In silence they at last entered the chamber where so much evil had been plotted.
There was a dim light burning in the room; and two spectral black-robed figures sitting on chairs. They gave harsh exclamations at sight of the British financier. Their eyes gleamed with a fierce, avaricious light.
“I kept my word,” said Agent “X” quietly.
FOR a moment there was awed silence, then the man at the Agent’s left pressed his foot on a bulge in the carpet. The spotlight on the ceiling above flashed on. It bathed Dunsmark’s face in brilliant radiance. The paleness of his features, the tenseness of his attitude, the combative look in his eyes, testified to the fact that he had been brought unwillingly. Agent “X” had relied on that. It was why he hadn’t dared take Dunsmark into his confidence. The unpleasant interlude had been necessary if his plans were to succeed.
“Does he know the reason for his being here?” came a voice from behind one of the hoods.
“No,” said the Agent. “I have told him nothing. I have kept my word—brought him. Inform him of what we have in mind.”
The man at the Agent’s right spoke in a harsh measured voice.
“You are an important man, Dunsmark—important to your country and to the world. Neither your country nor the world can afford to lose you. They will, for that reason, take pains to see that you are returned to them uninjured.”
The British banker slowly nodded his head. A sudden surge of blood swept across his face. His cleft chin jutted.
“I understand everything, Dunsmark. You understand, of course, that ransom is expected for your safe return. A child could understand that. You can guess that the amount of ransom for such an important person as you will be large, staggeringly large, but not too large—not more than your country will gladly pay. But you don’t understand just where you are. You don’t realize what will happen if you fail to meet our demands.”
Dunsmark’s right fist tightened into a ball.
“By Gad, gentlemen—I don’t care what your demands are. You’ve picked the wrong victim. You can’t intimidate me!”
A harsh, grating laugh came from behind the black hood.
“Have you followed the news, Dunsmark? Have you heard of that mysterious organization called the ‘Torture Trust’? Have you read reports of what happens to men who refuse to meet its demands?”
Dunsmark’s face paled again, and its expression showed that news of the terrible series of crimes had reached England.
“I see you’ve heard of us,” continued the voice. “You have heard of dead men, rich men and their sons, being found with their faces gone, eaten by acid. You are a man of imagination. You can picture to yourself no doubt what the slow claws of acid can do. You can understand why you will pay.”
“Damn you!” cried the Englishman. “I still say you can’t intimidate me. I won’t sell my country out to ransom my own carcass.”
“No!” the persuasive voice went on. “That is noble of you. That is loyal. You are a man of high ideals, of great principles. You will sacrifice yourself. But have you ever had liquid drops of torture poured on your skin, Dunsmark? Would you want to return to your country marred beyond recognition? Would you want to spend the rest of your life looking so hideous that your friends will turn away from you in horror?”
“Damn you—damn you!” gasped the Englishman. “Let me out of here!”
“That will be easy,” said the voice of his tormenter. “We can ask the ransom money without your consent. But everything will be better, more simple, if you will write a note yourself directing your country to pay what we ask. We will make all arrangements for the note’s delivery, the delivery of the money, and your safe return. It will be conducted in a businesslike way.”
Dunsmark was quivering with fury now.
“All we ask,” said the hooded figure, “is a sum proportionate to your high position. A sum which your country, or you yourself perhaps, can well afford to pay. All we ask is five hundred thousand pounds!”
The Secret Agent gasped. They were demanding over two million dollars.
Dunsmark, still trembling violently, remained silent.
“What do you say,” came the voice. “Will you cooperate—make things easy for yourself and us? Or must we give you a taste of what hell is like?”
“Go to the devil, all of you,” the Englishman cried in a sudden burst of fury. “There are police in America! There is law and order. You’ll go to prison and the gallows for this.”
The Secret Agent spoke then.
“He will not be convinced, my friends. We will have to take him down below. Call our slaves.”
The hooded figure at his right silently pressed the button concealed under the carpet—the button that flashed lights in the deaf-mutes’ quarters. A moment later four of them glided in, and the same hooded man flashed orders with his fingers.
The Agent spoke then.
“I am going with him,” he said. “Let us all go. Let us see that our slaves make no blunder in this.”
Silently they rose and wound through the chill corridors to the cellar below. The door of the torture chamber was unlocked. Struggling and protesting fiercely, Dunsmark was thrust into the metal chair. In a moment the metal cuffs had been clamped over his hands and ankles.
“We have come,” said the Agent, “to give you a chance to change your mind—before it is too late.”
One of the mutes, precise as an automaton, had gone to a shelf and taken the stopper from a bottle of acid.
“You see it,” said the hooded figure standing by the Agent’s side. “You see the liquid that no human will can endure.”
“God!” cried Dunsmark. “There are decent laws and police in America, I say. You’ll go to prison. They won’t let this happen.”
As though in answer to his words, a sudden sound reverberated through the building. It was a clanging metallic note. Then somewhere far above, faint and shrill, a whistle sounded. The noise of a blow came again, repeated, taken up and echoed, till the whole warehouse shook and trembled, as though a hundred axes were crashing through the doors.
“The police,” hissed the Agent, fiercely. “A raid. Every man for himself!”
Chapter XIX
Mysterious Instructions
IN her room at the Hotel Graymont Betty Dale paced restlessly. She lit innumerable cigarettes, took short quick puffs, ground them out. Her eyes were dark with worry. Once she went to the window and stared out across the rooftops. Lights showed on the river far away. In the streets below, after-theater crowds surged and jostled, and the faint blare of taxi horns rose in an uneasy murmur.
There was laughter and gaiety in the ceaseless stream of humanity that flowed on the sidewalks around the hotel like a stream washing the base of a great cliff. There were smiling faces and lightly moving feet. But Betty Dale had a sense of uneasiness, a sense that strange, sinister things portended.
That afternoon she had had a visit from the Agent. He had come to her as H. J. Martin. His card had read: “Credit Manager, Felder & Wright Department Stores”! He was disguised as a sallow-faced, sandy-haired man. She had been fooled as usual until his card had turned black in her hands leaving a glowing white “X” on its surface. Then she had known.
But this time his instructions had surprised her even more than his disguise. He had discarded for the moment his habit of talking in parables and innuendos. He had issued short, crisp statements.
“I want you to do something for me, Betty. If I don’t call back before one o’clock to-night, I want you to phone police headquarters. Ask for Inspector Burks and tell him that Sir Anthony Dunsmark has been kidnapped. Tell him Dunsmark has fallen into the clutches of the ‘Torture Trust,’ and tell him where Sir Anthony and the members of the trust can be found.”
He had given her explicit directions then—street numbers that Betty recognized. The place he described was the old warehouse where she had been held and threatened with torture. Her face paled at the recollection.
The Agent had remained silent and Betty had noticed that in his eyes was a strange, bright light. When he spoke again his words had not been an answer to her worried query, but further instructions.
“Don’t use the hotel telephone, Betty. Go at least four blocks away. Use a store phone booth and leave as soon as you have made your call.”
He had gone away then, leaving Betty Dale anxious, uneasy. The hours had dragged by. All evening she had hoped he would call again, hoped that he would countermand his strange orders. How could even the Secret Agent know that Sir Anthony Dunsmark would be kidnapped? The British banker, she knew, had not landed in America. Had Agent “X” wormed his way into the innermost circle of the “Torture Trust,” and if so what desperate game was he playing?
Twelve o’clock came with no further word from him. She called the steamship office then. They told her the liner Victoria, on which Dunsmark was arriving, was in the harbor, but that it would be held at quarantine for an hour or more.
A quarter of one came and Betty put on her hat and coat. She took an elevator to the lobby, walked through it and passed out into the street. Five blocks away she entered a cigar-store telephone booth and dialed a number. The sleepy voice of a desk sergeant at police headquarters answered her and Betty said:
“I want to speak to Inspector Burks.”
“You can’t, lady,” the sergeant said. “He ain’t here. He’s gone home.”
“I must speak to him anyway. This is very important.”
“Who are you?”
“Never mind. Get the inspector. It’s a matter of life and death.”
The sergeant grumbled and complained, but at the end of a minute he had made switchboard connections. Another voice sounded over the wire.
“This is Inspector Burks. What’s it all about? What do you want?”
In quick, breathless sentences Betty Dale relayed the message that the Agent had asked her to deliver—the message announcing Sir Anthony Dunsmark’a abduction—and the inspector’s voice rose into a harsh irritable rasp.
“That’s impossible! You’re lying! The Victoria, the boat he’s on, hasn’t even docked. She’s still at quarantine. I know because I’ve got cops waiting to look out for him. Who the hell are you, lady?”
But Betty Dale didn’t answer. She had done her duty, done what the Secret Agent had asked. She hung up quickly and left the store before the police tried to trace the call.
INSPECTOR BURKS at the other end of the wire jangled the receiver futilely. His pale face had turned a shade paler. There was an uneasy look in his eyes. The girl who had called him up and refused to give her name was obviously a nut. What she had told him couldn’t be true. Dunsmark couldn’t be kidnapped before the Victoria landed. But still he was uneasy. And he wasn’t a man to let anything pass.
Growling in his throat, still irritable from having been waked up, he lifted the receiver again and demanded the ship-to-shore service.
“Get me the steamer Victoria—now in the harbor. Let me speak to her captain.”
In a moment the call had leaped through the air across the harbor by wireless telephone. The voice of the captain buzzed in his ear. Inspector Burks asked a blunt question.
“Is Anthony Dunsmark still on board? This is the head of the city homicide squad.”
The captain answered quickly.
“Sir Anthony left nearly an hour ago. The police commissioner came and got him.”
There was an instant of dead silence, then Burks spoke hoarsely.
“The commissioner—say—he wouldn’t do that without letting me know.”
“It was the commissioner I tell you—there’s no doubt about it”
“What the hell!” exploded Burks. He was beginning to tremble now. He was beginning to sense that something somewhere was terribly wrong. It wasn’t like the commissioner to do such a thing without informing the heads of his departments.
With shaking hands, Burks dialed the commissioner’s house and got the commissioner’s red-haired wife.
“I want to speak to Charlie,” said the inspector.
“He hasn’t been home all evening. He’s out with the boys again—playing cards, I suppose. You’ll probably find him at MacDorsey’s.”
Burks knew who MacDorsey was—one of the city’s richest political bosses. He made the telephone dial buzz like an angry bee, and when he got MacDorsey on the wire his voice was a husky croak.
“Better not interrupt the commish,” said MacDorsey. “He’s drawing for a royal flush.”
“I’ve got to speak to him. It’s important.”
Burks gulped for air when he heard the commissioner’s polished voice, a little chiding now at being disturbed during off hours.
“What is it, inspector? More grief I suppose?”
“Did you go out in a boat tonight, chief, and take that Englishman, Anthony Dunsmark, off the Victoria?”
“Did I what? Say, have you gone crazy, Burks? What are you talking about?”
“You didn’t get him off about an hour ago?”
“No. Say! I’ve been here with the boys all evening. What the hell’s the matter with you!”
“Dunsmark’s been kidnapped, chief. The ‘Torture Trust’ has got him. The captain of the Victoria says someone who looked like you grabbed him off the boat. I’ve been tipped off to where he is. I’m going to raid the place.”
The commissioner’s tone was apoplectic.
“For God’s sake don’t let this get into the papers! We’ll all look sweet. I’ll sit in at the raid. Where is it?”
In brief sentences Burks told him. Then he made the wires hot. His rasping voice started the various departments in action, got other inspectors on the job. He asked that trucks of the emergency squad be sent out, asked the boiler squad to cooperate, and ordered all available men of the homicide squad rounded up.
Half dressed, with his shoes unlaced and his collar unbuttoned, he sent his own car roaring down town through the night-darkened streets.
THE biggest raid in the history of the city police was under way. Telephone wires were humming. Captains and sergeants were bawling orders.
A green, high-speed truck of the emergency squad, cops clinging to the brass rails on its sides, came hurtling out of a side street and roared down town with its siren screaming. Two motor-cycle cops joined it, clearing the way, adding their horns to the din.
Private cars drew aside. Pedestrians scuttled to safety. Inspector Burks, his face bleak, drove madly, holding his own horn down.
The tip-off, whoever had given it, had been complete. And he had made his own instructions complete also. No one was to act until he arrived on the scene to direct the raid.
He found grim-faced men waiting in the dark streets around the old warehouse. There was the glint of dim light on riot guns and on the black, wicked snouts of automatics held in steady hands.
Sergeant Mathers, roused from sleep, his eyes bloodshot, came up for instructions.
“Throw a cordon around the whole building,” said Burks. “Circle the block. Don’t let any one get out.”
Stealthy-footed men approached the building from all sides. “Those houses in the rear,” said Burks. “Watch them, too.”
A sleek, official car with a uniformed chauffeur slid to a halt, then crept through the lines of detectives. The commissioner himself had arrived, his mouth under its mustache a hard, straight line. Someone had put him in a bad spot. Someone had made him appear ridiculous.
“Let’s get going,” he snapped.
The raid began then. Men with axes, sledge hammers, and crowbars started battering in the doors. Powerful searchlights mounted on the trucks of the emergency squad flashed on, sweeping the sides of the big building, making the dark evil streets as bright as day. Patrolmen and plain-clothes detectives poured in, battering down doors and racing along corridors.
It was Inspector Burks himself who first
saw a spectral black-robed form ahead of him. The man flashed into sight for a moment around a passage angle, and Burks saw the evil glitter of eyes behind the slitted hood.
“Halt!” he said. “Stand where you are or I’ll shoot.”
The hooded man ignored the warning. He tried to spring up a flight of stairs.
There was the harsh crack of an automatic. Burks had been a dead shot in his day. The man on the stairway screamed and spun around. He tottered, clutched at the wall. Then his body slumped and rolled backwards. He collapsed on the floor of the passage and lay still.
Burks ran forward and snatched the hood loose. Then he gave a swift gasp of surprise.
“God! Albert Bartholdy—one of the D.A.’s snooty assistants. No wonder the cops didn’t have a chance.”
There was a blue hole in the side of Albert Bartholdy’s head. One member of the “Torture Trust” would never plot evil again.
But a patrolman with a riot gun down the corridor cursed in pain. Two sinister gray-clad figures had appeared ahead of him as if by magic. One of them had flung a glittering tube of liquid. It was only by a miracle of good luck that the cop stepped aside in time.
The tube smashed against the wall close to his head. Reeking chemical fumes filled his nostrils. Drops of seering acid struck his cheek.
He cursed again, crouched low, and his finger pressed the trigger of the riot gun. The automatic mechanism jumped and clattered. Flame spurted from the black muzzle.
The two evil, gray forms wilted before it, plunged to the floor, and lay still.
The raiders penetrated to the cellar then. Somewhere ahead a light showed. The inspector ran forward, then stopped. Another black-robed figure lay at his feet. He held his gun steady, but the figure did not move. He stopped, pulled the hood aside, and his face muscles sagged in amazement. For seconds he stared in utter bewilderment.
The man at his feet was not dead but only unconscious. He was breathing harshly, regularly, in the manner of a man under the influence of drugs. But his presence in that place and the black hood he wore showed that he, too, was a member of the “Torture Trust.” Burks recognized the features.
Secret Agent X – The Complete Series Volume 1 (Annotated) Page 12
