“Valerie’s in no condition to answer questions, inspector. The rest of us will tell you what you want to know. We were here, too.”
“And who are you?”
The girl’s answer was haughty. She stared at the inspector with chin held high.
“Suzanne Blackwell,” she said.
“Go ahead,” said Clyde gruffly. “I’m listening.”
“Sam, Lili, Otto, and I dropped in a little while ago to see Valerie. Her father was in his study here. The door was closed. Valerie sent Thomas, the butler, to tell the senator that guests had arrived. He didn’t answer Thomas’s knock. Valerie became uneasy because her father has been under a strain from overwork lately. She opened the door and found him as you see him now. The safe was open, papers scattered about. It seemed like a robbery—the window was open, too. That’s all we know.”
Inspector Clyde had a notebook in his hand. He spoke crisply: “These three friends of yours, Miss Blackwell. I haven’t had the pleasure of an introduction. Let’s get them straight. One at a time, please.”
AGENT “X” was paying close attention. The inspector’s brisk questioning was saving him trouble. Suzanne Blackwell’s next words startled him. She pointed toward the girl who stood between the two men by the door—a stunning, lithe-bodied brunette.
“Miss Lili Damora,” she said, “of New York, Budapest, and Washington.”
This was the girl Agent “X” had been asked to investigate, the black-haired beauty who had been seen in the company of Captain Nelson. She teetered self-consciously on high heels and patted her sleek coiffure with an affected gesture. She had luscious, pouty lips and the languorous air of a society belle.
Suzanne Blackwell indicated the two men next, giving the name of the dark one first, then the blond ex-spy.
“Mr. Sam Barkley, American sportsman, and Herr Otto von Helvig of the German Legation.”
Inspector Clyde wrote down these names and turned to the Agent.
“And you?”
“Captain Stewart Black—just arrived, inspector, to do a little questioning on my own account.”
In clipped sentences Inspector Clyde issued an order to the sergeant of detectives who had followed him in.
“Look around outside, Quane. See whether there’s anything on the lawn.”
The inspector himself walked across the study to the small safe that stood open, its papers strewn about. He hurled a question over his shoulder.
“What seems to be the matter, doctor?”
Doctor Stoll answered quickly. “A slight stroke, I should say. Some of you help me get him upstairs. Send for a trained nurse at once. Call this number.”
As Agent “X” stepped forward to assist, the front doorbell sounded again. There was a furious, impatient note in it this time. The Negro servant hurried to open it and two men burst into the hall.
One was short-legged, immaculately dressed, his round fat face pink with excitement. The other was taller, thinner, a gauntly saturnine look about him, a fanatical light in his eyes. Senators Josephus Cobb and Haden Eathborne.
Valerie Dashman, getting a grip on herself, went forward to meet them. Cobb spoke abruptly, words trembling from his lips.
“Rathborne and I have been arguing. We’ve come to have a talk with your father. We must see him at once, we—”
The senator’s voice ended in a fat wheeze. His eyes grew round with horror. The color slowly drained from his face and was replaced by the pallor of deep-rooted fear. For the Agent, Doctor Stoll, and Otto von Helvig were carrying the limp form of Senator Dashman out of his study.
Cobb’s eyes rested on his senatorial colleague’s sickly hued features. Then he gasped a sentence that seemed wrung from his lips.
“Good God—the ray!”
Inspector Clyde, following the procession, turned sudden, sharp eyes on Cobb.
“What was that you said, senator?”
Added fear leaped into Cobb’s eyes. He shook his head with abrupt emphasis.
“Nothing—nothing—I was only talking to myself. What on earth has happened here?”
“Robbery,” said Inspector Clyde. “And Senator Dashman has suffered a stroke.”
COBB stood speechless, swaying on his short legs as they carried Dashman upstairs. A faint sardonic smile showed on the face of Haden Rathborne. Suzanne Blackwell’s face had gone white.
The eyes of Agent “X” were tensely alive. Cross-currents of human drama had made the atmosphere of Dashman’s home electric. “X” hadn’t missed Cobb’s explosive mention of the ray.
As they laid the senator on his own bed, the Agent’s eyes rested on Dashman’s neck. A tiny red mark showed there. The skin around it was slightly swollen. The Agent pointed toward it.
“Look, doctor—what’s that?”
Doctor Stoll glanced down quickly, shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I saw it. I’m wondering. It looks as though the senator had pricked himself. His pen perhaps.”
“Perhaps,” said the Agent, but his voice sounded skeptical. Then his eyes narrowed. A sudden horrible thought flashed into his mind.
That mark was part and parcel of the ghastly mystery, the folds of which seemed to be growing deeper and denser as he went along. He had noticed something else, and he hurried downstairs after they had laid Senator Dashman on his bed. The senator was in the doctor’s care now. All that could be done for him would be done.
“X” was thinking of the strange look of terror that had come over Suzanne Blackwell’s face when Senator Cobb had mentioned the ray.
Evidently she, too, had some knowledge of Browning’s creation.
She was putting on her hat and coat when Agent “X” reached the hallway below. He saw that her fingers were trembling. She was no longer the poised, self-confident girl she had been when he first entered. Cobb’s blurted utterance had shaken her for some reason.
Sam Barkley and Otto von Helvig hovered anxiously near her. Valerie Dashman was at her elbow.
“I must go home at once,” Suzanne was saying. “You’ll excuse me, won’t you, Valerie? I know your father will be all right. You won’t think I’m running away?”
“No—but why—”
“I can’t tell you now—but I feel—that I ought to go home.”
Sam Barkley laid his hand on her arm. “I’ll take you,” he said. “My car’s outside.”
Von Helvig intruded himself quickly. His tones were smooth but firm. There was a challenge in his eyes as he met those of Barkley.
“I was leaving anyway. I must get back to the legation. There is much work tonight. I will take Miss Blackwell with me, if she will be so kind.”
Barkley shrugged and stepped back. Von Helvig captured the girl’s arm. With a quick good night to the others, Suzanne Blackwell left. The Agent’s eyes followed the tall figure of Karl Hummel, alias “Otto von Helvig.” The man he had known as one of Europe’s most cunning spies. Here was a lead he could not neglect in his quest of the stolen plans. He must follow it, but not immediately. There was still Lili Damora.
He turned, looked about him. The woman from Budapest was in close confab with Senator Rathborne. It seemed to the Agent that she was using her charms upon him, attempting to dazzle the senator with her exotic beauty. Her lashes rose and fell coquettishly, sweeping her delicately tinted cheeks. Every gesture she made was for effect. The lithe balancing of her body on one graceful hip. The movements of her slim, carmine-tipped hands. Admiration gleamed in Rathborne’s narrow eyes. He seemed to lean over her predatorially.
Now was no time to question the woman—not with Senator Rathborne listening. Not with so many strange cross-currents in the air. He would see her alone, later. His eyes roved again.
SAM BARKLEY and Senator Cobb were standing together by the study doorway. The senator was mopping his fat face nervously. The pinkish flush of excitement had given way to a pallor that lingered. His glance swept the stairway up which they had so lately carried Dashman. He was waiting tremblingly for the
doctor’s full report—waiting with a fear that “X” could well understand.
“X” walked up and introduced himself.
“I’m told,” he said, “that Captain John Bernard Nelson was murdered tonight. He was a friend of Senator Dashman’s. But perhaps you can tell me something, senator. What was the meeting in the State, War and Navy Building from which Nelson was returning when he was killed?”
Fear leaped into Cobb’s eyes. “I am not at liberty to speak,” he said quickly. “I know nothing about Captain Nelson. I never saw him before tonight.”
“Then you were at the meeting?”
“I did not say that!” Cobb gasped. “Really, captain! If there is a Government investigation into this matter and if I am called as a witness, I will answer questions at the proper time. Now—”
“I beg your pardon,” said Agent “X” suavely. “Since Senator Dashman has been unfortunate enough to have a stroke, it seems that my visit here tonight was timed badly.”
He excused himself, murmured a wish to Valerie Dashman that her father would soon recover, and left the house.
Once outside he moved quickly. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still overcast and fitful lightning flickered on the horizon. The Agent summoned a cruising cab and gave the address of Senator Blackwell’s house. Why had Suzanne Blackwell been so alarmed when Cobb had mentioned the ray? Did she fear an attack of like nature on her father? And what part was the former spy, Karl Hummel, playing in his new rule of embassy attaché?
These were the questions Agent “X” asked himself as the cab sped along. At the moment, there was no one in all Washington to help him. He had undertaken a tremendous task single-handed. And he seemed to be working in a confused and black night of impenetrable mystery.
He dismissed his cab a block from Blackwell’s home. It was farther along in the suburbs than Dashman’s residence had been. A wide lawn stretched around it. Wet shrubbery glistened on the lawn.
Agent “X” moved toward the house like a wraith. He had played his hand openly so far. Now he was going to play it secretively—look and listen before he made any further move. He climbed an iron fence, dropped onto the lawn. He moved across it through the wet grass toward the house where a flicker of light showed.
Fifty feet from the house Agent “X” paused with an abrupt tingling along his spine. Something had moved in the darkness, something that was fleeting, sinister. A sudden premonition of danger telegraphed itself to his ever-alert brain. With a motion that was instinctive he jerked his body to one side.
As he did so, something like a swift-winged insect whispered past his head. It struck the trunk of a tree with a soft spat, and stopped, ten feet away.
Agent “X” whirled, then fell to the ground. Out of the darkness of a mat of shrubbery, four figures leaped toward him. The sense of imminent, hideous danger warned him that he could only escape death by some quick ruse.
Chapter VI
Men of Mystery
HE lay still as the figures moved up. Their feet were uncannily silent on the grass. They walked like savages, bent forward, shoulders hunched. He caught a glimpse of the face of one in a shaft of light filtering from the street. That face was brown-skinned. Not negroid. The bones were too high, the lips too thin, the eyes too small and bright.
These, he felt sure, were the same men who had worn the green masks in the chamber where Saunders had been poisoned. These were the killers who had carried out a master murderer’s will.
The truth of this was verified a moment later. One of them spoke in the strange tongue that “X” had heard before and recognized. They closed in around him like wolves.
His stillness, his appearance of death, was all that saved him. Knives gleamed in the hands of two of the men. Another carried something else, a tiny, slender pipe, mysterious, sinister.
They muttered in their monosyllabic language. Two of them reached down, the ones with the knives. There was horrible purpose in the way their hands groped.
“X” hurled himself sidewise then with an abrupt movement that was timed to within a fraction of a second. A master of disguise and strategy, he could use physical force, too, when necessity dictated. His feet swept in a circle, knocking two of the killers to the ground—those with the knives. His powerful hand caught the ankles of the other two, hurling them off their feet.
There was something ghastly about their stoical silence. He had taken them by surprise, tricked them, by playing possum, but they made no noise as white men would have done. They showed the training, the discipline that an exacting master had instilled into them.
They sprang back toward “X.” For a moment one of their knives swept downward in a whistling arc.
The Agent struck then, lightning fast, with the tips of his fingers only. It was a strange blow, a thrust of his wrist forward. His hard finger tips jabbed the knifeman just under the armpit. The brown-skinned killer gave a grunt of pain. His knife slipped from his hand.
For a moment after the Agent had struck him he lay writhing in pain, his lips locked together. The second knifeman tripped over him. But the man with the strange pipe in his hands was stepping back. His hands were taut as talons. His eyes glittered with an evil, murderous light.
The Agent saw him raising the pipe to his lips. Here was death. The threat of the knives was as nothing compared to this new device. For “X” knew what that insectlike whisper past his head had been. He knew what it was that had struck the tree trunk.
With a movement like a wrestler, Agent “X” clutched the fallen knifeman, raised him above his head, and hurled him forward toward the other who held the pipe. There were steely muscles beneath “X’s” well-fitting uniform. He knew the secrets of leverage and suddenly applied strength. The man he had flung struck the feet of the other. Both rolled to the ground with a serpentlike hiss of breath.
A guttural order came from the lips of one who seemed to be their leader then. In an instant all four of the strange brown-skinned men were slinking away into the darkness. It was as though the night had swallowed them. One moment they were there. The next they had gone, and “X” could not hear even the sound of their feet. But, holding his head close to the ground, looking along it, he saw four shadows flitting across the iron fence that bordered the estate. A moment later he heard the sound of a motor starting up, heard it purr away into the night. Single-handed he had defeated them, but he did not fool himself. Sooner or later he was destined to meet them and their devilish master again.
THE Agent rose to his feet. The elbows and knees of his uniform were wet and muddy. Mud smeared his sides and back. But he hardly noticed it. He moved forward for a moment, turned on the beam of a miniature flashlight with a bulb hardly bigger than a grain of wheat. He pointed it toward the ground, stopped and picked something up.
In his hand was a featherweight pipette—a hollow reed, open at both ends—seemingly harmless. It had dropped from the brown-skinned man’s fingers when he had fallen. One end of it had been stepped on and crushed. It was useless now, but the Agent knew it had been more deadly than the fanged jaws of a snake. It was a blowpipe, a savage assassin’s weapon, simple as it was terrible.
He walked back to the spot where he had been when the strange whisper sounded so close to his head. Again his light flashed on. Sticking in the trunk of a tree was a tiny dart, a, brilliant green feather at one end, a bone point at the other with a black, gummy substance adhering to its surface.
He drew it out, broke a section of the blowpipe as a guard against the deadly point, and put it in his pocket. His mind flashed back to that small mark on Senator Dashman’s neck. Here was the answer. It had not been the paralyzing ray, but something almost as sinister. Two horrors hung over Washington: the threat of one still unleashed; and the real, ever-present menace of a band of hideous poisoners whose motives were veiled in mystery.
Eyes harsh as steel points, Agent “X” moved on across the lawn toward the house. This was what he had come for. The four brown-skinned kill
ers had delayed him, but had not turned him from his course.
There was a light in the room that seemed to be the library. The rest of the house, save for the servant’s quarters, was dark.
Agent “X” again took his chromium tools from his pocket. He had not forgotten the words of the man who had spoken to him through the desk—the man who had summoned him to Washington. “Your task is greater than the mere pursuit of a murderer—a thousand times greater.”
The threat of murder was a side issue. He was here to battle an unseen threat to a nation.
With swift, tense movements he came close to the house. A light showed over the vestibule of the front door. He went to a side entrance where no light showed in or out.
Silently, deftly, utilizing all the skill he possessed, he used his steel implement to pick the lock and enter the house. He found himself in a narrow hall that seemed for the use of servants alone. He moved along it, remembering where the lighted library was. He heard servant’s voices in a room at his left. He passed through a door at his right, the dining room. He crossed a hall, saw the library ahead. The door of that was ajar. Voices came from behind it. Agent “X” crept close.
The voices came plainly now. Risking the possibility of being seen he moved closer still. The door of a writing room showed near by. He would duck into that if a servant should come.
There were three persons in the library—Suzanne Blackwell, a young man, and the senator, her father. Von Helvig was not there. He had apparently taken Suzanne only as far as the door.
There was tense drama in this expensively appointed room. The Agent’s eyes snapped. The girl, Suzanne, was speaking, her face still white, her slim hands clenched. She was talking fiercely to her father.
“It was the ray, I tell you,” she was saying. “The ray you told us about. Senator Cobb said so. I heard him. If you had been there to see Senator Dashman you would believe me. It was horrible. I remembered what you had said and I was afraid—for you.”
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