Fear leaped into Cobb’s eyes. “I am not at liberty to speak,” he said quickly. “I know nothing about Captain Nelson. I never saw him before tonight.”
“Then you were at the meeting?”
“I did not say that!” Cobb gasped. “Really, captain! If there is a Government investigation into this matter and if I am called as a witness, I will answer questions at the proper time. Now—”
“I beg your pardon,” said Agent “X” suavely. “Since Senator Dashman has been unfortunate enough to have a stroke, it seems that my visit here tonight was timed badly.”
He excused himself, murmured a wish to Valerie Dashman that her father would soon recover, and left the house.
Once outside he moved quickly. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still overcast and fitful lightning flickered on the horizon. The Agent summoned a cruising cab and gave the address of Senator Blackwell’s house. Why had Suzanne Blackwell been so alarmed when Cobb had mentioned the ray? Did she fear an attack of like nature on her father? And what part was the former spy, Karl Hummel, playing in his new rule of embassy attaché?
These were the questions Agent “X” asked himself as the cab sped along. At the moment, there was no one in all Washington to help him. He had undertaken a tremendous task single-handed. And he seemed to be working in a confused and black night of impenetrable mystery.
He dismissed his cab a block from Blackwell’s home. It was farther along in the suburbs than Dashman’s residence had been. A wide lawn stretched around it. Wet shrubbery glistened on the lawn.
Agent “X” moved toward the house like a wraith. He had played his hand openly so far. Now he was going to play it secretively — look and listen before he made any further move. He climbed an iron fence, dropped onto the lawn. He moved across it through the wet grass toward the house where a flicker of light showed.
Fifty feet from the house Agent “X” paused with an abrupt tingling along his spine. Something had moved in the darkness, something that was fleeting, sinister. A sudden premonition of danger telegraphed itself to his ever-alert brain. With a motion that was instinctive he jerked his body to one side.
As he did so, something like a swift-winged insect whispered past his head. It struck the trunk of a tree with a soft spat, and stopped, ten feet away.
Agent “X” whirled, then fell to the ground. Out of the darkness of a mat of shrubbery, four figures leaped toward him. The sense of imminent, hideous danger warned him that he could only escape death by some quick ruse.
Chapter VI
HE lay still as the figures moved up. Their feet were uncannily silent on the grass. They walked like savages, bent forward, shoulders hunched. He caught a glimpse of the face of one in a shaft of light filtering from the street. That face was brown-skinned. Not negroid. The bones were too high, the lips too thin, the eyes too small and bright.
These, he felt sure, were the same men who had worn the green masks in the chamber where Saunders had been poisoned. These were the killers who had carried out a master murderer’s will.
The truth of this was verified a moment later. One of them spoke in the strange tongue that “X” had heard before and recognized. They closed in around him like wolves.
His stillness, his appearance of death, was all that saved him. Knives gleamed in the hands of two of the men. Another carried something else, a tiny, slender pipe, mysterious, sinister.
They muttered in their monosyllabic language. Two of them reached down, the ones with the knives. There was horrible purpose in the way their hands groped.
“X” hurled himself sidewise then with an abrupt movement that was timed to within a fraction of a second. A master of disguise and strategy, he could use physical force, too, when necessity dictated. His feet swept in a circle, knocking two of the killers to the ground — those with the knives. His powerful hand caught the ankles of the other two, hurling them off their feet.
There was something ghastly about their stoical silence. He had taken them by surprise, tricked them, by playing possum, but they made no noise as white men would have done. They showed the training, the discipline that an exacting master had instilled into them.
They sprang back toward “X.” For a moment one of their knives swept downward in a whistling arc.
The Agent struck then, lightning fast, with the tips of his fingers only. It was a strange blow, a thrust of his wrist forward. His hard finger tips jabbed the knifeman just under the armpit. The brown-skinned killer gave a grunt of pain. His knife slipped from his hand.
For a moment after the Agent had struck him he lay writhing in pain, his lips locked together. The second knifeman tripped over him. But the man with the strange pipe in his hands was stepping back. His hands were taut as talons. His eyes glittered with an evil, murderous light.
The Agent saw him raising the pipe to his lips. Here was death. The threat of the knives was as nothing compared to this new device. For “X” knew what that insectlike whisper past his head had been. He knew what it was that had struck the tree trunk.
With a movement like a wrestler, Agent “X” clutched the fallen knifeman, raised him above his head, and hurled him forward toward the other who held the pipe. There were steely muscles beneath “X’s” well-fitting uniform. He knew the secrets of leverage and suddenly applied strength. The man he had flung struck the feet of the other. Both rolled to the ground with a serpentlike hiss of breath.
A guttural order came from the lips of one who seemed to be their leader then. In an instant all four of the strange brown-skinned men were slinking away into the darkness. It was as though the night had swallowed them. One moment they were there. The next they had gone, and “X” could not hear even the sound of their feet. But, holding his head close to the ground, looking along it, he saw four shadows flitting across the iron fence that bordered the estate. A moment later he heard the sound of a motor starting up, heard it purr away into the night. Single-handed he had defeated them, but he did not fool himself. Sooner or later he was destined to meet them and their devilish master again.
THE Agent rose to his feet. The elbows and knees of his uniform were wet and muddy. Mud smeared his sides and back. But he hardly noticed it. He moved forward for a moment, turned on the beam of a miniature flashlight with a bulb hardly bigger than a grain of wheat. He pointed it toward the ground, stopped and picked something up.
In his hand was a featherweight pipette — a hollow reed, open at both ends — seemingly harmless. It had dropped from the brown-skinned man’s fingers when he had fallen. One end of it had been stepped on and crushed. It was useless now, but the Agent knew it had been more deadly than the fanged jaws of a snake. It was a blowpipe, a savage assassin’s weapon, simple as it was terrible.
He walked back to the spot where he had been when the strange whisper sounded so close to his head. Again his light flashed on. Sticking in the trunk of a tree was a tiny dart, a, brilliant green feather at one end, a bone point at the other with a black, gummy substance adhering to its surface.
He drew it out, broke a section of the blowpipe as a guard against the deadly point, and put it in his pocket. His mind flashed back to that small mark on Senator Dashman’s neck. Here was the answer. It had not been the paralyzing ray, but something almost as sinister. Two horrors hung over Washington: the threat of one still unleashed; and the real, ever-present menace of a band of hideous poisoners whose motives were veiled in mystery.
Eyes harsh as steel points, Agent “X” moved on across the lawn toward the house. This was what he had come for. The four brown-skinned killers had delayed him, but had not turned him from his course.