Fury and fear welled up in Jason Hertz’s mind. His lips opened and he gave a loud, involuntary cry.
“Fool!” hissed the man beside him.
Hertz shrank back in his seat, afraid of what he had done. For his cry had echoed startlingly through the night. A light flashed somewhere on the wall of the prison—another and another. A siren rose like the voice of some monster, beginning with a throaty gurgle and lifting into a furious, spine-chilling wail. The purple shaft of a searchlight on one of the prison towers winked on. Its shimmering beam moved, swung downward, centering on the car. An instant later Hertz cried out again in a frenzy of fear.
For a flickering pinpoint of light leaped out on the wall of the prison. There was a staccato rattle like the drum taps of doom. And, in the air around the speeding car, there came the deathly whine of steel-jacketed bullets.
Chapter II
Forced Testimony
UNDER the lawyer’s hands, the roadster leaped ahead in the darkness like a live thing. A machine-gun bullet struck against the metal back of the car. Another passed screamingly between the two men’s heads, slapped against the shatterproof windshield, and sent spider-web lines radiating in all directions.
Hertz, his face white and ghastly, crouched whimpering in his seat. He stole a sidewise glance at the lawyer’s features, saw the hawklike nose, the jutting chin, and deep-set eyes. The man was driving calmly, as though death were not riding the wind behind him.
They passed at last beyond the searchlight’s range, and the bullets ceased to come. There would be pursuit; but it seemed nothing outside of a bullet could catch that speeding car. Under its long, low hood the smoothly running motor rose into a mighty paean of power. The speedometer needle swung to sixty, seventy, eighty as the car leaped ahead along the dark road. Hertz spoke again.
“You gotta tell me where I’m going. I won’t stand for this.”
“No?” The single word was ironic, mocking.
“Where you taking me—that’s what I wanta know.”
It seemed that a grim smile spread over the lawyer’s face. He was silent, and leaden fear gnawed at Hertz’s heart again. He only knew that they were leaving the city behind; that they had reached a country road. Then the car swung sidewise, turning off the smooth macadam. It passed along a dirt lane between rows of pines that moaned and whispered in the night wind. They came to a jarring stop.
“Get out!” said Gibbons.
The mystery of the night seemed to deepen. Hertz’s nerves were almost at the breaking point. He crouched back, showing his teeth, his hands hooked like talons.
“I won’t!” he shrieked. “I’ll—I’ll—”
Under the instrument-board light he found himself looking into the sinister muzzle of an automatic. His craven spirit weakened.
“All right I’ll go. Take that gat away. Don’t shoot!”
But the gun was not withdrawn. Hertz walked ahead, trembling, with the gun in his back, and the outlines of a house suddenly rose out of the blackness before him. It looked like a farmhouse, low and ramshackle.
A key grated in the lock. He was pushed inside and the door closed after him. There was the stuffy smell of deserted rooms and musty carpets. Gibbons appeared to know what he was about. He pushed Hertz into a rear chamber, struck a match and lighted an oil lamp. The windows of the room were tightly boarded up. Gibbons thrust a chair forward and motioned Hertz to sit down.
Alone with the mysterious lawyer, Hertz had a deeper sense of dread. The compelling eyes of Gibbons were upon him again. He sensed mystery behind them, and power. It was as though they were boring into his very soul. The voice of the lawyer sounded harshly.
“You are free of prison, Jason Hertz. In return you are going to give me information!”
So, that was it! A snarl rose on Hertz’s lips. His eyes gleamed wickedly.
“I won’t tell you nothing. I don’t know nothing!”
The gray-haired man before him smiled again and drew a clipping from his pocket. He held it in front of Hertz’s face. It had been cut from a newspaper—CATRELLA KILLED AT SCENE OF TORTURE MURDER.
“He was one of your pals, Hertz. You’ve seen the papers in prison. You know that murders are being committed—men tortured to death. Joe Catrella was in on it in some way. Give me the names of his friends.”
The question came relentlessly; but Jason Hertz shook his head.
“I don’t know nothing—I won’t talk,” he cried.
He’d heard rumors of the series of hideous killings that were baffling the police. Prominent people found dead—tortured. “The Torture Trust,” the papers called it. Fear sealed his lips. He knew little; but he dared not tell even that. Death was the penalty meted out to a squealer in the underworld, and there was mystery and horror behind this murder wave that eclipsed anything he had ever heard of before. There was an uncanniness to it that made his spine crawl. He wished he had stayed in jail.
“I don’t know nothing,” he repeated wildly.
HIS voice died in a gasp. He found himself looking into the eyes of the lawyer, found himself unable to turn away. Like a bird staring at a snake, he was held fascinated.
The lawyer’s face was coming closer to his—closer, closer. The lawyer’s eyes were pools of blazing light.
Hertz cowered in his seat, pressing till the rungs of the chair cut into his back. Terror of the man before him rose in his throat and seemed to choke him. He sensed again that he was in the presence of a person who had powers beyond his knowledge—vast depths of strength and magnetism. It seemed that his own brain was being battered into submission.
“Think back, Jason Hertz. It is March, 1933. You have not been caught by the police as yet. You are not in jail. You are with Joe Catrella, plotting evil. What is your understanding with him? Who are his friends?”
The eyes of the lawyer were relentless. His voice went on droningly. Jason Hertz felt himself slipping—slipping into the mysterious depths of hypnosis.
From drowsiness, Hertz went into laxity of posture, slumping in his chair, staring with glassy eyes into the face of the man who called himself Crawford Gibbons. Then slowly his body became rigid; his fingers tightened around the arms of the chair; his legs pressed stiffly against the floor. He was in the third stage of the hypnotic state, the stage known as catalepsy; his will completely under the dominance of the strange man before him.
“You will speak, Jason Hertz. You will answer my questions.”
Sweat broke out on the forehead of the escaped convict. Fear still fought for control of his subconscious mind. But the man in front of him substituted another fear, deeper, more imminent.
Gibbons reached around the side of Hertz, his forefinger extended. He pressed the tip of it against Hertz’s spine.
“There’s a machine gun at your back, ready to blow you to pieces, Hertz! You can feel it there, pressing, pressing. You must speak. Who were Catrella’s friends? Who gave you your orders when you were with him?”
A gurgle came from Hertz’s lips. They moved slowly. The cords in his neck stood out.
“I—don’t—know!” he gasped. “The Bellaire Club. We hung around there. Panagakos, the manager, may have been—I got notes in the blue vase—telling me what to do—the vase on the dance floor. So did Catrella. We never knew—who the big shot was—the guy we was working for. We sent notes to him the same way. Don’t kill me—for God’s sake! That’s all I know; I swear it. They got me—in that spaghetti-joint holdup—when I tried to make a little dough for myself on the side. I had a moll and she—”
His voice trailed off. For the lawyer, Gibbons, had stopped listening and had taken his eyes away. A man in the hypnotic state tells the truth because he must. Jason Hertz had told all of interest that he knew!
Gibbons moved back and Hertz sat staring straight ahead of him. His labored breathing told that he was in the hypnotic trance. He might stay thus for hours.
Gibbons drew a pencil and notebook from his pocket. He placed the pencil in Hert
z’s fingers, put the notebook under his hand.
“Write, Jason Hertz! Write one of those notes to your boss—telling him you are out of prison, ready to serve him again.”
The fingers of Jason Hertz moved mechanically. The pencil whispered across the paper like the pencil of a spiritualistic medium doing automatic writing. When the note was finished. Gibbons tore the page loose, folded it, and put it in his pocket.
Then he began a series of quick, mysterious movements.
HE brought the light nearer Hertz, studied his face, and, after a few seconds, walked to a cabinet standing against the wall. He opened the front and drew from it a collection of odd-shaped apparatus.
There was a magnesium flare set in the center of a silvered, parabolic reflector. There was a small movie camera, a dictaphonic machine driven by a spring motor, and a set of elaborate measuring instruments based on the formulae of the Bertillon System. He placed them in front of Jason Hertz.
Lighting the flare, he focused it on Hertz’s face and body.
“Get up!” he ordered. “Walk around, Hertz.”
The escaped convict obeyed, rising from his seat and moving about the room in the manner of a sleepwalker. But his muscles made characteristic movements that the lens of the movie camera in Gibbons’ hands began to record.
“Sit down,” said Gibbons after a time.
Again Hertz obeyed, and Gibbons brought the camera closer.
“Smile,” he commanded, and Hertz did so. Then in quick succession Gibbons ordered the felon to scowl, laugh, register fear, surprise, and arrogance.
He set the camera down with a snap, turned off the magnesium light, and started the motor of the dictaphone machine.
“Now, Hertz—follow me. Repeat first the vowel sounds—aaa—ah—oh—ooo—ee! Now the consonants. Ker—ter—bur—mer—”
The needle of the dictaphone recorded the vibrations of Hertz’s voice on the hard-rubber cylinder. Gibbons was using the science of phonetics, setting down every inflection of the convict’s lips, throat, and tongue for future use. When he was satisfied that he had missed nothing, he closed the dictaphone and set to work with his measuring instruments, going over the planes of Hertz’s face. He jotted down the widths of Hertz’s eyes, mouth, and nostrils, the angle of his jaw, the slope of his forehead, the height of his cheek bones.
Satisfied at last, he put his apparatus away, keeping only the movie film, the cylinder from the dictaphone, and the figures he had set down.
He took up the notebook and pencil and began scribbling a brief note.
“You have betrayed your friends, Hertz,” he wrote. “You know the penalty of betrayal in the underworld. There is murder abroad, torture, horror. Your only chance to live is to escape from the country. I am giving you that chance. To catch a wolf I am freeing a rat. In the enclosed envelope you will find a passport already filled out and a boat ticket to South America. Take them, go, and never come back.”
The lawyer took a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket, put it in the note he had written, placed it in the envelope with the ticket and passport and pinned it to the front of Hertz’s coat. Then he paused a moment, holding the pencil in his hand.
With a strange, grim smile on his face, he reached forward and made a mark on the envelope—a mysterious “X” that seemed to have no purpose or meaning.
But if Jason Hertz could have seen it, he would have understood more about the strange adventure he had been through. For the man whose symbol and trade-mark that “X” was had built up a reputation which had reached even behind prison walls. It was a reputation for swift movement, startling courage, masterly disguises that no man could penetrate—and mysterious motives that no man could fathom.
It was a reputation that baffled the police as well as the underworld. For the man who hid behind “X,” symbol of the unknown quantity, seemed to be working against crime, even while classed as a criminal.
Gibbons turned then and strode through the door into the night, and behind him floated an eerie yet melodious whistle that had in it an unearthly quality like a voice from some other world.
Chapter III
The Agent’s Hide-Out
IT was an hour later that Gibbons, the lawyer, parked his roadster and walked along a quiet street at the outskirts of the city. His movements were quick, eager. There was a strange, restless brightness in his eyes.
The silence of the night was punctured by the shrill cry of a newsboy, peddling an early morning edition. Gibbons bought a paper and the restlessness in his eyes deepened as he stared at the front page. Black headlines were spread across it. They told of another mysterious torture murder—a millionaire’s son found dead in his penthouse apartment, his face eaten away by acid.
Somewhere down the block a police siren sounded and a green roadster whirled by. Gibbons, watching from the shadows, recognized the man in it—a detective from the homicide squad. Murder seemed to whisper through the darkness of the night. Menace lay like a pall over the city.
The lawyer’s pace increased. Once he paused in his swift stride to press a hand to the left side of his chest. An old wound, received on a battlefield in the World War, had given him a momentary twinge of pain.
A harsh laugh fell from his lips. Years ago doctors had predicted that he had only a few months to live; but he had gone on living, defying death. Perhaps it was this closeness to death that made him so restless—or perhaps it was something else.
He reached a wealthy residential section at length. The river flowed beside him, millionaires’ homes and expensive apartment buildings rose at his right. At the corner of the block he stopped. A high wall followed the line of the side street. A huge pile of masonry, bleak and austere, towered above the sidewalk, the windows of it boarded up. It was the old Montgomery mansion, facing the river, the house that the litigation of heirs, quarreling about the estate, had kept empty for years. Its luxurious rooms were gathering dust now. Mice moved unmolested across its polished floors. Moths were nibbling at the expensive rugs.
The man who called himself Gibbons turned and walked down the side street. There was no one in sight. He followed the wall as silently as a shadow. A few gaunt shrubs that had not been properly tended for years made a sparse fringe along the wall.
Suddenly the man stopped. He parted two shrubs and stepped behind them. His hands moved in the darkness for an instant. An old door leading into the ancient garden swung open. The door closed softly behind him.
He was in a place of ruin, decay, and desolation with the teeming life of the city shut away. Under the glow of the sky overhead, he picked his way through the garden, passed statues fallen from their pedestals, passed a tumble-down summerhouse, passed a fountain that had long since ceased to spray moisture.
He appeared to be at home, appeared to know where he was going, appeared to belong there. He came to the rear of the house, lifted the cover of the cellar door, and descended a flight of stone steps.
A key grated in the lock. In a moment he was inside. Then he paused by another door in a rear room of the old cellar. Flashing a tiny, electric light, he pried loose a piece of paneling and stared intently at a hidden dial.
A clocklike mechanism behind the dial moved a cylinder of paper slowly like the drum of a seismograph. There was a stylus poised over the paper. It recorded blows and footfalls. The paper drum was blank, showing that for the last twenty-four hours no one had passed through the hidden passageway behind the door that led down to the black waters of the river. The man nodded in satisfaction.
He moved up into the house, to a room that was hidden beneath the huge front staircase. It was in reality the false back of the old butler’s pantry. The partition had been expertly moved forward and a door into the secret chamber was concealed by shelves that swung outward.
Here the man who had made the house his home could be as much shut away from the world as though he were in the black depths of a vault.
There were strange things in that secret room: a small chemica
l and photographic laboratory, jars, bottles, and mysterious boxes; a miniature arsenal, containing humane but efficient weapons; gas pistols that could knock a man unconscious within a radius of twenty feet; tiny, stupefying darts concealed in cigarette lighters; a concentrated tear bomb in the stem of a watch that would momentarily blind a man when he stooped to look at the time. There was also a mirror at the side of the wall under strong lights. It had three movable sides that would show every angle of a man’s face, head, and body.
GIBBONS walked up to it and stood regarding himself. Then he moved away and seated himself at a shelf before another mirror. His long, restless fingers began to stray across his face. Beneath their tips a mysterious transformation took place. He plucked tiny plates of tissue-thin metal from his nostrils—plates that had made his nose hawk-like; peeled a transparent covering of fibrous, fleshlike material from his chin and cheeks; lifted the clever, mesh-thin toupee of gray hair from his head. His whole appearance had changed.
The mirror reflected him as he really was—as he was never seen by any living soul—as he never appeared except in the silence and secrecy of this one room. The face that stared back at him from the mirror was even-featured and boyish-looking. Gray eyes that held a hint of humor in them. Brown hair and a smooth-shaven skin.
It was only when he turned his head and the light fell on his face in a certain way that new lines were brought out—lines that made him look suddenly older, mature, poised—with the record of countless experiences written in them, and indications of restless energy and driving will power that would not let him be quiet.
A grim smile came as he looked at himself. Secret Agent “X.” The man of a thousand faces—a thousand disguises—a thousand surprises! The man of whom it was whispered that he had the unofficial sanction of a great government in his fight on the criminal hordes preying upon society. The man said to be officially dead in the records of the Department of Justice—his supposed death arranged that he might disappear and fight crime in a new and startling way.
Secret Agent X – The Complete Series Volume 1 (Annotated) Page 2