They moved forward now at a steady trot, guns drawn, eyes alert. Suddenly, an office door opened. A woman came into the hall, sent a frightened glance at the column of men with guns in their hands. The woman was Dora Winton, and her appearance gave the Agent an opportunity that he dared not neglect. As Mrs. Winton opened her mouth to scream, X sprang forward. He drove his gas pistol forward threateningly.
“Shut up!” he snarled. “One peep out of you and you’re dead!”
X MOTIONED to one of the men. The convict understood. He came up beside the woman and thrust his gun into her side. The body of convicts moved slowly forward like a single ferocious animal in cunning retreat. Had they known that the guns with which they threatened were as harmless as toy popguns, that desperate courage would have been shattered.
Guards melted before the menacing body of men. It was not that they feared the snarling convicts. To all appearance any effort on their part to interfere with the escape would have meant the death of Mrs. Winton. There was only one thing that Agent X feared. And no sooner had they gained the prison yard than they met that one thing—tear gas.
Only the Agent’s super-human sense saved them then. Some inexplicable warning told him to turn his head and look back over the heads of his convict army. Four guards had quietly stepped from the door they had just left. Each carried tear gas bombs. One had his right hand raised, ready to hurl the bomb into their midst.
“Stop!” And all the dominant personality of Secret Agent X became apparent in that one word. “Make the slightest effort to stop us, and this woman dies. You may blind us with gas, but you cannot prevent my finger from tightening on the trigger of this gun.”
The man with the gas bomb lowered his arm. The guards stared helplessly at one another.
“Get to the two supply trucks,” X whispered. “One man, the woman and I in the driver’s seat of the first truck. We’ll force them to open the gates.”
The men moved cautiously, backing toward the trucks, nervous as wild beasts before a trainer’s lash. And the guards watched helplessly. X stood beside Mrs. Winton while one of the convicts sprang in beneath the wheel of the truck. X nodded at Dora Winton. “Get in,” he ordered.
The woman, white but courageously firm, lifted her head haughtily. “I positively refuse.”
X brought up his gun slowly toward the woman’s head. She stared into the muzzle fascinated. Yet she did not move.
“Let her have it!” shouted one of the convicts from the truck.
“Drive like hell for the gate!” shouted another.
X felt his throne of power crumbling beneath him. He could not harm Mrs. Winton. He would not had he been able. Beside him, the motor of the truck was roaring into action. X knew the fickle souls of the criminals who made up his army. They would not hesitate to make a break for the gates and leave X, their liberator, at the mercy of the guards.
There was no time for debate. X seized Dora Winton in his arms, lifted her, almost threw her into the cab of the truck. It was a move that required both hands, the move the guards had been watching for. X could not have used his gun on the woman then. A gas bomb performed an arc against the leaden sky. It burst only a few feet from the second truck. The first truck was already in motion.
Agent X was the only man of the escaping party who was not in one of the trucks. A white, vaporous tongue of tear gas reached out for him. The acrid fumes choked, blinded him. Yet, through a blur of tears, he saw the first truck rolling toward the gate.
GUARDS drew their guns, loosed screaming lead, all aiming at a single target—the lonely, staggering man who was Secret Agent X. A slug landed squarely between his shoulders. Protected by his bullet-proof vest though he was, the impact sent him lurching toward the ground. He snatched at the handle of the truck door, clung to it, felt himself jerked along the ground.
Suddenly, a gray-clad arm reached down from the truck, seized X by the arm and dragged him to safety. Half blind though he was, X saw the face of the man who had saved him. Just a convict, perhaps a murderer, but he was not inhuman enough to permit the man who had risked much to release them, to be shot down. Agent X was not one to forget such an act.
It was the second truck that had received the full effects of the tear gas. Yet in a desperate effort, the driver had got the machine going. Motor roaring, it lurched blindly ahead of the truck in which Agent X and Dora Winton rode. It charged at the gate like a maddened monster of steel. The driver, blind, choking, fed every possible ounce of gas into the struggling motor. Guards at the gate scrambled away in terror before the rushing monster.
The car swayed. Guided by the gas-blinded convict, it struck the steel gate-post, a ton and a half projectile of snarling steel and screaming men. Steel fence twisted. Glass shattered. The entire truck seemed to telescope. Its nose suddenly acquired pleats like the bellows of an accordion. Men were thrown out as the truck came to a sickening stop, front wheels halfway through the fence.
But the disaster had given Agent X and his party an unlooked for advantage. Not only were the guards at the gate thrown into disorganization, but the lock of the gate had strained and broken. Before the accurately guided charge of the Agent’s truck, the gates swung open.
“Turn left!” X shouted. “Drive, man, drive!”
The man behind the wheel needed no urging. He let the eight-cylinder engine beneath the hood take the bit in its teeth. The truck lurched sickeningly along the state road. Behind them, sirens of the pursuing prison cars screamed their warning.
“Side road to the right!” shouted X.
Tire squealed. The truck careened into an unpaved road. Ahead, X sighted a large shed that was attached to an old dolomite quarry. “Ditch the car!” he ordered. “Everybody out. Make for that shed. I’ve prepared for this.”
And he had prepared for just such a move. If all else failed, he had planned just such a prison break in order to liberate Lizio.
The truck slowed. Men sprang from it into the tall weeds at the side of the road. The driver let the truck run into the ditch. Agent X, gripping Mrs. Winton by the arm, led and half dragged her across the field. X and the escaped prisoners stumbled through the door of the shed.
IT WAS gloomy in the building, but not so dark but what X made out the flame-red hair of Jim Hobart.
“Martin sent me,” X cried. It was the signal he had previously arranged with Hobart. At once, Hobart’s picked private detectives surrounded the group of convicts. There were oaths and shouts of “double-cross.” Firing pins clicked upon empty chambers.
“Hands up, everybody!” shouted Hobart. And in the dim light of the building, X saw six convicts raise their hands. He slipped away into a small, dark room that had been used for storing tools. In the dark, his fingers worked swiftly and accurately, reforming his makeup material until his became the features of A.J. Martin, the newspaperman whose friendship Hobart valued so highly.
As soon as the transformation was complete, X joined the others. Hobart’s eyes popped a little. “Mr. Martin!” he gasped.
“On your toes, Hobart,” X said crisply in the voice associated with this most famous of all his aliases. “Hold these men for the prison officials.” He glanced across the big room at the prison-pale faces of the convicts. One face stood out—that of the man who had dragged X into the truck.
X pointed the man out to Hobart. “That man gets full credit for having checked the prison break. You understand, Hobart? Make up a story that he got wind of the planned escape, got in touch with you, and led the men into this ambush. I don’t know that man’s offense. Whatever it is, there’s good in him. Make him a hero and the very least he can expect is a shortened sentence. I owe him something.”
“Just as you say,” Hobart agreed readily.
“And Hobart, I’ll take one of your cars. That’s Mrs. Winton over there. I’d like to take her home.”
Jim Hobart looked at Mrs. Winton. She was pale but firm-lipped. At the moment, she was very lovely. Hobart smiled, wondered perhaps, if Mr
. Martin, confirmed bachelor, hadn’t fallen at last.
But it was with a purpose quite different than romancing that X drove Dora Winton back to the city.
“This is my father’s house,” she informed him as X stopped the car in front of a magnificent mansion on West End Avenue. “I’ve lived here since my separation from Mr. Winton. It’s really nicer looking on the outside than on the inside. Father’s laboratory equipment is generally littered over most of the house.”
“A chemist, isn’t he?” X asked, as he escorted Dora Winton toward the door.
She nodded. “And a tireless worker. But I have my wing of the house where I can get away and be with my birds.”
“Oh, you like birds?” X asked, opening the door for her.
She shrugged. “Not particularly. But Mr. Winton hates them.”
X turned and stared into the woman’s face. Beautiful perhaps, but there was a hard expression of cold hatred in her blue eyes. She smiled, invited him to enter. As they crossed a beautifully appointed hall, she added: “I like to think of the birds as keeping him away.”
“Just why did you go to see Lizio in the prison today?” X asked suddenly.
The woman’s eyes widened with surprise. “How did you know that? But I suppose in your capacity as a newspaperman you would get that information.”
X nodded. The woman was scrupulously avoiding his question. She put her hand on the door that led into her apartment. “Forgive me, won’t you, for not asking you in. This entire experience has been rather terrifying. I’m quite fagged out. But come sometime, won’t you, Mr. Martin?”
He took her hand, bowed slightly. “It would indeed be a pleasure,” he assured her. As she opened the door, he glimpsed the interior of Dora Winton’s drawing room. A pleasant, sunny room, with flowers all about and birds in cages. Little chirping canaries.
Inasmuch as X was certain that the strangling death was of a chemical nature, he had good reason to suspect Dr. Mills. But at the moment, Lizio’s escape worried him more than anything else. It was inexplicable. There seemed only one sure way of finding out why Lizio’s escape had been planned and put into execution: that was to disguise himself as Lizio and walk the dingy corridors of the underworld—an unusually dangerous move inasmuch as the police would have orders to shoot him on sight.
CHAPTER V
Hidden Doom
THAT night in a cheaply furnished, two-room apartment not far from the Hoola Club, a man moved furtively through the dark. He went to a window and looked down upon the street. Light from the street partially illuminated the man’s face. He was young, but his face was weazened and wrinkled. The big furry felt hat he wore on the back of his head seemed to weigh heavily upon him. The man was Tip Morgan, reporter of the Herald.
Morgan’s indrawn breath whistled between his teeth. Down below, two men lounged against a lamp post. Morgan drew back from the window. He took a small flashlight from his pocket and used its feeble beam to guide him across the room. He went into the bedroom, straight to the bed. He lifted a pillow and removed a sheaf of paper.
This he carried back to the living room and laid on a small table that stood beneath a book shelf. Then he went out into the hall and picked up the telephone. He called a number that was evidently familiar to him.
“This Betty Dale?” he whispered into the transmitter. “Well listen, Betty. That story we’ve been working on—it’s finished…. Yeah, but I don’t know that I can get it to the office…. I’m being watched constantly. Can you come and get it? They won’t be suspecting you…. You will? Good girl!” Morgan hung up, stood looking down at the phone.
Back in the living room, a flashlight beam picked out the table where the manuscript lay. A somber figure moved to the table. A hand reached out, picked up the paper and pressed a bit of wax to the last sheet. From the wax, a length of fine, silk thread was suspended. Attached to the thread was something like a small flask that glittered like quicksilver in the light of the flashlight. The hand lifted the glittering thing and put it on the book shelf….
Sometime later, in his hideout a few blocks away from Morgan’s flat, Agent X was accomplishing another miraculous disguise. What was most amazing was that he worked without either model or photograph to aid him. His head, at the moment, was monstrous and machinelike.
A cap of flexible metal was pressed over his head. The metal was curved so that it hid the natural hollow at the nape of his neck. When covered with plastic, it appeared that X had no neck at all. Heavy plates beneath his coat hunched his shoulders up nearly to his ears and added to the neckless effect he was trying to get.
He had spent much time on the toupee of close-clipped, black hair with which he covered the metal head plate. This toupee came far forward in front to simulate a low forehead. With plastic material he fashioned features that were expressionless and almost brutal. Then he tinted the plastic so that it resembled the skin of an olive-complexioned man.
When he had completed the subtle touches with a lining pencil, he surveyed his work in the mirror. With the exception of the position of his ears, Agent X looked very much the part of Tony Lizio—enough like Lizio, certainly, to attract bullets from any policeman who saw him.
DRESSED in a shoddy suit, the pockets of which he filled with his own special equipment, and with a hat pulled well down over his head, he ventured out into the ill-lighted street. He walked with a shuffle such as most convicts acquire. He had scarcely proceeded the length of a block before he heard the heavy tread of a policeman ahead of him, Agent X was frankly courting trouble, but not with the police. He slipped into a dark doorway to wait until the cop had passed.
When the policeman’s tread had diminished, X breathed again and stepped out into the street. At the end of the block, he turned left and shuffled to the mouth of an alley. He was now within the boundaries of the territory of the Turney gang. He entered the alley unafraid, his head lowered, his eyes darting from one shadowy hole to another.
Steps sounded on a stairway. X paused, watching and listening. A husky voice burst into song. A squat figure clumped from the dimly-lighted stairway, lurched into an ash can and cursed. Light fell across the man’s face. X recognized him as one of the Turney brothers’ pals.
Agent X shuffled forward, pushed his hat back from his face. The man put one foot back on the stairs.
“Whatcha want?” he demanded hoarsely.
X uttered not a word but continued forward. Light from the stairway fell across his face—a hideous face, made up as it was, and somehow terrifying to the man at the foot of the stairs. He gasped:
“Lizio! Whatcha want, dammit!” He made an ineffectual stab at his shoulder holster. His brow had suddenly become beaded with sweat.
“Why you wanta to have me dead?” asked X in a whisper. His voice, intonation and accent were an exact imitation of Lizio’s. “Why you put me in da frame?”
“I—I didn’t,” choked the man. “Not me, brother. When the others wanted to do it, I voted thumbs down. I don’t frame guys. I—don’t you touch me!”
The Agent’s hands went out like the talons of a hawk. He seized the man by the shoulders, shook him until his teeth rattled. “Who did then? You tella me quick or I tear you in bitsa pieces!”
“I—I—it was— I can’t tell. They’ll kill me.”
“And I tear you to bitsa pieces!”
The man struggled, but the Agent’s grip only tightened. Somewhere above, X heard a window open.
“It—it was Agent X, that’s who it was,” the hood gasped out, as if it was the inspiration of the moment.
“Don’t be da fool. I kill you.”
“No—no,” the frightened man pleaded. “It was—it was the Turneys. The Turneys and—”
Something moved behind the Agent. He flung the frightened hood from him, half turned. A blackjack descended upon his head with terrific force. The leather sack split and its leaden contents scattered like shrapnel. It was a blow that would easily have fractured his skull, but the metal h
ead plate, that was a part of his disguise, broke the force of the blow.
DAZED though he was, half blinded by the brilliant lights of threatening unconsciousness that flashed before his mind, X turned and struck out at his shadowy opponent. His fist landed on the man’s shoulder, rocked him backwards. As light from the stairway fell across the man’s face, X recognized him as another of Turney’s henchmen. The man snatched out a gun, fired straight at the Agent’s chest.
At such close range the force of that shot as it thudded into his bullet-proof vest was stunning. Its effect, coupled with the blow he had received on the head, brought X to the ground. He fell flat, rolled sideways, lay perfectly still for a moment. Somewhere, a man was running, his shoes sounding hollowly on the pavement. If the police came, and the sound of the shot was bound to attract them, Agent X would be helpless to defend himself. X ground his teeth, clutched at consciousness that threatened to fade any moment.
Laboriously, he hauled himself to his feet, staggered to the wall of the building and leaned against it for support. Footsteps on the stairs again—the crisp click of high heels. Fay October stepped from the doorway. She turned, looked directly at the Agent, then moved off in an opposite direction.
X took a long, deep breath that was like a tonic to his fagged senses. Then with that same shuffle, he hurried after the night club woman. She jerked a frightened glance over her shoulder, started to run. X sprang after her, seized her arm. She writhed away, leaving something in his hand. At the same time, she screamed: “Police! Help! Police!” And she ran toward the mouth of the alley.
The sound of the shot had already alarmed the policeman on the beat. He came around the corner just as X was on the point of pursuing Fay October. The girl screamed again, pointed back toward X. The policeman ran into the alley, shouting at X to halt.
But X was running like a rabbit, turning, twisting, dodging, zigzagging from one side of the alley to the other. It would only have been luck if one of the cop’s bullets had landed, and luck was not with the law that night. X vaulted over a fence, landed in a small court, ran up a narrow runway between buildings and gained the street. He ran to the corner, then proceeded at a more leisurely pace toward his hideout.
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 7 Page 5