Betty and Charlotta came running up. Betty took one look at the madman. She knew that brown, wavy hair. She knew those gray eyes: in spite of the makeup that was smeared on the man’s face, she knew it was Agent X. She uttered a faint cry and fell back in Charlotta’s arms, sobbing out:
“It’s Agent X!”
And the staggering thing with the flying arms looked at Bates and giggled idiotically. Bates dropped the lantern, seized his beloved chief, and stared in horror into dull, mad eyes. “Good Lord!” he whispered. “Stark insane!” And gripping the struggling form he went to the mouth of the passage while Charlotta helped the grief-stricken Betty along behind.
They were on a rocky ledge overlooking the city. A powerful electric lantern illuminated the ledge where six big gas cylinders were mounted. Standing with his hand on the valve, counting the strokes of the distant clock, was the tall figure of Shaitan, his features covered with a gas mask.
SHAITAN turned, yanked a heavy automatic from his belt. His other hand left the valve and went to lift the bottom of the gas mask. “Put up your hands, all of you. Your hands, do you hear! Release that staggering idiot!”
Reluctantly, Bates released X. The maddened Agent dashed headlong to the edge of the cliff. Betty screamed, hid her face on Charlotta’s shoulder as X slipped from the narrow ledge, fell, but somehow managed to catch himself and drag himself to safety. Then he staggered back across the ledge, fighting with nothing, falling over his own feet.
Shaitan covered them with his gun. Bates was cursing slowly and methodically. In his dark eyes a terrible rage was smoldering.
“I warned Mr. X,” Shaitan said lightly. “He would try to prevent the inevitable. Too bad he didn’t get enough of the gas to kill him outright.” Shaitan dropped the bottom of his mask into place, still keeping the gun turned on Bates and the two girls. Agent X wasn’t worth watching. He was lunging at the rock wall, clawing at it, trying to climb its perpendicular face, all the time uttering a meaningless babble. Shaitan’s hand went to the main gas valve.
“Here!” Bates called out sharply. “Not going to do that!” He took a step forward. He knew what X would have done at that moment if he had been able. He would have risked anything to keep Shaitan from loosing death upon the city below.
Shaitan reached over and swung one of the flexible gas vents so that it pointed across the ledge. He lifted the bottom of his mask again. “Another step like that and I’ll let you sample the gas!” he warned.
“You’re not going to turn that valve!” Bates said slowly. He was steeling himself for the effort he was going to have to make. He wondered how long it would take him to die with a bullet in his body; wondered if there was going to be time for him to save the city and the two girls whose lives depended entirely upon his actions. He ground his teeth together and sprang forward. Shaitan raised his automatic.
But at that moment, the insane Agent X did the most insane thing of all. His right hand darted in under his shirt and brought out the metal mirror Shaitan had thrown to him when X had been in the rocky prison. Shaitan pulled the trigger of his gun, but at the same time he involuntarily dashed his left hand across his eyes.
The bullet intended for Bates went wild. Shaitan couldn’t have hoped to aim, blinded as he was by the reflected rays of his own lantern directed into his eyes by the mirror in X’s hands.
THE AGENT’S mad staggering had brought him much closer to Shaitan than the latter had realized. And in that moment when the reflection from the mirror had blinded Shaitan, X regained his sanity. He pounced upon Shaitan with the ferocity of a lion. His right hand went up, seized Shaitan’s gun, and twisted it from his grasp. At the same time, his left fist drove upwards to catch the killer on the point of the chin.
Shaitan sagged back against the wall of stone, where breathless and furious, he glared from the gas mask lenses into the cold, hollow eye of his own gun. And never had Shaitan seen a more sane man that the one who held that gun.
A joyful sob from Betty Dale as she realized that all this madness on X’s part had been but acting that had made misdirection and cunning deceit possible. He had won again against terrible odds with no more formidable weapons than his wits, a mirror, and his fists. Betty would have rushed to him had not Charlotta detained her.
X never took his eyes off the treacherous Shaitan as he spoke rapidly to his friends. “Sorry I had to make the mad act so realistic. Had to make Shaitan realize you were all desperately afraid I had gone mad from the gas in that death chamber. When we met in the passage, we were too near Shaitan’s ears to risk any conversation. I got through the gas chamber by holding my breath, for something of a record time, I believe. But holding my breath for long intervals when I use my anesthetizing gas keeps me in practice for that sort of thing.
“Charlotta, Shaitan doesn’t look like such a terrible monster when he’s robbed of his weapons, does he? But he has a wonderful brain. None but a criminal genius could have lone-wolfed this whole scheme. He hadn’t a soul helping him except Kennedy who had been forced to act as his messenger.”
X went over closer to the cowering killer. “Bates and Charlotta are going to feel disappointed when I remove this man’s gas mask,” he said. “But if it’s any consolation, I felt about the same way. To think that the only man who had a perfect alibi the night Bedford was murdered should turn out to be the killer was quite a shock to me. But when I realized that I was the very man who would have been the witness to say that he couldn’t have killed Bedford, very nearly made me crazy, as I must have appeared a moment ago. What time was it Charlotta, when you and Lorin Garvey were trying to get me to confess that I was Shaitan?”
“About noon,” said the girl. “Why?”
“Simply that, had you told me it was noon or had I thought to ask, the alibi wouldn’t have worked and we would have had the murderer right on the spot. Not for one minute did the man whom we knew as Lorin Garvey suppose that I was Shaitan. But he managed to drug me, keep me only about half conscious in a room where I could not see daylight. The only way I had of telling the passage of time was by watching the electric clock in Garvey’s study.
“It was one of those calendar clocks. At midnight, the date on the calendar changes automatically. What Garvey did was simply set the clock up twelve hours so that the calendar changed at noon instead of midnight. In my doped condition, I had no conception of the time that had passed.
“What Garvey did was to make me think he and I were together at midnight when it was really noon. Then, after I had been doped so that I would sleep for about fifteen hours, Garvey just waited until midnight to kill Bedford.”
AGENT X reached out and pulled the gas mask away from the face of the man they had known as Lorin Garvey. “You were very smart all the way through,” X said. “That gag about your assistant stealing the formula for the gas was just a bluff. The only thing that tripped you up, that gave your identity away, was so ridiculously simple that any school boy would have discovered it. I doubt very much if you could spell the word ‘deceive’ correctly this very minute.”
The killer’s pale lips peeled back in a snarl.
“I noted,” X explained, “that in the code messages you used to try and extort money from the insurance people, the word ‘deceive’ was misspelled. You had simply twisted the ‘i’ and the ‘e’—a very common error. That, of course, told me nothing. But when you kidnaped yourself for the purpose of explaining your own disappearance, you left a note addressed to me, saying that Shaitan was going to get you. Even that might have got by me if it hadn’t been that once more I saw the word ‘deceive’ spelled ‘decieve.’ And to that message, you had signed the name, Lorin Garvey.”
“You mean to tell me that I was in Garvey’s house all that time and didn’t know that he was the killer?” demanded Charlotta.
“Just that, only it’s a little worse. You had been hunting Shaitan all over the world. You were waiting in Garvey’s house for Shaitan to make his appearance, when all the time the man yo
u thought to be Garvey was really Shaitan. Shaitan arrived at Garvey’s laboratory long before Peter Knore, who also was anxious to get Garvey’s gas formula. Shaitan arrived before John Morris or you or Bates or I could get there. He tortured Garvey into revealing the formula. One of the things he did to the real Garvey was cut off his eyelids—an old Oriental torture, as you know, Charlotta.
“Then, because I had picked up the real Garvey, by that time a disfigured, wandering maniac, Shaitan feared that Garvey’s reasoning power might return long enough so that Garvey could give me some information. So Shaitan staged an automobile accident which resulted in a period of unconsciousness for me. In that time, he completed his work on Garvey and killed him. The real Garvey had probably been mad for weeks. And he has been dead for three days.
“Tonight, I stopped at the hospital morgue. Microscopic comparison of hair from Garvey’s corpse, then unidentified, with a hair taken from Garvey’s hair brush, told me that the mad unknown had been the real Garvey. Then this man here, who has called himself Garvey, is Shaitan—the bald Shaitan.”
X reached out, snatched the pale toupee from the killer’s head to reveal the high, domelike pate of Shaitan. He pulled the smoke-lensed glasses from the man’s eyes. The catlike, faintly luminous eyes of Shaitan lashed their beams of hatred across X’s face.
With a terrible cry, Shaitan sprang at X’s throat. His long fing-ernails gashed X’s flesh. X reeled backwards, almost to the edge of the cliff. Bates sprang to aid his chief, but even as Bates reached out, he saw one of the struggling figures outlined against the sky. Arms and legs were beating the air as the lank figure shot off into space. A terrible, ascending shriek made the night hideous with its awful sound and awoke every echo in the black hills. Then a dull, thumping sound far below. Then silence.
On the edge of the cliff, X straightened up and drew a long breath. Shaitan had seen the Agent’s real face, but he would boast of that only in hell.
“I must show you the jiu-jitsu stunt sometime,” X said calmly to Bates. “The same one I got you with in the Brownsboro jail.”
They started back toward the spot where they had left the truck, winding their way slowly along the rocky trail, X and Betty in front and Charlotta and Bates behind. Down in the valley, lights were going out all over Brownsboro. The crisis had passed. Midnight had sounded and yet the air was pure to breathe. The citizens would say that Shaitan had been bluffing when he threatened to destroy fifty thousand of them at a time.
“They’ll never know,” Betty sighed. “They’ll never know how close they came to death, nor will they know the man who saved them. Not as I know him, anyway.”
X laughed. For the first time in many days it was a happy, boyish laugh. “You really wouldn’t want them to know, would you?”
Betty shook her head. “I’d be frightfully jealous if anyone besides me knew. Sometimes, I think I was even jealous of your mirror.” Her head tilted back, her red lips smiling.
“Darling,” he whispered.
Some fifty feet behind them, Charlotta stopped. In the moonlight, she saw Agent X holding Betty tenderly in his arms.
“Matter?” asked Bates.
“I think your chief sets you some very good examples,” she said slowly.
Bates nodded. “Finest man in the world—” He stopped, stared ahead. He faced Charlotta and saw the invitation on her lips. “That? Example I’d do mighty well to follow, eh?”
“What do you think?” Charlotta asked.
Death’s Frozen Formula
Why did those strange human derelicts patronize newsreel-movie showings and immediately leave the theatres with evil, mysterious intent? That was the veiled enigma Agent X had to pierce—while unfathomable gusts of hell’s killing cold trapped X and Betty Dale in a murder maelstrom.
CHAPTER I
Death Dance
A RAGGED awning of faded striped stuff fluttered dismally above the doorway of the Juana Diaz Wine Shop. It was bitter cold in the street. In the shop, a guitar whanged a nasal accompaniment to the rich baritone voice that sought to forget the chill of the wind in a song of warmer climes. November was not for the dark-eyed, olive-skinned natives of the Puerto Rican and Spanish quarter just north of Central Park.
A taxi turned off to Fifth Avenue at 111th Street and came to a stop in front of the Juana Diaz. Its fare was a woman. What could be seen of her face and figure indicated that a more searching light might have revealed great beauty.
There was something indefinably strange about the woman—something beside the fact that her stockings, though of the sheerest chiffon, did not match. It was obvious that she had dressed in haste and without a moment’s thought. Her jaunty sport hat clashed with the formal sable evening wrap she wore.
The woman had trouble separating one bill from the thick wad in her pocketbook. Finally, she had the driver help himself to his pay and tip. Then her trembling fingers dropped the pocketbook on the running board of the taxi.
“You want to hang on to that, lady,” said the driver as he picked up the purse.
The woman stared at her purse as though she had never seen it, then clasped it tightly and ran up the street. Halfway up in the next block, she stopped.
From across the street came the sound of music ground harshly from a phonograph. The woman stood on the corner and clung to a steel telegraph post. She uttered a strained, anxious laugh and crossed the street to the somber, gray-fronted dwelling from which the music came. On worn, narrow stone steps she paused.
“Must not forget the mask,” she whispered, and then she opened her purse and searched in its depths for a small black packet of silk. This she unrolled to reveal a domino mask to which was attached a length of elastic.
She fastened the mask over her face. She found the bell-pull, gave it a jerk so that the bell within jangled hysterically.
The brass mail flap in the gray door clinked as though cautious eyes had examined the woman on the steps carefully. The door was opened, and the light of an amber-shaded lamp fell upon the exotic-ally beautiful figure of a second woman.
THE WOMAN who sought admittance had dressed without thought or sense of harmony, but the woman in the doorway had omitted nothing from her toilet that would lend her charm. Hers was a dark, secret beauty that warmed to gay colors and daring costumes. Her dark, soft skin had a faint yellowish cast that suggested mixed bloods. Her lips were warm and scarlet, her eyes cold and sea-green.
The woman on the steps swayed slightly forward. “Zerna,” she breathed, “I’m desperate. Help me!”
Contempt rather than compassion curved the vivid lips of the woman called Zerna. “Get a grip on yourself, my dear,” said she in a strident voice, as she helped the caller into the house.
A man came running down the street, sprang to the narrow steps before the gray-fronted house. He thumped the door furiously and, noticing the bell for the first time, pulled and pushed it until time the woman called Zerna reappeared.
“My wife,” the man gasped. “I saw her go in here. I will not have—” He stopped, noticed for the first time that he was speaking to an exceedingly beautiful woman.
Zerna smiled. “Oh, really, haven’t you made a mistake? The young lady who just entered has no husband.”
The man shook his head. “I beg your pardon. That woman was my wife. I must see her at once. This is a matter of the utmost importance.”
A man in the stiff, black garb of a servant appeared directly behind the woman called Zerna. There was something in the dredge-engine cut of his jaw that suggested that his dress was the only humble thing about him.
“This gent making trouble, m’am?” he asked.
Zerna frowned slightly and shook her head. She addressed the anxious man on the steps. “Your name, please.”
“Colrich—Mr. Fred Colrich. The woman who just entered this house is Mrs. Colrich. I demand to be taken to my wife at once.”
“I am very sorry, Mr. Colrich,” said Zerna, “but there is no one here by that name. I kno
w the young woman who just came in very well.”
“And that’s that,” added the servant. He slammed the door in Colrich’s face.
INSIDE the house with the gray door, the phonograph continued to scratch out its music in tireless accompaniment to the shuffling of dancing feet. All the dancers wore small black masks. There were débutantes and wealthy club men. There were street women and potential thugs. It was an odd democracy of the best and the worst in society, joined here by a single link—dope.
Dope stared from the slots of their little black masks, through pupils dilated with cocaine or contracted with morphine. Dope spoke wordlessly from their twitching lips.
Round and round the floor, the couples moved beneath the dim light of tawdry lamps placed on old tables around the sides of the room. And over and above them all hung an aura of indescribable evil. Terror, too, was there, and death; and the darker tragedy of minds going mad, drug-chained to nightmares.
Perhaps the most incongruous couple on the floor was the woman in her sable furs and her partner. Her black mask was spotted with hot, frantic tears and now and again her shoulders would shake with a sniffling sob. Her partner was a withered youth, who whispered to himself, laughed shrilly, smirked continuously.
A man in evening clothes, his face completely masked, stepped from a doorway and spied the weeping woman and her partner. As they wheeled gracelessly within his reach, the man in evening clothes reached out and tapped the woman on the shoulder. She jerked a glance at the man, and instantly her lips twitched into a smile. She all but threw her partner from her, seized the arm of the man in evening clothes, and said: “Thank heaven! I couldn’t have lived a moment more!”
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 7 Page 32