She turned from the Secret Agent. “Don’t worry. There’s a way out! You have to oxydize the chemical producing the Amber Death. If you get it in time, everything will be all right. That’s how they prevent the Amber Death from reaching the extortion victim’s right hand.” She fairly flew around the room, dumping chemicals into a glass beaker. “Watch the door, Bill. I’m through with the Ghoul! If he comes in here, kill him!”
The strange, unexpected entrance of the girl could be explained only by the fact that Bill Morgan was evidently some one who was very dear to her. As soon as she had entered the room, “X” recognized her voice. In fact, he had suspected from the very first that she was Drew Devon so disguised as to lend Oriental atmosphere to the opium palace and at the same time enable the Ghoul to have a person he trusted watching over the opium den at all times.
“X” watched Drew Devon work. She was mixing a strange concoction. He knew that if she failed in her efforts to halt the creeping death, he would have not only lost his life but also the chance of ridding the earth of the Ghoul. He looked down at his hand. The flesh was faintly tinged with yellow. He knocked the back of his hand against the edge of the work table. It rapped out like a wooden thing and there was no feeling in it.
Pale beneath the yellow paint she wore on her face, Drew Devon turned toward him. She filled a huge hypodermic syringe with the pinkish fluid from the beaker. She peeled back both sleeves of his coat, jabbed the needle into his flesh, and pumped the pinkish liquid into his blood stream.
“The other arm, quickly,” she whispered. And again the needle went home.
A TINGLING sensation raced through “X’s” body. But he had yet to regain his old strength. Drew Devon hurried back to the shelves, filled a clean beaker with liquid from a bottle, and handed it to him. “Drink this,” she commanded.
He took the beaker and drank gratefully. It had contained some stimulant not altogether unfamiliar to “X”.
“Feeling better?” she asked with a smile.
“A lot,” “X” replied. Already the stiffness had passed from his legs and arms. “Where’d you learn—”
“Vardson taught me,” she said quickly. “I’ve helped him in the laboratory. But we mustn’t stay here.”
“Right! I’m goin’ back after that damned Ghoul!”
Drew Devon seized both of his arms. “Bill! You can’t! Come, we’ll go to my room, until I can plan a way for us to escape. You can’t match wits with the Ghoul! Oh, I’ve risked everything to save you. I can’t lose you now. Next time, he might throw you into the ant pit as he has Vardson. Come quickly!”
Holding him by the hand, Drew Devon led him through a door, and into a hall. At the end of the hall and down a short flight of steps, she stopped in front of the door of her room. Taking a key from the pocket of her Oriental garb, she unlocked the door.
It was a small room, but comfortably furnished. She forced “X” to sit down into a chair. Going to a table, she selected a cigarette, lighted it, and regarded him through half-closed eyes for a few minutes. Suddenly, she got up, crossed the room and kissed him impulsively. She sat down on the arm of the chair and dropped her arm over his shoulder. Her face close to his she whispered dreamily:
“Don’t know why I love you, Bill. Don’t know why I staked everything on saving you.”
“X” looked into the lovely face and frowned. “Love me as much as you did that rich slob of a Calvert?” he demanded.
Drew Devon recoiled from him, stood up. “Bill! Jealous, after all I’ve done for you? You know I hated Calvert. I had some old letters he’d written me. I was trying to collect five grand on them, and he wouldn’t come across. The piker! Satisfied?”
“X” shook his head. “Not yet, Drew.”
The girl’s yellow-tinted forehead crimped into a tight frown. For a moment, fury possessed her to such an extent that she could not speak. When she had found her tongue, she spoke in an icy whisper: “So, I am Drew, am I? An error on your part! So I save the man I think to be Bill Morgan, and he calls me Drew—a name he has never known me by! Now, I know you—Secret Agent ‘X’!”
WITH the speed of a striking snake, her hand darted inside her garment, and reappeared with a small, black automatic. The pistol cracked almost as soon as she had drawn it. But at the first movement of the girl toward the hiding place of the weapon, “X” had leaped to his feet.
He swerved slightly to the right and the shot spent itself on the wall behind him. She had no time to pull the trigger again before “X” had seized the gun and twisted it from her hand. He turned the muzzle toward her.
“Tell me where Betty Dale is!” he demanded.
For a moment, Drew Devon’s eyes were riveted in terror on the gun in the Agent’s hands. Then a smile curved her lips. “I do not think Secret Agent ‘X’ would kill a woman. I am taking advantage of your gallantry.”
“X’s” left hand sought the pocket of his coat, and flashed out again. The hypodermic needle, which he had filled previous to his impersonation of Morgan, stabbed into the woman’s arm. A shrill cry of terror died in her throat as she fell forward into “X’s” arms.
He carried her to a little closet at one side of the room, and placed her on the floor. He removed the black wig the woman wore and slipped it into his pocket. Then he took a pair of Oriental pajamas, similar to the ones Drew Devon wore, from a clothes hanger in the closet. These he concealed under his coat.
He turned next to the woman’s dressing table. Removing the small tube of plastic volatile material from the heel of his left shoe, he lost no time in making slight but effective alterations in his make-up. He added deep lines in his cheeks, a crook in his nose, and removed the black wig which had been part of his Morgan disguise. Then armed with the little automatic he had taken from Drew Devon, he opened the door and stepped into the hall.
“X” knew that he would have to go down into the prison cells on the floor below. It was there that he must first look for Betty Dale. At the end of the hall, instead of opening the door that led into the second laboratory, he turned to the door at his left. This door yielded when he used one of the keys that he had removed from Morgan’s pockets. Down another short hall he came to what appeared to be a blank wall.
A careful search under the beam of his flashlight revealed a tiny black button near the base of the panel. He knew that this was a door leading into China Bobby’s office—the connecting link between the half-caste’s dope den and the underground realm of the Ghoul. Without further hesitation he pressed the button. An electric signal burred; the panel slid back.
The office of China Bobby was empty. “X” went to the half-caste’s desk and examined the switchboard that he had seen China Bobby use. It was covered with perhaps a dozen different buttons, each one marked with a letter. He had to take a chance on the button marked “C” opening the door into the cells in which the Ghoul kept his prisoners. At a touch of the button, another panel slid back and “X” recognized the dark stone stairway that led to the catacombs below.
As he hurried through the door, a sharp clicking sound behind him, stopped him. He shot a glance over his shoulder, but saw no one in the office.
“X” ran down the steps. That clicking sound had worried him. It might be some sort of a signal that would send a troup of the Ghoul’s men hard on his heels.
As he entered the row of cells, the stale air was knifed by a giggling shriek of stark madness. From directly ahead of him the cry had come. He hurried forward, flashlight darting from one cell to another. Suddenly, he stopped. Yawning in the floor, in front of him, was a pit covered with an iron grating set in the floor. “X” sent his light beam down into the opening, revealing a scene of revolting horror.
In the pit, the mad scientist, Vardson, ripped his garments from his back; tore at his own flesh with his fingernails. The man was a raving maniac—a product of the Ghoul’s torture. The floor of the pit was like a single moving, red shadow. Stinging ants! Vardson’s body teemed with noxious, stingi
ng little lives. A myriad of tiny legs scurried across his face, into his eyes.
THAT such might be the fate of Betty Dale spurred “X” into action. Vardson was beyond help. But Betty—
He stopped only long enough in the cell where he had left the unconscious Morgan, to regain his special equipment. Then he was out into the narrow passage again, the searching beam of his light darting from one cell to another.
As the passage branched abruptly to the right, “X” came upon a little cell apart from the others. Through the iron grating, he saw the form of a woman extended at full length on the wooden bench. It was Betty. Her eyes were closed, and she was breathing heavily. She must have been drugged, for without the assistance of narcotics no one could have slept within the range of the tortured Vardson’s screaming voice.
With feverish haste, he unlocked the cell door with one of Morgan’s keys. Under the light of his flash, he searched his pockets and laid out strips of transparent adhesive, makeup material, yellow pigment, and the wig and pajamas he had taken from Drew Devon. He knelt beside the sleeping girl. His fingers worked quickly and skilfully.
With the transparent adhesive tape, he stretched the flesh around the girl’s eyelids so that her eyes attained the slanting appearance of a Chinese. Then he spread on plastic volatile material and yellow pigment over Betty’s face. And when he had completed his task, Betty looked the exact counterpart of Drew Devon when the latter was disguised for service in the opium den. He completed the disguise by putting the black wig over Betty’s blonde curls.
Then he gave her a stimulating hypodermic that brought her out of unconsciousness in a few seconds. The girl sat up, stared about her with terror-filled eyes. She met the strange face of the man who had worked miracles with her appearance. Her lips formed the unuttered question: “Who?”
“X” smiled reassuringly. “Don’t you know me, Betty?” He drew the letter “X” on the bench.
She gasped. “How did you get here?”
“Tell you later,” he said. Picking up his pocket mirror, he held it before her face. “While you’re getting used to being a pretty Chinese lass, you can tell me by what trick the Ghoul brought you here.”
She stared for a moment in astonishment at her new features. Then: “I received a call from a man whom I thought was the city editor. He told me to go over to China Bobby’s restaurant, that another reporter would meet me there. It was a woman I had never seen before who met me. It must have been one of the Ghoul’s gang, because she led me back through a door and into a room where there was a man with a golden veil over his face. He asked me all sorts of questions about you. I didn’t say anything. He said something about putting me with the ants or something like that. Some one carried me down here. I was drugged. I don’t remember anything else.”
The Agent’s eyes burned with fury as he thought of what might have happened to Betty. “Just the kind of a trick the Ghoul would try,” he said. “Do you remember Drew Devon? Think you can impersonate her? You’ve got to. You must get out of this rotten hole.”
“But you? What will happen to you?”
KNOWING the generous nature of the girl, “X” knew that she valued his safety above her own. If he was to persuade her to leave him in this moment of great danger, he knew that he would have to give her some responsibility outside the Ghoul’s headquarters. “My work is not yet completed here,” he told her. “Your task is to warn the mayor.”
“The mayor!” she exclaimed. “You mean the Ghoul might use his Amber Death on the mayor?”
“X” nodded. “And if the Ghoul succeeds in his plan, who knows but what he will next turn his eyes toward Washington! But you must hurry. You’ll have to put on these Oriental pajamas to make your disguise complete. Quickly, now. Everything depends upon the speed with which we act. If you stay here, the least the Ghoul will do is torture you in an attempt to gain some information.”
Betty needed no urging. She had already slipped out of her dress, and was putting on the pajamas. She had scarcely fastened the jacket of the garment when a whispering sound broke through the darkness. It was the voice of the Ghoul. It seemed to be coming from the hall right outside the cell.
“Spy, do you presume that at this very moment I am not watching you?”
Betty uttered a frightened little gasp. She clutched the Agent’s arm. “What was that?” she whispered.
“The Ghoul,” he replied softly, “has loudspeakers located everywhere in this place. He isn’t watching. He can see no better through this gloom than we can. It’s the colossal egoism of the man. He must have seen me enter this prison from that peephole he has in the wall of the office.”
“But if he knows you’re down here, why doesn’t he send some one after you?”
“X” did not answer that question. He knew that that was exactly what the Ghoul would do, or had already done. His mind was busy, trying to see a way out of their difficulty. He took Betty by the arm and led her through the door of the cell. He turned out his flashlight and handed it to her. “Don’t use it until you leave me,” he said. “We’ll work as far toward the steps as we can. Don’t trip over that grating in the floor.”
A low moaning sound came up from beneath their very feet. Then the stagnant air was rent by an hysterical laugh. Vardson, in the ant pit.
Betty clung closely to the Agent as he piloted her through the darkness. “Leave you? Do you think I could leave you—now?” came her tremulous whisper. But the element of concern for the Agent in her voice dominated any indication of personal fear.
“X’s” heart was pounding like a triphammer. For all he knew, the darkness shrouded some diabolical trick of the Ghoul. His arm encircled Betty’s shoulders. For a moment held her with fierce tenderness. Then reason mastered sentiment. He pressed Drew Devon’s automatic into her hand. “Shoot to kill, if you have to,” he told her as they moved slowly up the passage. “In this same direction, you’ll find a flight of steps leading out of here. If the door at the top isn’t open, you’ll find a little black button right at the bottom of the door. Press it. Once in China Bobby’s office, you’ll have to experiment with the switchboard to find the button that opens the front door leading into the opium den. Don’t worry. I’ll probably be right behind you.”
Again the Ghoul’s voice whispered along the corridor. “Spy, Secret Agent ‘X,’ or whoever you are, my eyes are upon you. My hand is lifted to strike!”
Betty tried to suppress a shudder.
“Be brave, Betty,” the Agent whispered. “He may try some sort of a trick. But remember, you are Drew Devon. If we are cornered, you must pretend to struggle with me. You must cry out that I am Secret Agent ‘X’.”
A little sob broke from Betty’s lips. “No—no! I will never do that! Not for all the mayors and presidents!”
“X” STOPPED, seized the girl’s shoulders, and held her tightly. “Betty!” he whispered sternly. “And I always thought that I could rely upon you! You must do exactly as I tell you if the Ghoul’s men come. It will give you an opportunity to get through the lines. Your disguise is perfect. In the part of Drew Devon, you cannot do otherwise than denounce me. And remember, when you reach China Bobby’s office, I will be right behind you!”
“But you can’t hope to escape!”
“I can escape, only if you play your part. Hush!…. There’s some one coming up the passage behind…. Remember your part—struggle, cry out that I am Secret Agent ‘X’…. Wait—”
Breathless, they listened in the darkness. Soft, padded footsteps sounded behind them. And in front of them, the rasp of a door opening. Husky whisperings. They were between two squads of the Ghoul’s men.
Suddenly, a barrage of light-beams shot through the darkness in front of them. And from behind, men came running. “X” turned and seized Betty with his left arm. His right hand closed gently but realistically over her throat. She struggled, kicking and screaming. “Help! This man is Secret Agent ‘X’. Help!” she cried.
And as the twin
squads bore upon them, “X” pushed Betty from him and toward the door. He turned to meet his foremost foeman, knowing that the man would not dare use his gun for fear of hitting the girl he supposed to be Drew Devon. “X’s” fist smashed into the man’s jaw, sent him reeling backwards.
The agent ducked under a descending knife, seized the man by the waist, picked him up bodily, and threw him back over his shoulder. As he fought with silent fury, he saw a bright flash of color move through the criminal band, and streak toward the steps. Betty had played her part well. She was on the way to safety.
But the girl gone, “X” knew the criminals would not hesitate to use firearms. Though he wore a bullet proof vest, he knew that at such close range he could not hope that vulnerable parts of his body would escape the flying shot. But he had prepared for that crucial moment. Beating back his nearest opponents with Herculean blows of his left fist, his right hand plunged into his pocket and closed upon a little glass capsule that had been enclosed in his medical kit.
He took a deep breath, sprung aside to avoid a knife-thrust, and dropped the fragile glass bubble on the floor of the passage. There was a sharp pop and instantly a cloud of gray vapor rose from the floor. A man directly in front of “X” spilled forward on his face. “X” hurdled him; brushed aside another staggering, choking man; drove his fist into the surprised face of another, and he was free. He ran up the passage, pounded up the stone stairway, and sprang into China Bobby’s office.
The half-caste was there, his back toward “X.” He was holding Betty by the arms, evidently thoroughly convinced that she was Drew Devon.
“But, Drew,” China Bobby insisted, “you can’t go out in the streets in broad daylight in the outfit of a Chinese girl. It might lead the police to investigate these cellars.”
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 4 Page 46