version of himself.
For a moment, the two of them stared at each other. Lamont managed to recover his senses first. "Who are you?" he demanded.
Peter, who'd managed to wedge himself into another ceiling corner to escape the flying bullets, watched the unfolding disaster, not sure what to do. Stephen had swirled into visibility and was now just staring at the elder Cranston, and only one of them was armed with something more than thought power.
"I said, who are you?" The Shadow's voice demanded, and Peter knew instantly that it was not his partner who had issued the mental command.
Stephen opened his mouth...and giggled.
Peter blinked. Stephen was giggling helplessly like a fan confronted with his favorite rock star. And Lamont Cranston looked like said rock star after a bad day, about to punch out the paparazzi.
"How did you get in here?" Lamont's mental voice pressed, not sure why the younger man wasn't immediately succumbing to the psychic commands.
Stephen still didn't respond, still staring like a starstruck teen and giving his grandfather an idiot grin.
Well, if that was going to be Stephen's contribution to this entire dire situation, Peter decided, he would have to do something useful instead. He dropped from the ceiling and nailed Lamont Cranston in the jaw and sent him flying across the room.
Stephen was trying to figure out how best to respond to a situation he'd only encountered in his wildest dreams--a face-to-face meeting with the original Master of Darkness--when his partner dropped from the ceiling and slammed his grandfather in the jaw and sent him flying across the room.
An instant later, Peter was pinned to the wall by a hurricane-force psychic blast from Stephen. "YOU KNOCKED OUT LAMONT CRANSTON!" Stephen's mental voice shrieked.
"What was I supposed to do?" Peter retorted. "The man had a gun and a psychic bazooka, both of them trained on you!"
Stephen grabbed Peter's shirt. "That...that's my grandfather!" he babbled.
Peter grabbed Stephen's wrists and pushed him away, adopting a polite 'don't spook the lunatic' tone. "We were trapped! The man fired a gun at me! He was covering the exit, and you weren't thinking clearly..."
Stephen took a deep breath and tried to get himself under enough control to make his friend understand that what he'd just done was a very bad idea. "Peter," he said, his voice rising ever so slightly, "that is The Shadow. The first. The original. A man just seven years removed from his days as a Tibetan warlord, with enough psychic power to flatten a truck and a temper almost as strong. He is going to kill you when he comes to."
As if on cue, Lamont groaned and started to rise.
Acting on impulse, Stephen hit the switch for the upstairs door.
Seconds later, Lamont regained enough of his senses to spot a man springing straight up the stairwell with the lookalike riding on his back. He took off after them.
By the time he got to the top of the stairs, they were already on top of the nearest rooftop and moving out of sight. What the Hell...?
Three rooftops later, the two superheroes stopped to catch their breath. They took a seat on the roof and leaned against the edge, feeling foolish. "Stephen?" Peter chuckled.
"Yeah?"
"When we get back and the girls ask us how it went, let's leave this part out, huh?"
Stephen laughed, then froze. "The time machine."
It suddenly hit Peter why his partner looked so alarmed. "It didn't come through with us."
"It stayed in the 21st century. Which means..."
"...we can't get home," Peter realized. "We're stuck here. Two 21st-century men trapped in an age of pulp comic mobsters, never to return to home, destined to die a half-century before they were even born! We're trapped in the middle of an X-Files episode! We're trapped in Twilight Zone hell!!!"
Stephen just stared at Peter. "When do you find the time to watch all this stuff?"
Peter started laughing, unable to do much else at this moment. Then he calmed down and tried to think through the situation a little more clearly. "We're here. Seventy years ago, we were here. And seventy years later, we were home to find out we were here."
Stephen nodded. "So there is a way for us to get home...if there wasn't, we never would have gotten those letters..."
"You're not thinking what I'm thinking..."
"Oh, yes, I am. And even if I wasn't, remember, I can read your mind and change my thoughts to match."
Peter laughed again. "We have to go back there and...um, apologize to your grandfather."
"And hope he doesn't kill us before we can." Stephen took a deep breath, then sighed and got to his feet. "Shall we go?"
Peter hopped up, then shrugged. "Hop on."
Wow, this had been a strange night. First the fight with Duke Rollins, then meeting a drop-dead-gorgeous blonde who happened to be a rather powerful-if-untrained receptive telepath, then a weird vision of an Asian warlord invading his dreams, and now this. Whoever those two men were, they clearly knew a lot of things they weren't supposed to, and Lamont was determined to find out how. He poured himself a cognac, then took a seat on the chaise lounge and opened the bag they had left behind.
The first thing his hand drew out was a brightly-colored one-piece costume. He looked over it with interest. The material was unusual, nothing he had ever seen before--stretchy and light, but also fairly strong, judging from the way it sprang back to shape after he pulled on it. A spider logo was on both its chest and its back. Also inside the bag were gloves, boots, and a mask with white-silver mirrored lenses--they didn't feel like glass, but were too strong to be cellophane or some other non-glass substance--that apparently went with the body suit. He set the clothes aside, mentally noting that he'd have to have a talk with an agent in the garment district to see if there had been any new fabrics brought into the country recently.
He reached back into the bag and withdrew a dark black cloak. His eyes widened, and he quickly raced across the room to check the locker under the stairs.
Sure enough, his costume was still there.
He walked back across the room and rechecked the bag.
It was all there--the hat, the red scarf, the dual shoulder holsters, even the silver automatics.
"Who were those two?" Lamont wondered aloud.
He shook the cloak out. It was definitely the same fabric, and the same design, but a good three inches shorter than his own cloak. Looks like it shrank in the wash, he noted to himself sarcastically, then tossed it over a nearby chair and continued searching the bag.
The next thing he found was a pair of silver gauntlets, each with a thin trigger on a swivel attached to them. He shifted the bag in his grip to continue his examination of the strange bracelets.
The bag slipped out of his hands and fell to the floor, and a small notebook fell out it.
Curious, he picked up the notebook and opened it.
Shadow:
Mind power. Theoretical strength ? Can bend people's wills to match his own.
Family business. At least two. Uncle, then him. Stories go back over 70 years.
Invisibility. Shadows visible. Appears to be hypnotic trick of some kind.
Accelerated healing? Seems to recover very quickly from most injuries.
I can sense him better than most. Does that have something to do with his telepathy?
Spiderman:
Accidental powers. Sticks to walls, better flexibility than an Olympic gymnast.
Danger sense--not clairvoyance, not really psychic. "Spider-sense"?
Practical strength at least 5x normal. Watched him peel open a steel door once.
"Real" spiders over 40x stronger than size indicates--possible correlation?
Theoretical strength Most experts say 10 tons at least.
Speed Extreme.
Webbing Artificial addition. Unknown formula.
Victor:
Gazillionaire. Full Shadow powers and training. Stephen's predecessor. Both of them have father issues.
Runs "think tank" (read: tax shelter), Cranston Industries.
Stephen's uncle, apparently the older son of two.
Bio sketch from the Classic says Stephen's father was named Alexander--either Victor is much older than his brother or Alexander married late; Stephen is really young to be a son to someone Victor's age.
Research says Stephen's parents were killed in 1983. Is this all there is to that story?
Seems to like me. Don't think he trusts me yet. I can understand that.
Moe Shrevnitz:
Also third generation. Seems to know Stephen better than Peter.
Straight Agent.
Lead-footed cabbie.
Fascinated by psychic phenomena--stashes a copy of Psychics For Dummies under the driver's seat.
Mary Jane Watson:
Peter's girlfriend. "MJ". Cute nickname. Scribbles "Mrs. Peter Parker" on notepads when she thinks no one's looking.
Actress/model/waitress. Fame growing at reasonable rate. Stephen's doing?
Mere mortal. A normal friend at last. But then, I'm not normal either...am I?
Questions:
Clairvoyance. What can I do? What are the limits?
Heard Stephen talking to Victor about me.
Unknown terms: Projector. Sanctum. Tulku. Awakening.
Awakening was the term they used a lot. Should I be worried?
Lamont flipped through additional pages, getting more confused by the moment by the things he was reading. What was this? Someone had been taking notes on the Shadow's abilities. Some of the names were wrong, and others were just confusing--there weren't two Shadows, he didn't have any brothers that he knew of, and The Shadow had only been active for six years, not seventy--but someone knew the words "Projector", "Sanctum", and "Tulku", and used other terms from his mission in close to the right context. Who were those two? How had they found this?
Looking back at the gauntlet, he checked it over carefully. The spiderman's artificial webbing, perhaps? He slipped it onto his wrist, flicked the trigger mechanism into his palm, and pressed it gingerly.
Thwipp!
Stephen and Peter stared down at the alley from the rooftop above. Neither of them had moved since getting there. "We really should go in there now," Peter said.
"Yeah," Stephen agreed. "You first."
"Um...yeah." Peter didn't seem especially eager to head back to face a man who was ticked off at him and could probably leave Stephen in his psychic dust. "You don't want to meet the man yourself?"
Stephen wasn't sure he wanted to face his grandfather again until he got his hero worship under control. "I already did. And I don't think I..."
"You really did kinda fall flat on your face," Peter agreed with the unfinished sentiment.
"Oh, come on, I don't think I did that badly."
"You were faced with a man you clearly idolize and giggled like a school girl."
"I could have done worse."
"Yeah. You could have fainted, or thrown up..."
"Or passed out and woken up in a cheap tuxedo in a jail cell..."
Peter looked offended. "That was different."
"Or gotten drugged into thinking I was the devil..."
"You know, that wasn't an especially difficult stretch of the imagination, considering your obsession with darkness..."
The door rumbled open, and the two of them fell silent.
Lamont left the Sanctum and strode toward Moe's cab, which had pulled up at the end of the alley. On his left wrist was one of Peter's webshooters.
Peter saw this and slapped his forehead. "We forgot the bag."
"With the costumes in it," Stephen agreed, then paled. "Dammit..."
"What?"
"I had Sarah's notepad in my pockets...which I emptied into the backpack."
Peter whacked his partner in the back of the head. "What is it with you and losing important pieces of information today?"
Stephen gave Peter a mental shove. "Hey, that notepad is the last thing I lost in seventy years."
"You look a little edgy," Shrevnitz commented as the cab pulled away from the curb.
"Has anyone been asking questions about me?" Lamont asked.
Shrevvy shook his head. "No--why?"
"Someone was in the Sanctum."
The shock was evident in the cabbie's eyes. "Somebody broke in?"
"No, that's the strange part. They didn't break in. They used the master switch."
"Any idea who?"
"No. But that's not all. They also had a notepad. They seem to know a lot about me, and they've got some notes on you, too."
"Really?"
"But the notes don't make any sense. Most of their information is wrong."
"Wait a minute--notes on us or notes on The Shadow?"
"Both. But most of it is inaccurate. There are five names in the notes, but they're all wrong. I've never heard of these people that the notes link to me, and the only people Burbank can find in New York with the names Parker, Watson, and Branson either immigrated from England only a year ago, moved away last spring, that kind of thing..."
"Didn't you date an Anna Watson once?"
Lamont scoffed. "Very briefly last year. She was way too young for me anyway."
"So...what about the other two names?"
"The other two names are Cranston and Shrevnitz."
Moe stared at his employer in the rear-view mirror.
"And they had an exact copy of my costume," Lamont added.
"What did they look like?"
Lamont started to answer, then caught a glimpse of the passengers in the cab that had pulled to a stop next to them at the traffic light. "Like them."
Moe tensed his grip on the wheel. "Want me to lose them?"
Lamont thought about it for what felt like an eternity. Two mystery men, with no trace, no names, and no answers had breached his security, and been following him long enough to get at least some information on his abilities. "Lose 'em. But get behind them. I want to know where they're from."
Moe nodded and floored it.
The Cord squealed away.
"That went well," Peter observed from his place in the back seat.
"You want I should follow them?" the cabbie asked his passengers.
"No," Stephen replied. "We're getting out." He handed the driver a $5 and stepped out of the cab.
Peter followed. "So are we pursuing on foot now?"
Stephen shook his head. "We don't have to chase him. We know where he lives. It'll be dawn soon. Let's find somewhere to sleep."
Several minutes later, the duo was still walking down the street, looking for a hotel. "They've all moved!" Peter complained.
"They're all closed. It is the heart of the Great Depression, after all."
"Again with the history lesson. You do know I hated history in high school, right?
Stephen smiled broadly, taking deep breaths. "Oh come on, Peter, life is about experience. This is an experience!"
Peter glanced at his partner. He had never seen the man happier. "You love this, don't you?"
"What do you mean?"
"At first I thought it was just nostalgia, but now I get it. You love this whole era. More than ours."
Stephen thought about it and nodded. "Yeah. I do. Look around, Peter--these were the days when things were built to last, the days when travel was made for comfort and style as much as practicality. These were the days when men were gentlemen, and women were ladies, the days when men never hit women, and the kids were able to play in the street. The days when things were made as works of art instead of disposable commodities. Look at the architecture in these buildings. If they were thirty stories higher, you'd love this era too. We are in the good old days our grandfathers remembered with longing."
Peter smiled. "Sounds like somebody spent a lot of time staring at old photos as a kid and wishing he could have lived in them."
"Yeah." Stephen looked embarrassed. "Anyway..."
Peter tensed. "We are being followed."
Stephen glanced in the side mirror of a parked car...and broke into a broad smile. "That's my grandfather that just got the drop on us back there."
Peter couldn't help but laugh. "Do we lose him?"
"No. We have to talk to him, after all. Let's see how long he'll play Follow The Leader."
Peter nodded, and the two kept walking.
Lamont wasn't sure if they knew he was there or not, but in the final analysis, it didn't really matter. He followed them willingly through the streets until they turned into an alleyway a little too quickly for his taste. The whole thing smacked of a set-up, so he crossed the street and walked until he'd caught up with the alley on the other side before peering down it.
Empty.
Lamont cursed under his breath. Whoever they were, these two were good.
Stephen, concealed by The Shadow's hypnotic mind clouding, looked down from the rooftop at his grandfather and sighed. He knew he had to talk to Lamont, but he wasn't too sure how it would go.
Peter, under the roof's overhang and concealed by the shadows of the night, watched as well. "Looks like we lost him."
"He knew we were on to him, though," Stephen agreed as they watched him get back into Shrevnitz's Cord, which drove away through the night. "That street-crossing was a defensive move. Remember, he's got the same night vision skills I do, but there wasn't enough light on this side of the street to allow him to pick us up. So he's pulled back to regroup."
"Want to follow?"
"No. Let's head back to the Sanctum, retrieve our stuff, and find a place to crash for the night."
"I'm all for that." Peter climbed back up to the roof, offered his now-visible partner a lift, and the two of them were off on yet another roof-spanning transit through the city.
Two hours later, the morning was bright once again, and the duo had barely slept, each taking brief naps next to heat stacks on rooftops while the other kept watch. "This is getting ridiculous," Stephen noted. "We know we have to face him sooner or later."
"Well, I don't know about you, but I'd really like it to be sooner," Peter replied.
"It might be good to play this card just so we can see what the rest of the deck contains," Stephen agreed. "Let's see if we can get a cab."
Peter took a look around below them, then found a quiet corner on the side of the building where no one would notice two people climbing down a ladderless wall.
Back out on the street, the duo was just about to set about trying to find a cab when they noticed a crowd gathered around a museum a block away.
Stephen felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. "Let's go take a look."
Peter gave him a suspicious glance. "Thought I was the one with the danger sense."
"You are. I'm just getting a very real sense of deja vu."
"What do you psychics call seeing the past--retrocognition?"
"History."
Peter grimaced. "Yeah, yeah, rub it in. What do you expect to find?"
"The transport chamber for a Mongolian warlord." He looked around. "Make some friends. I'll be right back."
As Stephen made his way along the police tape toward the working officers, Peter spotted a young boy who was telling the story to an amused couple. "Yeah, the police say they've never seen anything like it," the boy said, and held out his hand.
The couple smiled and handed the boy a shiny coin and headed on their way.
The boy put the coin in his pocket and moved on the next person approaching, who happened to be Peter. "Hey, mister. Heard the news?"
"Not yet," Peter said, playing along. "What happened?"
"A guard got killed."
Never pass up an opportunity for history lessons. "Anybody know who did it?"
"Well, it's like this..."
Stephen, meanwhile, had found a police officer with a girasol ring. He smiled to himself. Nice to know some things didn't change. He focused a gaze on the back of the officer's head to get his attention.
The officer, realizing someone was behind him, turned around.
Stephen raised his own ring to the cop.
The cop returned the gesture.
Stephen's eyes gestured over to a corner of the building.
The cop nodded and headed over to join him.
"The sun is shining," Stephen whispered.
"But the ice is slippery," the cop answered.
"What happened here?"
"Looks like a routine suicide. Dr. Humboldt, the curator, says that a late night shipment was brought here, a large silver coffin. No return label, and Humboldt says it wasn't anything they'd have acquired. Humboldt and his assistant Berger left a guard--Pete Nelson, our unfortunate stiff--to watch over it, and they said the next thing they knew, they heard a single gunshot. They ran back and Nelson was dead. Wound was self-inflicted. Looks like suicide..."
"...but it doesn't feel like it," Stephen finished, mentally retracing his grandfather's notes.
"Right. Humboldt says the guy was good and dependable, never had any trouble, had a girlfriend and was gonna get married..."
"...so why would he kill himself?" Stephen knew what the real answer to that question was, but he had to get the officer to come to that conclusion on his own to avoid altering history. So he looked around for clues. "Where's the coffin? Everything else is undisturbed--the crate pieces, the packing straw, the body--but the coffin's gone."
"That much silver would be worth a lot to somebody," the cop agreed.
"So we could easily have a staged suicide on our hands. Everybody's tied up with calling the police, checking out the guard..."
"...plenty of time for somebody to sneak in and steal the coffin."
"Or maybe they were in the coffin to begin with."
The cop raised an eyebrow. "Somebody got smuggled in?"
"It's worth a second report. This could be more than a simple suicide. This could well be murder."
The cop nodded. "Thanks, buddy."
"No, thank you." The pair shook hands, and Stephen headed off to find his partner.
He missed Police Commissioner Wainwright Barth doing a double-take as he watched the vaguely-familiar-looking young man leave the area. Then he looked at his watch. Far too early for Lamont to even be awake, Wainwright mentally complained, then took a swig from his pocket flask and headed off to question his men.
By the time Stephen rejoined Peter, the story-telling kid was just finishing up his latest recitation. "The police say they've never seen anything like it," the boy said, and held out his hand.
Peter smiled and obligingly gave the boy a five-dollar bill.
The kid's eyes bugged out of his head, and he stuffed it into his pocket as fast as he could. "Wow."
"Lot of money for a kid your age, huh?" Peter laughed.
The boy grinned up at them. "I am now the most powerful kid in school."
Peter laughed. "Well, just remember--with great power comes great responsibility."
The kid nodded, looking thoughtful.
"Benjamin Parker!" shouted a woman across the street.
The kid looked over. "Yeah, Mom?"
"Stop bothering those strangers and come on! You'll be late for school."
"O.K." The kid ran off without another word.
Peter turned ghostly pale and stood silent for a long beat. "Did I just tell my uncle Ben that 'With great power comes great responsibility'?" he finally said aloud.
Stephen nodded. "You must have made quite an impression on the young man. Bet he'll remember that one for a long time."
Peter felt his spider-sense tingling in the weirdest way it ever had. This was definitely nothing like any movie he'd ever seen. "Stephen..."
"Yeah?"
"I want to go home."
Stephen patted his partner's shoulder. "We will. But we have things to do here first."
"Like talking to your grandfather."
"Who's about to get very busy."
"Khan?"
Stephen nodded.
"So how many days until the bomb?"
"If I remember my history right, less than four."
"Then we really do need to find him."
At that moment, Stephen's ring suddenly began to glow.
"What the...," Peter began.
Stephen's eyes widened. "This is his ring. The transmitters are tuned to activate his ring."
"Think you're intercepting his messages?"
"One way to find out. Think you can find Cranston Manor from here?"
"I'd rather take a cab."
Stephen chuckled. "I never thought I'd ever hear you say that."
The two men headed for the curb, and Peter spotted an approaching cab.
So did Stephen, and he quickly realized that they needed to catch another one. "Wrong cab," he said, steering Peter away.
Peter started to ask why when he suddenly recognized the car...and the driver.
Moe Shrevnitz practically did a double-take as he spotted the two men his boss had pointed out last night practically right in front of him. He screeched to a stop and climbed out of the cab...
...only to find the two men had vanished.
Shrevnitz shook his head. These late nights chauffeuring The Shadow around were starting to get to him. He got back in the cab and drove away in his usual lead-footed manner, leaving the already-unnerved couple in his back seat wondering just what they'd gotten themselves into.
Stephen swirled back into visibility at the edge of the shadows around the museum. "All clear."
Peter dropped off the wall and landed next to his partner. "This is insane."
"You think this is insane now? We haven't even found the atomic bomb yet."
"Or the time machine."
"Or Lachlan and Maxwell."
"You're right. There's a whole lot of insanity left to enjoy." Peter sighed. "Which can of crazy should we open first?"
Stephen looked at his ring once more. "Let's go meet Granddaddy at the office."
By the time the two men made it to Times Square, Moe Shrevnitz's Cord was stopped at a traffic light and letting Lamont Cranston out to join the crush of pedestrians filling the sidewalks.
Stephen watched his grandfather nonchalantly turn a corner and vanish from view, then got out of the cab two cars behind the Cord. "Looks like he got the message," he told Peter.
"Good," Peter observed. "One potential problem down. A gazillion more to go."
"You're quite the pessimist today," Stephen remarked as they started following Lamont at a safe distance.
"One of us has to be the realist. And you're too busy waxing romantic about Depression-era architecture."
"And you left your sense of humor back in the 21st century..."
Peter grabbed his arm. "Hold it."
Stephen was about to jerk his arm away, then realized his partner was searching anxiously for the source of whatever danger was triggering his built-in alarm system. He joined Peter in looking around for the source...and suddenly felt strangely familiar ripples in his psyche. He closed his eyes and let projective sight take over...
...and then felt his own blood run cold. "Khan."
Even the name was enough to kick Peter's already jangling spider-sense up another notch. "Where?" he said.
Stephen saw the brick wall to the Sanctum slide shut. "Following my grandfather."
"What do we do now?"
Stephen spun details from The Shadow diaries through his mind, then realized what he had to do. "We wait."
Satisfied that he wasn't being followed to his Sanctum--and that those two strangers weren't still playing cat-and-mouse with him--Lamont hit another switch just inside the door and started down a flight of steps. A large gear mechanism slid the wall back into place, locking the world out and Lamont in.
The stairs were dark for a moment, then a timing mechanism kicked in and other gears pulled iron doors upward, revealing subdued lighting and an elegantly furnished underground study. This was The Sanctum, The Shadow's office, a place of solitude far away from the life of Lamont Cranston. The rooms were decorated in dark woods, strong leather, huge bookcases filled with reference volumes from nearly every field of knowledge, a workbench with small tools...and a radio console in the corner, at a magnificent mahogany executive wraparound desk.
It was over to that desk that Lamont headed, doffing his gloves and dropping them into his hat, then tossing his hat aside to the workbench before sitting down in his chair and flipping switches on the radio console.
A small screen about the size of a 78 RPM record lit up, and a shield opened to reveal the face of Burbank. The transmission equipment was courtesy of another agent, an engineer from General Electric who swore that this new "picture over radio" technology would revolutionize communications. It definitely had helped The Shadow's communications; Burbank could now show him things other agents had sent without having to send them across the pneumatic network. But it was strictly one-way; The Shadow could see Burbank, but Burbank could not see him...which was the way Lamont liked it. "Report," he ordered into the broadcaster's microphone on his desk.
"Agent in 26th Precinct reports possible murder investigation in progress at Museum of Natural History," Burbank stated.
Lamont raised an eyebrow. "Murder?"
Burbank nodded. "Agent advises inquiry."
"Understood." Lamont flipped off the switch to the screen, then leaned back in his chair and looked thoughtful. Simple murder investigations normally didn't warrant urgent messages to The Shadow, so there had to be something more going on here than met the eye. He'd have to head over to the site himself and take a look around...
A strange ripple reached his thoughts, and a shadow drifted into the corner of his eye. He looked toward the movement.
Standing on the stairs was a Mongolian man, long black hair reaching to the tops of his shoulders, a thick beard adding menace to the face. He was dressed in an elegant fur-trimmed blue and gold silk coat, with a matching underdress. He looked like a ruler, and had the arrogant expression to match...the same arrogant expression Lamont had seen in his dreams.
Lamont frowned. How in the world did someone get down here without him realizing it? Again? He was certain he hadn't been followed. He got up from his chair and approached the stairs carefully.
The man looked at him for a moment. "I saw you as taller," he said in heavily accented English.
Lamont now looked suspicious. He could feel the psychic energy now from the man, reflecting the probing waves Lamont was sending out to try and feel out his visitor. And that made him curious--and uneasy. "Who are you?"
The man nodded toward him. "Shiwan Khan...last descendent of Genghis Khan."
Lamont raised an eyebrow and looked up the stairs, trying to figure out how Khan had slipped inside. Now he could feel the man's psychic energy pulling against his strong mental barriers. He turned up the pressure to reflect the intrusion away.
Khan smirked. "You are, of course, deeply honored," he continued.
Lamont wasn't honored, he was annoyed. Normally he was far more careful than this. He kept studying the stairs, trying to figure out how in the world Khan had slipped in behind him without him noticing.
Khan couldn't stop smirking. He'd gotten under Lamont's skin. How rewarding. "Do not feel obligated to introduce yourself," he continued. "I know who you are." He gestured derisively over Lamont's polished appearance. "Not this temporary version of yourself. I know who you really are...Ying Ko."
That got Lamont's attention. He looked right at Khan, quickly concealing the alarm in his expression.
Khan bowed his head slightly, almost deferentially. "I am a great admirer."
Lamont put on a false relaxed smile. "I don't know what you're talking about."
Khan scoffed. "Please. It is no more difficult for me to invade your mind than it was this room." He came down the stairs, looking around at Ying Ko's underground palace. Not the regal appointments he'd have expected for a ruler of men, but very nice. He noticed the dark leather furniture off to one side, near a gas fireplace. "May I sit?"
Lamont noticed Khan didn't wait for him to say "yes" before dropping into the wingback armchair. Lamont came over to join him, doffing his coat and draping it over the chaise lounge. This was, at least, interesting, but he had no idea how the Mongolian had learned so much. Clearly, he was psychic--receptive, Lamont noticed from the man's natural energy patterns, but with strong projective tendencies--but there was almost no one in the world who knew the full story of Ying Ko, who could connect it so clearly with Lamont Cranston. And only Moe knew where The Sanctum was, and even he didn't know its exact location, so the only way Khan could have gotten that info was to follow Lamont. And the fact that Khan had somehow managed not only to follow him, but to slip in behind him, unseen, was still troubling. He studied the man before him carefully, uncertain of how to proceed.
Khan noticed Lamont's prying eyes, and the rippling waves of projective energy that kept trying to find a weakness in Khan's psychic defenses, find out how he'd learned so much. It might be worthwhile to play the next card in the deck so that they could get down to business. "You are hurting my feelings, Ying Ko," he chided. "I should think you would enjoy meeting another with the unique ability to cloud men's minds."
That phrase--"cloud men's minds"--solved the mystery instantly. It was the phrase used during training in The Temple Of The Cobras to describe hypnotic projective telepathy. Lamont's eyes widened in amazement. "You were a student of The Tulku?"
"Yes," Khan said with a smile. "He spoke of you constantly." A cynical chuckle. "But I'm afraid he wasn't able to turn me quite as easily."
Lamont kept his expression even. Khan's admission explained a number of things--how he had learned the connection between Ying Ko and Lamont Cranston, how he was able to deflect away Lamont's prying thoughts, even how he'd managed to follow Lamont undetected. Lamont was such a strong projective telepath that his receptive side often failed to notice that his defenses had been penetrated until it was too late, so his mind was very easily clouded once someone managed to find a way in. Lamont found it interesting that apparently Marpa Tulku had not been satisfied with converting Tibet's fiercest drug lord; he'd gone after the Mongolian equivalent as well...and had, apparently, failed to control the man's darker tendencies. What he was feeling from Khan was pure, unadulterated evil...none of the gentle goodness that was the hallmark of Marpa Tulku's training.
Khan noticed Lamont studying him. Good. Reality was beginning to sink in. Now to get him to relax a bit. "Say," he said in a genteel tone, "would you happen to have some American bourbon? I have developed a bit of a taste for it. I will be happy to pay, of course..."
Lamont smiled slightly. Alcohol might be a good way to get Khan to loosen his tongue...and his psychic defenses. "No, no--quite all right," he said in his best gracious host tone, then headed over to his sidebar, found two glasses, and unstopped the bourbon bottle. "Say--you wouldn't happen to have paid a visit to the Museum of Natural History last night..." He poured the drinks and put on a mock curious smile. "...would you?"
Khan stood and accepted the offered drink. Now he and Lamont were eye-to-eye--or, rather, eye to chin, as Lamont easily had six or seven inches of height and probably 50 pounds of pure muscle on him. But size wasn't everything, Khan had learned through the years. He'd been able to intimidate men with just his temper and ferocity, even before learning that he had mental powers that could enable him to rule the world. He just smiled at the American before him. "A wonderful collection of Tibetan tapestries." He held his glass aloft for a toast.
Aha. Khan had been there last night. No doubt when The Shadow went to investigate, he'd find some kind of strange packing crate of unknown origin, and the unfortunate museum employee who'd opened it was probably the murder victim. Lamont clinked his glass hard against Khan's and glared down at him.
Khan smiled again. Just as he'd suspected, Lamont was trying to use his superior size and physical strength to intimidate Khan. It had worked in Tibet, where Ying Ko was significantly larger than the average peasant...and had a reputation even larger. But it wasn't going to work against a Mongolian warlord. Khan took a swig of the bourbon.
Lamont did the same.
Khan shook his head. "Oh, Ying Ko...grown men still shiver at the mention of your name. You are, I have to confess, my idol." For a moment, he looked less like a rival and more like an ardent admirer. "Your raid on the Village of Barga? I studied it."
A memory flashed into the forefront of Lamont's mind against his wishes. It was of a fierce battle, Tibetan mercinaries rampaging through the home village of one of the last remaining opium lords to rival Ying Ko for strength and territory. Ying Ko's army had made swift work of Shao Lin's guards, and Ying Ko himself had sliced his sword through Shao Lin's neck and held his head aloft as some kind of trophy...
Khan smiled proudly. "How nice...you remember it."
Lamont forced the memory back down. "It rings a bell."
"It should. It was a masterstroke." He set the glass down on a shelf and began pacing The Sanctum, talking wildly with his hands as he remembered the stories he'd heard of the raid. "Swift, vicious, cruel. Pure genius."
"Uh-huh." Lamont really didn't want to talk about this any more. Surely Khan hadn't come here to exchange war stories. He took one last swig of the bourbon and set his glass aside. "So...what brings you to The Big Apple?"
Now all the admiration in Khan's features was gone, and he was back to full-blown regal monarch mode. "My destiny." He looked over at Lamont, who was approaching, and began to circle around one of the support pillars to keep himself opposite the curious psychic. "Genghis Khan conquered half the world in his lifetime. I intend to finish the job."
Lamont kept moving around the pillar. "And just how do you intend to do that?"
Khan smiled slyly. "If I told you, it wouldn't be a secret. I travelled to this country in Genghis Khan's holy silver coffin, to absorb his power. In three days time, my Mongol warriors will rise up and reclaim the lost kingdom of Sianking. And all the world will hear my thunder!" He stopped pacing and looked at Lamont for a long moment. "That is a lovely tie, by the way. May I ask where you acquired it?"
Lamont looked down at his tie. He'd forgotten what he was even wearing today. He looked curiously at Khan. "Brooks Brothers," he replied cautiously.
Khan looked interested. "Is that Midtown?"
"43rd and Madison," Lamont replied, then realized the complete absurdity of the question. He was exchanging fashion tips with an insane warlord, of all things. "You," he said, pointing right at the Mongolian, "are a barbarian."
Khan took the accusation as a compliment. "Thank you. We both are." He approached Lamont, who was still eyeing him with a great deal of curiosity. "I know that inside you beats a heart of darkness. You dip into it every time you put on that hat and cloak." He grabbed Lamont's lapel and made him look right at him. "Join me."
Lamont turned away quickly, but Khan was right in his face once more. "Together, we will pit armies against each other like a chess game," Khan continued. "We will take our fill of pain and wash our hands in blood."
Lamont started once more to turn away, but Khan stepped into his path and began backing him toward the wall. "You are Ying Ko, Butcher Of Lhasa," Khan hissed, trying to appeal to Lamont's basest nature. "You, and only you, deserve to be by my side." He could see the darkness in the other man's eyes now, and tried to seize it. "Your mouth waters at the thought of real power. I am offering you the chance to take it. Be my partner, Ying Ko."
Lamont felt the wall stop his motion. He looked Khan in the eye for a moment. It was clear now that Khan wanted Lamont's extreme projective power, needed it to fulfill his plan...but was willing to destroy Lamont if he couldn't have it. And Lamont wasn't about to offer it. "That's not my name any more," he stated firmly.
Khan backed off angrily. "But it is, nevertheless, who you are!" He reached into his pocket.
Lamont stomped his heel on a hidden switch in the floor, and a panel on the wall dropped open to form a pocket-like bin beside his left hand. He reached into the now-opened bin and pulled out a chrome .45 pistol, aiming it right for Khan.
Khan flung something at Lamont.
Despite himself, Lamont couldn't take his eyes off the metallic object whirling toward him. He put his right hand up to grab it, closing his hand around it when it struck him. He opened his hand and looked at the object.
It was a silver Chinese coin. Lamont looked toward where he'd last seen Khan.
The Sanctum was now empty. "For the bourbon," he heard Khan's voice say. "We will meet again."
Lamont kicked himself mentally. He'd allowed himself to become distracted, and Khan was able to once more cloud his mind. It would do no good to rush up the stairs--he could hear the turning gears of the doorway mechanism, and knew that by the time he got to street level, Khan would be long gone. He looked at the coin once more.
It seemed to be shimmering, and felt strangely warm to the touch.
He frowned. It had to be some sort of clue, but what did it mean? Was Khan's plot to steal great antiquities? Would it involve a ransom? Did the coin itself mean anything? And what did it all have to do with the lost kingdom of Sianking?
Outside, just above the Sanctum's concealed door, Peter held tight onto the wall and Stephen held tight onto his partner's shoulders, trying to fight the disorientation of blood rushing to his head caused by Peter's upside-down perch. "Here he comes," Stephen's Shadow voice whispered.
The brick door slid back and Stephen's psyche cleared any lingering clouding suggestions...and spotted an unseen Khan hurrying down the alleyway, as if he were taking no chances about being chased.
"Go."
In one impossibly smooth motion, Peter dove off the wall, hit the external fire escape switch to close the doorway, and dove inside before the brickwork slid back into place.
The entrance mechanism gears turned once more, and Lamont heard the grating of the bricks as they slid back into place. Lamont smacked another switch on the wall to reset the timing mechanism so that the iron doors wouldn't seal him in, so that the system would work when he left for the day. But it looked like that wouldn't be for quite a while...it looked as if he was going to be spending a lot of time here in research today.
And that was when his mind suddenly registered the presence of yet another psychic mind in his presence.
"Getting busy 'round here," one young man's voice called.
"Might want to set up a lemonade stand," another agreed.
Lamont looked up and saw the two strangers he'd found in his Sanctum last night coming down the stairs. This business of strangers dropping in to his private office today was getting more than a little annoying. "Are you with Khan?" Lamont asked by way of introduction.
The slightly taller one, the man with coal black hair and piercing blue-green eyes that looked way too familiar for Lamont's taste, laughed at this...in a way that Lamont recognized but couldn't--or didn't want to--place.
"Us? With Khan?" the other one, shorter but possessing a chest and shoulders that were far broader and more muscular than his size would otherwise indicate, replied sarcastically. "You need to work on your mind reading skills."
"Then who are you?" Lamont demanded, ignoring the mind reading comment. Clearly they knew a lot more about him than he was comfortable with them knowing. But he needed to find out where and how they'd gotten that information.
"That's...a complex question," the dark-haired man answered.
Lamont stretched out slightly with his mind as he spoke, trying to find any detail he could in their thought patterns. He started with the taller one...and to his surprise found that he was being blocked. He kept his face neutral. "Three people have rather rudely barged into this room in the last 24 hours. The third just left. An obvious enemy. You don't work for him? Then who do you work for?"
The two traded a difficult look. "Uh...," the dark-haired one began...
"Actually, we work for you," his partner answered. "Kind of, anyway."
For the first time, Lamont noticed that both men were sporting fire opal rings on their left ring fingers...and he definitely did not remember making either man an agent. This was the earliest in the day in at least seven years that he'd ever really needed a drink. He kept a wary eye on the pair as he headed for his sidebar. "O.K.," he said as he poured a snifter of cognac, "if you work for me, then I'm sure you won't mind telling me what you know about Shiwan Khan."
"More than you, apparently."
Lamont turned to glare at the sharp-tongued smaller man, then did a double take when he saw he was sitting on the wall. "What the..."
"You have three days," interrupted the taller one, who was now crossing the room toward him with a strangely familiar confidence in his step.
Lamont wasn't sure what to think of these two now. "What happens in three days?"
"Khan wins." The dark-haired intruder snatched the snifter out of Lamont's hand and downed it in a hard gulp, only pausing a moment to let the burn pass through him. "And the world ends."
Lamont considered. And all the world will hear my thunder... "All right. Your names?"
The drink thief handed Lamont back his snifter. "Stephen."
"Peter," the gentleman on the wall added.
Cranston and Parker. Lamont mentally retraced the cryptic information on the notepad as he gestured over to the desk.
Stephen crossed the room and took a seat opposite his grandfather's chair.
Lamont poured himself another drink, then came over to sit in his own chair, his eyes never leaving Peter and his mind never stopping its gentle probes of Stephen, still mystified why his probes were being blocked. "It's Chinese, surprising because the Khans are Mongolian. The coin's design suggests 13th or 14th century--part of the inscription is in Latin, which would put it after Marco Polo's far eastern exploration."
Stephen nodded. "Keep going."
"The edging suggests metal tools, some kind of round cutter, so this isn't the only coin that was made, but the etchings on the surface were done by hand tools."
Peter turned to his partner, acknowledging with his expression that Stephen's oft-spoken admiration of his predecessor wasn't misplaced. "He's good."
Stephen smiled. "He's the best."
Lamont didn't comment. Instead, he went to the bookshelf and withdrew a large volume on coins of the world. He sat down across from Stephen once more. "You're keeping me out," he said quietly to Stephen as he flipped through it.
"I don't let people in much any more," Stephen quietly replied.
Lamont found that answer interesting. "And him?" he asked with a head gesture to Peter.
"Him? Him you can read. Just don't challenge him to arm wrestle."
Lamont cast his gaze up to Peter. "Spiderman. Peter Parker. Practical strength at least five times normal."
"Nice work," Peter retorted after recovering from the momentary shock of hearing his secret called out. "You get that from my mind or the notepad you found in my bag?"
Lamont reached into his inside jacket pocket and held up the notepad. "Fascinating. Confusing, but fascinating. No answers, just a lot of questions...questions I suspect you two can answer."
"I'll need that notepad back," Stephen said firmly.
"You going to start providing those answers?"
"Maybe...after you give it back to me."
Lamont considered it, then tossed the notebook across the desk.
Stephen pocketed it and nodded his thanks.
"Got anything else in your pockets you want to share?" Peter challenged.
Lamont looked annoyed at Peter's impertinence again, then reached into another jacket pocket. He still didn't trust the two men, but everything he'd been able to find out about the bracelet from examining it showed it wasn't a lethal weapon, so returning it to its owner might not cause any problems...not yet, anyway. "You have interesting taste in jewelry," he said, tossing the metal gauntlet into the air.
Peter dove off the wall, snatched the gauntlet out of the air, and pounced onto the ceiling above the two Shadows in a move so slick that it looked as if he were completely unaffected by gravity.
"Circus acrobat?" Lamont commented.
"Pro wrestler," Peter answered glibly.
"Uh-huh." Lamont went back to studying the coin. "All right, if the clue isn't in the carving, then the clue is the coin itself. It's not gold..." He showed the greyish underlay visible in one of the coin's worn edges. "...and it doesn't feel like silver. It could be bronze, but it has no patina. It's too brightly colored for it to be mere stone. It's warm to the touch, warmer than I would expect even from a coin that had been on someone's person." He looked over at Stephen. "You think very loudly."
Stephen drew back slightly. "What do you mean?"
Lamont smiled coldly. "You're a natural projector. Projectors are very rare, so when I run across one, I tend to notice them. But one of the weaknesses of natural projectors is that they have trouble shielding their thoughts for extended periods of time. You think I should go talk to a metallurgist. It just so happens that I picked up a new agent last night with that very skill, which only my driver and the agent himself know. You even spoke his name inside your head--Dr. Roy Tam. Even my most trusted associate doesn't have that name yet. So I want to know how you do."
"Moe Shrevnitz might take offense at you calling Burbank your 'most trusted associate'," Stephen shot back, ratcheting up his mental defenses in preparation for a direct strike.
Peter felt his spider-sense surge from a tingle to a five-alarm alert in his head in the space of a second.
And in that same timeframe, Lamont Cranston had leapt to his feet and blasted a burst of telekinetic energy toward the man across the table.
Stephen was on his feet equally quickly and firing back a defensive volley.
The two sets of thought waves collided so hard that Peter felt the shock rattle his entire body. He pressed himself hard against the ceiling and braced himself for a second round of assaults.
But Peter wasn't the only one reeling from the shock waves. Both Lamont and Stephen put hands to their temples and stared at one another in astonishment. Lamont, because he'd never expected to collide minds with a projector anywhere near his strength...
...and Stephen, because the stories his uncle had told about Lamont's powerful psyche not only weren't exaggerations but may have even been seriously understated. That was the hardest Stephen had ever been smacked in the psyche, harder than Marpa Tulku had ever pressed him, harder than the smackdown mental blows from Victor's many training sessions when he was a teen, harder than even the firestorm of mind-shredding energy he'd braved from Harrison Devin a few months back, and he had to get himself under control before he overreacted and wasted energy on offensive assaults instead of defensive postures.
"Who are you?" Lamont's Shadow voice demanded.
Stephen took a deep breath, then forced himself to psychically speak the words. "I'm your grandson."
Peter cringed. This was not the way he'd envisioned this revelation unfolding. "Oh, boy..."
Lamont paid him no attention and instead stared at Stephen as if he were seeing a ghost...or looking into a mirror. This was insane, a trick, a trap by an enemy who had somehow found out his secrets and was trying to psychically manipulate him...
...or maybe he was telling the truth. It wasn't like Lamont had never heard Marpa Tulku discuss being able to see the future, and he'd read some pretty convincing stories of psychics with the ability to transcend space and time with their minds. But this wasn't some vision, ghost, or mirage standing here, it was a flesh-and-blood man...who looked disturbingly like a younger version of himself..."Prove it."
Stephen looked confused. Prove it? How? This was 1933; there were no DNA tests or computerized birth records, and even if there had been, there was no way to prove what was going to happen two generations down the road...
...or maybe there was. "I'm not going for a gun," Stephen promised, slowly reaching for his pants pocket.
Everything in Lamont's personal experience told him never to trust anyone who said that. But this whole situation was outside anything he could ever have imagined he would experience. He gauged the distance to the nearest hidden panel concealing a weapon and tried to decide whether or not he'd have time to dive to it before the acrobat on the ceiling could break up the attack while he warily watched Stephen's moves.
Stephen pulled out a small photo from his pocket. He turned it to face Lamont. "You met this woman last night at the Cobalt Club. Her name is Margo Lane."
Lamont's eyes boggled. It was indeed the mysterious woman he'd met yesterday, the latent receptor who'd heard his thoughts, the unforgettable beauty who'd invaded his dreams because he couldn't stop thinking about her. But this photo was a formal portrait, something that a family would have commissioned...how could this man have gotten it?
"The man in the photo is her father, a physicist with the War Department named Reinhardt Lane. This picture was taken in 1932. It used to be on the desk of my great-grandfather."
Lamont raised an eyebrow and looked at Stephen. "You must be joking."
Stephen let the faintest of shadowy chuckles out of his mind. "Hello, Granddaddy."
Lamont cast a suspicious glance upward at the man clinging spider-like to the ceiling. "And I suppose he's your half-brother?"
"No way," Peter retorted.
"It would be his worst nightmare if we shared genetic makeup," Stephen agreed. "He thinks I'm crazy."
"No, I know you're crazy," Peter corrected. "No thinking involved here."
Lamont looked from Stephen to Peter and back again. "So you're the brains and he's the brawn?"
Stephen laughed at the characterization of the pair that had always been guaranteed to get a rise out of Peter. "See? Even he knows."
Peter swung his backpack at Lamont and Stephen both.
"Touchy, touchy," The elder Shadow noted.
"You've noticed," the younger one added.
Lamont eyed both men warily. The scary part of all of this was that he was actually starting to believe their story. Which meant he needed to find out why they were here in the first place. "So," he spoke aloud, leaning against the wall--near a hidden pistol just in case he was being double-crossed--"what's next?"
"That depends," Stephen replied.
"On what?"
"On why exactly we got sent back here," Peter stated.
Lamont looked at them. "I'm not sure I understand."
"We didn't exactly come here willingly," Stephen explained.
"But we did come here at your direction," Peter added. "Kind of."
Stephen frowned. He hadn't wanted to tip their hand this way yet.
Lamont noticed the change in expression. "Not much point in keeping secrets now, is there?"
"Well, there might be," Stephen countered. "There's a school of thought about time travel, mostly supported by fiction, that it's not good to disrupt the sequence of events that lead up to the present for fear of changing the present by altering the past."
Lamont considered this notion. "Interesting point."
"Except that we apparently did at one point alter the past," Peter interjected.
Lamont looked confused. "I don't follow."
"We ended up in this situation in the first place because you wrote us each a letter--personally addressed to us by name."
"And we were attempting to follow the instructions in them," Stephen added, "when we ended up here."
Lamont considered this as well. "My teacher believed there was no such thing as coincidence--that all things are connected in ways no one is ever meant to completely understand." He mused on that point for a moment, then walked back over to the desk and picked up the coin. "So, where do we go from here?"
Stephen thought through this moment, spinning his knowledge of Shadow history through his head. "Tomorrow morning, you need to go speak to Dr. Tam about the coin."
"Why not today?" Lamont challenged.
Stephen knew the answer--the chain of events in The Shadow's historical diary stated that today was spent researching the coin in ways other than examining its metallurgical elements--which meant that he needed to have a good reason to keep the calendar in synch when Lamont had already figured out the next step. "Because today, we need your help on something else."
"Such as...?"
"Finding the two guys who came through the time field with us," Peter said, realizing where Stephen was heading with this.
"Mark Lachlan--a professor of nuclear physics--and his assistant Paul Maxwell," Stephen clarified, relieved at Peter's ingenuity. He made a mental note to apologize later for the brain/brawn joke.
Lamont debated letting out The Shadow's derisive laugh at the two men, then decided that maybe they had a point. After all, clearly these two knew a lot more than he did about this situation. "So where do you suggest we start doing that?"
Stephen looked to Peter for direction. After all, it was his idea.
Peter didn't waver in the slightest. If he were doing this by himself, he knew exactly where he'd start looking for a professor of physics in 1930s New York--at the home of many of the earliest nuclear physics discoveries itself. "Columbia University."
Moe couldn't believe it when he drew close to the Sanctum's alleyway entrance only to see Lamont come out with the two strangers from the night before. But, Lamont wasn't mentally sending him away, so he pulled to a stop outside the alley and obediently popped open the passenger doors.
Lamont and Stephen got in the back, Peter in the front.
"Drive," Stephen and Lamont said in the same instant.
Stephen waved off Lamont's expression of annoyance. "Sorry. Force of habit."
Moe looked slightly confused as he pulled away from the curb. "Um...where to, mister?"
"They know," Lamont clarified.
Moe looked startled. "What?"
"They're agents. And they know everything. Everything."
Moe tried to compose himself once more. "O.K., then. Do I at least get an introduction?"
"Certainly." Lamont gave a knowing smile. "Moe Shrevnitz, meet Peter Parker in the front and Stephen Cranston in the back."
Moe screeched to a stop and turned back to face the two men in the back seat. "You've got to be kidding."
"Do I look like I'm kidding?" Lamont replied.
Moe looked from Lamont to Stephen and back again. It was almost scary. No, it was scary, no "almost" about it. The two men looked as if they could be brothers...they had the same facial structure, the same coal black hair, the same piercing blue-green eyes...
"They're filming a Doublemint commercial later," Peter interjected.
Moe looked over at Peter. "What?"
Peter rolled his eyes. Yet another history lesson. "Never mind."
"Drive," Lamont stated again firmly.
Moe shook off his disbelief and drove on. "Where to?"
"Columbia University."
Moe nodded and headed for the uptown university.
"So I take it you actually believe us now," Stephen observed.
"Not completely," Lamont admitted.
"Yet you haven't kicked us out of the cab."
"Not yet."
"Ah."
The rest of the ride went by in silence.
"I can't believe it," Mark Lachlan kept saying as he and Paul Maxwell walked down by the East River. "Einstein was right. The Unified Field Theory isn't just a bunch of unsupported speculation unprovable by any means. We proved it. We used it. We're walking in Manhattan in December 1933."
"You did it," Paul answered, sounding less skeptical than he had before.
"I did indeed," Lachlan replied, giving a self-satisfied smile.
Paul looked around, trying to take everything in and match it all up to the facts he had in his head. "You're sure this is where it all began?"
Lachlan stopped in his tracks and stared right at a round metal building, shaped like a giant bathysphere, sitting on the docks. A fussy-looking fellow in a badly-tailored pinstriped suit and a ratty trenchcoat looked around nervously as he turned the building's wheel-shaped door lock. "I'm sure."
"Nothing," Peter sighed frustratedly as he left the Science Department building at Columbia. "That is the most closed-mouthed group of physicists I've ever met. None of them have seen anybody matching Lachlan or Maxwell's descriptions, and even if they had they probably wouldn't have told me."
"Well," Stephen replied from his perch on the front steps of the building, "while you were running into walls with the physicists, wealthy young man-about-town Lamont Cranston took a stroll over to the archaeology department to find out more about the history of Shiwan Khan's mysterious coin."
"Which, if I remember your history lessons correctly, is what he did the last time around."
"According to his notes. Which isn't to say that he wasn't pushed this direction because of us, or in spite of us, or maybe independent of us."
"At least you didn't just blurt out the pertinent facts and spoil the whole thing for him."
Stephen frowned. "You got a problem, Spider?"
Peter debated giving an answer, then decided that he didn't really have a choice. "Yeah, I do. You're acting schizophrenic here. One minute you don't want to say anything to 'disrupt the past', and the next you're practically telling your life story to your grandfather and directing an investigation that he's supposed to be doing. This isn't a game, Stephen..."
"I know that."
"Could have fooled me."
Stephen looked Peter in the eye. "You're jealous."
Peter looked taken aback. "Of what?"
"You tell me."
Peter scoffed. "Now that may be the stupidest theory I've heard from you today."
"So tell me I'm wrong."
"You're wrong," Peter said a bit too quickly as he tried to banish frustrations about short buildings and not having a relative to confide in from his mind.
Stephen smiled coldly. "No, I'm not."
"See? I knew you were going to say that. You're playing the 'I Know Something You Don't Know' game again, like you always do, only this time you're playing it on less than friendly turf. Your grandfather still doesn't trust us any further than he can throw us, and frankly I'm more than a little bothered by that, considering that he likely holds the key for how the Hell we get out of this chronological paradox."
"We have the advantage of history. We know how this all turns out."
"Or maybe we don't. After all, we could very well be changing history just by having this very conversation. The point is that we don't know how all this turns out this time around. Which means we really need to watch what we say and do, because not even The Shadow knows what's going to happen this time."
"Are you two finished?"
Both Stephen and Peter whirled to see Lamont standing behind them. "How long were you there?" Stephen finally asked.
"Long enough to note that the two of you are having a disagreement over which secrets to keep and which to spill." Lamont pointed at Stephen, then gestured with his head toward a dark corner. "Let's talk."
Peter and Stephen exchanged glances, then Stephen crossed toward the darkness to join his predecessor.
Lamont waited until Stephen was deep into the shadows with him, then turned on the younger man with sudden fury, shoving him up against the wall and staring into his eyes with a dark and power-filled gaze. "Your partner's right--you're playing a very dangerous game, and I don't like games that aren't played by my rules. I don't know who you really are, and I don't particularly care. What I do know is that you obviously know more than I do, and that is not a situation I allow to last for very long once I uncover it. Now...where is Khan?"
Stephen took a deep breath and steeled both his resolve and the protective barriers around his psyche. "I can't tell you."
"WHY NOT?"
"There are other things at stake besides Khan," Stephen explained, forcing his mind to hold the harder-than-ever intruding probes at bay. "The next three days decide more than this mission--they decide me, too."
Lamont released Stephen's jacket and lowered his forearm from across Stephen's throat. "Tell me."
Stephen really wanted to, but knew that he was dangerously close to a complete rewrite of history as it stood now. "I can't."
"Why not?"
"Because if you're anything like me, you won't let it happen the way I remember it, even if it had a happy ending. You'll get the answers, but not from me."
Lamont considered. "Two days. If I don't have Khan by then, you tell me everything."
Stephen nodded.
"All right, then. Let's get back to work."
Stephen straightened his jacket, then followed Lamont back across the grove.
Peter watched the two men cross the campus toward him. Lamont was giving him a glare that sent his spider-sense tingling, and despite his earlier protestations about being careful not to upset the present/past/whatever-the-Hell-this-thing-was, he was seriously thinking about flexing a little bit of spider-enhanced muscle and tossing Lamont around just to wipe that arrogant expression off his face...
"Just try it," Lamont's Shadow voice interrupted his unspoken musings.
Peter made eye contact with Stephen just long enough to indicate that he was seriously considering trying it indeed, then backed off a step. "So, where to now?"
"The currency exchange, off Wall Street." Lamont approached the curb and barely broke stride as Moe Shrevnitz's cab pulled up and popped its rear door open.
"Cranstons, the only people in Manhattan who never have to wait for cabs," Peter remarked as he and Stephen joined the elder Cranston in the taxi.
The New York currency market took an immense beating on black Tuesday, but was starting to climb back up. Business was business, however, and foreign currency still came into the country.
A disembodied shadow ran across the floor of one of the many coin-holding rooms and pooled itself around a crate that lacked a shipping address. A similar coil of black approached from the opposite direction.
"All clear," the younger Shadow told the older one.
Lamont and Stephen swirled into visibility and pulled the lid off the crate without hesitation. Inside were hundreds of coins, just like the one Khan had tossed. "Looks like your source was right," Stephen observed.
"He usually is," Lamont returned, fingering the coins. "There are a lot of coins here--enough for Khan's purpose?" Even as he was asking it he shook his head. "No. There are too many of these here, and that's the problem. He gave me one of these...which means he likely brought a shipment with him. Somebody's smuggling currency in here, but not for Khan's purpose, whatever it is." He faded from view again.
Stephen followed suit, mentally taking notes on his grandfather's problem-solving style.
The lights were off in the exchange office records room, but the dark was no issue for Lamont Cranston. A small spotlight appeared, shining back and forth, until he found the file he was looking for. He pulled out one slip of paper and left the room.
"Well?"
Lamont jumped and looked around...and finally spotted Peter crouched in a corner near the ceiling and down the hall. "You are going to give me a heart attack."
Peter felt his blood run cold at the words, remembering Stephen's stories of how the elder Cranston indeed lost his final battle with a failing heart two years before Stephen's birth.
"Cranston men have a tendency to die of heart attacks and strokes," Lamont said matter-of-factly in response to the unspoken sentiment. "Usually fairly young. Side effect of the somewhat destructive lifestyle tendencies built into our personalities."
"You read minds more often than he does," Peter noted.
"Not usually." Lamont chuckled slightly. "I don't have a super-strong partner with a built-in danger alarm willing to watch my back even when I tick him off. So I have to compensate accordingly."
Peter realized he'd just been awarded a point of respect from a man who didn't award such things very often. He nodded his thanks.
Lamont nodded in reply. "I take it your partner is elsewhere?"
"Waiting for the cab, like you told him to. I take it you found what you were looking for?"
Lamont held up the piece of paper. "Let's go."
As Lamont and Peter left the building, they saw Stephen leaning against a light post. "Waiting long?" Lamont deadpanned.
"Hard to get a cab these days," Stephen responded.
With that, Shrevnitz's Cord pulled up to the three men at the curb.
"You need to tip better," Lamont replied as he gestured toward the open rear door.
The three men climbed into the cab. "148 Houston Street, Shrevvy," Lamont ordered.
Stephen felt himself tense and instantly shored up his mental blocks to keep Lamont out.
"Corner of Second and Houston, coming up," Moe answered, driving away.
"What's at Second and Houston?" Peter asked, trying to keep his own reaction calm.
"The address where a very large shipment of Chinese coins matching Khan's pocket change came in just recently." He cast a gaze from Stephen to Peter. "I take it the address means something to you?"
"It's...the location of Lachlan's lab back in our time," Peter finally said.
Lamont didn't buy the notion of that being a complete explanation, but let it go for now. He'd find out for himself soon enough.
"Speaking of addresses..." Stephen reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a cream note card envelope. "Messenger service dropped by while you were looking for one."
"That's not for me," Lamont replied.
Stephen looked oddly at the letter, then opened it.
Moments later, the essential information faded into view:
Mark Lachlan and Paul Maxwell registered at Moonlight Hotel, room 1216.
Stephen looked surprised. "When did you have time to put out feelers for that info?"
Lamont gave him a knowing look.
"Never mind," Stephen answered his own question. "I don't think I really want to know."
A shadowy laugh trailed the cab as it sped across town.
Farley Claymore was busily tinkering in his lab and puttering with his containment sphere when he heard a noise and froze. "W-who's there?"
Paul Maxwell stuck his head into the room. "Farley Claymore?"
"Yes."
"Mr. Claymore, I represent a buyer for your containment spheres."
Claymore nearly dropped the welding torch he was holding. "I...I'm under contract to the War Department."
"But you recently began working on the sly for another...less official...source."
Claymore paled considerably. "How do you know about that?"
"As I said, I work for your new buyer, and he wants an update on the beryllium sphere."
Claymore slowly relaxed. His other employer had told him to be ready for a signal that could come at anytime, after all. "It's getting there. I have to work at this alone, you know. It will be ready by tomorrow."
Paul nodded, keeping his face neutral. "Good. Guards will be coming for it soon." With that, he left the room.
The moment he left Claymore's sight, Paul pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and checked it. The office number, the name, the implosion sphere, all of it was written down accurately.
"I can't believe it," Paul whispered. "It's all real."
Like Lamont Cranston, Shiwan Khan had a sanctum as well. Unlike Lamont's, though, Khan's was a place of spiritual refuge, not intellectual study. A Tibetan tapestry illustrating the god of travelers hung on the wall, and a large incense pot sat in front of it. A prayer mat lay on the floor, where one could kneel and meditate. And Khan was now kneeling in meditation before the tapestry, opening his receptive mind, seeking an American scientist to help him unlock the power of the ancient elements of his ancestry.
Thoughts swirled around him, filled with the decadent desires of a modern-day Rome or Shanghai.
Khan frowned and filtered them out, listening now for specific thoughts associated with alchemists, sorcerers, and other experimenters.
More thoughts surrounded him, filled with wildly impossible theories, scientific equations he didn't understand, experiments he knew were useless...
...and then, thought patterns of a man in deep concentration, trying to figure out why his atom-splitting device wasn't quite working right.
In an instant, Khan had his name. "Reinhardt Lane."
As night fell over Manhattan, an exasperated and overworked Reinhardt Lane tossed the notebook he'd been examining aside and once more tightened the wires attached to his spherical generator. He was beginning to lose focus. He could almost hear the hissing and humming of the equipment in the lab taunting him, laughing at him...
"Reinhardt Lane."
Reinhardt stopped working for a moment. Had someone called his name? He sat silent, listening carefully.
"Reinhardt Lane."
There it was again. Reinhardt looked around.
Only shadows from his equipment greeted his gaze.
Reinhardt shook his head. He needed air. Turning around, he walked toward the doors to the balcony and stepped out into the chilly December night.
Being the revered physicist that Reinhardt Lane was had its advantages. To go along with his huge research grant, he had easily the best lab in the entire Federal Building; it took up nearly a third of the twenty-third floor, had room for a ton of equipment plus books and a small conference area, and even had a balcony running the width of the building and overlooking the city below. If Reinhardt weren't so wrapped up in his work, he might actually enjoy the view; the lights on the surrounding buildings were almost hypnotic in their twinkling beauty, and even that obnoxious neon billboard for Llama cigarettes on the roof of the building next door had its own strange attraction.
Smoke curled lazily from the cigarette on the billboard, held by a generic WASP man and surrounded by the slogan "I'd Climb A Mountain For A Llama". That smoke was enticing--enticing enough to make Reinhardt fish his own pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, pull one out, and light it...
"Reinhardt Lane."
Reinhardt looked up at the billboard.
The WASPish face had transformed into an angry-looking Asian man with long black hair, full beard, and harsh brown eyes. And those eyes were staring right through him. "Reinhardt Lane, Khan's voice called from the billboard.
Reinhardt's eyes went completely blank. "Yes, my Khan," he whispered.
Moe's cab came to a halt at the end of Third Avenue, and The Shadow exited, reaching the next street through a break between a Laundromat and a convenience store.
The Shadow scanned the street and paused. Second and Houston was an empty lot. He looked at the piece of paper again, but there was no mistaking the address. 148 Houston Street should be right in front of him, yet there was nothing here except weeds and trash. "Dammit."
"Not what you were hoping for?"
The Shadow turned around and saw Stephen standing at the edge of the alley, Peter on the wall above him. The two of them were good, he had to mentally admit. "No. This must be a drop point of some kind. I'll have surveillance on this place within the hour."
"Good idea."
"So what now?" The Shadow asked.
"I think we need to check up on Lachlan and Maxwell at the Moonlight," Peter suggested.
The Shadow nodded. "That might be a good plan. Sometimes better progress can be made with lateral moves than head-on collisions when the latter is currently getting you nowhere."
"I'll get the bag from the cab," Peter said, springing away.
"Does he always let you send him away hypnotically like that?" The Shadow asked Stephen when Peter had vanished around the corner.
"He's getting better at detecting when I try," Stephen admitted.
The Shadow stepped into the dark alley and leaned back against the wall. "An agent of mine at Columbia gave me an interesting piece of scientific info earlier today."
Stephen adopted a similar pose. "Really?"
"It would seem that there's a group of physicists there working with a group in Washington on proving some kind of 'unified field theory' from a German scientist named Albert Einstein that could conceivably allow travelling across time as easily as travelling across land and sea. Big government secret project, codenamed 'Philadelphia'. It could conceivably be working before the end of the year."
Stephen smiled and nodded his thanks.
The Shadow's eyes reflected a mysterious smile hidden by the red scarf. "You didn't ask for the details."
"I don't need them yet."
The Shadow looked Stephen over head to toe. "Stephen...Cranston."
It was the first time Stephen had detected any sign that Lamont actually believed the wild story they'd been spinning. "Indeed."
The Shadow dropped away the mind-clouding disguise that exaggerated his features and lowered the scarf to reveal the curious expression of Lamont Cranston. "My...grandson."
Stephen's own cool expression softened noticeably. "Yes."
"And that woman..."
"Yes."
Lamont rolled his eyes and blew out a hard breath. "What do I see in her?"
Stephen gave his grandfather an Are you sure you're not dead? look.
"Never mind," Lamont answered his own question. "I don't think I really want to know."
Stephen chuckled slightly. "Not yet."
"Touche." He gave a glance toward the sky near the edge of the alley, where Peter was leaping across the rooftop and crawling down toward them. "I think this is the scene where we part company for the evening so we can each attend to our own pursuits."
"Probably."
"No fair gossiping about the superhero behind his back," Peter wisecracked as he rejoined the pair.
"I don't play fair." Lamont raised the scarf over his face and his features sharpened into The Shadow's hawkish appearance instantly. "I'll be in touch."
"We'll be waiting," Stephen promised.
The two generations of Cranstons nodded to one another, and then The Shadow vanished into the night.
"What did I miss?" Peter asked.
Stephen stared into the darkness wistfully. "Marty McFly giving dating tips to his dad."
Lachlan was pacing back and forth in the hotel room, frustrated that he'd been left alone in this mixed-up time and place, in a room so small one would have to step outside to change one's mind, when there was a knock at the door.
Lachlan gave a peek through the peephole, then pulled the door open and yanked Paul back inside. "Where the Hell have you been?"
Paul shrugged. "Soaking up some history. We have to know the layout, right? The city's changed a lot over the past seventy years, and we've got less than three days to put all of this together. There's no War Department in Manhattan in our timeframe, and the Claymore lab is long gone. I've been scoping out those addresses we found, trying to make sure those places actually existed."
Lachlan nodded, seeing the logic. "Good work."
Paul nodded his thanks.
Lachlan crossed the room to look out the window over the city. "Three days, Paul," he whispered. "Three days from now, we'll be able to get our hands on and destroy the first nuclear bomb and all its plans. Three days, and the world is forever changed, Einstein be damned."
"You really think we can?" Paul asked.
"I know we can. We know how it works--the prototype is sitting in our warehouse. The crates, the papers, the formulas all say Reinhardt Lane, and we know Farley Claymore, the only other person working on the project, commits suicide in three days. We can make it work!"
Paul nodded. "We're gonna change the world."
Peter and Stephen entered their hotel room at the Moonlight. "Wow," Peter said sarcastically. "I've seen closets bigger than this."
"I've owned closets bigger than this," Stephen agreed. "Want the bed or the floor?"
Peter tossed the backpack into the small room chair. "I don't suppose you'd be willing to flip for it?"
"Not unless we use one of Khan's bronzium coins."
Peter doffed his shoes, leaned against the wall, and took a seat. "This is what I don't get. What's so special about the bronzium coins that Lachlan would go to the trouble of completing a time machine to get them?"
"Well, for one thing, they're very rare." Stephen put an ear to each wall to see if he could hear their neighbors through the walls, then pulled the curtain to the room closed and locked the chain lock across the door. "For another, they're mildly radioactive. Reinhardt Lane didn't want to build an implosive generator that depended on radioactive elements, and as you know from your physics classes, true nuclear fission doesn't get 'discovered' for another year. So his implosive generator was supposed to be designed to work on non-radioactive elements."
"But it didn't quite work."
"Right. Somehow, Khan found him and hypnotized him into completing a 'compromise' reactor. So it works--or rather, would have if my grandparents hadn't put a stop to it--but not with anything but the bronzium."
Peter raised an eyebrow. "Grandparents?"
"Yeah. My grandmother and great-grandfather were the ones who actually disabled it. Long story, which we might get to see actually play out before our eyes in three days."
Peter made his way to the ceiling, dusting away a cobweb from a corner. "If we don't corrupt the timeline by our very presence. Though I'm actually beginning to wonder if anything could." He flicked his eyes upward. "Should I alert our quarry that we're right below them?"
"Not right now. Remember, we don't actually know what we're supposed to be doing to, with, or for them. Hopefully we won't sleep through them moving around above us." Stephen collapsed onto the bed and sighed. "My grandfather actually believes us now. I didn't think he ever would."
Peter was intrigued. "Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"
"Considering he holds the key to my very survival, I'd say it was a very good thing."
"Yeah, there is that. So I take it you're taking the bed?"
Stephen rolled his eyes, then snatched a pillow and the bedspread off the bed and dragged them to a corner near the radiator. "Have at it," he said, turning off the overhead light.
Peter dropped off the ceiling and twisted in mid-air to land in the middle of the mattress on his back. "Ow! That thing's like a slab of concrete! I'd almost bet the floor is more comfortable."
Stephen smirked. "Want to trade?"
Peter rolled his eyes, then defiantly fluffed the remaining pillow and crawled beneath the covers.
It was not the movement of their upstairs hotelmates that awoke the time-shifted heroes the next morning, but rather a knock and a cream notecard sliding beneath the door.
A still-sleepy Stephen tossed his covers aside, then crossed the room to retrieve the note. An instant later, he became fully alert. "Rise and shine, partner. Cab'll be here in fifteen."
Across town at New York University, Lamont climbed into the cab and shut the door. "To the Sanctum," he said firmly.
"You got it," Moe replied, putting the cab into gear and pulling away. "What did you find out about the coin?"
"Bronzium. It's called bronzium, and Khan is using it as fuel for a new weapon." He turned to Stephen, sitting next to him in the back seat. "Start talking."
Stephen considered carefully whether Lamont had managed to gather enough information on his own for him to be filling in the details, then realized they didn't really have time for such debates. "Khan is attempting to create something called a 'nuclear bomb'."
"Nuclear?" Moe asked.
"21st century speak for 'overkill'," Peter explained.
Lamont recognized the uneasy edge in Peter's tone. It was the same uneasy edge Dr. Roy Tam had when Lamont had asked him how big the explosion from a bronzium "atomic" bomb would be. "What kind of power are we talking about? Tam couldn't give me a number."
"If it blows, there won't be enough left of Manhattan to fill a teacup," Peter told him, not noticing Stephen's sharp look.
Lamont noticed the look, though. "What are you two hiding?"
Stephen considered again, then decided to spill it. "In our time, the atomic bomb is the ultimate weapon. It's a weapon of last resort. It's also a weapon of necessity. Its development is inevitable...but not this soon."
"How does it work?"
Stephen and Peter exchanged a look, then Peter went into physics major mode. "The essential ingredients in an atomic bomb are some kind of molecularly unstable element and an electron accelerator that breaks the unstable bonds and sets off a chain reaction explosion. Sometimes it's done with a long, steady stream of electricity, but most often it's done with a bombardment of charges on all sides from an implosive generator. You enclose the whole thing in an enhancement shell to keep all the energy inside and focused so that the electrons collide together and break up the molecules until the whole thing reaches something called 'critical mass'. Then, kaboom."
Lamont considered this. "Unstable element...meaning bronzium. So Khan needs an implosive generator and an enhancement shell to complete his bomb. Tam said something about using a beryllium sphere to 'enhance' the reaction."
Peter nodded. "It's actually the perfect material. It's lightweight, hard, conducts electricity and heat, but it's non-magnetic, which means it won't be affected by the electromagnetic waves used in the implosive device."
Lamont mused on this as well. "Beryllium isn't all that uncommon," he noted. "I know it's used to make light bulbs and radio tubes, and even used in dentistry. So it's possible for there to be large quantities of beryllium in use throughout the city in perfectly legitimate ways." He looked at both men. "Tam didn't seem to think any of this was actually possible with current technology."
"Tam was wrong," Stephen said bluntly.
Lamont looked his grandson in the eye.
Stephen didn't flinch from the look. "We have an agreement."
Lamont frowned. "Two days."
Stephen nodded.
Lamont cast his gaze around the cab. "Suggestions as to where to go from here?"
Silence stretched for several minutes. "Lachlan and Maxwell likely have this knowledge as well," Stephen finally said. "Which means we need to track their movements, because we still don't know what role they play in all of this."
"All right. Shrevnitz, slight detour. Head back for the Moonlight."
The cabbie still wasn't completely comfortable with the way the two men seemed to be dictating events and approaches to the boss, but it was not his place to question. He turned off the main thoroughfare and headed back to the Moonlight Hotel.
Manhattanites who were still buzzing about the enigmatic Shadow's strike on Duke Rollins barely 36 hours earlier would have been completely left agog by the sight of a strange man in a tight red and blue suit scaling the street-facing wall at the Moonlight Hotel.
That is, if they'd actually been able to see such a thing. Which they couldn't, because of Stephen Cranston's mind-clouding suggestion to blur their view of Spiderman's ascent to Lachlan and Maxwell's 12th floor hotel room.
"I'm in," Spiderman reported over his radio as he opened the unlocked window and climbed into the room.
"'bout time," Stephen's voice returned, an edge in his tone that Spiderman was quick to chalk up to fatigue from the mental exertion of clouding someone other than himself rather than actual annoyance at Spiderman's relative speed. "I take it by the fact that you're in the room that our two friends are not?"
"Good deduction, Sherlock." Spiderman gave the room a quick search, even lifting up the bed to check under it. "Wow, they came here with even less than we did. There's no sign of backpacks or briefcases or anything that contains paper or clothing anywhere..." He paused as he spotted something. "...except the control box for the time machine."
"Which isn't likely to do us much good in 1933." Stephen turned what little facts they had over in his mind. "Given that they probably know more about the non-Shadow events than we do, we have to assume they have some kind of guide to find the players involved. If I could only figure out what their next move is going to be..."
Spiderman kept searching the room, finally finding a small envelope cast aside in the garbage. "Hello...what's this?"
"I don't know," returned Stephen's sarcastic answer. "Clairvoyance is not my strong suit."
"And besides, you left your clairvoyant side back in the 21st century," Spiderman retorted. "Found something. An envelope with Maxwell's name on it. Looks very new."
"Maybe we're not the only ones getting letters from the past?"
"No, this is too new to be from the past, or at least for them to have gotten it from the past while still in our time. It's white, with printed interior--like a security envelope. Couple of blank sheets of paper inside it, though, so somebody didn't completely trust the security printing. Relatively good quality paper, too. Shall I bring it down?"
"Couldn't hurt. Anything else?"
Spiderman looked around. "Some coins--recent vintage."
"O.K., so they too acquired money from some source in this era. Makes me wonder all the more if they have a past contact as well."
"I told you Maxwell really looked like he knew where he was going when he got away at the Monolith."
"You were right. This is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Stephen kept pondering the pieces, trying to make them fit into this puzzle that was rapidly growing more complex than ever. "All right, since they're not in the room, we have to assume they've gone elsewhere on whatever mission brought them back to the past. The key question is, where?"
"Who did Khan go after first?"
"You're thinking of going in the same order?"
"Well, you have to admit they might be doing the same."
"No, I don't. Khan recruited Farley Claymore before he went after Reinhardt Lane--that much my grandfather knew for certain, but didn't have the details as to when that actually occurred. But Claymore is little more than a minor footnote in Lane's documentation, so it's entirely possible that they don't know about Claymore."
"What was it Lachlan said--'it worked once, we have to make it work again'? To me, that sounds like they're after Lane."
"But Lane didn't know he was actually building a bomb."
"True, but we do. And presumably Lachlan and Maxwell do, too. Which, to me, says they're after Lane."
"Then maybe we need to see if they asked for directions on how to find him. Remember, in our Manhattan, there's no War Department building. Let me know before you step out the window so I can blur you again."
"Yeah, showing off in the pre-spandex superhero era might not be the smartest approach." Spiderman hopped back to the ceiling and crawled across to the far wall. "Start blurring," he said, climbing out and closing the window.
"Dad, slow down," Margo Lane was urging the voice on the other end of the line. "You're not making any sense. Are you all right?" She listened once more to the sound of her father, the renowned physicist Reinhardt Lane, babbling incomprehensibly into the phone. She supposed she should have been grateful that he was actually taking her call--three previous attempts to get through to his office that day had been blocked by the switchboard operator refusing to put her calls through and insisting that the refusal was at her father's direction--but instead she was more frightened than ever. "Dad, I don't understand what you're saying. Are you all right? Do you need help?"
More incoherent babbling that sounded almost like the rapid-fire Mandarin Lamont Cranston had spoken to the waiter at that Chinese restaurant two days ago, and then the phone went dead.
Margo slammed the receiver down, then picked up the phone again. "Operator? Get me the police." She sighed at the question coming from the other end of the line. "Yes, again."
Stephen turned away from the concierge desk and met Peter halfway across the lobby. "They didn't talk to the concierge," Stephen reported. "Any luck with the doorman?"
"Yeah." Peter held up the wad of money left from their raid of Lamont's safe. "I greased the doorman. They left in a Sunshine Radio cab a half-hour ago."
Stephen raised an eyebrow. "Greased?"
Peter rolled his eyes. "Saw it in a bad movie once."
Stephen laughed. "Good work." He went into the hotel and made a beeline for the payphones. "Good afternoon. Is this Sunshine Radio Cabs? Oh, thank goodness. This is Mr. Arnaud, from the concierge desk at the Moonlight Hotel. I understand one of your drivers picked up two of our guests outside the hotel about a half-hour ago. One of them just received a very important phone call and I'm trying to track down where they might have gone. Is there any way you can contact your driver and find out where he dropped them off so I can send a runner after them?" He paused and listened to the answer. "Of course I'll hold."
Margo once more slammed the receiver down and began pacing like a caged cat. Her father was shutting her out. He hadn't done that since her mother had died. Something was clearly wrong. Why wouldn't the police help her out? Why wouldn't he take her calls? What was going on? Why wouldn't the War Department put him through? And why was Commissioner Barth ducking her pleas for help?
Well, she decided, if Wainwright Barth wouldn't take her calls, he could explain why in person. She headed upstairs to change clothes and fetch the necessary ingredients to ply her feminine wiles on Barth and anybody else she needed to in the process.
"You're sure this is where they said the cab had gone?" Spiderman asked his unseen partner.
The Shadow stood near the edge of the warehouse where the partners were conducting their observations, swirling into visibility and trying to stay in the ever-lengthening shadows as nightfall approached. "This is it," he replied. "But there's no cab here...or anything else, for that matter..."
"But there is a giant metal ball," Spiderman cracked, gesturing with his head at the bathysphere-shaped building across the way from them. "Weird."
The Shadow looked at the building, trying to figure out why it was triggering something in his brain. "Spidey...what do you need to build an atomic bomb?"
"Radioactive elements, a particle accelerator, and an enhancement shell..." Then he shook his head. "That is not a beryllium sphere."
"No. But Farley Claymore had a lab on the East River in 1933 where he built and tested beryllium spheres. And my grandfather's notes on his dealings with Claymore described it as looking 'like a big tin baseball'."
Spiderman groaned. "Oh, brother. They do know about Claymore."
"Which puts them one step ahead of both us and my grandfather. I think it's time we called in reinforcements."
"What, you want to somehow drag Victor through the time portal?"
"No. I was thinking of more contemporary help..."
A few minutes later, the pair walked into the midtown police headquarters building. "You're sure any agents we find will actually be willing to help us?" Peter whispered.
"Positive. My grandfather had very extensive ties to the police." He looked down the hall. "In fact, here comes one now--name's Joe Cardona. Inspector. One of The Shadow's best badge-wearing agents ever."
Peter noticed. "He's looking right at us."
"Right at me," Stephen acknowledged.
"Does he know Lamont Cranston?"
"Undoubtedly. Commissioner Barth is Lamont Cranston's uncle, remember?"
"Yeah, and with the way he's looking at you, that family resemblance thing between you and your grandfather is going to get at least one of you in trouble."
Stephen smiled. "No, it won't."
Cardona approached the pair cautiously. The taller of the two looked disturbingly familiar, in a way he couldn't place...
"No, he doesn't," Stephen's telepathic voice commanded Cardona's curiosity. "They're just agents. And they need your help."
Cardona froze in place for a moment, then shook his head to clear it and wondered what in the world he'd been thinking. There were over five million people in this city, and every person he ran into looked at least a little like somebody else. He pulled himself together again and stepped over to the main desk to meet the pair. "Can I help you?"
Peter showed his ring discreetly to Inspector Cardona and whispered the code words. Stephen flashed his own ring.
Cardona discreetly showed his own ring and whispered the correct response, then led them into an interrogation room and killed the microphones. "What do you need?"
"We've got to find this cab," Stephen said. "It left the Moonlight Hotel about an hour ago." He handed the detective a slip of paper with the cab's city permit number written on it. "Last seen at the Claymore Labs down on the East River within the last half-hour. We need it now."
"Claymore Labs?"
"Big tin baseball down by the warehouse district," Peter added.
"That's a laboratory? Wow. Never knew what that thing really was." Cardona slipped the number into his pocket. "I'll look this permit number up and have Dispatch put out an APB. I can't allow you guys to go back there, so cool your heels out front and I'll be back in a few minutes."
"Thanks." Stephen led the way out to the lobby...and then stopped dead in his tracks.
"What?" Peter asked.
Stephen just stared straight ahead at the platinum blonde bombshell who was pleading with the desk sergeant for assistance.
"Look, I just have to see him!" Margo Lane said in her best helpless dame voice. "Can't you send someone around? Check for...I don't know...safety violations or something?"
Peter stared as well. "Is that...?"
Stephen nodded.
Peter could barely contain his glee. "And you thought this wasn't like Marty McFly meets his parents."
Stephen flashed a backhanded slap toward Peter, which the arachno-human dodged easily.
"I'm sorry, ma'am," the desk sergeant said in a slightly annoyed tone, "but we can't do that without authorization from the Commissioner, and he isn't in now. There's nothing I can do."
"Well, then, get the Commissioner out here," Margo continued in an equally annoyed tone.
The desk sergeant's sigh was almost as loud as a freight train. "Like I said, ma'am, he's not here."
"Where is he?" snapped Margo, leaning in closer to put some of her best assets on display.
Peter noticed. "I can tell what he saw in her."
Stephen once more tried to backhand Peter and missed, all the while never taking his eyes off his grandmother. Pictures definitely did not do this woman justice. "The only thing he's seen in her at this point is that she's a receptive telepath. So he shut down on her real fast. For now, anyway."
Finally fed up with the answers she was getting, Margo turned on her heel and stormed out.
Peter's eyes nearly popped out of his head and he let out a low "ah-h" sound. "Wow. That dress looks even better from the back."
This time, Stephen fired a telekinetic slap at his partner. "Hey! That's my grandmother!"
Peter barely flinched. "Yeah, but not my grandmother."
Stephen rolled his eyes and debated whether he was going to tell MJ about this bit of ogling when they finally got back to their own time, then suddenly thought through his grandfather's narrative about this case...about how things got out of control after a distraught Margo Lane barged in on him during dinner with his uncle at the Cobalt Club...but she was about to leave without gaining a crucial piece of information she would need to accomplish that task...
He weighed the consequences for another split second, then started to follow her.
Peter grabbed his shoulder. "Where do you think you're going?"
"To make sure history takes the proper course." He shrugged his arm free and hurried outside.
At the bottom of the precinct steps, Margo fished a cigarette out of her purse and attached it to a long lacquer stem, sighing exasperatedly as she tried to figure out where to go from here. She started to strike a match...
...only to have one flick to life directly in front of her. She looked up.
A vaguely familiar-looking young man was standing before her, holding a wooden match extended toward her cigarette.
She accepted the light, then regarded him coolly. "Thank you."
Stephen nodded an acknowledgement.
She studied him for a moment longer. "You look familiar," she said finally.
"I was standing in the lobby just a minute ago," Stephen covered.
Margo shrugged. That had to be it. "Do you always offer lights to women you meet in lobbies?"
"Only the ones who look like they need them."
Clever boy, Margo mentally noted. Cute, too. But way too young. "I didn't get your name."
A mysterious smile played across his expression. "I didn't give it."
Margo nodded an unspoken touche and smiled flirtatiously
Stephen decided to get down to business before his grandmother got down to business of her own. "You were looking for Commissioner Barth."
That brought her back to reality. "Yes, I was."
"I happened to overhear him telling one of the detectives that he was having dinner with his nephew at the Cobalt Club."
She smiled again, this time a smile of genuine gratitude for his assistance. "Thank you."
"You're welcome."
She gave him one last smile and wink, then headed across the street to her parked car.
Stephen just watched her go. Unlike his romanticism of his grandfather's history, Stephen had never thought much about Margo Lane, about her role as the matriarch of The Shadow's lineage. And he was surprised to find how ashamed he felt about that. He would definitely have to pay closer attention to the family photo album and The Shadow's journal when he got home.
"Does she know Lamont Cranston is Commissioner Barth's nephew?"
Stephen nearly jumped out of his skin before he realized it was Peter asking the question. He turned to face his friend. "Not yet."
Peter tried to keep the teasing smile off his face. "Then you do realize that you just set your grandparents up on their second date."
Stephen nodded and tilted his head back, shutting his eyes against the madness. "If I get through this without completely losing my mind, it will be a miracle of Biblical proportions."
"You don't suppose this was why we needed to be here?"
"Not any more than you believe that you had to come here to give your uncle the 'great power, great responsibility' bon mot."
"O.K., if that's not the reason, then things are about to get a lot more interesting. Cardona got the license plate of our cab. A beat cop spotted it stopped briefly near the corner of Second and Houston before it pulled away and headed uptown."
Stephen felt his eyes nearly pop out of his skull. "You've got to be kidding."
"Nope. I asked Cardona to verify the location. He disappeared for a minute, then came back and said the cop was absolutely certain...because he, too, thought it was weird that a cab would be stopped so long at an empty street corner."
"Dammit."
"They could be going there because it's where we all dropped in to this era two days ago."
Stephen gave his partner an oh, come on look. "You don't believe that any more than I do."
"No, but I really need to play Devil's advocate for once, because if they're going there for another reason, we are all in big trouble."
"No kidding." And then it hit him. "But my grandfather's about to be in bigger trouble."
"From what?"
"Take me to the top of the Empire State Building and I'll fill you in on the way."