The Master didn’t recover before “X” followed up. A brain-fogging smash between the eyes dropped the man to his knees. He lunged for “X’s” legs, but the Agent was expecting that move. He leaped lightly out of the way.
Springing to his feet, the master charged in. That was suicide. “X” sidestepped, and hurled a devastating punch to the center of the Master’s hood. The man’s knees buckled. The Agent slashed with a deadly volley of lefts and rights. The Master flailed madly, but he had taken all that his system could absorb.
He made one last frantic lunge, missed with a clumsy, slow-freight heave, and received a wicked clout to the nerve center behind his ear. He sprawled on the stone floor, and Agent “X” pounced on him.
The Agent’s light sprayed over the face of the man he had pinned down. It was still covered by the livid blue hood. The Agent removed this, and then nodded to himself as though in corroboration of something he already suspected.
“Michael Carney!” he rasped. “Carney—who pretended to stay in prison because he was afraid of the DOACs!”
A harsh laugh came from the Agent’s lips. It was a tribute to one of the cleverest, boldest and most ruthless criminals with whom he had ever come in contact. For a while he had suspected Summerville. Carney himself had thrown suspicion on Di Lauro. Now “X” knew the truth.
Carney’s cold black eyes stared up at the man who had conquered him. Carney’s lips moved.
“Agent ‘X,’” he said. “So—they didn’t kill you after all! You get the last hand! You win! The game is yours—and I don’t even know who you are! But I’ll make you an offer. There’s no man living who can’t use dough. I’ll give you ten million dollars, make you rich for life, if you’ll keep your mouth shut! What do you say?”
The Agent didn’t answer for a moment. He tensed instead. Something—a sound that was like a distant peal of thunder, reaching even to the damp chamber where they were, vibrated through the stone walls, making tremors as though the earth itself were shaking.
A slow, grim smile spread across the lips of the Agent.
“Listen!” he said. “It’s too late, Carney—even if I could be bribed by a devil like you. That noise! It’s your joint across the river blowing up—with all the poison gas and germs and rats in it going up with it. It’s the end of the DOACs, Carney—the end of the maddest, biggest racket that you or any other mobster ever thought of.”
The Agent lifted the man to his feet then. Something had gone out of Carney as that sullen rumble sounded. His body sagged. His face was dough white.
The Agent’s flash was still on. He held Carney’s own pistol against the man’s back.
“One bad play and I shoot, Carney. You’ll follow those devils of yours, and cheat the electric chair. Maybe you’d prefer that. If you do—just try to get away now.”
BUT Carney didn’t. With his organization smashed, his trick discovered, and Agent “X” the victor, Carney showed the abject cowardice of his kind. He shuffled toward the center of the chamber, pointed up.
“That’s the trapdoor,” he said tonelessly. “These used to be the old dark cells. Nobody uses them now. My pen’s just overhead. I cut in under my cot.”
“Pretty clever, Carney,” said the Agent. “You were able to leave your cell at night any time you wanted to—and become the DOAC emperor over in the headquarters you had established. You go up first. I’ll have the gun on you. Don’t make a sound when you get up. Quiet—understand.”
Carney’s face showed that he did not understand; but he obeyed meekly. There was a small stepladder nearby. He drew this up. It reached to within a foot of the low, damp ceiling. Carney climbed with “X” directly behind him. The ex-DOAC leader thrust up the concrete and metal flooring. It had been cleverly hinged and went up noiselessly.
The racketeer stepped through the door and Agent “X” followed, closing it after him. They were in Carney’s cell now, in the prison’s bottom tier, in the row where the “gentlemen” prisoners were kept. Carney, able to pay for small luxuries, was in good company. Bankers, swindlers, wealthy confidence-men, fitted these cells. Carney stood dumbly, wondering what was coming next. Agent “X” acted at once. Climbing up the ladder behind Carney he had changed guns, discarding the deadly automatic for his own gas pistol. He raised this and fired full into the racketeer’s face. When Carney had collapsed he laid the man on the prison bunk.
Then Agent “X” pocketed his pistol and took out his small, elaborate kit of tools.
Listening for the first warning of the night guard’s footsteps, he went to work systematically on the cell lock. There were needle-thin pieces of steel in his tool kit, others with goose necks and still others with small pivotal extensions. He reached out through the bars experimenting with first one steel and then another.
At the end of five minutes the lock clicked open. The Agent crouched back abruptly among the shadows. He heard the slow footsteps of the guard now. He waited until the man had passed, turning a corner to another row of cells. Only the snores of sleeping men sounded.
The Agent left Carney’s cell, shutting and locking the barred door after him. Then he cat-footed along the dark, still corridor toward the passage that he knew led to the warden’s office. He looked up once and saw a lurid flickering light coming through a window high overhead. He knew what that must be, and his eyes shone grimly. Another jarring, thunderous explosion came then from across the river.
Here and there in the prison now he heard sleepy voices calling, men who had been waked from their slumber and were wondering what these explosions meant.
Agent “X” stole on, opening the door to the passage he sought, stealing along it to a door that gave into the warden’s office. A light showed a threadlike streak just above its sill. “X” guessed it was locked.
For a few minute his fingers roved over his face, skillfully changing the disguise of A.J. Martin. That was too valuable to him to throw away now by allowing it to be seen under suspicious circumstances. His features had a thin, nondescript look as he took out one of his master keys and went to work cautiously on the lock, flashlight in hand.
He swung the door open silently, stepped into the room.
A man was standing by a big window which gave a view over the prison wall and out across the river. He was staring intently, his face cleft into deep lines of worry. The man was Warden Johnson, on night duty since the first DOAC raid.
So absorbed was he in the lurid flames and clouds of smoke drifting above the St. Clair mansion that he didn’t see the lone visitor who had come so silently into his office.
Not until “X” spoke did Johnson realize he was not alone. Then he turned and gave a violent start of amazement.
“Warden—don’t move,” said Agent “X” quietly.
JOHNSON’S eyes grew wide with alarm as he studied the man who had come into his office through a locked door. The man wasn’t dressed in prison clothes. His features were unfamiliar. His suit was dripping wet. It was this fact that seemed to hold Johnson’s interest as much as anything.
He opened his lips to speak at last, but the Agent silenced him with a wave of the gun he held in his hand.
“Pardon the intrusion, warden. It was necessary—as you will understand later. Now take off your clothes, if you please—I am going out and want to change with you. My own are wet and uncomfortable.”
The warden’s jaw dropped. He showed no inclination to obey. Amazement seemed to have robbed him of the power of movement. The Agent came closer, his finger tensed.
“I’m sorry, warden. I didn’t want to have to do this, but—”
He left the sentence unfinished. His finger pressed the trigger of the gas gun. A jet of vapor spurted into the prison warden’s nostrils and open mouth. He collapsed soundlessly, unhurt, but completely out.
The Agent worked quickly, stripping the man’s clothes off, substituting his own wet ones, and getting into the warden’s suit himself. He moved the warden’s inert body until the desk light, tilte
d over the edge of the desk, fell on his face. He studied that face for moments, then strode across the office and made sure the door was locked on the inside.
He set up the small, triple-glassed mirror that he had removed from his wet clothes, lifted a tube of his plastic, volatile material and a vial of pigment. Then he went to work on his face again, his skilled fingers moving with the deft touch of a magician. He was in a bad spot. If some one should come— But circumstances had forced his hand, making necessary the thing he was about to do. He did not want to be held and questioned by the police. It might interfere with the future of his dangerous, daring career.
With a fidelity that was uncanny he imitated every contour and line of Warden Johnson’s face. He molded his own features into an exact likeness, until it seemed that the warden’s twin brother stood in that room. When all was finished, and his material put away, he carefully thrust the warden’s unconscious body behind his desk where it would not be discovered for some time, perhaps not until the warden himself came to.
Then the Agent drew the warden’s small typewriter across the desk and sat down. He put a piece of blank paper in the roller. For five minutes his long fingers clattered over the keys with the staccato speed of a machine-gun fusillade.
The words that he left gave all details of DOAC activities in America, of the strange headquarters that had existed across the river, and of Mike Carney’s secret leadership of the murderous group. He told also of the exit in Carney’s cell and the torpedo which rode a wire under the river and was the connecting link. When he finished he leaned forward and made a brief pencil mark—the sign of an X.
The Agent rose and strode to the door then. In a moment he was moving along a hallway that led to the prison exit. He passed a guard who nodded and asked a question.
“What’s going on, sir, in that house across the river? It’s gone up in smoke, they say, and—it sounds like a munitions plant exploding.”
“Perhaps it was,” said “X” dryly. “I’m going out to see.”
He passed other guards as he left the prison. With them also he nodded and exchanged comments. Outside the prison wall, a grizzled officer in charge of a contingent of State troopers saluted respectfully. Agent “X” returned the salute, the gleam of sardonic amusement in his eyes. His work was done. He was passing back into the obscurity and mystery that surrounded his life and activities, under the very nose of the law.
He turned and strode away into the night as the Army officer watched him, slightly puzzled as to where the warden was going. The lurid light of the fire still raging in the house across the river silhouetted “X’s” figure for a moment. Then the velvet darkness swallowed him, and, out of the shadows where he had gone, only a strange, melodious whistle floated. But the note of it died slowly, and presently only the silence of the night was left.
Table of Contents
Secret Agent "X": The Complete Series Volume 2
Copyright Information
Introduction by Will Murray
City of the Living Dead
Hand of Horror
Octopus of Crime
The Hooded Hordes
Secret Agent “X” – The Complete Series Volume 2 Page 60
