Secret Agent "X" – The Complete Series, Volume 2

Chapter I

THE tall man in the office marked “E.E. Winstead” was restless. He glanced at his watch for the dozenth time, looked at the telephone cradled in its rack, went to the window and stared out.

Below him, evening traffic moved glitteringly. Taxis, private limousines, roadsters and coupés rolled by. A swirling tide of humanity passed along the sidewalk toward the garish lights of the theatre district.

As he watched, figures detached themselves from the crowds, stopped to buy papers at the stands or from one of the newsboys who were screaming shrilly, then moved on, antlike, bearing their bits of white away. There was a note of strident excitement in the continuous clamor of those newsboys.

“Extra! Read all about the big moider! Senator Foster killed! Extra!”

The tall man left his office, went down into the street, got himself a paper and returned. It was the third time he had done so within an hour. He seemed to crave action.

A half dozen earlier editions lay on his desk. This one added little to the news about the murder. The lead of the story was the same.

The tall man sank into the big chair before his desk again. He found one new item at the end of the murder story of this latest edition. A maid in the senator’s home claimed she’d seen a strange car parked before the driveway some time in the middle of the afternoon.

Carefully the man at the desk cut this item out, adding it to an envelope of clippings in a drawer. Those clippings were from many papers in all parts of the country. They told of strange crimes that had taken place in recent weeks of National Guard barracks and police headquarters raided in the dead of night by weirdly hooded figures; of machine guns, rifles, automatics and ammunition stolen in alarming quantities; of sporting goods stores that had been broken into and stripped of all weapons in Cleveland, Salt Lake City, Buffalo. All this was believed to be the work of the DOACs.

In a dozen other cities, a chain of hideous murders had been reported. Men had been found dead, killed by molten lead poured into their throats. Men with ghastly gray beards of metal covering their chins. This might be the work of the DOACs, too.

The tall man at the desk didn’t know. There was a frown of deep concentration in his intent, burning eyes. His long fingers reached up, touching his face in an absent gesture. That face, completely natural in appearance, was a marvelously clever disguise. The features under it were hidden so well that no one would have guessed their presence. They were concealed as cunningly as the identity of the tall man himself. For “E.E. Winstead” and the mysterious investigator of crime called Secret Agent “X” were one and the same.

THE name was only another cognomen of the Man of a Thousand Faces — the man whose amazing, daring actions had aroused the curiosity of every detective bureau in the country as well as the underworld.

It was a name chosen by Agent “X” in the campaign against crime inspired by a secret message straight from Washington, D.C.

Sensing what the threat of the DOACs might mean, “X” had organized his own secret staff of skilled operatives. He had posted them in every state in the Union.

Little was known about the DOACs. Progress, so far, had been pitifully slight. It was rumored that they planned a dictatorship of America; rumored that disgruntled, discontented people all over the country were joining their secret membership. The symbol of their power was a clenched fist hurling a lightning bolt.

The telephone rang as Agent “X” bent over his clippings. It was a long-distance call from a state nearly a thousand miles away. The voice that came over the wire was that of Jim Hobart, one of the Secret Agent’s most skilled and trusted operatives. There was a quaver of excitement in Hobart’s tone now.

“Calling E.E. Winstead.”

“Winstead speaking.”

“Solder has gone down again, boss. Two more customers in this territory received orders last night. My own firm may have been active. Haven’t been able to locate any parties to the deal. Prospects for advancement look swell. Saw what happened to sponsor of Washington code. What instructions have you?”

Agent “X’s” fingers tightened over the telephone till his knuckles showed white. In those short, innocent-sounding sentences Jim Hobart had got across a message of horror. “Solder has gone down again,” meant that molten lead had been used as a murder weapon once more. “Two more customers in this territory received orders last night,” indicated that there had been two victims. And by his reference to the “sponsor of Washington code” Hobart was telling “X” that he’d seen about Senator Foster’s murder.

The Secret Agent’s voice was devoid of emotion as he answered: “Continue sales work in that territory. Be careful of too rapid promotion. Call me again tomorrow.”

He snapped the receiver up. The burning look in his eyes had deepened. Hobart, ex-police detective, suspended from the city force on graft charges that were the result of an underworld frame-up, had been given employment by the Agent. The ex-dick didn’t know for whom he was working. He thought that Winstead was the assumed name of A.J. Martin, an inquiring newspaper reporter who wanted to get inside facts about the DOACs for his paper.

With Agent “X’s” guidance, Hobart had been able to join the ranks of the DOACs in one of their midwest chapters. But Hobart’s reports, though faithful, had been disappointing to “X.” The rank and file of the DOACs knew little. They merely received instructions and propaganda from an “inner circle,” which Hobart had been unable to penetrate as yet.

Restlessly Agent “X” scanned the paper to see if these other brutal murders in the West had been recorded. They had not. Hobart had given him the news by wire long before it had reached the metropolitan press. Then suddenly Agent “X” started.

His eyes, trained to miss nothing, focused abruptly on the personal columns of this late edition. There in bold type were words that made his pulses hammer.

The group of letters that followed the Agent’s name was as surprising as the public appearance of that name itself. The entry in the personal column read thus:

The Agent tensed in his desk chair. Here was a code message or a cipher-gram. Some one wanted to get in touch with him. Some one had used the personal column of the paper as the only means of doing so.

STARING at the word grouping, “X” knew that they might be in any one of many ciphers.

With fingers that trembled he drew a pad and pencil toward him. It was second nature with him to attempt a solution of any code or cipher he might happen to see.

He jotted down the established frequency table of letters beginning with “E”, one hundred and twenty-six, “T” ninety, “R” eighty-three. This table had been figured out by government experts. It showed the natural frequency of letters as they appeared in the English language, based on a comparative study of one hundred thousand words. But the letters in the newspaper appeared to follow no regular frequency.

The discovery of this eliminated the possibility of a common substitution cipher. “X” reasoned that the man who had written the cipher would not have used code. Without a decoding book, patient weeks of labor were often required before a code could be read. “X” experimented with all the better-known ciphers; then glanced at the first three words again — his own name.

His brain worked with lightning rapidity. Could it be that the key to the cipher was contained in those words? This seemed to be a logical conclusion. No one had gotten in touch with him previously to suggest a key. Until a key was found no cipher except those of the simplest forms could be solved.

The full force of Agent “X’s” extraordinary deductive powers focused on the problem. All types of ciphers were known to him. The key words of most did not contain repeated letters. The word “secret” for this reason would not be likely to constitute a key. “X” was too short. This left “agent” as the most logical possibility.

“X” drew up charts of the best-known ciphers. He tried the word “agent” in various positions without results, finally arriving at the diagraphic cipher known as the Playfair. This had often been used in the World War.

He made the necessary twenty-five letter box, put the word “agent” at the top — its natural position — and went to work on the message again. Then almost instantly his eyes brightened. The first four letters of the first group, “BTXA,” spelled “have.”

Quickly, with the expert ease of a man trained in cipher and code work, he deciphered the other groups, using the vertical, horizontal, and diagonal letters on the Playfair diagram he had made. The result was a message more significant than even he had anticipated.

“Have information concerning menace threatening peace and safety of country. Please communicate through paper in same cipher to arrange meeting. Speed imperative.”

For many seconds “X” studied this message. The dynamic light of intelligence in his eyes seemed to glow like a living torch. Was this a trap, set by the DOACs themselves, after learning somehow that he was active against them? Or was it from some one willing to take a desperate chance and become an informer against the DOAC organization? For the wording of the message made “X” certain that it referred to the DOACs in one form or other.

Working carefully with his diagram, using the Playfair cipher again, with the word “agent” as the key, he enciphered an answering message.

Translated, this message read:

He figured the word rate on this, according to the paper’s published schedule, then put the message and the money in a sealed envelope addressed to the paper’s personal column. Out in the street he went quickly to a telegraph office twelve blocks away. Here, without giving his name or address, he handed the envelope to a special messenger for immediate delivery to the newspaper. It would appear in the next afternoon’s edition where the eyes of the Agent’s mysterious correspondent would surely see it.

Chapter II

TWENTY-FOUR hours later, a smart coupé turned into River Boulevard, heading uptown. The lights of other cars showed beetle-like along the wide thoroughfare. On the black river the ports of ferries and steamers twinkled.

The man at the car’s wheel bore no likeness to E.E. Winstead. His features were such that one would have said there was not even a family resemblance. Yet he was the same man who had read and answered a message in the Playfair cipher through the columns of the paper.

So plastic and flexible was the strange, volatile material used by “X” in his disguises that it seemed living flesh. The new features he had created, though unlike Winstead’s, were just as commonplace. For the Agent didn’t want to attract attention to himself. And, just as he had taken precautions to make an elaborate disguise, so he had taken other precautions.

Concealed in hidden pockets of his suit were nearly a half dozen of the odd devices he was in the habit of carrying.

The coupé he was in, seemingly an ordinary stock model car, had sheets of light-weight armor plate along the back and sides. This plate, of the finest manganese steel, was proof even against machine-gun bullets. The Agent had used it tonight, half suspecting he was walking into a trap.

Even in this armored car he knew he was challenging death. But fear had no place in his dangerous, desperate work. Fear he had cast out long ago. His pulses were beating with excitement now, with the thrill of the chase, with the hope that the mysterious code message and the man he was to meet in the next half hour would throw some light on the strange activity of the dreaded DOACs.

In the fast-moving cars he passed were couples and groups of well-dressed people on their way to evening entertainment. Soon they would be drinking, dancing, laughing, sitting in comfortable seats at popular shows.

Their gay and smiling faces were in sharp contrast to the dark, brooding menace Agent “X” had set himself to combat. Yet, if that menace were allowed to go unchecked, the secure world that these people knew would end. There would be bloodshed, misery, terror spread across the face of America. The DOAC organization with its poisonous, insidious propaganda would rise like a savage tide sweeping all before it.

The corner lights of Morgan Street appeared directly ahead. The Secret Agent pressed the brake pedal of his armored coupé. No other car was parked here now. His own would appear plainly to the unknown cryptographer when he passed.

Agent “X” backed his coupé into Morgan Street, facing the boulevard, ready to go in either direction if a strange car should signal him to follow. His own parking lights were on. He turned off the dashboard light. In the dark interior of the car he sat, waiting, smoking cigarettes, eyes watchful.

Once a black limousine came along Morgan Street and passed him. There were four men in it. The Agent tensed, prepared to hear the crash of bullets. But the car rolled by, the men did not look his way. A policeman swinging his nightstick sauntered down the block, passed out of sight. The traffic along the boulevard appeared to thin. The Agent looked at his watch.

Ten minutes to nine. The city crowds, pleasure bent, had already arrived at their destinations. The hour of “X’s” strange rendezvous was drawing near.

He watched every car that passed now with an intent gaze that missed nothing.

Nine came. A minute went by — two — and then the Agent sat straight forward in his seat, hand poised over the gear shift of his coupé. For a small sedan was rumbling by. There was a lone man at the wheel. As he came opposite Morgan Street, the man turned his head for a bare instant. Then the tail light and front headlights of his car winked four times.

Smoothly Agent “X” meshed his clutch, and released the brake. Smoothly he rolled onto the wide boulevard. But his eyes were focused intently on the car ahead. Its red tail light was a secret symbol of mystery.

The sedan had not slackened its pace. Only by that brief, winking of light had the man in it betrayed that he was responding to the Agent’s ciphergram.

“X” turned into the boulevard and rolled after the car ahead. He cut down the intervening space till the sedan was only the distance of a half city block in front of him. He was following as he had said he would, waiting now for the man to lead the way.

Ten blocks farther, and the driver of the sedan turned off the boulevard. He sought a side street, a wide thoroughfare in the uptown residential section of the city. Here he kept up the same steady pace and the Agent followed.

Then suddenly Agent “X” hunched forward over the wheel. A hundred feet ahead, out of the mouth of an intervening street, another car plunged. Its speed indicated it had left the boulevard at the same time as the sedan, driven along a parallel way, and deliberately cut in at this point. The rear curtains were down. “X” could not see inside. But he had caught a glimpse of several heads as the car made the turn.

THE sedan in front suddenly speeded up and “X” saw in that instant that the bigger car was giving chase. Fury possessed him, fury and a sense that he was fighting some vast ruthless force. For there was maddening efficiency in the way the other car behaved. Those in it had been lurking somewhere along the boulevard. They had seen the signals the sedan had flashed, seen and given chase. They had waited till the sedan was well away from the lighted boulevard before coming close. What were their intentions?

The next few minutes developed into a roaring, rocketing chase. Stark fear seemed to possess the man in the sedan. He was driving ahead like a madman, driving so fast that in the first moments of the chase he drew away from the limousine, and from Agent “X” following.

Then the limousine speeded up, too. In a moment the Agent heard the crackling tattoo of machine gun fire. The men in the limousine were shooting at the fleeing sedan. “X” pressed the accelerator of his own car nearly to the floor boards. It leaped ahead dangerously through the dark street. Lights were appearing in windows along the way. The quest of the writer of the ciphergram had plunged “X” into a fierce turmoil of action. Its culmination came quickly.

As he drew close to the limousine, the rear curtain moved aside. Something was shoved through an opening. A winking eye of flame appeared. Spidery crossed lines showed on the shatter-proof glass of the windshield of “X’s” car. The snap and crack of bullets sounded.

“X” lifted a bullet-proof metal panel which rose nearly to his eyes. Lead struck against this.

Then the men in the car lowered the snout of their weapon. A front tire on “X’s” car blew with a ripping explosion. A giant’s hand seemed trying to wrench the wheel from his grip.

The next second became a fight with death, a fight to see that his coupé did not leave the street, plunge across the sidewalk and wreck itself against the side of a house. Muscles in his arms and shoulders stood out. He held the wheel steady.

So fast had he been traveling, so torn by bullets was the tire, that it flapped around the rim of the wheel, beating against the fender. And, as the plunging car slowed, it came off the wheel entirely, and the coupé jounced along on one metal rim.

Agent “X” brought the car to a standstill, leaped out. His eyes were livid pools of light. The muscles of his face were set into masklike rigidity. The chase was far ahead now, nearly two blocks beyond the point where he had been shot at. He could still hear the popping of bullets.

A cruising taxi, attracted by the noise, came whirling out of a side street. Agent “X” leaped to the running board. The taxi driver, seeing the Agent’s bullet-ravaged car tilted against the curb, seemed to regret his haste in coming to the scene so soon. A tight-lipped command from “X” jerked him into action.

“Follow that car ahead. Step on it!” the Agent ordered.

The taxi driver’s reactions were almost automatic. The dynamic light in the Agent’s eyes, the snapping tones of his voice, left no other alternative. The taxi plunged ahead.

Far behind in the night the thin wail of a siren sounded. Some one had telephoned. The police were coming. But “X” feared what might happen to the man in the sedan before they arrived.

STRAINING his eyes over the taxi driver’s hunched shoulders, he saw the sedan forced to the curb. He saw the limousine stop, saw men swarm out, but could not make out clearly what happened. Those other figures which had come out of the limousine appeared to be lifting the driver of the sedan across the street bodily.

They thrust him inside. The limousine leaped forward again while the taxi was still a block behind.

In a burst of speed it passed the parked sedan, empty now. “X” saw that it, too, had been raked with bullets. Both rear tires were riddled into ribbons. The rear window was smashed. So were two of the side windows. He wondered if the man were still alive. If so, what would those others do to him?

The hideous answer to that came quickly. They had left the residential district behind. They tore through a section of small stores, then the street cut between open building lots. The taxi driver was swearing.

“I can’t catch ’em, boss. This bus is too slow, I’ll burn ’er out.”

Agent “X” didn’t answer. The driver was obviously doing his best. The clattering whine of the straining motor told that. But he had seen what the driver of the cab had not. The car ahead had pulled up to the curb beside one of the vacant lots. The door opened and something was heaved out — something that lurched and tottered on its feet for a moment then pitched forward, falling.

The limousine roared on into the night; the taxi after it. But Agent “X,” seeing the hopelessness of trying to overtake that speeding car in this cab, issued another sharp command to the driver.

“Stop on the next block.”

The taxi drew into the curb close to the spot where the car ahead had halted. Before it had ceased to roll forward, Agent “X” yanked the door open and flung himself out

The man he had seen fall was not on the sidewalk. He was a dark, seemingly shapeless blob on the other side of it, face pressed downward against the earth.

Agent “X” leaped forward and turned him over. A gasp of sheer horror fell from his lips. For the man was dead, his features screwed into distorted agony. His lips were wide apart in what appeared at first a hideous grin. But a clot of lead, once molten, now hardened into terrible solidity, thrust from his mouth. It hung down over his chin like a grotesque untrimmed beard. The man’s tongue had been silenced forever.

Chapter III

THE taxi driver left his cab, followed “X” and stared down at the dead man, eyes wide, voice a hoarse rasp.

“Jeez — who is it? What did they do to that guy?”

The Agent made no reply. He did not know himself who the man was. He stooped quickly, thrust a hand into the man’s coat pocket. His fingers encountered a worn wallet and a few letters which he drew out, clicking on a small flashlight.

“Gordon Ridley, Twenty-four Warner Avenue,” was the name on the letters and on the name card in the wallet.

Agent “X” put both into his own coat, and searched the man’s other pockets to see if there was anything else to identify him. Nothing but a bunch of keys, which “X” pocketed, also.

“Who is he?” the taxi man repeated. “Those guys took him for a ride.”

Agent “X” nodded, then swivelled his head suddenly. The note of a police siren was sounding down the block. Headlights of a swift car appeared. Other sirens yelped thinly, blocks away, like hounds giving tongue.

“The cops,” breathed the taxi driver.

Agent “X” drew a couple of dollars from his own wallet, put them into the dazed taxi man’s hands, enough to cover his fare. He turned then and strode swiftly across the big vacant lot.

“Hey!” the taxi man yelled after him. “Wait!”

“X” paid no attention, moving on into the shadows, breaking into a run at the last as he heard the brakes of the first radio patrol car screech to a halt. He did not want the delay of endless questions. The police would want to know what he knew about the dead man. They would hold him as a material witness, perhaps try to implicate him in the crime.

He vaulted a fence, turned right down another street, cut between two dark houses, then turned left, zigzagging like a pursued fox.

Somewhere behind him a police whistle shrilled. He could hear excited voices, the sound of running feet. He soon left both behind. But he was not taking any chances.

Under cover of the darkness his skilled fingers worked with uncanny dexterity. He removed a layer of plastic material from his face, added another pigment, darkening his skin, built up new contours from the tubes he took from his pocket. He seemed a swarthy Latin when he came into the light again. The taxi man would not be able to identify him if they should meet. Neither would those in the murder car if by any chance they had gotten a glimpse of him in his coupé.

He hailed another taxi on a cross street, said:

“Warner Avenue.”

“What number, chief?” the taxi driver asked.

The Agent said: “Just drive along. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

They swung into Warner Avenue, a section of cheap rooming houses. The Agent eyed the numbers on the buildings as they passed. He ordered the cab to stop when forty showed, paid his fare and continued on foot.

Sauntering on the opposite side of the street, he saw No. 24 across the way. The house that the dead man lived in was like the others on that block — red brick, dilapidated, hinting of respectability gone into decay. There was a “room to let” sign in the front window.

The block seemed quiet, broodingly sinister. Night wind rustled the leaves of the few sparse trees. Somewhere a fretful child was crying faintly. These were the only sounds.

AGENT “X” crossed the street, eyes alert, pulses quickening. He climbed the cracked steps of No. 24, took out the keys that he had removed from Ridley’s pocket. His knowledge of locks made him choose the right one instantly. He opened the door, entered a musty carpeted hall. A small bulb covered with peeled yellow paint cast a saffron glow over a hat stand, an old chair, and a small table. Somewhere in the basement rooms he heard footsteps, as of a large woman moving about a kitchen. A doorway showed a flight of stairs leading down.

He passed this, moved by an old-fashioned parlor and up a flight of stairs to the floor above. This it seemed likely would be where the rented rooms were located.

Again his knowledge of locks served him. Several doors were shut. Another key on Ridley’s ring opened one. “X” found himself in a small hall bedroom.

Tensely he looked around. The place had an eeriness to it. It was the room of a murdered man — the room, perhaps, of a man belonging to a powerful and deadly secret society. Before making inquiries of the landlady, Agent “X” began a swift search of that room.

He went to the door, shoved the old-fashioned bolt home, strode to a small dresser standing against the wall. With speed and thoroughness his hands roved through the drawers.

Nothing here but a few pieces of clothing and some toilet articles. The closet in the room held an overcoat, two pairs of shoes, a couple of empty boxes. Ridley’s belongings showed that he had been in poor circumstances financially.

A battered suitcase was stuffed under the bed. The Agent drew this out eagerly. Some old magazines were stuffed in it, a few more clothes. In the cover flap were some letters addressed to Ridley.

“X” glanced through them, gathered that they were from a married sister on the West Coast. They threw no light on the menace that Ridley’s cipher had indicated.

The Agent was puzzled. How had Ridley come to use the Playfair cipher? What connection, if any, had Ridley with the DOACs? Again, the Agent’s deductive faculties began working. A man sufficiently cunning to use a complicated cipher would hardly leave incriminating evidence lying about his room for the prying eyes of a landlady to see. But that didn’t mean there was nothing here.

“X” began a more thorough search of the room then. He had looked in all the obvious places. He began systematically going over every foot of wall space and every stick of furniture. He turned the chairs upside down, searched the bottoms. He pulled every drawer out of the dresser, looked beneath them. He took the bedcovers off, searched them and the mattress. Nothing came to light.

Then he stared at the floor. There was a worn carpet on it, nailed down, showing the uneven ridges of irregular boarding beneath. Something caught and held the Agent’s eye.

At one corner of the carpet, that nearest the window, the tack heads looked brighter. He verified this by getting down on hands and knees. The other tacks showed rust spots, or worn places where feet had tramped. These were newer, unworn. The Agent’s eyes glowed. Such little things he had trained himself to observe, things that other people might have passed by.

He took out his compact tool kit, removed from it a thing like a small chisel. He thrust the edge of this under one of the tacks.

The tack came up easily, showing that it had been removed before, or that the wood beneath was rotten.

In less than a minute he had all the tacks in the corner up. The board beneath was sound. The Agent’s pulses beat faster. He saw that at some time this piece of boarding had been sawed in two, a foot from the wall. There were nail heads in it, but, when he inserted his chisel device, the board lifted easily. The nail heads were only dummies.

Beneath the boarding was a space a foot square between the floor and the ceiling of the room below. In this hidden space were several articles. One, which instantly attracted the Agent, was a folded bit of rubber like a bathing cap. The Agent picked it up. His hand trembled then, for he saw at once that it was not a bathing cap, but a hood, made to fit tightly over the head, with eyeholes and a breathing space cut for the mouth.

He recalled the raids on police headquarters and National Guard barracks made by strangely garbed figures. Staring at the thing in his hands he had a sense of eeriness. Here was the hood of a DOAC member. Vivid blue, skull-like, it would, he knew, make its wearer look like a grotesque human vulture.

HERE was proof, also, that Ridley had belonged to the DOAC organization, proof that the hideous molten lead murders could be attributed to the secret society, as “X” had guessed.

The Agent stuffed the hood in an inner pocket. Its presence on him would be like a death warrant if he should be caught by the DOACs. And, if he fell into the hands of police and it were found, it would mean imprisonment. But neither possibility worried him. His eyes were bright with the thrill of the quest.

He picked up the other articles in the floor space. These consisted of a wicked looking Webley, a box of shells beside it, and an envelope containing a small pamphlet and a square of paper. He pulled the paper out, stared at it frowning.

Here was an example of the propaganda that was luring thousands of embittered souls into the ranks of a secret society that was as false as it was criminal. The word “DOAC” was an abbreviation of the phrase “Defenders of the American Constitution.” But Agent “X” wasn’t fooled by their high-sounding title.

There were murderous fanatics in the membership; thieves and killers who sought only their own good. To swell their ranks they were wilfully sowing the seeds of fear, doubt, bitterness; trying to undermine the faith of those who believed in the strength and destiny of democratic America.

He folded the paper, put that in his pocket also, picked up the small pamphlet that the envelope also contained. Its date was 1918. It was a pamphlet dealing with codes, ciphers, and secret inks — the kind issued formerly to operatives in the American Intelligence Service.

It hinted that Ridley, the murdered man misled by the false propaganda of the DOACs, and learning his mistake too late, had at one time been connected with the Secret Service.

It gave “X” a clear mental picture of the man, Ridley, discharged from service at the end of the World War perhaps, had become bitter when he found himself at last among the ranks of the unemployed. He had been fit material for the DOACs’ lies. But Ridley, finding that the organization of which he had become a member was really a threat to the country he had once served and loved, had tried to do his duty, tried to bring details of the menace he saw to the ears of the one man he thought might help.

Agent “X” put the pamphlet and the gun back into the floor space. He put the board over it, placed the carpet and the tacks back in place.

He had found out all he wanted to know here. No need to question the landlady. She wouldn’t even be aware of the strange significance of her roomer. “X” unbolted the door, slipped out into the hall as quietly as he had come. He descended the stairs of the still, gloomy old house, opened the front door.

Then instantly he paused, his eagle-sharp eyes swiveling forward while the crack of the door was only a few inches wide.

For a man was lounging across the street, a man who had the manner of a shadower. He was watching No. 24, leaning against a fence.

THE Agent drew the door shut swiftly, not knowing whether the man, a detective possibly, or a spy of the DOAC organization, had seen him or not. He retreated quickly along the hall toward the rear of the house. His discoveries had been too precious for him to risk capture now.

In the stuffy, old-fashioned parlor he raised a window quietly. There was a trellis just outside, a yard beneath. The yard was still and dark. He climbed through the window, shutting it after him, swung down from the trellis onto the soft turf of the yard. He cat-footed across it, climbed a fence, and immediately became conscious that he was being followed. There was a skulking figure behind him in the shadows by the fence.

The Agent set his lips grimly. He slipped into the darker shadows himself, removed his gas gun which could knock a man unconscious even in the open air with its charge of dense, anesthetic vapor.

Moving along the side of the fence, he passed through a free-swinging gate into another yard. Here he waited, planning to make a prisoner of this shadower behind and find out who he was — detective or DOAC spy. But the man did not come on. He, too, waited, crouching animal-like, a barely visible blob in the eerie gloom of the night.

Then the Agent whirled, eyes narrowed. On his right, across the width of the yard, something else moved. The lighted rear window of a house in the row along Warner Avenue was suddenly blotted out by the head and shoulders of a man. “X” felt a tensing of the skin along his scalp. There was a purposefulness about the man’s movement. It came to the Agent abruptly that this man and the shadower behind him were working in perfect accord.

Stooping, running silently on the balls of his feet, Agent “X” tried to put distance between himself and this second shadower. But a third figure appeared at his left. Then something moved straight ahead — and “X” knew suddenly that he was surrounded; that the night was filled with skulking, sinister forms. That these men were DOACs, determined to capture or kill him.

Chapter IV

HE waited tensely, taking stock of his chances of escape. They appeared slight at the moment. These men, who to the Agent’s experienced eye did not behave like detectives, had completely surrounded the house where Ridley had dwelt. They were closing in on him — human wolves seeking their human prey.

He could see the ghostly whiteness of their faces, see the glitter of their eyes. They wore no hoods now. They counted on the darkness to hide their identities — or else were so sure of their victim that they didn’t care whether they were seen or not.

Agent “X” flung toward the darker shadows of a scraggly hedge which made an uneven line by one of the fences. He merged with it, paused a moment, then ducked back on his tracks.

The men immediately in front converged on the hedge, thinking evidently that “X” planned to use it as a barrier. He saw the gleam of guns in their hands. Yet they seemed reluctant to shoot. It appeared that they wanted to take him alive.

He saw his chance and vaulted over another fence. Somewhere in the darkness behind him there was a sibilant exclamation — a warning or a command.

He glanced over his shoulder in time to see two figures fling over the fence after him. The sinister chase was on again. Against the lights in the rear of the houses he saw crisscrossed clothes poles with lines strung between. He stared intently, wondering if these offered a way of escape; then quickly gave up the idea. A building, taller than the others, showed up ahead, with two backyards intervening. It was a six-floor, walk-up apartment, and it occurred to “X” that there might be a basement area-way here, offering an exit to the street.

He moved swiftly toward the rear steps of the nearest rooming house, leading the chase that way. Then he put on a burst of speed, leaped across a weed-grown flower bed.

The dark, clustered leaves of a bank of peonies rose like a protecting barrier. He swished through them, crouched. He knew now why the men around him held their fire. They did not want to draw attention to themselves — and they felt sure of their victim.

The Agent found an old empty basket leaning against the fence behind the peony bed. He flung this to his left, making it stir the dank stems of the plants ten feet away. He himself moved with catlike steps in the other direction. This ruse gave him nearly twenty feet advantage over his pursuers.

He was vaulting over a fence when they spotted him again. He dropped down, crossed another yard and then a second fence. The rear of the dingy apartment was directly ahead. “X” saw no areaway entrance; but there was one dim bulb burning in a basement window, and the window was open.

Quick as a flash “X” slid through it, and found himself in a damp cellar with ash cans, a coal bin, and an unlighted furnace. Ahead was a door leading to the street apparently; but “X” hesitated to use it. Seeing the grim efficiency of these men, he guessed there would be other watchers posted outside; guessed that every side of the block was under close surveillance. Those who had murdered Ridley were out to see that the man who had answered his cipher did not escape.

The Agent wheeled around the coal bin in the cellar, saw an old cracked wardrobe closet standing against the brick wall before him. It might offer a possible hiding place.

He reached forward, drew the door open, and instantly changed his plan. Here was no hiding place. The wardrobe was hardly more than eight inches deep. The whole front opened up. But the janitor had obviously used this discarded piece of furniture for his own convenience. An old coat and a pair of dusty overalls hung on hooks inside. A row of whisky bottles, some empty, some half filled, were ranged along the floor.

Agent “X” snatched the two articles of clothing from their hooks. He strode into a space behind the coal bin where he saw a workbench and a rack of rusty tools. He slipped into the overalls with lightning speed; then, before snapping the shoulder straps, he took certain articles from an inner pocket of his own suit

A light, silk mesh toupee was among the articles. He discarded his hat, throwing it into a refuse can and dropping a soiled burlap bag over it. Next he slipped the toupee over his head. He peeled away portions of the flexible, pliant material forming his disguise, giving his face a suddenly cadaverous look.

From a small vial in his pocket he smeared reddish brown pigment over his features; black pigment beneath his eyes. Then he dabbed dust and cinders over his already changed face. The result was startling.

In the space of a few seconds the Man of a Thousand Faces had created a new personality. He was, to all intents and purposes, a hatchet-faced, bent old man now. The plastic material remaining still on his chin, nose, upper lip and forehead, distorted the whole shape of his face. He let his shoulders droop, swung his head from side to side. He no longer resembled the man who had entered Ridley’s room.

He could hear faint noises. The sinister members of the DOAC gang would arrive in the basement any moment, knowing that the man they had pursued must come through that window.

“X” picked a wrench from the tool rack. At the end of the chamber behind the coal bin was a massive boiler. A tangle of pipes led from this along the wall. Several faucets led from the pipes. Agent “X” clamped the wrench over one faucet, turning the handle slightly at the same time so that water ran out. He flung some in his cupped palm over another pipe elbow. He bent forward and thrust the wrench in among the pipes. The glow of the dim bulb shed sufficient light for a man to work by.

As he stooped over, back turned, his sensitive ears told him that he wasn’t alone in the cellar. Cautious footsteps sounded. The Agent deliberately rattled his wrench on a pipe elbow. So quietly that he could barely hear them, the footsteps approached.

It took all the Agent’s will power not to turn. Lax as he seemed, he was ready for a lightninglike spring if he was attacked. Death was close at hand. But he was gambling on the perfection of his quick disguise. This bent, white-haired old man in slack overalls and jumper, stooped over the pipes, surely didn’t look like that agile-footed person the DOACs had pursued across a maze of yards.

Then he felt the hard, vicious snout of a gun thrust against his ribs. A harsh voice told him:

“Stick ’em up!”

The words, the accents of the voice, smacked of the underworld. Agent “X” gave a deliberate start of surprise. He straightened slightly, mustered his breath in cracked accents. Then he turned, raising his arm as he did so, and letting the wrench fall.

A man was standing before him, a man with a blue, close-fitting hood over his head. Only his eyes showed; glittering, feverish in their brightness, and the cruel, thin slit of a mouth. The man’s hands on the big automatic were as white as a girl’s however. The man’s pressed trousers spoke of the dandy.

Behind that macabre hood was the vicious gunman type that “X” had met with before. It confirmed his suspicion that there were hardened criminals within the DOAC ranks. Looking over the gunman’s shoulder he saw other hooded faces staring at him in the gloom of the cellar, other guns pointing his way.

The slightest out-of-character gesture on his part now and he would be cut down mercilessly. Here were the flitting figures that had pursued him across the yard. Here were the ruthless human wolves set to hunt him down.

Agent “X,” playing his part in masterly fashion, let his body grow still more lax and let his jaw sag. When he spoke his tongue clucked and stuttered as though in mortal terror.

“Go — easy — there, f-fella! I–I ain’t got nothin’—you want!”

The hooded man’s eyes bored into his. The Agent’s dust-streaked face worked with apparent fear — worked as an old man’s might, helpless before desperate criminals. He could feel the eyes of the others searching him, too. Life or death dwelt in their gaze. He waited to see whether his disguise would be adequate.

TENSE seconds passed. The gunman snarled an abrupt question. “Was there a guy in here a minute ago?”

Agent “X” shook his head, moving his lips as though they were palsied. The muzzle of the gun was jabbed closer.

“N-no. I didn’t see nobody,” “X” stuttered.

The sinister beings in the room debated a moment. Then one of them spoke commandingly.

“Keep him covered — we’ll look around.” The hooded figures moved away, all but the one guarding “X.”

He heard their feet cross the cellar floor, heard them poking in every cranny and corner. Then their footsteps whispered up the stairs into the house. He knew they wouldn’t stop till they searched every floor, every apartment. They were out for the Agent’s death or capture.

“X” still waited, body slack, backed up against the pipes, staring at the blue, vulturelike head before him. He could barely make out the human features beneath the glazed, rubberized material of the strange hood. The slitted mouth, the eye holes, gave the man the appearance of some grotesque devil conjured up in a nightmare.

The Agent’s lax, palsied manner made the gunman less vigilant. This was what “X” had anticipated. He waited, weighing each sound that reached him — waited till he was certain the others were on the floor above. Then, with an abruptness that took the gunman by surprise, Agent “X” swung both arms forward and down. One sliced to waist level, knocking the automatic from the hooded gunman’s fingers. The other, doubled up, struck the gunman’s chin in a perfect knockout blow.

The man collapsed to the floor of the cellar soundlessly. His gun made only a faint metallic clatter. The Agent stood tensely, waiting, but nothing happened. The others were intent upon their search of the house.

“X” stooped, lifted the front of the gunman’s rubber hood and saw the vicious, brutal face of some underworld character, a stranger to “X.” He groped in the man’s pockets for some identifying article, found nothing and lowered the hood. Then, all in one movement it seemed, he stripped overalls, jumper and white wig off. He snatched his own rubber hood out — the one he had taken from Ridley — slipped it quickly over his own head. The next instant he moved toward the open window of the cellar, and as he did so he heard some of the men above returning.

Chapter V

WITH the quickness of a cat Agent “X” raised himself and slipped across the sill. The use of the blue, vulturelike hood proved instantly to be a wise precaution. For, as his own body blotted out the light of the window, forming a silhouette, a hoarse voice sounded in the darkness, asking an abrupt question.

“You got him?”

Agent “X” straightened. He made out then the dim form of a DOAC guard, gun in hand. The man had been posted outside by the others to keep watch.

So quickly that the guard never knew what struck him, Agent “X” lashed out. Again his knuckles cracked against flesh and bone, and the guard flung backwards, dropping to the sparse turf. A second only, “X” stooped to run swift fingers through the man’s pockets, hoping again to learn a DOAC’s name. But the man carried nothing except the gun in his hand and an extra box of shells.

Agent “X” arose, crossed the apartment’s rear yard and merged with the shadows. He swung over a fence cautiously, waited, eyes probing the darkness to see if he were being followed. There was no sign of movement behind.

He put as much distance as possible between himself and the apartment, then drew off the DOAC hood, stuffed it in his pocket and made his way to the street.

He thought of his armored coupé, shrugged. To go back to it now would be suicidal. It was registered under another name, as were the various cars he owned. It might be taken by the police as evidence, in which circumstance he would never be able to salvage it. Its loss would have to be chalked up to the other expenses of this case.

Agent “X” signaled another cab which took him back to the vicinity of his office. Four blocks from it he maintained a hideout in a small walk-up apartment. He went here first, changed once more to the disguise of E.E. Winstead, and returned to his office.

Other offices in the building were closed now. But the all-night elevator was still operating, and “X” had his key. To the manager from whom he had leased the office he had stated his business as that of private investigator. It explained his odd comings and goings at all hours of the day and night.

As “X” opened his door he saw the yellow oblong of a telegram beneath it. He picked this up, ripped open the paper, scanned the message inside.

“Tried to get you and couldn’t. Call Meadow Stream 224. Hensche,” it said.

The lustrous, almost uncanny brightness of the Agent’s eyes increased. Meadow Stream was the town where the State penitentiary was located — and “X” had stationed Hensche there because of a recent, strange threat the DOACs had made.

Agent “X” strode to his phone, dialed long distance and gave the Meadow Stream number. The guarded voice of Hensche came over the wire.

“That you, boss?”

“Yes. Winstead speaking.”

Hensche began talking now, low and fast, not in verbal code as Hobart had done, but in tensely clipped sentences.

“There’s going to be hell to pay, boss. That threat against Mike Carney was no bluff. A bunch of strange guys have blown into town since dark. I overheard two talking. A raid on the pen to get Carney out and make him come across about his dough is set for midnight. It’s the D.’s all right.”

The Agent’s reply was clipped, brief.

“Stick close. I’ll be up!”

“You mean tonight, boss?”

“Yes.”

“X” dropped the receiver back in its cradle. He lifted a pencil, drew a clipping from his desk. A photo from a newspaper file was attached. It showed the hard, sleek face of Michael Carney, former big shot, serving a ten-year stretch for grand larceny.

AGENT “X” studied the face thoughtfully, familiarizing himself with every line and contour. If certain things transpired tonight, he wanted to be sure he would recognize that face if he saw it. For Carney was reputed to have “salted” away nearly five million dollars during his bootleg operations. He had been too smart to keep records or receipts. The federal government had failed to indict him on a charge of income tax evasion is it had other big shots. There’d been no bank deposits, no investments. His wealth was a matter of rumor only.

The grand larceny charge had come, some said, as an underworld frame-up. It had been proved in court that Carney had “borrowed” from friends and lost in bad investment the comparatively small sum of fifty thousand dollars. He’d offered to make restitution; but public sentiment had been against him. Carney, because of his character, had been sentenced to the ten-year stretch. The police, however, hadn’t been able to scare him into telling where his fortune was cached. Carney had stoically faced the long prison term.

But a threat had been made against him recently from another source — a threat more terrible than any the police had voiced — a threat from the DOACs.

A note had come to Carney in prison, written by the DOACs, demanding that he reveal to them the location of his hidden fortune. If he refused, the DOACs stated that they would remove him from prison and make him tell by a means of their own.

Carney, shaken, had begged for extra protection. The law could not make him tremble; but the threat of the DOACs did. Underworld whispers had told him of those men whose mouths had been stopped with lead. But the prison warden had laughed at the DOAC threat. The press had made fun of Carney for his nervousness. The DOACs, it was claimed, would never dare raid the state’s prison.

“X,” watching every sign of DOAC activity, had dispatched Hensche to Meadow Stream to report if the DOACs really attempted to make good their threat. Now that report had come.

“X” took another look at Carney’s photo, started to put it back in his desk, hesitated. Reaching a sudden decision, he shoved it into an inner pocket of his coat. Then he looked at his watch.

It was after eleven now. Hensche had said that the raid was scheduled for somewhere around midnight. Meadow Stream was two hundred miles away.

Once more “X” left his office and hurried to his near-by hideout. Here, behind a locked door, he seated himself before a triple-paneled, collapsible mirror. His fingers worked with deft assurance, removing again the disguise of E.E. Winstead.

Now for a moment “X” appeared as he really was. Here, uncovered in that locked and secret hideout, was the face that the police of a dozen cities would have paid thousands to see. Here was the face that the underworld had speculated upon at various times, the face that not even the Agent’s few intimates had ever knowingly laid eyes upon.

It was a remarkable face, as strange as the man himself. In direct light it appeared surprisingly youthful, even boyish. But when the Agent turned his head and the light beams fell at a different angle, the planes and contours of maturity showed. Power, inward strength, intelligence, were written on those features. Firm lips, a straight aquiline nose, a strong chin; the hair a gleaming chestnut brown.

A few seconds only it remained uncovered; then the Man of a Thousand Faces began creating another disguise. This was a quick one, taking him hardly a minute to build up.

It was a disguise he had used many times — the disguise of A.J. Martin, inquiring newspaper man. If he were to meet Hensche, this was the disguise he must wear. For it was the disguise under which all the Agent’s operatives knew him in the battle he was waging against the DOACs.

He left his hideout, chartered another cab and gave the address of the municipal flying field. He urged the driver to all possible speed, with a promise of double fare.

THE cab lurched through streets quieted now of the day’s activities. Down a long avenue, four blocks left, then out into the suburbs, where the undisturbed peace of night lay. But there was no peace for the Agent, no rest in his desperate struggle against the forces he had pledged himself to overcome.

The cab halted before a white-painted gate where a sleepy watchman challenged it. “X” paid the driver, showed a card in his wallet to the watchman and was admitted.

An air beacon swung a long finger into the night sky. A bulb burned in the operations office at the side of the field. Agent “X” stopped here, registered the fact that he was going up, strode quickly past a long row of locked and deserted hangars.

He paused by one, snapped open a padlock and plunged into the dark interior. An overhead light which he switched on revealed the trim lines of one of “X’s” crack planes.

Orange and blue in color, the ship was a single-seater, streamlined throughout. With staggered wings and a cowled radial engine, it had the grace of an Army or Navy pursuit job. Agent “X” called it the Blue Comet. It was a ship capable of the highest speeds.

He looked at it fondly for an instant, then went to the tail and began pushing it from the hangar. A dolly under the skid added to the smooth-running air wheels up front, made the plane easily manageable by one man on the ground as well as in the air.

On the concrete apron in front of the hangar “X” lifted the tail from the dolly, snapped off the hangar light and closed the door. The plane’s nose was pointed toward the field. It crouched in the darkness like an eager bird, ready to leap into the sky.

“X” slipped a suede helmet over his head, climbed into the one cockpit and wound up the electrically operated inertia starter. In a moment the motor sprang into thundering life. At sound of it the man in the operations office switched on the field’s floodlights.

One minute of warming, and “X” took off into the night sky with the thrumming, taut swiftness of a rocket. He climbed steadily, banked only once, then hurtled ahead toward the spot two hundred miles away where the clenched fist of the DOAC menace threatened to loose a sinister lightning bolt.

Even the criminal, Mike Carney, didn’t deserve the torture that awaited him if he fell into the DOACs’ hands. No man did. Led on by a thirst for gold to expand their sinister projects, the DOACs would force the secret of his fortune from Carney’s lips even if they had to tear him limb from limb to do it. The Agent didn’t doubt that such an organization had devised forms of torture too horrible to think of.

But besides his desire to save a human being from torment, was an even stronger desire to gather more data concerning DOAC activities. How could they hope to gain entrance to the state prison unless they had spies among the guards or inmates, men who would help them from the inside? And if there were such spies “X” wanted to learn their identities.

His mind swiftly turned over the strange events of the night as he sent the ship hurtling through the black sky. Towns, cities and villages streamed by below him. He flew high, sighting at last the small, peaceful river on which the prison town of Meadow Stream was located. Its grim, gray walls, he knew, lifted directly from the river shore. One of the state’s oldest penal institutions, its various buildings were castlelike, symbolic of the might and majesty of the law. Many a famous murderer had spent his last hours in its death-house before the hot, searing power of electricity ended his earthly career.

Agent “X” shut off his motor, glided down out of the darkness. His quick airman’s eye had spotted a field not more than a half mile from town, along the highway that led to Meadow Stream. Its green color looked like open turf.

He swept earthward in a long glide, ready to switch on the motor again if the field proved impractical for a landing. A pale moon and a ground haze made the task hazardous.

At the last he clicked on his landing lights for a brief instant, saw that the field was adequate, and side-slipped in.

Quietly as a rubber-tired carriage coming to rest, the Blue Comet rolled to a stop. Agent “X” leaped out There was a dump of bushes at the end of the field. “X” rolled his plane to these, turned it about, facing the wind for a quick take-off. He removed his flying helmet, stuffed it into the plane, and set off toward the town.

Almost immediately he broke into a run. For a sudden, wailing sound shattered the silence of the night. It was a siren, somewhere on the walls of the prison, rising higher and higher, like the scream of some demented thing, giving warning that danger and death impended.

Chapter VI

A SEARCHLIGHT blazed blue-white in the darkness that lay ahead. Agent “X” moved forward with the long, rhythmic strides of a runner trained to conserve his breath. But a hundred yards down the road he saw the lights of a car coming along behind him.

He stepped into the center of the highway, held up his hand and the car slid to a stop. One man was in it, a farmer, judging by his clothes, stirred by the siren’s note, coming to see what it meant.

The Agent climbed onto the running board. He ignored the suspicious glances the driver gave him. The car shot ahead toward the town and the prison.

Lights were beginning to flare up in houses along the way. People were dashing into the streets. The farmer charged through them, honking his horn. The car sped past a railroad station, took a curve on two wheels, and came to a stop two hundred yards from the prison.

A half-dozen searchlights were blazing now. Leaping from the farmer’s car, the Agent saw movement on top of the prison wall. Above the wailing clamor of the siren, still sounding, he heard the popping of rifles and the rhythmic chatter of machine-gun fire.

As he watched, a man by one of the prison turrets threw up his arms and hurtled to the ground. He had been shot by a sniper somewhere in the darkness below.

Agent “X” reconnoitered. He left the farmer, slipped into the shadows, angled straight toward the prison. The raid seemed to be centering on one side of the rectangular wall.

Cautiously he crept forward. Armed and desperate killers, he knew, were there in the darkness, murderers gathered together in an amazing organization.

A row of houses lined one side of the road. They led almost up to the prison gates. Agent “X” slipped behind these, moving steadily forward till he was within five hundred feet of the prison wall.

Gathered around the last house of the row he saw crouching figures. A searchlight on the prison wall bathed the ground before them in eerie bluish-white light. Against this background Agent “X” caught glimpses of sinister hooded heads.

The DOAC raiders were here in full force, hiding behind their strange headgear. As yet they had made no attempt to scale the prison wall. They were answering the fire of the guards. But “X” saw a group, with ladders, held in readiness. A DOAC marksman with a high-powered rifle aimed directly at the nearest searchlight. The man fired. His aim was excellent. The light went out with a hissing sputter. There was a gap in the path of illumination now.

Down this path of darkness, straight toward the prison wall, a hooded figure ran. The guards on top of the wall could not see him. But “X” could make out his figure silhouetted against lighter ground beyond. The man carried something — a strange roundish object with projecting rods like small electrodes at one side.

He moved close to the prison wall, flung the object upward. An instant later something happened to one of the turrets where armed guards crouched behind their bullet-proof barriers. There was a ripping, tearing sound like a giant lightning bolt, a blaze of orange light.

A bomb had obviously been detonated — but a bomb of a different sort than any “X” had ever seen. This one seemed to suck inward, creating a terrific vacuum that disintegrated animate and inanimate matter alike.

The turret vanished before “X’s” eyes. Stones and the sprawling, mangled figures of men swept together, then dropped. The Agent clenched his fists, cursed harshly under his breath. For the DOAC raid was bolder and more ruthless than he had anticipated. They were using war-time tactics to gain their end.

Other hooded men carrying more of the strange bombs ran forward. They attacked the two corner turrets. The chattering machine guns atop the prison wall kept up till the last. One of the hooded forms went down writhing. His companion caught up his fallen bomb, hurled that and his own, and another turret was silenced. Then a score of the raiders swarmed forward.

Four carried ladders. There was no fire from the wall above now, nothing to stop them planting the ladder against the stone barrier.

From the direction of the town a roaring motor sounded. “X” saw some of the men before him turn. Like sinister gray ghosts four of them crossed the street, mysterious bombs in their hands.

“X,” powerless at the moment, saw them take position where they could see the road to the prison.

The car coming evidently bore armed men from the town bent on seeing that the raid was not carried out.

THEN one of the hooded figures flung a bomb with uncanny accuracy as the car charged down the narrow street. Agent “X,” watching, aghast, saw the strange bomb drop directly on top of the speeding vehicle. A terrible thing occurred instantly. Again came that ripping, tearing sound.

The car seemed to collapse inward as though a huge fist had clutched it, crunched it. A mighty, invisible force worked havoc in the darkness. One of the car’s passengers, a man with gun in hand, was leaping out. As the bomb exploded he seemed to burst apart, killed horribly before “X’s” eyes.

“X” realized then that the DOACs had developed a new and terrible weapon. Was this what they planned to use in their assumption of power? The destruction of the car filled with men coming to the rescue of those in the prison was a terrible warning. The street grew silent and deserted after the catastrophe. The raiders began swarming over the prison walls.

Eyes gleaming in the darkness, Agent “X” reached into his coat. From a hidden pocket he drew the DOAC hood of Ridley’s that he still carried. He quickly put this over his own head, then moved forward and mingled among the other hooded figures.

The men about him did not speak. They were armed with rifles and machine guns. A few still carried some of the super-destructive bombs. Their job seemed to be to see that those who went over the prison wall were not disturbed by any one from the outside. “X” heard sounds of firing within the prison now. Two more ripping concussions sounded as more of the strange bombs were detonated.

Three hooded men moved forward and “X” followed them. They passed the bodies of two DOACs who had fallen, slain by fire from the top of the wall before the machine gunners and marksmen with rifles had been slaughtered. “X,” with a swift movement, stooped and gathered up one of the fallen men’s weapons, a Winchester repeater. Carrying this, he felt sure he would be taken by the DOACs as one of their own band.

He followed them up the ladder, climbed to the top of the prison wall and down another ladder to the ground. A guard on a far-off corner of the wall took a potshot at him. A bullet whined dangerously close to his head.

But the raiders inside seemed to be having things their own way. A shudder passed along “X’s” spine. He saw the body of a slain guard at his feet — a body mangled and mutilated by one of the bombs till it was hardly recognizable as a man. His sense of fury against the DOACs increased. They had displayed the callous brutality of fiends tonight. Yet he felt certain that the men around him were only carrying out orders. It was those who directed their movements that he wanted to locate.

He saw lights in the warden’s office, then saw, through a barred window, that an assistant warden on night duty was being forced by the DOACs to open a corridor door leading to the cell blocks.

The warden had apparently issued an order. For no more bullets were fired by the guards remaining on the prison wall.

A minute passed — two — and “X” saw a group of DOACs coming from the warden’s office leading a prisoner.

For a moment “X” saw only the hulking silhouette. Then, as the prisoner came closer, “X” recognized the features of Michael Carney. Carney’s suave, smooth face looked white. It might have been prison pallor. More likely it was terror of the men who had come and taken him out. A DOAC walked on either side leading Carney. Another walked behind him, a rifle prodding his back. To the DOACs, this prisoner represented a possible five million dollars.

“X” joined the group about the former big shot gangster. They moved toward the ladder, two hooded men ascending first, then Carney.

They had accomplished their purpose now. Once over the wall, the DOACs strode into the darkness, walking swiftly toward the spot where they had cars waiting.

“X,” as though acting on prearranged orders, joined the small group around Carney. Playing a desperate role, “X” elected himself one of Carney’s guards. His eyes, behind the slit in the weird blue hood he wore, glittered brightly. His pulses were hammering.

LIKE gray ghosts the hooded men moved through the night. They stopped at last, and “X” made out the bulks of several big autos. Carney was thrust into an open touring car. A DOAC sat on either side of him. Two more sat in the driver’s seat. Agent “X” and another DOAC took the small collapsible seats in the rear of the car. Seven passengers in all, the car whined off into the night, its headlights still out. All around “X” was movement as other cars slipped away from the hidden parking space by the prison.

The DOACs did not drive through the town. They took a road skirting it. By the pale glow of the moon they shot ahead, a long cavalcade of killers and terrorists, their destination unknown to “X.”

Stealthily he drew from his pocket a strange weapon — firing concentrated ammonia. It seemed a slight thing with which to fight armed and desperate men. But “X” had a plan.

Without warning, with a quickness that took them utterly off guard, he fired smarting, blinding ammonia fumes straight into the eyes of the two sitting beside Carney.

They cried out. The man beside “X” turned around in amazement. He, too, got a dose of ammonia that temporarily blinded him as surely as though needles had been jabbed into his eyes. The back of the car became a fighting, clawing madhouse.

The driver and his companion turned in their seat. “X” put the man beside the driver out by bringing the barrel of his ammonia gun down on the man’s hooded head. He thrust his gun against the driver’s neck, hissed an abrupt order.

“Turn left through the fence — drive across the field!”

The driver seemed to think he was insane. “X” repeated the order, jabbing the gun harder against the man’s spine. With a cry on his lips, sounding muffled behind his weird hood, the driver pulled the wheel.

The big car turned off the highway. A wooden fence paralleled the road at this point. The car broke through it with a clatter. It shot ahead over a stubbly field, jouncing and rocking.

“Stop!” ordered “X.”

The driver jammed on the brakes. As he did so “X” went into action like a man gone berserk. He caught the DOAC beside him under the arms, heaved him from the car onto the ground. He tackled Carney’s guards next. They fought like wildcats, but, blinded, they had no chance against “X.” One he knocked out with a punch to the jaw. The other he heaved from the car as he had the first man.

HE forced the driver out next, climbing over behind the wheel himself. A second more and he threw the clutch in and shot ahead.

Carney sat like a man dazed, staring at “X” open-mouthed. Behind them in the night was confusion, noise. The other DOACs had learned something strange had happened. “X” heard the sound of another car crashing through the fence, following. He had a hundred foot start. He pressed the accelerator down, put on a burst of speed. The big car plunged ahead. Beside him the man whom “X” had knocked unconscious with a blow of his gun, swayed in his seat like a sack of grain.

“X” drove across the field furiously. At times the big car sank hub-deep where the earth was soft. “X” threw the engine into second. Then he opened the side door of the driver’s seat and unceremoniously pushed the unconscious man out to lessen weight.

He pulled out of the soft spot, went plunging and rocketing ahead. Beyond this field was the highway down which the farmer’s car had carried “X.” His sense of direction told him this. It was the keystone of his desperate plan to rescue Carney.

But a spotlight snapped on behind, across the field. It fanned the air for a moment, then came to rest dazzlingly on his own car. The sinister rhythmic beat of machine-gun fire sounded. Bullets whined in the night around them, plowed into the earth beside them, slapped into the rear of the car as DOAC marksmen fired. Mike Carney sprawled forward in his seat, getting down behind the rear of the car for protection.

Agent “X” thundered on, driving with fierce, reckless abandon. Then suddenly he gasped and stamped on the brake pedal. For something loomed directly ahead in the moon-bathed gloom. It was another fence, and this one, he saw just in time, was made of piled-up stone.

The car slued to a screeching halt, its radiator close to the uneven rocks. This wall could not be smashed through. It was a barrier that must be contended with — and, directly behind, roaring across the field, was a group of armed men, bent on the recapture of Carney and the murder of “X.”

Chapter VII

AGENT “X” flung the door open and leaped from the big car. He raced to the wall. Carney seemed to think he was trying to escape and yelled something, but Agent “X” paid no attention.

With the evil whine of bullets around his head, “X” shoved frantically at the rocks. It was an old wall, loosely piled, and stones toppled off under the quick thrust of his hands, others he pulled back toward him, leaping out of the way as they fell. Three machine-gun bullets struck the wall ten feet away and ricocheted off into the darkness. The DOACs couldn’t aim accurately in their speeding, jouncing car.

Deliberately “X” pulled other rocks toward him until the wall in front of the car had become a low mound loosely piled.

He got back into the driver’s seat, speeded up the engine, threw the clutch in slowly, and crept forward.

Like a tractor the front of the car reared up. Higher and higher it went till the headlights pointed directly toward the sky.

Mike Carney yelled again, crouching lower in his seat behind “X.” For a breathless instant the under part of the car’s chassis struck a stone. Metal grated, and it seemed that they would be stuck there. Then the rear tires gripped a rock, got traction, and the car shot ahead again. The front dropped sickeningly as the rear end flung skyward. Carney was hurled against the back of the seat. Agent “X” gripped the wheel desperately. The rear wheels, dropped off the rocks with a bone-shaking jar.

Then the car, with gathering speed, lunged ahead through the scrub trees, breaking and bending them. It ploughed through bushes with a sound like rushing ocean waves, broke at last into the open with a long, level stretch of road ahead. “X” had won his way to freedom, got himself and Carney out of the clutches of the DOACs. He pressed the gas button down, sent the big touring-car roaring ahead.

Looking over his shoulder, he could still see the spotlight on the pursuing car, screened by a barrier of bushes. The DOACs hadn’t even gotten over the wall. He doubted that they would, till they had flattened it still more.

Night wind streamed past as Agent “X” drove furiously ahead. It wasn’t pursuit by the DOACs he was seeking to avoid now. It was the State troopers, local police, and special detectives who would scour the country in search of those who had taken part in the raid on the prison. Before turning Carney over to the law again, “X” wanted to question the big racketeer. He looked around. Carney met “X’s” gaze searchingly.

The Agent still wore his DOAC hood. His disguise as A.J. Martin, newspaper man, had served him often and well. No use letting Carney see him now as Martin. The big gangster might spread whispers through the underworld that would prevent “X” from appearing as Martin again.

The Agent, watching the road ahead, saw an opening among some trees. A dirt road branched off here. “X” twisted the wheel, sent the car in, out of sight of the main highway. He slid to a stop and turned to face Carney.

His eyes, bright and penetrating, focused on the gangster. Carney began to look uneasy. He bunched his shoulders and fear showed on his face.

“What’s your racket?” he growled. “You must have something on your mind! What is it?”

“X” answered quietly. “Don’t go up in the air, Carney. I’m not after your money. But I figured what would happen if the DOACs got you.”

“How did you know they were coming after me?”

“I got tipped off.”

“If you ain’t one of ’em, where did you get that headpiece you’re wearing?”

“From a DOAC who was killed.”

Carney seemed to debate this, staring sharply at Agent “X.” Then he spoke again, sneeringly. “You’re telling me you got me away from those mugs just because you wanted to do a pal a good turn?”

Agent “X” shook his head. “That was only one of my reasons, Carney. I had another. You’ve got a lot of friends on the shady side of the law. The chances are you’ve heard rumors. Do you think the DOACs are just a bunch of gunmen? Or are they something else? Give me a little information and I’ll help you stay away from the big house.”

CARNEY shook his head again, fear shadows deepening in his eyes. “I don’t know much about the DOACs — but I do know this! You can’t put me where they can’t find me. There’s only one spot in the country where I’ll be safe now — that’s back in jail — and that’s where I’m going till things blow over.”

Agent “X” gave a short, humorless laugh.

“You weren’t very safe in jail tonight.”

The gangster had a ready answer. “That was the warden’s fault. I told him the DOACs meant business, but he wouldn’t do anything about it. That’s why the DOACs got in. Now he’s had his lesson. If I go back he’ll see that it don’t happen again. There’ll be enough guards posted to keep out an army. I know when I’m well off. And there’s a reason why I don’t want to get bumped. Maybe you’ve heard about a little lady I’m interested in?”

Agent “X” nodded.

“Greta St. Clair, your fiancée. The papers ran a story about her, Carney, when you were put in stir. Miss St. Clair took a house in sight of the jail and said she’d wait ten years if necessary for you to get out; didn’t she?”

Carney leaned forward, touching “X’s” arm. His voice was hoarse now.

“That’s the only thing I’m afraid of, mister. They’ll try to work on me through her, see? I can’t have that happen. It would drive me nuts.”

Again Agent “X” nodded.

“Tell me everything you knew about the DOACs,” he said. “I may be able to help break up their gang and help the girl, too!”

Carney took a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. He spoke huskily. “I can’t tell what I don’t know, guy. I got a few suspicions; but that’s all.”

“And what are those suspicions, Carney?” asked “X” softly.

“There was a guy got out of stir just after they put me in,” Carney said. “His name was Di Lauro. He used to be a half-cracked anarchist nut. Then he tried to get tough with a gun. I heard he’d been paroled and skipped. He used to talk a lot about the hell he’d raise when he got out of stir. He said something about a secret gang of some kind. Maybe he’s the guy back of it, and maybe he ain’t.”

AGENT “X” stored the name away in his mind. Di Lauro. A half-cracked anarchist. Some fanatic might have conceived of that as a cunning way to build up a following. “X” started to speak; Carney beat him to it.

“That’s all I know. I been in stir a year and a half now. A guy don’t hear much in jail. But whoever you are, you seem on the up-and-up. Do me a favor! Go see Greta — and tell her from me to watch out every minute. I won’t see her again till visitor’s day at the jail.”

“You’re determined to go back then?”

Carney’s eyes probed the shadows around them fearfully. He leaned closer, spoke in a whisper.

“Determined to go back! Say — they tell me guys have been found with lead poured in their mouths! That ain’t no mob stuff! I may be wrong; but I figure it’s the DOACs who done it. They think I got a lot of dough salted away. If they get me they’ll be pouring hot lead on me to make me talk. I ain’t got no dough. I’m a poor man, and I don’t want to be put on the spot for something I ain’t even got!”

“X,” looking at Carney, knew the man was lying. There was a look of craft and cupidity in Carney’s eyes. Fear of the DOACs and desire to hang onto his ill-gotten fortune, hidden somewhere, made Carney look upon his prison cell as a refuge.

The Agent shrugged. “I’ll see that you get back then,” he said. “And I’ll tip off that girl of yours to look out. Then I’ll see what I can find out about Di Lauro.”

“You’re some kind of a dick, ain’t you?” asked Carney shrewdly. “Don’t tell anybody what I told you. Maybe Di Lauro ain’t the guy.”

“X” was silent as he backed the big car around. It was now long after midnight. He had the problem of getting Carney back to jail. That was no easy matter. The DOACs had spies everywhere. It would be better to telephone the prison and have an escort meet Carney. But “X” didn’t want to come in contact with the forces of the law himself, be questioned and perhaps held for the part he had played tonight. He spoke to the gangster again.

“Lie down in the car,” he said. “Pull that robe over you. You’ll be out of sight. I’m going to find a phone.”

“You’ll be pinched if you’re seen in that hood,” said Carney.

“I’ll take it off — before I phone,” said “X.”

Carney obeyed instructions, got down in the rear of the big car, drawing the soiled and moth-eaten lap robe over him. Agent “X” went back into the highway, and drove on in the same direction he had followed before his conversation with the gangster. In a half hour he saw the lights of a town ahead. He stopped beside the road, spoke to Carney:

“Wait here. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He plunged into the bushes, and under cover of the darkness he drew off the DOAC hood; removed the disguise of A.J. Martin.

The sandy-haired wig, part of his make-up as the newspaper man, came off. He put that and the DOAC hood in a deep inner pocket. He slipped a close-fitting toupee over his head, and changed his features until they were utterly unlike Martin. It was another of his remarkable stock disguises that he had learned to make even under cover of the darkness.

He walked quickly back to the car again, a dark-haired man with nondescript, blunt-looking features. When he climbed into the seat of the driver Michael Carney looked up, regarding him with hard, shrewd eyes.

“Lie low,” the Agent said harshly. “We’re going into town now. There may be DOAC spies around. It will be tough if they spot you.”

“What about the car?” said Carney uneasily. “You swiped it from them. They may spot it.”

“X” had thought of that, too, but he shrugged.

“It’s a chance we’ve got to take,” he said.

EXCEPT for the lights along the sidewalks, the town seemed dead. It was after two o’clock. The streets were deserted. Not even an all-night drug store was open. But “X” drove on swiftly till he found a hotel catering to transients. A light burned in the lobby of this. A night clerk was on duty, yawning over his desk.

This hotel looked like a good spot to leave Carney until the prison officials could pick him up.

The Agent went in and the clerk directed him to a telephone booth. Agent “X” dialed long distance and called the state prison; He and Carney had put many miles between themselves and the prison town in their wild night ride. The Agent’s announcement that Carney was safe and ready to return to his cell caused a furore in the warden’s office. The warden, roused from his bed by the raid and still on duty, spoke with brittle excitement.

“Who is this calling?”

“Never mind, warden. Get an escort together. Come here as fast as you can and pick up Carney. Hotel Franklin, Dennistown.”

The baffled cursing of the prison warden was audible as “X” hung up the receiver.

The Agent strode outside, climbed into the car and drove it directly to the door of the Hotel Franklin. The quiet of the streets was undisturbed. “X” spoke to the gangster.

“I’ve phoned the warden to come and get you here at the hotel. That seems like the best way out.”

He accompanied Carney to his room on the second floor, said an abrupt good-by and left, knowing that the gangster, cringing with fear under the DOAC menace, would remain in his room till the prison escort came.

“X” drove his car to the highway along which the prison escort must come. There he backed into a grove of screening trees, and waited till he saw headlights far down the highway.

Many cars passed — the last dozen filled with armed State troopers. The prison warden was taking no chances this time. He had learned his lesson.

Twenty minutes went by, and the cavalcade of cars repassed, going the other way, Carney hunched between two burly prison guards. Agent “X” smiled grimly at the sight of a felon returning to prison voluntarily because it was his only refuge against a threat that had put terror into his criminal heart.

SIX hours later, a gray-haired man, whose card bore the name “T. Galaway, investigator for the governor,” walked up to the prison gate. An early morning sun shone down on the scene of last night’s destruction. The slain, guards had been taken away. Those among the hooded raiders who had fallen under bullets from the prison walls had been removed by the DOACs.

Stone masons were already at work on the watchtowers that had been smashed by the bombs. A cordon of State troopers stood guard around the grim walls of the prison. All the inmates were locked in their cells. There would be no exercise in the prison yard for days to come. Warden Johnson was ruling his walled empire with military discipline.

A score of newspaper reporters clamored outside the prison gates. More were arriving every instant. Their press cards had gained them entry through the line of State troopers. But Warden Johnson refused to grant them an interview.

He was busy in his office, answering long-distance phone calls, consoling families of slain guards, supervising the prison repairs, interviewing state, federal, and local detectives who were gathering information about the hooded raiders.

When Galaway’s card was sent in, however, Johnson’s reaction was immediate. He told his secretary to admit Galaway at once. Expecting a call from the governor’s mansion any instant, Johnson was nervously apprehensive. Blame, he feared, would attach to the fact that he had not heeded the DOACs’ threat against Mike Carney. The lives of the guards might have been spared if he had done so.

Galaway, tall, austere, with a look of penetrating intelligence in his eyes, was ushered into the warden’s private office. The warden received him uneasily.

“Sit down. Have a cigar, Mr. Galaway.”

“I don’t smoke, thank you.”

The warden became still more uneasy under Galaway’s intent gaze. There was dynamic, almost hypnotic power in the scrutiny of this tall stranger. Johnson fidgeted in his chair, rolled his cigar between lips that were unnaturally dry.

“I hope the governor understands that we did all we could in the raid last night,” he said. “My men were hardly prepared for such a desperate attack by armed criminals. You’ll explain to him that from now on we’ll take extra precautions. Through the co-operation of Major Manley I’m to have a detachment of State troopers stationed here indefinitely.”

T. Galaway made a deprecatory gesture with his long, lean hand.

“I’m not here as an inquisitor, warden. There will be a formal investigation of the affair later. The governor, I may say, will be interested in your report on Carney’s strange return.”

Galaway smiled inwardly, then went on: “What I would like this morning is a little data on a former inmate of your prison. Did you have here at one time a convict by the name of Di Lauro?”

Galaway’s eyes gleamed as he asked this question. Warden Johnson looked relieved. At least the governor was withholding his criticism until the full details of the affair last night had been weighed. The warden became talkative at once, glad to change the subject.

“Leon Di Lauro is the man you mean. Yes, we had him here. The board saw fit to parole him over a year ago. This was done, though, over my objections. I never liked Di Lauro, never trusted him. He was a troublemaker; but outside influence was used to get him paroled. Di Lauro didn’t report to the parole board at the time required after his release, however. State detectives were employed in an effort to locate him; but he hasn’t been seen or heard of since he left my charge.”

Galaway made quick notes on a square of paper. The gleaming light in his eyes intensified. He tapped his chair with nervous fingers.

“If you please, warden, I’d like to look at Di Lauro’s record!”

“Certainly, Mr. Galaway. That’s easy!”

The warden rang for his secretary, and ordered the convict’s case history brought from the prison files at once. Galaway looked through them, made notes.

Here Galaway used his pencil to underline two words: “Bomb outrage.” Beneath the smooth-shaven contours of his face — another elaborate disguise of Secret Agent “X”— small muscles tensed. He recalled those terrible bombs of the night before. The ripping, tearing concussion. The torn bodies. The car he had seen collapse in the street as though giant, invisible fingers had crushed it.

Carney had mentioned Di Lauro as a possible leader of the DOACs. Di Lauro’s connection with terrorist bombers in the past made this possibility stronger. The Secret Agent went on taking notes from the prison record.

Agent “X” pocketed his notes. The light in his eyes was steely now. As a character, Di Lauro was a good lead. Such a man might be guilty of building up a nation-wide terrorist organization like the DOACs. He had brains, he knew the power of words as proved by the charge of criminal syndicalism lodged against him. He was dangerous, fanatical.

AGENT “X” thanked the warden and rose. In saving Carney from the DOACs, he had run into a bit of evidence which might help him trace the leader of the murderous DOAC group. Warden Johnson spoke vehemently, breaking in on the Agent’s thoughts.

“The governor needn’t worry any more,” he said. “Nobody will take any prisoner out of this jail again.”

“You think Michael Carney is safe here then?” asked “X.”

“Yes. He’s yellow and whining for protection. He’d rather be in jail than out. He’s still scared stiff. But he needn’t be. We’re going to give him better protection than he ever had from his mob. We’re going to keep him in his cell from now on. The only visitor who will be allowed to see him will be that girl of his.”

“You mean his fiancée, Greta St. Clair?”

“Yes.”

“And what about her? Will she be safe — or will the DOACs try to hit at Carney through her?”

Warden Johnson shrugged.

“That’s not my affair, Galaway. If she’s fool enough to fall for a guy like Carney, and stick close by, the way she does, it’s her funeral, not mine.”

“She lives somewhere near here then?”

“Yes — there.” The warden rose from his seat, pointed out a window which gave a view over the prison wall. Agent “X” rose, too. He knew the location of Greta St. Clair’s place of residence from the newspaper story he had read. But he wanted to get the warden’s own reactions. The warden was gesturing through the window.

Beyond the prison walls, over across the river that swirled at the base of the grim wall, the roof of a house showed dimly through the tree-tops. It was a half mile away, but a dormer window commanded a view of the prison.

“That’s the house she lives in,” the warden said. “She takes the ferry across every Monday and Thursday, the days we allow visitors. She’s nuts about Carney and claims he was framed.”

Agent “X” spoke quietly, watching the warden’s face.

“Wouldn’t you say she was running a great risk?”

“Perhaps! Who knows? They say she has a bunch of servants to wait on her. There may be DOAC spies among them — waiting to see if they can get a line on Carney’s money from her, or bump her if they feel like it. But, as I say — it isn’t my grief. She’s smart enough to know she’s in danger from the guys that tried to get Carney. She’s got money of her own, and she’d better clear out — take a trip to Europe or something. If she were my gal that’s what I’d make her do.”

Recalling Carney’s fear that there was no spot on earth except the prison where he was safe, “X” wondered if this didn’t apply equally to the girl. She could be traced and followed even to Europe.

Again he thanked the warden, then left through the guarded entrance and the lines of troopers as he had come. He was glad he had got away before a call from the governor’s office came. That might have put him in an embarrassing situation.

His eyes turned toward the glinting surface of the river again; toward the house of Greta St. Clair. Was that where the ruthless, hideous lightning bolt of the DOAC power would strike next?

Chapter VIII

IN the busy city offices of the Herald a telephone jangled. A girl, blonde and winsome, seated before a desk covered with copy, reached out and lifted the receiver from its hook.

“Calling Betty Dale,” a masculine voice said over the wire.

“Miss Dale speaking,” the girl replied.

A shaft of sunlight from the open window fell on the girl’s head. The sunlight seemed to remain imprisoned there, as the golden hair, clustered low at the nape of her white neck, had caught some of its warmth and shimmer. The soft curve of her cheek showed a youthful, vibrant glow.

“You’re the lady who wrote a feature article about Greta St. Clair, aren’t you?’ the strange voice said.

“Yes. Who is this speaking, please?”

“A young man who’d like to meet Miss St. Clair. You had an interview with her and I thought—”

Betty Dale interrupted stiffly. There was an edge in her voice, proving that for all her gold-and-white girlishness she had a will of her own.

“You’ll have to think up a better excuse than that for an introduction. I’m very busy this morning. If you don’t mind—”

“Wait.’” The single word came low-voiced over the wire. There was a note of command in it that held Betty Dale wonderingly. Then she gave a sudden start, and the warm color in her cheeks paled.

In the receiver against her ear a strange note sounded. It was no longer a man’s voice. It was a whistle, musical yet eerie, a whistle that Betty Dale had heard before — the whistle of Secret Agent “X.”

The paleness of her cheeks was followed by a flood of rich color that suffused her whole face and neck for a moment. That strange whistle seemed to touch some responsive chord in her heart. It came from the lips of the man she admired and respected above all others in the world. For Betty Dale was one of the few persons on earth who knew the amazing, mysterious character of Agent “X’s” career.

Often they had faced danger and death together. And, though Betty Dale never to her knowledge had seen his real features, she had come, deep in her heart, to love Agent “X.” His visits were the high spots in her life. When he was away, probing some sinister crime, Betty Dale plunged into her own newspaper work harder than ever, to keep worry from her mind. For she had pledged herself never to hinder the Agent’s work by letting him see how much she cared. All she asked was a chance to help him.

“You!” she breathed into the telephone, a tremor, which she couldn’t quite conceal, on her lips.

“Yes, Betty. I’m sorry if I disturbed you when you were busy.”

The girl flushed again. “I only said that because — because I thought you were some one else.”

“Then you can meet me sometime this morning?”

“Yes — any time. I want to see you anyway. I’ve got something to tell you.”

“Good, Betty! Walk along Carter Avenue, then, between Tenth and Eleventh Streets at ten-thirty. There’s a sporting goods store in the middle of the block. You’ll see a young man looking in the window at the fishing tackle. Stop and look in the window, also.”

Betty agreed, then rose quickly and went to the managing editor’s office to obtain leave of absence. She said she’d just had a hot lead on a story and was going out after it. There was a good deal of truth in this. On almost every one of the Agent’s cases Betty Dale had been able to obtain a scoop. Her intuitive intelligence told her that the Secret Agent might be on the trail of the DOACs.

If he succeeded in tracing down the heads of the organization and having them arrested, Betty knew she’d be given inside details before anyone else. Working with the Agent, she had become invaluable to her paper.

She tried to finish correcting a sheet of copy; but the words blurred before her eyes. She continually glanced at her wrist watch. The hands seemed to crawl.

Ten o’clock came and Betty began dabbing powder on her face. She smoothed her hair, put her hat on at a saucy tilt. She wanted to look her best when she met the Man of a Thousand Faces.

A graceful, energetic figure, she left the newspaper building, took a taxi to Carter Avenue and strolled along in the early fall sunlight. Her blue eyes continually darted ahead. Her heart was beating rapidly. She got to the block between Tenth and Eleventh Streets too early, walked past it and came back.

Then her heartbeat increased still more. A young man was standing outside the window of the sporting goods store. Slouching, dressed in a suit that had a slightly collegiate cut, he was staring through the window at the fishing tackle. A limp cigarette hung from his lower lip. His hat was on the back of his head.

BETTY DALE had never to her knowledge seen this young man before. As she approached she wondered if there’d been some mistake or if she were still too early. The young man had a sleepy look. He seemed to be engrossed in the display of tackle. Surely this couldn’t be Secret Agent “X.”

But Betty Dale smiled to herself. She’d been fooled dozens of times before. The Agent had tested his genius for disguise on her. In spite of her keen powers of observation and her feminine intuition he had tricked her again and again. Staring sharply from the corners of her eyes at this young man, she was ready to swear that she did not know him. But she walked up slowly, stopping to stare in the window too.

She trembled as she bent her golden head to look at the fishing tackle, which didn’t interest her in the slightest degree.

“You fish, lady?”

The young man’s drawling voice startled her. It was as unfamiliar as his appearance. She turned, flushing. His sleepy gaze was fixed upon her. He was grinning a lazy grin. She shook her head slowly, staring at him — waiting. Doubt began to assail her as the young man continued to grin. Everything about him looked strange, unfamiliar. The young man, seeing her perplexity, took his wallet from his pocket.

“I sell fishing tackle, lady,” he said, in the same drawling voice. “Here’s my card.”

He handed her a white card on which was written the name “Claude Erskine.” Betty’s eyes widened as she looked. For, under the light of the open sky, a letter X, large and superimposed, was appearing over the name.

She needed no more proof than this. Slowly she tore the card into tiny pieces and let them trickle from her fingers. Then she raised her eyes and smiled.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Claude Erskine.”

The stranger’s eyes were no longer sleepy. They had changed in the space of a second to steely alertness. Betty knew then that some deep purpose lay behind the Agent’s request to meet her.

“That’s the name I want you to use when you introduce me to Greta St. Clair, Betty,” he said. “Tell her I’m a fellow reporter, thinking of doing an article for a movie magazine.”

Betty Dale searched the Agent’s eyes. If she hadn’t known what his strange work was, if she hadn’t guessed the deep motives that lay behind everything he did, she might have been jealous. For Greta St. Clair was an exotic woman, and Agent “X” seemed determined to meet her.

“You think she’s in danger from the DOACs, don’t you?” said Betty suddenly, speaking hardly above a whisper. “You’re working against them, I know.”

The Agent nodded. “I’m glad you’re not one of their spies. I wouldn’t stand much chance with a person of your cleverness,” he said.

Betty grew serious. “We get stories on the Herald about the terrible things the DOACs are doing. I guessed you would fight them — from the first. And yesterday I heard something I thought you’d want to hear. That’s why I said over the telephone I had something to tell you.”

The Agent touched her arm. “I’ve got a car up the block. You can tell me as we drive along; it will be better than standing here.”

They got into the Agent’s small coupé and Betty Dale began to talk quickly.

“If you’re fighting the DOACs you’ll want to know this. There’s a man the Herald suspects now. He’s a well-known figure. You must have heard of him. His name’s Benjamin Summerville.”

Agent “X” nodded instantly. “An ex-state senator and big industrialist.”

“He was a big industrialist. But he claims the depression ruined him. He’s a bitter critic of the New Deal, too. Yesterday, he told a Herald reporter he was half in sympathy with the DOACs. He says this country needs a new party with strong-arm methods. He’s been making a lot of violent speeches, so violent that even his own party has thrown him out.”

The Agent stared at Betty for a moment, eyes filled with speculation. He remembered the propaganda pamphlet he had found in Ridley’s room. Here certainly was another hot lead.

“Thanks, Betty,” he said quietly. “The Department of Justice is probably investigating Summerville now; but I’ll put one of my own men on his trail. What you tell me checks up with something I learned myself.”

Di Lauro and Summerville — it was conceivable that either might be operating the hidden mechanism behind the DOAC organization.

“I was at the state prison last night, Betty,” the Agent went on. “I saw the DOAC raid. I flew back to the city this morning just to get you. I want to get a line on Greta St. Clair and give her a word of warning. But, without somebody she knows to introduce me, I doubt if she’d let me in. She must be terrified at what happened to Carney last night. She’ll be suspicious of every stranger. I want to save her if I can from being kidnaped or killed by the DOACs.”

“She’s as safe as any one could be,” said Betty. “You’ll be surprised. She knew when I saw her that she was in danger from the underworld just because she is in love with Carney. That’s why she took that strange old house. It’s almost like a fortress, and she has guards — former friends of Carney’s, I think. Even the DOACs would think twice before they tried to kidnap her.”

“You haven’t seen any reports of the raid on the prison, then?” asked “X.”

Betty Dale shook her head.

“No. Two of our men are there now. But the warden won’t see them. And all the eyewitnesses are afraid to speak. I know that some guards were shot. That’s all.”

The Agent’s answer was harsh. “Not only shot, Betty — bombed! The DOACs have some kind of new explosive. What it does isn’t pretty. That’s why I say Greta St. Clair is in danger. She may not know it; but she is. Carney himself asked me to warn her.”

“Carney? Then you are the one—” Betty Dale stopped speaking. She made it a point not to inquire into the Agent’s affairs.

“Yes, Betty. I took him away from the DOACs. I knew — I saw what would happen to any man who fell into their clutches.”

Betty Dale’s face went white — white with sudden fear now for the safety of the Agent. The love that she found so hard to conceal showed in her clear blue eyes. For a moment her slim fingers pressed his arm.

“You must be careful,” she said huskily. “If they ever found out— Perhaps the DOACs are responsible for those terrible murders that have taken place all over the country — the men whose mouths have been stopped with lead.”

“Perhaps,” echoed the Agent softly.

IT was after one when Betty Dale and Agent “X” came in sight of the house at Meadow Stream where Greta St. Clair lived. The Agent got a better look at it now. He’d been across the river when he had first seen it that morning. Only the roof and that one dormer window had been visible. Now, as he left the main highway and turned into a side road, he saw the main part of the house rising above a high brick wall.

The house was of brick, too, French colonial in style, ivy grown. The wall ran around the entire estate. No ivy grew on this. It had, he saw, been carefully cleared away, and on top of the bricks were strands of barbed wire, stretched tightly erect by steel posts. A wrought iron, old-fashioned carriage gate barred their way. The place, as Betty had said, was like a fortress.

And the man who came to the gate when “X” pressed the bronze electric button, was like a fortress guard. He had sharp eyes, a pock-marked face. One side of his coat bulged slightly. He was, “X” knew at once, a former denizen of the underworld. But at sight of Betty Dale the man broke into a genial grin.

The man touched an elaborate lock mechanism which had recently been riveted into the iron, drew back the big gate.

“Drive in, Miss Dale. The lady’s expecting you. She said you’d phoned her you was coming.”

The pock-marked guard gave Agent “X” a sharp glance which “X” returned.

The Agent drove slowly up the long driveway toward the house. He heard the iron gates clank behind them. Around the lawn, acting as gardeners, were several other sharp-eyed men. It was plain that several of Carney’s old mobsters had found a quiet refuge on this estate, guarding Carney’s fiancée. Were there, he wondered, any DOAC spies among them?

White columns held up a large carriage porch. The front doorsteps led up beneath it. Agent “X” drove under this. Betty Dale leaped lightly out.

Then suddenly she gave a piercing scream. Agent “X” whirled. He heard the scratching of claws on gravel and a chorus of low growls. Then he, too, leaped out and stood close to Betty.

Like streaks of tawny lightning a half dozen gigantic mastiffs came around the corner of the house. They stood in a semi-circle around “X” and Betty, hackles stiffly erect, fangs showing, and slowly, with menace in their greenish, heavy-lidded eyes, they crept closer.

Chapter IX

BETTY DALE screamed again. At almost the same instant the door of the house burst open. A woman stood framed in the threshold — a woman of thirty, chestnut haired, slim figured, delicately beautiful.

For an instant only she was still, then she took three quick strides in her slippered feet, moving out onto the top step. In her right hand was a small plaited whip of red-and-white rawhide.

“Mogul, Prince, Captain — get back!” she cried.

Her voice came with brittle precision as she spoke to the dogs. She stamped a slippered foot.

The animals did not move quite fast enough to suit her. Her hand nicked out like the hissing dart of a snake’s tongue. The lash curled around the nearest dog’s neck. The big animal gave a sudden yelp and leaped away. The others vanished with him, padding off softly on their huge paws. The woman on the steps smiled down at her visitors, showing white teeth between lips that were touched with crimson.

“I’m sorry to welcome you like this, Miss Dale. The dogs weren’t here when you came before. Michael made me get them — after that threat against him in prison. They’re a nuisance, but a protection. Won’t you and your friend come in?”

There was the gracious poise of the perfect hostess in the manner of Greta St. Clair. Looking at her stunning figure and soft features, hearing the refined modulation of her voice, Agent “X” marveled that such a woman had ever fallen for Mike Carney.

He studied her covertly, recalling how quickly she had brought the lash down on the dog’s neck. Perhaps for all her delicate beauty and apparent refinement there was a strain of cruelty, hardness, in her make-up. Perhaps she was more interested in Carney’s money than in the man himself. Whatever her motive for sticking close to Carney the risk she was running was real enough. The wall with its barbed wire, the armed guards, the dogs, could hardly protect her from the fiends who used the might of disintegrating, mangling bombs.

At the top of the steps, Betty Dale, still pale from her fright, introduced Secret Agent “X.”

“My friend, Claude Erskine,” she said. “He’s a reporter, too. He has it in mind to do an article about you for a movie magazine.”

Greta St. Clair laughed, brushing a strand of hair from her high, white forehead.

“But I am no longer in the movies,” she said.

Agent “X” leaned forward, looking into the woman’s eyes, his own bright and intent.

“Writing an article about you was only an excuse I gave Miss Dale in order to get an introduction,” he said. “My real purpose in coming here was to warn you — and question your servants.”

“Warn me?”

“Yes. The whole world knows that you love Michael Carney, Miss St. Clair. And since the whole world knows it, certain enemies of his know it, too. You are running a great risk in staying so close to him at the present time. Do you know it?”

Greta St. Clair drew herself up a little stiffly. An edge crept into her voice.

“I am no fool,” she said. “I know what I’m up against. You needn’t have come to warn me. Carney has told me enough — and I have taken every precaution. You saw those dogs. You may have seen the wire I’ve put around the wall. Among the barbed wires is another part of an alarm system. This place is like a fortress.”

“But the servants,” said “X,” dropping his voice. “You have no assurance that there are not spies among them.”

“You are wrong there. Most of them are Carney’s old friends, here to protect me. Come, I will show you.”

She led her visitors around the big house. She rang a bell and two men appeared. They, too, had the pale, poker faces of gangsters.

Greta St. Clair conducted Betty and the Agent down a flight of steps to a big cellar room. There were heavy iron shutters across the windows of this basement chamber. At the far end of it, under an electric light, was a target made of white pasteboard and marked in black circles. A number of bullet holes showed in it. Greta spoke to her two men who had followed her into the cellar.

“Show my friends what you can do,” she said sharply.

The two men’s faces remained impassive. Simultaneously they drew automatics from armpit holsters. So rapidly that the shots seemed to form a continuous stream of sound, they fired — and a dozen more bullet holes appeared in the target, some directly in the center of the bull’s-eye.

“You see,” said Greta. “They are perfect marksmen, and,” she added hastily, “they have permits to carry their guns. They guard me night and day. That is why I am not afraid.”

Agent “X” drew the woman aside.

“Those men,” he said, “who raided the prison last night had bombs and machine guns. Even your alarm system, your dogs and your armed guards could hardly withstand raiders who use wartime tactics.”

“You have not seen everything,” she said. “There are other precautions I have taken.”

SHE led them to the second floor of the large house next. As they ascended the stairs she pointed back to a huge square of boarding like a hatch cover. It was hinged and arranged so that it could be lowered over the top of the stairs, then bolted into place. Its under side was sheathed with steel plating.

She took them next into her bedroom. This had the rich furnishings of a woman who loves luxury. A canopied bed with hand-embroidered coverlets; a rosewood dresser littered with expensive knickknacks; soft rugs on the floor. But the windows of the room were crossed with stout iron bars. Greta St. Clair closed the door. That, too, was sheathed in sheet steel, painted to look like the walls.

“I could shut myself in here,” she said. “Long before the DOACs or any one else could get me, the police would come in answer to my alarm. If a single one of those wires is touched along the fence an electric siren on the roof will sound. It can even be heard in the prison across the river.”

“All this is clever,” said “X,” “but I’ve told you the DOACs use bombs. Just how terrible those bombs are I can hardly tell you. I hope you never will see. But men were killed before my eyes. An auto was crunched like a child’s toy. If they come after you they would blast through your armor plate and your barred windows.”

Greta St. Clair drew herself to her full height and spoke coldly.

“Whatever the risk, nothing can make me change my mind. Warden Johnson told me something over the phone that perhaps you do not know. Michael, for my sake, wants to serve his sentence until he is pardoned, so that he can become a respectable citizen again. He voluntarily came back to his cell last night after he had escaped from the DOACs. He might have left the country, but he did not. He isn’t afraid to run any risk for me. Neither am I afraid to run any risk to be near him. I shall continue to live here and visit him daily. It is the least I can do.”

Agent “X” hid the sardonic gleam in his eyes, wondering what version of last night’s activities Carney had given to Warden Johnson.

Greta St. Clair served them cocktails, then they left. But not before the woman had given Betty Dale an invitation to dinner soon. She smiled upon Betty, but Agent “X” fancied that she was slightly cold to him.

HE drove Betty Dale back to the city, lost in deep thought. He was anxious now to get back to his office, anxious to extend the range of his operatives’ influence. Greta St. Clair’s house must be watched day and night to see that death and destruction did not creep upon her. And Betty had given him a valuable clue. He would post another operative near the residence of Benjamin Summerville, embittered industrialist who had voiced sympathy for the DOAC organization.

He said good-by to Betty, changed his disguise to E.E. Winstead, hurried to his office. In this campaign against the DOACs, the most serious menace to his country he had ever done battle with, he was moving with patience and strategy. One man, no matter how clever and versatile, could not be everywhere at once. Yet, through it all. Agent “X” was still playing a lone hand.

The men he had hired only collected facts for him, studied isolated evidences of DOAC activity. The whole country was “X’s” battle ground. He was prepared to rush to any state in the union at a moment’s notice. Prepared to go anywhere that the sinister lightning bolt of the DOACs might strike.

He put two more operatives on the job, selecting them from his carefully kept files.

One, a man named Chatfield, he sent to keep watch at night around Greta St. Clair’s estate. Another, Costigan, he dispatched to the town where Summerville lived. Both had orders to telephone or telegraph his office if anything should turn up. He stationed Ralph Peters, a former bellhop, now out of work, in his office to relay calls to him if he should telephone.

Then in his plane, the Blue Comet, Agent “X” took off for a tour of several states. There were many rumors to be investigated. DOAC activity was spreading like some sinister blight across the country. The Hooded Hordes were becoming more of a threat every day. Rumors were drifting in.

The papers were running scare headlines. Strikes were deliberately being fostered in many communities, it was said, with the aid of DOAC influence. Discontent was being wilfully encouraged. It was even stated that crops, in certain sections of the country, were being ruined at night by the armed and hooded terrorists.

All these reports Agent “X” weighed, investigated, sifted; landing at airport after airport. He visited farmers, industrialists, labor leaders; talked with his own operatives; planned new means of boring into the heart of the DOAC organization.

Every few hours he telephoned back to his office, and Ralph Peters gave him the information his other operatives in distant parts of the country had reported.

All this activity was costing Agent “X” thousands. For the first time in his career he was drawing heavily on the fund that had been subscribed and put at his disposal. But he was prepared to draw thousands more to fight the dread menace of DOAC activity….

It was on the afternoon of the third day of his protracted air tour that Ralph Peters relayed an exciting call to Agent “X.”

“That guy Costigan has been trying to get you for the last hour, boss,” Peters said.

Costigan was the man “X” had stationed near the home of Benjamin Summerville.

“What does he want?” the Agent asked quickly.

“I don’t know, sir. He left a number and said you could call him at four. He sounded excited.”

Agent “X” hung up, frowning. He flew to another town, looked at his watch and saw that it was just four o’clock. Then he called Costigan.

The man answered immediately, as though he had been waiting close beside the phone. His voice held a note of triumph.

“Boss, I been talking to one of Summerville’s servants. There’s something funny going on. A guy’s staying at Summerville’s house that nobody is allowed to see. One of the maids told the butler about him, the butler told the gardener, and the gardener told me. This guy calls himself Doctor Lorenzo, but he never goes out except at night. Summerville’s daughter is sweet on him, I think. She goes with him, sometimes. The maid says he’s writing a book, and she saw his real name on the manuscript. It isn’t Lorenzo at all, boss. It’s the name of a prisoner who was paroled from the big house a while back.”

“Yes — and what prisoner was that?” The Agent’s tone was vibrant as he asked the question.

“A guy named Leon Di Lauro, boss. That ought to make a good story for your paper. I remember reading that Di Lauro jumped parole, and the dicks are after him right now!”

Chapter X

A TINGLE of tense excitement coursed up the Secret Agent’s spine. Benjamin Summerville harboring Leon Di Lauro. Michael Carney’s suspect and Betty Dale’s suspect together. Here was a development worth investigating at once.

The Secret Agent cancelled his scheduled visits to other communities where DOAC activity had been reported. He sped to the airport in a taxi, climbed into the cockpit of the Blue Comet, and headed the cowled nose of the fast plane eastward.

Villages, cities, and open country streamed below him. He studied his map as he flew along. Summerville lived now in the town of Norwick, in southern Connecticut. A small municipal landing field was marked there on the map. The Agent made quick time across many states.

It was just at dusk that he landed at Norwick; but he did not go directly to Summerville’s home. First he got in touch with Costigan, receiving a more detailed report of all that the man had learned. Costigan, formerly attached to a small detective agency, had done his part well. Posing as an unemployed man he had actually gotten work on the grounds of the Summerville estate. It was from the gardener that he had picked up his information.

“It’s a big house, boss,” Costigan said to the Agent, who came in the disguise of Winstead. “Lorenzo or Di Lauro stays somewhere in the left wing. I couldn’t see his room. And you want to be careful if you talk to Summerville. He’s got a couple of huskies working for him inside. They look like ex-pugs or bouncers in some tough joint. They gave a couple of reporters the bum’s rush yesterday.”

Agent “X” nodded. “You can take the evening off, Costigan. You have given me the information I wanted.”

Costigan looked troubled. “You don’t want me to hang around the place then in case somebody gets rough with you.”

“No. I’ll take care of myself.”

There was assurance in the Secret Agent’s tone. By one means or another he intended to interview Summerville. He would judge the man’s character for himself, and get a look at his mysterious guest.

A taxi took “X” to the suburbs where the former senator and industrialist still lived. Summerville claimed to have lost his fortune in the depression. His mills were closed down. But there were those who said it was because he was too niggardly to pay decent wages. He’d been a bitter opponent of the NRA, refusing to conform to any code. Now, shut away in his big estate, he lived a feudal-like existence, out of touch with his political party and his former friends.

Agent “X” dismissed his cab and walked boldly up the drive of the Summerville residence. At his ring a tall, beefy man opened the door. “X” remembered Costigan’s words. This man, for all his smartly cut clothes, had the ugly face of a small-time pugilist who had been battered in the ring. One eye was squinted. There was a scar across his lip. His right ear was enlarged and had cauliflower crinkles. He scowled at Agent “X.”

“Whadda you want?”

“To see Mr. Summerville. I’m certain he’ll want to talk to me. I represent the Associated Press.”

Without waiting for a reply Agent “X” shouldered his way in. He was past the big butler before the servant could stop him. But the man slammed the door and overtook “X” in three strides as he was crossing a tiled hallway.

“You gotta wait here!”

The servant muscled “X” toward a small reception room at the left. Ungraciously he took the card “X” handed him, pointed to a chair, turned on his heel and left.

The Agent did not sit down. He started to move about the small room, stopped. Another servant had appeared as if by magic and was standing in the doorway regarding him.

The Agent took out a cigarette and smoked it as he waited.

TWO minutes passed and the servant who had been set to watch him did not move. As silent and immobile as a statue, he remained in the doorway. Then footsteps sounded. The butler returned. He held “X’s” card in his fingers. Deliberately he tore the card in fragments and flung the pieces toward an unlighted open fireplace.

“This way,” he said harshly. “You can’t see Mr. Summerville. He’s busy. He don’t want to talk to the press any more.”

Agent “X” didn’t move. Calmly he puffed on his cigarette. The big butler made a sound in his throat that might have been an order or a growl of irritation. He nodded to the smaller man. Both of them stepped forward and grabbed “X’s” arms.

“X” did not protest as they led him to the door. Faster and faster they propelled him, while a third servant, a scared-looking little man, opened the big front door. The two who held “X” tried to heave him across the front steps so that he would stumble and fall.

At this point he jerked away, then struck out deftly and quickly with both hands. His knuckles hit just above the belts of the two men, knocking the wind out of them. They staggered back, making strangling noises, clutching their middles, while the Agent sauntered nonchalantly down the drive.

Out of sight of the house, he turned quickly and walked beside the iron fence that encircled the huge estate. At a point where shadows were darkest he suddenly reached up and grasped the topmost spikes of the fence. Strands of barbed wire were twisted around these spikes. The Agent, moving cautiously as he drew himself up, was careful not to stir them. He stepped across the wires, balancing expertly, then jumped down and dropped to the lawn below.

He was now inside the Summerville estate. Looking through screening trees, he could see the house. Most of it was dark, but here and there a window glowed with light.

He stopped suddenly as his sensitive ears heard footsteps. A man, burly as the two servants inside, moved across the lawn. His silhouette showed against a downstairs window for an instant. He carried a heavy knobbed stick in his right hand and, on a leather leash, a big police dog strained.

The Agent heard the animal’s low growl. It swerved, pulling the man directly toward the spot where “X” stood. The man stopped, unsnapped the dog’s leash and spoke gutturally.

“Go get ’im, boy!”

The next second “X” sensed rather than saw the dog bounding forward. “X” drew his strange gas gun from an inner pocket. There wasn’t time now with the man urging him on, to try his usual trick with animals.

He crouched, so as to see the dog’s silhouette also against the illumination of the window. Then, at the last minute, “X” fired his gun full into the animal’s snarling mouth and leaped aside.

With a barely audible growl the big animal continued straight forward but his legs grew weaker and weaker, he stumbled, flopped to the grass and lay still; out peacefully for the next half hour.

The man was obviously puzzled. He stood listening, head cocked on one side, unable to see “X” among the shadows.

“X” STOLE forward, making a sudden, silent rush out of the darkness. The scream of fright that rose to the watchman’s lips was silenced by another charge of gas. Almost instantly, he, too, staggered and toppled.

The Agent’s face was grim. He hadn’t injured either man or dog; but he didn’t intend to be balked in his plan to see Summerville. If Summerville were connected with the DOACs, “X” wanted to know it.

He replaced his gas gun, took a ring of delicate skeleton keys from his pocket and continued on toward the house. Two windows interested him at once. Old-fashioned blinds had been drawn across them. Through the shutters faint light was streaming.

Coming closer, Agent “X” raised himself on tiptoe. There was a shade drawn inside, also, but he found a place at last where he could look between the shutters of the blinds and under the bottom of the shade.

Here was a lighted room with shelves of books around the walls. A man was sitting at a roll-top desk, bent over some papers. His gaunt, deeply lined face was intent. “X” moved quietly along the house, looking for a convenient door. He found one leading to a sun porch, with a room behind the porch that was dark and apparently deserted.

He used his keys to unlock the outer door and gain entry to the porch. Tiptoeing across it, he tackled the inner door next. This opened also, and in a moment he was in the darkened room.

Risking detection by one of the strong-arm servants, he pushed ajar the door of the chamber he was in and stepped out into a hallway. Two doors were visible here. One appeared to lead to the room with the light in it — Summerville’s study.

The Agent made for this, ears alert for the sound of approaching footsteps.

So slowly and quietly that the man before the roll-top desk didn’t hear him, “X” opened the door and entered.

A heavy rug muffled his footsteps as he moved into the room. Besides the door into the corridor, another showed at his left, leading apparently into some chamber beyond. The Agent took quick note of this, then spoke with calm precision.

“Summerville — I’d like a word with you.”

The man at the desk started as violently as though he had been struck. He whirled in his chair, his gaunt face draining of color. Then, slowly, as his eyes focused on “X,” scrutinizing him from head to toe, fury mottled his cheeks. His hand darted toward a signal button, but Agent “X” spoke abruptly.

“Don’t, Summerville. Before calling your servants you’d better hear what I have to say.”

“And who might you be? Who let you in?”

The ex-senator’s voice was thick with rage.

“Nobody let me in! I came — after your servants had thrown me out. I’m the newspaper man who wanted to see you.”

Summerville’s lips twisted into a bitter snarl. “By God, I’ll have you jailed for this! You can’t break into a man’s house with impunity.”

Agent “X” studied the face before him carefully.

“You probably know,” he said, “that ugly rumors are circulating about you, Summerville. You’ve antagonized your own party. It’s being whispered that you’re a DOAC sympathizer. Is that true?”

Summerville struck his desk with one bony fist. “How dare you catechize me about my political beliefs after entering my house like some burglar?”

“Not so loud, Summerville! I’d prefer — and it might be better for you, too — if we kept this talk strictly between ourselves. I came here to learn the truth — not to embarrass you. Are you, I ask, a DOAC sympathizer?”

Summerville was silent, his face still contorted with anger. Agent “X” came closer. In his own gaze was that strangely magnetic quality that had a tangible, almost hypnotic effect on those whom he looked at.

“It may interest you to know,” he continued, “that there are rumors of your being under surveillance by the Department of Justice at this very moment. Unless you want to deepen the stigma of suspicion upon you, now is the time to make clear your position concerning the DOACs.”

SUMMERVILLE’S cheeks paled, but he continued to glare at “X,” pursing his thin lips. The Agent drove home his advantage, studying Summerville, hoping for some shade of expression that might betray to him the man’s inner feelings.

“Your attitude has already ruined your reputation as a political leader, Summerville. Be careful you don’t also ruin your chances of remaining a free citizen. Those suspected of DOAC leanings are liable to arrest from now on.”

Summerville rose slowly in his chair, knuckles resting on the desk, nostrils quivering.

“It’s well known that I’m a reactionary,” he said. “I’m not in sympathy with any of the present-day political trends. I advocate a third party. But if I’ve been impetuous in announcing sympathy with an organization which has overstepped the bounds, I’ll now make a statement which you can publish if you want to. I have no connections whatsoever with the DOACs. Certain things in their attitude appealed to me at first. I made some rash statements. Now I am withdrawing those statements.”

Agent “X” bowed, an ironic twist to his lips. “And how does your guest feel about the DOACs, Summerville?” he asked.

“My guest!” Summerville’s face twitched nervously. “What the devil do you mean?”

“Nothing to get excited about, Summerville! I’m told that you have a guest, a Doctor Lorenzo, staying with you. The doctor, I also understand, is interested in politics. His opinion in regard to the DOAC organization would be of interest, too. I’d like to meet him.”

As Agent “X” said this, his eyes bored into those of the man before him. He was playing boldly, risking death in his efforts to learn the truth; but the expression he saw on Summerville’s face now seemed solely one of fear.

“I begin to understand,” he said. “You’re not a newspaper man at all. You’re a detective, here to pry into my private affairs. It means, I suppose, that the government has taken it upon itself to persecute me and my friends.”

Agent “X” started to reply to this, then abruptly tensed. For Summerville’s face had set into sudden, mask-like rigidity. The man was no longer looking at him. Instead, he was staring over “X’s” shoulder as though at an unpleasant ghost.

“X” turned slowly, an inner voice warning him of danger. He’d heard no sound of footsteps, but he saw now from the corner of his eye that the other door he had noticed on entering was open.

Framed in the threshold of it was a man with enormously broad shoulders, snapping eyes and a black beard shot with streaks of gray. The man was hunched forward in an apelike posture. His piercing eyes were fixed fiercely on Agent “X.” In the stubby fingers of his right hand was an automatic with its blued muzzle pointed straight at the Agent.

Chapter XI

SUMMERVILLE made a gurgling sound in his throat.

“Doctor — for God’s sake don’t shoot!”

The black-bearded man with the gun came slowly into the room. There was murder in his eyes. Summerville cried out as the bearded one’s finger seemed tensed to send a bullet crashing into the Agent’s body.

Looking at the bearded man, Agent “X” saw that Lorenzo, or Di Lauro, had the face of a fanatic. His eyes blazed with an unholy light. He had rugged features, thin, cruel lips, and a high sloping forehead, speaking of brain power above the average. Di Lauro remained silent, ignoring Summerville’a plea. He was trembling, racked by some frenzy that possessed him.

The air in the room seemed to grow more electric each second. Without warning, Summerville made a dive toward the wall, pressing his finger on the button controlling the overhead lights. The room was plunged into instant darkness. And, as the mantle of gloom fell, the bearded man’s automatic gave a choking report. But Agent “X” had lunged sidewise, away from the spot where he had been standing. The bullet meant for him screamed past his head, burying itself in the wall.

He made a leap toward the man with the gun. But something tripped him. He sprawled for a moment, got up immediately. As he rose, he heard a door slam shut.

He flung toward the spot thrusting his shoulder against the panels, only to find that the door had been locked. He started to grope for his skeleton keys, but there came the sound of running footsteps and another door swiftly closing. “X” saw the folly of pursuit. Leon Di Lauro had rushed out of the house into the darkness, making good his escape. To look for him in the shrubbery around the black lawn would be futile.

Somewhere in the study quick breathing sounded. The Agent moved quietly to the spot where the light switch was located. He pressed the button, flooding the room with illumination.

Summerville was standing near his desk, his face ashen. He stared at the Agent and spoke slowly.

“He didn’t kill you then! I’m glad. I didn’t want a murder in this house.”

The relief in the man’s tone was unmistakable. Agent “X’s” eyes were bleak as he stared at Summerville.

“You aided him to escape, didn’t you?”

“You mean I saved your life.” There was a sneer on Summerville’s lips.

As the two men faced each other, quick footsteps came along the hall outside. The door opened and a girl entered the room. She was followed by the two strong-arm servants who now stared at the Agent in open-mouthed amazement. The girl spoke hoarsely.

“What’s going on here, father? Who is this man?”

“X’s” eyes traveled over the girl. She was tall, raw-boned, and bore a striking resemblance to Summerville. Unbeautiful, but intellectual, she had weak gray eyes that peered at the Agent near-sightedly.

“Nothing has happened, Bertha. Run along and don’t bother us.”

“But I heard a shot — and— Where’s Doctor Lorenzo? I called him. He’s not in his room.”

“He got excited and left,”

“It was he who fired that shot then. I knew it!”

The girl’s words came in a gasp. She clenched her hands, standing tensely, staring first at Agent “X,” then at her father. Summerville made an impatient gesture at her and the two servants.

“Go away. I want to talk to this man alone.”

THE servants, their faces heavy with scowls, shot hostile glances in the direction of “X.”

“Get out, I say!” roared Summerville again, and in a moment the two servants, shrugging, turned on their heels and left. But the girl came closer, a stubborn look on her face.

“Where’s the doctor gone?” she demanded. “Why did he shoot? You must answer me. I have a right to know.”

Her homely face was screwed into a frown of anxiety. Agent “X,” shrewd judge of human nature, saw that this raw-boned girl had a more than casual interest in the bearded Di Lauro.

“I can’t answer your question, Bertha,” said Summerville harshly. “Leave it alone now. Mind your business and go back to your room. Everything will turn out all right if you don’t meddle.”

With a venomous glance at Agent “X” she left. Immediately her father fixed the Agent with a hard stare.

“You see the trouble you’ve caused in coming here,” he said gratingly.

“You’ve got to expect a little excitement of this sort,” said the Agent dryly, “if you insist on harboring ex-convicts, Summerville.”

“By God, sir — what are you driving at now?”

Fear had leaped into Summerville’s eyes.

“Perhaps you don’t know who your guest really is, Summerville. His right name is Leon Di Lauro. He was recently paroled from the state penitentiary. Suppose you tell me why he is staying at your house?”

The look of fear on Summerville’s face increased; but he maintained stubborn silence. The Agent continued.

“What if I let the police know you’ve been harboring a man wanted by the parole board for failure to report? That wouldn’t do much to correct the bad reputation you’ve been building up for yourself lately.”

Summerville appeared suddenly to reach a decision. He thrust his jaw out aggressively.

“Tell the police any damn story you want to,” he said. “I’ve one of my own. You broke into this house. A guest of mine, Doctor Lorenzo, fired at you in self-defense. I’ve never heard of this other man you mention. I don’t believe your story. The doctor is a friend of my daughter’s. She met him some weeks ago, found he was writing a book and suggested that he stay with us in order to have a quiet place to work. That’s all I know, and—”

He stopped speaking abruptly, for there came a sudden sound at the study door. It was thrust open violently and one of the servants stuck his head in. There was a strained look on his face. He spoke with harsh excitement.

“We just found Rheinhart and that dog of his knocked out cold, Mr. Summerville! They’re out on the lawn, and that guy there must have done it”

The eyes of both men focused on the Agent. Summerville swore, then stabbed a quivering finger at “X.”

“You’ve broken into my house!” he shouted. “You’ve knocked out my servant! You’ve tried to intimidate me! Now it’s my turn for a little action. Hold him, Garrick, while I telephone for the police.”

The big servant strode into the room, and, hard on his heels, was the other smaller servant who had helped to eject “X” when he visited by the front door.

Summerville made a grab for the phone as his men stepped forward to make a prisoner of “X.” The Agent’s hand moved like a streak.

He whipped the gas gun from his pocket, waved it menacingly at the two men, then backed toward the shuttered window. With one hand groping behind him, he quickly raised the sash.

HE found and opened the catches that held the old-fashioned blind. While Summerville stood helpless, hand poised over the telephone, afraid to move, Agent “X” stepped easily through the window and dropped to the dark lawn below.

He left the grounds of the Summerville estate, climbing dexterously over the spiked and wired iron fence. He kept to the shadowed streets till he sighted a cruising taxi which took him back to the center of town.

Here he plunged into a telephone booth and called his own city office. The voice of the young man stationed there answered him.

“No reports, sir, in the past two hours.”

Agent “X” frowned and looked at his watch. The hands showed nine o’clock.

“You mean to say Chatfield didn’t call at seven?”

“No, sir. He did not.”

The Agent hung up, a furrow between his brows. Chatfield was the operative stationed by “X” outside Greta St. Clair’s establishment.

“X” put in a direct call to Greta St. Clair’s house, prepared to question her in the pose of “Claude Erskine.” But the voice of the telephone operator sounded in his ears.

“Sorry, sir, the number you called does not answer. It is temporarily out of order.”

“Out of order?”

“That’s right, sir.”

Agent “X” dropped the receiver back on the hook, left the booth in three quick strides. He took several deep breaths. His eyes were bright. He looked up Costigan, gave the man instructions to continue his shadowing of Summerville, then went to the municipal flying field. Fifteen minutes later he was winging through the night again in his hurtling, rocketing ship, the Blue Comet.

He did not swerve from a straight line till he picked up the blue and silver streak of the river that flowed by the state prison’s fortresslike front. He followed it, sweeping lower as he made out the glaring beams of the searchlights that burned on the prison walls, turned on since the raid. He crossed the river and side-slipped into a small field beside a highway. Greta St. Clair’s house was a half-mile down the road.

AGENT “X” strode quickly through the darkness. A grim sense of foreboding filled him. A sense that Chatfield’s silence, his failure to report, indicated another act of terrorism on the part of the DOACs.

He crossed fields and woods making a short cut, till the high wall of Greta St. Clair’s estate rose before him. Then he paused, holding his breath.

Lights were burning near the front gate. They were not lights from the house itself, but lights held in the hands of men, electric torches and lanterns. He saw the visored caps of cops, saw an automobile and several motorcycles close to the walls. The iron gate was open.

He strode forward, and instantly saw that the gate had been smashed, and that the wall itself was cracked and broken. Loose strands of wire hung down. This havoc had been wrought by some terrific explosion. Agent “X” could guess what it was.

Lips grim, eyes probingly bright, he shouldered up to the group of men.

“Something happen?”

He baited a cop by deliberately asking a stupid question. The blue-coat turned toward him, his face plainly showing irritation.

“Huh!” he grunted. “When mugs get to throwing bombs, something usually happens, doesn’t it? Them hooded guys have been messing around again. The same mugs that tried to snatch Mike Carney out of stir. Now they’ve kidnaped that high-stepping dame of his, and knocked off some of her servants while they were doing it. Better start traveling, pal. The chief’s showing his teeth today. He’s likely to pick up any nosey gent and book him as a suspect.”

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:

“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

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 that 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.”

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

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

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!

“I’ll come out there, Jim,” he said hoarsely.

“What can you do, boss? The strike’s bound to go through — unless these factory owners cough up. And a hundred grand is a lot of dough.”

“Listen, Jim,” the Agent’s voice was hard and thin, “I’ll bring the money myself. I’ll get it somehow. We’ve got to stop this strike!”

He heard Jim Hobart’s gasp of surprise.

“A hundred grand, boss. I don’t see how you can do it!”

“I’ll try anyway.”

The Agent’s eyes were almost feverishly bright as he hung up. He licked lips that had become a thin straight line. The money angle didn’t bother him. He still had plenty in the bank, a vast sum at his disposal to combat crime. But it was the time element. He couldn’t just wire the money to South Bolton. The cash must seem to come from the factory owners themselves. His presence would be needed on the spot.

There was no other sure way. It would take the genius and tact of the Man of a Thousand Faces to see that the money was distributed properly. And the strike might already have started. His presence would be needed by those innocents whom it would affect — the wives and children of the workers, ground down already by four long years of depression.

Never had Secret Agent “X” been torn by such a conflict of emotions. Betty Dale, somewhere in the East a prisoner awaiting torture and horrible death at the hands of the DOACs! The city of South Bolton, a festering point of sinister DOAC activity. He walked the streets for minutes, trembling, shaken, trying as he had never tried before to pull himself together.

A sound that was like a groan came from the Agent’s lips. The bright morning sun had lost its brilliance for him. A gray pall of horror seemed to stand between him and it. The death shrieks of the man he had seen die seemed still to echo in his ears. Forcibly he shut out the thought that shrieks of a like nature might come from Betty Dale’s lips if he were not in time.

TIME! That was the vital thing! Never had he had such a realization of the value of time as now. He wasted no more seconds in thought. His mind was made up. Duty came first — the duty that commanded him to go where he was most needed; where he could bring the greatest good to the greatest number. He must go to South Bolton where the hideous lightning bolt of DOAC terror was scheduled to strike.

He moved along the street in a frenzy of speed. Back in his hideout he made another quick change of disguise. This time when he came out he was a new character — Elisha Pond, man of means, depositor in several big eastern banks.

He took a brief case with him. A taxi sped him to the door of one of Washington’s largest financial institutions. It was just opening for the day. As Elisha Pond, he was known here also.

The cashiers behind their cages were startled by “X’s” burning eyes and intent face. One of them stepped forward. The Agent stilled the emotions that racked him. He spoke quietly.

“I want to draw out a hundred thousand in cash this morning.”

“A hundred thou—” For a brief instant the clerk glanced up as though he had heard the voice of a madman. Then his own official composure returned.

“Certainly, Mr. Pond, but I’ll have to speak to one of the managers first. Just step this way, sir, if you don’t mind.”

Agent “X” was taken through grilled doors, along a marble corridor, to a row of inner offices behind the cashiers’ cages. He hardly noticed his surroundings. His face still worked with the force of his emotion.

To the quiet-faced man in the manager’s office he repeated his request. He said that he was flying west immediately and needed the cash to satisfy certain parties in a big business deal.

The manager had his account looked into, found that there was sufficient on deposit, and made out a withdrawal slip himself. He tapped his desk nervously, eyeing this strange depositor. It wasn’t the first time Elisha Pond had made odd demands on the bank. His mysterious comings and goings had never quite been explained. But he was too big a depositor to be questioned.

“That will just about clean us out of the cash we have on hand, Mr. Pond,” the manager said, smiling. “But it is our policy to please. I’m glad we could accommodate you this morning.”

The cash was brought to “X” in bills of large denomination. He counted them, stuffed them quickly into his brief case.

“Don’t you think you’d better have one of our guards accompany you out of the city?” asked the manager. But Agent “X” waved the offer aside.

“I’ll be all right, thanks,” he said. “Sorry to have troubled you like this.”

He was away in a moment. Another taxi sped him back to his hideout, where he changed again to the disguise of A.J. Martin. In ten minutes he was on his way to the airport at Anacostia.

Another twenty minutes, and the blue-and-orange nose of his fast, bulletlike plane was speeding him westward through the morning sky. Never had he driven the little ship as he did now. Every second that ticked by on his instrument-board clock seemed precious. It seemed as if they were drops of his own life’s blood, dripping away.

He pushed the throttle forward to the quadrant stop, sent the ship hurtling like a rocket over rivers, forests, fields and towns.

IN three hours he canted the blue wings of his plane down toward the airport at South Bolton. Three hours to cover over six hundred miles. Three hours from Washington, D.C.

He slammed down in a breath-taking side-slip that seemed to spell destruction. He yawed the blue plane’s tail at the last minute to kill speed. When his wheels touched he hurtled toward the row of hangars so rapidly that a frightened mechanic shrieked a warning, until Agent “X” fish-tailed to a skidding stop with a wing tip almost touching a hangar door.

“Take care of the ship,” he yelled. “I’m in a hurry. See that she’s gassed and oiled — ready to take off any minute. There’s an extra twenty in it if you do the job right.” He tossed the amazed mechanic a ten-spot, signaled a taxi outside the field gate.

In the center of town, a phone call put him in touch with Jim Hobart. In ten minutes he was conversing with Jim in a hotel room. Hobart’s eyes bulged at sight of the brief case.

“You got the cash then, boss?”

“Yes. But that’s only the beginning of it. Now to get it into the hands of the right parties and have it turned over to the DOACs. The strike’s got to be stopped.”

Hobart pulled a long face. “It’s already started, boss. They’re fighting now in front of the Consolidated Mills. The police are out. I seen two guys shoved into an ambulance as I came by.”

Agent “X” grabbed Hobart’s arm and spoke hoarse instructions.

“Get back to DOAC headquarters. Play your part with them. I’ll handle my end of it. I’ll meet you here as soon as it’s over. You mustn’t be seen in public with me.”

The brief case of money under his arm, Agent “X” went to the mill section of town. Police lines stopped his taxi within two blocks of the Consolidated Mills. He heard the spiteful crack of revolver and rifle fire, saw grim-faced cops holding a thousand or more workers at bay. There was trouble in the air — hate and suspicion running rampant, like some unseen but menacing beast.

This was no normal strike. The workers themselves didn’t understand it. Feeling was running high. Men who had been given work after years of idleness now found themselves out on strike. Employers who had signed codes, increased wages, were suddenly without help, while orders piled up.

The union bosses that “X” saw were scared-looking, haunted. He knew that DOAC terrorism had reached them. He knew that they feared for the safety of their families and for their own lives. They could not disobey the DOACs’ command to call a strike, any more than the workers could disobey them.

One boss rose on a barrel top, warning the workers against violence, pleading with them to be patient. Two men who had the look of hired thugs stepped forward. They yanked the man from his perch, began beating him unmercifully while factory employees stood by, afraid to take a hand, and failing to understand just what was going on.

“X,” grim-lipped, shouldered through the mob. Two cops stopped him gruffly. Once again he showed one of his cards. It identified him as a representative of the American Federation of Labor. He was allowed to pass.

The owner of the Consolidated Mills was trying to bring strikebreakers in. Four truckloads of unemployed men from the city’s parks were nosing through the lines of sullen workers. The police opened a way for them. “X” saw the first real outbreak of violence.

A factory hand made a harsh-tongued harangue to his fellows. A dozen men rushed forward and surrounded the foremost of the trucks. The driver tried to speed up the vehicle. He was pulled from his seat, sent staggering into the gutter with a black eye. Workers swarmed around the truck in an angry sea. A strikebreaker shouted a warning. He was pulled from the truck and beaten. Blood ran as a fist squashed his nose. The voice of the mob rose in an angry roar.

The other scabs, fear suddenly in their hearts, leaped from the truck and ran yelling. Sticks, stones and empty bottles followed them. One man fell to the pavement with a cracked skull.

“X” SHOULDERED on inside the mill and a furtive watchman conducted him to the manager’s office. The owner wasn’t present; but the manager, bald-headed, nervous, was there. “X” at once told his purpose in coming.

“This strike most be stopped,” he said. “The workers don’t want it. It’s going to cause needless suffering and killing. It will wreck the returning prosperity of this city. The DOACs’ demands must be met before it is too late.”

A flush of fury spread over the manager’s pink face.

“That’s impossible,” he said. “They want a hundred thousand dollars from the mills of this city. The owners of Consolidated and others have refused to meet their demands. The DOACs and the workers are in league against us. It’s criminal extortion.”

“You’re wrong,” said the Agent harshly. “The DOACs have used intimidation, terrorism on the union leaders. They don’t want the strike any more than you do. But their lives wouldn’t be worth a cent if they didn’t call it. There’ll be murders, bloodshed if this thing isn’t stopped. The demands of the DOACs must be met, I tell you — to prevent a terrible catastrophe in this city.”

“It’s a racket!” shouted the manager. “We won’t be taken in by it. Who the hell are you?”

Again Agent “X” showed his card, and the manager’s face grew redder still.

“So! I told you the workers were in league with the DOACs. You dare to come here and tell me—”

Quietly Agent “X” opened his brief case.

“How much of the extortion money is assessed against this mill?” he asked.

“Twenty thousand dollars!”

The Agent took out a dozen packages of bills as the manager stared in wide-eyed amazement. “X” flipped the bills down on the man’s desk.

“Give me a receipt for that — and tell your boss that it is to be paid over to the DOACs at once.”

The manager was speechless for a moment. He found his voice. It was breathless.

“What about the other mills? Will they pay their share?”

“Yes. I can promise you that they will pay, too. The full amount will be raised.”

The manager nodded, grabbed a telephone. There was relief on his face. As he told his boss the good news, the sound of the strikers outside was like a rising storm.

Violence had gained headway as “X” went to the next big mill. A thousand wild rumors were going the rounds. Some union leaders were uncertain as to what course to follow. They were fighting furiously among themselves, giving and countermanding orders.

The mill owners, feeling that this strike was unfair and uncalled for, were bringing more and more scabs in. Regular employees of the mills, seeing their valued jobs snatched from under their noses, were becoming bitter, dangerous.

Beads of sweat on his forehead, working madly against time, Agent “X” visited mill after mill. He felt like a man pouring oil on troubled waters, trying to calm a raging sea to save a frail craft from destruction. His frenzied work was beginning to take effect.

The owners of the various mills along the trail behind “X” were getting in touch with one another. The word was going about that money had been obtained, that the DOACs’ demands were to be met.

An hour passed. Agent “X” moved on, interviewing, haranguing, taking packs of bills from his brief case. But not until the last mill owner had received his share of the Agent’s money and informed the DOACs that the sum demanded had been raised did the hooded organization get in touch with the union leaders.

Then at last the fury of the strikers began to abate. Groups of workers began straggling back to their jobs. Foremen began organizing shifts.

At the outskirts of the city by the last mill that Agent “X” came to, a tense knot of men stood gathered. Here, like a lurid spark of revolt refusing to die out, hatred and suspicion were still burning fiercely. The Agent heard a man’s voice, hoarse, frenzied, haranguing those around him. He saw a pair of arms flailing the air. The man seemed to have the gift of an orator. He was holding the others spellbound.

“Don’t go back to your work, fools!” the man was shouting. “Don’t let your bosses betray you. Who are they to make pawns of you! They are being bought off. They are the tools of the mill owners. Money has been sent in from the outside to stop this strike. You are being sold out, double-crossed, betrayed.”

A leader of a local union thrust forward angrily to speak to the man. The man lashed out with a huge, brutal fist, knocking the other down. As he did so he turned his head and Agent “X” caught sight of his face for the first time. He gasped.

The man was broad-shouldered, his features covered by a dense black beard shot with streaks of gray. The gleaming, close-set eyes, burning with the light of fanaticism, were familiar.

Every muscle in the Agent’s body grew tense. He was looking at the face of Leon Di Lauro — Summerville’s strange guest and Mike Carney’s suspect.

Chapter XV

THE sight of this man backed up the Agent’s suspicions against him and Benjamin Summerville. Di Lauro was trying to make trouble. His persuasive eloquence was creating doubt in the minds of the mill-hands. He had caught their attention. His violence against the union leader made him seem dramatic.

The Agent knew that many of the DOACs probably were honest men, working for what they considered the betterment of the nation. These were the ones who had been fooled and tricked by DOAC propaganda — men like the slain Gordon Ridley. Possibly Di Lauro was such a man, too. Again, he might have the cleverness to cover criminal motives with the cloak of sincerity. Whatever his real character, he was in a tight spot now. The union leader was rising angrily, fists clenched, demanding that the workers ignore Di Lauro and return to their jobs.

The men were uncertain, bewildered, torn between loyalty to a union they felt might have betrayed them, and the convincing arguments of the bearded agitator.

Di Lauro was a solid man, built to stand physical punishment, well able to give it out. The union leader had the same muscular proportions. They glared at each other. Intense hate shone in their eyes.

“Comrades, this man is a four-flusher, a crook, a trouble-maker,” cried the union leader. “You don’t know him, and neither do I. Listen to him and you’ll have a lot of grief on your hands. The best way to get ahead in this world is to work. Don’t forget the tough times you’ve all been through! You guys are lucky to have jobs. There’s a lot that would like to be in your shoes. Go back to your jobs now and let this bird whistle through his whiskers alone.

“He knows how to sling the lingo — but don’t let that fool you. Get back to the mill — an’ tonight you can drink your beer, take your missus to a movie or play with the kids. What more does a guy need to be happy?”

It was a sound argument. The union leader had outlined an age-old method of finding happiness — through work. But Di Lauro had a silver tongue and glib cleverness in the use of words. He raised his hands to the men. His voice boomed out dramatically.

“What does life mean to you, friends? What do you ask? Do you demand nothing more than enough money to keep you existing so you can get on the job at the blast of the whistle every morning? Are you toiling ants, insects, that life means nothing to you but work? Take warning, friends! Don’t let yourselves be slaves of the money monsters who drain your life away. They will throw you aside when you can no longer produce the wealth they squander in riotous excesses.”

Di Lauro’s teeth gleamed in a triumphant snarl. His eyes blazed. Momentarily he was holding the workers spellbound, keeping them away from the jobs that gave them a living.

The union leader boiled with rage. He was a self-made man who’d worked hard and honestly all his life. His face still bore the marks of encounters of an earlier day. He lunged at Leon Di Lauro, and the rabid, wild-eyed agitator met him with a bruising attack. The two men clashed, each ready to fight to a finish.

The Secret Agent wondered. The union leader was obviously a hard-headed, two-fisted advocate of labor organization, loyal to his union, right or wrong. But what about Leon Di Lauro? Even the Agent, skilled at detecting hidden motives, was in doubt. Was Di Lauro, possibly an emissary of Summerville, spreading discontent, working for the DOACs, building a campaign to exploit man power?

While the Agent harassed his brain with conjectures, the bearded agitator and the union leader began a furious exchange of blows.

The mill hands stopped. Forgotten were their troubles in the excitement of witnessing a primitive battle.

Di Lauro was a savage fighter. He slashed into his foe with both fists pumping destruction The union leader fought valiantly, but he wilted under the blasting punishment. Di Lauro rocked his opponent repeatedly with devastating blows to the head and body. The bearded agitator was beyond the age of fist fighting, and he did not avoid all the clumsy swings that were hurled his way.

In a few seconds both of them were drenched with crimson. None of the workers attempted interference. The Agent himself saw that it was a fair fight.

Di Lauro had his foe on the way out. Grimly he bored into the union advocate, slugging in flesh-splitting blows. He pounded a hard left to the head, sunk a sickening right to the stomach, cut loose with a deadly onslaught to the chin. The union leader was finished.

Then the crowd suddenly melted away. Five uniformed guards came sprinting from the mill. They carried tear-gas bombs, guns, blackjacks, and they were roaring threats at Leon Di Lauro.

IT was the Agent who told the agitator to run. Those guards were not headed on a kindly mission. Given the license, they might even kill Di Lauro. The agitator took one sharp look at the oncoming group, muttered savagely, and headed down the residential street that adjoined the mill grounds. The guards redoubled their speed.

The Agent broke into a swift run, too, following Di Lauro, careful not to lose sight of the man.

All the while he had been maneuvering for the end of the strike, he had been thinking of Betty Dale and the gruesome fate awaiting her if he failed to obey the DOACs. He had to get back to Washington in time, and a whipping southeast wind worried him. A headwind could cut a plane’s speed in half. Even now the Agent’s margin of time was so scant that he was filled with a chilling, gnawing fear — but he wanted to catch Di Lauro.

Suddenly a siren screeched. A black touring car careened around the corner of a side street, swung into the road ahead of the Agent.

“X” gasped in terror. He saw death in that rocketing car. He visioned Betty Dale being thrown to those drooling old men, the leering DOAC executioners. How could he save himself? How could he get away from the men in that car, so he could save Betty from leaded destruction?

The ugly snouts of Tommy guns were protruding from the bounding, roaring car. The siren never ceased its shrill, ear-splitting blast. Obviously that shrieking racket was to drown out the snarling thunder of blazing sub-machine guns.

Those death-dealing weapons were manned by men in vivid blue hoods, by members of the DOACs! The siren increased in deafening intensity. The machine’s exhaust began to snort and boom.

Spouts of angry flame spewed from the Tommy guns. The roar of the pounding guns merged with the shrieking siren and the exhaust’s explosions. But those jagged tongues of powder flame didn’t lick out at the Agent, now darting for cover.

The target was Leon Di Lauro, the agitator.

Di Lauro stopped suddenly. His head went forward and his feet flew into the air as though he had tripped over a wire stretched knee-high across the road.

The Tommy guns poured a wicked stream of lead into the bearded man. Before he hit the ground, his body had been pierced a hundred times. He had been converted into a human sieve.

The death had come with merciful swiftness, for Di Lauro had died before the first shots had ceased echoing. The car came to a screeching, grinding, tread-destroying, skidding stop. Three hooded men leaped out. One carried a smoking pot. The others held grim-looking tongs. The dead man’s jaws were pried open. A shaft of molten lead descended from a ladle. The dead body gave a convulsive shudder as the live metal shriveled tissue.

The corpse was left in the center of the road, with a beard of lead attached to the broiled flesh of the chin. The Agent ground his teeth. The murder car streaked down a side street. DOAC vengeance had reached South Bolton, and that vengeance made the Agent searingly conscious of Betty Dale’s peril.

Chapter XVI

THE workers had swung around again. They were heading toward the corpse. “X” gnawed at his lips and surveyed them for a tense moment. They had been swayed by the words of Leon Di Lauro. Now they would be infuriated over his murder. And they might turn their fury on the Agent thinking he was an accomplice of the killers, because he had apparently pursued Di Lauro under the muzzles of their guns.

The least they would do would be to hold him for a thorough questioning, and now a delay would mean that another life would be taken by the fiendish DOACs. Up a side street in the residential section, “X” saw a man stepping into a car.

He dashed for that car. A cry sounded behind him. The mill guards were heading the mob. They were coming after him!

Something whined above the Agent. It was a bullet. The sweet, smiling face of Betty Dale rose before him. The roar of the mob behind him sounded like an angry storm at sea. “X” had done his work in South Bolton. He had broken the backbone of the strike, had prevented untold misery. He was the benefactor of those men behind him. Yet those he had protected would destroy him, and, finishing him, would rob Betty of life, too.

The car ahead was starting. The driver was shifting gears quickly. In a moment he would be on high, speeding away from harm. The guards were shooting at “X.” From a second-story window a man hurled a bottle at him.

The Agent dodged the missile. From another window an earthenware jug came spinning. The Agent saw it too late to avoid it entirely. The jug struck his shoulder, jolting him off balance. The Agent stumbled, regained his stride, and catapulted through the air.

His hands flung out, clutching the spare tire on the back of the moving car. His hands slipped, but he dug his fingers into the treads. Those treads saved him from the charging mob. “X” was dragged a quarter of a block before he could get sufficient hold to draw himself up.

Once his feet were off the ground, he quickly muscled himself to the top of the car, and crawled across the fabric. He lowered himself to the running board beside the terrified driver. “X” was loath to take advantage of the frightened fellow, but he was in no position to trust a stranger. The driver uttered a shout of alarm. The Agent cut it short with a sense-shattering left hook to the point of the jaw.

The car swerved to the gutter, bounced onto the sidewalk. Grabbing the wheel and swinging the machine into the street again, the Agent shoved the unconscious man across the shiny leather, and slid into the driver’s position. Shots winged above him. Mob leaders bellowed for him to stop. “X’s” answer was to jam the accelerator to the floor. The car plunged forward, and purred into top speed.

The mad pack was left behind. The Agent raced the car for a few blocks, then he slackened the speed to conform to traffic regulations, and headed into town. The car owner had received a mule’s-kick clout. “X” knew how to time a punch to get the full force of his power and weight into the impact. The fellow would be unconscious for an hour, groggy for a day. But he would be rewarded. The Agent never stinted when he paid off those who aided in his war against crime.

He drew up in front of a drug store. He knew an unconscious man would draw a crowd, but he had to risk further interruption. He rushed into the store to a telephone booth and called a number. In a few minutes he was talking to his operative, Jim Hobart.

“Get to the flying field as quickly as you can,” he ordered Hobart. “If you beat me there, charter a fast plane and follow me to Washington. Never mind the expense. Go to my apartment there, and wait for a call. I’ve got to travel six hundred miles in three hours, and it looks as if I’ll be bucking a headwind.”

The Agent hung up. Jim Hobart was reliable. He’d follow orders without question. Outside, “X” found a crowd gawking at the unconscious man in the car. The Agent’s punch had drawn blood from the mouth, and that was why passers-by knew the fellow wasn’t sleeping. “X” had expected the gawkers, but he had hoped the police wouldn’t interfere. A motorcycle cop was trying to arouse the Agent’s knockout victim.

“X” had to do some convincing bluffing.

“Say, you’re the man I want!” he exclaimed to the cop. “I’ve just called headquarters. Told them to detail a radio car to get a motorcycle escort for me. I’m from the governor’s office. Been investigating the strike. This man was hit by a brickbat. Don’t know the extent of the injury. Must get him to the hospital. Then I have to go to the flying field. Have to rush to the Capital for a conference with the governor. Clear the way, officer. Quick, now! Not a minute to lose!”

THE Agent fired his orders so quickly that the cop didn’t have time to think or question his right to give them. “X” was in the car and the engine was humming. The motorcycle cop leaped onto his machine, sounded the siren, and secured the right of way for the “governor’s representative.”

At the hospital, less than half a minute was lost, while stretcher bearers took the unconscious man inside. “X” left the information that the fellow’s car would be at the flying field. He stuffed three crisp twenties into the man’s pocket as payment for the blow on the chin and the trouble he had caused.

With the cop shrieking his siren and speeding in the lead, traffic lights meant nothing to the Agent. At the field, he shook hands with the officer, brushed the cop’s coat, deftly slipping a ten-dollar bill into the policeman’s pocket.

Leaving the car for the owner to pick up later, “X” rushed onto the field. Jim Hobart was there. A mechanic was climbing out of the Blue Comet’s cockpit. Another attendant stood by, ready to give the propeller a whirl.

“She’s waiting for the gun, boss,” said Hobart. “Everything’s been checked. But, say, I picked up something hot.” He drew the Agent aside. “A.J., the DOACs have an arsenal located somewhere in the east. I don’t know where, but it’s supposed to be a whopper — enough fireworks to outfit a dozen regiments and raze a city. The same rumor has it that smaller arsenals are located in strategic positions throughout the nation. You know what that means, A.J. The DOACs are planning a surprise revolution. When they’re ready, the whole country will be attacked at once. We’re liable to be under DOAC rule any time.”

Tenseness embossed ridges of muscle on the Agent’s jaw. He was heavy-hearted and tormented with worry over Betty Dale. Even now, it might be too late to save her. Suppose he had engine trouble? Suppose he hit a storm? Sleet, piling up, had cracked many a wing. There were a thousand possibilities of disaster. Any one would be fatal to the girl.

And now the press of duty weighed down on the Agent. An arsenal. It had potential destruction for thousands. His first duty-governed impulse was to change his plans, to remain and trace down the rumor. But the rumor might be nothing more than that, and then he would always be harassed with the knowledge that he had sacrificed Betty Dale to his own sense of duty.

“I ought to get more details on that arsenal,” he told Hobart, to whom he was A.J. Martin, newspaper man. “But, Jim, what would you do if a girl you knew, and liked, got into the hands of the DOACs, and they had threatened to silence her with molten lead?”

“Huh?” retored the gruff Hobart. “Do? Why, I’d go thirty-six thousand miles into hell for her!”

The Agent nodded and ran his tongue over his lip in a moment of meditative silence. Then he snapped into action, vaulting into the cockpit of the Blue Comet, and signaling to the mechanics to give the propeller a kick.

“You said it, Jim!” he exclaimed fervently. “Thirty-six thousand miles into hell is only a pleasant little stroll when you’re going after a girl like Betty Dale. See you in Washington.”

His last words were drowned by the roar of the motor, but Jim Hobart already had his instructions. The Agent was far from relieved of worry, but his heart was lightened, now that he was heading for Betty’s rescue. It was two o’clock when he took off. At five he had to be on the square in the Capitol rotunda. He had three hours to make six hundred miles.

ONCE before he had shot his Blue Comet through space as swiftly as that, but weather conditions had been favorable. Already, while the town of South Bolton was still in sight, his plane was laboring against an insidious headwind. He sought altitude, and the icy air informed him that he was facing a storm. Maybe he could get above it. The Blue Comet was a plucky little craft. It had got through heavy weather before, but not at the speed the Agent had to make.

“X” kept his eyes glued to the speedometer and the clock. The minute hand seemed to be tripping at double time, while the indicator on the mileage dial changed figures with heartbreaking slowness. Although time was more precious than his life now, he had too much time for thinking. His imagination tortured him. He tried to concentrate on the DOACs, tried to shut out worry by planning moves against that legion of fiends. But the horrible fate that hovered over Betty Dale was like a scalpel thrust into his harried consciousness.

The screeching wind rose in velocity. Tempest weather set in. For an agonizing hour the Agent didn’t fall below his schedule. If he maintained this speed, he would reach Washington in time. But ahead, glowering storm clouds were billowing in ugly masses. Already slivers of ice stabbed at his face. Valiant, defiant, the Blue Comet bumped along like a machine on a rocky road. What would happen, though, when it bucked the ferocity of the snarling, ripping, twisting upheaval of the storm ahead?

The Agent frantically nosed the plane upward, trying to get above that sullen black menace. But before he had climbed a thousand feet, the storm struck. A lashing gale shrieked around him. Whirling missiles of ice beat against the fabric of the wings. The stays sang against the racing wind, the uprights groaned and creaked, the fuselage shuddered. Yet higher and higher the Blue Comet soared, its roaring propeller slashing the knife-edged sheets of sleet.

The storm’s savagery didn’t dimmish. Ice clung to the wings, ice that could cripple a plane. “X” gritted his teeth and kept on climbing. Numb and blue, he clutched the stick with raw, stiff hands. The bitter cold was splitting the skin. But the chill dread of losing time punished him more than the cruel weather. The plane was going up, but not ahead. Helplessly the Agent cursed. All nature seemed to be conspiring against him.

Although it was still daytime, the Agent couldn’t see ten feet ahead. On every side, black, maddening chaos closed in on the Blue Comet. Another thousand feet of altitude, and the panic. The fury of the whipping, thundering storm had redoubled. “X” was failing! The odds were so heavy that he wouldn’t reach Washington at all. He wouldn’t even be able to make a forced landing. The storm would crack him up.

The Agent muttered savagely. His frost-encircled eyes were burning slits. His mouth tightened to a scar of determination. His half-frozen face set grimly, the muscles bunching into fighting knots. If he had to take defeat, he was taking it snarling and battling to the last.

He couldn’t get above the storm. He couldn’t get under it. Maybe he could get around it. Recklessly he side-slipped and zoomed the Blue Comet directly south. The gale slugged the sturdy little craft with a shrieking broadside that almost flipped the plane over and sent it into a fatal spin.

“X” threw all his skill into the fight against the storm’s cyclonic force. The blasting hurricane toyed with the battered ship. A guy wire snapped. The Agent clenched his jaws and kept the plane riding athwart the wind. Any moment, he expected the wind to damage a wing or rip off the tail. Suddenly something crashed against an upright on the right wing.

THE Agent peered through the stinging curtain of sleet. Another object shot by the ship. “X” uttered a gasp of fright. A bird! That was what had struck his plane. Wild geese, probably victims like himself of the storm’s fury. If one of those creatures had hit the propeller, the steel blade would have been shattered like brittle glass.

A hysterical laugh escaped him. Then he muttered a curse. Was he losing his grip, going insane? This killing ordeal was enough to rob anyone of reason, but he had to master himself, had to keep himself in control. He held the plane on its new course. The Blue Comet roared through the heavy darkness. Was there no end to this storm? A sense of defeat deadened the Agent. Only his iron will kept him from lapsing into a coma. He wasn’t going to win. Betty Dale would be sacrificed. To “X,” this storm seemed like the end of the world.

Then he gave a choking cry. He saw a shaft of light piercing a rift in the storm clouds. The sun! He drew the stick back still farther, fed gas to the laboring motor, shot up through the hole in the clouds into dazzling, gleaming sunlight. Life seemed magically transformed. Below, the storm clouds still roiled and eddied. The Blue Comet was in high, thin air at an eight-thousand-foot altitude.

Ahead was a clear vista of blue. He sent the plane above the path of the wind. His heart was pounding with exultancy. He glanced at the clock, made a swift calculation. There was still time! Unless he struck another storm area or had motor trouble, he could reach the Capitol around five o’clock.

In comparison with his wretchedness of a short while before, he felt almost light-hearted. He had found a gap in an almost impenetrable barrier, and his mind refused to be shrouded with doubt. It was like awakening from a hideous nightmare to find sunlight pouring through the window.

Time was passing swiftly, but the Blue Comet was proving its worth. Once the air speed indicator showed that the plane was traveling two hundred miles an hour.

For the first time since Betty was kidnaped, the Agent relaxed. He lay back in the cushioned seat, almost dozed off. The mileage was mounting on the indicator. The sun was far on its western course when “X” saw the blue ribbon of the Potomac.

A few minutes later he was spiraling down to Boiling Field. The plane had scarcely taxied to a stop when he leaped out of the cockpit, motioned mechanics to take the Blue Comet to the hangar, raced toward a line of parked cars. He hired a machine, and baited the driver with a five-dollar bill to jam the accelerator to the floor.

But this time the car didn’t have a motorcycle cop clearing the way. The driver had to stop for traffic lights. Those delays ate up the precious seconds.

IT was five o’clock when the machine careened into Pennsylvania Avenue. The Agent was wild-eyed with suspense. Would the DOACs give him a few minutes’ grace? Or had his chance vanished with the tolling of the hour?

“X” was three minutes late when the car scraped to a stop in the Capitol grounds. The Agent paid the driver, and bounded to the gravel. He raced inside the rotunda. His keen eyes swept anxiously across the floor. Less than a dozen people were here. None had the searching, impatient look of a waiting person.

The Agent rushed to the designated square; it was four minutes after five now. He kept turning around, but no one approached him. “X” quelled an impulse to shout his identity. His eyes were feverish, his mouth parched. The pigments put on for the A.J. Martin disguise hid the hectic flush that panic had caused. For all he knew, Betty this minute was in the hands of those revolting old men. Maybe already her fresh beauty was denied by death!

He brushed a hand wearily across his face. There is a limit to any man’s resistance. “X” thought he was going to collapse. Then his eye singled out a man hurrying from a western exit. There was no mistaking that tall lean form, the leonine, stalking stride. The man was the DOAC representative who had met him before.

“X” stifled a cry. The emissary wouldn’t recognize him as A.J. Martin. Before, the Agent had posed as Danny Dugan, the race-track tout and cheap sport. The Agent pulled a badge from an inner pocket, thrust it into his outside coat pocket, hurried after the DOAC.

When he stepped alongside the man, he had his hand in his pocket, and a cold gleam in his eyes. He grasped the DOAC’s arm roughly, spun him. The man gave a startled jerk and shrank back from the Agent’s glare.

“Comin’ along nice, Harry, or do you want me to tap you?” rasped “X.” “I knew I’d nab you sooner or later. You’re losin’ your class, Harry. Those bank notes you turned out wouldn’t have fooled a child. No, Harry, you haven’t the knack any more! Why, fifteen years ago, you could turn out the prettiest line of green goods on the market. You know what it means this time, Harry. The judge will throw the book at you. Come along nice, Harry. I like to be gentle to has-beens.”

The DOAC representative uttered a gasp of amazement. “Who are you? What — what’s the meaning of this outrage? Harry? My name isn’t Harry. Green goods? I’m not in the grocery business. Let me go, or I’ll have you arrested.”

The Agent laughed, and made the DOAC swallow hard by flashing his badge, the insignia of a government Secret Service operative. He rushed the man along to a southern exit. “X” didn’t want to meet this man’s chauffeur — yet.

“Trying to pull the old stuff, are you, Harry?” sneered the Agent. “You’re not Harry Hagar, the counterfeiter, are you? You’re probably Sterling Wright Worthington, the philanthropist. You wouldn’t steal the bread out of the mouths of widows and orphans. Not you, Mr. Worthington. You’d get their money before they had a chance to spend it. Don’t kick up a fuss, Harry. I want to get you in the city’s ice box an’ knock off. Takin’ the missus to the movies tonight.”

The Agent kept talking and ignoring the DOAC’s protests. The man was convinced that “X” was a government detective who had mistaken him for a counterfeiter and confidence man. Outside, the Agent piled the representative into a taxi, and gave the driver the address of his hideout.

When the DOAC discovered that the car wasn’t heading for the city prison, he began to splutter again. “X” silenced him with the cold ring of his gas gun.

“Never mind where you’re going,” he said in a low voice. “Keep quiet. You’ll get your chance to talk later.”

The menace of the gun made the DOAC tractable. “X” got him into his apartment before the man spoke again. Then the startling truth dawned on him. Fear spread a sickly wash across his face. His eyes grew wide. He began to tremble.

“You — you’re Secret Agent ‘X’!” he cried in a sudden frenzy.

Chapter XVII

FOR a moment he stared aghast at the Agent. His eyes were glassy with fright. His jaw sagged, and the color drained from his fear-distorted face. He cowered against the wall, lips quivering and terror taking complete command. He started to plead with “X.” Then his swiveling eyes fixed on a slender bronze statue on the table.

He uttered a snarl like a trapped beast. His foot lashed out, dealing the Agent a painful kick in the shin. It diverted “X’s” attention long enough for the DOAC to grab the bronze figurine and hurl it.

The missile struck “X” in the stomach. The impact knocked him backwards. His gun slipped to the floor. Now the DOAC’s eyes glittered. Fright changed to savage triumph. To kill the Secret Agent would gain him a high post in the wicked organization. He grabbed a lamp from the table and hurled it. “X” saved himself by warding off the missile with his forearm. He got to his feet and lunged into the DOAC, his left fist ready for destruction.

Frantically the DOAC looked for another weapon within reach. Finding nothing that would inflict damage, he tried to fend “X” off with his foot.

The Agent sidestepped neatly, unleashing a dynamiting haymaker for his foe’s jaw. “X” pulled his punch a little, because he wanted only to daze the DOAC. The man’s legs failed him. He sprawled out, and before he could struggle up, the Agent had him pinned down and had snapped a pair of handcuff’s on his wrists.

“You’re through,” he informed the DOAC. “Accept defeat and do as I tell you! You’re luckier than you think. The DOACs are going to make their big push for power soon. But unless something happens to me, the leaders of your organization are going to find themselves in the death house, their mob of thugs scattered and broken. Now you’re going to tell me the means you have of identifying yourself at DOAC headquarters. Talk fast!”

The captive was sullenly silent. Yet his ugly manner was obviously a cloak of fear. The man’s hands were palsied. He had to lick his lips repeatedly. His face had the mottled whiteness of raw dough.

He showed a spark of defiance, but it died under “X’s” hypnotic glare. The DOAC seemed to shrivel under the Secret Agent’s burning eyes. It was will against will, and the prisoner’s sagged beneath the iron force of “X’s.”

The Agent didn’t speak for a moment. He was accomplishing his purpose without threats or rough tactics, crushing the DOAC’s spirit with his fierce gaze. Suddenly the captive wilted. He slumped in a chair. A sob escaped him. His defenses were broken. He was soft clay.

“All right,” said the Agent. “Give me the facts straight! I’m going to get into DOAC headquarters — and you’re going to help me! Give me the countersign, quick — and whatever else I need to know.”

“I can’t! I can’t!” The DOAC whimpered, fear making his teeth chatter. “They’ll kill me — fill me with hot lead — cook my insides. I can’t squeal — do you hear! I can’t!”

The prisoner broke into low moans. He rocked his head from side to side. His eyes were wild and staring. One of the Secret Agent’s most effective weapons was his reputation. His identity was unknown. But the startling, daring things he had done in his ceaseless warfare on crime had caused rumors to spread through the underworld. His enemies feared him as a mysterious, unknown quantity — the quantity “X,” which might appear and work havoc at the most unpredictable moment.

The universal fear in which he was held had often served the Agent as an asset. At the moment, however, he saw that it might prove a liability. For terror was unhinging the mind of the prisoner. Hysteria was getting possession of him. If he lapsed into raving madness, he’d be useless to “X.” The Agent gave him a reassuring tap on the shoulder.

“Snap out of it,” he said in a more kindly voice. “Give me the countersign. How do you get into the place? Tell me the procedure — and I’ll promise protection from the DOACs and leniency from the law.”

The man was whipped, ready to clutch at anything that promised him safety. He blurted out an address on the other side of town. Then he stopped as the significance of what he’d done stung into his consciousness. Cowardice had shattered his morale. He was nothing more than a blubbering mass of fear. The Agent spoke again encouragingly, nodding to the DOAC to continue.

“Ring the bell three times, then once, then seven,” whispered the prisoner in a croaking voice. “My number is C B Forty-two M. The countersign is, ‘I regret that I have but one life to give for my country!’ But don’t tell them, for God’s sake! Don’t let them know I squealed!”

The Agent knew his captive wasn’t putting on an act. He knew that the man was telling the truth. All the while he’d been intently studying the man’s features.

Suddenly he snatched up his gas gun and fired full into the man’s face, silencing the DOAC’s instant scream with a blast of anesthetizing but harmless vapor.

As the DOAC lay unconscious, Agent “X” went to work quickly before his three-sided mirror.

HE changed the pigments that covered his skin, built up the frontal bone above his eyes with plastic materials, broadened the bridge of his nose, and reshaped the contour of his face. When he had finished, he bore uncanny resemblance to the man lying on the floor. The Agent changed clothes quickly with the DOAC member, then stretched him out comfortably on a couch and administered a hypo injection that would keep him unconscious for at least twelve hours.

The Agent, dressed and made up as the DOAC operative, took a taxi to the Capitol grounds. His face buried in a newspaper, the DOAC’s chauffeur was waiting for his employer. “X” approached the car from the right as though he had just come from the rotunda.

He had the door open before the hard-faced driver turned. The man dropped his paper and touched the visor of his cap. “X” experienced a tense moment. Would some irregularity in his make-up betray him?

The chauffeur had a poker face and an unnaturally piercing gaze. The Agent eyed him severely. Immediately the driver became apologetic.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he spoke humbly. “You were away longer than I expected, and I took the liberty of glancing at the news. It won’t happen again, sir, while I’m on duty. Headquarters, sir?”

“X” grunted affirmation, and slumped on the cushions. He frowned with disapproval, but inwardly he was elated. His disguise was sufficient. The chauffeur’s attention was given to avoiding a rebuke for not opening the door for his employer.

The motor purred. The driver shifted gears, and the car rolled down the graveled path. What lay ahead? The Agent realized the grim possibilities. Suppose he made a slight misplay at headquarters? Suppose the DOACs discovered his identity and threw him to those evil old men?

“X” shook his head violently as though to clear it. He had to get his thoughts into another channel. Imagination could play havoc with one’s nerves.

In a few minutes the chauffeur swung the car into a broad, maple-lined street of decaying grandeur. The imposing edifices on each side dated back to the glamorous Nineties. There were embassy buildings, homes of wealthy politicians. Once cabinet members had lived here, a vice-president. In former administrations much of the Washington social life had centered here. Now it was a quiet street, with “To Let” and “For Sale” signs on many of the houses.

The chauffeur drew up before a three-story building that had the forbidding aspect of a home that had been closed for the season. “No Trespassing” signs had been posted on the lawns. The windows were boarded up. The house seemed bleak and forlorn.

“X” waited until the driver got out and opened the door for him. Then he hurried to the house. He pressed the button three times, then once, then seven. He waited tensely. There was no response. He heard no sound of footsteps inside. But he felt that prying eyes were studying him. A wave of desperation swept over him.

Suppose his captive had lied after all? Suppose these were not the right signals? The Agent was shaken by the thought. Good Lord! Was he going to fail? He had surmounted all obstacles so far. Was he walking into a death trap now, a trap that would snuff out his life and Betty’s? He was chilled with foreboding.

Then his pulse beat quickened. The door was opening, silently, slowly, mysteriously, as though by a ghost hand. The house exhaled a gush of cold, musty air. Inside, the hallway was shrouded in deep gloom. “X’s” eyes probed the darkness. The furniture, draped with gray covers, appeared like wraiths.

“X” entered. The door closed softly. There was a sharp, ominous click of the lock. The Agent tingled with suspense, uncertainty, but he dared not show his concern. He walked slowly down the dark, tomblike hallway, not at all sure that he was following the customary procedure.

Another click. A slot opened in the wall. A brilliant rapier of light stabbed at the Agent. He stopped instantly, seized with misgiving, licking his lips nervously. A sharp voice cracked out one word.

“Number?”

“C B Forty-two M,” intoned the Agent.

The slot closed. “X” drew a sharp breath. He clenched his fists, moved on through the darkness, wondering, if the next moment he would be knocked senseless, carried to the death chamber.

He walked a few feet. Another slot opened. The Agent felt much relieved. Evidently he had done nothing so far to arouse suspicion.

“The countersign,” another voice demanded.

“I regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” said the Agent evenly.

“Proceed to the council hall and give your report,” was the response.

“X” GAVE an inward groan. The council hall. How would he find it in the dark maze of rooms in this house? The building was a closed-up embassy, constructed to accommodate many people. Besides the many rooms, there were probably secret chambers, specially built by the DOACs. But he had to do what he could — for Betty Dale’s sake.

He felt along the wall until he came to the first door. It was locked. The Agent quickly fitted a skeleton key and entered the pitch-dark room. He carried a flashlight, but he knew it would be hazardous to use it. Before he left the room, “X” donned the blue hood he had taken from the captured DOAC.

The Agent went from room to room, becoming more desperate as each door failed to open onto the council chamber. He had the feeling that he was spied upon. Certainly his actions would be questioned. How could he explain the delay? He crept up the winding staircase. He guided himself by the railing, which was as chill as a slab in a morgue. The oppressive silence was becoming an intolerable burden. If only he could hear footsteps, some one speaking. Even the scuffling sounds signaling an attack would be better than this dread, brooding quiet.

He reached the landing at the top of the flight. He paused, tensed, his brow knitting in a frown of attention. He heard a weird, melodious peal, muted by distance and sound barriers. It was a somber ring, struck in a minor chord, like the tolling of a bell for the dead.

The chiming of the bell came from below, far below. “X” raced down the stairs. He was grateful that the mournful ringing continued, for it gave him direction. At the rear of the hallway, he found a narrow door. It was unlocked. He opened it, and went down a long flight of steps. At the bottom was another door. This opened onto a long, dank, and winding tunnel.

The bell ceased its sonorous pealing. Voices sounded from the end of the twisting underground corridor. Presently “X” found himself in the council chamber. The hooded DOACs were there, ghastly and wraithlike in the phosphorescent glare from the ceiling. He heard the cackling old men behind the curtain.

The hooded leader rose and raised his hand in the DOAC salute. “X” repeated the gesture. He was told to take a chair before the assemblage.

“Where is the hated foe?” demanded the leader. “You have failed. Secret Agent ‘X’ is our greatest obstacle to power. He has ferreted out facts, spied upon us, dared to combat us. You, as a trusted member of the council, were sent to bring him here. You return alone! All DOACs are sworn to the code that death shall be dealt to those who fail. You understand, C B Forty-two M, that you must suffer the price of incompetence — unless you have some very adequate and satisfactory explanation as to why you have not fulfilled your duty.”

“X” stood rigid as the dread words fell on his ears. From behind the curtain came the demoniac laughter of the madmen, the DOAC executioners.

Chapter XVIII

THE Agent thought quickly. His explanation had to be convincing, or he’d become another victim on the gory death list of the DOACs. Also in voice and manner he must imitate the man he was impersonating.

“You condemn me for another man’s cowardice,” he said thickly. “I was at the rotunda at the appointed time. Secret Agent ‘X’ did not appear — but I was determined not to return without our hated enemy. I waited long and he didn’t come. By now he may be a thousand miles from here, traveling by fast plane. Is it fair that I should be put under fire and threatened with death because another man is afraid?”

A murmur passed through the council. It bore a triumphant note. The leader didn’t speak at once. Probably he was taking time to ponder the situation. Possibly he detected a suspicious inflection or pronunciation in “X’s” speech. The lead, boiling behind the curtain, and those slavering, giggling killers were still a threat. But the Agent maintained a respectful silence.

“Yes,” said the leader finally. “Yes — you are right, comrade. You have nothing to fear — for the DOACs stand for justice, kindness. You have worked well, comrade, and the Master will reward you handsomely. Seekers of liberty and right, we have reached the turning point in our fight for the DOAC cause. Secret Agent ‘X’ has retreated. His tricks and bravado were but a veneer, a mask to hide his cowardice.

“He will not jeopardize his own life to save the girl who is his devoted ally. We have whipped him, comrades. He is running, running. Our greatest human obstacle has been dissolved by fear. That is good news, comrades. We have triumphed over an enemy — but there is something even more thrilling. Our plans have been changed, speeded up. This very night the command will be issued which will make the DOACs rulers of America. We are approaching the zero hour!”

The leader stood up, staring with burning, fanatical eyes at those about him.

“I will communicate with an intermediary of the Master at once,” he continued. “The Master will be glad to know that Agent ‘X’ has fled. He will clinch our victory over this man who tried at every turn to thwart us. This girl of the Secret Agent’s will be destroyed — as others have been destroyed. The Agent will know the full meaning of DOAC vengeance after tonight. The meeting is adjourned, comrades.”

A surge of fierce rage went through the Agent. He wanted to lunge at the DOAC leader, wanted to tear words from his lips. Where was Betty Dale? Before anything else now “X” had to find her.

The members of the council filed from the chamber. The leader remained. The Agent followed the others, but in the darkness of the tunnel, he fell behind, lingering till the group had passed through the first door. Then he returned.

A telephone receiver clicked softly on its hook. “X” stood in the gloom outside the chamber while the leader used the phone. The Agent listened intently, muscles taut, nails pressed against the palms of his hands. Then he heard the leader give a number.

“X” did not wait for the DOAC to speak the words that would condemn Betty Dale to horrible death. He moved forward into the room, crept up behind the leader. The light from the ceiling threw his shadow ahead of him. The DOAC saw it, uttered a cry of alarm, dropped the receiver and whirled. He whirled directly into a terrific right uppercut that landed somewhere along his jaw. “X” couldn’t get an accurate aim, because of the man’s hood. The blow was high, yet it staggered the leader.

He reeled back and shouted at the top of his lungs. The three old men dashed from behind the curtain. They were formidable only when they had a prisoner ready for the molten lead. While he forged into the DOAC council chief, “X” flipped a backhand slap at one of the creaky executioners. The blow was light, yet it sent the hideous ancient spinning against the wall. The other two fled.

The DOAC pulled a blackjack from his pocket and flailed it at the Agent. The shot-loaded weapon struck “X” on the shoulder. The numbing smash halted his attack for a moment. A stinging pain shot through his arm. The blackjack, swung up, and swished down for his head. “X” saved himself from disaster by knocking the DOAC’s arm sidewise. Then he launched a deadly attack that drove the leader against the wall.

FOOTSTEPS sounded in the tunnel. His legs wobbly from a bruising-blow to the head, the DOAC staggered to the side, got a chair between him and his enemy and shouted for help. “X” reached him with another flesh-splitting clout that sent him crashing into the chairs. He had to finish this man before the others came. He had to get to the telephone and speak to the party at the other end.

The DOAC lost his blackjack, but he produced a snub-nosed automatic from an armpit bolster. Before he could fire, “X” knocked the gun to the floor. Then he connected with a one-two punch that found the DOAC leader’s jaw. The DOAC jackknifed to the floor, out of the fight completely.

Snatching up the ugly automatic, the Agent blasted three shots at the oncoming DOACs. He didn’t shoot to kill or even to disable, but to drive fear into the murderous group. Three men had catapulted through the door. The two ancients had not returned. This sort of business was out of their depth. They were insane, but they still possessed the will to live, and “X” knew they had hidden themselves.

“Quiet!” the Agent snarled at the three hooded men. “One more step and I shoot to kill. Line up against the wall. Raise your hands. That’s it. You’ll slaughter others, but you won’t take chances with your own precious lives, will you?”

The Agent was the master of the council chamber.

Keeping the DOACs covered, he rushed to the telephone. The party had hung up. He clicked down the hook, and called central, demanding that the connection just broken with this number be traced.

“Don’t ask questions!” snapped “X.” “I’m a government agent. And if you don’t rush my order through, you’re going to be among the unemployed.”

He gave the number of the DOAC phone, printed on the number plate, and ordered the operator to call him back the instant she obtained the desired information. The Agent’s voice was incisive, authoritative. He jammed the receiver on the hook, and went to work on his prisoners, yanking off their hoods and staring at them.

The men were strangers to him. The leader was a smooth looking fellow, but the other council members were obviously persons of the criminal class. “X” quietly slipped his gas gun out and fired quick shots in their faces, knocking them out.

He found a winding passageway that branched off from the main tunnel, and he dragged his inert prisoners there. By the time he got back to the council room, the telephone was jangling. Central was on the wire. The call had been traced. “X” was given an address two miles across town.

The Agent went upstairs cautiously, stopping often and straining to catch the slightest sound. He didn’t relish the prospect of getting a knife in his back.

He got out of the embassy building without being challenged. The fact that he did caused him grave concern. The DOACs had left the mansion, had gone after Betty Dale probably, or to warn the intermediary of the “Master.” They might get there before him. He was racing against time. Before he opened the door, he removed his hood.

A block from the DOAC headquarters, the Agent hailed a cab, and ordered the driver to stop at the first cigar store. The cab stopped at the beginning of the business section, and “X” rushed into a store to telephone. He was impatient, restless, apprehensive. Maybe there would be no answer to his call.

But there was. And the man at the other end was Jim Hobart, gruff, slangy, loyal Jim Hobart. “X” had called his apartment. Jim had arrived by plane.

“No time for gab, Jim,” barked the Agent. “Grab my car at the Apex Garage down the block, and meet me at the corner of Wyndham and Georgia Streets as soon as possible. Make your deadline five minutes. Speed, boy!”

In the phone booth, “X” laid out his make-up material on the stand, spread his small three-sided mirror, and quickly molded the features of one A.J. Martin, newspaper man. He waved a dollar bill at the cab driver to prod him into getting to his destination in the least possible time. He reached Wyndham and Georgia about a minute before Jim Hobart arrived.

Jim was at the wheel of another one of the Agent’s cars, a high-powered little coupé, geared to make ninety miles an hour.

“You made speed from South Bolton, Jim,” said the Agent. “Now let’s see you make speed to Hastings Avenue. I’ll make out I’ve been hurt. Keep the siren going. To hell with traffic lights. When a cop whistles, point to me. I’ll act like a dying man, and he’ll let you through.”

JIM HOBART immediately proceeded to violate traffic laws. The siren shrieked and the motor raced. Part of the route spread through the thick of business traffic. Cops shrilled on their whistles, shouted, cursed, fumed. But always Jim pointed at the Agent, whose head and arms were dangling over the side of the car. Crimson was dripping onto the running board. “X” looked like an injured man desperately in need of hospital care. The scarlet liquid wasn’t blood, but a beet-juice preparation, which he carried in a small vial, just to stage such an effect as this. The theatrics used by “X” on many occasions had saved lives. He knew the value of realism.

Jim sent pedestrians scurrying for safety. He was a skilled driver and he wove the car through the heavy press of traffic like a huge shuttlecock. Soon he was out of the congested area, speeding unhampered through the broad avenues of the residential sections.

On Hastings Avenue, the Agent called a halt about a block from the address he meant to visit.

“Be ready for a quick get-away, Jim,” “X” ordered. “I’m going into a house after that girl I spoke of — and I don’t know whether I’m coming out alive. But if this girl is in there and I get her out, you rush her to safety and don’t take chances trying to help me”

“You’re the doctor, A.J.,” said Hobart “But I’d like to go along, too, and take a crack at some of those DOAC palookas. I’ve been getting mad at them for a long time.”

The Agent waved to his operative, and sped down the sidewalk to the number he’d got from central. It was a peaceful looking place, two stories, brick, with a small trim lawn.

Boldly the Agent went to the front door and pressed the button. He was ready for violence, for sudden happenings. Immediately approaching footsteps answered his summons. “X” stood tensely, though outwardly he maintained a casual attitude. But he didn’t maintain that attitude long.

The door opened. “X” gave a start of utter amazement.

A woman stood in the hallway, a slim, beautifully gowned creature, with chestnut hair and delicate features. She stared at Agent “X,” now disguised as A.J. Martin, uncomprehendingly.

The woman was Greta St. Clair.

Chapter XIX

BEFORE he could speak or recover from his astoundment, the Agent heard footsteps crunching on the graveled driveway. He recovered himself then. Trouble was coming. There was fire in the Agent’s eyes. The woman shrank back under his fierce gaze.

“Where’s Betty Dale?” he demanded harshly, forgetting for the moment all subtlety of approach. “I want to see Betty Dale. What are you doing here? Don’t stall. I want the truth.”

All color drained from Greta St. Clair’s face. She shrank back as though he had struck her, but her voice came huskily.

“Who are you? How dare you address me in such tones? You must be mad! Betty Dale — who is she? I’ve never heard—”

Two hooded men bounded up the front steps. “X” turned and dodged just in time to avoid a gleaming knife spinning through the air. The wicked blade crashed against the brick wall. The woman uttered a cry of terror, clutched at her throat, and cowered back into the hallway.

“The DOACs!” she cried. “The hooded men! They will kill — kill!”

“X” leaped into the house, but before he could slam the door one of the hooded men had thrown his bulky body inside. He was armed with a set of brass knuckles. They didn’t use guns, apparently for fear of attracting the cops.

The Agent swayed under a murderous swing from a brass-armed fist. The DOAC’s arm curled over his shoulder. “X” sank a paralyzing blow wrist-deep into the man’s stomach. The hooded killer doubled up, breath gushing forcibly from his mouth. He tried to clinch the Agent, but a set of hard knuckles rammed against his chin.

The pile-driving smash made him spraddle-legged, but before the Agent could slug in a finish punch, the man’s accomplice sprang on “X’s” back.

The two sprawled on the floor. The DOAC got a strangle hold on the Agent and was applying merciless pressure. For a moment “X” thought he was through.

The blood was pounding in his head. Suffocation was poisoning his body with fatigue. The DOAC had the bony part of his forearm against “X’s” windpipe, and every gulp of air that went into the Agent’s tortured lungs wheezed through a closing channel.

The other DOAC was recovering. He drew a knife from a sheath under his coat and raised it for a murder thrust.

“Cut his heart out, comrade!” snarled the garroter.

And the Agent could see that the comrade intended to do just that. Death was but a split-second away. “X’s” strength had been sapped by the DOAC’s choking clutch. But he mustered all his waning power in a terrific kick. His foot flung out like a catapult, catching the hooded man in the stomach. The DOAC uttered an agonized grunt. His knife flew from his grasp. The battering-ram smash knocked him sprawling. He struck his head against the wall and lay still.

The long, slim blade flipped in the air a few times, flashing like a leaping trout and then plummeted down, deadly point first straight for “X’s” body! The DOAC had the Agent’s neck cramped in a hold as agonizing and dangerous as a grizzly’s bone-crushing hug. “X” felt his senses failing him. Sparks and black dots danced before his eyes. He thought his head would explode from pain.

It all happened in the tick of a watch. The Agent saw that wicked knife descending, realized he was about to swoon from lack of oxygen. But his iron will asserted itself. He hurled his tattered strength in a desperate lurch to the side, saving himself from the falling knife, and striking at his foe, as he did so. His fist landed on the man’s neck. The garroter howled in pain. The sudden shock made him release his death hold. That was all the Agent needed. He rolled free, pressed a dent out of his windpipe, filled his burning lungs with fresh air. The oxygen sent strength coursing through his system.

The DOAC leaped up, grabbing the knife again, and swinging it overhead for murder. But he was too late. The Agent struck another fierce blow. Knuckles cracked against flesh.

The DOAC staggered a moment like a day-old calf, then fell forward, completely out. “X” plunged down the hallway, burst open a door, paused. He was in a handsome drawing room, heavy curtains drawn across the windows. His eyes, bright and cold as chilled steel, roved quickly.

One of the curtains moved, infinitesimally — enough for the Agent’s trained eyes to note. He was close to it in two strides. His hand thrust forward, drew it aside — and clamped over the wrist of Greta St. Clair!

He swung her out forcibly, whirled her around, pushed her across the room. The woman cowered back and sank on a divan, trembling under his spellbinding, hypnotic glare.

“Now,” he said, “talk quickly! You’re supposed to be a prisoner of the DOACs. Your house was raided. You were captured along with Betty Dale. I know now that you are one of the DOAC gang. Where is Betty?”

GRETA ST. CLAIR shook her head. “You are mad,” she said. “That is the only explanation. I have never seen you before. I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Don’t lie!” the Agent said, his voice low and harsh. “Don’t lie — do you hear! The DOAC leader in Washington called this house a few minutes ago. You are here — free — not a prisoner at all. You pretend that you have never heard of Betty Dale. That is proof enough for me that you are one of them. Tell me where she is, I say. If she dies—”

The dark eyes of Greta St. Clair had become glistening pools of fear. She stared at the man before her with nostrils dilated.

“I understand,” she said slowly. “I see now. You are — Secret Agent ‘X’! It was you who came with her — as Claude Erskine. You are disguised now. You were disguised then.”

“Yes,” he said hoarsely, admitting his identity for once. “Yes — that is the truth. And it will do you no good to lie. You posed as Carney’s fiancée. You made him think you loved him— but all the time — you were one of them. It was his money you were after. And when they raided the prison—”

“I had nothing to do with that,” she said. “I did — love him. They forced me to join them — after I was captured. They promised not to harm him, if I would help them get his money.”

The Agent saw treachery in the woman’s eyes, saw that she was not telling the truth; saw that she was hiding something. He shook her arm fiercely. Then spoke with irrefutable logic.

“If you had joined the DOACs after the raid you would not have risen to such a high position so soon. The Washington leader would not have called you to relay a message to the Master. I know you are lying. Tell me quickly where Betty Dale is.”

The woman was stubborn, keeping her one defense — her lies. She shook her head again.

“I know that you are — fond of her. If I knew where she was — if I could save her — I would. Perhaps if you leave this house at once—”

“She is not here?”

“No.”

The Agent stood dumbly for a moment, baffled, heartsick, everything forgotten except Betty Dale’s danger. A hoarse, pleading note crept into his voice.

“You are a woman,” he said. “You would not want to see her die — with lead in her throat. You must tell me where she is — now, so that I can save her.”

Greta St. Clair rose, facing him, the look of fear in her dark eyes slowly being replaced by craft. Womanlike, she sensed suddenly that she had the man before her at a disadvantage.

THEN the Agent saw her glance swerve for an instant. It was only the barest movement; but, trained to miss nothing, he caught it. Every nerve in his body leaped into instant response. The brief shifting of her eyes was like a shrieking signal of death.

The Agent lunged sidewise, whirled. In the doorway back of where he stood, a man was framed — one of the men he had fought and left in the hallway outside. Even as the Agent turned, the man raised his hand. So quickly that it was only a shimmering, silver streak, the man hurled his knife.

In a split-second response of nerves and muscles that co-ordinated perfectly, the Agent dropped to his knees. He heard the doom whisper of the deadly blade pass his head. He heard a soft thud as the knife struck something in back of him. Then he heard a cry that he was destined never to forget. It was the cry of a human being in pain and terror — the cry of Greta St. Clair.

The man in the doorway gave a horrified exclamation. He lunged forward into the room, meeting a blast from the Agent’s gas pistol. And, as the man staggered back, the Agent turned toward the wall of the room once more.

Greta St. Clair had sunk to the divan again — but not in fear alone this time. The gleaming blade of the knife had pierced her dress. Its ugly handle was quivering to her gasping breaths. She was staring down at it with a look of dull horror.

He wondered that she lived at all. It seemed to have struck close to her heart. He dared not touch it, fearing that the slightest movement of the long blade would snuff out the spark of life that her steely will preserved. He leaped to her side, eased her gently back against the pillows. Crimson was staining her dress, spreading in a great ugly blot.

She looked up at him then, her eyes already glazed with approaching death. They seemed uncomprehending; but they turned from him to the man lying on the floor. She nodded slowly, as if answering in her own mind some strange question that had troubled her. The Agent spoke softly then.

“He did it! The knife meant for me — struck you.”

“And — I—am dying!” she breathed, in a whisper so low that he could hardly distinguish the words. Her head fell sidewise. For a moment he thought she had gone. But, tensely, feeling an icy dread that he was too late, he asked a question.

“Tell me. It can do no harm now! Where is Betty Dale?”

The woman opened her eyes with the languor of one who is close to sleep. They became fixed on the face of the Agent. They seemed to be searching, brushing away a fog that was obscuring their focus. Suddenly Greta St. Clair smiled. It was the smile that had once flashed on the silver screen, bringing Greta close to stardom. It was the tender smile of a woman who, for all her strange cruelty and ruthless ambition, can still feel human emotion. Slowly she nodded again, spoke so softly that it seemed the voice of a person already talking from another world.

“I know,” she said. “She loves you — and you—”

She could not finish the sentence. Pain brushed the smile away. She reached up, clasped the hilt of the knife. Close to her ears the Agent’s lips moved, almost like a man uttering a prayer.

“Where is she?”

Greta St. Clair’s lips moved in response. The sound that came from them was hardly speech. It was a ghostly whisper, faint, pain-racked.

“My — house!”

IT was the last sentence that Greta St. Clair was ever to utter. But for a moment her dark eyes opened again, and the faint smile softened her lips. Then she slipped sidewise, slowly on the pillows — slipped and remained staring off into space. Greta St. Clair was dead.

For a second only Agent “X” stared down at this woman who was not altogether bad. The answer that she had given with her last dying breath amazed him as much as her presence here had. It amazed him and sent him into action at the same time.

There was no sound anywhere in the big house. Greta St. Clair had apparently been its sole occupant. Now she, too, had joined the silence.

Grimly the Agent turned and strode from that room of death. Near the doorway into the hall he paused for one brief instant. A telephone stood on a small ebony table. The number written on it corresponded to the one he had heard the DOAC leader speak.

He passed down to the hallway by the other unconscious DOAC, lying still as death. Recklessly he opened the door to the street and raced down the steps. There might be other DOACs lurking outside. For the moment he did not care. His emotion was too great to think of any risk. Up the block he knew Jim Hobart was waiting. He turned and covered the pavement with long, quick strides.

Dusk was falling over Washington. The night seemed to speak of menace, evil, and the mystery that cloaked the disappearance of Betty Dale and the strange and hideous activity of the DOACs in America.

The Agent was breathing quickly. The evening air felt cold on his face, chilling through the plastic, flexible material of his disguise. He was almost running when he reached the coupé where Jim Hobart crouched over the wheel. The lanky operative stared at “X” anxiously, seeming to sense his inner turmoil.

“What is it, boss? Anything happen? Did you find the girl?”

The Agent shook his head, leaping into the car and edging Jim Hobart over as he took the wheel himself.

“No — but I know where she is. We’re going after her now.”

Chapter XX

A PLANE’S motor sounded muffled over Meadow Stream. A wide-winged shadow darted above the silver band of the river, veiled now in darkness. In two hours Jim Hobart and Agent “X” had made the trip from Washington in the fast two-place ship he had hired, replacing his own Blue Comet. For there must be no slip-up in the work ahead. He wanted help at hand.

The Agent made a skillful landing in a field almost opposite the penitentiary. The plane had scarcely taxied to a stop when the two men were climbing over the fuselage to the ground. They sprinted through pitch-dark woods, crossed the road to the high wall surrounding the St. Clair house.

The gate had been repaired and was now locked, but the Agent quickly inserted a skeleton key that gained them admittance to the grounds. They moved across the dark lawn, silent as wraiths, on guard against a surprise attack by any DOACs who might be lurking about.

The Agent felt a slight, unpleasant tingle along his scalp as he passed the spot where he’d seen the mangled bodies of Greta St. Clair’s guards.

His eyes were flashingly alert. The DOACs might have got in communication with others at Meadow Stream, warning them that “X” was on the way.

The big house was dark and bleak. There was no sign of life, but to “X” it stood there like a sinister monument of treachery. What lurked within? Were human fiends waiting in the pall of gloom for more torture victims? Was Betty Dale really here, or had Greta St Clair, in spite of her dying smile, given the Agent a false lead?

The silence seemed ominous, threatening, giving rise to a dozen ugly possibilities. “X” listened, straining to catch some sound.

But there was none, not even the moan of night wind under the eaves. They walked up the front steps, treading as cautiously as prowling thieves.

“X” tried the door. It was locked. He inserted one of his master keys. The click that followed was fleeting and only slightly audible, but to their harried and overworked imaginations it sounded like the rattle and clank of prison chains.

Inside, the hallway was tomblike in its quiet. The miasma of mystery permeated the sullen gloom. Their soft footfalls seemed to thud. Even their breathing seemed to rasp in contrast to the utter silence.

No lights showed anywhere. The servants had evidently left after the DOAC raid. But the Agent didn’t relax his caution. He led Jim Hobart down the hall, stopping every few seconds to listen again. He ascended a flight of stairs, searched every room in the upper part of the house, without finding anything but the wreckage still scattered across Greta St. Clair’s bedroom by the DOAC bomb. “X,” using his flashlight now, probed into every closet and corner.

He searched the attic rooms of the house, too, then led Jim Hobart to the first floor again. Here he opened a door and went down a flight of stairs to a cellar.

The place was black, but “X” knew his location. He and his operative were in the cellar where Greta St. Clair’s guards had demonstrated their marksmanship to the Agent and Betty Dale.

“X” brought forth an instrument that looked like a small, vest-pocket camera. It was his amazing sound amplifying device constructed with delicate rheostat controls corresponding to the film wind. Out of the instrument he took a tiny disc microphone connected to a cord. The box itself served as the earphone.

Holding the box to his ear, he placed the microphone against the walls, moving about till he had traversed the whole room. Then he stopped and pressed it to the floor itself — but the only vibrations were the scraping of his own foot. He adjusted the sensitive rheostats, and suddenly his pulse quickened with excitement. He heard a faint sound, indistinguishable at first. He tuned the rheostats, obtaining the highest point of reception. Footsteps! Muffled voices! Those were what now came through the super-sensitive instrument.

“X” stood up, felt along the wall, and found another door. He opened it and the two entered. The cloying fragrance of old vintages informed them that they were in a wine cellar. The Agent whispered close to Hobart’s ear.

“Don’t breathe!”

HOLDING his own breath, the Agent held the sound box to his ear, and moved around the crow-black room turning the microphone in all directions. He heard his footsteps thundering in the earphone, but nothing else. If any one had been in the room, the microphone would have caught the person’s breathing, and the amplifying device would have magnified it into a harsh rasping.

Now the Agent brought out an electric flash and stabbed the darkness with a blade of light. The walls were lined with kegs, barrels, shelves of bottles turned on their sides, others standing erect. The St. Clair house was well equipped for pleasure and life — and probably it was as well equipped for misery and death, too.

“X” searched the floor for a trapdoor. He found none, but he did find where footprints in the dust led to the far side of the room and ended abruptly. The Agent clamped his jaws grimly.

“On your toes, Hobart!” he whispered tensely. “We’re going into something now. I don’t know what. If we find the girl, the main thing is to get her out of here. That may be your job — while I stand off the DOACs. Never mind what happens to me. Get — the — girl — away!”

Hobart nodded grimly and bit into his lower lip. The footprints leading in a single direction had only one explanation. Behind the tier of bottle-filled shelves was a door, a panel that would give ingress to the chamber or chambers below. “X” pulled on the shelves. They yielded to his efforts. The shelves were secured together like a bookcase. On uprights were tiny runners.

The Agent pulled the shelves away from the paneled wall. He examined the varnished surface carefully, and found fingerprints in the lower right-hand corner of the third panel. He pressed on this spot, as others had done. The panel slid back on oiled bearings, and a gust of chill air shot up from below.

A dim light from the sub-cellar room suffused the gloom. “X” had shut off his flash. He and Hobart stole down the long flight. A board creaked. “X” stopped, his hand on his gas gun. Somewhere in a chamber below him, he heard muffled voices. He doubted if the noise of the creaking board carried to that chamber, though there was a chance a sentry had been posted outside.

No one approached. “X” continued on. He reached the bottom of the stairs. A winding corridor led to a door. Beyond, men were talking. To one side stood a stack of empty whisky barrels. The Agent and Hobart drew down behind them. The voices of the DOACs didn’t carry distinctly through the walls. He could not catch the drift of the talk, so he placed his microphone to the wall. Then “X” tensed and clenched his fist.

“Get the signal room ready,” one of the DOACs was saying. “The Master arrives shortly before midnight. That hour will become one of the most important in American history. There must be no accidents, no slip-ups, no incompetence! The Master will send the word to all parts of the nation. From Maine to California, from Florida to Washington State, the overthrow of the present order begins on the stroke of twelve. You men now owe allegiance only to the Cause. Be hard, be ruthless! Blast opposition before you. Dissolve the present system in the gases and liquids that science has provided.”

Prickles raced along the Agent’s spine. The sinister hour was drawing near. “X” had to prevent the fatal broadcast that would bring destruction to vast numbers of citizens who would rise against the hooded hordes. Throughout the land, happy people were sleeping, dancing, working, unaware of the tragedy that hovered near.

From all points the scum of the nation would gather — the mentally diseased, the street hoodlums, the rat-faced gangsters, the addicts of pernicious drugs — the vast legion of defectives who in the main filled the DOAC ranks. They would sweep across the land, scattering misery and evil and desolation, plundering and killing and razing the structure of decent society — all in the name of liberty, equality, fraternity.

SUDDENLY he put a warning hand on Jim Hobart’s arm. The door opened. Three DOACs came out. The door closed, and they strode down a narrow gloomy passage. They entered another room. Brilliant light glared through the entrance. “X” got a glimpse of a control board of rubber-knobbed dials. That was probably the signal room, equipped up to the latest invention in radio progress. The DOACs must use some special wave of their own.

The Agent motioned to his operative. The two followed down the narrow passage. “X” didn’t go into the signal room. He couldn’t afford a clash now. He wanted to find Betty, wanted to get her out of this evil place, before he began his onslaught on the hooded fiends.

He opened a door near the signal room. His gas gun was ready, if he should meet a DOAC. The room was not occupied, but it was far from empty. The Agent’s eyes widened.

Jim Hobart, seasoned campaigner though he was, couldn’t suppress a gasp of amazement. They were in an arsenal, not an ordinary arsenal of guns and ammunition, but one filled with instruments that gave the opposition not the slightest fighting chance.

There were guns, of course, racks and racks of them: Lebels, Mausers, Winchesters, Marlins, guns of domestic and foreign make. They were not terrifying, however. Rifles were obtainable. National Guard units and State militias could retaliate against foes armed with guns. But what chance had the soldiers with their inadequate hand grenades against the terrible bombs used by the DOACs?

There was case after case of these bombs, each fitted with a clocklike dial and supplied with two electrodes. There were time bombs that could be set to explode seconds or hours later. One of them could tear a six-foot gap in a brick building, could twist heavy armor plate, could destroy half a regiment. But the DOACs didn’t end with bombs.

“X” and Hobart went into a sub-chamber fitted with laboratory equipment. In test-tube racks were vials labeled with scientific names. Those vials swarmed with invisible germs, countless millions of them; germs of typhoid, of the deadly sleeping-sickness, of devastating tropical fevers, of infantile paralysis, and all the horrible ills that beset man. The DOACs were ready for the most fiendish of all modern war tactics — the use of bacteria!

Even guns, bombs, and bacteria did not complete the DOACs’ equipment for annihilation. In another sub-chamber, they found tanks of the wicked Lewisite gas, di-chlorethyl sulphide, or “mustard gas,” di-phosgene, and diphenyl chlorasine which could penetrate any respirator. Here also were huge metal containers and hoselike jets from which liquid fire could be sprayed. The DOACs had obtained equipment for the most modern and horrible type of warfare. Beneath the St. Clair house were enough deadly destructive agents to wreck a whole nation.

AGENT “X” shuddered. There were, he knew, other DOAC chapters scattered throughout the land. There were headquarters in every large city; but he doubted if there were anywhere else an arsenal as fearful as this. This was the center, the hub of DOAC activity. From it the Master was to issue the command which would loose the hooded hordes like a ravaging blight over the country. And who was the Master?

“X” did not know. But this he did know. With the Master killed or captured, and this fearful vipers’ nest of evil put out of commission, the country might yet be saved from the hideous wave of terror that was destined to engulf it. His eyes roved speculatively over the bombs, back to those containers of poison gas. His lips were a thin white line as he turned to Jim Hobart.

The lanky operative was shaken, too. His police work had given him knowledge of explosive and poisonous agents. The color had drained from his face so that his freckles stood out like livid, leprous spots.

“Geez, boss — there’s enough rough stuff there to croak a whole state. There’s enough—”

He did not finish, for “X” had turned toward the door. His own gas gun was clasped in white-knuckled, talon-like fingers. His eyes were blazing like living coals.

“Never mind the stuff now, Jim,” he said thickly. “We must find the girl first — and get her out of here. Then — later — I’ll attend to that.”

What Agent “X” expected to do, he did not say. He pushed the door into the main corridor open again. These underground chambers were built as massively as the rooms of some great railway terminal. They showed the thoroughness and efficiency of the DOAC organization. The Agent started to go through the door with Jim Hobart at his heels, then he paused.

A sound stirred faint echoes along the corridor. It whispered in the air above their heads, ghostlike, disturbing.

“Hear anything, Jim?”

“Yes!”

Hobart’s reply was hardly more than a husky croak. He was leaning forward, staring at “X” intently, listening. The sound came again and this time there was no mistaking it. It was the muffled scream of a girl, frightened with terror, speaking of starkly hideous things, and it came from somewhere on their right.

Agent “X,” lips working, leaped forward. He sped down the corridor on his silent, rubber-soled shoes with the quickness of a cat. Jim Hobart followed, but could not keep up.

There were several doorways here. But the scream was repeated a third time, and its wavering note directed him. It came from the third door on the Agent’s right. He reached the spot in an instant, thrust the door open, and his heart leaped within him.

An iron grating like that of an animal cage reached from floor to ceiling halfway across the room. There was a barred door in its center. This door was open now, and, in the small prison beyond, Betty Dale, her face wan as death, was cowering back against the farther wall as a hooded DOAC moved toward her.

As though the bars of the prison were not enough, small gleaming chains were fastened to Betty’s white wrists. She could not move far in either direction, and the DOAC had something in his hand. This was a smoking metal container with a turquoise blue alcohol flame beneath it — a pot of boiling lead! He set the pot down, leisurely approached the girl, and Betty screamed again. It appeared like a brutal act of intimidation.

“X” didn’t wait to see whether the hooded DOAC meant to pour lead on the girl’s skin or in her throat. The man was intent in his sadistic action. “X” plunged straight through the small barred door of the human cage.

His gas gun was in his hand, but he did not pull the trigger. Not often did Agent “X” strike to kill. He left that for cruder, less skillful investigators who made a habitual practice of violence. But red fury surged through his blood now. For a bare instant Agent “X” was the primitive, whose one thought is to strike down an enemy in the quickest possible way.

He brought the heavy metal muzzle of the gas gun down on the DOAC’s hooded head with all his might. There was a sickening crunch as bone gave way, and the man fell.

Betty Dale’s body seemed to sag. She looked on in dull-eyed amazement, almost doped with the terror that possessed her. Only when the Agent stepped over the fallen body of the hooded man and came close, did Betty’s expression change. Then her eyes became fixed on the face of the Agent. A great trembling seized her.

“Betty!” he said, and, almost as though it were the sign of the cross, he made the mark of X in the air close to her face. A torrent of words came to the girl’s deathly pale lips. The Agent checked them with a quickly made gesture.

“Not now, Betty,” he whispered. “I want to get you out of here first. That is all that counts.”

She made a sound like a moan then.

“These chains!”

The Agent clutched her slim wrist, looked down at the metal that circled it. Small, compact locks showed in the steel that formed a tight-fitting bracelet. The Agent had files and tools with him. He could pick the locks or cut through the chains — but that would take time — and time was precious.

He turned then to the man he had knocked out and perhaps killed. Quickly he bent down, went through the man’s pockets and drew out a key ring. His expert eye saw a key here that looked as though it would fit. But as he picked the key up, examined it, a hoarse voice spoke in a whisper from the doorway.

Agent “X” looked up. Jim Hobart had come into the room. His face was even whiter than before. There was a look in his eyes that “X” had never seen before — not fear so much as resignation. The lanky operative’s lips moved again.

“I guess it’s curtains, boss. They’re coming — the DOACs! There’s a bunch of them down the end of the long hall, now!”

Chapter XXI

THE Agent did not try to verify Hobart’s statement. He knew that the operative was telling the truth. “X” leaped to the blonde girl’s side, thrust the key he had found into the locks on her wrist, turned it and unsnapped them.

He poked his head out the door. The DOACs were running around the corner from the far end of the hallway. “X” pulled the girl out of the room, and shoved Jim Hobart after her.

“Hurry!” he cried frantically. “You can make it! You’ve got a clear field. Get her out of here, Jim. Take her away from Meadow Stream. I can hold these dogs. Don’t talk! Run!”

The girl gave “X” an appealing look. Whatever her impulse, she was ready to obey orders. Hobart grabbed her arm, hurried her down the hallway. The DOACs uttered shouts of rage, and cried for a halt. But the two kept on. The Agent followed closely behind. But instead of continuing, he darted suddenly into the arsenal.

He was out again before the DOACs could reach him. They came to an abrupt stop, cursing and fuming, then shrinking back in stark terror.

“X” had both hands raised overhead. In each hand was a mangling, destroying vacuum bomb. He came nearer to them, step by step. He made as though to hurl one of the containers of concentrated death. A DOAC shrieked.

By this time Jim Hobart and Betty Dale were out of the sub-cellar, on their way to fresh air and safety. That problem was cleared away. “X’s” job now was to prevent the fatal broadcast, to stop the Master from sending out the command that would usher in an era of tragedy and oppression.

Suddenly the DOACs turned and ran — far enough to get out of range of those terrible bombs. Then one hooded man swung around again, and opened up with an automatic. Leaden pellets of death screamed above “X.” The man was trying to make “X” surrender. His first shots were high, but any second the Agent knew he was liable to lower his aim, and shoot to kill. “X” dashed for the door of the arsenal.

The killers roared savagely, and came on. A fusillade of bullets spouted from flaming guns. “X” got half across the threshold of the arsenal when a slug nipped the back of his coat. He slammed the door and bolted it. DOACs were swarming in the corridor. They came up to the metal door of the arsenal, beat upon it. One, a sub-leader, spoke sneeringly to “X.”

“You’re through, stranger,” he said. “If you’re Agent ‘X,’ you’ve lost, and we are the victors. The Master is on his way. He’ll be here any minute. The DOACs are as good as rulers of the country already. Nothing you can do will stop us now. But surrender — and perhaps the Master will be lenient with you. The strong can afford to be lenient with the weak.”

The Agent didn’t answer. His mind was in a turmoil. How was he going to get by that mob of killers to the signal room? The fate of thousands depended on the next few minutes. It was nearly midnight. Possibly the Master was standing by the microphone now, ready to issue his orders. Because of that handful of murderers outside, was the whole nation to become a thieves’ paradise, a haven for homicidal maniacs?

He thought of hurling a bomb over the transom. That would slaughter the cluster of fiends. But would the explosion blow up the entire arsenal, and send this sinister house scattering to the skies? He was willing now even to sacrifice his own life. But the bomb might only demolish this section of the sub-cellar, killing those DOACs and himself, and leaving the signal room unharmed. That wasn’t the way. If he had to die, he wanted to go out knowing that the DOACs had been beaten.

Suddenly his keen ears detected a sound behind him. He spun around. A hooded figure was stealing down upon him. The DOAC held a gun. He didn’t fire for an obvious reason. “X” still clutched those bombs. The killer had come in by a rear entrance. The talk of the man outside had been a stall, to give this one a chance to sneak up from behind. “X” snarled and twisted his face in a threatening grimace.

The same instant he thumbed down the light switch on the wall by the door, plunging the room in darkness. The DOAC uttered curses, threatening to blow the Agent’s brains out. “X” took advantage of the outburst to place the bombs carefully on the floor against the wall. Then he cat-footed toward the killer, gas gun in hand. The man was still muttering and mouthing oaths.

“X” got to one side of him, fired, but the man ducked away from the cloud of vapor.

“X” lashed out with the gun muzzle then in the general location of the hooded man’s head. The blow landed on the killer’s skull, but the rubber hood cushioned it The smash on the head rocked him on his heels, but didn’t send him to the floor.

THE Agent closed in with the murderer. His hand groped in the darkness and clutched the automatic. He tried to wrench it from the hooded man’s hand, but the DOAC had an iron grip on the butt. Suddenly he got his other hand free and gouged “X” in the eye. It was a foul and brutal trick. The shock sent a shudder through the Agent.

He relaxed his hold on the man’s gun a little. The DOAC forced the weapon down. The barrel was close to “X’s” face. The killer didn’t know how close, and that was what saved the Agent. Exerting all his wrought-iron strength, he began prying the automatic away.

Then the DOAC tripped him. “X” fell backwards. The DOAC would land on top. The crashing weight of his body and the thump against the floor would stun “X,” give his foe a chance to shatter his skull with a bullet. But the Secret Agent was a skilled wrestler.

In mid-air he swung his body sidewise, got his arm around the back of the killer’s neck, his hand under the man’s chin. He gave a violent snap which shifted the DOAC’s body under him. At the same time he jerked the man’s gun hand away from his body. It was all done in a swift moment. The howling DOAC, suddenly terror-stricken, pressed the trigger of his automatic. The bullet went wild.

There was a terrific explosion, and the Agent himself gave a piercing scream. Then he fired his gas gun straight into the DOAC’s face.

The DOAC had been sure of victory when he’d tripped the Agent. Now he sank to the floor, inert. “X” scrambled to his feet. He clicked on the electric switch and showered the room with light.

“I got him! I got him!” he cried — for the benefit of those in the corridor. “I finished the Secret Agent — drilled him through the guts. He’s ready for sweet lilies and slow music, comrades!”

The Agent took off the DOAC’s hood, and concealed his own face with it. Beneath the blue fabric, his eyes were burning. He had a desperate plan, a plan that might prevent plagues and epidemics, a plan that might cost his own life.

He bounded across to an open case of time bombs. Quickly he set the detonating mechanism of one into operation, adjusted the clocklike dial. He contemplated his work for a moment, then glared in the direction of the DOACs on the other side of the locked door. Events were going to happen swiftly from now on. Those thieves, rats and murderers were going to be dealt with as they deserved, to save a nation from bloody catastrophe. These in Greta St. Clair’s house obviously formed the “inner circle.” They were vicious criminals all, in on the most sinister doings of the DOAC organization.

“Come on, comrade!” shouted a DOAC. “The Master has arrived!”

A thrill of excitement went through the Agent. He rushed to the door, threw back the bolt, went out. His face concealed by the hood, he joined the DOACs, who were filing toward the signal room.

Suddenly their hands were raised in a brisk, military gesture — the DOAC salute. From another door stepped a hooded man of stocky build. Across the forehead of his vivid blue hood was a mystic symbol — a clenched fist hurling a livid lightning bolt. This was etched in bright yellow. The man had an air of stern authority. His presence awed the DOACs into silence.

Even “X” felt some of the magnetism of this man, the enemy of peace, decency and happiness. The Master paused for a moment, his bearing rigid, his glittering eyes piercing through the slits in his blue hood. He did not speak. The DOACs bowed humbly before this iron dictator who was about to touch off the spark of revolution in America.

THE Master turned his back on them and entered the signal room. The DOACs stood motionless, as awed as peasants would be in the presence of an emperor. “X” waited a moment. He had to go into that signal room. Would the DOACs stop him?

A clock began to bong off the hour of midnight. That decided “X.” He was going in. If they challenged him, he’d reach the Master before they could get to him. Probably every man in this sinister group was a murderer. They would not hesitate to kill him if they learned his identity. But what was his life compared to the thousands he would save, the millions he would protect?

“X” pushed boldly through the cluster of hooded men. He got his hand on the door knob when one of the DOACs started to protest. The Agent raised his hand to silence the fellow. The gesture produced results. These killers belonged to a secret organization. They didn’t know each other even. How could the DOAC know that the man at the door had not been detailed to be the Master’s aide? He lapsed into silence. The Agent went into the room.

The Master stood at the microphone. Only he and “X” were in the room. The ruler of the hooded hordes was engrossed in his speech. He saw the Agent and gestured for him to go out. Instead, “X” bolted the door.

“Comrades,” spoke the Master in an impressive voice, “you are listening to your leader — the man you have sworn allegiance to, the man in whom you have vested your hope of happiness and prosperity. Many of you may think of me as a hard man. I have been hard, because my task has been hard. This world demands a violent change. Evil must be pulled out by the roots. To mend we must first destroy — and tonight—”

That was the end of the Master’s speech. “X” lunged at him. His fist shot out. Behind his terrific swing was all the power of his body gathered together by the hate he possessed for this arch-fiend. He crashed his fist against the Master’s chin, and sent him hurtling backwards.

The Master thudded to the floor and lay still. Who was he? The Agent had no time at the moment to find out.

He grabbed the microphone. This was the big moment. He didn’t know how many were listening in. Maybe hundreds, maybe scores, maybe only a few. Whatever the number of DOACs, they constituted enough to spread the Master’s word to every section of the country. The Agent meant to continue the leader’s speech, but not as the chief had planned.

“Tonight,” “X” spoke into the microphone, imitating with remarkable skill the impressive quality of the Master’s voice, “I had planned to issue an order which would overthrow the present government — and put the mighty DOAC organization into power. But, comrades, I have sad news. Our blow at the existing order must be postponed indefinitely. We have traitors in our midst!

“My list of the state and district leaders has been stolen. It has fallen into the hands of the police and government operatives. They are ready for a gigantic coup. Every member on that list is known to them. At any moment they will close in. Possibly now they are hammering at your doors! So my message to you tonight is a warning. Flee! Flee, my loyal ones! Gather sufficient funds and get out of the country immediately. Drop your arms! Leave your equipment behind you. It will do you no good now. Hanging, electrocution, lethal gas await those who are caught. Without DOAC control of the government, all of you are murderers. So flee — before it is too late!”

The Agent was throwing his whole dynamic personality into the speech to make it convincing, to drive fear into the hooded terrors. This was the only possible way to break up the widely scattered DOAC chapters.

He knew that his words were taking effect in many far-off states. So intent was he that he didn’t notice that the hooded Master had recovered from the swift punch. The Master was crawling cautiously toward a small door in the far wall. Suddenly the hooded leader stood up, flung the door open. “X” saw the movement then, and cried out a command to stop. But the Master’s only response was a harsh oath. He bounded through the opening and was lost in the darkness beyond.

Chapter XXII

THE Agent dropped the microphone and ran after the hooded man. He had disrupted the DOAC organization, prevented a stupendous holocaust. Now he couldn’t let the founder of that fiendish legion get away. The Master must be trapped somehow. Free, he would still be a menace to the peace and safety of America.

The Agent flung into the darkness and headed down a dripping tunnel. He was in Stygian gloom. The passage took a winding course. Once “X” crashed into the rock wall at an abrupt turn. He was stunned by the collision, but he reeled on. His footsteps resounded from the walls with thunderous reverberations. The walls were slimy. The ceiling dripped. The air was dank and chill.

Suddenly the sounds of running footsteps ceased. “X” hugged the slippery wall. Was the Master going to attack? The Agent expected to hear the thunder of an automatic. But no flames lanced the darkness, no bullets shrieked past him. Instead, he heard the swish and splash of water, the clank of metal against metal.

The Agent rushed forward. He realized that he was out of the winding passage. He heard water slapping against rocks. He knew it might be suicide, but he flashed his electric torch.

The Master let out a snarl at once. “X” turned off the light, and threw himself to the ground.

A gun roared. Bullets screamed overhead. The Master pressed the trigger until the clip was empty. Immediately the Agent bounded erect, ran forward, keeping in a low crouch. Then he heard a triumphant snarl, the clank of metal again.

Once more “X’s” flash pierced the darkness. His light gleamed on a long, metal tube, built much like a huge, fat cigar. Already it was sliding into water. On the rear end of this tube was a propeller, with a bronze guard over it.

The Agent understood. This was a torpedo, a regular Whitehead used by the United States Navy. But a miniature hatch on its top was closing, held in place by inside clamps. It was being used as a one-man submarine.

The torpedo’s bottom was secured by ringbolts to a cable which ran into the water. The propeller was going, and the torpedo was submerging. The Agent sped across a rocky ledge. The torpedo was disappearing. There was no time to lose. The Master was making his getaway.

The Agent catapulted through the air. He hurtled downward, cut the water in a swift dive, came up in time to catch the bronze propeller guard.

His hands were hardly more than an inch from the whirring, cutting blades of the propeller. If he stretched out his fingers, they would be chopped off in a split-second. From habit, the Agent had taken a huge breath before he dived. His lungs were full now, but he didn’t know how long it would be until he could take another breath.

Suddenly he was going through the water faster than a man had ever traveled that way before. The torpedo, propelled by compressed air, sent up a steady stream of bubbles. The Agent had the protection of plastic material on his face. He was wearing clothes. This alone saved him. If he had been stripped or garbed in a swimming suit, the speed with which the torpedo shot ahead would have burned him so that sheer agony would have forced him to let go.

Even now it was all he could do to keep his grip of the propeller guard. The torpedo dived into the depths, following the wire cable. The pressure was terrific. His eardrums seemed about to burst. His pulses throbbed like trip-hammers. His lungs were taxed to the utmost. His head began to whirl. He gritted his teeth and clung on.

Most men would have been torn away from the torpedo the moment it had gathered full speed. “X” felt his grip weakening. The steel cut cruelly into his hands, but he only clung more stubbornly. He couldn’t let go, wouldn’t let go! Too much depended on his riding with this torpedo to its destination.

HE couldn’t hold his breath any longer. He exhaled. His veins were swelling, his whole body throbbing in protest against this suffocation. His fingers were growing numb. They were slipping, slipping.

Then — swish! The torpedo reared its nose upward, came to a jolting stop. “X’s” grip was broken. But his head bobbed above the surface, and gratefully he gulped air into his aching lungs. The torpedo was completely out of water, secured to a spring which had caught the tube when it shot above the surface. In the darkness the Agent silently trod water.

The hatch in the long cylinder opened, and the hooded Master climbed out. “X” couldn’t see him, but he could hear the metallic sounds and shuffling footsteps on damp stones.

The Master was cursing now, and “X” heard him moving away. He waited until the sounds dwindled, then muscled himself out of the water onto the rocky ledge, and stealthily followed the man.

The footsteps receded still farther. “X” suddenly clicked on his torch, flooding the chamber with light. The Master whirled, saw the Agent, and shoved his hand in his pocket for his gun. “X” let him draw it, and then a vicious crack on the arm knocked it out of the hooded man’s hand. The Master snarled, and whipped out a ham-like fist.

He had amazing speed for one so large. He dealt “X” a malleting blow over the heart. The Agent countered with a terrific hook that knocked his foe against the damp wall of the old underground cell in which they were fighting.

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, tilted 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.