FANNON did not rise. He allowed the smoke to trickle slowly from his nostrils, then said drawlingly, “I thought I was here to talk to the Skull.”
The stocky man asked, frowning, “What makes you think I’m not the Skull?”
Fannon slowly shook his head. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you haven’t got the brains to be the boss of this outfit.”
The stocky man grinned again. “You win, brother. I’m Rufe Linson, second in command. The Skull always likes to test men out this way. He’s watching us now. Before you can see him, I’ll have to search you. Stand up.”
“I was searched once, before coming in,” Fannon protested, though complying.
Rufe made a derogatory gesture. “By that halfwit, Binks. I do a regular job. See, the Skull has got wind that there’s a certain guy tryin’ to squirm into this place—a guy called Secret Agent ‘X.’ You might be him for all we know. So we gotta search every man right down to the skin. This ‘X’ guy always has special trick stunts on him; and if we ever found gas guns or trick cigarettes or things like that on a new guy, believe me it would be tough for him.”
While he talked, he searched the new man’s clothing with a thoroughness that overlooked nothing. He ripped the lining of Fannon’s coat, turned down the cuffs of his trousers, took the ribbon off the hat, ripped open the tie.
In the pockets he found a few coins, a package of cigarettes, and a box of matches. He broke every one of the cigarettes, then made Fannon remove his shoes. He pried open the soles to see if there was anything hidden there.
“It’s all right,” he assured Fannon. “When you go back to the main room, you’ll find new clothing to put on. The Skull always keeps his men well dressed.”
When he had finally satisfied himself that there was not a thing on the new man that might be suspicious, he said, “Okay. Put your shoes on. The Skull will see you now. Here’s where you get a chance to make some real dough. I guess you can use it?”
Fannon nodded bitterly. “They made me work for almost nothing in the prison shop for five years. Now I want to make them pay me for it.”
“You’ll get your chance, boy. The Skull will show you how.” He was watching closely while Fannon laced his shoes, fascinated by the swift movement of the long, dexterous fingers. “Boy,” he admired, “no wonder you’re the best safe man in the country—with them fingers. Can you open any kind of safe at all?”
“I’ve never hit one I couldn’t,” Fannon told him. He finished lacing his shoes and stood up, “What now?”
“You go inside. I guess you’re okay. Be careful how you talk to the Skull. Act respectful. He don’t take any lip, and he don’t stand for jokes.”
Fannon nodded, said, “See you later.” He walked across the anteroom with a firm step, shoulders back, as if going in to face an unavoidable ordeal. He stepped from the lighted anteroom into the pitch blackness of the next room, and heard the door slam behind him. In the darkness he put his hand out behind him, felt for the knob which should be on the inside. There was none. This door had no knob on either side. It was evidently operated from another room. He was locked in there in the darkness—with the Skull.
Chapter II
EXPOSED
HE stood still, waiting. Soon he heard a rumbling noise from the floor directly in front of him. A trap door of some sort had opened, and from the aperture thus formed a platform was rising. On the platform was the weirdest figure that the eyes of man had yet beheld.
A faint glow of light came up through the trapdoor, and it illuminated the form that was rising. Clad from head to foot in a bright vermilion cloak, it wore a hood of the same material and color. The face was exposed, but it was not the face of a human being. No flesh showed. There was only the grinning outline of a skull—the skull of a skeleton. There was a strange sort of glow about it that seemed to emphasize the bony structure of the fleshless head.
Fannon stood quietly in the darkness, not a muscle of his face moving, as he watched the ghostly rise of the vermilion figure. Suddenly the platform stopped moving, and a spotlight alongside the figure burst into light, flaring directly into Fannon’s face. Fannon blinked once or twice, then lowered his lids.
The figure spoke, but Fannon could not see it now, because of the spotlight. “You have no doubt now, Mr. Fannon, as to whether you are talking to the Skull?”
Fannon shook his head. “No.”
The Skull chuckled. “No doubt you are anxious to learn why you are being admitted to the ranks of the Servants of the Skull?”
“Because you need me,” said Fannon.
The Skull grunted impatiently. “I need no one. I could get along without you very well. But your particular knowledge will help me to expand my operations. The man who preceded you was only an amateur compared to yourself in the business of opening safes. He thought himself indispensable, however, and acted disrespectfully to me. He even entertained notions of supplanting me in command here. Binks showed you how far he succeeded. Take warning from his fate.”
Fannon remained silent, and after a moment the Skull continued, “Before you were released from prison you were approached with an offer of employment. You were ignorant of the nature of that employment, but you knew that its nature was criminal. Am I right?”
Fannon answered tonelessly, “You are right.”
“Now that you know that it is the Skull who is employing you, are you still eager to go on?”
“I am,” Fannon said. “In jail we managed to get news of every one of your exploits. We knew that you were recruiting, for we heard of several disappearances from the underworld, which were followed by crimes that only the missing men could have accomplished. These crimes were attributed to the genius of the Skull, so we knew those men had been drafted to serve you.”
“That is true,” said the Skull in a pleased tone. “What particular crimes did you hear of?”
“Well, the last I heard of, was the kidnaping of Ainsworth Clegg, the oil man. There had been several kidnapings before that. Then I heard that Clegg, like the others, had been found on the streets of the city, with their mentality destroyed, their bodies wrecked in some horrible manner, so that the doctors gave them only a few days longer to live. We wondered what terrible thing could have done that to them.”
The Skull chuckled. “You shall have a chance to see how it is done. Now, I wish to tell you this—every man who is selected by me to become a servant of the Skull will be able to retire a wealthy man when his term of service is over. But—” the Skull’s voice became hard, brittle—“in return he must give me blind obedience. He must carry out every order I give, or suffer the consequences. If you are ordered to kill your brother or your sister, you must obey!” The Skull was silent for a long minute, then asked slowly, “Are you ready to take service with me?”
And Fannon answered tersely, “Yes!”
“That is good,” the Skull said, “You will now go back to the main room. For one week you will be on probation. During that week you will be assigned one task. If you carry it out successfully, you will be admitted as an equal to the ranks of the Servants of the Skull. You will be just in time to participate in the greatest coup in the history of crime which I am now planning. It will be something to astound the world, something which will net us a huge profit.
“One thing more—” as Fannon turned to the door—“no one is allowed to leave this place while in my service. You will be conducted in and out on expeditions, blindfolded, by Binks, who is the only one besides myself that knows the way out. At night, do not try to leave the main room. It is dangerous.”
FANNON nodded, his eyes still veiled from the spotlight. Suddenly the spotlight clicked off, and as his eyes became accustomed once more to the gloom, he saw the hideous vermilion-cloaked Skull descending slowly on his movable platform. Then the trapdoor closed, and he was left in pitch darkness.
There was a click behind him, and the door swung open. He stepped into the lighted anteroom, and the door swung s
hut once more.
The anteroom was empty. He was kept waiting for almost ten minutes, which seemed an hour, before the door at the left opened and Binks reappeared. Binks said little now, seemed to be sulky. He led Fannon back through the maze of passages along which they had come. This time Fannon’s keen eyes darted here and there on the return trip, noting angles of corridors, little points about the passages that would enable him to find his way through them alone.
At one spot Fannon suddenly stopped and ripped loose leather from the sole of his shoe where Rufe had cut it. Binks glowered at him suspiciously, but Fannon explained. “Rufe cut my shoes up, and the leather bunches. Makes it hard to walk.”
Binks grunted, and went on; he did not notice that Fannon, instead of throwing the leather away, rolled it in the palm of his hand until it was a soft ball. At another time, just as they were passing through one of the sliding panels, Fannon tripped, and nested heavily on the halfwit. In that instant Fannon’s long, dexterous fingers darted into Binks’ pocket, and came out with the special key he had used to get from one corridor to another.
Binks said, “Can’t you keep your feet? What’s the trouble, tired?”
“I guess I need some rest,” Fannon grumbled, as he palmed the key and slid it into his own pocket.
In the main room some of the men were playing cards or shooting dice; some were reading. Nate Frisch was perusing a magazine with intense interest. He put it down when Binks and Fannon came in, started to say something, but changed his mind and continued his reading. He evidently remembered the halfwit’s previous warning.
Binks said, “Come on through; I’ll show you your bunk.”
Binks had not noticed the swift movement with which Fannon, as they came in, had inserted the rolled piece of leather into the lock of the corridor door to keep it from locking when the door was closed. He led him into a dormitory just beyond the main room. Here there were rows of cots against the walls, each with a number painted in black on the wall above it. Binks stopped before number seventeen.
“This was Tyler’s,” he explained. “Now it’s yours.” He pointed to a pile of clothes on the cot. “All new. The Skull takes care of his servants. Ha, ha!”
Fannon watched him go out through the main room, wondering how his face had become so evilly scarred. All over the place the lights were extremely dim, so that it had been impossible to examine those scars closely. Fannon wondered if the man was as silly as he appeared to be, or whether it was a pose. If a pose, what was the purpose?
He watched through the open door while Binks went through the main room and out into the corridor, watched the heavy, iron-bound door slam shut. He breathed a sigh of relief. Binks had not discovered the leather jammed into the lock. The way was open to get out of there later.
Now he undressed, went into the lavatory and washed, then returned to his cot and lay down. In less than five minutes he was sound asleep.
Two hours later he awoke, almost as if he had set an alarm clock somewhere inside his head to arouse him at that moment. He was refreshed by his sleep, cautious and wary. All around him men were sleeping. Loud snores came from many of them. Only a single night light was burning at one end of the room, and by its glow he distinguished the features of Nate Frisch asleep in the cot next to his.
Soundlessly he arose, and without waiting to dress, he stole out into the main room. It was empty. Evidently there was a curfew hour here, a compulsory bedtime. In his bare feet he was as silent as a cat. He pushed at the heavy door, and it gave under his pressure. The piece of leather had done its work.
HE stole along the outer corridor without encountering a soul, until he came to the wall at the end. He knelt as he had seen Binks do, found a short lever protruding only three inches from the wall. He pulled this downward, and saw the panel in front of him slide out. He stepped into the elevator, found the lever that closed the panel, as well as another one beside it. In a moment he was ascending, and when the cage stopped, he opened the panel, stepped out into the upper corridor.
In the middle, where the dull bulb glowed, he inserted the key he had taken from Binks’ pocket in the little slot, and stepped through the opening when the panel slid out. He decided that the panel was set in motion by an electrical circuit that was closed when the metal key was inserted in the slot. He was now in the passage with the doors, one of which was the room where Tyler was confined. He had carefully counted the doors, knew it was the second one from the end.
He proceeded cautiously now, fully aware that there must be some sort of trap here for the intruder. In front of Tyler’s door he paused a moment, then, standing to one side of the door, he touched the knob with his thumb and index finger, and turned it gently.
His caution saved his life.
For from a cunningly concealed hole in the center of the knob, there catapulted a small needle. A spring had ejected the needle with tremendous force. Anybody seizing the knob to turn it in the natural manner would have received the needle in the palm of his hand. As it was, the needle fell harmlessly to the floor. Fannon picked it up, and his lips set in a grim line as he noted that the tip of the needle was coated with a brownish substance. Probably a deadly poison.
But he was given no time for cogitation. For the turning of that knob had done something else besides eject that needle; it had set off some sort of alarm; for somewhere in the maze of passages, a bell began to ring with clangorous insistence. Fannon realized that he was trapped. So clever a man as the Skull would not have left doors unguarded without setting a trap of some kind for the unwary.
Without trying to get into Tyler’s room, Fannon darted down to the end of the passage, toward the sliding panel he had come through. Quickly he inserted the key, watched the panel slide away underneath the dim electric bulb directly above it. The panel opened, and Fannon started to step through it, then stopped suddenly, halfway across. For on the other side stood Rufe, grinning evilly, a heavy revolver leveled at his heart.
“Lift up your hands!” Rufe grated. “High! Over your head!”
Fannon hesitated, but Rufe thrust the gun forward, finger tense on the trigger, lips snarling.
Fannon raised his hands, stood still.
Rufe taunted him. “I figured there was something phony about you, Mister Fannon! If you was really Frank Fannon, you would of recognized me as the guy that did a job with you ten years ago. But I thought maybe your time in stir kinda ruined your memory. Now I know different. Won’t the Skull be glad to find out that Mister Fannon is—Secret Agent ‘X!’”
Chapter III
THE MYSTERIOUS MR. POND
THE case of Ainsworth Clegg, mentioned by Secret Agent “X,” posing as Fannon, in his interview with the Skull, had stirred the city as it had seldom been stirred before.
Clegg was an extremely wealthy man, the Chairman of the Board of Paramount Oil. His kidnaping by the Servants of the Skull had been an audacious bit of business in itself, taking place in broad daylight right in front of the Paramount Oil Building on Broad Street. Clegg, a man in his early fifties, was descending from his automobile at ten A. M.
The chauffeur was holding the door for him, when three cars drove into the street, stopping one in front, one behind, and one double-parked alongside Clegg’s limousine, thus blocking it off from view on three sides. From these cars there erupted a score of men armed with machine guns. They did not threaten; they acted.
Two of the gunners raked the street in both directions, clearing it of living beings. Twenty people were killed by that fusillade. Other men struck down the chauffeur, while four of their number seized Clegg and bundled him into the double-parked car.
Then the horde of criminals leaped back into the automobiles and sped away, delivering a parting volley at a radio car that just turned into the street. The radio car was wrecked, the two policemen in it killed.
Pursuit picked them up within three minutes, but the cars separated. Each one was followed for a while, but a strange thing happened in each case. At o
ne point in the chase, each of the cars seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth. One minute they had turned a corner, and the next minute, when the pursuers had come around the same corner, the quarry was gone.
The police conducted a thorough search of the streets where the disappearance had taken place, but with no success. It seemed as if some mighty power of magic had waved a wand and caused the cars, with their vicious occupants and their prisoner, to vanish into thin air.
The hue and cry was tremendous. But the next day it increased in intensity when there was delivered by mail at police headquarters an envelope containing nothing but a single card. On one side of this card was the picture of a Skull. On the other side was a message; a message so preposterous in its demands that it must have been written by a madman. It required that the sum of four million dollars in gold be raised by midnight the same day, as ransom for Clegg. It made no threats, merely contained the one sentence. And it was signed—The Skull.
The newspapers printed an appeal that afternoon, from Clegg’s family, addressed to the Skull, stating that it was a physical impossibility to raise four million dollars by midnight, let alone in gold. It appealed to the Skull to set a more moderate ransom, one that it would be possible to pay. Not even a millionaire, the notice stated, could pay four million dollars, or even one million. People just didn’t keep their assets in liquid cash.
It was hoped that there would be some response to this appeal, some sort of word from the kidnapers. To the consternation of Clegg’s family and business associates, not a word was forthcoming. For one week they waited in anxiety and dread, until the day that Mr. Elisha Pond found Ainsworth Clegg in the street.
MR. ELISHA POND, whose means no one questioned, was himself a rather mysterious personage, whose goings and comings had long ago become the despair of society matrons. For months at a time he might not be heard from at all, and then, with no notice of his coming, he would drop into the Bankers’ Club and spend a few hours with a particular group of men who usually congregated there after dinner. Among these were Pelham Grier, the stock broker, Jonathan Jewett, head of one of the largest insurance companies in America, and Commissioner Foster, at present head of the police department.
Secret Agent X : The Complete Series Volume 3 Page 3
