The detectives made a dash toward the stairs. They mounted the steel steps in sudden panic, climbed while the jet of torchlight flame snarled below them.
But the room above was hardly better. Pipes in all parts of the building were bursting, hissing. Gouts of flame shot across space in a roaring inferno. Steel walls buckled and melted. Plaster crumbled into a red-hot dust.
The watchman they had heard came running to them, sweat streaming from his face. His eyes were bulging, fists clenched. A column of flame like a malicious living thing caught his body close to the middle. It seemed for a moment to wrap writhing arms around him. A piercing, frenzied scream came from his throat. The sound echoed through the high vaults of the factory above the fire’s roar. The man lurched and staggered, then collapsed, literally cut in two by the crucible heat. He lay, a horrible blackened thing that had once been a man.
Bates’ square-cut face was bathed in sweat. Cords in his bull neck stood out. He made a dash for the steel stairs down which they had come from the floor above. But Peaselee saw him and followed, clutching his arm before the detective had taken a half dozen steps. He had noticed what Bates in his hurry had overlooked. Molten metal in lava-like streams was already trickling down the treads. The stairs were melting high above. They were no longer safe. All of them were trapped in a seething inferno of flame.
Chapter II
FIEND OF FIRE
BATES spoke hoarsely, bloodless lips close to Peaselee’s ear. “Can’t leave by the door or windows. Cops would get us.”
Peaselee abruptly drew the detective toward the north side of the room. Another chamber led off here. There was no glow of bursting sprinkler pipes in evidence as yet. But to reach it, he and the others had to run a gauntlet of savage flame. It singed their clothing as they swept by, reached curling fingers at their flesh. They plunged on into the unlighted chamber, stopped.
Peaselee’s light swung up. There was no sprinkler outlet visible. The room was a storage chamber for heavy machinery. There was no window either, only a blank brick wall straight ahead. This lay against the side of the warehouse they had left ten minutes ago.
No window, and the heat of the flames behind them was increasing every second. Escape by the exits was cut off. They were imprisoned by a flaming barrier, sealed in this ventless chamber till more flame entered and snuffed out their lives in a torrent of molten steel.
Bates began swearing, hoarsely, monotonously, his red-rimmed eyes darting about. One of the detectives with him turned back toward the flames. Peaselee stopped him with a quiet command.
Uncomprehending, but startled into submission by this clear order in the face of raging tumult, Bates and his men stood still.
Peaselee ran straight forward toward the blank brick wall. When he neared it, he took something from an inner pocket. It was a small object, shaped like a packet of cigarettes. There was a tiny lever at one end, a sharp metal point set solidly in the black case.
He placed the case against the bricks three feet from the floor. He jabbed the metal point into a crack in the plaster. It stayed there firmly. Then Peaselee pressed the lever down.
A faint sputtering like an electric spark came from within the box. Peaselee turned and dashed back toward the spot where he had left the others. He pulled them down behind a piece of heavy machinery. Their blank faces showed that they did not understand.
Before they could even question him, a tremendous explosion shook the room. The floor seemed to rise and quiver. Plaster and bits of bricks whistled above their heads. Dust filled the air in stifling clouds. Deafening echoes sounded.
Peaselee leaped up as quickly as he had crouched. His flash, spraying forward through the murk, played over a jagged hole in the wall. He had set a bomb, and it had blown straight through the bricks and plaster with the force of a giant battering-ram.
Bates suddenly turned and stared at the man called Peaselee. There was respect and awe on the big detective’s square-cut face. His belligerent manner had entirely left him. His voice came hoarsely. “Got it now. Only one man I know of could have pulled a stunt like that. Only one man! You’re him! You’re—Secret Agent X.”
There was a moment’s silence, broken only by the hiss of the flames outside, and the men’s deep breathing. Then “Peaselee” nodded. He pointed to the hole in the wall. “Follow me!”
They did so, obeying silently, quickly, like well-trained automata. They knew they were in the presence of a master manhunter whose slightest word was a command. They realized that the shabby, gray-haired figure ahead of them had saved their lives. They slipped through the wall like shadows. They left the scorching, seething death of the flames behind. Then suddenly they paused.
Shouts and footsteps sounded down the long corridor directly in front. The police had entered the warehouse. The threat of discovery and capture was imminent again.
Secret Agent X spoke a swift command. “Head toward the back of the building. Leave by a window. Quick!”
“And you, chief,” Harvey Bates said firmly.
“I’ll hold off the cops.”
THE flashing, compelling light of authority gleamed in the Agent’s dark eyes.
Bates grunted a word of agreement. Then they sped off at right angles, away from the menace of the oncoming police.
When they had left, the Secret Agent leaped to a high pile of old boxes at the hallway’s side. He climbed them agilely, reached a steel bracing girder over the floor. He walked along this, stood poised above the direct center of the corridor where the police must pass.
They came on, guns gleaming, flashlights bobbing in their hands. There were only two of them he saw, but they had apparently glimpsed Harvey Bates and his men and had heard their voices. One of the bluecoats crashed three quick shots along the hall. Bullets ricocheted, whined. The pungent smell of cordite rose to the Agent’s nostrils. He waited, crouching, every muscle tense. They were only ten feet away, five feet. They were directly under him now.
He dropped like a panther plummeting from a limb on unsuspecting quarry. Yet he was careful not to injure the blue-coated men. He merely knocked them off their feet, sent their guns spinning, made their flashlights crash.
Cursing, clawing, they went down in a heap beneath his outstretched arms and body. They struck with furious fists at this human whirlwind who had dropped apparently from the sky.
X untangled himself in an instant, backed away. He turned and raced forward along the way the police had come. He heard them behind him, searching frantically for their guns.
One located his weapon when the Agent had taken fifty strides. But the cop’s flashlight was broken and the corridor was dark. The bullets that the policeman sent after X screamed harmlessly by. He ran on, reached the open door of the warehouse, plunged quickly through it—and he knew that Bates and his operatives were also safe.
But he made no attempt to join them. Instead, he crossed a rear yard running, vaulted a fence. For a moment he crouched in utter darkness. And his hands, lifting, did strange things to his face.
He drew off the gray toupee of “Peaselee,” revealing a sandy one beneath it. He made deft changes in the plastic material covering his skin. He erased the lines of age, rounded the features. He touched pigment, taken from a tiny vial, here and there to his flesh. Lastly he peeled off the ragged garments that clothed him, exposing a trim business suit below.
He whipped a cloth cap over his head, stepped cautiously into a side street, a different person. Even if Bates should meet him face to face there would be no chance of recognition. The Man of a Thousand Faces had assumed another role.
Outside, along the wide avenue at the end of the street, sirens rose in a screaming tumult. Already a half dozen alarms had been turned in. Fire engines and police radio cruisers were converging on this festering spot of incendiary crime.
THE AGENT legged it for the avenue, turned right and saw the light of the burning factory lifting evilly into the sky. The windows had become oblongs of shimmering light. Som
e had burst outward, shattering glass into the street. Bright tongues of flame were shooting up. The whole great building was like a roaring furnace with every draft turned on.
The police cordon around it still held, and reserves were hastily coming up. They were stringing fire lines across the entire block. The curious crowds, increasing in size every instant, were being held at bay. Only the uniformed men, police and firefighters in their helmets and long black coats, were allowed inside.
X saw the first streams of water pumped on the factory. He saw the hissing drops disappear in dense clouds of steam, seeming only to add to the heat of the flames. He saw the futility of such a method of battle. Evidently the firemen saw it, too.
They made way suddenly for a huge red truck that came thundering up. It was packed, not with hose, but with gleaming tanks of chemicals under pressure. The Agent recognized some of the latest fire-fighting equipment. Great metal flasks of carbon dioxide, the gas that can smother flames in ships’ holds and in blazing cellars.
Firemen, daring the terrific heat, ran pipes from the truck to the lower windows of the factory. An engine throbbed into life. Pumps sucked the gas from the tanks, forced it in screaming jets into the building. Under its spreading blanket even the chemical-fed fury of the flames within began to abate. One chemical was battling another in this startling war of science.
As the heat in the lower floors began to show signs of subsiding, firemen thrust ladders against the factory’s walls. They inserted new pipes of the stifling gas into the windows of the floors above. These seeming pigmies in their helmet hats were slowly conquering the mighty giant of flame. The Agent knew the reason. The arsonist terror in the past few days had spread. There had been other purposely set fires. The truck had been held ready, its equipment augmented, waiting for another emergency call. Now it was proving its usefulness.
He started suddenly, turning his gaze upward as a sound drifted down from the sky. Mist, red as the flame below it, swirled above the burning factory. Out of this mist, eerie and sinister, came the hum of an airplane’s motor. It throbbed like the drone of a giant bee, poised above hell’s chimney. And in an instant the Agent saw the plane itself.
A darting will-o’-the-wisp of black and yellow swooped down out of the night. A small, fast ship with bands around its fuselage, looking for all the world like a curious wasp drawn by the fire below, circled close in the heat that seemed to reach for its wings. The pilot appeared mad to risk such perilous currents. The small plane bucked and quivered in the eddying drafts. It banked, turned, and came lower still—and the Agent sensed something sinister in its strange maneuvers. It was a winged wasp of death bound on some evil mission.
Police and firemen on the pavement saw it. Eyes in the dense crowd outside the fire lines watched its actions in straining silence. It banked once more, and came down till its black wings almost touched the housetops—till a puff of heat made its striped fuselage roll like a cask at sea. And in that instant the gloved arm of the lone pilot moved out from the small plane’s side.
X caught a quick glimpse of something dropping, small objects round and hard as walnuts. They fell toward the side of the factory where the firemen were fighting the blaze with their chemical gas. And where they fell men screamed and staggered. Above the roar of the flames, above the drone of the plane’s motor and the hissing gas, came a shrill sound of human torment.
The Agent saw firemen clutch at their faces wildly. He saw two tumble from a high ladder and pitch headlong into the street to their deaths. He saw others run away from their posts like men gone suddenly mad.
Chilled with horror, he burst forward through the stunned and gaping crowd. He tore through the fire lines beyond. No one tried to stop him. The police stood frozen with wonder at their posts. Firemen outside the radius of the nut-like missiles were running toward their comrades.
X caught sight of the features of one of the wildly clawing forms. The man had fallen to his knees. He had torn his coat and helmet off. His face was a bloated mass of tortured flesh, swollen to twice its normal size. His arms and legs looked as though he’d been stricken suddenly with elephantiasis. His lips and throat had swelled till his anguished screams had been choked off. As the Agent neared him he fell backwards writhing, then lay unmoving, a puffed and ghastly corpse.
Chapter III
DEATH’S HIGH CARNIVAL
ABOVE the screams of the victims of the strange bloating death there sounded the sinister humming of the murder plane. The Agent raised his eyes. The striped ship was just disappearing in the swirling, crimson mist.
He looked around him. The scene in front of the burning factory was like a glimpse into some hideous torture chamber at the mouth of hell. Men were stumbling, falling, crying out in anguish. Men were pulling their bloated, pain-wracked bodies over the pavement where the light of the flames shimmered in a weird devil’s dance of doom. Men with livid skins and features puffed beyond all human semblance lay gasping out their lives.
The Agent stood with clenched hands, eyes dark with horror. This was something he had not reckoned on. He had come on the trail of mysterious, undercover crime. He had come to investigate the activities of an arson ring which he knew was active in the city. Now he was faced with the fact that the arsonists were also murderers, killers as fiendish, as merciless as any he had ever known. Death was holding high carnival around him. The firemen who had dared to interfere with the incendiaries’ work had themselves become targets for destruction.
And the flames, like fiends rejoicing in newfound freedom, were leaping higher. Their livid light was reaching out across the street. The factory was doomed.
An ambulance clanged noisily down the block. It came nosing through the tense crowd and whirled up to the fire. Interns, their white suits turned red as blood by the light of the burning building, bent over the dead and dying and lifted them on stretchers. A half dozen of the hideously bloated bodies were borne away. Other ambulances joined the first. Following them came a long car filled with police detectives.
A big man with a pale, aquiline face and black eyebrows jutting menacingly above cold, piercing eyes was the first to alight. His features were familiar to the Agent. He was Inspector John Burks of the city homicide squad. Murder as well as arson had taken place. Burks, grim dealer in murder mysteries, was on hand.
He was followed by a group of experts from headquarters. Fingerprint men, official photographers, an assistant medical examiner.
In long, jerky strides, Burks walked to one of the bloated corpses. X saw his face grow tense, saw his hands twitch as he stared down. The Agent drew closer and watched the medical examiner begin his gruesome work.
But his attention was distracted in a moment by the arrival of two more cars. A limousine and a yellow taxi pulled up simultaneously close to the fire zone. From the taxi a small man with a sharp-featured, wrinkled face and snapping eyes alighted. His mouth was working, his gaze riveted on the factory fire. The Agent heard his shrill voice even before he could distinguish what the man was saying. The stranger came closer, talking vehemently, gesturing passionately with his skinny arms.
“I own that building!” he shouted. “I’m Herron—Jason Herron! Why isn’t something being done to stop the fire? What are the engines here for? What are these men doing? I pay taxes! Why don’t I get protection?”
No one paid any attention to the man’s shrill tirade. He stopped suddenly as he glimpsed the police gathered about the bloated corpse. But their legs and shadows prevented him from getting a detailed view. He continued angrily in a moment:
“I don’t care what’s happened, or whether men have been injured. It’s their job to see that property owners aren’t ruined. That’s my building—burning up!”
The passengers from the limousine were approaching. One was a tall, middle-aged man with glasses, a brick-red face and a commanding bearing. His companion was younger, efficient looking, alert. The man with glasses spoke to Herron.
“Your property’s cov
ered, isn’t it, Mr. Herron? You’re all right. It’s we insurance people who should do the worrying. This is the third incendiary fire in a week.”
HERRON turned on the newcomer with angry violence. “Mathew Monkford!” he snarled. “You’ve got a nerve to show your face here! If you’d done what those criminals asked you this wouldn’t have happened. My building’s covered, but that won’t make up for what I’m going to lose in business. It’ll take months to build another factory. Meanwhile I’ll lose orders. As president of the Great Eastern Insurance Company it was your place to protect your policy holders’ interests first and foremost—even if you had to give in to the incendiaries.”
The tall insurance man frowned. “Do you expect me to encourage crime by surrendering to criminals? This city has its police force, hasn’t it?”
“The police!” Herron snorted. “They were posted here to guard this building. And what happened? See for yourself! It’s burning—burning to the ground. And neither the police nor the firemen are doing a thing about it. I have contracts out calling for merchandise. I can’t fill them. I’ll be ruined.”
Again Mathew Monkford shrugged. “A few more losses like this,” he said slowly, “and Great Eastern will be ruined, too.”
Herron turned away with a furious gesture. He stalked toward Inspector Burks. His high-pitched voice lashed out. “I know you, sir! I’ve seen your picture in the papers. You hold down a soft job with the police. We taxpayers hand you your salary. What have you got to say at the disgraceful failure of your men to do their duty?”
Burks lifted a hard gray face and stared at Herron. His cold eyes seemed to bore through the factory owner. His answer was rasping. “Get out! I’m not interested in you or your building. Men have been murdered tonight. That’s all that interests me. Take a look at this corpse and stop your yelling. Be glad you aren’t in this man’s shoes! And if you’ve complaints to make, make them to the commissioner. I’m here to run down killers.”
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 6 Page 22