Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 4 Page 42

  A quick kick to the policeman’s wrist and the gun was knocked from the copper’s hand. “X” led a powerful, paralyzing blow to the cop’s solar plexus. The man went down in a heap. “X” hurdled both the cop, and the steps, landed in the back yard, and sprinted towards the fence. He vaulted over, and ran down the alley.

  Behind him another police whistle sounded. There came the roar of a starting motor, followed by two quick shots. Ahead of him, a car speeded by the mouth of the alley. Though he had only a glimpse of that car, he recognized it as the black sedan belonging to China Bobby. There were two persons in the front seat. Drew Devon and the Eurasian had escaped.

  Chapter V

  SUICIDE PACT

  ON his way to a near-by hideout, Secret Agent “X” bought an evening paper from a boy. Tucking it under his arm, he hurried on up a dismal street, entered a red-brick dwelling, and hurried up worn stairs to the second floor to enter a room which he rented under one of his numerous aliases. He had nearly an hour before it was time for him to go, in the guise of Elisha Pond, to the special meeting called by Lionel Gage.

  From beneath an iron bed, “X” took a small leather-covered case containing a compact short wave transmitter and receiver. He put the case on a table, manipulated various knobs and switches. Using a telegraph key that was incorporated in the transmitter, he called the headquarters of his secret organization directed by Bates. An answering call came almost at once; and “X,” using a code known only to him and Bates, sent this message:

  “What have you on record concerning Dr. Claudio Luigi?”

  While waiting for Bates to look up the information, “X” spread the evening paper out on his knees. He remembered that Drew Devon had told him that he might find the name of the person who was the Ghoul in the evening paper. He could hardly expect a word of truth in the woman’s statement. Probably she had no more idea than he who her employer, the Ghoul, really was.

  She had been compelled to kill time while waiting for her cigarette to burn down to the point where it would discharge the poison dart. However, the Agent was always thorough.

  “X” saw in the paper that once again the Amber Death had struck—this time a wealthy newspaper publisher. As they had rushed his slowly ossifying body to the hospital, the ambulance had been held up by a gang of masked men and the Amber Death victim had been kidnaped. Again the law had been outwitted. Farther down the column was:

  GHOUL WARNS ELISHA POND

  Knowing most of the details even better than the newspaper men, “X” skimmed over the story. One paragraph, however, attracted his attention. It gave out the startling information that the Ghoul’s warning had come from a radio in a parked car owned by Daniel Calvert. Police investigation had shown that a compact short-wave converter had been attached to the car radio. Calvert, who had arrived to take possession of his car some time later, denied any knowledge of the short-wave device.

  “X” remembered that at the time, Daniel Calvert must have been in the apartment of Drew Devon. Possibly, Calvert had parked his car in front of the club, and taken a taxi to Drew Devon’s apartment just to prevent his being trailed by some newspaper reporter anxious to dig up more about the scandal in which the financier and Drew Devon had been featured. More than likely, one of the Ghoul’s men had added that short-wave converter to Calvert’s car radio. Still, Calvert was a man who would bear watching. His dealings in Wall Street had been none too clean.

  At that moment, the information from Bates came through. Dr. Luigi had been born and educated in Bologna, Italy. He was a specialist in dermatology and had a large practice among wealthy people of the city. Bates further informed “X” that all efforts to locate the Ghoul’s headquarters had been fruitless. The extortionist’s sinister whisper had passed out into the ether through an ultra-short waved transmitter which permitted great range with a minimum power. All attempts to find out what substance the hypodermic needles, taken from Warnow’s room, had contained were also failures.

  “X” RETURNED the radio equipment to its hiding place and proceeded at once to assume the disguise of Elisha Pond.

  Half an hour later, he alighted at the porte-cochere of the palatial home of Lionel Gage. It was Gage himself who admitted “X”; for, as Gage explained, he had deemed it wise to dismiss the entire staff of servants for the night. In the magnificent glassed-in conservatory “X” greeted the six men present—among them the swarthy Daniel Calvert, the suave Dr. Luigi, and the timid Robert Cass. The others were all men whom “X,” as Pond, had frequently come in contact with.

  When cigars were well lighted, a tall, blond man, hardly out of his forties, stood up. He was Anthony Bernard, whose family had for generations found a fortune in the iron and steel industry. He paced the floor nervously for a few moments, chewing his cigar ragged. “Well,” he snapped at last, “what’s this wonderful proposition of yours, Gage?”

  Lionel Gage’s dark eyes turned from Daniel Calvert to Dr. Luigi.

  With a vigorous jerk of his shaggy head, Dan Calvert rapped out: “Tell ’em, damnit!” He leaned far forward on the edge of his chair, and glared about the circle of anxious faces.

  Gage, nervous and ill at ease, ran a finger around the inside of his collar. “You gentlemen understand that we are all marked men,” he said huskily. “We’ve either been threatened by the Ghoul, or have bank accounts that would prompt one to expect to hear the Ghoul’s voice at any time.”

  Bernard’s jaw sagged. The chewed cigar dropped from his mouth unnoticed. He glanced apprehensively into the shadowy corners of the room as though he half expected to hear the Ghoul call him by name.

  “We’ve all been threatened,” Daniel Calvert’s unpleasant voice croaked. “Or haven’t we?” he demanded crossly. “I have. Paid, too, like a damned ass! But—” his voice dropped to a crackling whisper—“a man likes to live!”

  “I haven’t,” Bernard muttered.

  “Haven’t what?” Calvert glared at the younger man. “Sit down, Bernard! Enough to give a man the shakes just watching you pace up and down, and mutter like one in a trance.”

  Bernard flushed. “I said I haven’t been warned by the Ghoul.”

  Robert Cass jerked a nervous glance at his watch. “This won’t get us anywhere, gentlemen—sitting here bawling at each other. Let’s have the plan. Anything that will trick the Ghoul.”

  Calvert snorted. “This plan is anything—the last resort. The police are stumped. They can’t swear out a warrant against a voice.”

  Gage explained his plan:

  “The Ghoul will continue his damnable practices just as long as they net him anything. If we don’t pay, we become living corpses—live brains within dead bodies.” He repressed a shudder. “The Ghoul is an infallible power. There is only one escape. Only one way to check the Ghoul’s nefarious scheme before he confiscates most of the wealth of the city, perhaps the wealth of the country. That is not to pay the Ghoul a single farthing from here on!”

  Anthony Bernard wheeled on Gage. Color had completely drained from his face. “Not pay!” he muttered hoarsely. “Man, are yon in your right mind? Cass, Pond, Luigi, all of you—is there a man among you who has not dreamed of the Amber Death? Good Lord, gentlemen, in my sleep I’ve seen this face—” and his trembling bands raked across his cheeks—“this face reduced to a contorted yellow thing, the face of a living mummy!”

  Dr. Luigi got up, laid a restraining hand on Bernard’s shoulder. “Get a grip on yourself, Bernard,” he said sternly. “No time to play the coward.”

  Bernard’s right hand came up flatly against Luigi’s cheek. The sound of the slap cracked throughout the room. The mark of Bernard’s fingers flamed Luigi’s smooth, dark skin. Daniel Calvert catapulted from his chair. His thick, outthrust arms shoved Bernard back to a chair.

  “Sit down, you fool!” he roared.

  Panting, pale with anger and shame, Bernard sat down. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  “Please, gentlemen,” said Dr. Luigi, straining to control his
voice, “let us hear the rest of the plan.”

  “Yes, the plan! Go on.”

  GAGE continued: “It is a plan that requires courage, but for the common good, we must be the ones to defeat the Golden Ghoul. As Bernard has said, the police are helpless to fight this thing they cannot see. This person called Secret Agent “X,” who I am inclined to regard as a myth, has evidently had no better luck than the police.

  “Here is my proposition. Tonight, each of us will sign an agreement not to pay one cent of tribute to the Ghoul. This agreement will be published in every paper in the country. Furthermore, to show that we are in earnest, and to deprive the Ghoul of the pleasure of torturing us with his Amber Death, each of us must agree to commit suicide when the Ghoul next makes a demand upon us!”

  “You’re crazy!” Bernard leaped to his feet. It was only with considerable effort that he restrained another nervous burst of temper.

  “And you believe,” Elisha Pond asked mildly, “that meeting defeat from a handful of men will cause the Ghoul to give up extortion entirely?”

  “That is my belief, Mr. Pond,” Gage spread out a sheet of paper on his carved walnut desk. “I have the agreement which I have just outlined. May I have the honor of being the first to sign this declaration of our independence?”

  “You may—and be damned!” cried Anthony Bernard. “I’ll pay if it lands me in the bread line whenever the Ghoul speaks to me.”

  “If it would avail us anything to sign,” Robert Cass said as if he were giving the question considerable thought. “But death, whether by the Amber Death or by putting a bullet through my own head—” He was seized with a fit of shaking that prevented him from continuing.

  “I didn’t say anything about a bullet,” said Gage as he signed the suicide pact with a flourish. “I have a poison that Dr. Luigi tells me is perfectly painless—even pleasant. One gradually dozes—”

  “Anthony Bernard.” A cold dispassionate voice echoed throughout the room.

  Cass’s thin hand seized the sleeve of the Agent’s coat. “Look!” He pointed at a heavy radio console at the end of the room. This time, whoever had attached the short-wave converter to Gage’s set had made no attempt to conceal the fact that the Ghoul’s voice came from the radio. The pilot lamps made a ghostly eye of the airplane dial on the radio.

  “Anthony Bernard,” repeated the voice, “this is my first warning. It shall be my last. I will give you two days in which to raise seventy-five thousand dollars. If you succeed, I will permit you to live. Fail, and your life is mine.”

  “Good Lord!” gasped Bernard. “The Ghoul! Two days to live—”

  Again came the voice. “Two others are marked for the Amber Death. Elisha Pond, what have you done toward raising the money I demanded? You defied me. You shall be punished. And to him who opposed my strength with his puny will, I give certain death. Lionel Gage, I have spoken to you.” The voice sighed into silence.

  A half-mad smile, ghastly in its untimely glee, twisted the lips of Anthony Bernard. “Now, Gage, where’s your courage?”

  Gage passed a quivering hand over his high, pale forehead. But his jaw was set with deadly determination. His right hand plunged into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a large hypodermic needle.

  “Stop him!” shouted “X.” With a celerity that belied the aged appearance of Mr. Pond, “X” sprang across the room. He caught Gage by the wrist—too late. Gage had emptied the entire contents of the syringe in the flesh of his neck. His fixed eyes stared at Pond. “All over now,” he panted out “Doesn’t take much nerve. Painless—”

  A scream of pain retched from Gage’s throat. He fell to the floor writhing in agony. His hands clenched and unclenched. Facial muscles contracted in a hideous grimace. And very, very slowly, a tinge of yellow crept upwards across his face.

  “Look! His face. It’s the Amber death!” shouted Cass.

  “So that’s the painless poison!”

  “Didn’t Luigi give it to him?”

  Like an enraged panther, Bernard sprang toward Luigi. “Traitor! You’re the Ghoul!”

  THE Italian suddenly paled, sidestepped to escape the lunging Bernard.

  “Kill Luigi! Kill the Ghoul!”

  And suddenly the room was drowned in darkness. Every light in the house seemed to have gone out at once. Men uttered high-pitched, feminine-like screams of terror. The glass roof of the conservatory was smashed to bits. Pieces of broken glass fell in tinkling rain upon the tiled floor. And through the opening in the roof, dark, agile shadows dropped.

  Hoarse blasphemies cascaded from the mouth of Daniel Calvert, and mingled with a hideous, pain-ridden shriek.

  “Dio Mio!” Luigi’s voice. “The Amber Death!”

  And above the noise of bedlam, the Ghoul’s voice whispered orders.

  Across the room, “X” saw a gleam of phosphorescent light—a death’s head drawn in luminous paint. The death’s head danced around the room. That luminous face—perhaps it marked the Ghoul himself. “X” sprang across the room toward the face of fire, encountered a writhing tangle of arms and legs.

  The blade of a knife raked his arm. Thin, clawlike hands dug at his throat. “X” let go with his right at a shadowy foeman. He twisted free. Not ten feet from him gleamed the death’s head. He leaped toward it, saw the dark form of a man who bore the ghostly emblem. “X” tripped over a sprawling body, caught his balance and raced on, hard on the heels of the illusive wisp of phosphorescent light.

  In front of him, his quarry crashed through French doors, stopped, encountering the wall of the next room. “X’s” fingers crooked like the talons of a striking hawk as he seized the creature by the throat. But his man was possessed with the strength of desperation. He twisted and turned in the Agent’s grasp. He drove hard, short blows to the Agent’s chest. Yet “X” clung to the man with the tenacity of a bulldog.

  A faint, gurgling cry from the man he was slowly inevitably choking into insensibility. “Ghoul! I’ll—pay—”

  That agonized cry knifed through the Agent’s heart. He had made some mistake. He released his grip, snapped a flashlight from his pocket and played the brilliant ray upon the face of the man he had tried to throttle. It was the terrified face of Anthony Bernard. Even in the light of the flash, he could make out the tracing of the death’s head on Bernard’s shirt front.

  “You. Pond!” gasped Bernard. “You the Ghoul?”

  “No—no, Bernard! Where did that mark on your shirt come from?”

  “You’re crazy! Nothing on my shirt!”

  “Look,” the Agent commanded. He snapped off the light for a moment.

  Bernard gasped. “Why—why how did it get there?”

  “Some one marked you so that the Ghoul could find you in the dark,” the Agent explained. “Could your valet have marked that shirt?”

  “Incredible!” Bernard exploded. “Why, I’ve had Ho-Yang for years.”

  “A Chinese! Undoubtedly, Bernard, your valet is in the Ghoul’s gang. Had I not chased you out here, you would have been in the Ghoul’s power.”

  “But I was to be given two days to raise the money,” Bernard objected.

  “X” nodded. “Merely to put you off your guard, I think. The Ghoul has a different method. He does not work as most extortionists do. The Amber Death first. Later, you pay—under the torment of the living death. That is his method.”

  Though “X” had not noticed it before, the entire house was shrouded in an awful silence. “X” took Bernard by the arm, and dragged him through the French doors and into the conservatory. “X” played his light about the room. The place looked as though it had been struck by a small hurricane. Broken glass covered up-ended furniture and was strewn over the floor. But, as “X” had expected, there were a number of canvas, shot-filled bags lying around the floor. But there was not a single human being in sight. The Ghoul’s work had progressed in its usual efficient manner. The master criminal seemed to be everywhere. His nefarious schemes seemed infallible.
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  Suddenly “X” snapped out his light. A little gasp from Bernard. “What’s the matter.”

  “Hush,” the Agent cautioned. “The door on the right. It’s opening. Quiet, now.’”

  The door creaked. Cautious footsteps padded across the floor. Bernard, his hand on the Agent’s arm, was shaking like a leaf. “X” waited until the footsteps came closer. Then the beam of his light sliced through the gloom to center on the frightened face of Robert Cass.

  “Cass!” Bernard exploded.

  Relief passed over the little man’s face. “You there, Bernard! Thought the Ghoul took you along with the others.” He hurried over to where “X” and Bernard were standing. “I managed to hide in that closet. Couldn’t see much of what went on. Some of the mob climbed back up the ropes to the roof. Others just seemed to disappear.”

  “X” nodded his head. The bags of shot accounted for those sudden and mysterious disappearances. And he knew from the cries he had heard that Calvert and Luigi had both fallen victims of the Amber Death. Probably, they had been removed to the Ghoul’s headquarters. What had been the fate of the others, he did not know.

  “Hadn’t we better inform the police?” asked Bernard.

  “Definitely, no!” the Secret Agent replied. “We must all go to our respective homes at once. I do not trust the police. They have been so successfully defeated in every attempt made against the Ghoul, that I suspect some man, some one high in the police force, is the Ghoul himself!”

  This statement was obviously false. While “X” had a theory concerning the identity of the Ghoul, this theory included no one on the police force. But he knew of no other way of convincing Bernard that he should not go to the police. Already a desperate plan was forming in “X’s” mind. It was a plan that would endanger Bernard, perhaps, but it was one that might enable “X” to come face to face with the Ghoul.

  In his car a few moments later, “X” watched Cass and Bernard drive off in their own cars.

  Chapter VI

  KILLERS FROM THE CLOUDS