With a bull-like roar that challenged the fire to do its worst, he lowered his head and plunged from the office. The flames had already mounted backstage and Achmet’s smoke-dimmed eyes sought frantically for a way out. There was one way out. A steel ladder led up to a batten for supporting drops and this extended across the stage to another ladder. On the other side of the stage, the fire was not yet well started. Achmet made for the metal ladder and scrambled up.
But before he could quite gain the batten, he heard a voice calling him by name from below. He turned his head. Following him up the steel ladder was the slender, graceful figure of the Leopard Lady. Her green eyes were the only thoroughly chilled things in the inferno.
“Haven’t you forgot something, Achmet?” she asked. “Where is my share?”
Achmet laughed aloud, turned, and gained the batten which swayed slightly on its ceiling-hung supports. But the Leopard Lady followed.
“Achmet,” she called, and smoke had made her voice more husky than ever, “no man has ever deserted me if I wished it otherwise.” Walking like a cat, she moved along the narrow batten. Midway across the stage, Achmet stopped. Only his heavy beard concealed the cunning smile on his lips.
“Well, my poisoned flower, perhaps your work deserves some recompense.”
Warily, the Leopard Lady came nearer. Her green eyes never left the valise in Achmet’s hand. Something glittered in her fingers. A knife, and she held it by its long, narrow tip ready to throw.
“So you imagine that you can shed me like a worn garment, Achmet?” Her right arm flashed out and down like a striking adder. The glittering knife flashed across the short span that separated her from Achmet. The big man ducked with an agility that belied his bulk. The knife missed him by inches and he nearly dropped the valise trying to save himself from falling to the flaming stage below.
With a cry like the snarl of a cat, the Leopard Lady sprang forward, hands outstretched, seeking Achmet’s throat. But the bearded man was ready for such a move. His left leg shot forward, his big shoe tripping the woman. For a single moment, she swayed on the narrow batten. Then dizzy with the height and the flaming sea of flame, Felice Vincart lost her balance and pitched head first into the inferno below. Shriek after shriek marked her downward plunge.
“See if you can land on your feet, cat!” roared Achmet. But as he raised his head, the roaring laugh died on his lips. For at the other end of the batten, from whence Achmet had come, was a phantom. Its face was scarcely recognizable as a face because of the havoc fire and smoke had wrought. But the man moved forward and in his strange eyes blazed the light of avenging justice.
Achmet’s right hand darted to his pocket and he tore out an automatic. “So you follow, man hell cannot hold?” he muttered.
The faceless thing came unalterably forward. “You might have known I would follow you to hell itself,” said a calm, smooth voice.
ACHMET raised his automatic and took deliberate aim. He must not miss, for the man on the batten was Secret Agent X. Though his make-up was utterly ruined and his clothes ragged, the Agent was without injury. He had escaped from the burning storage room by following the example of the retreating leopards. He had gone through that narrow chute and gained the stage.
He faced death now as calmly as he had faced it a hundred other times. As Achmet raised his automatic, the Agent’s hand went into one pocket of his riddled trousers. There was a crack of a shot. Achmet cried hoarsely, swayed, and caught himself by looping his left arm around a batten support. He had not dropped the valise, but his gun was gone and a wound in his right wrist spurted blood.
“Yes,” said X in the same deadly calm, “I have an automatic dropped by one of your men in the storage room. You have nothing, now.” But X knew the gun was empty. He had exhausted all but the last shot defending himself against the leopards as he came through their chute.
Achmet mouthed an oath, turned on the batten, and ran to the end. X followed closely. Achmet slid and half fell down the ladder. From his position at the top of the ladder, X swung the empty automatic above his head and hurled it at Achmet’s retreating form. The gun struck the man between broad shoulders. Achmet only grunted and dodged into a dressing room.
X dropped to the stage, ran into the wings, and lunged at the dressing room door. Achmet waited, his legs wide spread and in his hands was a Browning repeating rifle.
“Now, Mr. X, I have a gun. I intend to use it.”
X shrugged. “All right, you’ve got me. You’ll not live long, though.”
“And why not? Suppose Achmet should vanish?”
“Go back to Egypt, I suppose?” X regarded the man through amused eyes.
“Perhaps.”
“Then I hope you learn Arabic when you’re there. A man named Achmet Karahmud should know that language. You don’t. At the bottom of each stock certificate sold by your murder company there was a little bit of writing—supposed to be your signature—that a great many people might have taken for Arabic. You didn’t dare write it in English lest some one discover it. Then the police might have picked you up sometime when you were masquerading behind grease paint, putty nose, beard and wig. The disguise was good enough to fool me,” X went on. “Probably no one in your gang except Felice Vincart knew your true identity. The point is that when you tried to scrawl something that looked like Arabic at the bottom of those stock certificates, you failed. When I guessed that Achmet Karahmud was the president of your murder company, why—Eureka! Achmet is no more of an Egyptian than I am. Not as much, in fact, for I read and write Arabic.
“Then there was the business of the colorless essence in the china cats—an essence that produced a killing rage in the leopards by its very odor. True, human beings would not smell that odor, but to the sensitive nostrils of the leopards, that odor blazed a trail and said to them, ‘Kill, kill, kill.’”
“So you know that, do you?” growled Karahmud.
X NODDED. “And you were the only one of my suspects who had the proper facilities for distilling such an essence, the existence of which you learned through the Farington zoo, no doubt. That essence was distilled from monkey glands, monkeys taken from the zoo, no doubt. By your process of distillation, you improved upon its power considerably.
“When I realized that the Leopard Lady’s cats unfailingly attacked your victims because they had touched the green china cats, I was sure of my men. Those cats contained that powerful essence—monkey scent. Any animal trainer will tell you that the odor of a monkey on his clothes would make it exceedingly dangerous for him to enter a cage with the big cats. The odor is sufficient to drive even trained cats into an unmanageable rage.
“And all the time you controlled your organization, you mingled freely with your stockholders, claimed to be a stockholder yourself, simply to divert suspicion and spy upon the men and women you intended to kill.”
Karahmud laughed. “And knowing that monkey scent drives the big cats wild, you knew that the substance in the china cats was the fluid essence of that same scent?”
X nodded. “It could be nothing else, and you were the man best equipped to make that essence. Then, of course, there was a hair from a South African baboon found in your office. You had had a monkey there though I could not have known the reason until I understood just how the china cats worked.”
Karahmud nodded. “Clever. Well, you’re finished, Mr. X.” He raised the Browning rifle.
X smiled. “Sorry, but the gun isn’t loaded. I took the precaution of unloading it before you entered the room. Try it, if you don’t believe me.”
For a split second, Achmet’s eyes dropped to the gun in his hand. It was sheer bluff on the Agent’s part. But in the moment that Achmet’s eyes lowered. X leaped. He diverted the barrel of the Browning by a fraction of an inch just as it started pumping lead.
His right fist swung up to the point of the killer’s chin with all the energy in the Agent’s powerful body. The killer was a big man, but that blow was made to fell an ox.<
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X dropped beside the killer and fortified the first dose of oblivion by giving him a second knock in the side of the head. He ripped off black beard, wig, and peeled away nose putty. Beneath was the sandy-complexioned Stuart Gray, maker of cosmetics and distiller of rare perfumes, the rarest of which was monkey scent.
Searching the man’s pocket, X found gold-shell which Gray had fitted over his own teeth to emphasize the difference between himself and the character of Karahmud which he assumed. These shells, together with beard, wig, and putty, he put near the bag of loot. With a rag from his own clothing twisted around his forefinger, the Agent drew a letter “X” in the grease paint on Karahmud’s forehead.
The blows he had handed Gray would require an hour’s time to sleep off. Long before that time came, X would see that Gray was found with all the incriminating evidence about him. Farington and others who had been victimized by the gang would make reliable witnesses as to the guilt of the man who disguised himself as Karahmud.
This done, Agent X coolly kicked out the dressing room window and slipped over the sill. Anyone in the alley back of the burning theatre might have heard the Agent mutter! “Achmet sleeps!”
But there was no one in the alley, nothing there but night and the lonely man. Then even he vanished, swallowed by the smoky black murk that was no deeper than the mystery that must shroud forever the true name of Secret Agent X.
The Fear Merchants
Chapter I
THE CRUCIBLE OF CRIME
HIGH UP, on the fourteenth floor of the big warehouse that faced the river, four men stole forward with the swift, silent steps of stalking ghouls. A wide corridor stretched before them, murky with night shadows, dank with the dampness of neglect. The certainty of their movements as they passed along it was grim proof that what they did had been carefully rehearsed.
At the corridor’s farther end a high window rose. The leader of the quartette stopped abruptly when he came to this. He was a big man, ruggedly built, with features that suggested cubist art. His head was almost square. His mouth was a straight line across a square-cut jaw. His eyebrows formed a higher line set at right angles to the jutting down-sweep of his nose.
The others saw his profile outlined dimly against the faint glow that crept up from the street. They watched as he softly raised the sash. They saw him poke his head cautiously into the chill night air and stare down three stories to the roof of the factory building that lay dark and still below.
For seconds he peered at this, eyes squinted up, face stonily intent. Then he pulled himself in and turned. There was a faint click as his electric flash went on. Holding the light cupped deftly in the palm of his big hand, he let its beam fall on the features of his companions, studying each as he had studied the roof below.
Two were young, hard-bitten like himself; men with the steely eyes and the grim mouths of fighters; men picked for physical courage and mental poise—operatives of the Bates Detective Agency, one of the most efficient private crime-fighting organizations in the city.
The third man looked strange by contrast. Trampish, elderly, unkempt, his gray hair wisped down over a seamed old face. Rumpled and faded clothing hung on a body that seemed to have lost the limberness of youth. He stood with drooping shoulders, staring listlessly at the floor.
The holder of the flashlight scowled. “You’d better wait here, Peaselee.”
The shabby man shook his head. “No, Mr. Bates, I will make it. Mr. Martin asked me to help. You lead the way.”
The square-faced leader, Harvey Bates, looked doubtfully. He nodded, said a gruff, “okay,” then spoke suddenly to his own operatives, addressing them in clipped sentences, his voice harsh as the rasp of steel on ice. “Street’s full of cops. Tough going if they catch us—hell to explain. They’ll shoot. We can’t shoot back. But we’ve got to do the job right!”
He handed his flash to one of his men, took a bundle from beneath his arm, unwrapped it. It was a long section of rope ladder tightly coiled. There were strong metal fasteners spliced to the ends. He looped these over the steam pipe, snapped them shut. He let the end of the rope ladder out the window, paying it carefully down along the building’s face. There were no other windows on this side. The warehouse wall was a sheer unbroken drop of sixty feet, steep and dangerous as a cliff.
THE ROPE ladder finally lay swaying in the darkness like a giant snake. Bates nodded grimly, swung a leg over the window sill and groped for the first rung with his foot. “When I get down I’ll jerk,” he snapped. “Scallot, you come next.”
In a moment he was gone, descending into the darkness, till he stood on the tarred surface of the factory roof.
The others followed. Peaselee came last of all. Yet, in spite of his awkward, trampish and feeble look, he didn’t falter. Bates eyed him a moment, angular jaw thrust out. Then he gave final instructions to his men.
“You men know what’s up. We’re here to search every foot of this building and see if those firebugs who’re holding up the insurance companies have been at work. It’s a sure tip that the place will go up in smoke before midnight. The Great Eastern people wouldn’t come across. And this dump’s on the spot. The cops have searched already. Maybe we’ll have better luck.”
Bates angled his big body to the roof edge and peered down into the street. On both corners of the block alert figures were visible. Others prowled in the shadows across the way. There was a police cordon around the factory tonight. The way down the warehouse wall was the only means of entrance. This the police had overlooked.
Bates crossed silently to a skylight in the center of the roof. It was hooked on the inside where iron stairs led up, but the agency detective took a small jimmy from his coat and prepared to force the fastenings.
He had no more than thrust the jimmy’s head under the crack of the skylight cover when the stranger, Peaselee, spoke quietly. “I know a better way.”
Bates straightened, scowling, a sharp reply on his square-cut lips. Before he could utter it, Peaselee set to work. He produced a rubber suction thimble from somewhere in his coat, pressed this to the glass. In his right hand was a small glass cutter, hardly larger than a match. He drew this deftly around the edge of a skylight pane. He grasped the suction thimble, pulled. There was a single, barely audible snap. The pane came loose. Peaselee laid it carefully down, reached through the opening, and unsnapped the skylight hooks. In a moment the cover was lifted and the men were ready to descend.
Bates was scowling, keenly eying Peaselee. Then he clipped: “We’ll go straight down. Begin at bottom, work up. Easy with those lights.”
His operatives nodded. They’d been provided with electric flashes no bigger round than pencils. These threw a straight beam, converging in a disc of light the size of a ten-cent piece.
They passed quietly down through the floors of the empty factory, rubber-soled feet soundless on the steel-shod stairs. Not till they’d reached the engine-room below street level did Bates pause.
“No mistakes,” he warned. “We’re dealing with rats. Killers. We don’t know how they get their fires going. Tonight we’ll find out. Get busy.” He gestured with his light for the men to spread and begin their search.
PEASELEE moved away from the others toward a cluttered corner of the room. His stabbing, tiny beam systematically covered every foot of wall space, every brace and pipe. His strange, dark eyes followed the shifting ray with the questing eagerness of a hawk. Minutes passed. Suddenly he tensed and knelt.
A test outlet of the factory’s sprinkler system led down close to the floor. There were indications on the brass nozzle that it had been recently turned. But this wasn’t what held the gray-haired man. It was the faint sheen of a greasy substance on the metal. Oil, perhaps, to make the nozzle screw thread limber.
He stooped and sniffed, and the muscles along his back seemed to bulk larger like the rising hackles of a dog. A faint, disturbing odor reached his nostrils. Calcium carbide, it seemed to be—the gray stuff that gives the white
-hot heat to burning acetylene vapor.
Peaselee stared at the nozzle a moment, then jerked to his feet. His light arced upward. His quick eye followed the sprinkler pipe to the automatic vent above. There were dozens of those vents in every room of the building. If some substance containing calcium carbide had been put into the sprinkler system itself, if this were ignited, what would be the result?
As though in answer, there was a sudden sound somewhere in the building. The faint, insect buzz of a tiny metal ratchet quivered in the air. Peaselee heard Bates give a snort, heard one of the detectives whisper hoarsely: “What’s that?”
Another vibration sounded, like a katydid giving voice in a night-darkened forest. A chorus of buzzings came from several parts of the factory at once. A watchman, prowling on the floor above, cried out. Then louder, closer than any yet, a ghostly, metallic buzzing began in the very room they were in. It was over near the wall, hidden it seemed behind the plaster, close to the spot where Peaselee had sniffed at the sprinkler nozzle.
He started toward it, suddenly stepped back. For a tongue of flame had spurted against the pipe. It came from the wall, lancing outward through a break that had opened. Hot and straight as a torch, it played against the pipe.
There was a sizzling sound, a boiling. The pipe appeared to swell before their eyes. A crack opened in it, greasy liquid gushed out. In an instant it glowed with lambent life, became a luminous, snakelike mass of writhing flame. The heat mounted, increasing internal pressure in the pipe. A melting, devouring fury of flame shot like a swift sword across the room. It struck the side of a great boiler, bit with the force of a gnawing canker into the steel.
The light of its seething, hissing sparks showed up the white faces of Harvey Bates and his men. The whole room was bathed in shimmering, ghostly light. The place had become a chamber of horror and swift destruction.
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 6 Page 21