Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 5

by Paul Chadwick

  For a moment, the Agent’s heart stood still. He sprang to the door. Hand on the knob, he paused. In the room beyond, he distinctly heard the voice of Inspector Burks. Furthermore, he could make out the inspector’s words:

  “The telephone call referred to a black bag that contained the real face of Agent ‘X’,” Burks was saying. “This must be the one.”

  Agent “X” yanked the door open.

  The silenced gun was in his hand. Burks and a plain-clothes man were facing a small black traveling bag on the davenport in the living room. Burks’ fingers were on the clasps!

  Not for a fraction of a second did “X” hesitate. His future activities depended entirely upon the speed and accuracy of his movements. The silenced gun plopped once. It was a snap shot that nicked the handle of the black bag. Burks uttered a startled oath, and let it drop. He turned, snatching at his gun. But in the time required for Burks and his companion to turn, “X” had crossed the room to within a few feet of where they stood. Apparently, without aiming, “X” squeezed the trigger of the silenced gun a second time. Total darkness. The bullet had shattered the only light globe in the room.

  “The bag!” Burks shouted. “Grab the bag!” And Burks himself grasped at blackness, encountered a coat-sleeved arm, and hung on. He led a powerful right hook that landed. The arm in his hand went limp. A body sagged to the floor.

  “Got him!” he shouted. “Lights, somebody!”

  AS police burst through the French doors of the living room, flashlights lanced the gloom. Burks stared down at the man he had knocked out. It was one of his own detectives.

  From out of nowhere, came a strange, eerie whistle. Burks sprang to the open front door. “This way!” he shouted. “Surround the house. Search the grounds!”

  But his search was in vain. A few minutes later, a young detective came running excitedly to the inspector.

  “He’s dead!” shouted the man. “Secret Agent ‘X’ is dead!” He seized the inspector’s arm and dragged him into the library where Planchard had committed murder and suicide.

  “The guy with the mustache is Dr. Jules Planchard!” explained the young detective. “I remember seeing him in the papers. The other guy—”

  “He looks exactly like that private dick, Hobart, we pulled out of the closet in Memorial hall,” Burks cut in.

  “Looks that way,” said the enthusiastic young detective. “But it’s just a mask. Don’t you get it? This guy must be Secret Agent ‘X’!”

  Burks knelt beside the corpse. With fingers that trembled with excitement, he lifted the flexible mask that covered the gang-leader’s face.

  “Good Lord!” he breathed. “Why, he was supposed to be dead! Why, of all the fakes!” He gripped his companion’s arm. “Begin to see! By heaven, no wonder he knew what all the old time criminals looked like. Why, he was a nut on making death masks of criminals in the old days. When Foster hears this, it’ll damn near kill him!”

  “Who is it, inspector?” asked the young detective, leaning over Burks’ shoulder.

  “Who is it? Well, it’s the ex-police commissioner of this city! It’s Major Derrick himself! He retired several years ago when a policeman accidentally shot and killed his son. That must have been why he wanted to square things with the police!”

  “But look at this mask on the desk,” said another man. “It’s the face of that girl reporter on the Herald!”

  Burks strode to the desk, picked up the mask of Betty Dale and looked at it inside and out. Then he regarded the note which rested beside it. Aloud, he read:

  “This will clear Betty Dale, won’t it, Burks? In the basement of this house, you will find many masks of many people who are dead or alive. You will understand how Derrick created the corpse gang. Derrick used this mask to frame Betty Dale—probably because her father was on the police force when Derrick’s son was killed. Sorry to deprive you of the pleasure of seeing my face. But look around you. Perhaps I am in this room right now!”

  A tiny letter “X” was penciled at the bottom of the note.

  Burks’ eyes darted about the room. “Every man inside this room and close the door!” he ordered. “I’m going to see which of you has make-up on his face!”

  The group of detectives looked at each other as though they thought Burks had suddenly lost his mind. And little wonder: for a mile or more away, one lonely man stood in a completely equipped scientific laboratory. It was a room known only to Secret Agent “X.”

  Light from the door of a small portable furnace cast strange, ruddy lights over the man’s features—irregular and dirt smeared features they were, for the Agent’s make-up had undergone considerable damage in the past thirty or forty minutes.

  He stood perfectly still, fascinated by the flames inside the furnace. If one might have been permitted to look over the Agent’s shoulder, one might have seen a strange thing in the heart of the flames. It was a little terrifying. Red and yellow tongues of fire licked up and around what appeared to be a human head—or at least a human face. The features were sagging, becoming more and more distorted as the flames devoured it.

  But it was not a human head. It was only a mask, perfectly modeled after the true features of the living Secret Agent. No man would ever see the like again.

  Horde of the Damned

  Chapter I

  MURDER NIGHT

  MOVING with catlike stealth, a man dressed in gray crept toward a high hedge in utter darkness. Night blanketed Rock Island, playground of millionaires. Sea wind whimpered like a live thing through the clipped shrubbery of a hundred huge estates. Surf snarled and battered at the rocky shores. The eyes of the gray-clad prowler probed the curtaining gloom ahead. He crouched as he neared the wall of green. Danger, sudden death, were close at hand.

  Reaching a gap in the hedge, he gripped the spikes of a massive iron gate with tensing fingers. He levered himself upward on powerful arms till he stood balanced at the top. Noiselessly he lowered his body to the ground inside. Suddenly he froze.

  Somewhere nearby faint crunching footfalls sounded, mingling with the eerie moan of the sea wind. Standing in blackest shadow the man in gray waited to see which way they would lead—then caught his breath.

  A guard was patrolling the path that led to the gate, a hulking figure seen against the faint lights of the house beyond. He held one arm bent as though in a sling. But there was something thrusting from it—the blued steel barrel of a sub-machine gun, poised for instant deadly action.

  The crouching, gray-clad man tried to slip sidewise from the gate. He stopped as high beds of flowers barred his way. Their slightest rustle would betray his presence to the other.

  Grimly he settled back to wait till the guard drew near. The footsteps grew more loud. A second passed, two. With a catapulting spring, the silent watcher leaped. Upward and forward he hurled himself, one balled fist drawn back.

  There was a crack of knuckles against flesh, a hiss of indrawn breath, a thud of colliding bodies. The guard’s head turned slightly, deflecting the full force of the blow that would have felled him. Surprise and fear contorted his face. He tried to jerk the gun around. His finger tightened over the crescent shaped trigger to send a stream of bronze-jacketed death into the other’s ribs.

  With a chopping downward blow, so swift no eye could follow, the man in gray anticipated his action and knocked the weapon from his grasp. His left hand flashed up and clamped over lips already parted for a scream. The weight of his lunging body bore the guard to the ground.

  In a thrashing, fighting heap they struck together. But the big guard wasn’t out. Fear gave him extraordinary strength. He struggled madly, fiercely like a cornered beast, trying to shout, beating with hammering fists.

  The other was handicapped by having to hold a palm over the guard’s mouth. There were more armed men about. A cry would bring them running from all sides. The gray-clad man held his advantage with the tactics of a master wrestler. He got a scissors hold on the guard’s thrashing legs. He pressed an e
lbow downward on the man’s heaving chest. With his right hand alone he jabbed dexterously through a barrage of flailing fists.

  The blow he had struck wasn’t a violent one, but it had the cunning science of jiu-jitsu behind it. It was a thrust beneath the pectoral muscle, under the heart, made with cool precision.

  The big guard crumpled and lay still as though a bullet had struck him. He wasn’t dead, but he would be out for many minutes.

  Working swiftly, the gray-clad stranger drew the man’s inert body out of sight. He shoved it in among the flowers. He pushed the fallen machine gun after it. He brushed his hands, straightened, turned toward the lighted house.

  He was no ordinary prowler. There was a press card in his pocket, but he wasn’t a reporter. The inconspicuous features of his face formed only a front. The face itself was part of a disguise. The man was Secret Agent “X,” noted and mysterious investigator, whose true identity had never been revealed.

  Strange rumors had been built up about him. There had been efforts made a score of times to blot out his life. The police of many cities rated him as a desperate harbinger of crime. In the dives of the underworld where his strange work sometimes led him, he was feared as a relentless human scourge. To some, the weak and unfortunate whom he had helped, he was classed as a merciful benefactor. To all except a very few he was an enigma, acting behind a cloak of mystery too deep to penetrate. Even these few had never to their knowledge seen his face.

  THE SECRET AGENT had hurried here tonight because of grim foreboding. He had come to fulfill a pledge he had made as a secret battler of crime. His violent, informal entrance into the big estate had been backed by desperate purpose.

  The law was in full force all about him. G-men, police detectives, and special guards were here. The place was alive with them, waiting, watching. Their flashlights flickered like fireflies in the dark. Their voices sounded, low, tense, fear-strained. Their gun barrels and pistol muzzles gleamed. The Agent had entered a hornets’ nest of action. He had made one of the boldest, most daring moves of his life.

  With utmost stealth, he approached the house; slipping forward on rubber soled shoes, crouching behind shrubbery as armed men passed. There was a big bay window at the side. Light came in thin shafts through old fashioned blinds. “X” moved toward this.

  It seemed sheer madness to come so close. There had been no time to create an adequate disguise. His role of newspaper man would hardly be accepted now. He was courting exposure, injury, death. Detectives ringed the entire place. But the Agent wanted to see both sides of the board in an amazing game of crime. He wanted to see the victims as well as the criminals who were expected to come.

  Two guards began a low voiced conversation and the Agent seized his chance. Crouching, he passed by them in the dark, invisible as a shadow, silent as a breath of air. He moved close to the big bay window, stood in darkness and peered inside. The sash was raised for ventilation. There was a thin crack below the shade. The whole interior of the room was visible to “X.”

  There were five people in it. The two in the center held his attention first. One was a tall, gray-haired man whose heavy features were creased with wrinkles of anxiety. The other was much younger, heavy featured also, with a family resemblance that was plain.

  “X” had seen press pictures of these two. The tall man was Vernon Lasher, once prosperous real estate broker, owner of the Rock Island Inn. His reputed wealth was making him the object of attack tonight. The young man with him was Ben, his son, the idol of debutante daughters during the days when his father’s fortune made heavy spending possible. An amateur sportsman, with racing stables, polo ponies, a car, a yacht and a plane of his own.

  THERE were three others in the room whom “X” did not know. Their presence seemed out of place tonight. On a couch close to the wall sat an elderly, red-faced man with a snow-white mustache bristling under a pointed nose. An old-fashioned army six-shooter lay across his knees. His manner was watchful, expectant.

  A dazzling, willowy girl with gray-green eyes and sloe-black hair sat beside him. Under her clever, synthetic make-up was the pallor of fear. Yet she was smoking, trying obviously to seem calm. Across from her, in a leather arm chair, another young man was slouched. Fear showed on his face. There was a sullen droop to his lips.

  Lasher was speaking, talking with harsh excitement, addressing the red-faced man.

  “They’re fiends—fiends, I tell you, Captain Crump! They think I can raise the money, and I can’t. Hard times have ruined me. I’ve only a few thousand left. The inn is mortgaged. I’m a poor man. But when I communicated with them, told them this, they only sneered. I begged them to wait, asked them to give me time to raise some cash. They said I was stalling and they’re coming for Ben tonight. They think they can snatch him, but I’ll—I’ll—”

  He struck the table before him with a hard-balled fist. He opened it, swept his hand toward the window where “X” stood. “Those guards out there are costing me every cent I’ve got left. This is to be a showdown, Crump—a showdown, you understand! I’m not depending on the government men or Swope’s detectives alone. I’ve hired others from the best agency in town. I’m going to save Ben. I’m going to give those devils the fight of their lives.”

  For a moment Lasher’s anger seemed to die. He spoke with apprehension in his voice.

  “You shouldn’t have come, Crump! It was a friendly act, I know. I appreciate your spirit. But it was sheer folly to let Miss Babette come with you. She can’t help. Neither can you or Hines. The three of you must leave at once. This is my fight, and Ben’s. We’ll see it through.”

  The young man with sullen lips rose from his chair. His eyes turned eagerly toward the door. He nodded quickly.

  “You’re right, Lasher, we can’t do anything here. We’ll only be in the way—if anything starts. I didn’t dream what was going on when I came with Holly. She mentioned a kidnap threat, but I didn’t think it was serious. Neither did she or she wouldn’t have come. She treated the captain’s pistol as a joke. But now—you say the rubber-corpse men are expected here tonight! If that’s so—then I think—we’d better go.”

  The rubber corpse men. Agent “X” knew what those strange words meant. For days past he’d been collecting data on the most extraordinary and sinister criminal activity he’d ever heard of. He had clippings from a hundred newspapers, private reports from a score of different sources. There had been killings, kidnapings, threats of death up and down the whole Atlantic coast.

  In themselves, such crimes might have been handled by the local police and federal operatives alone. It was the mysterious, horrible nature of the murders that had brought Secret Agent “X,” Man of a Thousand Faces into action. For the human fiends, whom the press of the country had dubbed the “Rubber Corpse” men, left hideous, boneless bodies in their wake. Coroners’ reports had been conflicting. Expert medical testimony had been unable to explain the nature of the weapon of death. Fear had given birth to a dozen ghastly rumors. Only a few facts were known.

  Extortion obviously lay behind the monstrous thing—the greed of some criminal or group of criminals, who used the sway of horror to attain their end. Ransoms had been asked for and collected under conditions of utter secrecy and stealth. Death followed whenever demands were not met. Still the crimes continued.

  AGENT “X” himself was baffled. He listened tensely to the conversation taking place inside the room. The red-faced Captain Crump was talking now, his voice sharp with contempt.

  “Where’s your courage, Hines? You are forgetting Miss Babette is present! These criminals are only putting up a bluff. They know they can scare men like you. I don’t believe the tales I’ve heard about them. Hideous dwarfs and boneless corpses—nonsense! You’ve been reading the yellow press! But if young Lasher’s in danger, it’s your duty to help him as a friend. Be a man, sir! Buy yourself one of these!” The captain tapped the revolver on his lap. His mustache bristled fiercely. His blue eyes glowered.

  T
he dark-haired girl, Holly Babette, nodded and gave a nervous laugh. “The captain’s right. Don’t let it get you, Clifton. Don’t believe all the stories you hear. You saw the police outside. The criminals, even if they came, couldn’t get through them in a million years. I’m going to stick around. A cigarette, please.”

  There was a look in the girl’s eyes that gave the lie to her words. Shadows of fear were there. Her hand trembled as she took the cigarette. The room was still. There were crosscurrents, hidden emotions here that the Agent’s alert mind caught.

  But he had no time to consider. A sudden warning of danger made him jump. One of the armed guards outside had come up noiselessly. “X” ducked and leaped away on silent feet, knowing he had been seen. A harsh cry sounded. A flashlight stabbed the dark as “X” dropped to his knees. He rolled, slipped behind the corner of the house and raced around it.

  Another light glowed directly ahead. A voice ordered him to halt. Instead, he stepped behind a tree, cut back on his tracks ten feet, and ran toward the hedge. He raced with sprinting speed, covering space with long flying leaps, confusing his pursuers.

  Then abruptly his own danger was forgotten. For a cry went up from the sea wall at the far end of the Lasher lawn. A cry of fear and horror. A shot blasted the night, another and another.

  Agent “X” leaped toward that side of the house. He skirted the hedge, coming close to a guard, avoiding the firefly conclave of lights near the spot where he had been discovered. Then he stopped dead short—stared at the sea wall.

  The detectives’ lights were playing on it. Hideous nightmare shapes of men were coming up. Dwarfs they were, grotesque figures with flattened heads, distorted bodies, horrible simian arms and legs. And in their hands were strangely shaped guns that hissed and flashed green fire.

  A detective, closer to the wall than any, lifting his gun to shoot, cried out and staggered back. The Agent’s gaze swung to him. His eyes riveted with sudden horror. Something strange, unthinkable, was happening to the man.