Betty Dale sat still, her keen brain grappling with the situation. Were these men detectives? Was this a new kind of third degree?
“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I don’t know who Jeffrey Carter really is.”
The voice spoke again.
“Are he and the man who calls himself Secret Agent ‘X’ one and the same?”
Betty Dale gasped. Whoever these men were they seemed close to the truth. The facts dawned on her. Horror crept through her veins like a flow of icy water. These men were the heads of the hideous “Torture Trust.” They had learned, or guessed, that the Agent was after them. But what could she tell them even if she cared to speak? She knew little about the Agent, and that little was a sedulously guarded secret. Courage and stubbornness overshadowed fear.
“I will tell you nothing,” she said.
One of the hooded figures spoke again, his tone as dry and sinister as the scrape of a serpent’s scales across stone.
“Others have said that. But there are things that will make any man or woman talk. There are things so terrible that human flesh crawls in the face of them. Things that make the human will crumble. Do you think that you, a mere girl, can endure such things?”
Betty Dale kept silent. She sat in her chair still frozen. They might wring the truth out of her, make her admit that Jeffrey Carter was the Secret Agent. She was not a superwoman. She might babble that if they forced her. But she knew it wouldn’t satisfy them. They would want more, and she couldn’t tell more. It was better to say nothing and let them think she knew all. It was better to stall for time.
She did not see either of the hooded men signal, but suddenly two men slipped into the room — two men dressed in gray, with faces as gray as their clothes. They were men with masklike expressions and reptilian cruelty in their lusterless eyes.
ONE of the hooded figures lifted his hands, making a series of motions in the air with his fingers — motions that the gray-faced men seemed to understand.
They drew Betty Dale from her seat and led her out of the room. The blindfold was slipped on again. She was led along corridors, down stairs, her numbed feet moving as though in a dream. She felt the damp coldness of a basement at last. She felt stone under her feet. Then she saw a light around the edges of the blindfold.
Suddenly she was tipped backwards, forced into what appeared to be a big chair. A scream of terror, her first, came from her lips as she felt cold bands of steel snapped over her wrists and ankles. The blindfold was removed and, glassy eyed, she stared about her.
The room she was in had a stone floor like a laboratory. The white shelves along the walls were loaded with bottles and tubes which heightened the effect. But the chair into which she had been thrust had no place in a laboratory. It was massive, heavy, made of steel and brass like a chair in a barber shop. The metal that encircled her arms and ankles was bolted to the sides of the chair. She was held as tightly as a prisoner in chains.
And a second look revealed that the room was not a laboratory. A laboratory would be devoted to science, research, human enlightenment. This room was dedicated to the opposite — to agony, fear, unspeakable horror. The room was a torture chamber.
One of the deaf-mutes was working at a shelf now. He had taken the stopper from a tall flask. He poured the contents into another flask, adding a few drops from still another.
Betty saw greenish, slow-moving fumes curling up like steam from a hideous witches’ cauldron. They rose around the deaf-mute’s face, but he didn’t seem to mind. It was as though close proximity to evil had made him immune to the terrible things in which he dealt.
Betty screamed again, straining at the metal cuffs. But it was useless, hopeless, and the two men in the room could not even hear her cries. Their faces were impassive, devilish.
The man with the flask turned and came toward her. He held the flask in one hand and in the other was a stick with a swab on the end of it. He dipped the swab into the flask, brought it out, and she saw that it was wet with a green, sinister liquid.
Slow fumes wreathed up, curling lazily into the air, hideous and terrible as the quiet uncoiling of a serpent. The man moved the swab toward the fresh beauty of her face, toward her skin that was as smooth as the velvety petal of a rose. On his face for the first time was a definite expression. It was a terrible smile — a smile that seemed to take some of the lackluster from his eyes. It was a smile of fiendish pleasure, as though the thing he was about to do would give him exquisite delight.
Betty Dale screamed again. She screamed because she could not help it, because her eyes were fixed upon those lazy, terrible fumes, because terror seemed to writhe through her body like a living thing.
Then the wave of terror deepened. It engulfed her in a black flood that pressed against her heart. With a piercing, agonized scream on her lips, she fainted.
Chapter XI
THE Secret Agent, sensing the awful significance of Betty Dale’s disappearance, sprang into action. There were times when he could be patient, times when he could wait, catlike, hour after hour to achieve some end. This was not one of them.
He felt responsible for the fate that had overtaken Betty Dale. If she had not aided him, been seen with him, this would not have happened.
He left the apartment building in long, quick strides. At the corner taxi stand where all-night cabs were available, he spoke to the drivers.
One was the cabman who had taken Betty Dale to the Herald building. He was taciturn at first under the Agent’s sharp questioning, but a dollar bill loosened his tongue.
“Did Miss Dale go to the Herald office?” The Agent asked.
The cabman could not remember. He had gone on after collecting his fare, he said.
“Was there any one around — any other car near by?”
The taxi driver stroked his chin. Yes, he remembered now. There was a closed car parked down the block. It had made little impression on him. There were always cars around the Herald office.
The Agent nodded. There was the harsh glint of steel in his eyes. He jerked open the door of the cab, got in, and gave the driver a number.
Agent “X,” unknown to any one but himself, had invested some of the funds intrusted to him in several cars. In his perilous work he needed one always handy. Each car was registered under a different name. He kept one, a sleek, fast roadster, in a mid-town garage.
The number he had given the driver was two blocks away from the garage. When the cab stopped, he got out, paid the driver and disappeared into a shadowy areaway beside the street. There he affected another disguise. He was H. J. Martin now, the man in whose name the mid-town car was registered.
He strode quickly to the garage, and the night attendant got the car out for him. A minute more and he was speeding toward the West Side river front — toward the dark alleys and sinister dives around MacDonough Street.
The traffic lights had been turned off for the night. The streets were almost deserted. He drove with reckless abandon seemingly, but really with such skill as few men could duplicate. His face grim, his hands tense on the wheel, he rocketed around corners, plunged through side streets, raced against time. He passed through MacDonough Street and onward, a half dozen blocks to the vicinity of the warehouse.
There he slowed the car’s speed, creeping forward, lights out, the engine barely turning over, till the big car was close to the vast bulk of the warehouse that rose silent and sinister into the night.