Secret Agent “X” – The Complete Series Volume 2

by Paul Chadwick

  The Agent’s casual manner had achieved results. He’d taken the flat foot off-guard, made him talk. From his wallet, “X” drew a business card and handed it to the uniformed man. It was one of many that he carried to help build up whatever character he’d assumed at the time. The card read:

  SILAS BURNS

  Enright Detective Agency

  “Miss St. Clair hired me last week,” explained the Agent. “I’ve been tracing down some threatening letters and keeping my eye on a couple of birds who’ve been parking too close to the house to suit the little lady. I’ll talk with your chief later. Right now, I want to buzz in there and look over the house and grounds before anything is disturbed.”

  The cop shrugged and jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  “O.K.,” he said. “Go ahead. But watch out you don’t disturb anything yourself.”

  “X” at once entered the grounds. He appeared to be a case-hardened private investigator interested in getting his job done and collecting his fee. In the spacious gardens he hurried down the marble flags of a flower-bordered path toward the house.

  On the crimson-splattered lawn lay the mangled, broken bodies of two of Greta St. Clair’s hired guards. ‘’X” paused, gnawing at his lip, eyes brightly alert. The men had been slain by bombs. One had been slaughtered beyond recognition. The second was one of those who had displayed his marksmanship in the basement chamber of the big house.

  THE Agent hurried on. The DOACs had been as pitilessly thorough as they had been in the raid on the state penitentiary. A bomb had split the gnarled trunk of a spreading oak. Most of the windows had been shattered by the concussion. The second-story windows of Greta St. Clair’s bedroom had been a target for the devastating bombs, which had blasted away the barred grating and crumbled a section of the brick wall.

  Dread assailed the Agent. He rushed up the steps, impatiently rang the bell. A sunken-eyed, stooped cadaver of a man in butler’s livery opened the door and stared suspiciously at “X.” The man was in the clutch of fear. His haunted eyes evidently had seen the atrocities of the DOACs.

  “What do you want?” His voice was harsh, his manner hostile.

  “Enright Detective Agency,” snapped the Agent, pushing the butler aside and entering. “Until this thing is cleared up, your job is to do the answering and not the asking. When did the fireworks start?”

  The Agent took the butler by the arm and forcibly led him down the high-ceilinged hall. The servant’s chin quivered. Stark terror washed green into the deathly pallor of his mummylike face.

  “I—I don’t know—anything,” he quavered in a croaking voice. “I was off duty, taking a nap in my quarters.”

  The butler dropped his gaze, and the Agent put bruising pressure into his grip on the man’s arm.

  “You’re no good at lying,” he rasped.

  He drew the butler into the luxuriously appointed dining room. The table was set for two, “X” noticed at once. The chairs had been pulled back, the napkins unfolded. A champagne bucket stood near the table. The bottle was unopened, and the ice had long since melted.

  “Talk—and save yourself discomfort,” grated the Agent. “I’ve no time to waste. Who was Miss St. Clair’s guest? They’d just sat down to dinner, I can see. What time was it? What did you and the other servants do to protect your mistress? How is it that two of her guards were killed, and all the others unharmed?”

  The butler choked an answer.

  “The DOACs—they came!” he said. “It was nine o’clock. I’d just announced dinner. Miss St. Clair, sir, and a blonde girl—I don’t know her name—sat down. Then there was an awful explosion. I thought the house was coming down. Spats Herndon and Mugsy Moretti, Miss St. Clair’s bodyguards, ran outside. Another explosion, and I saw them torn to pieces by a bomb. What could I do? What could the others do? We ran to the cellar.

  “When we came out, the cops had come. Miss St. Clair and the blonde were gone. It’s awful—awful! A man isn’t safe any more. How do I know you’re not a DOAC yourself? How do I know the other servants aren’t DOACs? For talking this much I’ll probably get shot or blown up myself.”

  The Agent dismissed the butler. He searched the house feverishly. The blonde—who was she? She had been Greta St. Clair’s dinner guest. Could it possibly be—

  In the drawing room, “X” found a lipstick—a special, imported brand he remembered having seen before. Fear was in his eyes as he looked at it. That lipstick—

  The Agent had seldom experienced such inner turmoil. He ran from room to room. The St. Clair bed chamber, with all its prettiness and knick-knacks of luxury, had been demolished.

  The mansion had become a house of fear. Servants slunk through the carpeted halls. They swivelled their eyes like hunted creatures. They stared at their fellow workers distrustfully. The Agent had made the butler talk, but the other servants were tongue-tied with fright. He left them alone. Harshness only drove them into hysteria. The DOACs had put a pall of horror over the St. Clair menage.

  Some of their uneasiness communicated itself to the Agent.

  Who was the blonde, he asked himself again and again. Had she, too, been sacrificed to the pitiless, ruthless lightning bolt of destruction that was the bone and flesh of that vast clan of fiends—the DOACs? The Agent’s uneasiness increased when he found a lace-edged linen handkerchief initialed “B,” in a rear corridor. That was all the proof he needed.

  He rushed madly from the house and searched the grounds. The gardens spread out in ornamental plots whose profusion of fragrant blooms reflected color under his flashlight beam. None of the flower beds had been trampled. Beyond the damage to the house, there was no evidence of violence.

  Abruptly the Agent stopped and stared into space with eyes that were sunken from anxiety. Another question crowded into his perplexed and troubled mind. His operative, Chatfield—what had become of him?

  LEAVING the grounds, the Agent nodded to the cop who had admitted him, and continued his search in the timbered, marshy land surrounding the house. Soon he discovered fresh footprints. Suddenly he reached down and picked up a chunk of dull metal.

  He gave a harsh exclamation as he stared at it. His scalp twitched. The thing he held in his hand seemed like some loathsome canker burning into his skin.

  Farther on, in a tangle of shrubbery, the Agent found Chatfield, and clenched his fists till the nails drove into his palms. For Chatfield was dead—horribly dead.

  The man’s putty-gray face was twisted with the indescribable agony that had been his while molten lead had cooked him into eternity—lead that now hung from his mouth in a grotesque, beardlike mass.

  The Agent was shaken, beside himself with anger. He tossed his head violently to clear away the stunning effect of this latest DOAC atrocity. Chatfield had been a brave man, and a loyal, intelligent assistant.

  Quickly “X” brought himself under control. Chatfield, whatever he had been, was beyond human help now. And there were others, living persons, who were desperately in need of help.

  “X” galvanized himself into action. He must do what he could to prevent this ghastly thing from being repeated. Tracks swerved to the north from the spot where Chatfield’s body lay. Presently they cut westward, leading to the road.

  Crouching low, the Agent moved swiftly, flashlight in hand, eyes burningly bright. Any sort of clue might help—a thread, a cigarette butt, a match used and carelessly thrown down. He prayed silently for something, anything, that would lead him to the head of that killer-clan of fiends whose methods were crushing justice and mercy from the earth.

  Then he found a clue—a clue that shocked him with its hideous implication. His tongue felt dry in his mouth. His temples throbbed with the dull monotonous beat of triphammers as he stood looking at the clue he had uncovered.

  That clue was a modish little powder compact lying by the side of the road. It was plated with silver and encrusted with imitation garnets, one of which was missing.

  Betty Dale’s compact!
There was no mistaking it. The last time he’d seen Betty, he’d noticed that one of the garnets had been lost from it.

  For a moment the Agent felt as though his nerves were trying to burrow through his flesh like greedy maggots. Sweat oozed from his pores; his stomach felt empty, collapsed. For, soldered to Betty Dale’s little vanity case was an ugly chunk of lead—symbol of DOAC vengeance.

  Chapter XII

  Shadow of Death

  FOR a while that globule of lead held his eyes with hypnotic fascination. His brain swarmed with conjectures. Was this a sinister warning, or had Betty’s red mouth been defiled by that gleaming, molten destruction?

  His eyes sultry, stormy, “X” crossed the river to the penitentiary then—returning as Galaway, the emissary of the governor. He wanted to see Warden Johnson and Carney. Arriving in the warden’s office, he found the warden plainly agitated.

  “Tough prisoners! Jail breaks!” the warden said. “I can handle them, Galaway. I’m trained to that sort of work. I know when to be hard and when to ease up on a fellow. I’ve put down some tough riots, and I’ve helped a lot of poor devils who came in here, helped ’em to go straight afterwards. But the DOACs have put the skids under all my confidence. I’ve got State troopers on duty, and a double detail of guards. Even with them I don’t feel easy. It looks to me like the DOACs haven’t finished with this place yet.”

  “What are the developments?” asked the Agent tensely.

  “Two things,” said the warden. “One you probably know. The sheriff across the river phoned a while ago to tell me Mike Carney’s girl, Greta St. Clair, had been grabbed, kidnaped. Then a few minutes back another phone call came. It was anonymous. We get plenty of them. But I can tell a fool and a crank as soon as he starts talking. The party who phoned this message wasn’t either one—and he wasn’t just satisfying a personal grudge. He meant business—big business.

  “It was Carney he was calling—not me. He threatened that this girl of Carney’s will be killed unless Mike tells where his fortune is laid away. And suppose Carney won’t unbutton his lip? Suppose they not only kill the girl, but strike at this place again? It’s going to make it tough for me.”

  “X” gnawed at his lip and mulled over the ugly prospects.

  “Let me talk to Carney,” he said at last.

  Warden Johnson nodded. He appeared relieved, glad to let some one else shoulder part of the worry. He took the Agent to the racketeer’s cell, a cell that was apart from the regular blocks, in a section where the moneyed class of fortune’s fools were located.

  Michael Carney was pacing the floor, sleek face pale with strain. His protruding, frog eyes had the hard, brittle look of glass. His lips were stained with the nicotine of many cigarettes. Michael Carney, without Tommy guns and a pack of slinking, drug-soaked rats, didn’t seem to be the master of the situation.

  Introduced as a representative of the governor, Agent “X” got an effusive greeting from the former czar of the beer traffic. Carney gripped the Agent’s iron-muscled hand with simulated warmth.

  “Help me, guy,” he pleaded. “They got Greta—Miss St. Clair! They’ve threatened to do just what I figured they might. I’m the real target but it’s Greta who’s in the spot. They’re going to—to bump her—if I don’t come across!”

  “Why not help her yourself then, Carney?” the Agent said quietly.

  Carney ran a quick hand across his face.

  “Geez, I want to, Mr. Galaway! I’ve denied right along that I had any dough laid away. Any guy in my place would have. But it was a lie. I’ve got the dough all right. And I’ll give it—every penny—to protect Greta. I’ve played a hard game, Galaway. I’m a hard guy, I guess. But it’d kill me if anything happened to Greta. Giving up my dough means nothing now—if she’s brought back O.K. Broadcast that, Galaway; spread it all over the headlines in all the newspapers!

  “You can do it. You’ve got pull. But tell ’em this. Tell ’em I ain’t going to be double-crossed. I know the rackets. A lot of mugs who never heard of me or my gal will try to chisel in. They’re the ones I don’t aim to hand any cash to. Before I spill the works, I’ve got to know that the guys I’m dealing with are on the up-and-up—the same guys that snatched the girl. Get me?”

  Agent “X” nodded. He saw in Carney’s distressed state a reflection of his own agitation over Betty Dale. He, too, would gladly give a fortune if he could be sure of getting her back. The DOACs had struck body blows at both Carney and himself. He gave the ex-gangster what assurances he could.

  THE next morning Agent “X” was back in his office in the city. He had spent a sleepless night, a night of futile, feverish activity, following clues that led nowhere, investigating a dozen different leads that all ended in cul-de-sacs. With Betty missing, with no definite leads to follow, he stayed in his office, waiting, hoping, listening for the ring of his telephone and for the report of some one of his many operatives which might throw some light on the affair.

  He bought early editions of the papers, shuffled through them feverishly. Then he gave an abrupt start and bent forward. Here was something of deeper significance than any mere clue. Here was a direct message from the criminals themselves.

  It was in the personal column of the paper, written again in Playfair cipher. Those groups of letters, couched in the cipher that the slain Gordon Ridley had first used, seemed to mock him. The message was longer than any of the others.

  “Secret Agent ‘X,’ it said. “We who hold your blonde friend demand an interview with you. At three-thirty this afternoon you are to stand on the fourth square in the king row, walking in the northern entrance on the western side of the Capitol’s rotunda, Washington, D.C. There a man will ask you the time of day. You will answer ‘thirty minutes short of four o’clock.’ He will set his gold, hunting-case watch. You are to follow where he leads.”

  The Agent’s eyes burned brightly. Hope sprang into his heart. The DOACs had Betty. But learning that Betty was still alive pulled him out of the abyss of despondency into which he had sunk. Action lay ahead. Action was what he craved. The DOAC order was incisive, brooking no haggling or counter threats.

  The Agent didn’t hesitate. Before ten the Blue Comet was roaring through the cloud banks, headed south. It lacked a few minutes of noon when the ship touched its wheels to the ground at Boiling Field, Anacostia, D.C. The plane taxied to the hangars, and soon “X” was riding a bus into Washington. He didn’t go directly to the Capitol building. Instead, he took a taxi to a street of furnished apartments.

  A key on his ring gained him admittance to one house. He went upstairs boldly to a small, completely equipped apartment, where dust on the furniture showed that it hadn’t been occupied for a considerable time. From a closet he hauled out a wardrobe trunk, neatly packed with dozens of suits and uniforms—a trunk such as a master character actor might own, or a vaudeville quick-change artist.

  From the wardrobe trunk the Agent selected a striped suit such as a race-track tout or a betting commissioner might affect. He went to work with his pigments and plastic materials. In a few moments his deft fingers had rearranged the contour of his face. His features became hawkish, his complexion a prison pallor. A judicious application of a belladonna derivative dilated his pupils, giving his eyes a stary look.

  A derby canted rakishly, a Malacca cane, and spats gave him the overdressed appearance of a sport.

  It was this individual—“Danny Dugan” he called himself—who stood on the designated square in the Capitol rotunda at the appointed hour. He looked decidedly out of place, but he had the rough-and-ready air of a person used to third degrees, a person who could maintain a short tongue under the longest ordeal of bulldozing. The role was part of a desperate strategy “X” had devised.

  ON the stroke of the half hour, a quietly dressed man, tall, rather frail in build, and certainly not a criminal in appearance, approached “X” and asked him the time of day. The Agent tensed. This was the beginning. Possibly he was heading into peril t
hat would end in another nightmarish atrocity, with him the victim. There was a limit to a man’s powers. If the DOACs penetrated his disguise, if they decided on a summary execution of any aide of the Agent, he’d have no more chance than a spy facing an enemy’s firing squad.

  The DOAC representative looked like a well-dressed, insignificant clerk, but, on closer inspection, murder smoldered in hard, cruel eyes.

  “Thirty minutes short of four o’clock,” said the Agent, giving the countersign ordered in the cipher from the DOACs.

  “Come with me,” said the representative, eyeing the Agent coldly.

  The tall man led “X” to the Capitol grounds, and indicated a black sedan parked in the roadway. A hard-faced chauffeur sat at the wheel. “X” got into the car. The tall man followed, and presently the machine was rolling along the graveled road to Pennsylvania Avenue.

  The DOAC representative smiled at the Agent.

  “You are not ‘X,’” he said softly, abruptly. “The orders specifically stated that ‘X’ was to be on the square. My friend, I fear you are heading into trouble meant for another!”

  The Agent pretended he was startled. No matter what happened, he had to stay in character, had to maintain the pose of Danny Dugan, sport and jailbird. He began chattering volubly.

  “Naw, I ain’t the boss, pal,” he said, talking out of the side of his mouth. “I’m Dugan, Danny Dugan. I just shook the warden’s mitt at Meadow Stream, after two years in the big house. I’m a right guy, pal. Sure t’ing. A fly cop found some policy slips that accidentally got into my pockets, an’ the judge was a mug. He slapped me over the wall for a two-year hitch. That’s where I got this silvery complexion.”