As Bates took off the straps that bound X, he explained what had occurred: “When I pulled up the net and found that the ray tube was not in it, I got off the roof. Met a woman running from the house. Something shiny in her hand, looked like the tube. I tried to take it from her. Got my hands on it. She scratched at my face. Thought I had the tube when some one attacked me from behind.
“I heard the woman scream. Somebody cursed, said something like: ‘Tomorrow Lowery gets it in the neck.’ That’s all I remember.”
“A man or woman said that about Lowery?” X asked.
“Man.”
“You said the woman scratched your face. No marks on your cheeks.”
BATES scrubbed at his jaw with a big palm. “Funny, I didn’t feel any pain either.”
“Because she didn’t have much in the way of fingernails,” X told him. “Vina Trumaine was the woman you tried to take the ray from. Her fingernails are filed down to the quick. But if the Fury has the ray, then surely the danger has passed. Suppose we walk up toward the gate and see if there is a guard there.”
“What became of the police, sir?” Bates asked. As they moved toward the gate, X repaired the makeup on his face. So familiar was he with the features of the mythical A.J. Martin that he could adopt them even in the dark.
“That’s it. Something is wrong with Foster. And it will be my first move to learn just what the trouble is. The Fury must be immune from the police and there must be a very excellent reason.”
They saw no one at the gate and passing through resulted in no attack. Obviously the Fury had the death ray. The danger of the moment was past. But a far graver danger loomed on the horizon—a danger that threatened the city, perhaps even the nation. The Bastion Ray appeared to be the most deadly weapon the brain of man had ever conceived. What it had done to steel it could more readily do to human flesh. And Donald Lowery was the first marked man.
“What now, sir?” asked Bates.
“Nothing for you to do but stay here and keep on the lookout. I believe that the devil who tried to attack you had strayed from the pack. If he puts in his appearance again, shoot, and shoot to kill. No hand to hand scuffling. I’ve seen the Fury’s death-touch in operation twice. It is the product of mad genius, perhaps, but it works.”
X left Bates on the lawn and hurried back to the Bastion house. They were all in the study—Bastion, Betty Dale, Moss, Kopsak, Arden and Vina Trumaine.
“The Fury has the ray,” X said, looking straight at Vina Trumaine. “There is no reason why we should stay here unless you choose. I am heading downtown at once.”
“Miss Dale,” said Vina Trumaine, “I wonder if you could drop me off at my apartment on your way. Dr. Arden, I know, wants to stay a few moments longer and talk with Mr. Bastion.”
“I’ll be delighted,” Betty said readily. Then perhaps she thought she ought to have consulted Agent X, for she looked at him strangely.
When Vina Trumaine had gone for her wrap, Betty approached X. The Agent led her into the hall. “Betty,” he whispered, “don’t trust Vina Trumaine for an instant. It was she who stole the ray from Bastion’s laboratory tonight. Now the Fury has it, for he has withdrawn his guards. For all we know, Vina Trumaine may be one of the Fury’s aides—and certainly she would make a capable one.”
“She has done nothing but ask questions about you ever since you deserted us,” Betty told him. “I really believe the woman is in love with you.”
Agent X smiled. “Jealous?”
Betty’s bright, blue eyes widened. “No. What right have I to be jealous?”
X pressed her hand gently. “Some day,” he said quietly and nothing more. But the one word spoke volumes.
“I’ll be most careful of the wicked Vina Trumaine,” she said.
“Good night, then.” And with a reassuring smile the Secret Agent left her.
ONE HOUR later, a man whose red hair was fading at the temples, whose nose was thin and hawk-beaked, whose eyes were squinted, entered police headquarters and demanded to see Commissioner Foster. “I have,” he said nasally, “important evidence in the Dejong murder case which I will relate to no one but the commissioner.”
In the commissioner’s office Edward Neihart, for such was the name the hawk-beaked man had given, glanced across at a screen that hid a portion of the room. “It might be wise,” he suggested, “to dismiss your secretary. The matter I am about to discuss with you should be heard by your ears alone.”
The police commissioner whitened perceptibly and promptly dismissed his secretary. “Now, Mr. Neihart, if you will get to the point at once,” Foster suggested. “My time is extremely valuable.”
“Hardly that, judging from the manner in which you exercise your duty,” said Neihart sternly. “You are busy retarding the normal police procedure.”
Foster frowned. Neihart noticed that his white fingers trembled. “Sir, I am not here to listen to such insinuations—”
Neihart’s fist thumped the table. “Yet you will listen.”
The phone on Foster’s desk jangled. The commissioner lifted it, listened, and hung up without a word. To Neihart he said: “You have information concerning the death of the Dejong girl? I know of no better time to hear that information. There has been another death-touch murder. Mark Brady has been picked up on West End near Seventy-eighth.”
Neihart smiled one-sidedly. “That is no news for me.”
Foster raised his eyebrows. “Just what is your profession? Are you a private detective? If so I do not remember signing your permit.”
“My permit,” Neihart declared, “does not need signing. I know of Brady’s death because I ordered it so. When one of your men is caught drinking too much, you demote him or take his badge away. When Mark Brady failed me, I demoted him to a corpse. Had not you been putty in criminal hands, information Brady dropped while drunk might well have put the skids under a certain little plan that culminated in theft at the Bastion house.”
Foster stood up. His eyes, red from lack of sleep, burned into Neihart’s brain. “Who are you that you know so much?” he demanded.
“I am,” the man told him, “one Edward Neihart, sometimes called the Fury.”
Foster’s lean figure trembled with ill-suppressed emotion. Suddenly, he flew into an uncontrollable rage, swung around the desk and threw himself at his visitor. “How much longer,” he shouted, “do you intend to keep my niece a captive. Damn you, I’ll strangle the truth out of you!”
Neihart warded off the commissioner’s rage-driven attack with a capable forearm. When he saw an opening, he shot in a blow with the flat of his hand. Foster was caught in the chest and thrown back into his chair.
Neihart tapped his coat pocket significantly, and smiled down at the panting commissioner. “I have a gun, but I need not use it. If I do not return to my office within an hour, your niece—” Neihart smiled as his voice trailed off.
Then he dropped into a chair across from Foster and idly scribbled on the desk blotter. “I shall hold your niece just as long as is necessary to accomplish my ends. If you co-operate with me, she shall be returned safely. I want no interference with my work. Of course,” he said, standing up, “I shall be permitted to leave this office without attracting any attention. If I should be followed, you can imagine the results. Or rather you can’t imagine the results. For your niece would pay dearly and—shall I say?—on the installment plan.”
With this final word of warning, Neihart left the office and the headquarters building.
FOSTER got up and paced the floor of his office. He was trembling like a man in the grip of the ague. Duty is a dear thing to a man who has worked his way up in the police force. But Foster loved his niece. His predicament was indeed a hopeless one.
As his pacing brought him back to the desk for the fifth time, his eyes dropped to the blotter where his unwelcome guest had scribbled. Foster’s heart almost stopped beating. He bent low over the desk, and studied the penciled scrawl on the soft paper. It was more tha
n idle scribbling; it was a message. He read it half aloud: “Things are not what they seem. Neither Neihart nor your horizon as black as they appear. Rest assured that I will exert every effort to return your niece to you, unharmed. And, incidentally, perhaps I’ll send you the scalp of the Fury.”
The note was signed by two pencil lines crossing to form the letter “X.”
Commissioner Foster smiled for the first time in many dark and sleepless hours.
Had Agent X gone to the commissioner and asked outright the reason for his failure to permit police to go to the Bastion place he would have received no answer! He had known, as soon as he entered the office, that Foster was a badly frightened man. There was only one way for X to gain the information he wanted—by the indirect method.
And he had gained the information he had come after. Undoubtedly Doris Foster had been kidnaped by Paul Vost, probably directly following the séance at Madame Susu’s. Her life was held as a check against police interference.
The next move that Agent X planned was against Dr. Arden. According to the information that Bates had given him, Dr. Arden had discovered a new anesthetic that induced artificial catalepsy. X was certain that something of the sort had been used in the coffin in which he had hidden himself. He was also inclined to believe that Arden’s drug had something to do with the emaciated slaves of the Fury.
BEFORE entering the house of the doctor, however, X made brief alterations in his disguise while he sat in the car. He required no mirror for changing his toupee and reshaping his nose. Then from a dashboard locker which contained special accessories, he took a neat counterfeit of a police detective badge. If Dr. Arden were at home, this badge might gain X admission. If he were not at home, so much the better. X had ways of his own with which to enter forbidden places.
Thus equipped, X got out and went up steps to the door of Dr. Arden’s old-fashioned, narrow house. His knock was unanswered. X was on the point of inserting one of his master keys into the lock when the door was jerked open by a man. X hastily palmed the key. He peered into the gloomy hall and recognized the stooped, scholarly figure of Dr. Cornelius Arden. At first, it looked as though the doctor had been dragged out of bed and was dressed in his pajamas, but as X’s eyes became used to the gloom he saw that the doctor wore a white, acid-stained laboratory suit.
“Sorry to disturb you at this time of night, Dr. Arden. I am from police headquarters. If you’ve no objection, I’d like to look over your house.”
“I certainly have objections,” replied the doctor warmly. “Do you realize that it is nearly midnight?”
“All right.” X allowed his voice to become flinty. “You want to be nasty about it, I got a search warrant here to show you.” X took out a pocket case, opened it and flaunted an official looking paper under the doctor’s nose. That it was not a search warrant made little difference in the dim light of the hall.
Dr. Arden coldly invited X to enter. X looked around the hall. For a man of means, Dr. Arden’s home was not very pretentious. X nodded wisely at the papered walls and brassy chandelier. “You got a laboratory here, haven’t you?” he asked.
Dr. Arden nodded slowly. “I am at present running a series of experiments of a rather delicate nature. I simply cannot allow anyone to enter—”
“Good!” X interrupted. “Let’s go there now.”
Dr. Arden paced dejectedly to a door at the rear of the hall. He was about to open it when he turned, made one last attempt to stall. “You haven’t the slightest idea what you are doing!” he declared.
X shrugged. “Maybe not. Let’s go.”
The doctor’s trembling fingers manipulated the lock. X pushed into a large, high-ceilinged room where glass tubes connected a huge retort, gas generators and condensers. All of the apparatus was familiar to Agent X. But in the part he was playing he chose to act ignorant of the glass instruments and their bubbling contents. “What you got here?” he demanded.
“I am simply generating a gas,” explained the doctor.
“Trying to put the public utilities out of business? Or maybe you’re making an anesthetic.”
The doctor’s eyes blinked rapidly. “No—no,” he denied hurriedly—too hurriedly. “It’s just a gas that I am generating here and putting into solution—”
“I get you,” cut in X. “In solution, it’s easier to saturate the linings of coffins with it. Dr. Cornelius Arden Fury!”
DR. ARDEN’S shoulders seemed to droop the more. His eyes were downcast. His knees were folding slowly. His next move was totally unexpected and the Secret Agent was literally taken off his feet. From what appeared to be a fainting fit, Dr. Arden launched himself into a long, low spring. His head struck X like a battering-ram just below the belt. His arms whipped around X’s knees.
X’s head struck the floor. It was a spine-jarring, stupefying blow. X recovered in a moment, but there was time enough for the doctor to seize a weapon—a long glass tube cut diagonally to a point. The tube stabbed downward. X made an attempt to seize the doctor’s wrist, missed and yanked his head to one side to escape being stabbed in the eye. The length of tubing passed down the side of his head and splintered against the floor. Glass particles rained across X’s face. Glass needles pierced Arden’s hand. Arden sprang to his feet, blood dripping from his fingers.
As X pulled to his knees, the doctor’s muscles seemed to explode in another of those battering-ram leaps that drove his body full weight against Agent X. Arden knew nothing of legitimate, hand-to-hand scuffling. There was no telling what sort of tactics he would apply next. His head struck X in the jaw, but at the same time the Agent’s fist arced in a short hammering blow that landed on Arden’s chest. Arden rolled to one side, the breath driven out of him. X reeled to his feet, his head fuzzy with the hammering he had taken.
At the moment, the rear door of the laboratory opened. Through mental haze, X saw Paul Vost, armed with a sawed-off shotgun. With him were two gaunt, hungry-lipped slaves of the Fury.
“Reach!” Vost commanded. “Keep ’em high.”
X put his hands above his head, eyed the shotgun warily. It wasn’t a weapon that a man rushed without considerable thought. If the charge of lead pellets found the Agent’s chest, all well and good, for he wore a perfect bullet-proof vest. But if the gun were raised a little higher, its blast of shot might easily tear his face completely off.
“You all right?” Vost addressed the doctor.
Arden got to his feet, breathing heavily. He nodded, pointed at Agent X.
“Sure,” Vost said, “he’s wise.” He nodded at the two emaciated criminals beside him. “Get started.”
A look of insane glee brightened the normally dull eyes of the thin men. Their right hands became clutching claws. The veins of their bony arms swelled. They advanced slowly, approaching at an angle, the prospective point of convergence of which seemed to be Agent X.
The death-touch. To elude it meant a blast from Vost’s shotgun. Surely possible death from the gun was preferable to standing there. X was weighing his chances, nerving himself for a spring at Vost—a leap that might well land him into eternity. Then a crisp, high-pitched voice cried: “Drop that gun! You’re covered!”
Vost swung halfway around. His shotgun struck the floor, roared, tore plaster from the wall. Vost raised his hands.
Standing in the door of the laboratory was a slim, boyish figure—a very young man in evening clothes and a silk hat. His features were completely covered by a mask of black silk. His small, white hands clenched two heavy-caliber Colt automatics. One of the guns cracked. It was an untrained shot that kicked the gun nearly out of the young man’s hand. With a howl of terror, the two mummy men plunged through the rear door. But the others stood like statues.
Silk Mask nodded his top-hatted head slightly at Arden. “Get the Bastion Ray, Fury. You have exactly two minutes to hand it over to me if you don’t want to get shot.”
“Who—who are you?” stammered Dr. Arden.
“I am Secret Agent
X,” said the Silk Mask haughtily.
CHAPTER VII
Drug of Living Death
IF this declaration surprised Vost and Arden, it completely bewildered Agent X. A perfect maze of tangled thoughts struck his mind all at once. Arden had the ray—or did he? Arden was the Fury—or was he? Was it Silk Mask who had written the name “Secret Agent X” on Madame Susu’s register and painted the Agent’s trade-mark on the wall of Bastion’s laboratory? If the Fury were executing crimes in the name of Agent X, then Silk Mask ought to be the Fury. Then why stick up Vost and shoot at his own slaves?
X was between three fires and he knew not which burned the brightest.
It was Dr. Arden who broke the silence occasioned by Silk Mask’s startling announcement. His was an air of shocked surprise. Whether genuine or faked, X could not tell. “You don’t mean that you think that I stole the Bastion Ray?”
Silk Mask nodded, though the gesture lacked assurance. X noticed, too, that the heavy, black guns in his hands were trembling slightly. Eyes in the mask glanced apprehensively about the room with its weird collection of instruments and its vessels of bubbling chemicals. But he did not see what X saw—Paul Vost’s thin fingers closing on a metal ring-stand clamp.
A moment later, X realized the purpose of that piece of metal in Vost’s hand. Vost moved with lightning rapidity, a faint, sneering smile on his lips. The ring-stand clamp flew across the room and smashed the big glass generator to atoms. Gas under pressure, the terrible drug that produced the sleep that was like death instantly spread across the room.
Only the Agent’s presence of mind saved him. Breath held, he sprang toward the door, straight against the two automatics held in the hands of the young man in the black silk mask. One of the guns blasted. The heavy slug imbedded itself in the Agent’s bullet-proof vest. The pain from the impact halted him only for a moment.
“Fool!” he cried between clenched teeth. “Hold your breath!” Then he bucked like a football player, knocked the young man through the door and leaped over the sprawled form. He swung around, slammed the door of the laboratory.
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 7 Page 17