He turned, walked up to one and sat down — the very bench that von Helvig had occupied that morning. He crossed his legs, blew smoke from his nostrils, leaned back comfortably. The three men he had brought with him crept noiselessly closer, the silenced automatics in their hands. They were awaiting his signal. The stage was set for murder.
A bell across the park struck a single booming note. Six-thirty.
Even as the stroke died away on the night air, a man’s shuffling figure appeared. He came from the direction of the park’s east end. Hat brim turned down, collar turned up, the man had the wrinkled features of Michael Renfew, dealer in espionage. The man was Secret Agent “X.”
FIVE hundred feet away, he saw the figure on the bench. Piercingly bright eyes stabbed out from under the Agent’s hat brim. The figure ahead looked like von Helvig. The German attaché had apparently kept the appointment. Tonight, it seemed, “X” was going to meet the “lovely lady” who knew where the Browning plans could be discovered.
Simulating a down-and-outer, “X” continued to shuffle forward. The man ahead, smoking on the bench, did not turn his head. He seemed to be deep in meditation.
The Agent was within a hundred feet of him now. Fifty feet — twenty-five. The Agent moved toward the bench — and not until then was the suspicion he had had confirmed. The man on the bench wasn’t Otto von Helvig. The man was a perfect stranger to “X.”
“A penny for a cup of coffee, mister?”
The Agent’s voice was the cracked, querulous voice of an old panhandler. His skinny fingers trembled. The stranger on the bench lifted cold eyes and shook his head.
“Not tonight,” he said. “Beat it.”
The panhandler dropped his skinny hand, turned and shuffled on. The man on the bench followed him with eyes that were suddenly bright. His lips skinned back in a mirthless grin.
Abruptly he took a white handkerchief from his coat pocket, opened it and blew his nose loudly. As he tucked the handkerchief back into his coat, three figures moved out of the shadows that made blotches on the park’s grass plot.
Their dark clothes blended with the shadows; their feet were noiseless. Swiftly, murderously, they crept upon the man disguised as Michael Renfew.
It was at the juncture of another asphalt path that they came close enough to fire. Simultaneously then they raised their guns.
At the last minute, as though some secret sense had warned him, the shuffling figure turned. But he appeared to be too late. The three hired killers fired.
There were no smashing explosions in the night. Only faint flickers of flame and three muffled reports. Then the sharp spat of lead striking where the guns were aimed.
Agent “X” lurched backwards as though the force of the lead had pushed him off his feet. One gurgling cry came from his lips. His knees bent under him. He sank to the asphalt, twitched a moment, and lay still. The gunmen pocketed their weapons and slunk away. The man on the bench, humming softly to himself, rose and sauntered in the opposite direction.
Chapter XII
FOR nearly five minutes, or until the slow measured steps of a patrolling cop sounded, Agent “X” lay just as he had fallen. Then, magically it seemed, he rose to his feet, moving quickly into the shadows. His eyes were gleaming like living coals. His lips were harsh. There was the trembling pulse of excitement in his body.
In the semigloom beside the path he reached up with tense fingers, feeling the front of his coat. There were three holes in the cloth. He probed in one; probed down to the hard resilient material of the bullet-proof vest he wore.
Half expecting trickery, Agent “X” had come prepared. The vest, cleverly molded to his torso, covered the whole of it. It had witnessed the shock of bullets many times before. He had established one thing tonight. Otto von Helvig didn’t stop at murder.
But the Agent wasn’t sure he had played his own hand wisely. In this desperate game, with so many crosscurrents, no man could proceed in a straight course. The Agent was a gambler. A high adventurer in an underworld of terror. A man who took chances with death itself in an effort to balance the scales of justice.
He sped across the park silently, swiftly. In the darkest shadows, amid a clump of shrubbery, his fingers roved over his face. His movements in the next hour called for a new disguise. Michael Renfew, supposedly dead, must stay dead.
It was a relief to get the rubber cap, imitating baldness, off his head. It was a relief, too, to peel the transparent tissues, creating a network of wrinkles, away from his skin. He took a few other materials from the lining of his coat. He used them with the skill of a man who was master of a thousand faces.
When he emerged from the shadows, he was young again, utterly unlike the man who had gone down under a volley of murderers’ bullets.
He got in his car and drove swiftly through the night to the Wilmott Hotel, the hostelry where von Helvig was stopping. He was not an instant too soon.
Otto von Helvig, tall, immaculately dressed, suave as only a diplomat can be, was just leaving his key at the desk. No one looking at his bland blond face would have guessed that here was a man who, less than an hour before, had engaged assassins to kill a fellow human being. But “X,” posing as Renfew, had dared to bring up a ghost from von Helvig’s past — dared to call him Karl Hummel. That in itself, “X” guessed, had been reason enough for the attempted murder. Perhaps there was a still more sinister motive.
He watched von Helvig go to the street, saw the doorman signal a taxi. The taxi sped along Pennsylvania Avenue. The Agent followed in his own hired car. Again his pulses throbbed with excitement. He believed he knew where von Helvig was going — to keep a tryst with a beautiful lady. Was it possible he knew the lady’s name?
Von Helvig’s taxi drew up before a building of fashionable apartments. He paid the driver, walked nonchalantly into the elaborate foyer.
Agent “X” drove on, parking a full block away. He walked briskly back. Von Helvig had disappeared. In the bronze directory Agent “X” looked for a name — and found it. Lili Damora! This, he believed, was the lovely lady von Helvig had come to see.
The eyes of Agent “X” were snapping. Lili Damora’s apartment was 4E. He must learn what was said at this meeting between von Helvig and the sinuous-bodied woman from Budapest. To do so he was prepared to gamble with fate again.
He walked boldly past the uniformed doorman. The girl at the telephone desk stopped him.
“Miss Damora is expecting me,” “X” said. Experience had taught him that a confident manner allays suspicions. He went directly to the elevator, ascending to the fourth floor.
Here he became more cautious. The corridor was empty. Faint sounds of radios and conversation came from behind the closed doors.
Agent “X” walked forward to 4E. His eyes darted alertly about This was evidently a large apartment. There were two doors. One marked with the letter and number. The other blank. That would be a bedroom. The first probably opened on an entrance hall with the living room off it. To go in there would be inviting disaster.
He stopped by the first door, listened. The faint sound of voices reached his ears. He moved on to the second, and could hear nothing.
The Agent worked quickly then. Keeping a sharp eye out along the corridor, he used his compact tool set with its implements that would open any lock. In a few seconds, with hardly a sound, the door moved inward, and he found himself as he had expected, in a bedroom. Von Helvig’s coat, hat, and stick were on the bed. Voices came from a room beyond — the living room.