He had a delicate problem now. The message demanding still more ransom had brought a quick plan to the Agent’s mind. There was a bare chance that he might trap the criminals through their own relentless greed. But only with Swope’s co-operation.
The Agent locked the front door and went to the closet where he had hidden Swope. He drew the police chief out, put him in a chair, and prepared to administer a powerful revivifying drug. He jabbed the point of a miniature hypodermic into a vein on Chief Swope’s wrist close to the pulse. A few drops of a compound containing digitalis and adrenaline went into the man’s blood.
Three minutes passed, and Swope opened his eyes. During that time “X” had changed back to Martin, and slipped the black cloth over his face. He held his gas gun in his hand, fixed Swope with a strangely hypnotic stare, spoke with compelling force.
“The money has been delivered, Swope! The criminals have come and gone.”
Swope gasped and blinked, gazing in fascination at the unknown, black-masked man before him. The Agent held the latest message up where Swope could see.
“They demand a hundred thousand more,” he said. “This must be paid at the same time in the same way tomorrow night.”
“It’s a trick!” growled Swope. “I get it now. You’re a crook—and you’re working with them.”
A grim smile twitched “X’s” lips beneath the mask. A weak spot of Swope’s character lay open. Vain self-importance was one of the man’s dominating traits.
“What I say is true,” the Agent grated. “I’m not working with them. I’m working against them the same as you—and I have a score to settle. Say nothing about what has happened tonight. You would be ruined, disgraced, if you let it be known that you let the money slip out of your hand and did not deliver it yourself.”
“But people will know—”
“No one will know! I have arranged it. You will be considered a hero for carrying through and meeting the criminals alone. Say nothing to anyone—understand? You’ve nothing to fear if you obey. Ruin, possibly death—if you talk.”
“But the money!” gasped Swope. “We can’t raise another hundred thousand. Even the rich men on the island will balk!”
“There are others!” said “X” softly. “Keep silent. Play your part. I’ll see that the money is raised somehow. Tomorrow night when you deliver it, I will not interfere.”
For a moment longer the Agent’s eyes bored into those of the amazed man before him. He saw the perspiration on the police chief’s face, saw that the fears he’d planted of ruin and disgrace would keep him silent. Swope was puzzled, stupefied—but he would obey.
Quickly the Secret Agent backed out of the room, raising the window, closing it softly behind him, disappearing into the night.
MORNING found him out by the cove again, the spot where the seaplane had landed the night before. His car was far away. He had crawled through the brush in Indian style. His expert woodsman’s knowledge aided his stealthy approach.
Screened by the bayberry thickets that rimmed the rocks, he swept the shores of the cove with powerful glasses. Nowhere apparently had the face of nature been disturbed. There was no sign of a secret hangar. There was no place where a seaplane might be drawn up.
Puzzled by this mystery that seemed to have no solution, the Agent returned to the Rock Island Inn. He was sure his delicate sound-recording instrument had not played tricks upon him. The only apparent explanation was that the plane had landed its passengers here and later crept away. The Agent would put that to the test.
Betty Dale had stayed as a guest at the inn. The Agent, as Martin, looked her up quickly and asked to see her alone. She saw the tense expression in his eyes, waited, knowing that something of vital importance had prompted him to come.
“Betty, there’s a way you can help me if you will.”
“You know I always want to help you. I haven’t seen Holly Babette this morning—but I’m going to look her up.”
“Not that. It’s something else now. I want you to help collect money for me—a hundred thousand in cash.”
Betty Dale gasped. Her blue eyes opened in wonder. She looked at the Agent queerly. Slowly she spoke. “I’ll do what I can. I’ve a little saved up myself. My father left a life-insurance policy. I have some friends—”
The Agent laughed, and for a moment his eyes dwelt tenderly on her face. “You would, Betty, I know. You’d lend me every cent you have. But that’s not what I mean. Here’s what I want you to do. You’ll hear through Swope before long that the criminals who kidnaped Ben Lasher demand another hundred thousand for his release.
“That much was raised yesterday on Rock Island. It’s doubtful if any such amount can be raised again. I want you to use your influence on your paper, the Herald. Make it plain to the city editor what will happen to young Lasher if the money isn’t paid. There isn’t time for a news story and a general appeal. But have him call up some rich man who will pay!”
“I will,” said Betty, “but—”
“There’s a man you can get in touch with at the Bankers’ Club. Elisha Pond’s his name. He hates crooks just as you and I do. He has a wad of money he can use. Get him to raise the cash and hand it over to Swope.”
Betty Dale nodded slowly, her blue eyes fixed on the Agent’s face. She sensed something strange in his words, saw a grimly, mysterious smile twitch at his lips, but didn’t know the cause. For “X” had never informed even her who Elisha Pond was. She did not guess that Pond was another alias of the Man of a Thousand Faces.
“X” left the island that day, paid a mysterious trip to the city, and returned at sundown. Betty informed him excitedly that Pond had given his voucher at the Bankers’ Club. The cash had been brought out in an armored truck and turned over to Swope. The second half of the ransom would soon be paid.
“X” LEFT the inn at nine o’clock. He sped once more to the northeast end of the island where Professor Guldi’s laboratory had burned. He parked his car a half mile from the shore in a deep grove of trees, snaked forward in utter darkness through woods and thickets to the rocky edge of the mysterious cove.
His daytime reconnaissance had familiarized him with the section. Tonight the glow of the stars was breaking through a thin veil of clouds. There was a ghostly sheen upon the water. It was faint, yet bright enough to let the Agent’s sharp eyes see if anything moved.
He lay flattened between the rocks along the bluffs edge, a pair of compact, powerful night glasses in his hands. Slowly he moved them over the chill water, scanning every foot of surface. There was as yet no stir, no sign of life.
The radium hands of his wristwatch showed nine twenty. For forty minutes he lay listening, waiting, straining his eyes and ears to catch any possible sight or sound. Once again he opened his black cases, set his sound-recording apparatus up.
Then, at the stroke of ten, he suddenly stiffened. The water before him was quiet, deserted still, but his ear phones registered the throb of a plane’s engine off across the island in the direction of Goose Bay.
For a full minute the sound continued in one spot. He could visualize the scene being enacted. The money was changing hands. Swope, sweating and fear-strained, was passing the squat satchel up to the masked men in the plane.
The plane’s engine increased its beat. The Agent’s phones told that it was streaking upward into the black sky as it had done the night before. He followed it to the point eight thousand feet above where the motor was shut off. There was a moment’s silence, then the rising of wind in an eerie whistle as the plane dived earthward.
Tensely, the Agent listened as the sound came nearer, nearer. The plane was plunging out of the black sky, straight toward the hidden cove where he lay. He moved back under cover of the bushes, his glasses gripped in his hands.
A moment more and the whistle of wind through struts was so loud that he didn’t need the amplifier. He whipped off the phones, tucked them into their case, listened to that banshee wail that grew louder each second in th
e sky above.
Lifting his eyes, he glimpsed the plane for an instant, a huge bird of evil against the ragged streamers of the star-lighted clouds. It flattened slightly, lessening the angle of its dive. The wailing of wind decreased.
The plane came down like a monstrous gull, sideslipping into the cove. Tiny lights beneath its pontoon illuminated the surface of the water for a moment. They were shielded on all sides. Their rays went directly down. They would hardly have been noticed a hundred yards away. But the plane touched the surface, splashed and slid along. The lights disappeared, the plane nosed slowly forward with its momentum.
The engine did not cough into life again. But there was a faint whine, a stable movement to the plane’s taxiing progress, telling the Agent that the starter motor was harnessed to a small propeller somewhere beneath or behind the pontoon.
He waited, wondering what would happen next, expecting the plane to come straight to shore and discharge its occupants. Instead, it crept to the very center of the cove, came to a standstill, lying sluggishly in the wash of the swells. The Agent peered at it through his glasses. Abruptly his fingers clenched till the knuckles went white.
In the water under the sharp pontoon, a mysterious, eerie glow came suddenly. It seemed to spring upward, out of the depths of the cove itself. The plane shivered slightly. Its ghost-gray wings rocked from side to side. Slowly, before the Agent’s startled gaze it sank from sight.
Chapter XIV
INTO THE DEPTHS
THE AGENT watched, filled with a sense of unreality. His breath felt tight inside his lungs. Black magic seemed to be taking place before his eyes. In all his contact with criminals he had never heard of such a thing.
The mysterious glow in the depths of the cove winked off. The top of the seaplane’s wings lay flush with the surface of the water for a moment. Then they disappeared. There was nothing left again but the dark water and the blackened rocks.
The Agent slowly lowered his glasses and rose. No wonder these desperate men had been having things their own way. Here was cunning, resourcefulness that almost staggered thought.
The Agent swung on his heel and started back through the woods. No need for caution now. The men in that plane were somewhere far below, hidden as though the sea and earth had swallowed them. The Agent returned to the Rock Island Inn and picked up Hobart. The grimness of his disguised face, the bleak light in his eyes, made the redheaded ex-cop start.
“What is it, boss?”
“We’re going into action.”
“Action!” Hobart rolled the word off his tongue, seemed to savor it. His hard face cracked in a smile. His blue eyes snapped with pleasurable excitement. “Swell, boss! I was afraid maybe you were going to keep me stuck in this dump, chasing down lighthouses.”
The Agent did not smile. “We’ll take a run to the city first. There are some things I’ve got to pick up. Then we’ll come back here.”
The Agent was silent as, with Hobart beside him, he headed into the night. He drove like a demon over concrete roads behind the funneling swath that his headlights cut in the darkness. He made the city limits in less than an hour, plunged through canyonlike streets.
“X” ordered Jim Hobart out, asked him to wait a minute on a corner. Then he whirled the coupé around the block, unlocked a private two-car garage, and drove out in a bigger vehicle—a huge sedan with plenty of room in back.
He picked Jim Hobart up again and sped to the city’s waterfront. In a dark alley between two warehouses, he stopped. A sign bearing gilt letters on the face of one of the buildings said united salvage company. The offices were closed for the night. Dark rooms behind them held a jumble of complex apparatus and machinery.
“Wait here,” said “X.” “Say you brought an official of the company if anyone should ask questions.”
Hobart nodded, looked concerned as the Agent slipped away.
“X” returned in the space of fifteen minutes. He was walking slowly, bearing with him what seemed to be a grotesque dummy collapsed. It was heavy. Jim Hobart leaped from the car to give him a hand.
“A diving suit,” he muttered.
“I had to borrow it,” said “X” significantly.
He deposited it carefully in the rear of the big sedan, covered it with a robe and sped away. He stopped next behind the rear entrance of a sporting goods concern. Once more he disappeared, came back bearing a strange bundle of canvas that looked like a tent.
This he put in the back of the sedan also and headed the car out of the city once again. Hobart looked puzzled, but said nothing.
SWOPE’S men stopped them at the bridge when they reached the island. “X” had to do some plausible arguing, show his press card, and introduce Hobart as a fellow scribe before he could get through. All cars were being questioned as they came and went. No one knew what the criminals might do next.
The Agent drove around a maze of roads for a time as a police car followed curiously. With a burst of speed and a short cut over a field, he shook the car at last. Once more he turned toward the island’s northeast end. He took the road that branched off Guldi’s to the left, crept close to the edge of the shore by the mysterious cove, backed into the woods, and covered the tire tracks with leaves.
“We’re going to leave her here,” he said briefly. “You may have to go back alone. Give me a hand with this gear.”
Wonderingly, Hobart helped him lift the diving suit and the bundle of canvas from the car.
“It’s a boat,” said “X,” tapping the canvas.
At the shore, risking a glimmer of his flash, “X” undid the canvas and set up a duck-hunters’ collapsible canvas skiff. Short oars were rolled inside. He stowed the diving suit in the bow, motioned Hobart to the stern and took the oars himself. Silently, without showing any light, he pulled out from shore to the center of the cove.
There he stopped and thrust his feet in the legs of the diving suit. He drew it up, buckled it around his waist. He slipped his arms in the water-proof jacket, prepared to set the lightweight aluminum helmet over his head. Jim Hobart’s voice came hoarsely.
“Where’s the pump? How will you get your air?” The Agent jerked a thumb toward the cylindrical tank on his shoulders. “Compressed oxygen. I’m taking my air with me.” He tapped a metal projection on the helmet’s dome. “The flutter valve where the bad air escapes.”
Jim Hobart peered over the side of the frail boat into the black depths of the cove. His eyes grew wide with apprehension. “What—what’s down there?”
“X” looked at Hobart a moment. “That,” he said quietly, “is what I am going to find out.”
“How will you get back up with no line?” asked Hobart. “I’ll stand by, but—”
The Secret Agent tapped Hobart’s arm to emphasize his words. “The only way you can help me now is to wait at the inn—and listen.”
The Agent fingered two threadlike insulated wires that he had let stick outside the suit. One held a tiny button switch, the other a spring key. They connected with a two-way midget radio in the front pocket of his coat. There were dry cells in the belt around his waist.
Grimly, he set the helmet’s bottom on the metal collar around his neck. He screwed down the clamps with practiced fingers, and while Jim Hobart watched with a frozen face, “X” swung carefully over the frail boat’s side and lowered his body into the chill water. For a moment his goggled face peered up like some huge crustacean. Then, with a faint gurgle of escaping air, it sank from sight.
Down, down into the black depths the Secret Agent dropped. The lead plates in the shoes of the diving suit kept him upright, pulled him relentlessly. The pressure of the water about him increased with each descending foot. It plastered the cloth of the suit around his body, made him feel strange and light. He was dropping into a black world of nothingness, cut off from all human sound and sight.
JUDGING the distance by speed of descent and water pressure, “X” believed he had gone forty feet when his shoes hit bottom. His knees
bent under him. He swayed a moment in this weird, chill world of eerie blackness. He groped around his feet and felt pieces of rock, sea grass and firm packed sand. Something quick and slimy slipped over his uncovered hands.
In the top of the helmet was the single lens of a light. He touched a lever switch beside it and sent out a beam of brilliant luminescence, as though the lens were a phosphorescent eye. Slowly he turned, adjusting his eyes to the wavering ghostliness of the water. He gasped behind his helmet as the beam fell on a strange contraption a few feet away.
A monorail conveyor, mounted on blocks of cement, ran parallel with the cove’s bottom. It led off into the unknown darkness toward the shore. Rings holding an endless pulley ran beside it. At the monorail’s outward end the lens of an electric lantern was pointed toward the surface. It was this that had made the eerie glow that “X” had seen.
And he understood now how the plane had disappeared. It had dropped a cable to that ring in the pulley below or had attached a line to an unseen buoy below the surface. The cable, drawn by some mechanical means, had pulled it down to the monorail below. There it had passed invisibly to its mysterious hangar.
Grimly, cautiously, the Secret Agent turned his goggled head shoreward and moved along beside the monorail contrivance. The cove’s bottom and the monorail on it began sloping upward. The rail was curved and the cement blocks held it down. It seemed to rise about ten feet up a natural declivity toward the shallower waters of the shore. Then the Agent saw a black square straight ahead of him. Light from his head flash gleamed on the monorail a moment. The single track went straight toward the jet-black shadows.
He continued walking, and passed through the mouth of a cut in the rocky shore of the cove. The cut became a cave as the Agent advanced still farther. Its straight sides told that it had been chiseled and split by human hands long ago. Captain Crump’s story of an old fort flashed through his mind.
The floor of the cave continued to slope upward with the monorail following its center. The sides were hardly more than twelve feet wide. Lessening pressure told the Agent that he was nearing the surface now.
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 5 Page 34