When “X” saw Doeg’s taxi draw to the curb he was a good two blocks behind. He immediately plunged into a side street, parked out of sight and reappeared on foot. Doeg must not see him. He would certainly think it odd that his friend, Lorenzo Courtney, was shadowing him.
So skillful had the Agent’s maneuvers been that Doeg was unaware that he was under surveillance. He moved with a lumbering, bearlike stride on along the street, in the same direction that the taxi had been following. At the next corner he turned left, walked two blocks till he came to a section of small shops and old-fashioned brick dwellings, and paused before a cast-iron fence.
Now for the first time he manifested furtive caution. “X” had ducked out of sight in an areaway. From the shadows of this he saw Doeg survey the street in all directions. Then Doeg ran quickly up the front steps of a shuttered house and plunged a key into a lock. An instant later he disappeared from sight.
The Agent waited a full minute. He looked at his watch again. It was now eight minutes of twelve. He came from his hiding place, moved almost invisibly in the shadows, walked around a full block and approached the house which Doeg had entered from the other direction.
Ascending the steps briskly as Doeg had done he made a quick examination of the lock. He had his special chromium tools with him, was prepared to use them if necessary, but he saw at once that an odd-shaped key on Lorenzo Courtney’s ring fitted this door.
In a moment he had opened it and was inside the mysterious house. No slightest sound reached his ears. He waited a moment, then drew his cameralike sound-amplifying mechanism out. To be caught with that in his hand would be to attract certain suspicion and attack if he were seen. But a blundering examination of the building would be equally as bad.
He pressed the disc-shaped microphone to the wall, heard a faint sound and, kneeling, shifted it to the floor. Now footsteps reached his ears plainly. They moved for some time as he listened, grew fainter and fainter, as though they were traversing a corridor or passage. They were obviously on a lower level than himself.
THE AGENT moved down a rear stairway to the basement floor of the house. He was now in a room similar to that of the house where he had almost burned to death.
He pressed his microphone to the floor again, heard the footsteps on a still lower level. His eyes widened. He strode at once to a cellar door, which the shifting beam of his flashlight revealed.
He didn’t need his microphone to guide him now. The dust of these cellar stairs had been disturbed. So had the dust on the cellar floor of this supposedly empty house. Many footprints were visible to the sharp, highly trained eyes of the Secret Agent. Many footprints all leading in the same direction. He followed them across the chamber till they ended close to a seemingly blank wall.
But there were cracks in the plaster before him, and a spot at his feet showed a jumble of ancient iron pipes where the house water connected with the city’s main. There was a shut-off here with a bent handle.
The Agent pressed against the wall ahead of him. It appeared to be rigidly solid. Here was an incomprehensive mystery, a point which might have stopped him—if he had not listened to those retreating footsteps through the earpiece of his sensitive amplifier. But men did not walk through solid walls.
He looked for hidden keyholes, found none. Then made a careful examination of the pipes, till he came to the apparent cut-off. Tentatively he turned this, half expecting to hear the swish and gurgle of water in ancient, rusty pipes. None came, but there was a distinct metallic click, and the solid appearing wall before him seemed suddenly to shiver.
The Agent pressed it again, and now a section of the wall turned on a pivot disclosing a jagged, lopsided doorway, cleverly following the haphazard line of the cracks. The cut-off had been contrived into a simple but effective lock.
The Agent closed the strange door behind him as Doeg must have done, walked on across another cellar room. This time the footprints visible to the Agent’s trained eyes led to a coal bin and disappeared. He plunged through the narrow door of the bin, and saw at once that the square piece of boarding at one corner must be the top of a trapdoor. There was no other possible exit from the coal bin except the window to the street chute, and that was thick with dust.
His questing fingers found a keyhole at the side of the boarding, which another key on Courtney’s ring fitted. He thrust it in, lifted the board cover, and descended a flight of steps. The weight of the cover surprised him till he looked up and saw that it was sheathed on the inside with heavy armor plate.
At the bottom of the steps he found himself in the passage along which Chauncey Doeg’s feet had echoed. His pulses were hammering with excitement. He had seemingly entered a bizarre and fantastic world of secret crime beneath the city’s peaceful life. And these precautions, the hidden doors, the subway-like passages, spoke of infinite power and cunning. The sides of the small passage he was in, hewn from the clay soil beneath the houses, were not fresh. They were at least a month or two old, proving that the brain or brains behind the devil-dark band had plotted crime long in advance of the actual commission.
But the Agent did not pause. Somewhere ahead of him he knew a password would be demanded of him surely—one that he did not know. But his quick brain had devised a daring answer, and he was glad that he had the smell of Courtney’s whiskey on his breath.
The passage curved beneath the ground, till Agent “X” in his excitement lost all sense of direction. The evident premeditation of the thing appalled him. What chance had society against such cunning, ruthless criminals armed with such a weapon as the strange darkness? The average evil-doer would consider a catacomb like this a rare feat. It was only a secondary precaution of the devil-dark gang.
At last the long curving passage ended in another stone wall with a steel door set in it. Here was no lock, no opening, except a narrow slit in the door’s center, now closed on the inside with a plate of metal, and a small signal button beside the frame.
No password had been demanded of the Agent as yet, but here was a barrier just as dangerous. In such a criminal group, each member surely would have his own signal, and “X” did not know Lorenzo Courtney’s password.
Yet he did not stand in uncertainty even for a moment. It was the Secret Agent’s way to act quickly, play hunches, flirt with Death itself. Firmly with no tremor in it, his finger pressed the circular eye in the button’s center and stayed there.
Chapter XIV
BLUFFING DEATH
FOR a full second he held the button down, then removed his finger and fished in his pocket for a cigarette. If any bell had sounded inside he had not heard it, and he couldn’t risk the use of his amplifier now. His own flash beam had revealed a small electric bulb in the roof of the passageway’s end. Any instant that slit in the center of the door might open, and if it did, and he had his amplifier, he would be caught red-handed.
The cigarette he lighted wasn’t in answer to a nervous craving for nicotine. Neither was it an act of bravado. It was done deliberately to create a certain impression which he wished to give. The cigarette was one of Courtney’s own, cork-tipped, expensive. The Agent let it hang loosely from his lips, swayed on his toes, and hummed beneath his breath as he waited.
Almost a minute passed, and then the bulb over his head and the slit before him glimmered at the same instant. One slid back. The other lighted up with a startling click. But the Agent did not jump.
Still swaying on his toes, his cigarette lax in his mouth, Agent “X” faced the mysterious slit and smiled. He smiled—perhaps into the very face of Death.
For there was no further sound from the opened slit, no visible sign of life or movement. The chamber behind it was obviously black. The light overhead had been so arranged as not to fall into it. Yet “X” knew for a certainty that a human eye was there, an eye hidden, yet scrutinizing him with grim intensity. He sensed with intuitive awareness that he was not approved of.
At least another ten seconds passed, then a sepul
chral voice spoke:
“Lorenzo Courtney!”
“Right!” The Agent put the same aplomb into his answer as was expressed by his teetering attitude, and the drooping cigarette. He squinted one eye to shut curling smoke out, said: “What’s the idea of keeping a fellow waiting?”
There had been a sinister harshness in the words of the unseen watcher; the harshness of the same voice that “X” remembered hearing in Craig Banton’s office during the fall of the uncanny dark. His one answer was like an insult, or a defiance hurled into the teeth of doom. But it brought the retort he had expected.
“Lorenzo Courtney, why did you not give the signal?”
The Agent’s coolness in the face of this demand was incredible—as fine a bit of acting as he had ever done in his life. He shifted his cigarette, removed it lazily from his mouth, flicked ashes to the floor of the passage.
“You won’t believe it, old man! But—the fact is—I’ve forgotten it!”
The Agent gave an amused titter, and drew a hand across his mouth. His accent had perfectly duplicated the British twang of Lorenzo Courtney. He continued the same suave tones, adding a slight thickness.
“Sorry! You’ll be wanting to use your damned whips on me next. But I was called to the club this evening for a few cocktails—and—” The Agent tittered again. “Frankly this mumbo-jumbo gets on my nerves at times. You ought to thank me for finding my way in.”
A single word came from behind the metal door: “Fool!”
A second passed, while the Agent still waited, hiding the breathless uneasiness he felt. He had thrown one of the strangest and most daringly simple bluffs of his life. Told a member of a hideously vicious gang that he had forgotten a signal which he had never known. Would it, could it possibly work? The Secret Agent had rolled his dice again.
And it appeared that he had won, for abruptly the door moved back. An arm reached out, yanked him angrily inside. A harsh voice spoke in his ear.
“Once perhaps you can get away with this, Courtney. But the Chairman would never allow it a second time. That would mean death! You took the pledge like the rest of us. You are under oath! I shall be forced to tell the Chairman of your conduct.”
The “Chairman.” Agent “X’s” thoughts raced. A moment later he almost started in spite of his iron self-control. For lights blazed above his head. He got a glimpse of his surroundings, and saw that he was in no damp passage or dusty cellar now. He was in a small corridor lined with white marble tiling, and at either end a neat door showed.
THE man standing before him, the man who had questioned him and let him in, was glaring at him now. Glaring through the eyeholes of a silk mask such as “X” had found in the chair in Courtney’s apartment and now carried in his pocket. The mask hid the man’s entire face. But a thrill passed through the Agent. For in that angular frame, that horselike head with its high, narrow forehead, those hunched shoulders, “X” believed he recognized another member of a now defunct banking firm, one Victor Blass, who had had a serious run-in with both the State insurance department and Norman Coe over the legality of guaranteed second mortgages on worthless property. Blass had been a wily scoundrel who had escaped the law. And now apparently he had joined forces with outright criminals. More than that, he was apparently in second command to the mysterious Chairman himself.
The Agent’s excited speculation made him appear to be in a daze.
“Put on your mask, fool!” said Blass. “You shouldn’t have come in without it any more than you should have forgotten the signal. Hurry! The others are ready. It is nearly time for the Chairman to come.”
“X” quickly adjusted the black silk mask of Lorenzo Courtney’s over his head, and Blass gave him a shove toward the door at the farthest end of the corridor.
Agent “X” opened the door and walked into a room that amazed him even more than the marbled entryway had done. For here was a carpeted chamber, with a polished desk, upholstered chairs and ornate electrical fixtures in it. The chairs were ranged around the floor, all facing in one direction, and ten men sat in them.
The group of black-shrouded faces under the glaring lights was weirdly incongruous. Their silence and preoccupied attitudes were strangely sinister. A few turned to stare at “X” as he took his place in a vacant chair. The rest held their gaze straight ahead. At the very end of the room a fine meshed, metal grille rose from floor to ceiling. Behind this was a single chair with a desk beside it. It was toward this desk and chair that the masked men were looking.
Agent “X” waited for the mysterious Chairman to arrive. His pulses were throbbing. It was obvious that this night he was going to see the body at least of the sinister being whose brains were responsible for the activities of the devil-dark gang. The man’s face would be hidden, but his movements, his mannerisms, might give the Agent some clue to his identity.
As the seconds passed “X” glanced at some of the still figures about him. He thought he recognized the bullet-headed, heavy-set form of Chauncey Doeg, the man he had followed here. Doeg, like the others, was awaiting the arrival of the Chairman.
Then abruptly Agent “X” tensed in his chair. The fingers of his right hand pressed involuntarily against its wooden edge. For a change seemed to have come over the room. The bulbs overhead seemed suddenly dimmer. There was an odd humming sound in the air that brought back vivid memories. Light moved before his eyes for a moment. He seemed to hear the terrified shrieks and curses of frenzied men and women in his ears.
THE lights grew dimmer, dimmer. The masked figures around him took on the appearance of weirdly, distorted ghouls, of beings from some unthinkable nightmare. Then they disappeared entirely, and blackness, utter and complete, enveloped the strange room.
“X” was not deluded. He knew that the lights above him had not gone out. He knew that it would be useless to wink his own flashlight on. For this was the same uncanny darkness that had descended on the bank; the same under which innocent people had been scourged brutally with whips that they might not interfere with the looting of the vault.
There were no cries or gasps around “X” now. The masked men evidently expected this to happen, were prepared. There was stillness in the room, until a slight, metallic scrape sounded from behind the grille. Then the faint scrape of a chair, then a voice.
“Greetings! I see you are all here! The meeting is about to begin.”
Agent “X” knew that voice. Its muffled, disguised tones had spoken to him over the telephone in Courtney’s apartment, given him his instructions to come. But it was distorted beyond recognition of the man from whose lips it came. And its words seemed a mockery of his purpose in coming. For it had said: “I see you are all here.”
That meant one thing. This man, this sinister Chairman, whose arrival had been awaited so tensely, wore a mask unlike the others in that room—a mask such as all the raiders on the bank had worn, and which enabled him to see his board of directors now. It meant, beyond a shadow of doubt in the Agent’s mind, that the directors did not know the identity of the Chairman who guided them.
The muffled voice of the unseen man behind the grille continued.
“Today, gentlemen, we have witnessed the complete success of our plans. The method, given a preliminary test a week ago, and which I outlined to you all last night, has proven itself more than adequate. You have read the papers this afternoon. You have seen how our little venture baffled the public and the police. I say ‘little,’ because what we did today is as nothing compared to what we shall do.
“Already our investment has paid a hundred per cent profit. There were two million in cash and negotiable securities in the Guardian Bank. Each of you shall receive his share. Dollar for dollar for the time spent, this is greater profit than any of you ever made in the heyday of your public careers. But the future, not the present, is what we must look to. The future, when we shall all be multimillionaires—able to do what we want, buy what we want—and wield the power that is the rightful heritage of brainy men
.”
There was a gloating, confident note in the muffled voice. The hidden Chairman of this unholy meeting of criminals was talking as though he were at the head of some successful and legitimate enterprise. But brutal harshness crept into his tone as he continued.
“Discipline! As I said to you last night, that is the backbone of our organized power. We must have discipline if we are to get the maximum return from our investment. And because I realize the necessity of this perhaps more than any of you, I have given certain commands that some of you may think harsh. I have said that punishment even to death, awaits any man among you who does not submit to the majority will. I have ordered each of you to check up on the conduct of his neighbor, for in spite of the masks you now wear, most of you are known to one another. That none of you know who I am is an asset to you all, for in it lies unity and power. If it becomes necessary to impose a death sentence on one of you, I personally shall take pains to see that it is carried out.”
Chorused growls of approval greeted these sinister words. Then a harshly bitter voice spoke in the darkness a few chairs away from Agent “X.”
“Death!” the voice said savagely. “Shouldn’t we, Mr. Chairman, extend that penalty beyond our own membership to those who are and have been our enemies? There are several persons I have in mind; but one especially who exposed and helped to ruin many of us during our banking days. I refer to Norman Coe with his prying citizens committee behind him. Because of his officious meddling into my affairs I even served a prison sentence.
THE Agent guessed then that this was Chauncey Doeg speaking, still bitter that the law, through Coe’s efforts, had punished him for his shady financial dealings. The voice of the Chairman gave answer.
“You are right, my friend. There are many enemies we must and shall settle with in time. But at the moment personal revenge must wait on more important matters. And meanwhile, gentlemen, for minor breaches of discipline within your own ranks, you have the whips! The whips! You saw how well they worked on the people in the bank today. You saw how the girl we were forced to interrogate before the raid, even though she was stubborn to the point of sheer stupidity, eventually submitted under the lash.
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 4 Page 9