He made up his face to look like a square-jawed Irish cop. He put on a visored officer’s cap, picked up nightstick, handcuffs, whistle, and service revolver. He seemed to be a policeman ready for lonely night duty.
His own roadster took him to within a few blocks of the Central Bank. He walked the rest of the way, avoiding the packed precinct house, lest embarrassing questions be asked. There must be extra cops stationed around the bank. He didn’t fear the questions of any men on patrol. He would simply say he had been transferred.
Wendal Carter had told the truth. There were special guards in light blue uniforms on all four sides of the bank. Agent “X” took up a slow patrol where he could see.
He adjusted himself to the leisurely stride of a cop walking his beat. He pushed at store doors with his nightstick. Once or twice, he passed other police officers, and spoke a friendly word.
The hours deepened. Midnight came, with fewer pedestrians along the streets. One o’clock came with none in sight. But he could still hear the measured footfalls of the guards outside the bank. Doctor Marko would find strong resistance if he attempted anything tonight. There were reserves ready to pour forth at the first signal, even if the bank guards were overcome.
“X” took another slow turn around the bank, along a quiet business block. Far ahead he could see another patrolling officer; the fresh-faced young chap who had spoken to him twice already as their paths crossed. Suddenly the Agent tensed.
A figure had run out of the shadows close to the cop ahead. “X” heard no sound, but the stranger lifted something, and there was a sudden stab of flame. The cop whirled like a boxer who has been struck a crashing shoulder blow. He threw up his hands, sank to the pavement. His nightstick made a faint rattle.
Cold with horror, the Agent darted forward, and raised his police whistle to give an echoing blast.
But he never blew it. For a giant tattoo seemed to beat against his back. So close that his shoulder blades appeared to bend inwards a series of crushing blows hammered on his spine. He gasped, fought against the lights whirling in his brain, and pitched forward on his face.
Chapter XII
DEATH’S CARNIVAL
HE was still fighting as he struck; but every ounce of breath had been knocked out of him. His nerves were temporarily paralyzed by the blow along his spine. He couldn’t see or hear. He could only lie inertly, asprawl on the chilly pavement.
Dimly he felt some one drag him a short distance, felt himself dumped against hard substance. He lay deathly still. He had no sense of time. Seconds or minutes were moving slowly by. Yet the spark of consciousness that he had not lost was telling him what had happened.
Bullets had struck against his metal vest. Bullets triggered at such close range that the plates of his armor piece were hot. The vest had taken part of the shock, kept the lead from killing him, but the inner shell had been rammed against his spine. Some would-be assassin had fired straight at his back.
Slowly, like a great, stifling curtain lifting, the stupor passed away. The cold chill of stone began to penetrate his senses. His nerves began to tingle, come back to sensate life. He opened his eyes, and waited in the semi-darkness.
The rays of a street light slanted along one arm. The rest of his body was in shade. He was huddled in the black doorway of a building, left for dead.
He remembered the cop he had seen falling, remembered how he had tried to raise his own whistle. He struggled slowly to a sitting position, stared out at the quiet street.
How much time had elapsed? What had happened?
The questions brought him clawing upright, braced on unsteady feet. His back felt bruised. There were tingling pains along his spine; but he thought of Doctor Marko—thought of the bank.
The full horror of what must have happened came over him. The man who had shot down the cop ahead had used a silenced pistol. Another assassin had been creeping up on him, armed with a silenced weapon, also. Murderous scouts around the edge of the bank zone had apparently massacred all patrolling cops. That looked as if—
Reckless of personal danger, the Agent lurched out of his doorway and stumbled toward the bank. His tingling nerves grew better as blood began to circulate. But there was a cold weight of dread around his heart.
He could no longer hear the footsteps of the guards. There were no guards moving along the bank’s sides. There was nothing—except utter stillness. Then the Agent gasped.
The clean shadow of one of the bank pillars was jagged, bulging. Something was lying in that pool of dark. Something moist and black appearing was trickling across the pavement. Blood.
He made out the huddled shape then. A guard in horizon blue, shot mercilessly, was crumpled against the bank facade. His coat was stained and sogged with crimson. He was dead. Another guard had been stuffed behind a pillar, slain, and dragged limply out of the way.
And “X” saw that the bank’s main doors were open. No need to see whether the vault was looted. That was obvious. The raiders had come and gone. But the reserves so close at hand? Had no one been able to get a signal to them?
As if in answer, “X” saw another slumped figure sprawled before a metal signal box that was open. A trail of blood led from one wounded leg. “X” stepped nearer.
The man had been shot at the other side of the bank, had dragged himself painfully here with his dying breaths. He must have lifted himself to the box, since the door was open. This alarm connected with the nearest precinct station. The dead man had even pulled the signal switch.
“X” tested it, found that the switch was still open. Why hadn’t the reserves turned out?
The black night gave no answer. “X” reached for his cop’s whistle, and found that it and his gun were gone. For safety’s sake, the killers had apparently taken these from all those they had slain. He thought then that the precinct signal wire must have been cut.
He was alone in a world of bloody death and desolation. Alone in a corpse-strewn desert of horror that Doctor Marko had made. Yet some of these guards and cops might still have faint life in them. He must get ambulances, help, do what he could at once.
He turned, and plunged away from the bank into a tree-lined street. He flashed around a corner, headed toward a building where green lights burned. The reserves were gathered there. Let them come and help. There might still be time to get on the trail of the bandits. His own revival was something they hadn’t expected.
BUT the Agent suddenly stopped in his tracks. There were no blue-coated cops coming in or out. But a man whom “X” had seen before, a reporter on one of the morning papers, came stumbling from the big glass door.
He was swinging his arms, making strange strangling sounds. He saw the Agent, paused, and fixed him with eyes that were feverishly bright. They were like glowing lamps set in a chalk-white face. Suddenly the man laughed.
It was a sound that came from his lips in a hideous, inhuman peal. The sound of a hyena baying at the smell of carrion blood. The sound of a frothing jungle beast. The man was stark, raving mad.
His laughter subsided in bubbling paroxysms. Words came tumbling from his writhing, quivering lips. “Another one!” he screeched. “Skeletons everywhere! Skeletons—Skeletons! Skeletons—even walking!”
He pointed at the Agent, jabbered in simian frenzy. “Bones! Bones! Dusty bones! Leave me alone—you skeleton! Get out! Get out!”
Gritting his teeth till they clicked and snapped, rolling his eyes dementedly, he lunged at “X” with waving, clawlike hands.
The Agent leaped aside, and struck the madman a clipping blow that felled him. But the maniac’s words had brought an icy horror to his heart. He jumped over the prostrate form, plunged through the precinct door, and braced a hand against the wall to steady himself.
The telephone on the desk was ringing shrilly. The sergeant was sitting back of it in his chair. But he was paying no attention.
He couldn’t! He was a skeleton—a blue-coated bag of dusty, crumbling bones. He had sagged forward o
ver the polished desk. One crumbling hand was spread and listless.
The Agent ran to the squad room beyond. He knew then why the reporter had gone mad. Other skeleton figures were draped, and slumped about—almost twenty of them, grotesque bags of dusty bones with the badges of the city police upon their sunken chests.
There was an acrid chemical odor in the air; something that smarted the Agent’s lips and lungs. The same odor he had noticed in King’s stateroom on the Baronia. Doctor Marko had struck again—more horribly and fearfully than the imagination could conceive.
The Agent’s hands balled into stricken, trembling fists. A curse ripped from his lips that was almost like the sound of the madman’s voice outside. The sight of this horrible charnel room was enough to unsettle reason.
He backed out of the door, whirled, and grabbed the phone on the dead sergeant’s desk. The angry voice of a man down at headquarters buzzed in the receiver.
“Precinct number seven! What’s the matter with you there? I’ve been calling for ten minutes. Are you all asleep?”
The Agent’s answer was harsh, toneless. “Not asleep. All dead! There’s been a mass murder here!”
“What!”
“You heard what I said—a mass murder! The reserves have been wiped out! The Central Bank’s been robbed! Get every one you can up here quick. Send ambulances.”
“Who’s this talking?”
“Never mind—get going!”
The Agent hung up. He called a hospital next. He wanted to make sure that if any of those poor devils around the bank had life in them they would get quick attention. The sergeant here, the men in that room on the other side of the door, were beyond any aid human hands could give.
Controlling the nausea of horror he felt, he went to the charnal chamber again and looked for clues. The grinning company of skulls were like ghoulish, silent watchers. A window in the rear was closed up but unlocked. A faint marking in the dust showed that something had been slid across the sill.
He yanked open a door, went out into a rear court. But the stone flagging showed nothing.
The thin wail of sirens was beginning to disturb the night. Fast cars were coming. Frantic police would soon be here. The Agent turned, and slipped into the darkness.
Chapter XIII
DOOM RIDES THE NIGHT
IN the shadowed corner of a backyard fence, he discarded the cop’s uniform. His hands worked along his face deftly, swiftly, as he created a disguise he had done many times before—one he knew so well he could even build up in the dark.
He took a folded, featherweight felt hat from an inside pocket. When he stepped cautiously into the street on the other side of the lot he was once again A.J. Martin. His own car was still parked up the block. He strode to it, got in, and drove back to the precinct house.
The first of the police had arrived. A half dozen prowl cars were parked at the curb outside. Other sirens were screaming in the darkness. Two cops were helping to his feet the jibbering madman whom “X” had knocked out. He was coming to life again, beginning to laugh and moan.
“X” strode past them, and pushed through the precinct door. Never had he seen grown men so stricken with a lethargy of horror. Cops stood about talking in low voices, too shocked and dazed to move. A beefy sergeant of police was trying to get action.
“Get outside some one of you. See what you can find.” His voice was a rasping croak. His massive face was putty hued.
“Better go to the bank,” the Agent suggested. “I just came by it. There are—dead men lying around.”
“Who the hell are you?”
The Agent showed his press card. The sergeant bawled at him, glad for a chance to work up some anger as a counter-active of fear.
“Beat it! Get the blazes outta here! We can run our own show.” He turned, mopping cold sweat from his face, shouted and swore at his men trying to make them come alive. The maniac in front of the building began to shriek and fight, complaining that skeletons were trying to grab him again. The scene was like some fantastic, horrible nightmare.
The Agent followed the police to the raided bank. The job had been pulled as precisely as the looting of the Baronia’s vault. Marko, besides his horrible dusty death, had developed some method which seemed to make all locks vulnerable.
More police arrived, plain-clothes men with them. The commissioner himself came, swollen eyed from being routed from his sleep, gray faced with consternation now. Fingerprint men commenced dusting mercury and chalk on every likely surface. Police photographers rigged their cameras up. Outside, the medical examiner and his assistants, with internes from the ambulances which had come, bent over the pitiful, crumpled figures around the bank. Marko had left utter chaos in his wake.
“X” waited long enough to see that nothing was being accomplished. The Agent, slipping away at last in his black coupé, saw a group of detectives bending over a young couple. They, too, had been killed, returning late from a dance, or party—their only fault being that they might have seen too much.
White-lipped, cold with the horror of it, the Secret Agent drove off.
He parked his coupé in a quiet street far from the looted bank. A key on his ring unlocked a sliding compartment under the car’s seat. There was a spool of rolled-up paper inside that came from a complex apparatus in a dust-proof case. The thing was an automatic radio teletype. The ribbon of paper contained inked records in code of all messages that had come from Bates and Hobart during the Agent’s absence from the car. The Agent scanned them eagerly.
Breerton had dined in the company of a man and woman known to be engaged in espionage activities. Count Cariati had entertained a group of society people in his suite at the Wellington Arms. One of them was a well-known investment banker. His guests had left shortly after midnight and he had retired.
A fresh section of ribbon was slowly unwinding from the automatic drum as clockwork purred and electro-magnetic styluses clicked. Its dots and dashes concerned Relli and de Coba.
“R and D have heard of job at Central Bank,” the message from Bates read. “Both seem upset. They talk of looking up a man named Sleeber.”
THE Agent’s pulses raced. He had instructed Bates to have his man put a dictograph in the gunmen’s room. All their conversations had been passed on to Agent “X.” This was the first time they had mentioned Sleeber.
To Bates, the name might easily mean nothing. But to “X,” with his vast knowledge of the underworld, it clicked instantly. Bruno Sleeber was the cleverest, most cunning fence in the city.
The Agent reached along the car seat and tapped his radio sending key again.
“Tell man watching R and D that he will be relieved in ten minutes. I will take the watch till seven. Post another operative then.”
The Agent sped across town, stopping only long enough to make some alterations in his face, changing the disguise of Martin. With a master key, he let himself into the rooming house that sheltered Relli and de Coba, going straight to the chamber where Bates’ operative was on duty posing as a lodger.
The detective had already received a radioed message from Bates. He accepted “X” as merely another member of the Bates organization—never dreaming that he was looking at the man who was the mysterious guiding head. He left his dictograph in “X’s” hands.
Relli and de Coba were still conversing. They were primed with liquor. “X” could tell by the thickness of their voices. The news of the bank looting which the landlady had heard by phone and passed on to them, had filled them with excitement. De Coba was pacing the floor, swearing like a madman.
“When do we get in on the heavy dough?” he shouted. “We’re told to stay in this dirty dump till we’re needed. We’re told we’re king-pins and will be given work—but nothing happens. Then a big job like this is pulled, and we don’t sit in. We’re being stood up, Blackie—and I won’t stand it!”
“Me neither! But what can we do?”
“Do! Go see this guy Sleeber—now!”
&n
bsp; There was a stamping in the room, then the slamming of a door. The Agent waited a moment, then followed cautiously. This was a worthwhile lead. The two were going to demand an explanation of a man who was apparently their boss. Alcohol and excitement over the big bank robbery had overcome their caution. They were going to look him up in the small hours of the morning.
They wove around the streets till they found a cruising taxi. The Agent followed in his own coupé. But when they reached Sleeber’s place, a brownstone house on a respectable block, and rang the bell again and again—nothing happened.
The taxi they had come in had been dismissed. They stood in indecision talking irritably till another cab pulled slowly around the corner. De Coba shrugged, and drew Relli toward it. Both men got in, and the cab rolled away. They had failed in their mission to see and question Sleeber, and when they sobered up “X” thought they might be glad of it.
The cab stopped before the trigger men’s lodgings, and “X” saw the driver jump out and hurry away. He sat forward tensely. He had stopped his own coupé nearly two blocks behind. What did this desertion by the taxi driver mean?
He watched and waited a minute, but nothing happened. The driver didn’t come back. The passengers in the cab did not alight. The night was dark, still, and somehow ominous.
“X” wondered if he had been seen, if this were some sort of ambush. But de Coba and Relli seemed too drunk for that. More likely they’d gone to sleep on the soft seat of the cab. But that didn’t explain the driver’s actions.
The Agent got out of his car, and moved slowly forward. He took the opposite side of the street, passed the parked taxi, and looked across. There was nothing visible in the cab. Relli and de Coba seemed to have disappeared.
He walked to the end of the block, crossed over, and came back on the other side. Close to the cab, he stopped and peered in tensely.
His eyes widened. Horror clutched at his throat like a bony hand, and sent chill prickles along his spine.
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 5 Page 8
