The Secret Agent stared aghast. Passengers were pressing curiously into the outer office now. A man who looked like a ship’s doctor was trying to quiet the assistant purser, evidently thinking him mad or drunk. Deck officers were calling orders. Two of the detectives “X” had seen were coming on the run.
He moved aside to let them pass, saw their faces gape at the dummy figure at the desk, saw that they had not been prepared as he was, and did not believe their eyes. One of them turned and drew the purser’s assistant in, disregarding his terrified protests.
“What’s that thing, Sloan?”
The detective’s hand indicated the crumbling skeleton corpse at which the assistant purser refused to look. The man’s voice came in a husky croak.
“It’s Caswell, sir—the chief! There’s—no doubt of it! That’s his uniform and hat. That’s him—oh, God!”
“How did it happen?”
“Don’t ask me, sir! How—how should I know! He went in to look over some accounts, and closed the door. I wanted to speak to him, and knocked. When there was no answer I stepped in—and he was there—just as you see him. And the vault was open!”
“X” stared across the room. The huge metal door of the safe gaped wide. Metal boxes were spilled out on the floor. Shelves visible inside were empty. One glance was enough to show that it had been robbed.
Sloan, the assistant purser, cowered and babbled, keeping his eyes averted from the thing at the desk.
“It’s impossible, sir—quite impossible. It couldn’t have happened. The vault’s the latest thing. You have to have two keys even to turn the combination. Caswell only had one, sir, I have the other. Mine’s still here.” He waved a small brass key, at which the detective grabbed.
“Good lord, sir, you don’t think that I—” Sloan cringed at the detective’s threatening attitude.
The Agent moved closer to the vault. He knew the purser’s assistant wasn’t guilty. Sloan’s words were obviously a babbling confession of innocence and horror. Yet this modern, compact vault had been opened easily by the same man who had put the lethal substance in King’s stateroom, and murdered the purser here.
“X” KNEW his safes. He had made a study of them. This was the latest, most compact type of patent vault. It was set flush with the wall, riveted to the ship’s steel girders, the combination dial itself locked with double keys. This was supposed to insure two men’s always being present when it was opened. But Marko had somehow found a way to open it.
The small room was filling rapidly. The captain himself had come, red-faced, white-haired, speechless over what had happened. The passengers were being driven hastily out.
A sudden clamor sounded, and a man who had evidently heard rumors came thrusting in. His darkly handsome, mustached face was contorted with consternation. His black eyes were snapping. He hardly glanced at the dummylike figure over the desk, but stabbed a finger toward the vault, and spoke with a foreign accent.
“It ees true! There has been a robbery. My valuables are gone!”
No one answered, and the man’s voice rose. He struck his chest with a show of theatrical fury. “I am Count Cariati, gentlemen! My fortune, all of it, was there—you understan’! My bonds, and the jewels of the House of Cariati. I have a receipt—here look! If they are not found and returned to me—I shall sue.”
His angry voice reached the milling crowd outside. Others began to shout their losses. Excitement raged across the whole lounge. A ship’s officer tried to quiet Cariati without success. The captain ordered him ejected. News of the strange murder was spreading now, bringing an undertone of horror. Panic threatened.
The Agent, glancing about the inner room, saw a door between the purser’s desk and the open vault. It was unlocked, slightly ajar. He thrust a knee against it. It led into the purser’s stateroom. Beyond was still another exit leading to the deck. “X” understood how Doctor Marko had entered.
He sprang toward this second door, but stopped abruptly as a hand descended on his shoulder. He whirled to face the detective who had given him a suspicious glance outside. The man was scowling openly now, his eyes hawklike, his mouth grim. “What’s your name?” he demanded harshly.
The Agent didn’t show the alarm he felt. He returned the detective’s stare calmly, knowing he was in a desperate spot. He had no stateroom to refer to, no luggage. He could give no name that would be on the passenger list. He would be questioned, investigated, held as a dangerous suspect until the ship docked, then turned over to the police.
As the detective repeated his question the Agent’s fist suddenly lashed out. He struck swiftly, surely at the point of the man’s jaw with the clean, hard force of a trained boxer’s blow. But, as the detective staggered back, collapsing senseless, muscular reflex made the gun in his fingers fire.
The shot thundered through the room. There came an instant chorus of frenzied shouts. “X” leaped away, yanked open the door, and darted through it, feet pounding close behind him in fierce pursuit.
Chapter IV
A DARING ROLE
THE Agent raced along the deck. Alarms were ringing in all parts of the ship, passengers tumbling from their cabins, word spreading that a murderous criminal was on board, and had been sighted. The Agent’s violent action had put the stamp of guilt upon him.
He saw detectives, and ship’s officers swarming out on deck behind him. Guns began to crack spitefully. Bullets whined past his body, whistled along the deck, chipping splinters from the polished woodwork. He lunged sidewise through another entrance, came to an inside promenade, and raced along it.
The whole ship was in an uproar. The alarm bells were still ringing shrilly. Frightened passengers were milling in the corridors, asking each other frantic questions. “X” pointed behind him and shouted at those he met, pretending to be a ship’s official.
“Bandits!” he cried. “The vault’s been looted, and a man’s been killed.”
He ran on, weaving in and out, spreading confusion with deliberate purpose, yet knowing as he did so that the grim hunt for him would continue. He had been seen. There would be no rest, no further chance to look for Doctor Marko in his present disguise.
He leaped up a flight of stairs, circled back, darted through another corridor on another deck. There were fewer passengers here. A gray-haired man with surprise stamped on his face poked a head through a stateroom door. He was tall, dignified, with glittering glasses balanced on a prominent nose. A corded dressing gown was wrapped about his powerful frame. The Agent drew abreast as other doors along the passage began to click open.
He whirled suddenly, leaped at the gray-haired man like a tackling quarterback, thrust him into his cabin. He flung a hand over the man’s mouth, stifling his outcry. He glanced around the stateroom, saw that the man was alone, and whipped a small pistol from his pocket, aiming deliberately at the stranger’s face.
He jerked the trigger, but instead of bullets, a grayish vapor spurted from the muzzle of the gun—a harmless anesthetizing gas that filled the man’s nostrils, made him stagger and collapse.
The Agent stepped backward, sprang the bolt on the stateroom door. He lifted the man to the couch, propped him. Then he studied his face intently.
He drew the gray-haired man’s dressing gown off, and appropriated it quickly. His fingers lifted to his face, pulled at what seemed to be living flesh with a result that was uncanny. For the features of “Clifford Brown” began to disappear. The strange, amazing art that set the Secret Agent apart from all other investigators of crime was being revealed in that locked cabin. The apparent flesh resolved itself into a carefully modeled, flexible plastic covering, a substance with a pyroxyline base, but containing other highly volatile elements blended in a secret formula of the Agent’s. Flesh-tinted, lifelike pigments lay beneath its transparent surface.
As the stuff came off, “X” appeared for a moment as he really was. Not even his few closest associates had ever seen him thus. Here was revealed a face that the police heads o
f a score of cities would have paid money to see; a face that was a jealously guarded secret, shared with none—that the Agent’s strange work might go on.
As the rays of a bracket light fell upon his features they appeared oddly changeable. Youthful, powerful, filled with the versatile force of a many-sided character. Mobile lips that could become grim or humorous. A fighting jaw. A nose that held hawklike strength. Rugged planes and lines that were the indelible, deep-etched records of hundreds of strange experiences.
The Agent took a mirror from the stateroom wall. He propped it up beside the unconscious man on the couch. He drew from an inner pocket a small leatherette case of vials and tubes. This was his portable make-up kit, the equipment that made him a “Man of a Thousand Faces.” Others he had in some of his secret hideouts. This was the set that he tried always to carry with him in anticipation of quick changes of disguise.
He studied the stranger’s face again. He took from a tiny vial a thin liquid that duplicated the man’s coloring. With uncanny skill, moving his long, strong hands precisely, he set to work.
Slowly beneath their deft touch, the planes, lines and contours of the man on the couch became duplicated on his own features. The plastic material squeezed from his small tube dried almost at once. Yet it formed a flexible covering that followed every movement of flesh and muscle beneath. It crinkled when he smiled; tightened when he scowled, assumed the perfect appearance of living skin. The Agent always carried a number of vari-colored toupees with him, made by a famous stage costumer, with their hair set on the thinnest, strongest of silk backing.
HE slipped a gray one on. Strips of transparent adhesive drew the hair line where he wanted it. He rose abruptly, and the man on the couch seemed to have become double. “Clifford Brown” had disappeared. In his place was a gray-haired stranger—a man who looked twenty years older and had the poise and dignity of age.
Voices sounded in the corridor. The Agent tensed, and reached a quick hand into the pocket of the man he had knocked out, drawing forth a wallet and a bunch of letters. He read the name on one, and gave a sudden, violent start. Colonel Stanley Borden.
Grim humor lighted the Secret Agent’s eyes for a moment. Fate had played a trick upon him. He had unknowingly disguised himself as Carlotta Rand’s employer.
He straightened, breathing quickly. He was playing a dangerous role in impersonating Borden. The man was well-known, might have intimate friends on board. And there was Carlotta Rand! Her dark eyes and clever brain might easily grow suspicious of his fraud. He’d had no time to study Borden’s voice and manner. It would be difficult to fool the girl who knew him so well.
Yet he lifted Borden quickly, laid him on the floor, and thrust him under the stateroom’s luxurious bed. He pulled the covers down to hide all trace, and leaped to his feet as a knock sounded on the door.
Moving with sudden conscious mimicry like an actor rehearsing a character part, he adjusted Borden’s glasses on his nose, opened the door slowly and peered out.
A detective and two nattily dressed ship’s officers stood outside. They carried guns, and their faces were creased and strained with worry. “X” blinked, and spoke in the tone he believed a man of Borden’s type would be likely to use.
“What is it, gentlemen? Nothing wrong I hope! Those bells—ah—wakened me from my nap.”
One of the officers answered quickly. “Sorry about the excitement, sir, but there’s the devil to pay! The chief purser’s been murdered, and the ship’s vault has been robbed. There’s a criminal loose on this vessel, hiding somewhere. We thought you might have seen him.”
The Agent straightened his shoulders, and peered down the end of his nose. He made his voice explosive. “Good God, sir! Murder—and you say the vault’s been robbed?”
“Yes, cleaned out—everything taken.”
The Agent drew Borden’s glasses off his nose with a sweep of his hand. He drew out a handkerchief, polished them furiously, said:
“This—this is a very serious matter! There were reports of mine in the vault of a confidential nature—papers, you understand, meant for the eyes of Washington alone! If they are not recovered—”
He replaced his glasses, glared at the officer before him. The man spoke with hoarse assurance.
“We’ll—find them, colonel! We’ll get your papers back along with everything else that was stolen. We know what the killer looks like and we’ll catch him.”
“You mean the man’s been seen?”
THE officer nodded, and gave a brief but accurate description of the Agent’s former disguise of Clifford Brown.
“That’s the man we’re after. He struck a detective who questioned him. Moreover, we’re certain he’s a stowaway. No one’s seen him on this ship before tonight. Keep your room locked, and be on your guard. There’s no saying where he may turn up.”
The Secret Agent nodded. The worried trio passed on. He watched for a moment as they knocked at staterooms along the corridor, and questioned other passengers. Then he drew in a sudden, startled breath.
A flutter of green showed at the end of the passage; an evening dress that clothed the graceful, glamorous figure of Carlotta Rand. She was hurrying forward, her face turned toward his, and her dark eyes fixed upon him.
The Agent’s heart increased its beat. The thing he had feared most had happened. He had been caught by the girl in a disguise he wasn’t sure of, one that stark emergency had forced upon him. A moment before he had escaped a fusillade of flying lead. Now he was to be the target for a clever woman’s eyes. Hers might prove to be the most dangerous weapon.
Yet he couldn’t side-step. It was too late. With her jet-black hair, her ivory skin, and her walk that had in it a suggestion of feline strength, Carlotta Rand was almost upon him.
He bowed slightly, held the door wide, and stepped back to be out of sight of the corridor in case anything developed.
She came sweeping in with a swirl of skirts, and a breath of haunting perfume. She turned to face him at once, and the Agent, whose nerves had the steadiness of steel, had to use self-control to keep from trembling. He closed the door, fumbled with his glasses, waited for her to speak.
But she seemed to be waiting, also. She stood with a slim hand on one shapely hip, her black-lashed eyes intent. She had told him herself that Borden’s papers were in the vault. She knew the loss he had suffered. She must be wondering what Borden’s reaction would be. And the Agent, not knowing Borden’s temperament, was at a disadvantage. But he couldn’t let the silence continue. It in itself might be a betrayal. He cleared his throat, said raspingly: “This—this is a confounded mess!”
He spoke thickly, with consternation in his voice, as a man might who has suffered a serious loss. None knew better than “X” the subtleties of speech. He waited to see how his words would be received—and he knew instantly that he had failed.
For Carlotta Rand had visibly started. Something was wrong in the pitch or tone he had used. Perhaps his choice of words had not been like the colonel’s. A strained, bewildered look crossed her face. She took a step nearer, her dark eyes widening.
“What—what did you say, colonel?”
“I said—those papers, stolen you know—a serious mess! You’ve heard, of course?”
“Oh!” There was unbelief, confusion, deep suspicion in her voice. Slowly, almost painfully, she tried to relax, her eyes still fixed upon him. She laughed a little, said breathlessly:
“They’ll surely find—the man who took them, colonel. He’s hiding on this ship. He can’t escape. He might be—anywhere.”
The Agent knew she was acting now. He had slipped up. His part of Colonel Bordon hadn’t fooled her. She was trying to allay his own suspicions that his ruse had been discovered. She was desperately frightened, almost overwhelmed with consternation, yet holding her nerves in check. Her eyes darted around the room, slid back to his face. Pallor came that cleverness could not hide. She would expose him the moment she got a chance. He had seen her gaze lin
ger on the stateroom’s telephone.
He laughed grimly, and her gaze locked with his in a sudden, unspoken battle of wits. Then, with a sound like a sob, she threw herself upon him. He hadn’t expected this. He was taken momentarily by surprise. Her long, carmine tipped fingers raked across his face. Her pliant body crushed against him.
He felt the slash of her nails along his cheek, knew instantly that the plastic covering had scratched open, and that she had made certain of his disguise. Even in terror she had not lost her poise. She had acted desperately to learn the truth.
She turned like a flash, whipped open the drawer of a small desk against the wall, and drew out the colonel’s service automatic. She swung it heavily in her slim hands, lifting the black muzzle to cover the Agent’s heart. But the Secret Agent’s lightning leap was quicker.
Before she could pull the trigger, he seized her wrist. With an expert twist, he wrenched the gun from her fingers, tossed it to the bed. As she stepped back, opening her carmine lips to scream and bring officers and detectives running, the Agent did as he had done with the colonel a few moments before.
His gas pistol arced up. A spurt of harmless vapor from its muzzle misted against her quivering nostrils. She sucked the vapor into her lungs and slowly, dazedly collapsed into his arms.
Chapter V
THE AGENT TAKES COMMAND
THE Agent regretted the grim necessity of his act. She lay like a wilted, perfumed flower with her bare arms and shoulders dazzling above the green silk casing of her gown. He would have preferred to have been more gallant to one so beautiful. But he’d had no choice.
He put her on the couch under which her employer still lay. He braced her shoulders with a cushion, made her as comfortable as he could. She and the colonel would come to presently, no worse off for their strange experience. But before that happened, the Agent had much to do.
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 5 Page 3
