The secret service man nodded.
“And you have been asked to attend a conference in Chief Hurd’s office?”
“I have,” Morris replied.
“Good!” X took hold of the man’s arm, steered him down the hall to the door of a washroom.
IT WAS a totally unexpected move. Agent X kicked the door open with his foot and flung Morris bodily into the room.
As Morris folded backwards through the door, X followed him. Morris was on his feet in a moment, trying to draw his gun. But X closed in fast. His left fist whipped across Morris’s right biceps, paralyzing the man’s gun arm. Then his right lashed at Morris’s chin. It was a perfect knockout punch.
Morris had hardly struck the floor before X had his pocket makeup materials out. It would be a quick easy change for both A.J. Martin and Morris were light-complexioned.
Five minutes later, the Agent stalked boldly into the hall, approached the guardian of Hurd’s door and demanded admittance which was immediately accorded him. Hurd took hold of his arm and introduced him to the other men in the office, saying:
“This is John Morris, to whom the city of Brownsboro owes the deepest apology for having mistaken him for the notorious Mr. X.”
X bowed to each man in turn. Lorin Garvey was there as well as Dr. Davies and Reed Kennedy. Four elderly gentlemen who sat somewhat apart and looked as though they wondered what this was all about, were then introduced as Mr. Sparks, Mr. Haleck, Mr. Feris and Mr. Mathews—the four who remained of the five men originally doomed by Shaitan.
“What is quite beyond us,” said Haleck, speaking for his companions as well as himself, “is that up to this moment we hadn’t the slightest idea that this Shaitan person intended to murder us. We have received no threats of any sort, yet you insist this is an extortion game.”
Chief Hurd nodded. “It’s a good bit different than anything of the sort I have come across.” He motioned to a man who was sitting at the side of his desk. “This is Mr. George Franks of the Philadelphia Association of Life Insurance Companies. He can explain the racket better than I can.”
FRANKS stood up, cleared his throat and began: “The insurance business is the real victim of this extortion racket—which, had it not been nipped in the bud, might have spread entirely across the country.” He turned to Sparks, Haleck, Feris and Mathews, saying: “You four gentlemen have insurance policies which total about one million dollars, or a total of five million in life insurance, distributed among you. The policies are from six different firms. The reason why you were not molested by this fiendish Shaitan is that you were not immediately concerned in his original threat.”
Franks cleared his throat again, then continued: “Shaitan demanded one million dollars to spare you five gentlemen. The money was to be raised by the six firms in our association. That was the threat as it originally appeared. We were inclined to take it all as a joke, since murder of five men is quite a large order and the fanciful name of Shaitan suggested that the writer of the threat note might be a little touched in his head.
“We ignored his threat. A few days later I received a note saying that I should watch the first column of the Brownsboro Bugle for proof of the fact that Shaitan was capable of carrying out exactly what he had threatened to do. It further stated that the message would be intended for our eyes alone and would be written in cipher, the key of which was given to me.”
Agent X’s eyes fastened on Reed Kennedy, as Franks went on:
“The first threat note coded into the paper was simply a repetition of the written note we had received, stating that five men were doomed. Four days later, my copy of the Bugle informed me that a member of Mr. Haleck’s family was to die. And two days later, I am sorry to say, Mr. Haleck’s son was killed in an inexplicable manner in the street. A number of persons in the street near him at the time were carried to the hospital, apparently converted into shrieking maniacs. How this was managed, I have just learned. Gas, of a deadly poisonous nature, had been stolen from Mr. Garvey’s laboratory.”
“Not the gas—the formula,” Garvey corrected.
“How it was turned into the street,” Franks went on, “we have yet to learn.”
“It came—” X said quietly—“from beneath Reed P. Kennedy’s car.”
Kennedy sprang to his feet. “It’s a lie!” he shouted. “You’re accusing me of having a part in this killing? I have already confessed to Chief Hurd that I was forced by the most terrible threats from Shaitan to print this cipher message in my paper. I also confessed that Shaitan compelled me to act as his messenger in collecting the money the insurance companies mailed. But I have had no part in murder. I even hadn’t the slightest notion that what I was doing was connected with murder.”
“Then,” said Agent X, his soft, compelling voice dominating every man in the room, “perhaps you were also compelled to devote your car and your chauffeur to the services of Shaitan. I was judging the method used in the Haleck case to be the same as that used in the murder of Sparks’s son which I witnessed outside the jail last night.”
KENNEDY sank into his chair and gnawed his lips. Finally, he nodded his head. “Twice, I received phone calls from Shaitan, whom I have never seen. Twice he told me to have my chauffeur drive to certain parts of the city, and to let the motor idle…. I lied a moment ago when I said I didn’t know this was murder.
“I later discovered that some sort of a timed gas bomb had been connected to my car and this probably fed the gas out through the exhaust pipe while the motor was idling. I should have gone to the police then, but I was afraid. Shaitan had said he would torture me into madness if I went to the police. He said he would cut off my eyelids! Could anything out of hell have conceived a more terrible torture than that?”
“Probably not,” said X. He retired in favor of Franks, the insurance man.
“That sort of thing continued,” Franks explained. “Always, the murders got closer and closer to the five doomed men. We knew well that if these men’s beneficiaries were to turn in their claims all at once, our companies would have been ruined.”
“Why didn’t you pay Shaitan’s demands, then?” Dr. Davies asked. “Here you’ll have to fork out your million for Bedford’s death and still the murder may go on.”
“No it won’t,” declared Chief Hurd. “We have captured Shaitan. He is in our jail. You see, the insurance company started sending him money in fifty thousand dollar installments. The first shipment of money, Shaitan was to be allowed to take from Kennedy. That was to make Shaitan bolder. The second shipment arrived, and Mr. Franks’s detectives and our police were on the job. Shaitan pursued Kennedy in his eagerness to get the money, and I arrested Shaitan after a terrible fight.”
“How,” asked X, “did you know it was Shaitan? Mr. Kennedy has stated that he has never seen Shaitan. To my knowledge, no one has seen his true face.”
“When a man makes a demand for money, then receives the money, it’s a pretty good sign he was the man who made the original threat,” Hurd stated. “Besides, this fellow acted suspicious. And he did have an opportunity to get hold of Mr. Garvey’s gas patent or whatever it was. He was Mr. Garvey’s butler.”
Agent X sprang to his feet. “You mean—” He stopped. Then his voice softened. “You’ve made a very grave error,” he said to Hurd. “According to your method of reasoning, Kennedy might just as well be Shaitan as this fellow you’ve arrested. I feel certain that if I were Mr. Haleck, or Mr. Feris, or any of the other threatened men, I would still consider myself doomed when an arrest was made on such flimsy evidence. I say with all assurance that you do not have Shaitan in jail at the present moment.”
“Mighty good reasoning,” said a voice from the door. All looked up to see two members of the police force standing in the doorway. Both had revolvers in their hands. “You see,” one of the cops said, “Shaitan is in this room right now. His other name is Secret Agent X. We have just discovered the real John Morris locked in our washroom.”
Age
nt X looked at the accusing circle of eyes turned on him, and at the police guns. His hands never approached his body. He merely brought them together and clasped them. Then he took a single step that brought him directly behind Chief Hurd’s desk.
“Stand still!” rapped Hurd.
X smiled disarmingly. “One accusation is quite enough. I am satisfied to be called Agent X, for I must admit that I am—Secret Agent X. But I am not—Shaitan. Think a moment. Last night at the jail, an entire mob was rendered unconscious by a little gas bomb of mine. Of that mob, not a man or woman in it feels any the worse from the little gas attack I staged. Had I been Shaitan, it would have been just as easy for me to have killed them. You probably will never understand the motives behind my methods of investigation—”
X’s voice never dropped. He had been speaking so softly, so confidently, that there was not a man in the room but what was completely absorbed in what he was saying. When he stopped speaking, his body was already in motion. Motion so swift, so precisely executed that he took everyone by complete surprise.
His right leg shot out with all the force of his powerful body behind it. His shoe planted against the desk, sent it rolling across the room straight toward the door. The two police saw it coming at them like a juggernaut, backed, shot at X—or rather at the place where X had been a moment before.
X had moved at the same moment he had kicked the desk. He dove headlong for the door, or rather for the desk that was jammed in the doorway. He landed on his side, felt two glass gas capsules, in his pocket, crush as the force of his leap sent him sliding across the top of the desk to somersault into the hall outside.
Then he was on his feet, running, holding his breath lest his own anesthetizing gas catch up with him. Probably those in Hurd’s office would never know what had happened. X’s hands had never approached his body. He had not so much as swung a fist, yet he had scored a perfect knockout.
In another moment he was in his car, roaring down the street.
CHAPTER VIII
City of Death
THAT night, Harvey Bates sat on his jail-house bunk and stared moodily at the floor. He wasn’t at all satisfied, particularly with one Harvey Bates. He thought back over what had taken place that afternoon and tried to reason out just what Agent X would have done had he been in Bates’s place. One thing was certain, Bates thought, X would never have permitted himself to be clapped into jail while the real murderer roamed the streets.
Bates heard footsteps in the corridor outside. He didn’t look up. He wouldn’t have cared to see anyone unless—unless that person was Charlotta. He looked up hopefully when he thought that it might be the girl, groaned and dropped his head when he saw it was only the young jailer.
“Oh, you still here?” the jailer said. He had been making that brilliant crack every half hour since Bates’s imprisonment until the big man wanted to grind his teeth every time he heard it. “Well, do you want to see a woman?” asked the jailer.
Bates stood up suddenly. He had seen a familiar silhouette against the opposite wall of the hall. He crossed to the bars as Charlotta came up. A bright smile flashed across the girl’s face. She seemed oblivious to the existence of the bars that separated them. Her body pressed flat against the bars, as close to him as she could get, she thrust her arms through the opening and managed, by standing on tiptoe to get them about his square shoulders.
“Gun under handkerchief, right hand,” she whispered. Then she suddenly broke the embrace, pulled her right arm away so that her right hand passed over his left hand. Bates felt the handkerchief and the cool gun steel hidden by it. It was a perfectly executed move on Charlotta’s part, but Bates was so completely right-handed as to be absolutely awkward with his left hand.
He dropped the gun. It clattered to the concrete floor. The young jailer shouted hoarsely and sprang forward. But Bates had already stooped, scooped up the gun with his right hand and thrust it between the bars.
“Unlock this door in a hurry,” he ordered huskily. And he glowered down from his formidable height upon the jailer in such a manner that the jailer had not the slightest doubt but what Bates would shoot to kill if his order wasn’t obeyed. The jailer took out keys, fitted one into the lock, turned it.
At that moment, the corridor suddenly became filled with men attracted by the jailer’s shouts. Bates shouldered open the door, sprang into the corridor and turned the gun on the approaching guards. “Stop!” he whipped out. “I’ll shoot.” Pure bluff. Under no consideration would Bates have shot these men. But his threat was enough to halt them.
But at the same time, Charlotta uttered a warning cry. Bates turned halfway around as three men sprang at him from behind.
Bates struck out with his right hand. The muzzle of the automatic Charlotta had slipped him gashed the cheek of one of his attackers. He threw another to the ground with what appeared to be an exaggerated shrug of his shoulders. He danced out of a hail of blows from the third. Some one managed to get Bates by the wrist and twist the gun away from him. Bates plunged forward, dragging two men who had gripped him from behind. But he found he faced still another man—a seemingly slight man whose hair was iron-gray.
BATES swung for the gray head, found his wrist locked in a grip of steel. The gray-headed man yanked Bates toward him, twisted around and actually pulled Bates’s body over his back and flung him to the floor. Because of this surprising move on the part of the gray-haired chief jailer, Bates found himself pressed to the floor by a mass of guards. They gripped his legs and arms and carried him back to the cell from which he had escaped.
The old jailer slammed the door. “That’ll teach you, I guess,” he said. “Now where’d that gun come from?”
The man who had brought Charlotta to the cell, pointed at the girl. “She must have brought it, sir.”
The old jailer said: “Watch for the femme, as the French say. You fellows clear out. I want to talk to this young woman alone.”
The younger guards had profound respect for the chief jailer after they had seen him throw a man who had looked as though he had a fair chance of knocking out the entire personnel of the city jail. They turned and retired down the hall, leaving the old jailer with Charlotta.
Charlotta held her head high and looked at the old jailer with contemptuous eyes. “Why don’t you lock me up?” she asked.
There was a strange, amused smile on the old jailer’s face. He said one word, quietly: “Charlotta.”
Charlotta’s eyes widened. On the other side of the cell door, Bates became suddenly animated. He pressed his face against the cage bars and regarded the jailer with such a devout look that the girl stared in amazement from the jailer to the imprisoned Bates.
“You, again!” she exclaimed softly. “But why—” she gestured bewilderedly and let her question dangle.
“Why should I aid you in liberating Bates?” X concluded. “Simply because there’s not a rope in town that would hold him.”
Agent X, for it was indeed he who had managed to throw the powerful Bates, produced keys and went over to Bates’s cell.
“Then—then you two—work together?” asked Charlotta in amazement.
“Constantly,” X told her. He unlocked the cell door and permitted Bates to step out.
“Thank you, sir,” Bates said quietly. He took Charlotta’s hand in his own big fingers. “And thank you.”
“Save all that,” X whispered. “As you’ve guessed, I was forced to knock out the chief jailer. He isn’t very well hidden and I didn’t hit him very hard. He’s not particularly strong and I didn’t want to hurt him. Any moment now, some one will find him and then there will be plenty of trouble. We can get out through the back way. I’ve a car all ready.”
X LED the way down the hall and came to the chief jailer’s office. He opened the door softly. Bates and Charlotta followed him into the jail kitchen and out on a little concrete platform where a small truck was backed up.
“Not exactly a luxuriant conveyance,” he apologized
, “but its appearance at the rear of the jail was less likely to arouse suspicion. A grocer down the street was careless enough to leave it unlocked. Remind me to see that he is well paid for his car in case we damage it, Bates.”
The three of them crowded into the cab of the truck. X piloted it down the alley.
“I was frantic to get you out of jail,” Charlotta said to Bates. “Some one has kidnaped Lorin Garvey.”
“Frantic?” X interrupted. “With good reason! Are you sure of this, Charlotta?”
“Positive. He’s gone. Simply vanished.”
X uttered a prolonged whistle. “We’ll have to work fast. If all those secrets of Garvey’s brain fall into the wrong hands, there isn’t a man or woman in the country that will be safe. He probably knows more about ultra-modern weapons than any other living man. You can appreciate what would happen if he was forced to turn over his knowledge to some criminal like Shaitan. Was there any sign of a clue left?”
“I don’t know,” the girl said. “As soon as I heard that Harvey was in jail, I got a gun and came over here.”
“Then, I’ll have to go to Lorin Garvey’s house right away. Did you notify the police, Charlotta?”
“No,” the girl replied, as X braked the truck in front of Garvey’s house. “But it looks like some one is there now. I thought I saw a flashlight in the front room just now.”
X got out, and Bates started to follow. The Agent stopped him. “Charlotta is a very capable woman, no doubt, but you’d better stay here and keep your eye on her. I’ll whistle if I need you.” Then X hurried off across the lawn, seeking the shadows, working with his makeup as he moved toward the house. He removed the gray toupee revealing his own natural hair. His skillful fingers smoothed out the wrinkles in the plastic material on his cheeks so that by the time he reached the house he had the appearance of a much younger man.
The front door was open. X walked into the dark hall, listened a moment to hear footsteps prowling about in the next room. X opened the door and slipped into the room. Footsteps stopped. Some one near at hand was breathing heavily.
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 7 Page 29