Puzzled and impatient, Don Winslow paced up and down the large, luxuriously furnished room. He liked to plan his moves in advance. Instead, ever since he had met Lotus in the dining room of the Empire, he had been facing one unexpected situation after another, in bewildering succession.

Whether Suzette, the French Secret Service operative, had any definite plans he could not tell. As for Lotus, he wanted another talk with her out of range from any concealed dictaphone.

A soft click of a latch behind caused him to whirl. There stood the girl herself, laughing, her back against the innocent-looking panel through which she must have entered.

“Excuse me, please!” she cried, coming swiftly toward him. “But your expression was so funny—as if I had stuck a pin into you. These hidden panels and underground corridors make you nervous, don’t they, Commander?”

At Don’s warning, “Sh-h-h!” Lotus shook her head.

“It’s all right, if we speak very low,” she reassured him. “I disconnected the dictaphone at the other end. Besides, there’s no one trying to listen now. Cho-San has other fish to fry just at this moment.”

“What’s that?” Don asked quickly. “A moment before you came in a buzzer sounded and he acted as if it were a fire alarm!”

“It was a sort of alarm,” the girl replied, seating herself in one of the deep arm chairs. “Dr. Skell got a telephone message from the garage. It seems that two of our city agents caught someone snooping about the place, and wanted to know what to do with him. Not that it matters much, but Cho-San will probably want to look him over.”

It mattered a great deal to Red Pennington, however, that he had let himself be caught by such a simple trick. As he sat now in the back of a strange car, under the muzzle of a thug’s pistol he understood only too well what had happened.

His captors, doubtless in the employ of Scorpia, had simply threatened or bribed his own taxi driver to clear out. The two cars looked much alike in the dark, and Red had been too unsuspecting to notice the difference, until a gun poked him in the face. As he sat there fuming at his own stupidity, the second plug-ugly came back from across the street.

“I phoned de house an’ asked wot ta do wid him,” the fellow reported. “De guy I talked to said ta leave him in de garage tied up, and turn off de lights.” “Okay!” grunted the second mobster. “I guess the big shots wanna give him the once-over. If he’s one of them Navy Intelligence ducks they’ll prob’ly bump him off, or burn him in their Chinese torture room. Anyhow, it ain’t none of our business.... Come on, you punk! Git out an’ put your hands behind you!”

The last words were addressed to Red, and emphasized by a wicked jab of the pistol barrel that raised a welt along the young officer’s jaw. Pretending to be frightened speechless. Red obeyed, but his brain was working at top speed to figure out a break.

At the first touch of the gangster’s rope, Red’s crossed wrists flew apart. Sweeping up, his hands caught his enemy by the head. With a powerful forward heave he hurled the thug’s body over his shoulder, then whirled to grapple the second man.

A pistol barked, its bullet grazing Red’s arm. The next instant he had wrenched the weapon away by a swift jiu-jitsu trick, sending its owner reeling with a right hook.

“Now we’ll see who’s runnin’ this party!” he growled. “Hands up or I’ll—”

WHAP!

A blackjack wielded by the first mobster slapped Red’s unprotected head. The bulky officer collapsed without a groan.

“Tha fat spy! I hope ya killed him!” rasped the man whose jaw Red had cracked. “He made my teeth ache right down to my heels!”

“Shut up and grab hold of his legs, Gimpy!” the other retorted. “If I did kill him, we got an alibi. He was threatenin’ us with your gun! Anyway, we’ll shove him in the garage and let the big shots worry about wakin’ him up.”

To carry Red’s limp body across to the warehouse and through a small door at one side was a short job. A second telephone call completed the business. Immediately the pair of mobsters drove away, the bigger one still groaning about his sore jaw.

Meanwhile, in the living room of the comrades’ quarters, Don Winslow was getting the real story of the beautiful Scorpion spy, Lotus. The girl had thrown away all pretense. She said she hated Scorpia and its evil plots to stir up war among the nations.

As for her own part in it, ever since she had been old enough to know right from wrong, her girlish instincts had rebelled against a life of spying and deceit. Yet her fear of Cho-San, and especially of that mysterious personage who called himself the Scorpion, had forced her to obey their orders. Even if she had dared to break with their dreaded organization, she had nowhere to go, no one to protect her from the vengeance of Scorpia.

At least, Lotus intimated, that was the situation until she had met Count Borg. AndrÉ was not the criminal type she had known. He never spoke of his past life, even after she came to know him well, but he had evidently been a man of honor and high culture until joining the ranks of Scorpia.

The lonely girl had fallen desperately in love with him, though he had never acted as anything more than a kind friend to her. Whenever she whispered to him her longing to be free from Scorpia, AndrÉ would show only a passing interest. Once he had half promised to take her away from Cho-San’s jealous guardianship, but it never came to anything.

“And now that AndrÉ is no longer one of Scorpia, he has forgotten me!” Lotus finished tearfully. “Now I will never be free, for there is no one who will help me!”

“Nonsense,” exclaimed Don gruffly, trying to hide the feelings her story had roused in him. “Listen, Miss Lotus! You have a lot more real friends than you ever had before. I’m one of them, and I know of another right here in this underground stronghold of Scorpia. When you get clear, there’ll be others—Uncle Sam’s trusted officers and agents, men and women—who’ll stand ready to protect you until we’ve wiped the Scorpion and Cho-San off the slate. You’ll pick up your friendship with Count Borg on better terms than before. He’ll be needing you this time, Miss Lotus—needing someone who really cares!”

“Don Winslow,” answered the girl solemnly, “you’ve given me a hope to live for. That’s something so priceless, something so far beyond any thanks, that I won’t try to say more. Except that you’re going to stop calling me Miss. Promise me that, Commander!”

“Plain Don, to you!” amended the young officer, gripping the strong little hand she offered him. “All right, Lotus; we’re shipmates from now on. In the name of the United States Navy, I welcome you to the ranks of peace. But remember this, always:—The things worth living for are also the things worth dying for! You and I and Suzette—yes, she’s a shipmate, too!—may have to give our lives this very night for the cause of world peace!”

The young girl’s smile was as fearless as the light that shone in her dark eyes.

“I am ready, Don Winslow!” she said calmly. “You can count on me to help or to suffer, as the need may be. Even the tortures of Cho-San’s Lantern Room could not terrify me now. Am I glad that Suzette....”

As if in answer to her spoken name, the little French maid appeared from behind the carved Chinese screen. Impulsively she seized her mistress’ hands and squeezed them.

“Suzette is glad also, Mademoiselle!” she exclaimed earnestly. “But, hÉlas! There is no time to speak of that. I have bad news for Commander Winslow!”