“Sure,” said the other masked man, “that makes sense. You wouldn’t expect Agent X to sign his own name to a check, would you? He’d be spotted by all the police in New York if he did. This Pond guy must be just one of the Agent’s phoney names.”
The other masked man was inclined to be skeptical. “Maybe you’re right; but how come Agent X’s voice sounds just like the voice of this guy?” And he indicated the real Agent X who masqueraded in the guard’s fur uniform.
“Sure, boss, don’t cha get it?” X hurriedly filled in. “X can talk like anybody. Wasn’t he talkin’ just like Esler when he came aboard?”
The masked man nodded. “You’re right. What’s the difference, just so he signs the check.” He handed check and pen to the guard. The masked man would soon discover the difference if he ever had the opportunity of trying to cash that check. The handwriting in the signature would certainly not be that of Elisha Pond.
X slipped unnoticed from the room and hurried up to the cabin above, passing members of the crew unnoticed because of the fur garb he wore.
BETTY’S cabin door was a flimsy thing beneath the bucking shoulder of Agent X. As he rushed headlong into the cabin, the girl awoke suddenly from her drugged sleep, saw the Agent’s fur-clad form, and opened her mouth to scream.
X clapped a furry glove over her mouth. “Betty!” he whispered tensely in the voice by which she knew him. And as recognition gleamed in the girl’s eyes, his hand dropped from her mouth.
“You! Darling!” she fairly shouted. The drug had excited her to such an extent that she had lost all sense of restraint. She threw her arms about the Agent and sobbed hysterically.
“Betty, you must control yourself,” he whispered and took hold of her shoulders and shook her. She stopped her laughing and crying, and stared at him with strange, wondering eyes. “Betty, there isn’t a moment to lose. You must think straight!”
Betty’s lips quivered as she complained: “Y—you’re so cross!”
X shook his head sadly. The poor girl had lost all sense of proportion. “Listen, dear,” and his voice became infinitely tender, “there’s a motor boat drifting astern. There’s an unconscious woman in it. I want you to get into that boat. I’ll help you down to the water and you’ll have to swim to it. Can you do that?”
Betty laughed. “With you I can do anything.”
“No, I can’t go with you. Bates and Hobart and the others are locked in the hold.”
“I won’t leave, then. You can’t send me away, because I won’t leave!” she all but screamed. And again came a fit of hysterical weeping.
There was nothing to do, X knew, but take her into the hold with him. He quieted her, promising that she should go wherever he went. “But you must be quiet, do you understand?”
“Still as a mouse,” she agreed, nestling her head on his shoulder.
X went to the door of the cabin and looked out. The deck was clear. He beckoned Betty to join him. Together they tiptoed toward the companionway leading down into the hold. The Agent’s heart was in his mouth. At any moment Betty might do something impulsive that would spoil their every chance.
At the bottom of the steps, X could hear the masked men questioning the guard whom they evidently still believed to be Agent X. They were demanding that he tell them where Esler could be found. The hoax could not last for much longer. But still, the hold would be the last place they would look for Agent X.
X held Betty in his arms, keeping his gloved hand over her mouth to prevent her from uttering so much as a whisper as they stole past the door of the room where X had been confined. Then they were again in the friendly darkness, moving quietly along toward a yellow spark of light. They passed the door of the engine room. Then, directly ahead X saw that the light came from a globe screwed above a door. In front of that door, one of the fur-clad men mounted guard.
Still holding Betty tightly, X approached the guard. “The boss wants the girl down here with the others,” he said.
The guard at the door asked no questions, but produced a key and fitted it into the lock. He swung the door open. X, standing directly behind the man, raised his left foot and planted a powerful kick in the small of the man’s back, so that he sprawled head first into the room. And before the man could utter a cry, X landed directly on top of him, seized him by the throat, and choked him into silence.
X looked around the room. Harvey Bates, Jim Hobart and their eleven men were in the center of the room, lashed into a huge bundle around a wooden post that rose from the floor to the ceiling. X drew Betty into the room, closed the door, and set to work on the ropes and gags that held the men in motionless silence.
A THIRD masked man had joined the other two in the cabin where the criminals were impatiently questioning the man they supposed to be Secret Agent X. It was this man that X had knocked out almost as soon as he had boarded the yacht. He looked on a moment while his companions shook the supposed X by the shoulders and roared:
“You’ve not told us where to find Esler! Where’s Esler?”
The dull-witted guard, still under the influence of the hypnotic trance, merely shook his head. “I am Agent X,” he said. “I sign my name Elisha Pond.”
The third masked man snarled an oath. “The man’s crazy. How sure are you he’s Agent X?”
He went over to the supposed X and gouged makeup material from the man’s face.
“Why, you poor fools, he’s tricked you. This is Jeris, one of our own men. Agent X has escaped, hell knows how!”
“Search the boat!” cried one. “Up on deck. He’ll be with the girl.” And they raced pell-mell for the companionway. On deck, they turned out the entire crew in a frantic search.
For five frantic minutes, they searched. Then the three masked men met at the stern of the boat. “Listen,” one of them whispered, “the engineer says there isn’t a guard down there where we had Bates and the others. Agent X and the girl must both be down in the hold, trying to get the others free. Our best move is to wipe out the whole group.”
“That’s the stuff,” one of the others agreed. “Pump liquid air at ’em.”
“Sure. Get down through the hatch at the stern. The one at the prow is locked, and the key’s been lost for months. Bottle them up with the cold that kills.”
DOWN in the hold. Agent X’s deft fingers were flying, untying knots and pulling gags. Betty, too, worked with furious, dope-keyed energy. She gnawed at knots with her teeth, skinned her fingers on the coarse hemp.
“Not a word,” X cautioned as he liberated Bates. “Everyone quiet. We’re outnumbered by about three to one. You free the others, Bates.” He turned to Betty. “Wait here. I’ll be back in a moment. I’m just going to look out the door.”
The Agent left the room and went back along the way he had come, but at the end of the companionway he stopped. There was a man on the steps—one of the fur-clad killers. Another man was passing down cylinders of deadly liquid gas.
It was impossible to mistake the purpose of the fur-clad killers. They held the vantage point that X had hoped to hold—the companionway. They had corked the one opening in the bottle.
X turned and ran quietly back to join the others. Not great need for quiet. All the gang members, and the crew, had been called out of the hold, which belonged to fourteen men and one woman—and death.
As soon as he gained the prison room, X called Hobart and Bates to the door.
“What are the chances?” Hobart asked eagerly.
The Agent shook his head slightly. “None, that way,” he whispered.
“There’s a stairway leading up to a hatch at the other end of the room where we were tied,” Hobart told him.
“Locked,” Bates clipped. “Don’t think it’s guarded.”
“One of my men is an ex-burglar,” Hobart said. “If we weren’t so damned empty-handed—”
X interrupted: “Where is he?” Hobart called one of his operatives over to the door, and X addressed the man:
“How lon
g would it take you to noiselessly open that hatch, if you had tools?”
The man grinned. “Sort of out of practice at that sort of thing. I could do it in ten minutes before Mr. Hobart sort of reformed me.”
“Come. There ought to be something in the engine room you can use.”
X hurried the man back to the engine room, there to hurriedly pick up a center punch, cold chisel, hammer and pliers. X found a jar of matches and some oil-soaked waste. These he stuffed into his pockets. Then he picked up all the pipe wrenches he could see. Good weapons, too—these….
Thus equipped, the Agent and the ex-burglar hurried back toward the room where they were to make their last stand against the doped killers. Even as they reached the door, they could hear shuffling footsteps coming along the passage behind them. X closed the door of the room. It locked only from the outside, but by main force they might be able to hold it for a while.
“Talk, everybody,” X urged. “Move around and make a lot of noise. We’ve got to cover the sound of the man working on the lock of the other hatch. If the gang gets wise, it will be just as easy for them to attack us from that point also.”
He went to the door and opened it just a crack, so that he could look out. One of the black-clad killers was in sight, saw the door open, and raised his deadly cylinder. A stream of the hissing, blue-white liquid slapped against the door. Only the fur suit the Agent wore protected him. Some of the liquid got in under the door, and the temperature of the room dropped degrees almost at once.
For a slow torturing death, the mob had only to turn their weapon on the door. Half of the danger of the stuff lay in the fact that it could make the air in the room too rich in oxygen, actually burning up tender lung cells.
“How much longer to break that lock?” X called huskily.
“Two minutes, that’s all.”
THE KILLERS were massing outside the door. It would take just two seconds for them to break into the room, and less than thirty seconds to turn everyone in the room into frozen statues of horror.
X turned to Bates. “Promise me,” he whispered, “to guard Betty Dale with your life.”
“Of course. But what are you going to do, sir?”
“Never mind,” X said sternly. “Protect that girl.”
Secret Agent X reached into his pocket and took out the ball of oil-soaked cotton waste and the jar of matches. He had obtained these in the engine room, knowing that in a case of emergency one man could hold back the cold that killed, could destroy it—at a price. Agent X was ready to pay that price.
The liquid, oxygen gas was in itself uninflammable. But since all combustion depended upon the presence of oxygen, that combustion was much more rapid and intense when the surrounding space was saturated with oxygen. In his own laboratory, X had seen a heated piece of iron burst into white hot flames in the presence of a small quantity of liquid oxygen. He was ready to repeat that experiment tonight on a larger scale with human lives at stake.
He had only to carry the fire to the very origin of the freezing death to turn that portion of the ship’s hold into a veritable blast furnace. It would cut off the criminal advance with a sheet of flame. It would rob the killing cold of its teeth by uniting the oxygen with combustible materials. And when the blast came—Agent X pushed the ugly thought from his mind.
Behind the furry mask, he smiled. Betty Dale, Hobart, Bates and the others would have their chance. That thought alone spurred him on to do what he must do.
CHAPTER XI
Invitation to Hell
BETTY DALE had seen Bates and the Agent talking near the door. As X took the ball of waste from his pocket, she came forward to join him. “What are you going to do?” she asked anxiously.
X did not look at the girl. He dared not to risk the pangs of a final good-bye. Instead, he answered her cheerfully: “I am going to plug up a little opening, that’s all.”
X raised his hand and closed the furry mouth-opening of his mask. Then he opened the door a crack. Outside, some twenty feet from the door, were half a dozen of the fur-clad killers. Each held a cylinder of freezing death in his gloved hands. Then, at a signal from their leader, they moved suddenly forward toward the door.
Agent X sprang out to meet them. His surprise appearance brought the line of killers at a momentary stop. But even as they released six solid streams of the blue-white, hissing stuff, X struck a match and lit the waste. Holding the flaming stuff at arm’s length, he rushed headlong toward the killers and flung the burning waste into their very midst.
There was a dull roar, and white-hot flame rose in an all-consuming sheet from floor to ceiling.
Betty Dale screamed, sprang toward the door. But the strong hands of Harvey Bates seized her.
“Let me go!” she screamed. She turned, beat at Bates’s chest with her small fists. Bates’s arms were like bands of steel about her. He scarcely saw the desperate fury in her face as she struggled to throw herself into that white-hot inferno. Bates’s eyes were dimmed. He was never to forget that heroic figure, silhouetted against that wall of flame.
Almost the first thing the blast had touched had been the fur-clad form of Agent X. Bates had seen that mighty figure flung backwards. He had seen the Agent’s arms fly upwards to shield his eyes from the stunning brilliance of the fire. He had seen that figure lurch forward into the fire, a figure that was itself a writhing mass of flame.
Had he been able to project his sight beyond the searing curtain of fire that blocked the criminal attack, he would have seen that same flaming figure, fighting its way toward the companionway, staggering up the steps to reach the deck rail. Then he would have seen a human meteor dive from the side of the boat to be immediately extinguished as the black water closed over it, leaving only a little cloud of steam to mark the spot where Agent X had disappeared.
A TRIUMPHANT shout from Jim Hobart: “The lock’s broken. Come on! Up on deck. Grab a wrench, you. Let’s move!”
Bates held the struggling, sobbing girl in his arms as he moved back toward the steps with the others.
“He’ll be all right,” he muttered in the girl’s ear. But Bates could not lend the ring of conviction to his words.
He lifted the girl in his arms as they gained the deck. The flames had sought out the wood framework of the central portion of the cabin, and the surface of the water was tinged blood-red by the tongues of fire.
A group of criminals, taken entirely by surprise, came around the corner of the cabin. But they had scarcely time to draw their guns before Hobart’s men were upon them, beating them to the deck with lusty blows from their pipe wrenches.
Vigilant patrol boats and other craft were looming out of the rose-tinted fog, coming to the aid of the burning vessel. Some of the criminals were deserting in a lifeboat. Others fought with Hobart’s men for the possession of a second lifeboat. But Bates had all he could do to hold Betty Dale. Help was so near that before the fire on the yacht began to creep their way, they would all be safely away. It was escape that the courage and quick-thinking of a single man had provided. But at what a price!
Thinking only of Betty’s safety, Bates carried the girl as far away from the actual fighting as possible. But as he reached the other corner of the cabin, a fear-mad killer almost bumped into him. The man had a gun. He raised it, laughed insanely. Instinctively, Bates threw Betty behind him.
A bullet from the mad killer’s gun lanced through Bates’s left arm. Bates’s big right hand closed on the man’s gun wrist, and with a powerful twist, brought the man’s right arm up almost to his shoulder blades in a hammerlock hold that brought a shriek of agony from the killer. The man dropped his gun, slipped from Bates’s grasp, and dived for the rail.
Bates never noticed whether that crazy killer went over the rail or not. He turned around. To his horror, he found that Betty was gone.
THE GIRL who loved Secret Agent X had taken the opportunity offered by the criminal’s attack, to slip from behind Bates’s shielding body. Free from his prot
ection, she had run swiftly down the deck, past the blazing cabin, and to the other end of the boat. She had but one objective—get to Agent X.
Golden hair flying, eyesight blurred from clouds of smoke through which she had passed, Betty seized the arm of the first man she met.
“Where is he?” she gasped out. “I must find Agent X. Where is he?”
The man laughed harshly as he tore out of her grasp. “Gone to hell, where the rest of us will go, if we don’t get off this damned tub. He dived over the rail in a mass of flames, sister. I’d look for a new man if I were you!”
Blindly, her hands found the rail. She stared fixedly at the flame-tinged water. She blinked back tears to see three shadowy forms drop one at a time into the gasoline cruiser tied to the stern. A flare of ruddy light found the face of one of the men. That face was covered by a black mask.
Not far from the cruiser, Zerna’s small launch drifted. Betty looked from the cruiser to the launch. Her two fists clenched. In her slim body a new strength was born. She would carry on the great work that he had been unable to finish….
In the forty-foot cruiser, one of the three masked men untied the rope that connected the smaller boat to the yacht. Another tinkered with the engine.
“It couldn’t have ended better,” said the third man. “We can make a clean getaway. We have realized nearly a million dollars in the racket.”
“We needn’t quit,” said the man in the prow as he cast off from the yacht. “I have some of the best blackmail pictures in the lot right here in my pocket.” He took a leather case from the inside of his pocket, patted it affectionately, and returned it to his pocket.
The engine popped, broke into a steady murmur. One of the masked men took the wheel, reversed the screws, and backed the cruiser away from the burning yacht. Then he turned the prow of the boat due east across the Sound. They had not gone a hundred feet before they sighted a motor launch coming straight toward them.
“It’s Zerna,” said one of the men. “She’s following us.”
“Take her aboard,” replied one of the others. “After all, she’s been on the level with us.”
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 7 Page 41