Secret Agent X – The Complete Series Volume 1 (Annotated)

by Paul Chadwick

  His real name and background were mysteries known, if at all, only to a chosen few. Who was Secret Agent “X”?

  Suddenly a frown crossed his face. He glanced at the telegram that lay open on a table in the strange room.

  It was in code and it had been sent from Washington, D.C., to a certain Elisha Pond, care of the First National Bank. Its seemingly meaningless words were burned into his mind like a brand.

  “Six victims claimed in Torture Trust,” the code words of the telegram stated. “Why aren’t you on the job?”

  He picked the yellow sheet up and walked toward a metal strongbox that rested on a shelf. For a moment he hesitated.

  Holding the telegram in his left hand, he ran the fingers of his right delicately along the lid of the strongbox till he reached a certain raised rivet head. He pressed this, and there was heard a faintly audible “click.”

  The rivet head corresponded to the safety catch on an automatic. But the forces that it held in leash were a thousand times more destructive. There were two pounds of trinitrotoluene concealed in a false bottom of the box which, unless the safety catch was pressed, would explode when the lid was raised. The terrible explosive guarded Agent “X’s” secrets from any one who might penetrate his hide-out during his absence.

  He laid the telegram for safe keeping on top of a special document that the box contained.

  The document bore a governmental coat of arms. It was couched in brief and simple terms, but its words carried a strange portent.

  In recognition of brilliant work performed and faithful service rendered, we confer upon you the title of Secret Agent “X.” Your way will be a lonely one. You will combat crime, fight ceaselessly against those who seek to destroy law, order, and the decencies of civilization.You will stand ready to risk your life in the cause of humanity as you did while serving your country in the Intelligence Division during the World War. For reasons, which you will comprehend, there can be no official acknowledgment of your work or sanction of your methods.Your funds, however, will be unlimited. Ten public-spirited men of great wealth, unknown to you and unacquainted with your name, have subscribed a fund for your use. A fraction of this fund is on deposit in the First National Bank. It can be drawn by you under the cognomen of Elisha Pond. This account will be replenished whenever it becomes low. Utilize it as you see fit.

  With a quick movement, the Secret Agent closed the box and released the safety catch again. There were those who knew of his existence and had absolute faith in his methods. He would endeavor to live up to that faith.

  He began going over his face again with quick, deft fingers. The boyish lines disappeared under the magic touch of his hands. Gray hairs appeared at the temples. The flabby contours and dignity of middle age came into being. He leaned forward and stared intently at his own reflection. The man of a thousand faces had again achieved a master disguise.

  Jeffrey Carter, clubman and gentleman of leisure!

  That was his role for the rest of the evening. It was after one o’clock, but he had no intention of going to bed. Sleep was a thing he seldom indulged in. Restless, dynamic forces seemed always driving him on. And tonight there was work to be done—a series of hideous murders to investigate.

  He had taken the photographs, the sound record, and the measurements of Jason Hertz for a purpose. No pains were too great, no efforts too laborious in creating a new disguise. When the time came to impersonate Hertz, he would do it with the skill of an artist and a scientist. But the time for the impersonation had not come.

  He rose, removed the clothes he had been wearing, and, from a closet containing a vast wardrobe, selected a trim tuxedo. It fitted perfectly his lithe, muscular figure; but, as he slipped into the coat, he winced again at the twinge of pain near his heart.

  That and the scar on his chest, drawn into the lines of a crude X where a piece of shrapnel had ploughed, might sometime give him away. It was a risk he was prepared to take.

  THE Secret Agent, alias Jeffrey Carter, took a taxi down town. He told the driver to swing left at Twenty-third Street, and he gave a number in a block of medium-priced apartment houses. Through the agent’s mind a series of sentences were moving, repeating themselves again and, again. Bellaire Club! Panagakos! A blue vase on the dance floor!

  He paid the driver, dismissed the cab, and walked forward. This was not a night-club section, but Agent “X” had special business. Halfway down the long, silent block he stepped back into an angle formed by the intersection of two walls. Here the deep shadows lay as black as ink.

  For a moment the Agent’s eyes narrowed. He was staring upward alone the brick facing of an apartment building opposite. There was a light showing behind the drawn shade in a window on the sixth floor.

  The Agent fingered the black bat-wing tie above his immaculate shirt front, gave his silk muffler a deft twitch, then moved briskly out of the shadows and crossed the street.

  He entered the building, passed through a small foyer where a switchboard operator was sitting, and ascended by an elevator. Walking left along a corridor, he pressed the button of apartment No. 6B.

  There came a sound of high heels clicking over the parquet flooring inside. A moment later the door opened and a girl with blonde hair and a petite figure stood on the threshold.

  She raised an uneasy hand, patted her gleaming coiffure nervously, and stared closely at Agent “X,” her blue eyes narrowing in worried speculation.

  “Miss Betty Dale, I believe,” the Agent said. “May I come in?”

  His voice now was cultured, softly modulated. The masterly disguise he had affected tonight hid his real identity. He was playing a part for a purpose.

  “My name is Jeffrey Carter,” he continued. “I’d like to talk to you a few moments if you can spare the time.”

  As he spoke, he watched the girl’s face narrowly. It expressed uneasiness, doubt, perplexity. Obviously she did not know who he was. Obviously to her he was a perfect stranger and a suspicious one at that.

  “Come in,” she said at last, a note of reluctance in her tone.

  She turned, her small pretty face screwed up in worry, and led the way into the sitting room.

  The long, powerful hands of Jeffrey Carter moved then. One of them flickered out, the fingers holding something that was like a thin stick of pomade.

  He made a quick movement close to the wall as he passed by, then slipped the mysterious stick back into his pocket. There was a faint smile on his face. His disguise had proven adequate under the gaze of a girl whose intelligence and cleverness he rated as high as her beauty.

  He reached out and snapped off the electric light switch, plunging the room into darkness.

  The girl gave a little gasp of surprise and fear; but the stranger’s voice reassured her.

  “A beacon shines for all good mariners,” he said.

  SHE turned. On the wall at her back was a glowing X, shimmering there with a strange eerie light. It was the mark of the Secret Agent—written in the purest radium paint—paint made by a secret formula and containing thousands of dollars’ worth of the world’s most expensive metal.

  “It is you then?” she said, relief in her voice.

  The Secret Agent had given her many moments of worry in his desire to use her as a test. He had come to her in dozens of different disguises. She never felt sure of her ground until he gave her some characteristic, identifying sign.

  His manner changed now. He was no longer the suave clubman. There was a tenseness in his attitude that the girl sensed. When they were seated in the next room, Jeffrey Carter talked quickly moving his long-fingered hands, restlessly.

  “Blue vases are the devil’s choice,” he said suddenly.

  The words were incomprehensible to the girl; but she relaxed in her chair, all uneasiness gone. The Agent generally spoke in metaphors and parables, the significance of which she learned in due time. Almost everything he said had some double meaning.

  Respect and intense loyalty mingled in he
r blue eyes as she regarded the man who tonight called himself Jeffrey Carter. Whoever the Secret Agent really was, she knew that he had been a friend of her dead father’s—the father who had been a police captain, slain by underworld bullets.

  She had been brought up to feel an intense hatred of criminals. The death of her father had crystallized this feeling.

  This man, her father’s friend, was working against the underworld. She trusted him, relied upon him, knew that he was kindly and brave. There had been times when he had placed sums of money collected from criminals in her hands—to give to charity, to help the poor and those who had been victimized by underworld plots.

  She knew that he kept nothing for himself, asked nothing but to live dangerously, recklessly, gambling with Fate. There were moments when wonder filled her as to what sort of face lay behind those brilliant disguises. Would she ever know? Or would death claim him before she had penetrated the secrets of his life?

  The Agent spoke mysteriously again, his eyes gleaming with some hidden emotion.

  “You are an accomplished dancer, Miss Dale, and to dance beautifully is an art. Tonight I ask you to dance with me.”

  She gave a start of surprise and flushed slightly. “What do you mean?”

  “The Bellaire Club is calling us, Betty. There is music to be danced to and a blue vase to be looked at. Put on your best frock.”

  SHE shrugged, nodded, and flashed him a smile. Something deeper than caprice and a love of dancing, she knew, lay behind his words. And when, at the end of ten minutes, she emerged from her boudoir, she was a vision of loveliness.

  Betty Dale was a girl who knew how to wear clothes. Poise and refinement were instinctive with her and that good taste which is something inborn and can never be taught. Because of these things, she had gotten ahead in the world. She had won a career for herself as a star reporter on the Herald. When she was covering society stuff, she could meet and hobnob with fashionable people on their own plane. This made her invaluable both to the paper and the Agent.

  More than once she had helped him by going places with him when he needed a feminine companion, by carrying out his orders, and by getting information that he required.

  Tonight she was clad in a white evening dress with a fur wrap draped over her shoulders. Together they went to the street and signaled a taxi.

  They were whirled through the brightly-lighted thoroughfares of the great city to the doors of the Bellaire Club, which, for all its gaudy ostentation, was a place of ill repute, a place where sinister things had happened.

  It was frequented by the fast, wealthy set, and by gangsters and gamblers who had made big money. There were gambling tables in the rear, a dance floor and a large orchestra in front, with tables for couples to sit at and drink.

  The Secret Agent had asked Betty Dale to accompany him tonight because a lone man or woman coming to the Bellaire Club was at once an object of curiosity to Mike Panagakos, the flabby-jowled, sloe-eyed manager. The Agent did not want that.

  He whirled Betty Dale around the room once, and his eyes gleamed as he saw a blue vase on a low settee by one wall. It was a fine piece of Turkish pottery that somehow fitted in with the gaudy, exotic atmosphere of the club. It seemed to have been placed there as a receptacle for flowers, but it was empty now.

  As they whirled past it, the Secret Agent’s hand flicked out. The note he had made Jason Hertz write fell into the vase.

  By that act he believed he was opening a trail that might lead him into the shadow of hideous murder and mysterious death.

  When the dance had ended, they seated themselves at a table to watch the moving crowds about them; the sinuous, over-painted women, and the immaculately dressed men.

  Then Betty Dale suddenly caught her breath, and the Secret Agent’s head turned quickly.

  Across the room a group of people had scattered. A woman gave a hoarse cry of fear.

  From the center of the group, a man ran forward into the circular spot cast by an overhead light. He was holding his hands to his face, staggering drunkenly—and, as Agent “X” watched, he let forth a scream of agony that shivered through the air with the keenness of a knife thrust. Then he collapsed and lay writhing on the polished floor.

  Chapter IV

  Police Net

  GASPS of horror went up from those in the room. The orchestra, playing a languorous concert number, came to a discordant stop. Men and women crowded forward, craning their necks.

  Agent “X” arose. There was a steely brightness in his eyes, tenseness in the low whisper of his voice.

  “Satan has struck,” he said.

  Leaving the girl at the table, he moved across the floor to mingle with the crowd around the fallen man. Silently, swiftly, he pushed his way close. Looking over the shoulder of an elaborately dressed woman, he got a glimpse of the man on the floor.

  The man’s hands were still covering his face. Between the quivering fingers Agent “X” saw inflamed, mottled flesh, pockmarked and drawn together. Faint fumes curled up. The man’s skin had been hideously burned. Someone had thrown acid at him

  Agent “X” turned. He ran to the nearest table, grabbed a bottle of olive oil and shouldered his way back, kneeling by the fallen man. With quick, deft fingers, he poured the sweet oil over the man’s tortured face.

  It was a simple remedy, but, quickly applied, it might save the man from death or life disfigurement. The man moaned and twitched. One side of his coat fell away. The edge of a gleaming badge showed. He was a headquarters detective. He writhed again, pawing at his injured face, then went limp. Merciful unconsciousness had come.

  The Secret Agent got up quickly. Mike Panagakos, the fat, sleek-haired manager, was pushing his way forward.

  “Call an ambulance,” said Agent “X” harshly. But another voice cut in on him.

  “It’s already been done. Everybody keep quiet. Don’t try to leave the room. There are men stationed at the doors with orders to shoot.”

  The man who had spoken was heavy-set, stern-eyed. He looked out of character in the tuxedo that wrinkled baggily around his lumpy body. He was Detective-Sergeant Mathers of the Homicide Squad.

  “It’s a raid!” cried a woman, the quavers of hysteria in her voice.

  “Raid is right! There’s been a murder attempted. There’s a killer in this room. Every man and woman of you is gonna get searched.”

  In Sergeant Mathers’ words was a savage note. He glared at the people around him with a ferocity that was backed by bafflement and fear.

  “The Torture Trust!” whispered somebody hoarsely. And a sudden silence descended on the room, broken only by the tense breathing of fear-stricken people. Horror seemed to creep out of the corners. The fat face of Mike Panagakos turned a sickly dough color. The whites of his eyes showed.

  Agent “X’s” quick brain grappled with the situation. Detectives, he realized, must have been posted in the room all evening. The police, too, must know that Joe Catrella had hung out at the Bellaire Club. They were leaving no stone unturned in their efforts to solve the hideous torture murders. And the “Torture Trust” in its campaign of terror had turned brutally on the police force itself.

  Agent “X” looked around the big room. At the main entrance, a man with a police automatic in his hand was standing alertly. There was another close to the door of Panagakos’ private office in the rear. A third guarded the window by the fire escape. Sergeant Mathers had worked quickly, efficiently.

  “Squad cars are on the way,” he barked. “There’ll be policewomen to search the ladies. Inspector Burks himself is coming.”

  The imperious clanging of an ambulance bell sounded in the street outside. It stopped at the door of the Bellaire Club. A moment later, the detective at the main entrance stepped back as two white-coated internes entered, a stretcher in the hands of one.

  Sergeant Mathers spoke again, pointing to the figure on the floor.

  “Get that man to the hospital as fast as you can.”

  The
internes moved like automata. Opening the collapsible stretcher, they lifted the unconscious detective, placed him on it, and carried him out of the room. The gong of the ambulance sounded again, growing fainter as it wound its way through traffic that had stopped as if frozen. The bell seemed to leave behind it a black pall of mystery and terror.

  In staccato sentences, harsh as the crack of a whip, Sergeant Mathers began questioning Panagakos.

  “Donelly was a good man. He’s the third who’s had stuff thrown in his face. The first one cashed in. Where was Donelly when he got his?”

  Panagakos shook his head. He drew the back of his hand across lips that were moist and quivering.

  “I—I didn’t see nothing,” he said. “I was in my office. When I heard the racket I came out.”

  A foreign-looking waiter in a short-tailed jacket came close to Sergeant Mathers. He made movements in the air with his hands.

  “It was from the kitchen that he came, señor. It was there that I first saw him—the policeman. But I saw no one else.”

  Mathers pressed forward, the crowd following, led on by morbid curiosity, and Agent “X” followed, too.

  HE saw Mathers round up and question the kitchen staff. Saw them shake their heads. They had seen no one. A hallway led to a big pantry and storeroom beside the kitchen. Agent “X” knew the angles of the building. He made it a business to learn such things. There was likely to be an air shaft in the storeroom. Why didn’t Mathers search there? But he couldn’t suggest it. It would attract attention to himself. The detectives would have to work their way. He would work his. But there was worry in his eyes.

  Any moment cars filled with policemen and policewomen might arrive at the Bellaire Club. Every person in the room would be searched. It was something that Agent “X” did not care to risk. There were strange articles concealed in his clothing—articles that it would be embarrassing to have the police find. Sometimes quick changes of disguise were necessary. Painstaking care had gone into the creation of featherweight, portable make-up. Odd kinds of material were cleverly concealed in the linings of his coat and vest.