Before “X’s” eyes a strange and amazing transformation came in that thick, tarlike paste. It turned white, although the mercury lamps gave it a purplish tinge. From a glutinous, semifluid material it changed to glistening, powdery crystals.
At last, “X” had the secret. The Big Boss made his synthetic dope by breaking down the molecular composition of some substance, probably a coal-tar derivative that cost no more than crude oil.
The horror of it stabbed through the Agent like an electric shock. Every coating of brown paste was soon changed into white crystals that meant misery, tragedy, death for scores. One coating yielded enough of the poisonous drug to enslave a hundred people. The terrifying sight made “X” clammy with dread.
The Agent had invaded the arsenals of crime kings, stored with bombs of destroying gases. He had been in the laboratories of madmen, where bacteria that wrought loathsome and fatal diseases were sealed in tubes ready to be spread over a defenseless land. But none of those frightful devices quite equaled the deviltry, the fiendishness of the Big Boss. He sent unsuspecting people into a life of the damned, made monsters, abhorrent and inhuman, out of creatures who once were men.
Below the Agent, those human gargoyles, those pitiful, cadaverous slaves, hideous from the ravages of dope, leprous under the rays of the mercury lamps, moved like rusted old machines. Guards stood over them, threatening with automatics and cracking blacksnakes across the thin, bent backs of the shuffling dope addicts.
Suddenly “X” swung around. He was not frightened, but the flesh felt cold along his spine. A sense of acute personal danger had broken through his concentration. His eyes burned with anger as he stared into the cold black bore of a revolver. The brutal, repulsive man behind it had stepped through a panel that had opened in the wall. Murder glittered in his piggish little eyes.
Chapter XVIII
A SHOT IN THE DARK
THE killer advanced with his gun aimed at the Agent’s heart. “Get those mitts in the air and talk quick!” he rasped. “Who sent you in here?”
“X’s” mind raced. He was no farther from death than the pressure of a trigger finger. There was no chance of getting his gas gun. A step toward the guard, and a bullet would rip into his heart. The antechamber was dark, but a purple glow from the mercury lamps shone on the guard’s ugly face. The Agent smiled. His manner became apologetic. He started to raise his hands slowly.
“Why, I—er—don’t understand, sir,” he said in a meek voice. “I’m Dudley Smythe of the New England Welfare League. I’m in town for the United Brotherhood Conference that opens tomorrow. I happened to be passing by, and I saw Brother Howe come in the servant’s entrance. I hailed him, but my good friend did not hear. Not realizing that I might be trespassing, I followed him. I’m sorry, so sorry, if—”
A vaporizing liquid that turned to tear gas suddenly sprayed over the guard’s vicious face. He shrank back, pawing at his smarting, blinded eyes. He uttered an agonized howl that “X” cut short with a savage uppercut that lifted the man off his feet and dropped him in a heap, senseless.
The Agent’s talk had thrown the killer off guard, had distracted him, while “X’s” hands were slowly moving upwards. But the left hand had stopped at the breast pocket, had clutched at the fountain pen secured there. The pressure of a tiny button had opened a catch that released the tear-gas.
“X” stepped back until the gas dispelled and lost its potency. Then he pressed back into the shadows, and drew his gas gun.
“Help! Quick! He’ll kill me!” the Agent cried, imitating the voice of the unconscious guard.
The man’s three associates came running at once. And, as they got within range, “X” pressed the trigger of his gas gun and held it down. There was a moment of choking, gasping confusion, and then the gas took complete effect. The first man staggered, tried to retreat, and collided with his companions. The three dropped like sacks of grain.
The Agent went into the room where the drug fiends were working at the glass-topped tables. Against the wall stood boxes containing packets and bottles of dope. The piles extended to the ceiling, enough of the refined product to enslave the entire metropolis.
The wretched creatures under the lamps performed their tasks with slow, mechanical movements, as though they were under an hypnotic spell. They were repulsive, horrible automatons, with all the spirit lashed out of them, beings who lived solely for the dope that was doled out to them in niggardly quantities.
The Agent beckoned to one of the dopies, who shuffled toward him listlessly. The worker’s eyes were two feverish spots burning in a fleshless face. The skin had the slate-gray tinge of death. He sniffed constantly. The man was dying on his feet.
“Where is the elevator that your master uses?” the Agent demanded. His voice was harsh. This was no time for gentleness.
The hophead shrank back in fear. “No! No!” he cried. “I can’t tell. They’ll deprive me of my drug allowance for a week. A week! Do you understand? A week of torture!”
The man was probably not more than thirty, but he had the decreptitude of age, the feeble, piping voice of one in the last stages of senility.
“You won’t be deprived of your dope,” said the Agent sternly, “but you will get the green death if you don’t tell me. The green death, understand! Where is that elevator?”
The hophead all but collapsed from fear. A spasm of shivering, a nervous convulsion, made it impossible for him to speak for a while.
“The green death!” the man gasped, his eyes bulging with horror. “No! Anything—anything but the green death! I’ll tell! I’ll tell!”
The trembling, terror-stricken man motioned “X” to follow, and reeled into another room. There the Agent found an automatic, self-operating elevator such as is installed in most modern apartment houses. But the entrance to this one was hidden behind a high, green-metal storage cabinet, which the dopie slid back on rollers. The Agent might have wasted precious minutes in hunting for it.
“Are you sure this is the elevator the Big Boss uses?” demanded “X.” “If you’re tricking me, you’ll get the green death!”
The drug addict recoiled in fright. “I’m telling the truth!” He cried in his shrill, feeble voice. “I have seen the green death! I’d do anything to save myself from it.”
THE Agent eyed him narrowly. “How much of this drug are you manufacturing a day here?”
“More than a hundred and thirty pounds,” was the ready answer, “and what do we get? We who make it! One hundred and thirty pounds, and we get five grains a day! Five grains! Yet each of us makes more than thirty-five grains a day, yet our daily dole is five grains.”
The drug addict broke into tears, and his wizened frame, hardly more than a skeleton, retched with great sobs. The Agent looked at him a moment, and then he led the wretched man into the laboratory. He addressed the other slaves.
“You are free men now!” he announced. “The guards are unconscious. They’ll be that way for an hour, but you’ll never be molested again. Take all the drugs you want. You’ll not be harmed. Quiet your shattered nerves! End your torture! Help yourselves, men!”
They stared at him in bewilderment. Then one of them uttered an exultant howl like the savage cry of an animal and dived for the drugs. The laboratory changed into a madhouse, with each dopie scrambling to get his hands on a precious packet. The man at “X’s” side wrung his hand, gave him a look that expressed deep gratitude, and then plunged into the mass of frenzied hopheads.
The Agent had had a purpose in turning the dopies loose on the narcotics. It wasn’t based purely on sympathy for them and their shattered nerves. It was to keep them quiet, out of the way, while he pursued his grim investigation.
He entered the elevator that he had been shown. He closed the cage and pressed the button that started the car upwards. It seemed that the elevator would never reach the top. “X” half expected it to stop, expected it to be converted into an execution chamber.
He searched for tu
bes or jets that might flood the car with lethal gas. He found none. Naturally, a master criminal like the Big Boss would conceal his means of destruction. Suddenly the car clicked to a stop. The Agent found himself staring at a concrete wall. Frantically he swung around. His body relaxed in relief. There was a door. His heart thumped. He listened. All he heard was the steady ticking of a clock.
He pushed the door open a little. The lights were on. The Agent poised carefully. He would bob his head in and back again quickly, enabling him to get a glimpse of the room before any one could take a pot-shot at him. Opening the door a little more, he darted his head forward. The room was empty.
It was a large room of a suite, and obviously the abode of Silas Howe. The man had maintained his masquerade even here. The furnishings were expensive but severe. Black was the motif of the decorations. Despite the costliness of the teakwood furniture, the place was as cheerless as a monk’s cell.
The Agent searched quickly through the suite. If Howe were there, he was hiding. “X” rushed to the telephone. He would call one of his operatives, and have him order General Mathers’ men to raid the stronghold of the dope ring.
But the telephone was dead. Anxiously he hunted for the switch that would connect it again, but he could not find it. Possibly the wires were cut.
Again the Agent had the eerie feeling that eyes were upon him. He ran to the light switch, pressed the room into darkness. He leaped to the window of the apartment.
Far below, on the opposite side of the street, he knew Jim Hobart and Allan Grant were waiting. “X” took a small flash with a powerful lense from his pocket. It had a focusing attachment to concentrate the rays. He adjusted this, then turned it down and blinked it; two longs, a short and two longs. A second passed, and there was an answering blink from below.
Hobart, watchful as the Agent had cautioned him to be, had seen the signal. He returned it, using a special secret code that the Agent had worked out for him and taught him weeks ago. “X” began giving Hobart orders. The time had arrived to smash the whole ring at once, to call in the law and strike ruthlessly, desperately.
“Get General Mathers,” he flashed to Hobart. “Twenty men at least. Raid basement! Follow radium lines!”
He sent down instructions for the headquarters in the Quinault Building to be raided, and also Karloff’s hideout in the old factory, where the Big Boss had addressed his hirelings. But he stressed the importance of striking hard at the stronghold below first of all. That was the fountain-head of the evil.
“X” heard a faint sound in the dark apartment then. Something scraped on the floor. Outlined at the window, he was a perfect target and knew it. But he had been forced to take the chance. Now uneasiness gripped him.
Madly he hurled himself aside. As he did so, powder flame lanced the darkness. There was a faint, dull pop that told of a silenced gun. A bullet screamed close to the Agent’s head, so close that it scorched the skin of his scalp. Some one cursed.
Chapter XIX
THE MASTER COUP
TENSE and alert as a crouching tiger the Agent stole along the wall. His photographic mind gave him a picture of the room. He could reach the door without crashing into the furniture. But a squeaking board might betray him. He dared not breathe. The awful uncertainty of whether his next step would be his last made him hold himself rigid.
A draft of cold air fanned the Agent’s cheek. Excitedly he felt along the wall. He reached an aperture, a panel that had not been opened before. He had no idea where it led, but he stepped through it into a small, well-like recess. His groping hands felt the cold frame of an iron ladder.
His heart pounded, and there was a sudden, bright light of triumph in his eyes. He climbed quickly, went through another opening into a pitch-dark room. Not even the tick of a clock broke the stillness here. From the street far below came the muffled roar of traffic. Little did those who passed by know the mystery, the weirdness, the peril and tragedy housed in this imposing apartment building.
“X” moved stealthily across the thick carpet, soft as lush grass under his feet. He would get to a switch, throw on the lights. With catlike caution he crept forward. Then suddenly his body tensed.
He gave a start of surprise, almost of awe, as light flooded the room. He stood all but petrified by what he saw. Under his disguise his face muscles stiffened. The fingers of his right hand clenched until they formed a fist.
For, sitting in an armchair and gazing at him with mocking, sardonic glints in his eyes was a white-haired, craggy-faced man, not Howe, but another—Whitney Blake.
The old financier smiled, but not pleasantly. There was a derisive, brutal twist to his thin-lipped mouth. The eyes of the two men clashed. In “X’s” was a questing light. Blake’s were hard, cruel, uncompromising.
The ladder to Blake’s penthouse was proof to “X” that Blake was at least in on the secrets of the dope ring and in league with Silas Howe. Yet the Agent delayed his accusation. He wanted to verify the truth of these new and startling suspicions. Back in his mind for days how had been a vague intimation, unexpressed even to himself, that Whitney Blake might have some connection with the ring. But it had seemed too fantastic to harbor even for a moment.
“I’m after Silas Howe,” said “X” quietly. “He must be here. I followed him from the apartment below.”
The old financial wolf regarded the Agent with a look of scorn and bitter, mirthless amusement. “My friend, most people in this world know too little. But you, whoever you are, are different! You know too much—far too much. Your curiosity has thrust you into a situation from which you will never escape.”
Blake’s expression changed. It seemed that all the bitterness, all the ruthless ambition of his grasping, callous soul writhed across his face. The man’s body shook with murderous rage. Agent “X” was astounded at the transformation. Gazing into the financier’s eyes was like looking into the black, slimy pit of some pool in hell where living furies lurked. The sudden change revealed the full secret, verified the Agent’s suspicions. Whitney Blake was the Big Boss, not the man who had given the harangue in Karloff’s hideout, but the guiding force of the great dope ring, the master of the pitiable drug-crazed slaves. His cover, his front, had been an even better mask than Silas Howe’s. The man had social position, a nationwide reputation in the financial world. Besides this he was old, supposedly mellowed by age, a donator to many charities, and it was believed that he had an infirmity that made him a helpless cripple.
Much that had puzzled the Agent was cleared up in a flash. He understood why de Ronfort had been murdered, and how Twyning had come to be killed in Blake’s apartment.
“You are the man who plotted to wreck the country to satisfy your ambition,” the Agent accused in a low, tense voice.
For a moment Blake remained silent, staring at the Agent fixedly. Then he parted his thin lips, showing teeth that seemed like the fangs of a wolf.
“Quite right, my good man,” he admitted with contemptuous indifference. “I intend to make the people of this city dance to the tune I fiddle. Soon the most honored and accomplished people in the country will be subservient to my slightest wish. I will be more absolute in my power than Nero or Napoleon—not by the force of arms, but by the force of drugs. And I will make money—money! Returns greater than that possible on any other investment today. Returns that will more than make up the millions I lost in the stock market crash when fools were in control!”
Inhuman greed shone in the old financier’s eyes. “X” spoke harshly.
“But you’re through, Blake!” he said. “For your work in spreading the dope blight, you could be sent to the penitentiary for the rest of your life. But there is a more serious charge against you. Murder, Blake! You might be acquitted of killing Twyning on the charge of justifiable homicide. But de Ronfort was murdered. You ordered his death yourself. And there will be witnesses to prove that you engineered the killing.”
WHITNEY BLAKE nodded slowly. “I see,” he said. “Yo
u are a surprising man. You talk as though you had intimate knowledge of my affairs.” He spoke with mock admiration. “Yes, I killed Twyning—with my cane gun, as no doubt you have already figured out. A brilliant man—Twyning! Truly a genius. It was he who discovered the secret of breaking down the molecular composition of certain coal-tar derivatives. But outside of the laboratory he was a fool, a child. He wanted to donate his formula to the government—a formula that would have given him greater power than all the military forces of the world. He wanted to give it away.
“Through Howe I had already gained control of Paragon Chemicals. Twyning opposed my plan to manufacture the drug. I had to make an addict of him. He came here to kill me, not Howe, so I disposed of him. Were you at Paula’s party? The killing rather livened things up, didn’t it?”
Whitney Blake threw back his head and laughed. There was a trace of madness in his eyes. But there was fiendish cunning also. “De Ronfort,” he continued. “Yes, I commissioned my efficient aide, Karloff, to dispose of him. A common adventurer! A cheap, sneaking smuggler—and he expected to marry my ward, Paula. It was absurd—and after I found out what he was, I—But never mind that now, my friend. You seem to think I’m an unhealthy influence in this country. What, may I ask, do you propose to do about it?”
There was open mockery on Blake’s face now. The Agent’s reply to his question was quiet.
“I have already done it,” he said. “The federal men have been called out. They are beginning a concerted attack on your organization. Probably, at the moment they are raiding your manufacturing room below. Your reign of terror is over, Blake. Your ring will be smashed!”
Once again Whitney Blake threw back his head and laughed. It was the laughter of a devil. His manner suddenly changed to mock sorrow. “It is very sad,” he said, with a shake of his head. “No doubt they are brave men. They have homes and loved ones. Such a tragedy! For you, sir, have only led them to their deaths!”
Secret Agent X : The Complete Series Volume 3 Page 46