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

by Paul Chadwick

  “Come with me, commissioner.”

  For another second the commissioner hesitated. He looked desperately about. It was late. He had dismissed his stenographer. His own cot, made up at the side of the office, testified to the fact that the police of the city were facing some sort of an emergency, a crisis so real that the commissioner felt his presence at headquarters was imperative every minute. It was this that accounted for the fear in his face. But the compelling look of the man who had burst into his office seemed to move him as much as fear.

  His hands dropped limply at his sides. With a shrug he walked across the office to the door.

  “Downstairs,” said Jones. “There’s a car waiting up the block. Walk toward it.”

  The commissioner started for the elevator, but again Jones’s voice gave an order.

  “Not that way—use the stairs.”

  Like a man in a trance the police commissioner did as he was told. When he reached the floor below, he shot one frightened look toward the desk, saw that the sergeant had disappeared, and his face stiffened. A door in the rear opened suddenly. A clerk started to come out, saw what was going on, and paused. Before Jones could fire, the clerk ducked out of sight.

  The commissioner swore harshly when he glimpsed the prostrate bodies of the two detectives on the sidewalk. For a moment it seemed that he was going to turn and fling himself on the man called Jones. Cords in his neck stood out. He clenched one fist. But Jones’s voice spoke softly.

  “Take it easy, commissioner.”

  THE four gangsters, trembling violently at sight of this highest official of the city’s police, closed in. It seemed that they wanted to hide their faces. They were like men clutching a bomb. They feared to keep it—and feared to drop it.

  Jones gestured toward the car up the block. The commissioner moved forward mechanically.

  When he was still twenty feet from it, there was a sudden sound behind. It was the shrill, ghostly wail of a police siren. A radio cruiser was coming up to headquarters. Jones heard startled cries as the cops in the car saw the two unconscious detectives on the sidewalk.

  He flung open the door of the powerful car.

  “Get in,” he said harshly. The commissioner obeyed, and Jones ran around the side of the car and jerked open the door of the driver’s compartment.

  As he slipped under the wheel, with Magurren crouched tensely on the other side, hell seemed to break loose behind them. A squad of uniformed cops who had been lounging in the barrack room at headquarters, poured into the street. The frightened clerk had given the alarm. One of the cops had a riot gun. He knelt, aiming for the tires of Jones’s car.

  But Jones spun the wheel of the big sedan viciously, sent it shooting away from the curb in a dizzy arc. It seemed to spring over the pavement like a live thing. The police cruiser, with headlights glaring and spotlight turned on, came after them. The riot gun in the cop’s hand stuttered into life, and a stream of low-flying bullets narrowly missed the big car’s tires. One of them struck a hub cap. Metal popped and cracked, and the bullet screamed away into the darkness.

  Jones, crouching over the wheel, spun around a corner. The engine under the big hood in front of him rose from a subdued purr into a muffled, throaty whine of gusty power. A hundred foam-flecked horses seemed to be whirling the car ahead through space. Then somewhere in the distance a police siren sounded—a second, third, and fourth gave answer. All the radio cruisers in the city appeared to be converging upon them, rushing to the scene of this most brazen and unparalleled of crimes.

  Chapter II

  The Man of Mystery

  THE four gangsters and the commissioner in the car with Jones were never to forget that ride. A madman seemed to be at the vehicle’s wheel. Yet a madman with such uncanny skill that the big sedan responded as though it had the ability to hear and obey human commands.

  It roared past an intersection, and two green police cruisers nosed out of side streets ahead. They came from opposite directions, stopped abruptly with squealing brakes. A score of short-wave radios were picking up the frantic appeals from headquarters. But the cops were in a tight spot. They couldn’t fire on the speeding sedan without risking the life of the commissioner.

  The patrolmen, therefore, sought to block the street, make the racing car slow down, and perhaps get a shot at the driver. To save the commissioner from what seemed certain death, a desperate gamble of some sort was necessary. They edged in at an angle across the street. The plunging sedan tore on.

  At the last moment Monk Magurren, tough killer that he was, swore harshly, fearfully, under his breath. Slats Becker closed his eyes and gripped the tasseled cord that hung from the car’s interior. The commissioner sat frozen with a glassy stare, swaying to the movements of the rocketing car like a propped-up corpse. Certain destruction appeared to stare them in the face.

  The police cruisers shrieked their sirens in warning. A cop with a gun in his hand leaned out. He waved frantically, ordering the black car to slow down. It came on like a roaring, lurching fury.

  The drivers of the cruisers tried to back away. It would have been too late in any event. It was the man at the wheel of the black sedan who saved the situation.

  His mild-featured face set in mask-like immobility, he swung the car deliberately toward the curb. His sharp eyes had glimpsed a driveway leading to a garage. The sidewalk was empty. The car’s fat tires cut into the driveway at a sharp angle. The car reared up, whizzed forward, and for dizzy, perilous seconds tore along the pavement itself with a wall on one side and the curb on the other. It passed the two glaring-eyed police cruisers.

  Then Jones swung the wheel again. The big car leaped back to the level of the street. It left the five men inside bathed in cold sweat. It left the cops in their cruisers paralyzed into inaction. Jones, his face masklike as ever, applied brakes for an instant, whirled into a side street.

  Over dark, rutted pavements the car sped forward. It seemed to crouch on each rise, gather speed, and leap ahead. It plunged down into the depressions like a speed-boat taking the swells.

  The sirens of the radio cruisers behind resembled the confused baying of hounds that have lost the scent. They faded into the distance as the big car plunged on. Now and again, a new one sounded in front.

  At such times, Jones at the wheel, bore away at right angles along some cross street. Once he cut through the uptown theater district, and again the men with him held their breaths and expected death. Grimly Jones held the siren of his own car down to clear the street of innocent pedestrians.

  He whirled up a long avenue toward a section of cheap apartments. He bore across town again, till the river showed black and somber under the curtain of night. Then he struck a parkway and followed along it till he was on the edge of the suburbs.

  For a moment he slowed the car’s speed, quieted the engine, and listened. Somewhere, far behind, the wailing, complaining note of a siren sounded. But it seemed to be going in the wrong direction, taking the wrong route.

  Jones smiled, pressing the accelerator again. The big car sped ahead once more. Suddenly he wrenched the wheel, pulled the car’s nose around, tore through a sparse hedge that scratched and slapped against the wheels. Abruptly he bumped to a stop, extinguishing the lights.

  Darkness lay all around them. They were in a vacant lot at the outskirts of the city. This strange parking space seemed to have figured in Jones’s desperate plans.

  “Get out,” he said.

  The gangsters obeyed now, cowed by the ride they had had, cowed by the crime they had taken part in, and by the strange, amazing actions of their new boss.

  Jones himself kept close beside the commissioner. The police chief’s face indicated that he expected death. He appeared to think the vacant lot was a prearranged place of execution. But Jones led him on.

  He crossed the lot with his little cavalcade following. The streets around it were deserted. A closed-down factory towered on one side, a vast bulk of blackness in the black night. Old,
jumbled sheds and warehouses showed ahead. Jones picked his way toward one of these. He stopped, took a key from his pocket, and fumbled familiarly. In a moment he had opened a door and marshaled his men in. He jumped down a boarded passageway, opened another door, and entered a deserted shed.

  A small pot-bellied stove was burning at one side of the room. There were bunks along the walls. It was a shed once used by a gang of laborers. Deserted and neglected, it made a snug hideout. Jones lit an oil lamp in a wall bracket. It cast a wan light over the dingy furniture. The windows were boarded up. No glow would show outside.

  In brief sentences, giving no explanation of his motives, Jones ordered the commissioner to take off his clothes. When this had been done, he rolled them into a neat bundle and stuffed them under his arm. They contained all the police head’s private papers.

  Stripped to shorts and an undershirt, the commissioner stood tense and waiting. The four gangsters watched with amazement and wonder. They now seemed to believe that Jones was mad. But his bright, alert eyes held them in a spell of fear.

  “I’m going to leave you,” he said suddenly. “Hold the commissioner here until I come back.”

  Abruptly, as though disobedience on their part was out of the question, he went to the door, opened it and disappeared into the night.

  The gangsters and the commissioner, listening, thought for a moment that they heard a strange whistle floating through the darkness. It was musical, yet eerie, seeming to fill the whole air at once. Then gradually, like an echo dying in the night, it faded away, leaving only blackness and mystery behind.

  THE man called Jones didn’t get back into the big car. He left it parked where it was in the vacant lot, concealed by darkness and the sparse, untrimmed hedge.

  He walked briskly along the night-shrouded street—walked with the swift, easy stride of a man who has a definite objective. Once a police cruiser flashed by him, its radio crackling, two tense-faced patrolmen at the wheel. They barely noticed the darkly dressed man on the sidewalk with the bundle under his arm.

  Once, a little later, Jones paused an instant in his stride to press a hand to his left side as a sudden twinge of pain stabbed close to his heart. But the pain passed and the man moved on. It was the pain of an old wound received in the flaming hell of a battlefield in France—a wound which doctors had predicted years before would kill him, but which his own amazing vitality had overcome.

  He turned suddenly, entered the front gate of a house with a “For Rent” sign on it. The house was shuttered and boarded, but he took a passkey from his pocket, opened a side door, and let himself in. He moved across creaking floors, climbed a flight of stairs, and went to an old attic room. Here, under the sweep of low eaves, he was shut away from the whole night-darkened world. It was a temporary hideout that the strange man called Jones had possessed himself of without asking any one’s leave.

  He fumbled for a moment in a closet, drew out a big suitcase. Snapping it open, he took out an assortment of strange objects. One was an acetylene lamp with an adjustable, parabolic reflector. The current in the house was turned off, but when he lit this lamp, it made the shuttered attic room as bright as day.

  He took out a collapsible mirror with three sides, set it up on a shelf, and studied his reflection for a moment. Then his long fingers began to move.

  The contours of his face which had characterized him as “Jones” began strangely to disappear. Under the brilliant, violet glow of the acetylene light, a new face came into being. It was a face that not even his few intimate friends had ever seen—a face, the identity of which he kept guarded with a thousand masterly disguises.

  The face that stared back at him from the mirror now was not like the gang leader called Jones. The blunt, nondescript features had disappeared. The sandy hair had revealed itself as a clever toupee.

  Brown hair showed above a youthful forehead. The even nose, mouth, and chin looked boyish. But, when the man turned suddenly to pick something up, the light fell on his features at a different angle. New lines appeared then, making him look suddenly older, as though, like the disguises that so cleverly concealed him, his own experiences and adventures had numbered among the thousands. It was the face of a mature, poised man of the world—the face of Secret Agent “X.”

  WHO was Secret Agent “X”? Many people had asked that question. There were those who thought of him as a dangerous, desperate outlaw. The police of a dozen cities suspected him. Yet the underworld itself regarded him with hate and fear—for his life was dedicated to a strange, relentless warfare on criminals.

  With unlimited resources at his command, with uncanny skill in the creation of disguises, with an utter disregard of the threat of death, he was a force that the most evil malefactors had to reckon with.

  The light in his eyes was burningly intent now. He began taking other objects from his suitcase, working with a definite, sure purpose. There were tubes of plastic, volatile materials. Other tubes of shaded, flesh-tinted pigments. There were tissue-thin nose and cheek plates to change the contours of the features, strips of transparent adhesive tape to draw face muscles into new shape—all the utensils and paraphernalia of the expert craftsmen in the art of disguise.

  Along with his materials in the suitcase, Agent “X” removed a half-dozen photographs of a human face. The face was stern, dignified, heavily mustached. It was the face of the commissioner of police whom he had so lately kidnapped. These Agent “X” studied for long moments. They showed the commissioner’s features from every angle.

  It was a half-hour later that he rose from his seat in front of the three-sided mirror and took off his clothes. As he slipped into those he had taken from the police commissioner, even the commissioner’s best friends wouldn’t have guessed that the man in that room was other than he appeared to be.

  Layer upon layer of the plastic, quick-drying material had molded “X’s” face into new lines. It was material so mobile that it followed every movement of the flesh beneath. The man standing there, buttoning up his immaculate coat was the commissioner to all intents and purposes. The wallet in his pocket, the various credentials, proved it.

  In a moment more, with his hat and overcoat slipped on, he strode out into the street, ready to hurl a gambler’s challenge into the very teeth of Fate and Death.

  Chapter III

  The Flame of Death

  FIFTEEN minutes later, a cop quietly patrolling his beat saw a staggering, reeling figure coming toward him. The cop gripped his nightstick, held himself tautly alert, then gasped. He leaped forward with a cry of amazement and concern.

  The face of the staggering man, seen in the radiance of a street light, was familiar.

  “Commissioner Foster!” the cop gasped.

  The commissioner seemed too weak and dazed to reply. He collapsed on the sidewalk. His hat fell beside him. The cop saw a red welt on the commissioner’s forehead. It was obvious he had been struck down by the men who had kidnapped him. He seemed to be suffering from amnesia.

  The cop blew his whistle. An answering blast sounded far down the block. Another cop came running. This second patrolman, when he found what the excitement was, rushed into a house and put in a call to headquarters. The call was answered by two patrol cars and by a special police ambulance.

  But by the time they arrived, the commissioner seemed to have regained his faculties. He was standing on his feet, aided by the cop who had first seen him. His hat was back on his head.

  He waved the ambulance interns away impatiently.

  “Take me back to headquarters,” he snapped.

  To the nervous, hesitant questions of the cops in the patrol car, he would make no reply. They soon lapsed into awed silence. He spoke once as the cruiser neared headquarters.

  “Say nothing about this. If any member of the force lets it out, I’ll have his hide.”

  The cops nodded. Whispers of the police commissioner being kidnapped had gone abroad. A few radio fans with short-wave sets had picked up scraps
of the frantic broadcasts that headquarters had sent out. Newspaper men were clamoring to know if there was any foundation in the rumors. But so far the police had stalled. Events of the past week had broken down police morale. For the public to learn that the commissioner had been kidnapped would come close to causing a panic. Now, with the commissioner safely returned, the whole thing could be hushed up. It would be a secret that would never get beyond official circles.

  There was a mob of eager newspaper men waiting outside headquarters. Unceremoniously, the commissioner brushed through them. Their jaws dropped when they saw him. They fell back, talking excitedly among themselves. A few bolder spirits hurled questions at him, but he answered none of them.

  Back in his office, however, his manner changed. His eyes gleamed with a strange, burning light. He mopped his face with the nervous intensity of a man who has been through a terrible experience.

  Inspector John Burks, head of the homicide squad, and six other inspectors were congregated in his office. Their faces had a funereal solemnity. They gazed at him like a man come back from the dead.

  “Was it the same gang, chief? Did they try to bump you off—burn you?”

  It was Inspector Burks who asked the questions. When he said “burn” he was not using mere underworld phraseology. There was a grimness in his tone, harsh lines in his pale, heavily browed face.

  The commissioner nodded slowly. “I think so,” he said. “I escaped—I’m not saying how.”

  Burks leaned forward then. His voice was a hoarse whisper, as though the things he was about to say were too terrible to go beyond the confines of that room.

  “There was another robbery early this morning, chief. A cop and a special guard were killed—burned. We thought you’d got it, too.”

  The others in the room nodded. They looked at each other and shifted uneasily.

  The man behind the commissioner’s desk knew what was wrong with these men. He knew what accounted for the grim lines in their faces, the haggard, half-furtive expression in their eyes. It was why the commissioner’s cot was set up in headquarters. It was why the commissioner had prepared to stay there night and day.