Secret Agent “X” – The Complete Series Volume 2

by Paul Chadwick

  The Agent was building himself up for a third degree. He felt sure it was coming, and he wanted it to seem that he was used to being browbeaten by a ring of hard-eyed coppers. As a petty crook, a cheap tout and a wise guy, to whom abuse was no novelty, he would have a better chance of carrying off his denials. For the DOAC leaders would think it logical that the feared and hated “X” would not take such an irresponsible character into his confidence, but would trust him to serve as messenger only.

  “A fella named Martin, one of them reporter guys,” went on the Agent, “met me when I got out of the big house, an’ said he knew a gent who’d give a smart cluck like me a job. That was what I wanted, because I wasn’t wishing to get no more policy slips in my clothes. Running errands an’ carrying messages, an’ such. I wasn’t on the all-day trot more than a week when I learned the fella who shelled out the twenty-five per was this “X” lug. Take it from me, pal, I ain’t been eating right since.”

  The DOAC emissary smiled thinly, and placed a hand on the Agent’s shoulder, as though to reassure him. “X” ground his teeth. He wanted to shrink from the touch as he would from that of a cobra. The representative’s teeth clicked. There was a sardonic curl to his lips, a cruel, mocking gleam in his ferretlike eyes.

  He touched the Agent’s neck with a finger. On that finger was a thimble, and to it attached a sharp spur. The spur pricked “X’s” skin, drew blood. The Agent—now Danny Dugan, the jabberer—uttered a howl. Such an outburst a man like Dugan might give in protest against a practical joke. There was no suspicion of intense fear in his voice.

  The Agent guarded against showing his inner chaos. The spur on that thimble had been dipped in a drug, he knew. Almost at once a deep drowsiness engulfed him. He felt his senses slipping into oblivion. He fought for control, struggled to peel back the film of sleep that was enveloping his brain.

  The effort was futile. Everything was washed in haze. He heard a taunting laugh, but it seemed far away. He had the sensation of floating through air, and then sensation ceased.

  Chapter XIII

  Chamber of Torture!

  IT might have been hours, or it might have been minutes before the Agent regained consciousness. He didn’t know. He awoke in a room illuminated by a ghostly light from a phosphorescent glare that covered the ceiling. The pall of death seemed to hover over the chamber. A musty odor assailed his nostrils, an odor that suggested long-imprisoned air, air defiled by bodies that age had crumbled to dust, air such as permeated ancient tombs.

  In this sinister recess a dozen hooded figures were seated. They were silent, motionless as mummies. But through slits in their wraithlike hoods, eyes glittered wickedly. They seemed like loathsome, revolting ghouls contemplating a corpse. They sat like a council of specters, gathered to render judgment over a helpless mortal.

  Beyond the walls of this eerie chamber arose low moans, unnerving sounds of torture. The Agent heard the clank, clank, clank of chains, the steady drip of water. Once there was a shrill, piercing shriek, followed by insane cackling laughter. Was this the abode of the mad?

  The Agent wondered if he were in the clutch of delirium, if this gloom-pervaded square of horror was a figment of a wild, torturing nightmare. But he didn’t wonder long. For a low, unearthly voice came from the hooded figure in the center of the group. The words rolled out as though from an orgiastic incantation of savage rites preluding a human sacrifice.

  “You are not Secret Agent ‘X,’” intoned the awesome voice. “You are Danny Dugan. You are a part, an accessory to the plan to thwart the movements of the DOACs. We command ‘X’ to appear before this tribunal. He defies the power of the DOACs. Therefore, we will strike. You die, Danny Dugan. Then Betty Dale will follow you!”

  The Agent did not have to simulate horror, but he directed that genuine horror into the channel of expression that would be employed by the character he played. He started to rise. Then horror piled upon horror.

  He could not move. His legs were numb. His body was without feeling. His arms were like useless sticks. Secret Agent “X” was paralyzed.

  His brain was clear. He still retained power of speech. But the lines of communication were down between his brain and body. For one moment, “X” almost slipped out of character, almost betrayed that he wasn’t Danny Dugan.

  He was a prisoner in his own body, as helpless as though encased in a concrete cast. Would this be forever? Had that insidious drug inflicted by the DOAC emissary turned him into a petrified man?

  “You have been inoculated with the sap of the nam-nam tree,” explained the spokesman of the ghostly council.

  Faint hope came to the Agent, but he didn’t let on that the DOAC’s statement held any significance for him. The nam-nam tree was native to equatorial Africa, to the miasmatic swamps of that sweltering, poisonous region. A distillation of the nam-nam sap had been used for generations by cannibals to benumb their victims. The effect lasted but a few hours. The Agent marshaled this fact up from his profound knowledge of pharmacology, and felt that the situation wasn’t entirely lost.

  A frenzied, pain-laden scream pierced the silence. The mad cry burst from the throat of a demented man, a person crazed with unbelievable torture. The Agent’s spirit surged against the fetters of paralysis. Were these bestial DOACs breaking a man on the rack, dismembering him alive?

  “Say, mister,” “X” shouted frantically, keeping to the role of Danny Dugan, “you got me all wrong. I ain’t a bad guy, honest I ain’t! Hell, mister, just because I took a job to stay out of jail, does that mean I should be killed? They don’t treat a murderer this bad. Give a guy a chance, will you? Look! I’m turned to rock. Send me to a hospital and I’ll never touch a dime of that ‘X’ stiff’s dough.”

  “You’ll have your chance,” droned the spokesman. “Tell us about the Agent! Where does he live? What are his plans? What does he know about us? ‘X’ is the cause of you being in this fix. You owe him nothing but hatred. Tell us what we want to know. Then your troubles will be over, and his troubles will begin.”

  Again came that hair-raising torture cry, answered by insane laughter as though a madman were gloating over a mutilated victim.

  “God, fellas.’” exclaimed the Agent, still posing as Danny Dugan. “Have a heart! I’ll be nuts in a minute. I don’t know nothing. I give it to you straight This damned ‘X’ ain’t never talked to me, even. I wouldn’t be able to tell him from an Eskimo. Never got a peek at him in my life. I just run errands, I tell you! You think a guy like him would let a palooka in the policy racket know his business?”

  “X’s” outburst was followed by a tense minute of deathly silence. The council of the DOACs didn’t move, but sat like cowled specters. The Agent was steeled to disaster, but the uncertainty, the nerve-racking suspense, stabbed him like a curly stiletto. He felt that this sinister silence was a lull before a frightful orgy of wickedness—and he was right. Suddenly the spokesman uttered a metallic command.

  A BLACK curtain was swept back behind the Agent. Two of the hooded DOACs turned the paralyzed “X” around so he could witness revolting brutality.

  Before the Agent stood a platform. Three shaggy, emaciated, tottering, cackling ancients bent their creaking bones in obeisance to the evil council. They were scarcely more than animated skeletons. Their legs and arms didn’t seem thicker than broom-sticks. Long noses, drooped close to their mouths. Their mummified bodies were clothed in scant leather aprons. Their sunken eyes glittered madly.

  But it wasn’t these creatures of bedlam who held the Agents intent interest. It was the pitiful wretch whose haggard face was thrust through a stout bullhide screen. The man seemed as mad as his tormentors, crazed by all the refinements of the torturer’s ghastly art.

  This terrified victim of DOAC savagery was young, in his middle twenties, although stark, raving terror had drained his hair of its natural pigments. It was white! The captive’s eyes rolled as though he were in a death convulsion. His bloated tongue protruded from his mouth like
a hanging man’s. His face was blotched with the scarlet rash of fear.

  Near him stood a kettle filled with smoking, bubbling lead! One of the wild-eyed ancients dipped a ladle and poured a fiery stream of glowing, sparkling destruction back into the iron pot.

  Some of the molten metal splattered, seared the face of the moaning captive, splashed deep burns into the pipestem legs of the leering madmen. They set up a raucous shrieking, a pandemonium of pain.

  A command from the hooded spokesman subdued them.

  “Once those idiots were young and had their reason,” said the DOAC to “X.” “That was six months ago. That first man was a promising lawyer, the next a brilliant young surgeon, the third a professor of economics. They plotted against our organization of altruism and nobility, and they have paid. Our experts relieved them of reason, drained their youth and substituted dying senility. Now they are going to show you what we do with traitors and enemies. That young man last week was a trusted lieutenant in our army of liberty. He conspired against us. He will now pay! Proceed!”

  The Agent roared his protest. His brain tried to penetrate the wall of paralysis that enveloped him. But he was helpless. All he could do was sit and cry out against the nauseating inhumanity of the DOAC punishment.

  THE specters who once had been men danced around the platform, howling, giggling and chattering in insane, fiendish, glee. The victim’s head waggled from side to side. Fear made it impossible, for him to form words, to plead mercy. He could only utter throaty cries of horror. He was racked by delirium, scarcely aware of the brutal fate that awaited him.

  The Agent kept begging the DOAC leader to prevent this unspeakable atrocity, but the hooded devil was silent. So great was “X’s” inner struggle, that he toppled off his chair. But he wasn’t to be spared the unholy sight.

  DOACs picked up his numbed body and held it on the chair. Two of the slavering ancients grasped ugly wrought-iron tongs and pried the victim’s jaws apart. The third madman twitched and trembled as he flitted around the bubbling kettle. He dipped into the molten-metal like a cook inspecting some choice soup. The victim uttered a shriek and fainted. “X” relaxed a little. Nature, at least, was humane.

  But DOAC fiendishness had no limit. A hypodermic stimulant was produced. An injection was shot into the victim’s arm, restoring him to nightmarish consciousness. Quickly the drooling ancient lifted a ladle spilling with fiery liquid lead.

  The monster paused over the condemned man. The ancient’s hideous lips were lathered with foam. It was a nauseating picture, for the old man almost collapsed with fiendish ecstasy. A shrill, triumphant jungle howl burst from his throat.

  A stream of flowing lead sizzled through the air. A heartrending scream came from the DOAC traitor. It was instantly clipped off as the liquid fire splashed into the doomed man’s mouth. There was a horrible gurgling that almost robbed the Agent of his senses. It was followed by a broiling sound. Fumes arose, fumes that, a second before, had been part of a being, a personality.

  The execution was over in less time than it took to empty the ladle. The head of the murdered man lolled through the aperture in the bullhide screen. The senile killers rolled on the floor, exhausted from their homicidal orgy. Not a sound had come from the hooded DOACs. Painful silence settled on the catacomb of horror. Then the hooded spokesman addressed the Agent.

  “You’ve seen,” he said, “how those who betray us, or go against our wishes die. The lead still boils. Talk, Danny Dugan. Tell us what you know about Secret Agent ‘X.’”

  After the hideous things he had seen, it was difficult for the Agent to maintain the character of Danny Dugan. Anger seethed within him. He wanted to heap his hate upon the DOACs, to revile them with the words of fury that were crowding to his lips. But he had no choice. He could not step out of character.

  He cried out again and again that he knew nothing of “X,” had never been introduced to him, and was totally ignorant of the mystery man’s doings. His outburst had a convincing ring. Finally the hooded men drew off to a dank, dark corner, and talked among themselves. The leader again addressed the Agent.

  “You are going back to Agent ‘X,’” he stated. “You will inform him that we are allowing him eighteen hours’ grace. It is now eleven at night. At five tomorrow afternoon he must be on the same designated square in the Capitol’s rotunda. We will accept no proxy this time. He, Secret Agent ‘X,’ must come—or we will strike. Remind him that the lead still boils—and that we still have Betty Dale. If Agent ‘X’ does not come, she, too, will be given a leaden drink.”

  The Agent’s neck was pricked suddenly by a needle coated with the powerful nam-nam essence. The paralyzing narcotic coursed through his bloodstream. In little time it reached the brain.

  “X’s” head felt as though it was suspended in mid-air. The cold, gloomy catacomb recess began to whirl. The impression came to him that all he had witnessed had been the mental torment of a man ravaged by a drug. A great drowsiness smothered down upon him. He heard the old-young men cackling. The shrieks of the dying man still echoed in his ears. Then suddenly he was engulfed by a merciful void. The numbing nam-nam had delivered him to peace once more.

  Chapter XIV

  “X” Gives Battle

  WHEN the Agent came to a second time, it was to feel a stinging sensation on the soles of his feet. He raised up. A cop was drumming his shoes with a nightstick. The Agent, still Danny Dugan, the policy racketeer, drew himself to a sitting position.

  He was on a park bench. This was Marcy Square. The dew was on the grass. The air was fresh, crisp, invigorating, and the dawn was in the glory of its awakening. Birds chirped and twittered in the trees. Pigeons strutted about the walks and lawns, hunting for their morning’s victuals. Squirrels chattered saucily as they begged early pedestrians for handouts. It was a world entering a new day with zest and vitality—a world far removed from the poisonous atmosphere of the DOAC catacombs.

  The Agent didn’t know where the subterranean den of evil was located, for his passage to and from it had occurred when he was unconscious. But he did remember the horrible events, remembered the vicious ultimatum delivered by the DOAC spokesman. He had much to do, and he had to hurry. He judged that it was seven now. Ten hours to be on that square in the Capitol rotunda again—ten hours to save Betty Dale from the hands of the fiends.

  “Better be movin’ on, buddy,” advised the cop. “I don’t want to see anybody booked on a swell morning like this. But I got to protect myself. The captain already has jacked me up for lettin’ you bums snooze on these here benches. Scram!”

  The Agent gladly took the advice, welcoming the fact that the nam-nam paralysis had worn off. He realized he had been brought by the DOACs to Marcy Square and dumped. For all he knew, DOAC spies were watching him, under orders to shadow him wherever he went.

  “X” rode into town, sauntered about the streets for a time. Possibly he wasn’t being shadowed—but he had noticed a lanky, eagle-beaked man watching him at Marcy Square, and he saw the same man again twenty minutes later in town. There might be others.

  As soon as the activity of the day began, he hurried into a big department store, brushed through the early morning mob of shoppers, went up in an elevator, down in another, then slid unobtrusively into a deserted men’s dressing room on the sixth floor.

  When he emerged he had the sandy hair and inconspicuous features of A.J. Martin, newspaper man, and he wore clothes to match the character. He had achieved this transformation with his compact kit of pigments and plastic materials, and by turning his suit inside out, revealing a different fabric and pattern from the one that had served him as Danny Dugan.

  Disguised as A.J. Martin, he descended to the first floor. There he passed the man with the beaklike nose, and the DOAC spy didn’t notice him. Even so, the. Agent changed taxis four times as he left the vicinity of the department store.

  At a public telephone booth he put in a call to his Northern office, learning from Ralph Peters that
his operative, Hobart, had tried to get in touch with him a few minutes before. The Agent had Hobart’s number. It was in the directory of South Bolton, a big industrial town nearly six hundred miles away. He called it at once and Hobart’s voice came excitedly over the wire.

  “All hell’s broken loose, boss,” were Hobart’s first words. He was making no effort now to effect a verbal code. “The D’s are at work again. They’re behind a general strike scheduled to be pulled off in South Bolton. For all I know it may have started. The local unions didn’t cook it up. Everybody’s been working out here and satisfied for the past three months. But the DOACs have scared the bosses into calling a strike. When the lid pops off, it’s going to be nasty business.

  “The D’s have planned carefully. No one here’s strong enough to prevent it. Back of it all is an extortion threat. The D’s have demanded that a dozen mill owners chip in and pile up a hundred-thousand-dollar pool. Then they promise to stop the strike. But the owners won’t cough up.”

  The Agent felt a sudden gnawing in the pit of his stomach. South Bolton was a long way off, and even his Blue Comet couldn’t make it in less than three or four hours.

  His fingers clenched the telephone receiver, pressing till his knuckles went white. His voice was a hoarse whisper as he answered Hobart.

  “Can you do anything to stop it, Jim?”

  “Me? No, boss, I’m sorry. I hate to think of all the poor guys that’s gonna get shot up and gassed. If the factory owners don’t change their minds and come through with the ante, the D’s are all set to wreck the mills. I heard ’em say so. Then the troops and police will be called out—and the workers and their families will get it in the neck. It’s gonna be tough as hell, but there’s nothing I can do, boss. I’ve been working with ’em, getting more and more dope. They’ve got me slated to help when the row starts.”

  AGENT “X” cursed harshly into the receiver. His fingers shook. His scalp felt tight. Betty needed him here in the East—Betty already in the hands of this murderous organization. Yet the thousands who would be affected by this useless, senseless strike needed him, too. How could he serve both, with South Bolton so far away? Yet he must find a method!