Secret Agent X : The Complete Series Volume 3

by Emile C. Tepperman

  The afternoon dragged by. Dusk came at last, stealing across the city like some shadowy, sinister portent. Sanzoni’s men came and went; came for orders; came to tell their supposed chief about their murderous, criminal activities. “X” could not tell them to cease their raids. A few innocent citizens must still suffer—that death might not come to thousands. He must appear in all ways to be Sanzoni.

  Sitting behind his desk, he gave directions to Sanzoni’s evil horde—and waited for the call that would be a command for Sanzoni himself.

  Yet the cigar-box radio on the desk before him was silent. Hobart had not succeeded in finding Harrigan. The Agent’s campaign against appalling, ruthless crime still hung in doubt.

  He got up at last, paced the private office, looked at the lighted streets of the city. Men and women were hurrying by, unaware of the danger that threatened every instant. Others, laughing, elaborately dressed, would come here to the Montmorency Club, to dance and be gay, while doom crept close.

  Goldie La Mar stuck her head in once. Meek, blonde and perfumed, clad in a clinging green evening gown, she spoke in sugary tones.

  “Ain’t you gonna have no dinner, Gus? I had the chef fix up all the things you like. I wouldn’ta danced with Bugs last night—only he asked me to—an’ I wanted to find out what he had to say for himself.”

  AGENT “X” waved the woman away. “Don’t bother me, Goldie. I’ll eat when I’m ready.”

  He had his dinner brought into his office again. He nibbled at it, had the dishes taken away, and sat hunched over the desk, apparently in deep thought, but really listening for the insect note of the concealed radio.

  Then at ten o’clock the telephone beside him rang abruptly. The Agent was conscious of a slight trembling of his hands as he lifted the receiver. It might be one of a score of people calling the gangster chief, some underworld acquaintance of Sanzoni. But a secret hunch told him that it was not. Personal calls had been few and far between all day. The club’s acting manager, a suave-faced young mobster, took care of the routine business.

  “Gus Sanzoni, speaking,” he wheezed. And as soon as the voice sounded at the other end of the wire, the Agent’s body tensed. For the tones of the voice were flat, unemotional, and spoken in a peculiarly measured way. Agent “X,” a close student of phonetics, knew that the voice he was hearing now was disguised; knew that it was spoken by a man who did not want his identity revealed—the Terror.

  “You were not at hand to receive my second call last night,” the voice said. “Why?”

  “I—I had to leave!” the Agent wheezed. “I was taken away—by a guy who called himself Secret Agent ‘X.’”

  There was an instant’s pause at the opposite end of the wire. Then the disguised voice came again. “And this man—Secret Agent ‘X’—where is he now? What did he want of you?”

  Recalling the air battle over the bomb, “X” knew that he must not make the slightest inconsistent statement.

  “I croaked him, chief,” he said. “I had to—he wanted to chisel in on our racket. He gave me a shot of dope—knocked me out for a couple of hours. I don’t know where he went then. When I came to I was in his apartment, but before I could get on my feet again, I heard him coming back. So I laid low. He thought I was still knocked out—then I jumped him. We had a fight—and I slugged him proper. Then I came back here. He had a bomb planted in the cellar. He’s a bad guy—but he won’t bother us no more. A coffin’s the only thing he’s got any use for now.”

  The Agent’s knuckles were white on the black receiver of the phone. He was playing a bluff that brought sweat to his forehead—sweat, because he feared for the lives of those teeming thousands outside. His voice sank, became more of a wheeze.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t here last night, chief, when you called. But I got some stuff—nearly a hundred and fifty grand. A hundred for you—all in cash.”

  “Take a cab to the foot of Smith Street,” the order came. “Get out, walk across the vacant lot at the right. Stand in the shadow of the big billboard. My man will meet you at ten o’clock. That is all.”

  The mention of the hundred thousand in cash had done the trick—diverted the Terror’s mind from Agent “X.” Not suspecting for an instant that any man would attempt such a thing as the impersonation of Gus Sanzoni, he had accepted the Agent’s story about his own death. It was now half past nine. In ten minutes Agent “X” would go forth to meet the henchman of the Terror.

  Chapter xIx

  NIGHT MEETING

  HANDS clenched tightly, eyes bleak, Agent “X” started to rise from Gus Sanzoni’s desk. Then he stopped. Out of the wooden cigar box before him a faint, insect-like buzz was issuing.

  “X” darted a glance toward the door, saw that it was closed and bent down. He recognized at once the dot-dash signals of the Z2 code. This was a special, syllabic code he had worked out with Jim Hobart, forcing the lanky redhead to learn it in many a tedious session with a telegraph key and a buzzer. Picked up by any amateur or commercial operator, its groupings would be unintelligible.

  But the message was brief and plain, simple as day to the Secret Agent’s trained ears.

  “Harrigan located. Visitor on Sutton’s yacht Osprey. Is expected to remain there as guest until yacht sails on cruise for southern waters.”

  Patiently, in precise dots and dashes, Jim Hobart began the message again. But Agent “X” lifted the lid of the cigar box and clicked the current off. If any one came in and walked close to the desk, that insect buzz would be a betrayal—and he had heard all he needed to know. Harrigan was on the Osprey—probably with the mayor again. Previous reports had informed “X” that Mayor Ballantine was spending a great deal of his spare time on the yacht.

  Agent “X” gathered up his cigar-box radio. He walked with it to the black safe in the corner. He again opened the safe, without listening to the lock now, for he had memorized the combination. He took out the black satchel, carefully counted out one hundred thousand dollars, and tucked them away in the satchel’s bottom. This left room at the top for his secret radio. He did not want to leave it behind him here.

  He closed the safe, put on Sanzoni’s hat and coat, and, with the satchel in his hand, he left the Montmorency Club by the side exit again. Several of Sanzoni’s gangsters saw him. But he didn’t speak, and they made no attempt to follow as a bodyguard. This was proof to “X” that they were accustomed to Sanzoni’s nocturnal departures, with the Terror’s share of the loot. Perhaps they did not know what Sanzbni carried in that satchel. But he had evidently impressed them with the fact that he was to be left alone when he went out with it at night.

  “X” followed the Terror’s instructions, took a cab to the foot of Smith Street, a dark commercial thoroughfare that led toward the black waters of the river. Its shops and warehouses were closed now. The cab jolted over rough cobblestones. The driver looked nervously about him when the vehicle stopped.

  Agent “X” paid the man, struck off to the right, where he saw the dark expanse of a vacant lot. In the shadow beside a big warehouse loading platform, he drew the cigar-box radio from the satchel. He stooped for an instant, thrust the radio through a broken board under the platform itself. Later, if he chose, he could retrieve it.

  There was not a soul in sight. The vacant lot seemed a place of desolation, of possible death. If this were a trap, the Terror could have found a no more likely spot. A thin, vicious cat rattled stones as it slunk out of “X’s” path. For a moment its green eyes glared back at “X.” This was the only indication of life.

  He saw the big billboard the Terror had mentioned rising on the far side of the lot. Its surface showed a ghostly white in the darkness where a faint wash of street light reflected.

  Agent “X” picked his way across the lot, every sense alert. He knew it must be close to ten. The Terror’s man must be near at hand, somewhere in the darkness. His own figure must be silhouetted by the glow in the street beyond. This was part of the Terror’s plan, so that his
representative could be sure Sanzoni had come alone.

  When the billboard rose directly above him, Agent “X” paused. All around him the darkness was complete. The great bulk of an old factory building rose on his left now, shutting out all light from that direction. Beside him was the smoke-blackened framework of the billboard. A thin streamer of dank mist off the river raced by him in the gloom like a hurrying specter. He heard no sound of footsteps, no indication of human presence.

  But, as a great clock in a square blocks away boomed the hour of ten, a voice spoke beside the Agent:

  “Give us that satchel, mister.”

  A SMALL, wiry man, sure-footed and quick as a rat, came out from the skeleton maze of the billboard supports. Without waiting for “X” to reply, his fingers closed over the satchel. He took it and whisked away as quickly as he had come. It was all over in an instant. The Agent had met the Terror’s man—and the Terror’s man had gone.

  But there were grim lights in Agent “X’s” eyes. He had come here for a purpose. That purpose was not to be lost sight of.

  He picked his way quickly back across the vacant lot. At Smith Street, he turned right toward the river. Suddenly he sped through the darkness like a silent, racing ghoul. His quick brain had been working. The rat-faced man had come from behind the billboard, come from the side facing the water. There was a dark street of deserted stores and few lights at that point, with old wharves to hide on, and innumerable doorways in which to crouch. It was there surely that the Terror’s man had gone.

  Agent “X” stopped short when he reached it. His rubber-soled shoes had made no noise. His eyes had adjusted themselves to the dim light. There had been rumors that Agent “X” could see in the dark. This was not so; but he had trained himself to make use of any available light beam; of illumination so dim that the average person could have seen nothing.

  He did not miss the faint movement a half block away which marked the passing of the rat-faced man. He even got the man’s direction—and he followed with the cautious footsteps of a master shadower.

  From doorway to doorway he slunk. Crouching at times, creeping Indian fashion across open spaces that he must traverse, eyes never losing sight of the man ahead.

  The Terror’s henchman looked back once. He could see nothing. His actions indicated that he felt himself safe. Often before he must have met Sanzoni, picked up the loot, and carried it to his master. He had no reason to believe tonight that the man who had come as Sanzoni was any other.

  And the course he was taking was parallel with the waterfront.

  Agent “X” crept closer, using the opposite side of the street. Dock entrances afforded shadowed shelter here, as did also the parked trucks, silent and still for the night. The Agent was almost opposite the small man now. He paused suddenly as the Terror’s representative left the sidewalk, crossed the street, and moved along the river’s edge. The man plunged between two covered docks, disappeared for a moment. But Agent “X” was soon at the mouth of the alleylike passage that led directly to the river.

  He saw that the rat-faced man had snapped on a flashlight. He was bobbing along toward the black water, the satchel in his hand. The beam of the flash was lighting the ground ahead of him, and abruptly Agent “X” crouched forward, eyes narrowed.

  For the thrusting beam of the electric flash had centered on a boat. It was a small boat, painted white. There was faint lettering on its bow.

  As the man stooped intently, loosening a mooring rope and arranging his oars, Agent “X,” crouched to the ground, coming closer. He held his breath as he made out the name that the letters on the boat’s bow spelled. There were six of them, forming a single word. That word was familiar to Agent “X”—Osprey.

  JIM HOBART’S message flashed through his mind at the same instant as he saw it. Harrigan had been located. Harrigan was on the Osprey. And now the Terror’s man, with a hundred thousand in stolen bills, was using the Osprey’s boat.

  The Agent could have leaped out of the darkness and made a prisoner of the man. But, so close to his goal, he dared not take chances. There was no saying what the Terror might do if his messenger from Sanzoni did not arrive.

  The Agent waited in the darkness, saw the rat-faced man shove off onto the black, sucking tide of the river, heard the faint rattle of the oarlocks as the boat drew away.

  He was holding his breath, tense in every muscle. But he turned and sped back to the riverfront street. In a black patch of shadow he tore at his face, peeling off the awkward make-up of Gus Sanzoni. He substituted, from tubes of plastic material that he carried, one of his “stock disguises” that he could fashion by the sensitive touch of his fingers alone.

  He drew the padding that had made him bulky as Sanzoni from beneath his clothes. The suit, many sizes too large for him now, hung slackly on his muscular frame. It was not comfortable, it even impeded his movements; but he could not help it.

  “X” had prepared for different kinds of water travel from a variety of hidden bases. There was a spot at the river’s edge where an old barge had sprung a leak and sunk. The water was shallow. The forward part of the barge was still above the surface. The company owning it had not cared to go to the expense of salvaging it, or having it destroyed. It had been roped off, left to rot. There was a gaping hole in its side where ice cakes in winter storms had battered in the planking.

  Agent “X” leaped to the barge’s deck from a near-by dock. In a moment he was above the jagged hole in its side. Hanging by his hands he lowered himself, angled his body beneath the deck, and disappeared from sight.

  Two minutes passed, and the knife-sharp bow of a small, odd craft appeared. It was a featherweight, Eskimo type kayak—a slender boat made of canvas stretched over a wooden framework. Agent “X” sat in the middle, in a circular cockpit. A thin, double-bladed paddle propelled the craft. Outside of a racing shell, it was the fastest type of one-man boat in the world.

  He pushed it from beneath the barge where he had kept it hidden, sent it skimming out onto the river. Swift and silent as a surface swimming seal, he drove it along with expert sweeps of the paddle, rocking from side to side as he dug the blade in.

  He paused to listen. The faint squeak of oarlocks reached his keen ears. That would be the Terror’s man, rowing toward the Osprey. Cutting down his own speed, Agent “X” followed the sound. He could have overtaken the other, reached the Osprey ahead of him. They traveled parallel with the city, continued nearly a mile up the river, to the yacht club opposite which the Osprey was anchored.

  Agent “X” saw the Osprey’s lighted portholes at last. He started, straining his eyes in the gloom as he came nearer. A feather of smoke showed above the Osprey’s single funnel. The boat was getting steam up, preparing for departure it seemed, and Harrigan, the man connected with the Schofield Arms Company, from which the inner casing of the radio bomb had come, planned to be among the guests on the contemplated southern cruise.

  Agent “X” heard a faint rattle as the unseen rower shipped his oars. He drew cautiously closer, and saw a porthole, near the waterline, darken for a moment. Either the Terror’s man had slipped through that, or some one had reached out to take the satchel from him.

  Grimly Agent “X” approached the yacht. He circled it once. Faint strains of music reached him. Monte Sutton was having a party again. Men and women were dancing, drinking, laughing, not knowing how close to the black mystery of death they were. For if the stolen loot was taken to the Osprey the man who called himself the Terror could not be far off.

  Agent “X” saw the row boat tender swinging at the end of the painter. The tide had pulled it out behind the anchored yacht. The rat-faced man had gone aboard. The lee side was the place for “X” to land. But a sailor was patrolling the deck above. Coming close, Agent “X” could see the man’s outline against the painted woodwork of the boat. Clad in pea-jacket and knitted cap, the man was dressed against the December chill. He was stationed on regulation watch.

  The Secret
Agent maneuvered the sharp nose of his kayak close. He edged silently along the yacht’s side, pulses hammering. Then he stopped, shipped his paddle carefully. He grasped the end of a thin silk painter in his teeth, and swung up the vessel’s side, using the ports as toe and hand holds. In a moment he stood on the yacht’s deck, and made his slender painter fast to the boat’s brass railing, using an expert seaman’s knot.

  But as he raised his head, a low voice called a sharp command. The next instant the patrolling sailor leaped toward him, and in the man’s hand was the gleaming outline of a gun.

  Chapter XX

  DEATH TO THE AGENT!

  AGENT “X” stood quietly as the man approached. He did not attempt to run. Did not speak. His attitude was deceptively careless. He slouched against the railing.

  But, when the sailor was close, gun thrust menacingly forward, eyes peering at “X”, the Agent ducked and plunged forward. So lightning quick was he, that the sailor was unprepared. A chopping uppercut of the Agent’s left hand sent the gun spinning over the rail into the water. The Agent’s right fist connected with the man’s jaw with a swift, clean crack that made the sailor sway on his feet, then collapse groggily to the deck. He rolled over, lay inertly, completely out.

  Agent “X” stooped, shoved his unconscious body into the shadows by a coil of rope. Then the Agent glanced up at the yacht’s funnel again. The smoke told him that the boilers were being fired. The oil-burning furnaces must be heating fast. Steam was almost up. It was nearly eleven now. Perhaps the yacht was to leave at midnight as many liners did. And it could not, must not, leave, with the Terror upon it.

  The Agent acted quickly. The time for a showdown had come. He was convinced that all the stolen loot, collected in a score of murderous robberies, was somewhere below decks. He was certain that the Terror was on board.

  He turned and raced silently along the deck toward the nearest entrance-way. Through a lighted window he got a glimpse into the main saloon. The dancing couples were there again. Agent “X” bent forward intently. He saw many people that he recognized. There was the puffy, troubled face of Mayor Ballantine. There was the tall grim form of Police Commissioner Foster. There, too, was Harrigan, immaculate in evening clothes, with Monte Sutton beside him, and a black-haired laughing girl on his arm.