Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 4 Read online

  Grimly, tensely, he stepped into a doorway out of sight and drew a piece of rubberized fabric from a pocket. It was the helmet mask de Graf had given him the night before, the mask that represented hours of patient, secret research on the part of the murdered physicist.

  The Agent knew now, had known for many hours, since the unfailing eye of Hobart’s movie camera had made its record, that the darkness had no external existence, but was in the eyes of human beings alone. It was a force, a ray probably, that temporarily paralyzed the optic nerve. No wonder that the darkness seemed more complete than any night. No wonder that criminals could work beneath it with impunity—criminals equipped with insulating helmets which made their own eyes impervious to the ray.

  There was sweat on the Agent’s forehead as he adjusted the strange mask over his head. A great crime was about to take place—and the safety of thousands depended on him alone. The police were coming. Detectives were already in the store; but police and detectives would be helpless against the blinding dark. They would flounder as futilely as they had on other occasions when it had fallen. Whips would be plied by the raiders, men and women would stampede, horror would be repeated perhaps.

  Yet to trap the criminals red-handed, to expose them for the fiends they were, “X” had been forced to wait until the darkness fell before he acted, forced to let the first fearful horror of the thing descend.

  The mask of de Graf, fashioned of gum rubber impregnated with lead sulphide and the rare metal, thorium, had goggles of pressed mica and glass. It was almost a perfect insulator. Already the buzzing in the Agent’s brain had diminished, as the action of the invisible, nerve-paralyzing rays was lessened. The lights before his eyes had ceased to dance. The twilight grew brighter.

  But pandemonium had arisen in the street, and the scene he saw before him was like a glimpse into some unearthly hell—a nightmare of horror that the Secret Agent was never to forget. On all sides people were floundering, pushing against each other. Their eyes, though blinded by the devilish ray, were wide with terror. The hoarse cries of men mingled with the piercing screams of women in a shrill tumult. Hysteria quivered like jagged lightning through the crowds.

  The Agent turned his helmeted head toward the electric truck. The two workmen were carrying on their task quite calmly in the midst of mad confusion. How they could do this was plainly evident to “X” now. They, too, had helmets on their heads—helmets which proved their guilt as members of the devil-dark gang.

  “X” SAW other helmeted figures slip from the two cars that had so quietly parked. Whips and canvas sacks were in these men’s hands. They pushed their way through the staggering, milling crowds toward the department store’s front. They entered as the Agent watched. He knew that others were entering through other doors that he could not see; knew that the raiders were gathering to do their work of looting. In a moment more, when the dark had so frightened the crowds inside that panic swept among them, those cruel, metal-tipped whips would begin to descend.

  A second longer the Agent crouched in the doorway, looking both ways along the street. He hoped somewhere to see the directing genius of all this, the mysterious Chairman whose identity he did not know. But if he was here he was well hidden—hidden even from the Agent’s searching gaze.

  Glancing back at the truck again, he saw one of the workmen strike out with a whip. A man and a girl had stumbled over the cable on the pavement, and were being lashed out of the way.

  The whip curled around the girl’s body like a snake, its metal tip tearing at her dress. The workman drew it back, lashed again, ripping the clothing in great jagged seams, baring the white skin beneath. The girl screamed wildly, and ran headlong from the vicinity of the truck. The young man with her tried to follow, but stumbled against the vehicle instead, and a shower of stinging strokes sent him cowering back.

  With breath hissing between clenched teeth, with fury lying hot against his heart, the Secret Agent fought his way through the seething mass of humanity about him. It was time for him to strike, time for him to make good his promise to the police.

  People flung themselves against him, clawed at him blindly as he circled and made for the truck. He slipped like a ghost in that black gloom through crowds now almost mad with fear.

  Feeling themselves secure, not knowing that anyone had guessed their secret, the men by the truck did not see the weirdly helmeted form until “X” was within twenty feet of them.

  A startled cry came from behind one of the helmeted heads then. The man shouted something to his companion above the uproar. Both men stared. Then suddenly they dropped their whips, and automatics gleamed dully in their straining hands. Like weird monsters they crouched to fire.

  Only rarely did the Secret Agent carry deadly weapons. But against this hideous band of whip-torturers who had killed women and robbed innocent children of their lives he had come armed. The weapon in his hand spoke quickly now. With the gun held close against his hip, not even taking aim along the sights, he fired twice, at the same instant that the others shot.

  Bullets whistled close by his head, slapped against a building behind him. But the Agent had ducked the moment after he fired, and his own shots had found their mark. One of the helmeted men cried out and pitched forward. His hands dropped at his sides. Like a puppet with suddenly severed strings he collapsed. The other man staggered, his gun clattering to the street. He was not mortally hit like his companion, for he plunged to the back of the truck, his hand flew forward to a hidden switch, and an instant later a blast of blue and orange flame came from the truck’s interior.

  The wounded man leaped back from the vehicle with a cry of pain. His plunging body struck the Agent. Both went down, and scorching heat funneled out from the burning truck, singeing their clothes. The wounded man groaned and went limp.

  Agent “X” dropped his gun and pulled the man away from the hungry heat of the fire. For a moment he went dangerously close himself, trying to get a look inside the truck, and glimpse the mysterious mechanism. But it was hopeless. Some violently inflammable substance had obviously been planted to make the complete destruction of the mechanism possible in case of emergency. White-hot flames hissed and interlaced, as though a hundred blow torches had been fired at once. Glass tubes were popping in a series of miniature explosions. Lead connections were melting away. Metal was fusing into a bubbling, shapeless mass.

  THE Agent backed away from the mystery truck and looked around the street. A change was already beginning to make itself apparent in those about him. The excited, terrified milling of the crowd was beginning to cease. Suddenly a man screamed and pointed toward the fire. There was a note of hysterical joy in his voice.

  “Light! Light!” he shouted. “Light again—thank God!”

  The fierce white-hot glare of the inflammable material planted in the car had broken through the blinding darkness of the Stygian night. Did that mean—As though in answer to the Agent’s unfinished thought others around began to shout:

  “The sun! The sun is coming out again!”

  With a grim smile on his lips, the Agent tore his helmet off and stuffed it in his pocket. It was true! His own eyes, unaffected previously by the strange rays, could see perfectly now without the glass goggles. The rays were no longer radiating. The mechanism in the truck had been put out of commission by the fire. The crowds in the street were slowly regaining their normal sight as temporarily paralyzed optic nerves began again to function.

  And it was the Agent, by his swift attack, who had forced the raiders to destroy their own dark-producing device. The burning had been done, of course, as part of a prearranged plan, thought out by the Chairman, to prevent the secret of the blinding rays from falling into the hands of the law. Normally, before the effect of the rays wore off, the raiders would have time to escape—as they had done on two previous occasions. But here again the Secret Agent’s action had changed things.

  For the helmeted raiders were now in the big store of S. Carleton & Company, detec
tives guarded every exit, and neither of the two men in charge of the truck had been able to warn their companions what had happened.

  Agent “X” turned and made his way quickly to the store. By the action of the people around them, the raiders had now learned that something was radically wrong with their plans. But for them it was too late. Their lashing, metal-tipped whips could beat blinding humans into cowering fear, but they were of little use against grim detectives, armed, and already partially able to see. The Agent watched the scene tensely. He had done his work well, given the guardians of the law more than an even break—and they were making good use of it.

  When two of the helmeted raiders discarded their whips, drew guns and started to fire, they were met with a volley of bullets. But a fierce fight was raging by another exit. Four of the raiders had concentrated their frenzied attack to escape here. Two were grabbed by wounded detectives and made prisoners. Two others managed to break through.

  Grimly the Secret Agent crouched with his gun in hand again. He fired as the helmeted running figures appeared, sent bullets smashing into the bandits’ legs, and saw them sprawl cursing and screaming to the sidewalk.

  Inside the store, the terrific battle had been won. A dozen detectives lay dead and wounded on the main floor. Victims of the first slashing onslaught of the terrible whips cowered in whimpering terror against the walls and counters. But the raiders—those still alive—were in the hands of the police, guns pressed against their sides, steel handcuffs clamped over wrists.

  Not a single member of the raiding gang had escaped. They had been caught red-handed with all their hideous paraphernalia—their cruel scourging whips tarnished with the blood of a hundred victims, their guns, canvas sacks to hold the loot, and their strange helmets.

  Detectives, coldly angry at the death of some of their comrades, were jerking the helmets off the heads of their prisoners, smashing down with blackjacks and gun muzzles when open rebellion flared. And the raiders were a bruised and vicious group when their faces were finally bared to the gaping crowds. The Agent recognized a few; Doeg, LaFarge and Blass among them. The others were obviously men of education also; ruined bankers and financiers, unable to stand the gaff of failure, and slyly engaged in desperate crime.

  Agent “X,” the man who had engineered this tremendous victory for the law, the man in down-and-outer’s clothes, stood on the sidelines and watched.

  He was at the curb when the members of the devil-dark gang were shoved into Black Marias. Later, in the disguise of A. J. Martin, he went to police headquarters, and was there when the commissioner himself made a statement to the press. The police, the commissioner said, were satisfied. The most fiendishly vicious group of criminals in the city’s history had been rounded up. True, the mechanism by which they created their blinding darkness had been destroyed by fire, its hideous secret kept a mystery, and millions in loot from previous raids were still to be salvaged. But the commissioner was confident that information leading to the recovery of the money could be sweated out of the prisoners. He was confident that not one man of the group had escaped; confident that the menace of the strange darkness would never fall on any city again.

  In half-uttered confessions, several of the raiders had indicated that Vivian de Graf had been connected with the band before her death. It was the commissioner’s private belief, he stated, that her murdered husband might have been the originator of the darkness, since it was known that he was a profound worker in science. The commissioner’s smile was complacent as he assured the gentlemen from the press that the whole mystery of how such a group came to organize would be unraveled as soon as his prisoners had confessed.

  All this the Secret Agent heard, and a smile twitched at the corners of his lips also; but it was humorless, sardonic. The police commissioner and the whole police department might be satisfied. He was not! And he never would be satisfied, or consider the case closed, until the unknown man behind it all, the mysterious Chairman, who had given the orders at the meeting that others carried out, had been exposed and caught.

  Chapter XVIII

  BLOSSOMING CLUES

  MONTHS after the capture and imprisonment of the devil-dark gang, Secret Agent “X” moved through the exhibition rooms of a flower show in a large mid-western city. He was in the disguise of a white-haired, benign looking old man now. There was a silver-headed cane in his hand which seemed a necessary re-enforcement to his faltering steps. Under his left arm was a portfolio containing notes on flowers and copies of horticultural journals.

  On both sides of the corridor through which he walked, flowers were banked in a riotous profusion of color. Roses, chrysanthemums, carnations, dahlias, geraniums—all the well-known garden blooms, together with fuchsias, gardenias, and other delicate hothouse blossoms.

  The humid air of the big building was heavy with their scent. Flower lovers and horticulturists of all sorts and ages strolled close by. Pretty girls at gaily decorated booths passed out advertising pamphlets, and free sample bouquets. A red-lipped, coquettish miss beckoned to the Agent and laughed up into his face as she drew a red carnation through his buttonhole. He smilingly submitted, then moved on toward the west end of the room where an elaborate arch of blue silk, stretched on a wire framework, had the word “Orchids” emblazoned across it in letters formed of the flowers themselves.

  In a moment he was in a chamber filled with thousands of the strangely shaped plants, rarest and most expensive of cultivated blooms. Many looked like bright-colored insects; like butterflies and moths poised for flight. Most of these the Agent, a student of many sciences, knew by name. There were the Habenaria, the Spiranthes and the Oncidium types.

  He paused at last before a group of blossoms yellow as saffron and marked with the startling spots of a leopard’s coat or some poisonous reptile’s skin. The flowers were beautiful and exotic; but somehow unwholesome, as though nature had been tortured and tormented for their cultivation. There were no other blooms like them in the whole building.

  The eyes of the Secret Agent gleamed as they fastened on these blooms. A faint, humorless smile curved his lips. He seemed a gentle old man bending forward to study the loveliness of rare flowers.

  Those who saw him did not guess that the benign and aged face masked the features of the most masterly crime hunter in existence. They did not know that he was on the trail of a criminal at this very moment; that, having sworn never to give up till he had his man, he had waited months to track down and capture one of the most elusive criminals he had ever encountered in his whole career. They did not know that in his pocket at the moment was a telegram in code, written by one of his own trained operatives, which concerned those saffron flowers before him.

  Weeks before, the Secret Agent had instructed paid operatives in a score of cities where horticultural exhibitions were scheduled, to get in touch with him if this special variety of saffron orchid appeared. He had equipped these operatives with a detailed colored plate of the flower itself, made from the single blossom he had picked up on the floor of Vivian de Graf’s apartment. For “X” believed that the admirer who sent those orchids to the society beauty was the unknown Chairman of the devil-dark group—the man who had not been caught in the police round-up.

  He straightened slowly from before the orchid exhibit, turned his smiling face toward a winsome girl attendant, and beckoned to her.

  “These flowers,” he said, “are most beautiful. I would like to learn more about them. Would it be too great an inconvenience to give me their owner’s name and address?”

  His voice was smooth, gentle, the soft voice of a polite old man. The girl looked at the number of the exhibit, consulted her register, and wrote a name and address on a slip of paper.

  “You’ll find the man who grew them at this address,” she said. “But the flowers are not for sale and neither are the plants. They are here as competitive entries only.”

  The Secret Agent thanked her and looked at the paper in his hand. It said: “D. H. Br
ownell, 36 Rose Hill Road.” Slowly, with the wistful smile still on his face, the Secret Agent moved toward the exhibition’s exit, sniffing from time to time at the spicy fragrance of the carnation in his buttonhole.

  He was panting, forty-five minutes later, as he climbed the gentle slope of Rose Hill Road. This was in a wealthy suburban section of the city where the horticultural exhibition had been held. Huge estates with green lawns spreading before them lined the well-kept street. Shade trees arched overhead. The feathery green of spring foliage showed in their interlaced branches. The air here, too, was sweet with the scent of flowers. Crime seemed as remote as some distant star. Yet it was crime’s black trail that had brought Agent “X” away from his usual haunts, brought him on a mission as strange as any he had ever embarked upon.

  HIS forward progress was interspersed with frequent halts beside some handy fence to catch his breath and fan himself with the fluttering leaves of a horticultural journal. He was playing the part of an old man well. His silver-headed cane tapping the sidewalk beside his shuffling feet, helped him at last to reach the house marked 36.

  Here he rested again, mopping his forehead with a cambric handkerchief. Then he clicked open a gate and moved along a cement walk between rows of ornamental shrubs. The house before him was a large one. It and the grounds showed signs of lavish care and unstinted wealth.

  A great dog came bounding toward him, barking furiously. The Agent paused with the timid uncertainty of an aged man and waved his cane at the animal, calling in a cracked voice for some one to check the beast’s rushes.

  In a moment a man appeared from the side of the house where he had been supervising the laying out of a new flower bed. That he was not a gardener was evident by his clothes. He was dressed in a stylish, white flannel suit. In contrast to the lightness of the cloth a jet-black beard covered the man’s cheeks and chin and spread magnificently over the whole front of his coat. The rest of his face was ruddy, healthy with the glow of good food and wine and robust living. But there was in the depths of his eyes a certain furtive sharpness, a certain swift calculation, and he glanced suspiciously at his visitor and frowned.