“Morvay!” he gasped.
THE inspector turned and ran on toward the lighted room ahead. His gun was in his hand, but he holstered it and breathed a sigh of deep relief. They had not been too late.
A man in an English-cut tweed suit was slumped in a metal chair in the center of the room. His arms and legs were manacled, holding him a prisoner, but he was unhurt. His loud voice showed that.
“Bully for you!” he said. “I told those devils the police would come. There were three of them—murderers, torturers. I told them there was law and order in this bally country.”
“Dunsmark,” said Inspector Burks.
He recognized the famous banker from the many photos he had seen in rotogravure sections of the papers. There was vast relief in his voice. He and his men had saved the city and the country from disgrace. And the “Torture Trust” had been smashed, trapped—its three hypocritical members caught red-handed and exposed: Morvay, Bartholdy, and Van Houten.
Then Burks saw a small key on a shelf near by. It looked like the key to the manacles on Dunsmark’s arms and legs. He tried it, found that it worked, and freed the Englishman.
Sir Dunsmark stood up, stretched his limbs and grinned.
“This isn’t such a bad country after all,” he said. “I had a scare for a time. Things happened rather suddenly, you know.”
“What about that man who came for you on the boat? They say he looked like our police commissioner.”
Sir Anthony was apologetic, courteous, but firm.
“I’ll tell you all about it later—tomorrow—if you don’t mind. I’m a bit fagged by all that’s happened. Excitement isn’t good for me, you know, and I’m a bit late for a rather important appointment. You gather what I mean?”
“Sure thing! Of course.”
Burks knew when to be courteous and when to be hard-boiled. A man like Dunsmark wasn’t to be trifled with and told what to do. There might be trouble involved. He personally escorted Dunsmark through the building and turned him over to the commissioner. Cops and plain-clothes men were still smashing doors, and rounding up the last of the gray-clad men.
The commissioner was solicitous.
“You must take my car,” he said. “I’ll see that you have a police escort.”
“Really,” said Dunsmark, waving his hand in the air. “No fuss or publicity, if you don’t mind. As I told the inspector, my nerves are a bit fagged. I’ll just borrow your car and slip out. Thanks awfully.”
He got into the car and gave the chauffeur the name of a hotel. The car rolled away on velvety springs. A few blocks from the warehouse and Sir Anthony Dunsmark seemed suddenly to change his mind.
“I’ll get out here,” he said. “A bit of walk will do me good.”
The surprised chauffeur started to object, then closed his mouth. It wasn’t for him to quibble with a distinguished passenger. He stopped the car, hopped out, and opened the door with a flourish.
“Give this to Inspector Burks at once,” said Dunsmark.
He slipped a small envelope into the chauffeur’s hand.
The chauffeur touched his cap, took the note, and got back into the car. He watched Sir Anthony Dunsmark’s tall figure disappear down the street.
“That guy’s nuts,” he muttered.
Then a faint, melodious whistle reached his ears. It was a whistle that stirred echoes high up in the rooftops and whispered eerily along the faces of the buildings. With a prickle on his scalp that he could not quite explain to himself, the chauffeur turned the car and drove rapidly back to the warehouse. He made his way inside the building, found Inspector Burks talking to the commissioner and gave him the note.
“Sir Anthony Dunsmark handed it to me,” he said.
Inspector Burks opened the note wonderingly, then stared in amazement, his eyes narrowing. The sentences of the note were brief and to the point.
Dear Inspector: Look in the closet at the extreme end of the basement corridor. You will find a little surprise. Kindly offer my sincere apologies to Sir Anthony Dunsmark. I regret the inconvenience I caused him; but he is a good sport. I’m sure he will understand when you explain the matter to him.
The note was unsigned. The inspector could make nothing of it. But he ran downstairs again, with the commissioner following him.
There was a door at the end of the lower corridor—a door into a small closet, so flush to the wall that they had overlooked it. They yanked it open now and stood speechless with amazement.
A man clad only in his underclothes sat on the floor of the closet bound with an old piece of rope and gagged with a sleeve of his own shirt. When they pulled him to his foot and drew the gag off, he spoke in a cultured British accent.
“Great Scott! What’s the meaning of this?” he said.
“Anthony Dunsmark!” gasped the inspector.
“Yes—and who are you—policemen, or more thugs and murderers?”
“Policemen,” said Burks. “This is the commissioner himself!”
“The commissioner,” said Dunsmark bitterly. “That’s what he told me before. If this is your idea of a bally joke, gentlemen—”
But Burks wasn’t listening at the moment. He was staring at the note that the commissioner’s chauffeur had handed him. It had been unsigned when he first read it. But now at the bottom of the white page, the outlines of a letter were slowly appearing, turning black as the light fell on it. The letter was an “X”—and it seemed to Burks suddenly that the “X” was like an eye staring up at him and winking in sly, sardonic amusement.
The Spectral Strangler
Silent, horrible as the crushing coils of a serpent were those unseen fingers that blotted out men’s lives. A criminal of satanic proportions had risen—the “Black Master,” whose victims fell with livid, hideous faces and protruding tongues that seemed a ghastly mockery of the fate they had suffered. Along this terrible murder trail Secret Agent “X” gambled with the Dice of Death.
Chapter I
Murder in the Night
WARNING prickles raced along Federal Detective Bill Scanlon’s spine. A hunch told him he was being followed. He was a little man grown gray in the service—gray hair, gray mustache, and thin, grayish features. He looked slight—almost weak. Yet, in the long years he’d worked for Uncle Sam, he’d built up a reputation for courage and ability that few men in the D.C.L. could equal.
He turned his head alertly, stared back, and something seemed to move behind him in the long shadow cast by the trunk of a leafless maple.
For a moment he stood uncertainly, then retraced his steps.
There was no fear on his face, but his eyes were watchful. He slid the flat bulk of an automatic out of his side pocket and held it against his thigh, moving forward cautiously like a man walking on eggshells.
He came close to the big maple, sidestepped around it—but no one was there.
A puff of night wind clattered branches overhead. They were sheathed with ice and made a dry rattle like skeleton fingers clicking together. Bill Scanlon stood waiting.
Then he relaxed. A cat with coal black fur and glowing green eyes spat at him and slunk away. It might have been an evil omen, but Scanlon wasn’t superstitious. He thought it was only the cat he had seen.
Pocketing his gun, he set off up the street again. There was someone on it he wanted to see—someone who might be a valuable witness in a mysterious murder and kidnapping in which the government was interested.
A shadow detached itself from the blackness of a house stoop opposite the maple. Slinking spiderlike, the shadow moved after Scanlon, stalking from tree to tree, hedge to hedge, and stoop to stoop, drawing closer—always closer.
Scanlon turned to stare again, but he saw nothing. The shadow was crouched as still as death. There was something deadly, something horrible, in the purposefulness with which it drew nearer.
Scanlon moved on. The person he wanted to interview lived on this block.
A twig covered with ice snapped behind him. He turne
d a third time, staring, his breath rising like steam in the cold night air.
Still no one was in sight, but the skin along Scanlon’s scalp began to tingle. He grasped the butt of his gun, holding it in his pocket, his finger crooked through the trigger guard.
On his left was a hedge of evergreens shielding the lawn of a darkened house. The evergreens were covered with hoarfrost. There was a gap between them that seemed as black as the cavernous opening in the front of a skull. Scanlon stared toward it for seconds.
Then the pupils of his eyes widened. He crouched, opened his lips as if to speak—but no words came.
Somewhere in the darkness behind the hedge there was faint, quick movement. It seemed no more than the blurring of a shadow against another shadow. No one appeared. No hand came into sight. But suddenly Scanlon uttered a hoarse, rasping gurgle and reached toward his throat.
His body jerked spasmodically. For a moment he gave the impression of a man dangling horribly at the end of a taut rope. His shadow writhed and leaped on the icy sidewalk beside him. He slipped, skidded, made choking sounds, his finger tightening involuntarily on the trigger of his automatic.
The gun belched flame in his pocket. It made a report that blasted the silence of the winter night. The bullet struck the icy pavement and whined away into the darkness.
Scanlon had both hands at his throat now. He appeared to be clawing invisible, horrible fingers away from his neck; appeared to be fighting a losing battle with some hideous unseen strangler who had held him in an unearthly grip.
But he wasn’t a man to give up easily. His struggles became more desperate, more frenzied. He tore at his coat, ripped open his collar with fingers as taut as talons. His shadow mimicked every movement he made, leaping like a dancer pirouetting to some mad, macabre rhythm.
Then at last he slipped and fell to the pavement, his face purpling, his eyes bulging out. He continued to writhe, but he made no sound now except the terrible wheezing of air fighting to escape through an aperture too small for it. The mottled, hideous purple of his skin deepened until his complexion had the hue of an overripe plum. Livid spots appeared on it where veins stood out. They seemed ready to burst sickeningly as blood pumped through them from his wildly laboring heart.
His movements grew slowly feebler. Then from his open mouth his tongue protruded grotesquely, horribly, as though he were mocking the unseen, silent thing that had struck him down.
ECHOES of the shot fired by his dying fingers whispered along the night-darkened street. A light flashed in a house diagonally across from the spot where he lay. A man came out on the porch, peered around, saw Scanlon’s body, and ran across the street to it.
For seconds the man stood bareheaded, staring down; then he turned quickly, his eyes dark with fright, and ran back into the house to the telephone.
Silence descended on the street again—a silence that was punctuated only by the skeleton clicking of the ice-coated branches. They seemed to be sounding a monotonous, macabre rhythm—a dirge of death.
The rhythm was interrupted at last by the wail of a police siren up the long street. Headlights flared on the icy pavements. A slim, green roadster shot into view. It was a radio cruiser come in response to the bareheaded man’s telephoned message to headquarters.
The cop at the wheel was leaning sidewise, staring out. He jerked the car’s nose toward the curb and brought it to a halt beside the body of Scanlon. He and his companion jumped out.
They bent down, opened Scanlon’s coat, and pulled papers from his pocket—then stared in surprise. The taller of the two cops spoke grimly.
“A Federal dick. Call headquarters quick. They’ll want to know about this.”
The other cop obeyed. He started at a run across the street, climbed the steps of the lighted house, and disappeared inside.
In twenty minutes the police cruiser at the curb was joined by a black headquarters’ car filled with detectives. It slid to a screeching stop. The men leaped out and crowded close around Scanlon, their breaths mingling in the icy air and their long overcoats making sprawled shadows on the pavement
They stared at Scanlon’s credentials and examined his body. Inspector John Burks, head of the homicide squad was among them—a tall man with snapping black eyes and jet-black eyebrows that contrasted sharply with his white hair. He began speaking in abrupt sentences.
“Strangled! Look at his face!”
A police sergeant flashed his light lower, then answered hoarsely, a note of fear in his voice.
“There ain’t no finger marks, chief. It’s like—like that woman who was killed last week, and those other guys—the taxi driver and the feller with him that they found in the vacant lot. Four of ’em murdered now—and all alike!”
Inspector Burks was silent for tense seconds. His thin face was working. His mouth was harsh. Four murders all alike! Four homicides as mysterious as they were horrible! Men strangled apparently by ghost fingers—their lives snuffed out by unseen hands. There had been no mark even on the white neck of the woman, the first victim. Yet her eyes, too, had been, staring and her tongue had protruded in that terrible mockery of death.
This was no ordinary murder case. It was uncanny, baffling, with the police already in a cul-de-sac from which there seemed to be no logical way out. A new and hideous crime wave was engulfing the city. Burks struck his clenched fist sharply against his palm.
“There’s a man I’d look for in this,” he grated. “A man who might do such things—the criminal who calls himself Secret Agent ‘X.’”
The sergeant bending over nodded somberly.
“Right, chief. It’s the kind of screwy job he might pull. But he’s a tough man to lay hold of. He never looks the same twice.”
“He’ll slip up,” said Burks harshly. “He’s almost done it a couple of times. And if—if he pulled this job—by God, I’ll land him in the hot seat.”
Burks’s eyes had an eaglelike fierceness as he stared down at the face of the dead Government operative. The distorted features and grotesquely mocking tongue of Scanlon seemed to speak of hideous things.
The medical examiner was still going over the body. He shook his head slowly.
“No doubt about it—it’s strangulation. You’d think a slipknot had been tied around his throat, or fingers held there—except that there are no marks.”
“Except!” Burks echoed the word bitterly. The ice-coated branches that were like bony fingers above his head scraped together in a sound reminiscent of soft, sardonic laughter.
Then a detective spoke, touching Burks’s arm.
“Who’s that guy over there?” he asked.
He was looking up the block at a figure that had suddenly appeared. A man swung into sight. He was tall, an overcoat flapped around his heels, and he was coming toward them across the street. Blunt features showed under a slouch hat. He was dressed like a young business man; but his eyes burned with a strange, vivid intentness. He walked up to the group of detectives around Scanlon until one of them stepped forward and barred his way.
“Keep back, guy! There’s been a murder. Who are you?”
The newcomer didn’t answer. He pulled a wallet from his pocket, fumbled in it and drew out a tattered press card.
“A news hound!” said Burks sourly. “How did you get wind of this so quick?”
The stranger uttered one word then, talking with clipped emphasis as though speech were precious.
“Radio,” he said.
“It’s tough,” snarled Burks, “when every Tom, Dick, and Harry listens in on police calls. Headquarters will have to use code for everything if they want to keep the riffraff away.”
THE man with the press card ignored this harsh comment. He pushed closer to the dead man until another detective barked at him to keep back.
When he glimpsed Scanlon’s face, he gave an abrupt, horrified start. The hot flame of some deep emotion sprang into his eyes. His hands clenched at his sides. He breathed quickly, deeply. Then, as if afraid he
might be betraying himself, he set his face muscles into masklike inscrutability.
He stood silently staring down at the features of Scanlon, but the strange, burning light in his eyes did not abate. Then he asked a few pointed questions which the detectives answered sullenly.
“If you print any phony story about this, I’ll have your hide,” said Burks harshly. “This is murder—the fourth one like it. Something big is up, see? You’d better be damn careful what you hand out in that lousy sheet of yours.”
The man with the press card nodded somberly. He took another long look at Scanlon’s face as though that face, even with the distortions that hideous death had wrought, were hauntingly familiar. His gaze wandered over Scanlon’s twisted, crumpled body.
Then he lighted a cigarette, puffed on it a moment, and, as if by accident, let it drop from his fingers. But, as he stooped to recover it, his eyes rested for an instant on Scanlon’s exposed cuff, where faint markings showed, unobserved as yet by the police. The slain D.C.I. man had written them there with a pencil, jotted down an address. And the stranger, in the flash of a second memorized that address, storing it away in his mind. Then, as quietly and mysteriously as he had come, he moved off into the darkness.
Inspector Burks, occupied with the murder investigation, didn’t notice the stranger’s absence for a few seconds. When he did, he shot an abrupt, uneasy question.
“Where did that bird go?”
The detective-sergeant at his side looked around in puzzlement.
“I don’t know, chief. I thought he was still here.”
Burks stood scowling, hands thrust deep in pockets, eyebrows drawn together.
“I wonder—” he said slowly. Then he whirled on the men around him and gave a harsh, quick order. “Don’t let him get away. I want to talk to him.”
Two cops broke swiftly from the group, spreading out in different directions, searching the street, their flash lights in their hands. They covered the whole block, then came back shrugging apologetically.
“He beat it, chief. We looked. We couldn’t find him any place.”
Secret Agent X – The Complete Series Volume 1 (Annotated) Page 13