The Mystery of the Black Rhino Page 8

  They quickened their pace up the stairs. When they reached the second landing, they heard Jackson above them—so they headed up to the third floor.

  Frank had noticed that the Hotel Zebra had four stories. Jackson stopped on the third floor and headed down the dimly lit hallway.

  “This is definitely not a four-star hotel,” Joe whispered.

  “You got that right,” Frank agreed.

  Just as they were passing a door, it opened, and a man came out. He was draped in a towel, and he was heading down the hallway.

  “A communal bathroom,” Joe observed. He suddenly had an idea.

  Up ahead Jackson was unlocking a door. After struggling with the lock for several seconds, the door finally opened and Jackson went inside.

  “Quick!” Frank said. “Let’s find out the number.”

  They hurried along the corridor until they reached the room Jackson had entered.

  “Room Thirty-seven,” Frank said. “That’s the information we’ll give the police. Come on.”

  “We may be able to give the police some other information, Frank, if we just wait long enough,” Joe said. He motioned toward the far end of the corridor, which was even dimmer than where they were standing. “Let’s wait for a few minutes.”

  “Why, Joe?” Frank asked. “We have what we came for.”

  “That communal bathroom gave me an idea,” Joe said. “If Jackson takes a bath, then we can search his room. We might be able to find the name of this man who’s coming in two days.”

  “You’re right. There may be a telephone number or something,” Frank said. “But what makes you think he’s going to take a bath?”

  Joe shrugged. “He looks like an American, and most Americans are used to washing themselves daily,” he explained.

  “Won’t he take the key to the room with him?” Frank said.

  “He had trouble opening the door, so I think he’ll take a chance,” Joe said. “I doubt if he keeps anything he considers valuable in the room, anyway.”

  After an hour of waiting Joe was about to concede that he had been wrong. But just then Jackson’s door opened, and he exited, wearing only a towel. He headed down the hall toward the communal bathroom. And he hadn’t locked the door!

  Once Jackson was inside, Joe said, “Let’s do it!”

  Frank and Joe hurried down the hall and quickly went inside Jackson’s room.

  It was as seedy as the rest of the hotel. There was a small chest against one wall, with a couple of the drawers pulled out halfway. A suitcase was lying open at the foot of the chest. The boys couldn’t tell if Jackson had been packing or unpacking. There was an unmade double bed on the far side of the room. The open window just above it was letting in plenty of noise from the street below. Outside the window, the Hardy boys could see the frame of a rickety old metal fire escape.

  “That’s comforting,” Joe said with a hint of sarcasm in his voice. “This place is a real firetrap!”

  “Let’s start looking,” Frank said. “Jackson doesn’t strike me as the kind who spends much time soaking.”

  Frank started with the suitcase.

  “I’ll search his wallet,” Joe said.

  He picked up Jackson’s wallet off the top of the chest, flipped it open, and looked in the bill section. When he found nothing except some American and Kenyan currency, he looked through the other pockets. Just as he was about to put it back on the chest, he stopped. “Hey, Frank! Take a look,” he said. “There’s something weird here.”

  Frank stopped his search of Jackson’s suitcase and looked at what Joe was pointing to.

  “It’s his driver’s license,” Frank said. “He’s just as ugly as his picture.”

  “Look at the name,” Joe said.

  Frank looked closely at the tiny print. “Harry Andrews,” he read. The address was in Long Island City. Frank looked up at Joe. “I thought Mr. Watson said his name was Jackson.”

  “He did,” Joe said.

  “Well, maybe that’s what Andrews told him,” Frank said. “He probably has plenty of aliases.”

  “That’s probably it,” Joe agreed.

  Just then, they heard voices out in the hall. One of them belonged to the man they had been calling Jackson. At that moment, the door to the room began to open.

  There was no time to make it out the window.

  “Quick!” Frank whispered. “Under the bed!”

  The Hardys dove under the bed just as Andrews entered the room.

  He spent several minutes cursing whoever it was had stopped him in the hall for money. Clearly, there was no way that he was going to give away any of his hard-earned cash.

  The Hardy boys were finding it hard to keep from sneezing because of the thick dust on the floor, but Joe’s sniffling was overpowered by the angry words from Andrews.

  “I hope he’s planning to go out for the evening,” Frank whispered. “I don’t think I can stay down here much longer.”

  Andrews yawned, muttered something unintelligible, turned out the light, and headed toward the bed.

  “Uh-oh!” Joe whispered to Frank.

  They weren’t prepared for how low the bed sank when Andrews fell onto it.

  Frank and Joe both let out small groans.

  Andrews jumped up. “What the . . .” He tripped over the suitcase and crashed to the floor. This was followed by a string of curse words in several languages.

  Frank and Joe jumped out from under the bed. They had to get out of the room, but Andrews was between them and the door—and they could just make out his outline as he began to lift himself off the floor.

  “The fire escape!” Frank whispered. “It’s the only way out!”

  At that moment Andrews lunged across the bed. He barely missed them as Frank and Joe tumbled out the window onto the landing of the metal fire escape.

  The Hardy boys started down the escape, but part of the frame had detached itself from the side of the building. They had to hold on tightly to the rail as they ran down the steps to the next landing.

  Andrews was obviously used to getting dressed in a hurry, because by the time the Hardy boys had reached the bottom of the fire escape, Andrews, fully clothed, was already on his way down.

  Frank and Joe jumped down from the escape and landed in the alley together. They immediately headed toward Munyu Road.

  The crowds were thicker along the street now. The clubs were really lively.

  “Let’s head for River Road,” Frank said. “Maybe well luck out and find either a bus or a taxi that’ll take us back to the city center.”

  The Hardy boys didn’t want to run, because they were sure it would attract attention and probably give the street crowds the impression that they were up to trouble. But one look over their shoulders let them know that Andrews had reached the end of the alley, and was running up the street after them. They had to hurry.

  Frank and Joe began walking as fast as they could, weaving in and out of the crowds of people on the sidewalk. Finally they reached River Road.

  Frank ran up to a man standing on the corner. “Is there a bus or a taxi we could take back to the New Stanley Hotel?”

  The man laughed. “No bus. No taxi,” he said.

  Joe glanced around and looked back down Munyu Road. Harry Andrews was closing in.

  12 Under Surveillance

  * * *

  Right up River Road, about a half block away, a taxi pulled up to the curb in front of a busy nightclub. Two young couples got out. One of the men handed the driver what looked like a lot of money. “Be back in two hours,” he said. He spoke loudly, with an English accent. “And I’ll double that.”

  “Yes, sir!” the driver said.

  “Taxi! Taxi!” Joe shouted. “Wait!”

  He and Frank tore up the crowded sidewalk as fast as they could. The two couples stared at them in shock.

  “We need to get to the New Stanley Hotel as quickly as possible!” Frank shouted to the driver.

  Behind them, Harry Andr
ews had turned the corner and was racing toward them.

  “Well, get in,” the driver said. “That’ll be something for me to do while I wait to pick up these rich people!”

  The Hardy boys jumped into the taxi. It pulled out into traffic just before Harry Andrews reached them.

  “Man, that was close,” Joe whispered.

  They looked out the rear window to see Andrews scowling at them.

  “Do you think he recognized us?” Joe said.

  “If he shows up at the hotel tonight, then I guess he did,” Frank replied.

  “And if he doesn’t show up?” Joe said.

  “Well, in that case, he’ll probably let the man who’s coming in two days ‘take care of us,’ ” Frank said.

  Joe shivered. “I don’t really like either choice,” he said.

  “Me, either,” Frank agreed.

  “We need to let the police . . . ,” Joe started to say It suddenly occurred to them both that by now the police stationed in the hotel knew they weren’t on the fifth floor swimming.

  “We’re going to have a lot of explaining to do,” Joe finished.

  When they reached the hotel, Joe had just enough money to pay the taxi driver the fare and give him a meager tip.

  The Hardy boys had barely entered the lobby when they were met by Mr. Hardy and Dr. Malindi.

  “Are you boys hungry?” Mr. Hardy asked them.

  Dr. Malindi gave him a surprised look. This was obviously not the question he would have asked his sons if they had been missing for several hours after having given a large percentage of the Nairobi police department the slip.

  Frank and Joe nodded.

  “How did you guess?” Joe asked.

  “Good. I have a reservation for a table for four in the Tate Room,” Mr. Hardy said, naming the New Stanleys main restaurant. “We can eat, and then you can fill Dr. Malindi and me in on what’s been happening to you since you left the hotel.” Mr. Hardy winked at his sons.

  Most of the restaurant’s guests had already ordered and were in the midst of enjoying dinner, so it didn’t take the Hardys and Dr. Malindi long to be served.

  Frank and Joe told Fenton Hardy and Dr. Malindi everything that had happened to them, from the information about the man who was coming from the United States in two days to kill both the black rhino and the Hardy boys, to the race with Harry Andrews down River Road.

  By dessert Dr. Malindi was convinced that the boys knew what they were doing.

  “Harry Andrews lives in Long Island City, New York. That’s what his driver’s license says,” Joe said. “He must have given Mr. Watson a fake name, because Mr. Watson called him Jackson.”

  “That could be one of his aliases,” Dr. Malindi suggested.

  “That’s what we thought, too,” Frank said.

  Dr. Malindi had written everything down. Now he picked up his cell phone and dialed a number. He gave the information to the person on the other end of the line.

  “Are the police going to pick up Andrews tonight?” Joe asked.

  Dr. Malindi shook his head. “We can wait two more days for him, if it means we might get all of these culprits. We certainly don’t want to take a chance on tipping off the mastermind behind all of this,” he said. “I’ve sent some men to the River Road area to keep an eye on Harry Andrews. They won’t lose him.”

  As they left the restaurant, Dr. Malindi told the boys that he had arranged for them to take guided tours of several of the important museums, art galleries, and other points of interest in Nairobi.

  Frank and Joe accepted this gesture, even though they knew that the invitation had been offered so that the Kenyan authorities could keep an eye on them.

  “We’ll probably get enough information for a dozen term papers,” Frank said, “so this won’t be too bad.”

  Joe didn’t even want to think about school.

  • • •

  As it turned out, the next day was one of the high-lights of the trip.

  The Railway Museum particularly interested Joe. Outside there was a collection of old locomotives and carriages, most of them built in England. Some of the moving stock had been used in the filming of movies set in Nairobi.

  Frank thought the National Museum was the best. He stayed for a long time in the Prehistory Gallery, where there were reproductions of Tanzanian rock paintings and casts of wide-splayed, human-looking footprints—a small pair following a larger pair, which were discovered at Laetoli, in Tanzania. A guide told them that the footprints almost certainly belonged to Homo erectus, who many people thought were the direct ancestors of modern human beings.

  The Hardy boys were surprised when Dr. Malindi called them early on the morning of the second day of touring to ask them if they would like to accompany him to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport to meet the arriving flights with Americans on the passenger manifest. His plan, he explained, was to look for anyone suspicious.

  Frank and Joe quickly agreed.

  Once they were at the airport, they went immediately to the international arrivals area. A uniformed man handed Dr. Malindi a stack of papers.

  “These are the flight manifests,” Dr. Malindi told them. “Today there are fifteen Americans arriving in Kenya. Thank goodness it’s a slow day.”

  “Where are they coming from?” Joe asked.

  “Well, lets see,” Dr. Malindi began. “There are five arriving on a Kenya International Airways flight from New York. There are two arriving on Air France from Paris, three arriving on British Airways from London, one arriving on Olympic from Athens, one arriving on EgyptAir from Cairo, and three arriving on El Al from Tel Aviv.”

  “How many of these passengers are men?” Frank asked.

  “Twelve,” Dr. Malindi said.

  “I think the Kenya International Airways flight is our best bet,” Joe said. “Why would he want to go through Europe?”

  “Well, for one thing, the flight from New York is very long, and some people just don’t like to fly that many hours at once,” Frank said. “Flying through Europe breaks up the flight, and it usually costs about the same amount of money as a direct flight.”

  Dr. Malindi nodded.

  “We’re going to have people meeting all of the flights, looking for men who fit a certain profile,” Dr. Malindi said, “but I think you and I should stay by the flights arriving from New York and London. I have a gut feeling that our man will be on one of those.”

  Unfortunately, at the end of the day, no one who disembarked even remotely fit the profile the Nairobi police were working from.

  Six of the men were businessmen who were met by Kenyan representatives of their companies. Five of the men were college students from Texas Tech University. They were on their way to a biological research project in southern Kenya.

  The remaining man introduced himself to the Hardys and Dr. Malindi as a retired professor of African languages. Dr. G. Cranston Douglas had come to Kenya to write a linguistics paper comparing the names of certain types of fish in the coastal Bantu languages of Swahili, Mijikenda, Segeju, Pokomo, Taita, and Taveta. He looked like a character out of an old Tarzan movie. He was wearing a safari jacket and had a sweat-stained pith helmet on his head. He needed a cane to help him walk. The head of the cane was the carved face of a baboon.

  Dr. Douglas made his way to the stop for the shuttle to the New Stanley Hotel, only to find that the bus had broken down. Dr. Malindi offered to drop him off at the hotel when he dropped off the Hardy boys. The professor readily accepted.

  Although Frank and Joe couldn’t be sure, it seemed to them that some of the authorities were less than friendly as their group made its way through the airport to Dr. Malindi’s car. Even Dr. Malindi didn’t have much to say on the drive back into Nairobi, although the boys thought that might have something to do with their guest, Dr. Douglas.

  When they arrived at the hotel, Frank pulled Dr. Douglas’s luggage out of Dr. Malindi’s car and gave it to a porter. Dr. Douglas thanked them for the ride and went in
to the hotel to register.

  Just as the Hardy boys started toward the hotel’s entrance, Dr. Malindi stopped them. “I don’t know what to think, boys. I really don’t,” he said. “We’ll keep watching Mr. Andrews for a few more days, to see if anything happens—but I’m starting to wonder if your information wasn’t right. You’ll only be here for a few more days. Perhaps you’d better just forget about the detective work for a while and enjoy the sights of Kenya?”

  He gave them a smile and drove away.

  The Hardy boys looked at each other.

  “You know what?” Joe said. “I think we’ve just been told to mind our own business—in a very diplomatic way.”

  “No kidding,” Frank agreed.

  “There’s no way I can give up now, though,” Joe said.

  “I’m with you,” Frank said. “We’re not going to let anyone kill a black rhino—or anything else!”

  13 Fire!

  * * *

  When the Hardy boys got to their room, they found a note from their father. He wrote that he had been invited to spend a couple of days at Mfangano Island Camp in Lake Victoria with some of the other conference participants.

  “Dad has all the luck. We actually just learned about Lake Victoria in geography a couple of weeks ago,” Frank said. “I’d love to go there.”

  He told Joe what he remembered from class. Lake Victoria was the second largest fresh water lake in the world. Little was known about it outside of Africa until the nineteenth century, when European explorers declared it as the source of the Nile. Three countries border the lake—Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.

  Joe was reading through a guide book that had been on their fathers bedside table. “It looks like the only way to get to the island is to take a single-engine plane from Masai Mara, fly over the escarpment to Mfangano Island, and then take one of the camps motorboats around the island to the bay that shelters Mfangano Island Camp.” Joe closed the book and put it back on the table. “Sounds cool.”

  Frank yawned. “What do you want to do? It’s too early to go to bed.”

  Joe yawned, too. “You know, I’d kind of like to see a movie. An American one,” Joe said. “I can’t believe it, but I’m feeling sort of homesick. If we were in Bayport right now, we could go to one of the multiplex theaters.”