The man began a senseless muttering as “X” searched through his pockets hoping to find some identification. There was none. “X” put his lips close to the other’s ear. “Your name!” he repeated again and again, bombarding the delirium that gripped the sick man’s mind.
The man’s lips moved slowly. A quavering whisper issued from them. “Charlie!” he said. “Charlie!”
“Your last name?” The Agent urged. “I am a friend!”
The young man raised his head. The mist before his eyes seemed to clear for a moment. He pawed at the Agent with a feeble and emaciated hand.
“Tell my sis—my sister Holly—not to—” His voice trailed off as his effort to talk made him shake as though with palsy.
The Agent crouched before him suddenly rigid. Charlie Babette. Here, of course, was the answer to Holly’s strange actions—her fear-strained face, her furtive terror, her refusal to talk even to Betty Dale. The criminals had forced her to aid them by making a captive of her brother. The ransom they had rung from her was her service in a vicious cause.
It was she who had seen to it that young Hines had been kidnaped along with Ben Lasher. Perhaps she had feared what terrible thing the criminals planned. She had run to the lighthouse tower in utter terror, perhaps to plead with Guldi.
The delirious man was muttering again. He laughed suddenly, staring at “X” with burning eyes. “Not a bad fellow—I thought—a sportsman—but I wouldn’t do—” He clenched his pale hands and his laughter turned to drooling curses that brought a foam to his lips. “I’ll kill him—kill him!” he raved.
“Who?” The Agent’s hand was vise-like on his shoulder.
Fear contorted the features of the other. He tried to reach up and claw the Agent’s face. He cringed back in abject terror, mouthed: “You! You!”
A sudden noise behind “X” made him turn. Something moved by the mouth of the passage beyond the barred, half-open door. The whisper of sound was the tread of stealthily running feet.
Chapter XVIII
SKY BATTLE
THE Agent sprang into action. Information forced from the lips of the feverish man would come too late. He had an inkling already of the hideous plot. He must not let the man behind it escape.
He raced out the door to the end of the right-angle corridor, stepped back as bullets cut a hissing swath through the darkness. A machine gun stuttered fifty feet down the passage. Slugs screamed and whined along the face of the rocks. The Agent waited, and heard slow steps advancing. Then another sound came—a whispering wail that seemed to drift downward as though from another world. “X” recognized it. A police siren close to Guldi’s house. The open passage of the other fork acted as a giant speaking tube, conveying the sound into the underground tunnels.
The steps ceased to come toward “X.” Instead they turned and ran. A getaway was more to be desired than his death. The Agent slipped out of the door, raced forward along the outer passage, risking another wave of lead. There was only one way to escape now—the gray plane at the cavern’s mouth.
The Agent caught sight of two flitting figures suddenly. They were far ahead. Familiarity with the passage had given them a start. He lessened the distance in desperate strides. The light that had revealed the men before him came from the barred window of the chamber where Guldi’s hideous “accident men” were kept.
One of the running figures paused an instant, turning to send back a volley of bullets that made the Agent fling himself flat on his face. Lead snarled above him, ricocheted, stopped. He raised his head and saw that the figure had disappeared. But others, strangely contorted shapes, were flinging themselves into the passage. The window imprisoning the horror men had been raised. They loomed in his way as he raced forward, crouching, gibbering, dazed by their sudden freedom. They began to snarl, flattened heads turned toward him.
There was no time for strategy. The Agent raced straight at them. He lifted his gun, fired a quick shot and gave a savage yell. The distorted men cowered back for an instant. The Agent plunged straight through the menacing barrier they formed. They set up a howl and began to follow, gathering speed and courage as they advanced.
The Agent reached the airlock, passed through it. That would bar the monsters from farther progress. But there was no sign of the men ahead. Not until he came to the metal door at the cavern’s mouth did he see them. Then he caught only a fleeting glimpse of a man’s back as the water-proof door of the gray plane closed.
An electric motor whined. He saw the cable beneath the pontoon begin to shiver, understood that the plane could pull itself along the monorail track by inward power alone.
He pressed himself to the cavern wall and raced toward the bullet-shaped fuselage. The men in the plane couldn’t see him now. They were preparing for submergence. The Agent’s eyes fixed themselves on a square door in the plane’s tail that must lead to a baggage compartment. It, too, was water-tight obviously, but clamped on the outside.
Heedless of all personal risk, “X” moved toward this. He unscrewed the clamps with trembling fingers, thrust head and shoulders into the dark hole that the door revealed, drew his body in as the gray plane began to move.
He heard the swish of water around the slim pontoons. Crouching in the narrow space, he turned and gripped the inside of the door. With all his strength he pulled on a metal brace and waited. Without the clamps outside water might leak in.
But the rubber lining kept it out as the gray plane went under. It was a weird sensation, being submerged in a plane. Utter blackness came as the craft slid down the monorail to the cove’s level bottom. A few drops of salt water oozed around the edges of the door. But pressure on the outside helped to hold it.
The plane came to the monorail’s end. The strange ascent began as air inside the fuselage carried the craft upward. It broke the surface, seemed to shake itself like a bird. Instantly an electric starter whirred and the motor roared into life. The plane taxied forward with the engine warming.
“X” left the door, held close by wind pressure now, and groped about him. There were bundles and suitcases at his feet. Directly ahead was a blank wall dividing this rear compartment from the cabin proper. It was made of some composition board mounted on the framework. If there were sufficient space between the metal cross pieces he could slip between them after tearing the stuff off.
HE turned on his light a moment, glanced at the bundles at his feet. He centered the beam of his flash on a fat satchel. The same that he had passed over to the criminals in the disguise of Swope. The other satchel was there also, containing the money of “Elisha Pond.” And there were a dozen packages wrapped carefully with paper. Here was the fortune that the extortionists had taken in their raids.
The Agent turned to the wall before him, studied it a moment and turned off his flash. The sound of the plane’s engine was swelling into a roar. The craft was up on its step, ready for the take-off. The Agent drew his tool case from his pocket, selected a short-bladed knife. He cut finger holds in the composition stuff before him.
As the plane tipped back and leaped into the sky, he pulled with all his might at the thin boarding. A sheet ripped-off. There was a framework of inner bracing behind it, another board on the opposite side. The Agent’s flash revealed that there was room for him to get through between two angled braces.
He moved more cautiously now. Even above the roar of the motor some sound might be heard. He cut the boarding away around the full space of the supports, let it hang by a slender section and crouched waiting on hands and knees.
The plane was climbing steadily, mounting up and up into the night sky. “X” remained quiet till his airman’s sense told him that five or six thousand feet had been attained. Then he thrust head and shoulders through the severed hoarding and wriggled into the cabin itself.
For an instant he lay deathly still. The cabin was dark except for the glow of faint lights mounted on the instrument board up forward. Against them he saw the silhouette of the pilot crouched above the stick. He made
out another figure then, a man slouched in a side seat closer by him.
The Agent heard a rumble of voices muffled by the roar of motors. Finally, he accustomed his ears to the roar and segregated it from the voices by intense concentration. He made out the words of the man sitting beside the pilot.
“We’re lucky to get away from that devil.”
The pilot’s helmeted and goggled head nodded. “Right. And we got the money. Too bad we couldn’t have killed him.”
The big man beside the pilot went on. “Think of it—that devil disguised himself as Strickland. If I had known that he was Secret Agent ‘X’—”
“We got the money,” said the pilot. “To hell with him.”
Agent “X” rose, edged forward, his gun ready. The big man turned as though some inner sense had warned him. He grabbed for a gun. The Agent leaped, lashing out with his rock-hard fist. A frenzied cry was cut off as the big man toppled. His goggled head crashed to the floor of the plane.
The pilot whirled in his seat, shrieked out an oath and leaped from the controls. A gun came to his hand like lightning. He fired at the same instant the Agent’s gun stabbed flame.
A lurch of the plane threw them both sidewise spoiling their aims. Bullets snarled by the Agent’s face. He jerked the trigger again and it clicked on a fired shell. He flung Guldi’s gun from him, sprang forward along the cabin as the pilot sought to kill him.
The pilot, bracing himself against the plane’s tipping side, realized apparently that he would miss again. He met the Agent’s attack with a tigerish spring. Their bodies locked together. They stumbled, fought, swayed madly in the rocking plane. The pilot’s leg thrust accidentally against the stick, shoving it forward. The plane ceased its climb, shivered and fell off on one wing. The nose dropped. The plane began to dive toward the sea with the roar of its wide open engine mounting.
The pilot had wrapped frenzied arms around “X’s” body, gasped: “I’m going to kill you, Secret Agent “X!”
They both fell forward against the instrument panel. A light crashed out. The plane gave another sickening lurch as the stick was struck.
Gasping for breath, “X” freed one fist and began to deliver short-arm blows. The plane was hurtling seaward now, eating up space in a shrieking power dive. He must get the upper hand soon, or they would all hurtle to destruction. At this speed the water would smash the ship like a field of concrete. There was no time for strategy or cunning.
“X” DROVE his fists in jolting punches against the other’s body. He struck the pistol from the pilot’s hand, struck down the fingers that sought to close around his throat.
The plane gave a fearful sidewise twist, hurling them both against the stick. “X” regained his balance. He caught the other’s helmeted head, held it a moment and delivered a savage punch straight to the point of the chin. The pilot collapsed.
Dizzily, “X” braced himself in a mad world of roaring sound and plunging speed. He pulled the pilot’s slumped body away from the controls, eased gingerly into the padded seat. Thousands of feet had been lost. The black glimmer of the sea was straight before the gray plane’s nose. “X” cut the throttle, slipped his feet against the rudder pedals, drew back on the taut stick slowly.
The wings shivered like a stricken bird’s. The beat of the wind against flat wires and struts was a blasting, frenzied shriek. It seemed till the last second that the plane was going to strike the surface. It came out of its wild dive with the gray pontoons skimming the water, sending out sheets of spray.
“X” climbed again, mounting till the plane was on an even course. He left the controls a moment and went back into the cabin, flashing his light on the faces of the two unconscious men. He lifted the goggles that had shielded their faces. His mouth set grimly. Their identities came as no surprise to him. Charlie Babette had muttered: “Not a bad fellow—a sportsman.” That and Hobart’s report tonight had brought conviction to “X’s” mind. A chain of seemingly weird circumstances had led to a startling but logical conclusion. The Agent went back to his controls, banked, turned, and began a long glide earthward….
At the Guldi house a detective stationed outside suddenly pointed into the graying dawn sky and swore. The plane that had thundered mysteriously away from the cove was coming back. It was diving earthward.
“It’s falling!” the detective gasped. “It’s gonna crash—right here.”
The plane seemed to be dropping utterly out of control. It slipped from side to side in a falling leaf maneuver. At last it flattened out of a short dive, quivered and plummeted down in a pancake landing. Scrub pines lay beneath. The plane sogged in among them, slid flat pontoons along their tops an instant, finally coming to a standstill in an upright position.
The detective didn’t know he had witnessed a crash landing such as only a master pilot could accomplish. It seemed to him the crazy freak of some mad fall.
The man ran forward, shouting to his friends. G-men who had just leaped from an arriving car joined him. They forced their way to the gray plane and found that the door was open. Stranger still, the two men inside lay on the floor unconscious, though it didn’t seem that the crash should have knocked them out.
As lights played over their faces harsh cries went up.
“It’s Vernon Lasher and his son!”
“They weren’t kidnaped at all!”
“They must be the crooks—the ones behind the rubber-corpse killings!”
Faces strained in amazement at this weirdest of revelations. A G-man yanked the rear door open, examined the bundles stuffed with thousands in cash, and saw that here was concrete proof that Lasher and his son were the extortionists, trying to make a desperate getaway. As if sardonic Fate had taken a hand at the last, they had been returned to one of the entrances to their hidden hide-out.
Detectives and G-men clustered closer, speculating up this strange ending to an amazing chain of crime. And suddenly a whistle sounded—floating eerily out of the darkness, birdlike, musical, seeming to fill the whole air at once, its source hard to locate. The detectives listened uneasily, wondering what it could be. Gradually it faded.
None of those standing by the fallen plane guessed that the whistle came from the lips of Secret Agent “X,” man of mystery and destiny, and that it indicated the finish of another great crime case.
Ringmaster of Doom
Chapter I
MAN FROM THE PAST
That night the George Marcus house was gay with hospitality that had become traditional. Soft lights would gleam, glasses clink, and dance bands drone until the dawn silvered the grass on the little hills that surrounded the house. George Marcus, millionare bachelor, entertained lavishly just twice a year; then the gates of his estate were open, and the rest of the time were tightly closed.
At first, it had seemed odd that George Marcus should be a recluse three hundred and sixty-three days out of the year only to become the perfect host on two nights snatched at random from his lonely calendar. But after a decade of the same method, society had got used to the idea. Everyone who was anyone, tried to get invitations to Marcus’ two annual parties. The parties were either so modern in tone as to be spectacular, or so old-fashioned as to be quaint and breath taking in their loveliness.
But whether the old or the modern idea was carried out, the George Marcus parties set the trend for entertainment throughout the social season. That was the reason that no conscientious hostess would dare to miss them.
Along the drive, that coiled like a flat snake between the little hills of the Marcus estate, a car moved. An odd car it was, to be going to the Marcus house—a car with flapping top, rusted fenders, and a sputtering motor. Suddenly, the driver and only occupant of the car slammed on brakes that howled. He had sighted directly ahead of him, a swinging red lantern. He leaned far out to see around the bug-spattered windshield. The man who had been swinging the red lantern came running toward him.
The driver of the car had a thin, keen face, a prominent nose, and a
n explosive manner of speaking. “Matter? Bridge out?” he demanded, turning his frigid, skeptical eyes on the man with the lantern.
The man with the lantern was without a hat. His pale skin blended into pale hair. With the possible exception of a hint of piercing eyes beneath heavy lids, there was nothing remarkable in his commonplace features. “Nope,” he replied to the question put by the man in the car. “No bridges on this drive.” He jabbed his thumb at a badge that gleamed on his coat lapel. The word watchman was engraved upon it. “Just got to see your invitation.”
The driver of the rattle-trap uttered a scratchy laugh. “Invitation? Me invited to this blowout? Say, don’t you know me?”
The man beside the car held up his lantern. Rays from the red globe gave the man at the wheel a slight satanic appearance. The watchman shook his head. “Can’t say that I do.”
“I’m Paul Naramour, feature writer for the Trib. Don’t you read the papers?”
“Sometimes,” replied the watchman dully. “But you’ll save a lot of palaver, if you’ll just show me your credentials. If you haven’t got an invitation, perhaps you’ve got a letter from your editor or something.”
Paul Naramour fumbled inside the inner pocket of his coat. “I’ve covered these blowouts for three years,” he said, “and never had any trouble crashing ’em yet. Why this sudden icy barrier between Millionaire Marcus and a gentleman of the press?”
“Got to check up on everybody tonight,” replied the watchman. “Mr. Marcus is expecting an uninvited guest—and a dangerous one.”
Paul Naramour’s eyes narrowed. He leaned far out over the car, fumbled absently at a battered package of cigarettes. “Yeah?” he said huskily. “Who?”
The watchman’s eyes were leisurely scanning the letter Naramour had handed him. It was from George Marcus, directing the editor of the Tribune to send a reporter to the party. Clipped to the letter was Naramour’s pass card. Again the glint of piercing eyes as the watchman looked quickly at Naramour’s face. “Eh? What did you say?”
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 5 Page 37