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giving his apartment address. His mind was in too much of a turmoil for him to notice two well dressed men slide into a Ford Thunderbird and follow his taxi.
    The driver of the Thunderbird was around twenty-six years of age. His name was Chet Keegan. He had a baby faced handsomeness, blond, longish hair, a small thin mouth and close set green eyes. His companion was some fifteen years older, a hatchet faced man with a glass eye and a white scar running down the side of his left cheek. His name was Lu Silk. These two men were vicious and dangerous thugs: professional killers who would tackle any job, any kind of danger, any kind of killing if the money was right. They were soulless robots who obeyed Lindsey’s commands, not thinking, not questioning, knowing from long experience that Lindsey’s scale of pay easily topped any other offer they might receive.
    Unaware that he was being followed, Craig relaxed back in the taxi and looked at the photographs he had taken from the envelope. He shuddered. Even if he had had the guts to kill himself, he knew that the hurt and the horror these photographs would have caused the people they could have been sent to were too appalling to contemplate. Well, he now had them back. He trusted Lindsey. A bargain was a bargain, Lindsey had said. Never again! Craig avowed to himself. Never again would he pick up a stranger. He had no need to. He had plenty of friends whom he could trust. That had been a moment of utter madness, and how he had paid for it!
    The actual photographing of the formula had presented no difficulties nor incurred any risk. By now, Mervin Warren had complete trust in Craig, and left him to lock the Top Security safe and to clear up, often leaving him alone in the building. It was a mere matter of a few minutes to take the ten photographs and return the formula to the safe. But Craig’s conscience nagged at him. He kept assuring himself that the code was unbreakable. Yet why had this man blackmailed him to get these photographs? Was it possible that there was a means of breaking the code? Craig felt cold sweat on his face. He knew the vital importance of the formula. He knew every American code expert had tried in vain during the past two years to break it. He knew if the code could be broken and the metal produced, it would mean the biggest and quickest breakthrough in rocket development that could be imagined. But if the Russians broke the code . . . !
    He wiped his face with his handkerchief. Such thinking was ridiculous, he told himself. No one could break the code . . . that was for sure!
    The taxi pulled up outside his apartment block and he paid off the driver. He didn’t notice the black Thunderbird as it drew up some distance away, nor did he notice the two well dressed men as they got out of the car.
    He rode up in the elevator to the fifth floor, unlocked his front door, entered and shut the door. He took off his coat, then moving through his well furnished sitting-cum-dining-room, he went into the kitchen where he found an empty biscuit tin. His one thought now was to burn the photographs and the negatives. As he carried the tin into the sitting-room he told himself he would have to be careful . . . one photograph at a time. He mustn’t make too much smoke.
    As he put the tin down on the table, the front door-bell rang.
    He stiffened, his eyes alarmed. For a moment he hesitated, then rushed the tin back into the kitchen. Returning to the sitting-room, he pushed the bulky envelope of photographs under a chair cushion.
    The bell rang again. He went reluctantly to the door and opened it.
    Lu Silk put the barrel of his Mauser with its cone shaped silencer against Craig’s chest and rode him back into the lobby.
    “No fuss,” Silk said softly. “This rod makes no noise. It could blow your chest apart.”
    Craig stared into the bleak, scarred face and into the black single eye. The glass eye looked more human than the live one. He felt sudden terror; a