Secret Agent X : The Complete Series Volume 3

by Emile C. Tepperman

  But the dread knowledge of what lay behind them hung like a lead weight around his neck. He stayed close to Betty, with a sense of waiting. There was no telling what minute the bomb might go off. Fast as they were swimming, he wasn’t satisfied. He spoke once again, something of the dread he felt in his voice.

  “Keep it up, Betty—as fast as you can! Every stroke counts.”

  They were two hundred feet offshore now. The Agent wished it were two hundred yards. He could almost sense each passing second. He was counting in his mind, keeping track of the minutes. It must be almost twelve! The arch criminal would make it a point to stick closely to his schedule. Midnight sharp would be the deadline.

  Far off across the water he saw faint lights twinkling. People were there in their peaceful homes, all unknowing of the danger that lurked so close at hand. Nearer by were the moving lights of boats. Police craft, no doubt, and others going about their accustomed routine.

  Then, on a hilltop somewhere on shore, he heard the solemn tones of a great clock booming the hour. The Agent tensed. It must be past midnight. Sound traveled at eleven hundred feet per second. And he heard the clock just striking now—which meant the hour was past—or else the clock was wrong. Surely the dread moment was almost at hand. He had struggled, worked, done his best for Betty and himself. Still they were under the black shadow of doom. Only three hundred feet separated them from the island’s shores—only three hundred feet of water beneath them and shuddering death.

  HE came close to Betty, reached out a hand to her wet shoulder, felt the warm play of muscles beneath.

  “Steady, Betty. I think—”

  He did not finish the sentence. He heard the small, frightened cry that Betty gave. It stabbed at his heart. The Agent’s eyes recorded the hellish white-hot flash that erased the glow of the stars and seemed to sweep over their very heads. He saw the outline of the island, illumined now. But not the island he had moved on a minute before. The black bulk mushroomed out, spread like a menacing Titan across the blinding whiteness of the light.

  And then his ears, receiving impression later than his eyes, heard a sound that was like thunder multiplied a thousandfold. It was a sound that had bulk and substance, a crushing weight of tumbling, fearful reverberations, almost shattering his eardrums.

  Instinctively Betty’s arms wrapped around him. He held her small, tense body close to his. They were alone in a world of blinding light, of terrible sound, and of earth and rocks that rose volcano-like, seeming to reach to the very sky above.

  He got one look at Betty’s startled, staring face. He saw her eyes grow big, her teeth set. He could not speak, could not make her hear. He could only hold her with his arm, trembling to think what thing would shortly follow.

  For the three hundred feet that separated them from the island seemed pitifully small now. Fringing the black pandemonium of sky-tossed earth, a white line of water showed—like froth rimming the angry, cavernous mouth of some great sea beast. It rose higher and higher—salt water lashed to a foam by the concussion. It mounted, curled and raced toward them, in a roaring tidal wave.

  Betty saw it, screamed once, in a surge of fear that she could not choke down. The Agent, seeing that wall of water, believed that it was the end. One thing alone stayed clearly in his mind. He must keep hold of Betty. If it were possible to survive he must not let that fearsome, onrushing fury snatch her from his arms. His hands locked around her. He kept afloat with the scissors strokes of his feet.

  But in an instant even swimming seemed futile. For the water was almost to them, curling like a mountain top. There was a trough before it. They slid down into this, and as they did so, Agent “X” cried in Betty’s ear:

  “Breathe, Betty! Hold it!”

  He filled his own lungs till they ached. The water seemed to lift them in a mighty surge. They were borne up, up toward the foaming crest. Then the boiling spray engulfed them. Like straws they were rolled over and over; weighed down, hurled about in a Niagara of churning, fearsome water. More tumultuous than the roughest surf, more exhausting than anything “X” had ever known.

  Once he felt a vibration in the water, a compression as though some great weight had struck, and a black something seemed to rocket close at hand. He knew it was a rock, falling from the island, and that the bulk of water above them was all that was saving them from the raining destructing of countless missiles. But his lungs were almost bursting. He feared for Betty. And so, still holding her to him, he struggled upward. It seemed that he would never reach the surface. The boiling foam had subsided now. He appeared to be in still black depths. He held Betty with one arm, pushed with the other, forcing himself toward the surface before it was too late.

  Then his head came out. The rumbling roar of the explosion had ceased. The white light had gone, and his half-blinded eyes could not see the stars. But there was still movement all about them—and noise. The water was surging in a vast, sweeping tide. Stones were dropping on its surface in a pattering shower. Debris of all kind was falling.

  Something hit “X’s” shoulder, made a stabbing pain. A rock splashed close by. Any instant death might come. Yet he dared not take Betty down into the depths again, and there was no assurance that a rock might not strike them under the surface as well as here.

  He waited, paddling slowly in a solitude of blackness and death. And then a new menace came. For the tide had turned. He had lost all sense of direction, yet he could tell that in the last few seconds some change in the watery surge had come. The water that had gone out into the boiling wave was coming back, more sluggishly, to sink into the vast hole where the island had been, sink to replace tons of scattered earth. The Terror had fulfilled his threat, razed Baldwin Island to the water level. And now the waters were returning to cover the spot where it had been.

  Agent “X” gasped as the tide seemed to reach for them. This was worse than any undertow. And somewhere ahead in the darkness, as the falling rocks began to diminish, he could hear the rushing, roaring sound of a giant whirlpool. It grew louder, closer every instant. He and Betty were being swept back toward it.

  This was a new horror. They had lived through the tidal wave. But nothing could survive that sucking undertow. He knew it must be pulling debris down with it—as it would pull them, to crushing depths.

  He fought now, snapped into action, brought all the power of his steel muscles into play. He turned over on his back, drew Betty on hers, placed his left arm under her chin, keeping her head up. It was a lifeguard’s maneuver, one that “X” had often used. It left his right arm free, the powerful scissors strokes of his legs unimpeded.

  He swam as one would swim against a roaring current, swam with the blood pounding in his veins, with every muscle in his body straining like a tautened cord. Yet still the water bore him on. Still in his ears was that strange uncanny roaring. His eyes had grown used to the starlight again. He turned once, a tortured, straining face, and saw the boiling, deadly riptide where Baldwin Island had been. It was toward this he was going, toward the middle where horrors of green sea water were sliding down.

  “Betty! Betty!” he called.

  She stirred faintly then, as though the sound of his voice were bringing her back from great depths. But the moan that came from her lips ended in a choking gasp. She was on the borderland of consciousness, her lungs half-filled with water. He must fight it out alone, save her and himself, or go under with her to a watery death. The whirlpool could not last forever. The space the exploding island had made must at last fill up. The angry sea must reach its level again.

  He fought with the frenzy of a man in the toils of some mighty beast. Yet the current drew him steadily closer. The white froth of the riptide was coming nearer. And Agent “X” almost gave up hope.

  Chapter IX

  THE TERROR’S SIGNATURE

  HIS steely muscles could not exert themselves forever. His iron will could not battle endlessly against such overwhelming odds. Through seconds that seemed eternities he f
ought the sweeping, foaming current, till at last the tide, as though merciful to one who had struggled beyond all human endurance, began to slacken.

  The Agent’s movements toward the snarling edge of the whirlpool slowed. He began to hold his own, began even to make headway against it. Behind him the sea lapsed into a low moaning whisper.

  He was conscious of the water’s chill then, conscious of the black winter night around him. The cold cut into his very marrow as his own movements slowed. What must Betty Dale be feeling, still and limp in his arms?

  He shook her gently. “Betty! Betty! We’re all right now.”

  The faint sound she made frightened him. He turned her on her back, held her chin up, and moved her arms. She made another brief strangling noise. He saw then that he must get her out soon, drive the water from her lungs.

  The thought that she was in danger clutched his heart in a grip of fear that all the terrors he had been through had failed to bring. He looked over the dark face of the water. Everywhere whistles were blowing and lights were springing up. Some were moving along the surface—boats.

  Agent “X” filled his lungs with air. Not often did he ask anyone for help. Now it was not for himself, but for one who was more than a friend, one who had shared hideous dangers with him and had come through the Valley of Death at his side.

  He gave a shout that sped across the water like a gull’s wild cry. Again and again he uttered it, till the wailing siren of a boat gave answer. He saw a light veer then, saw the red and green riding lanterns of a vessel coming fast.

  He shouted once more, holding Betty’s small face up, moving her arms to drive the cold out. She couldn’t swim. She was almost strangled. Perhaps a blow from some passing bit of debris had struck her head. He trod water, keeping her afloat till the approaching craft raced nearer.

  He could make out its lines now! It was one of the police patrol boats he’d seen earlier that evening, before the frightful explosion had come.

  The blue-white beam of a spotlight whipped across the water, and Agent “X” waved his arm. The light centered upon him and Betty, and the boat swept close.

  At the last it veered, then edged slowly toward them, drifting with the wind. Hands reached down from its low deck. Betty was taken aboard first and carried into the small warm cabin. “X” was helped from the water and followed.

  Bluecoats stood all about them, men who, had they known “X’s” identity, would have snapped steel cuffs on him and menaced him with their guns. But they had no inkling that the mild-mannered stranger before them, in wet clothing, was the mysterious, uncanny Man of a Thousand Faces, regarded by the law as a desperate criminal. The Agent spoke quickly now:

  “Get some blankets and liquor at once,” he said. “The girl must be attended to.”

  A heavy-set cop bent over Betty to administer practical first aid, but Agent “X” thrust him aside. This was a job he would trust to no one. His amazing mind held data on many branches of science. Medicine was among those he had studied. He knew more tricks of resuscitation than any of these men around him.

  He turned Betty face down on the floor, set to work expertly, moving her arms in a way that forced water from her lungs and started blood surging through her heart. In a moment she stirred and a faint trace of color crept to her cheeks.

  Relief swept in upon the Agent now that he saw Betty Dale was safe. For a moment he allowed himself the luxury of forgetfulness, a second’s peace after the nightmarish horrors of the past half hour. But the cops’ grimly questioning faces brought him back to the sinister mystery of the explosion.

  “The girl’s Miss Betty Dale of the Herald,” he said. “She went out to interview the squatters who slipped back after you fellows had driven them away. My name’s Ross. We were just leaving when the big noise came. What was it?”

  The cops looked at each other quickly. In deliberately querying them first, “X” had checkmated questioning of himself. He kept up the pose of a puzzled witness of some mysterious happening.

  “Did the city have dynamite on the island, or what the hell?”

  “One guess is as good as another, buddy,” said a cop guardedly. “Maybe there was a powder house over on the dump. Who knows?”

  Betty Dale was sitting up, talking with the police when “X” re-entered the cabin. They had delved into their emergency chest, provided her with an ill-fitting woman’s coat, dress, and a pair of shoes several sizes too large. She exchanged a single, meaning glance with the Agent.

  “Please land me as soon as you can,” she told the cops. “I’ll want to turn in a story to my paper.”

  The harbor patrolmen nodded. They seemed relieved when the boat finally edged into a small municipal dock.

  CROWDS had gathered along the waterfront. Faces were tense with curiosity and apprehension. Questions were being asked in a dozen different tongues.

  Betty and the Agent pushed through the buzzing throngs whose interest had been aroused by the mysterious explosion. These people didn’t know that the tall man in the wet clothing could have told them more about it than the police. They didn’t guess that the two before them had come together through the very jaws of Death.

  Agent “X” summoned a taxi and took Betty back to her apartment to change her ill-fitting clothes. He cautioned her not to mention the men on the island or the fact that she had seen the location of the bomb. At the apartment door he said a hurried good-night and gave the cab driver another address. He stopped at last in the middle of a block, paid the taxi man off, and walked a hundred yards farther on. Here he went into the rear door of an empty house, the same hideout he had visited just before his trip to Baldwin Island.

  Even before changing his wet clothing, he strode up to the odd apparatus that stood in a wooden cabinet on the table. It was a special type radio receiver. Simple as the thing appeared externally, it was a monument to the talent of Agent “X” in a field of science which many men made their life work. It represented hours of patient research, amazing inventiveness, and a deep knowledge of the principles of mechanics and radio engineering.

  He called it a “radio wave camera,” and it was perhaps the only one of its kind in existence—a machine for taking permanent impressions of invisible radio waves. On a large revolving cylinder of white paper, operated by delicate clockwork mechanism, visual records of all the radio waves picked up within a given space of time were made.

  The meter length of the great broadcasting stations showed here. Also calls corresponding to amateur stations, police cruisers, ships in the air and ships at sea.

  More than five hundred tiny styluses, dipped in red ink and poised above the paper cylinder, were ever ready to descend and make their lines, as radio impulses operated electromagnets beneath them. All the broadcasts of the evening had made visual imprints. Each of those tiny, intermittent red lines corresponded to some orchestra, some speaker, singer or comedian in one of the big studios.

  At other points on the white cylinder, code from ships at sea showed. The machine was extraordinarily apt at picking up this, the dots and dashes being plainly visible.

  But Agent “X” at the moment was interested in none of these. He shut off the revolving mechanism, drew the cylinder from its drum, and ran his eye along a transverse blue line that had the figure twelve above it.

  Twelve o’clock—the zero hour at which the awful bomb had been detonated! Had the Terror been lying? Was it an ordinary clockwork bomb, or had radio impulse really done the work?

  The Secret Agent’s fingers trembled slightly. His eyes blazed with interest. The Terror had not lied. His talk of radio impulse, like his bomb on Baldwin Island, was no bluff.

  There, just one minute before twelve, was a red imprint that one of the tiny needles had made. Four long marks, two shorts, and four more longs. They had been written by a stylus set in action by a wave-length of approximately nineteen meters. They ended just before midnight, did not appear again, and had not appeared before all evening according to the cylindri
cal chart. As though the Terror had written his signature in blood, those tiny crimson lines on the paper roll were visible proof of his existence.

  Agent “X” straightened. He had done what no one else in the city had even thought of doing—made a record of the radio impulse which had exploded the bomb. He had its wave-length now, had proof of the Terror’s appalling cunning. He would set one of his operatives to watching that wave-length at all times, in the hopes of locating the point of broadcast.

  He changed his clothes quickly. Then phoned the Hobart Agency and listened in to a report from Bates. But neither organization, though they had worked faithfully all evening, had been able to pick up information valuable to “X.”

  IT was the next morning that the Secret Agent thought of another possible source of information. His methods were often strange. Throughout the city and the country he had made acquaintances in odd places. The underworld knew him only as a legendary scourge. The police considered him a desperate criminal. But to many, to the poor, weak, and down-trodden, he had been a friend and benefactor.

  None of these knew his real identity. But, going abroad in one or another of his amazing, brilliant disguises, he had made many loyal friends. In the Chinese quarter he was esteemed as a distinguished member of the famous Ming Tong. As Mr. Martin, newspaperman, he had been a friend and benefactor to many newsboys. In the disguise of a ragged tramp he had delved into the most impoverished depths of human society, made contacts with beggars, hobos, and down-and-outers. And often, beneath their dirt and rags, he had found brave humor, courage and shining human worth that shamed the upper rungs of society.

  Now, because he was working in the dark against murderous criminals, he thought of a man, a friend of his, who lived always in utter darkness.

  In his small car, Agent “X” sped down into the narrow, winding streets of the city’s tenderloin district. Here squalor and poverty showed on all sides. Here smells rose from the cluttered pavements to compete with the mustiness of the buildings that fringed them. Yet, close at hand, only a few blocks away in fact, was a section inhabited by criminals; with gaudy dance halls, drinking dens, gambling joints, and small unlicensed eating places.