Secret Agent “X” – The Complete Series Volume 2

by Paul Chadwick

  It was as though the city were awakening from a deep sleep of hideous dreams. With hope of getting to the bottom of things, stopping the epidemic, and finding a cure at last, the police of Branford were in a frenzy of excitement.

  In police radio cruisers, armed headquarters’ cars, and huge emergency trucks mounted with batteries of searchlights, they moved through the city toward Canal Street.

  But Baxter ordered silence until the appointed hour came. He was co-operating with Health Commissioner Traub, obeying his instructions. If this raid succeeded tonight, the name of Traub would never be forgotten in Branford. But Chief Baxter was more than glad to share the honors with anyone who could help round up this band of fearful extortionists. Traub, over the phone, had confirmed this belief that the disease had been spread deliberately. Traub said he had secretly been investigating the criminals and had unearthed extraordinary facts.

  Chapter XIX

  Showdown!

  IN the strange, evil hideout of the extortionist ring, Agent “X” was also active. Entering with his gangster colleague, he spoke to the man quickly.

  “Let me tell the boss what happened. Here!”

  He unfastened the zippers on his fur suit, reached in the back of his coat to a hidden pocket and brought out some bills. These he handed to his companion.

  “Some of the change I picked up at Traub’s,” he said. “Give me that injector gadget. You didn’t use it. The boss will want it back.”

  The other, impressed by the sight of the money, made no objection. He handed Agent “X” the injector. With both this and his own in his gloved hand, Agent “X” walked back to the room at the end of the corridor, in the wall of which was the boss’s peek-hole.

  Agent “X” rapped on the metal partition as he had heard the others do. There was no answer for a second. Momentarily he feared that perhaps the “boss” had gone. Then a sleepy, surly voice answered him. Evidently the leader of the extortionist ring had a cot where he could take naps in the hideout.

  “What is it?” His voice came harshly.

  “We got Traub, boss. We only had to use one of the gadgets. Here they are.”

  “You gave the commissioner a full injection?”

  Agent “X” laughed.

  “All there was in it, boss.”

  The small door below the eyehole opened. A hand appeared.

  It was then that Agent “X” acted with the suddenness of a coiled spring abruptly released. He dropped the injectors, seized the hand, held it—pulling it through the opening.

  A harsh cry sounded behind the wall. Agent “X” had his needle hypodermic out again. He plunged it into the wrist of the hand he held, squeezed the plunger. Then suddenly he realized that the needle was almost empty. He had used up most of the drug it contained.

  But he held the man’s hand tensely till the fingers were beginning to grow lax. The drug was taking effect on the man behind the wall. But how long would he stay unconscious?

  Dizziness swept over the Agent. He was aware again of the bacilli in his blood. This it was, he guessed, that had made him forget to fill the hypo needle. But footsteps sounded outside in the corridor. He dropped the hand he held, stepped away from the wall. Two men, evilly costumed and just back from some sinister mission, shuffled into the room.

  “We thought we heard some one yell,” growled one.

  “I knocked and the boss didn’t answer,” said “X.” “I thought maybe he was asleep and hollered at him. He ain’t there.”

  The others rapped also. There was no answer from behind the wall.

  “He’ll be back soon,” said one of the men. “He’s stayin’ here nights now.”

  They rolled down their hoods, waited, puffing cigarettes. Agent “X” looked at them. Here were more of the vicious scum of the underworld.

  They stared at him wondering why he did not make himself comfortable and lower his own mask. He shuffled out of the room, went down the corridor. But two other costumed men passed him. The hideous clan seemed to be assembling—their work for the night over.

  AGENT “X” crept down the stairway to the underground garage. Here was the door, the lock of which had given him so much trouble. It was made of steel. It would take the police too much time to open it—and time was precious. He left it unlocked, strode swiftly through the underground passage, unlocking all the doors he came to. Then he ran back, climbed the stairs, and tiptoed into Hornaday’s room.

  The man was breathing stertorously again. The effects of the diluted serum had worn off. He was back in the dread coma of sleeping sickness.

  Agent “X” rolled up the man’s sleeve and gave him another injection of the serum in the bottle. That would bring Hornaday around by the time—

  Feverish impatience possessed the Agent. Shooting pains were stabbing through his head. The disease was progressing in his body. But he was not thinking of himself. He was thinking of the success of his plans, thinking of Betty Dale. The gangsters had taken his watch from him, but he had possessed himself of Traub’s.

  He looked at it. Five minutes of two. The night had gone. It was early morning. But these fiends who worked like ghouls in the darkness were still up. So were others, Agent “X” knew, men he had summoned.

  He crept resolutely to the head of the stairs again. Faint sounds reached him. Some one was moving along the subterranean passage. The Agent’s heart beat faster.

  Then he went to Hornaday’s room again and quickly took off the gorilla-suit. He removed his cloth suit also, stepped back into the furred one again, and put the other over it. This bulked his clothing out, made him look fatter, gave him the proportions of Traub. At places where the black fur came below the cuffs of the other suit, he cut it off. Commissioner Traub seemed to be standing in the room.

  A cry sounded somewhere in the passage outside; then it seemed that a series of earthquake shocks came. Through the iron walls, through the concrete of the old gas works, came the blows of axes, the shouts of men. But some of the shouting men were already inside. The corridor outside Hornaday’s room rang suddenly to the sharp reports of automatics. Agent “X” looked out. The place was swarming with police—the men that he had summoned.

  Gangsters poured out of the room beyond. Fierce curses sounded, the crack of automatics. A yell went up as one of the gangsters appeared in his hideous gorilla suit. Two cops fired at him point-blank. He fell sprawling grotesquely, his hood came off.

  “It ain’t an ape—it’s a man,” cried a cop.

  Smoke made the corridor hazy. The acrid tang of it was in the air. Agent “X” ran out into the corridor. He was unarmed, but he didn’t care. The gangsters were putting up a stiff resistance. He saw tear gas bombs in the hands of two cops.

  “Not those,” he shouted. “There are real apes here. We can’t take any chance. That gas is liable—”

  “Commissioner Traub!”

  The cops’ jaws fell. But Chief Baxter shouldered forward, wrung the Agent’s hand.

  “Good work, Traub! Great! How the hell did you do it?”

  “X” didn’t answer. He snatched up a gun that a gangster, trying to plunge past, and dropped by a cop, had let fall. With this Agent “X” joined the fight. Not often did he use lethal weapons. But time was precious. What if the drug he had administered to the man behind the wall began to lose its effect? The man must not escape. He might take the serum with him—would in all probability.

  Agent “X” fought like a fiend; winged two gangsters in the shoulder; pressed forward toward the room at the end of the corridor, until cops gasped at the amazing audacity of Commissioner Traub.

  But they followed on his heels. The gangsters made a last stand, and were either shot or taken prisoners.

  Then Agent “X” shouted an order.

  “Bring in the acetylene torches quickly. Cut through that wall.”

  In his telephone conversation with Baxter, talking as Traub, he had instructed that torches be brought. Two big cops from the boiler squad, which had been s
ummoned, came into the room with the gas and torches.

  Slipping their goggles over their faces, they set to work. The white-hot flame of the torches bit through the steel wall that separated this chamber from the mystery room beyond.

  Sledge hammers broke out the brittle steel in the panels that the torches had cut. Agent “X,” Chief Baxter, and two cops stepped through. Then Baxter gave a harsh cry.

  A man was lying on the floor—a man familiar to many citizens of Branford.

  “Doctor Roeber!” cried Baxter. “Look, Traub! This guy who took care of the millionaires and swells is the crook, the big shot behind it all.”

  FOR one instant only, Agent “X” stood staring. Then his questing eyes searched the room and he leaped forward. In a glass cabinet was the precious serum. In another the dread virus culture, marked in the degrees of its potency. He grabbed one serum syringe, filled it, put it in his pocket. Whatever happened, he would reserve some of that for Betty Dale.

  “See that nothing happens to any of this,” he said. “It’s precious. Hornaday’s down the corridor in room G. He’ll tell you what to do. He’ll—”

  Agent “X” stopped speaking, for the man on the floor, Doctor Roeber, had suddenly stirred! His face twitched. He roused himself; thrust an arm under him and sat up.

  A sudden snarl came to his lips as he saw the faces about him. He rose unsteadily to his feet, but two cops stepped forward and held him.

  “We’ve got you, Roeber,” said Chief Baxter harshly. “Caught you with the goods. You’re the devil who stole the apes so you could bleed the people of Branford. But we’ve got you now. Commissioner Traub landed you nicely.”

  “Traub!”

  The name came from Roeber’s lips like a cry. He turned, saw Agent “X,” and his mouth dropped. Then the blazing light of fury came into his eyes. He raised his hand, spoke with seething venom.

  “Traub! He’s the man who worked with me all the time! He’s just trying to save his own dirty skin. He’s in the same boat as I am.”

  Eyes turned toward Agent “X.” He waited tensely.

  “I can prove it,” said Roeber. “I’ve got letters from him; I know his past! We went into this thing together. He’s the one who found out at the institute what Hornaday was doing.”

  Roeber came closer, dragging the cops after him. His sneering, mocking face was close to the Agent’s.

  “Deny it if you can, Traub!” he snarled. “You can’t get out of it this way. You thought you could double-cross me, but you can’t. You know about me, but I know about you, too. When you helped me practice in Branford under a fake name after I’d stopped doctoring gangsters; when you introduced me to all the swells and said I was a big society doctor, you didn’t do it for love. I forced you to do it by finding out you were a crooked politician and threatening to expose you. I’ve got pals to prove that. You’re in it up to your neck just as I am.”

  The Agent did not attempt to reply. He could not even afford to submit to police investigation. He could see that Roeber’s words had already half convinced Baxter. He was hemmed in on all sides, trapped. And the germs of the sleeping sickness were becoming more and more apparent.

  His quick eye roved over the room. Behind Roeber he saw the hidden exit by which Traub and Roeber had been in the habit of entering this room.

  As Baxter and Roeber waited breathlessly for him to speak, he suddenly leaped forward, shoving Roeber and the cops who held him out of his way.

  He made the exit in two bounds, thrust the door open and went through. Behind him came shouts, the stamping of feet. He fled along a narrow passage, passed through another door and another. The sheer abruptness of his action had given him a start on his pursuers.

  THE passage seemed to go on endlessly. It went downward at a slant. Agent “X” knew he was below the level of the earth. Then he climbed a flight of stairs, came at last to a door that opened into a little old shed. The door to this in turn gave into a side street, far from the premises of the old gas works. But the Agent’s pursuers were still on his trail.

  He could hear quick-footed cops pounding along the passages that he had traversed. The bacilli of the sleeping sickness made him feel weak. He couldn’t run far. They would overtake him.

  He crept away, skirted the gas house, saw an empty police cruiser parked in the street. The cops who had come in it were inside, taking part in the raid.

  The Agent leaped into this. Its transmission was not even locked. The law did not suspect that anyone would be bold enough to take a police car.

  The first of the pursuing cops came around the corner of the building just in time to see the Agent’s actions. A cry went up. Shots pierced the night. Traub was a marked man now. In the sight of the police, his flight had stamped him as the criminal Roeber claimed him to be.

  Agent “X” swung the car away from the curb, headed across the city. Behind him sirens began to wail in the night as the chase was taken up. There had been other cruisers on the block, parked also. The pursuing cops jumped into these.

  Clinging to the wheel of the small, jouncing car, half faint with the germs in his body, Agent “X” drove like a fiend. There was the light of purpose in his eye, battling with the glassiness of the disease.

  He knew where he was going; knew where he must lead this chase to make it appear right. But at the last he turned and saw two cops on motorcycles catching up. Even the fleet cruiser could not outdistance these two-wheeled speedsters.

  He slammed brakes on in front of Commissioner Traub’s house, leaped from the cruiser just as the motorcycles slid to a stop. He bounded toward the house, ran around it. The rear door was still unlocked as he had left it. He thrust it open, stepped back into the shadows, thence to the shrubbery on the lawn.

  From this vantage point he saw the cops enter the house—and he wondered with grim humor what they would think when they found Traub unconscious. Suicide would probably be the explanation, until the man awoke from the effects of the harmless drug and faced his accusers.

  Agent “X” slipped off into the night, his task done. And in his pocket was the precious syringe of serum that was destined for Betty Dale.

  Six hours later the newspapers in a dozen cities were screaming the news that the sleeping sickness epidemic in Branford was being checked. A gigantic extortion racket had been bared. A society doctor, a former gangster surgeon, and the commissioner of health himself were implicated. But now the staff of Drexel Institute, under the direction of a scientist named Hornaday, was rapidly producing the serum that Hornaday had worked out. There would be enough for all in a few days. It was as though a holiday had been declared. Parents with sick children rejoiced. A black pall of horror had been lifted from Branford.

  There were two mysteries which the people of Branford could never understand. Why had the guilty Commissioner Traub fled straight back to his home when the police chased him, and why had he apparently anesthetized himself with a harmless drug?

  A third mystery, even more puzzling to the newspaper editors of Branford, was how a reporter for an outside paper, the Herald, had gotten hold of the story of the criminals’ capture so long before they were even faintly aware of it. Chief Baxter claimed he had not released the story to anyone. The raid on the gas works had been made in absolute secrecy.

  Yet a man, who said he was speaking at the request of Betty Dale, had telephoned the news into the Herald in time to make the early morning edition. He also told them that the eminent Englishman, Doctor Vaughton could be found at a certain address. This created another sensation. It constituted one of the greatest “scoops” in the history of that paper. Their circulation jumped a good fifty-thousand copies and Betty Dale was rewarded with a substantial increase in salary.

  Betty, almost well after the injection of serum Agent “X” had given her, could have explained it, but refused to. To do so would have been to go against a promise she had given Secret Agent “X”—a promise not to reveal the amazing, desperate battle he had waged in Branf
ord—now no longer a city of sleeping death.

  Hand of Horror

  Chapter I

  Clutching Doom

  BROODING darkness lay over the pretentious mansion. No lights showed anywhere on the spacious grounds, except for a splash of incandescence thrown from the partly opened door of the cement garage that was built into the side of the house. Off to the left, the white stonework of a private mausoleum rose, wraith-like in the night, barely discernible in the gloom.

  In the house itself, the servants’ quarters were darkened. The dim bulb in the hall at the entrance left the rest of the corridor in shadowy obscurity. In one room only was there a sign of subdued life. This was a library on the second floor, at the rear. The house was built on a sharp slope, so that this second floor room became, in fact, a ground floor room.

  Here were gathered four men whose features were indistinguishable in the partial light of a weak-bulbed bridge lamp in the far corner.

  Even in the dim illumination, this room appeared as a sumptuously furnished library. Bookcases lined the walls; deep, comfortable upholstered chairs were in evidence. At the far end from the windows a balcony stretched across the room. The four men paid no attention to the furnishings. Though their faces were blurs, and the starched fronts of their dress shirts merely white splotches in the semi-gloom, it was apparent that there was a strange tenseness about them; a strained air of nervous expectancy that seemed to charge the atmosphere with hideous forebodings of doom.

  One of the four, a very tall man, was walking up and down, while the others sat still and taut, their very attitudes seeming to question him. Every time the tall man neared the far end of the room, the low-thrown light of the bridge lamp cast its gleaming focus on his brightly polished patent leather shoes that squeaked slightly with each step.

  One of the seated men flicked a lighter to a cigarette. The hand that held the lighter was revealed as flabby, pudgy, trembling. He took a puff or two of the cigarette, extinguished the lighter. Then, with an impatient motion, he crushed the cigarette in an ash tray on the end table.