Agent “X,” crouched low, could see their silhouettes against the glow of a street light that filtered through a window. A gangster came straight toward him. Agent “X” leaped up, struck a chopping blow to the man’s chin, and heard him collapse.
He sprang toward the door then. Sanzoni stepped around from behind his desk and the fist of Agent “X” flashed out to give the fat gangster a breath-jarring punch in his obese stomach.
Sanzoni collapsed gasping over his desk, and “X” sprang through a doorway into the corridor. Pandemonium had broken out in the club now. Shouts, screams, the excited cries of men and women mingled.
Straight across the big ballroom Agent “X” sped. He had verified what he had come to learn; verified the truth of Thaddeus Penny’s report that these were the men who were spreading terror and death over the city. The same men that Mayor Ballantine was giving protection to. It meant that Sanzoni was the ally of the Terror.
He ran down the stairs, saw the form of the doorman coming in to see what all the excitement was about, and leaped past him into the street.
In a moment he had merged with the darkness. And the night around him seemed heavy with mystery; heavy with the sinister threat of the thing he had learned.
He went to one of his hideouts and paced the floor, facing squarely the problem he was up against. He struggled silently, as a chess player might struggle, trying to anticipate and forestall the play of his opponent.
It was obvious that the impulse sent out to raze Baldwin Island operated only that one bomb. Those other silent eggs of death lay waiting, hidden, for the awful call that would bring them to life also. That call might come on the same meter number—merely another series of dots and dashes—or it might come on an entirely different one. And where were the bombs themselves? How could he find them, now that he knew how the Terror had hidden the one on Baldwin Island and knew also the identity of the Terror’s gang?
He got a city map, marked off all the strategic points where bombs would do the most damage. Yet he knew this was only guesswork. It would take days, weeks perhaps, to go over these spots—and meanwhile death and horror hung over the city. Yet if he could only find one bomb, see how the thing worked, learn the exact nature of the new explosive element, perhaps—
The Secret Agent’s mind, functioning like some delicate, precise machine, hit suddenly upon a startling conclusion. He believed he had divined one move at least that the Terror might make. One move that, in the light of facts “X” had unearthed, seemed logical and inevitable. To test this belief Agent “X” stood ready to face the thunderous menace of high explosive once more.
Chapter XIII
HIDDEN DOOM
LATER that night, between the hours of two and three, Secret Agent “X” approached the Montmorency Club a second time. Sleep was out of the question for him. Restless, dynamic forces drove him on, would not let him be quiet while destruction, fear and horror threatened the community. The thought of those hidden eggs of death, silent and waiting somewhere in the dark city, was a ceaseless spur to his energies.
Since verifying the fact that Gus Sanzoni’s gang was active in the crime wave now engulfing the city, Agent “X” had instructed Hobart and Bates to have their best men watch the doings of the gang.
Through both organizations, working independently, “X” had learned that most of Sanzoni’s men would be out tonight, ravaging certain sections of the city in a series of bold robberies. This meant that Sanzoni’s headquarters in the Montmorency Club would be comparatively deserted. It meant that the stage would be set for Agent “X” to play another surprising role.
Once again he had disguised himself, but not as Bugs Gary. His clothes were black now. His whole face had a swarthy hue. Amongst the shadows he appeared to blend with the night itself. He looked like a burglar or sneak thief once more, as he had on the night he’d gone to Mayor Ballantine’s home.
He drove to within a block of the club, left his car parked, and proceeded on toward the spot where the evil Sanzoni, like a fat, poisonous spider, spread his webs of crime. But “X” knew more about the gangster now. He knew that Sanzoni, for all his evil ways, was under the sway of a greater criminal than himself; knew that he was the cat’s paw that pulled the chestnuts out of the fire for the Terror. And Sanzoni, who divided his loot with the Terror, must have some way of communicating with his superior, some way of handing over the spoils of his bloody work.
This, however, wasn’t the Agent’s reason for returning to that place of sinister repute. He had another, more daring motive, based on the startling deduction he had made.
It was late, long after midnight, yet the orchestra in the Montmorency Club was still blaring raucously. Tipsy couples were still moving around the polished dance floor. A few late-comers were still arriving, nighthawks who made a practice of flitting from one gay dive to another.
As Agent “X” shuffled past the front of the club, somber and inconspicuous in his dark clothes, a gay foursome stepped from a limousine. Two youths in high silk hats; the girls in evening wraps, with painted, powdered faces wreathed in smiles. Slummers from uptown. Members of society, possibly, come down to rub shoulders with the city’s underworld.
He heard their empty laughter as they hurried into the vestibule. Their mirth would change to gasps of fear, they would run from the place, if they knew what he knew—and suspected the thing he had come to inquire into.
He didn’t go to the club’s front entrance. Its tawdry, gilded portals were not meant for such as he appeared to be. The doorman, who hours before had welcomed him as Bugs Gary, would order him away now.
A grim smile twitched the Secret Agent’s lips. Like a flitting shadow he moved around the side of the building, pausing at a basement doorway. This was below the level of the kitchen. Yet a dim light was burning somewhere inside. He would need all the caution at his command in the thing he planned to do.
He took his kit of special chromium tools from an inner pocket, selected those he needed, and went to work skillfully on the lock. In a moment, under the probing pressure of a small goose-necked bit of steel, it clicked back and the Agent opened the door. He found himself in what had formerly been a luxurious speakeasy. But now it was closed. Now the club had moved upstairs, screaming its tawdriness to the whole world, in renovated quarters above.
Behind the speakeasy were chambers which might contain sleeping quarters for some of Sanzoni’s men. “X” did not explore these. Basing his actions on a hunch he had arrived at, he searched for and found a door that led to the building’s cellar.
As he opened it, and moved down a stairway toward the dusty room beneath where a light in a wire cage burned, he heard the clanking of a shovel. He reached the foot of the stairs and crouched.
A MAN’S shadow lay like some fallen monster across the floor. It was the shadow of the janitor, fixing the furnace, keeping steam up, that revelers above might have tropic heat.
Agent “X” crept toward him swiftly, silently. When the man turned at last to put the shovel away, the black figure of “X” was directly at his elbow. A gun in “X’s” hand was pointed straight at his head.
The cry that the janitor started to give was stifled utterly by the jet of gas that spurted from the gun’s muzzle into his open mouth. It was harmless anesthetizing vapor that would merely keep him unconscious for a period of time. He collapsed soundlessly to the floor.
“X” gathered him up quickly, took him to the far end of the cellar room, and laid him on a pile of old burlap. Then he began the quick, shrewd search of the building’s basement—which was his real purpose in coming.
For the Secret Agent’s amazing deductive faculties had led him to the conclusion that one of the nitro-picrolene bombs might be hidden here.
It was a spot where a man of the Terror’s ruthless, systematic character would appear to have reason for laying one of the eggs of doom. Gus Sanzoni was working for him, gathering in the loot to be divided with his master. Sanzoni was a greedy, un
scrupulous criminal, a man who would turn on his boss, double-cross him if the chance came. He had not hesitated to double-cross Bugs Gary, take his girl away while he was in jail, and put him to torture when he came back.
And surely the Terror, whoever he was, would make certain that he could wipe out Sanzoni any instant he chose. What better means than concealing a bomb directly under Sanzoni’s stronghold?
So certain was “X” that this deduction was right, that he had come prepared with special equipment. Besides his regular tool kit, he carried in one pocket a small leather case containing instruments as compact as they were powerful.
The bomb hidden in the brick building on Baldwin Island had given him his cue. It had been cemented in the wall, and “X” knew that the criminal mind ever works in a routine manner. The gang who laid the Terror’s bombs for him would surely use the same means again.
He took a powerful flash and chisel-like scraping instrument from his pocket. With these he set to work. He began systematically at the farthest end of the cellar room. The beam of his light was like a round probing eye. It crept along the soot-blackened walls from floor to ceiling. Again and again at any spot that even slightly aroused his suspicions, he scraped with his edged tool.
Slowly he progressed forward till he had covered one side of the cellar. He went to another, searched over every inch of that without results. A third side followed, and still Agent “X” was persistent, still undiscouraged.
Several times he came to places on the plaster that stirred his interest. Either the soot didn’t seem quite as black or something about the surface held his attention. At such times he took a small watchlike instrument from his pocket. It had a tiny needle on its face, slender as a hair. It was a delicate magnetic galvanometer, fashioned to detect minute electric currents produced by the presence of metals.
He pressed this against the suspicious spots, watched the needle eagerly. Once it swung sharply, making his pulse quicken. But a brief scratching on the surface exposed a hidden water pipe.
He went on to the cellar’s fourth side, and here he found a small door, held fast with a padlock. This he undid easily. Inside was a square, cool wine cellar, with hundreds of bottles stored away in straw-filled bins. Here was the wine that trickled down the thirsty throats of the criminals and slummers in the gay rooms overhead.
The Agent’s eyes gleamed. This room was locked, hidden away from ordinary prying eyes. It was a likely spot to look. He began searching the walls quickly, and almost at once he found a place where the layer of accumulated dust seemed a shade too thick.
To his eager, observant eyes it appeared that this dust had been sprinkled there. His sharp tool scraped it loose. He found that the plaster beneath was whiter, fresher—found that it was a spot like that on the wall of the room on Baldwin Island, where he and Betty Dale had faced awful death.
And when he touched the galvanometer against this spot, the tiny hair-like needle swung instantly upward and remained like a trembling finger of warning. Tense with eagerness, knowing that he might be close to a bomb as terrible as any existing in the world, Agent “X” paused a moment.
LISTENING, he could hear, faint and far away, the throbbing pulse of the dance orchestra, hear the vibration of moving feet. Men and women were dancing over a veritable hell that they did not even suspect—dancing on Death itself, that lay silent and hidden in that dark cellar.
The Secret Agent set to work quickly. There was an electric bulb above him. He unscrewed it, put a plug in with a long cord attached, and inserted this plug into the handle of one of the tools he had brought. A miniature electric motor, sealed in a sound-proof shell, began to whirl. A cutting point with a rubber cap around it spun at the drill’s end. Agent “X” pressed this and the rubber deadened sound against the wall at the fatal spot. This was one of the devices with which he had come prepared, anticipating that he would have to cut through cement.
His sharp, diamond-set drill ate the concrete away. But in spite of all his precautions, it made a faint whining sound—a sound that he knew might reach other ears and attract attention. Because of this he was alert, listening and watching.
But when his drill broke through into a space behind the cement facing of the wall, he forgot all else in his eagerness to find what lay there. He inserted a different blade in his drilling device, a cylindrical type saw, and cut horizontally and vertically, until he could lift a square section of cement out. Then his lips became grim with intensity.
For a sinister metal object rested inside. It was shaped almost like a small fire extinguisher. But it was painted a dull gray, and “X” knew that those strange looking gadgets on the top were for no such humane purpose as the extinguishing of flames.
This was an instrument of hideous destruction, placed there to kindle a holocaust of death and horror such as the city had never known. Its gray metal sides gave no inkling of the deadly stuff it contained. The nature of the new explosive element was unknown to Agent “X,” but the mechanics of radio-control were familiar. Such control had been used to guide battleships, airplanes, tanks and cars. Most of the governments of the earth were secretly experimenting with it. It would play a startling part if there came another war. “X” had studied many of the devices already perfected.
New and terrible as the detonating medium of this super-bomb was, the radio-impulse device was built along recognized lines. A few moments of investigation, as he held the terrible engine of death in his lap, convinced him of this.
He took out a small screwdriver, turned it slowly on the bomb’s head, knowing that if he made a slip it would spell oblivion for himself and a thousand others. But he made no slip. He removed two screws which permitted the dust-proof cover cap to slip off. Beneath this was the radio-impulse mechanism, the clockwork gear, already wound, to be set in motion by intermittent dots and dashes on a certain wave length.
With steady hands, calmly as though this were nothing more than an old alarm clock he was tinkering with, Secret Agent “X” took a bit of copper from his pocket, and with this wired the clockwork wheels so that they could not turn. The call of death might come now, unseen and sinister in the air. The Terror might try to bring this egg of doom to life, as he had the other—but this was one bomb that would not obey the invisible impulses.
Agent “X” quickly slipped the metal shell back into place, twisting the screws into it to hold it fast. And, as he did so, breath abruptly hissed through suddenly clenched teeth. His hands froze around the gray surface of the deadly bomb. The muscles of his body snapped into rigidity. His eyes flashed sidewise and remained fastened on the oblong of the door.
For, so intent had he been on not making a slip with the lethal bomb, that he had momentarily relaxed his vigilance, neglected to watch and listen. And now the door of the small wine cellar had darkened. Now four ugly, intent faces were framed in it—men of Gus Sanzoni’s gang. And in their hands were black automatics, the sinister, round muzzles pointing straight at the Secret Agent’s heart.
Chapter XIV
SKY PERIL
A SECOND of tense silence passed before one of the gangsters spoke.
“Stand up, guy—raise your mitts—and don’t go for a gat!” he said.
The gesture of a single gun muzzle emphasized the order. Agent “X” obeyed immediately. His hands went up above his head—but they were not empty. They carried the gray cylinder of the bomb with them.
A thin smile curved his lips. His flashing, penetrating eyes held a sardonic light. He remained quiet, staring at the four who had surprised him, and something about his manner held them taut.
The man who had given the order to lift his hands spoke again. “What in hell are you doin’ here? You must want a drink bad to steal from Gus Sanzoni! Put that bottle down—easy so you don’t break it—and come out. We’ll teach you it don’t pay to break into this joint.”
The Agent spoke quietly then. The sardonic hint was in his voice now. That, and his coolly precise speech, coming from t
he unkempt figure he presented, made the gangsters hunch forward.
“This isn’t a bottle I’m holding. Look again, pal, and see what you make of it!”
The man who seemed to be the leader of the group gave a growling exclamation. “Here, gimme that flash,” he said to a man beside him. He grabbed the proffered light, clicked it on and focused its beam on the thing “X” held. His hard, brutal face twisted into lines of puzzlement, and there was a shade of uneasiness in his eyes.
“What in blazes is it? Looks like an oxygen tank—the kind they use on guys that do flop acts at fires.”
The Agent’s laughter sounded then, humorless, harsh, seeming to mock his questioner. “Wrong again, pal. It isn’t an oxygen tank—and if you don’t watch yourselves and go easy you’ll all be blown to hell.”
Curses greeted this remark, and hoots of derision. “The guy’s nuts!” one gunman said. “Come on, boys, let’s give ’im the bum’s rush. T’row ’im out of here!”
“A dose of lead will fix ’im better,” said another.
The leader stood uncertainly, eyes focused on “X” and on that strange thing he held above his head. The Agent spoke again, driving home his point, for he saw that if they were not checked some move on the part of these men within the next few seconds might spell utter catastrophe.
“I’m handing it to you straight,” he said quietly, using language that they would understand. “This is a bomb I’ve got—a pineapple—but one of the hottest numbers you’ve ever seen. It’s the same kind that knocked Baldwin Island off the map this evening. But it’s twice as big.”
At mention of the explosion on Baldwin Island, fear came into the leader’s eyes. News of the thing had reached the underworld. The man spoke hoarsely.
“Lay off him, boys, he’s a nut all right; but maybe he’s telling the truth. We don’t want no trouble here.” He took several steps toward the Agent, his gun still centered upon him.
“Now, fella, hand over that pill you got and don’t make any fuss about it. You don’t want to get drilled even if you are cracked.”
Secret Agent X : The Complete Series Volume 3 Page 55
