The Agent had had a purpose in turning the dopies loose on the narcotics. It wasn’t based purely on sympathy for them and their shattered nerves. It was to keep them quiet, out of the way, while he pursued his grim investigation.
He entered the elevator that he had been shown. He closed the cage and pressed the button that started the car upwards. It seemed that the elevator would never reach the top. “X” half expected it to stop, expected it to be converted into an execution chamber.
He searched for tubes or jets that might flood the car with lethal gas. He found none. Naturally, a master criminal like the Big Boss would conceal his means of destruction. Suddenly the car clicked to a stop. The Agent found himself staring at a concrete wall. Frantically he swung around. His body relaxed in relief. There was a door. His heart thumped. He listened. All he heard was the steady ticking of a clock.
He pushed the door open a little. The lights were on. The Agent poised carefully. He would bob his head in and back again quickly, enabling him to get a glimpse of the room before any one could take a pot-shot at him. Opening the door a little more, he darted his head forward. The room was empty.
It was a large room of a suite, and obviously the abode of Silas Howe. The man had maintained his masquerade even here. The furnishings were expensive but severe. Black was the motif of the decorations. Despite the costliness of the teakwood furniture, the place was as cheerless as a monk’s cell.
The Agent searched quickly through the suite. If Howe were there, he was hiding. “X” rushed to the telephone. He would call one of his operatives, and have him order General Mathers’ men to raid the stronghold of the dope ring.
But the telephone was dead. Anxiously he hunted for the switch that would connect it again, but he could not find it. Possibly the wires were cut.
Again the Agent had the eerie feeling that eyes were upon him. He ran to the light switch, pressed the room into darkness. He leaped to the window of the apartment.
Far below, on the opposite side of the street, he knew Jim Hobart and Allan Grant were waiting. “X” took a small flash with a powerful lense from his pocket. It had a focusing attachment to concentrate the rays. He adjusted this, then turned it down and blinked it; two longs, a short and two longs. A second passed, and there was an answering blink from below.
Hobart, watchful as the Agent had cautioned him to be, had seen the signal. He returned it, using a special secret code that the Agent had worked out for him and taught him weeks ago. “X” began giving Hobart orders. The time had arrived to smash the whole ring at once, to call in the law and strike ruthlessly, desperately.
“Get General Mathers,” he flashed to Hobart. “Twenty men at least. Raid basement! Follow radium lines!”
He sent down instructions for the headquarters in the Quinault Building to be raided, and also Karloff’s hideout in the old factory, where the Big Boss had addressed his hirelings. But he stressed the importance of striking hard at the stronghold below first of all. That was the fountain-head of the evil.
“X” heard a faint sound in the dark apartment then. Something scraped on the floor. Outlined at the window, he was a perfect target and knew it. But he had been forced to take the chance. Now uneasiness gripped him.
Madly he hurled himself aside. As he did so, powder flame lanced the darkness. There was a faint, dull pop that told of a silenced gun. A bullet screamed close to the Agent’s head, so close that it scorched the skin of his scalp. Some one cursed.
Chapter XIX
TENSE and alert as a crouching tiger the Agent stole along the wall. His photographic mind gave him a picture of the room. He could reach the door without crashing into the furniture. But a squeaking board might betray him. He dared not breathe. The awful uncertainty of whether his next step would be his last made him hold himself rigid.
A draft of cold air fanned the Agent’s cheek. Excitedly he felt along the wall. He reached an aperture, a panel that had not been opened before. He had no idea where it led, but he stepped through it into a small, well-like recess. His groping hands felt the cold frame of an iron ladder.
His heart pounded, and there was a sudden, bright light of triumph in his eyes. He climbed quickly, went through another opening into a pitch-dark room. Not even the tick of a clock broke the stillness here. From the street far below came the muffled roar of traffic. Little did those who passed by know the mystery, the weirdness, the peril and tragedy housed in this imposing apartment building.
“X” moved stealthily across the thick carpet, soft as lush grass under his feet. He would get to a switch, throw on the lights. With catlike caution he crept forward. Then suddenly his body tensed.
He gave a start of surprise, almost of awe, as light flooded the room. He stood all but petrified by what he saw. Under his disguise his face muscles stiffened. The fingers of his right hand clenched until they formed a fist.
For, sitting in an armchair and gazing at him with mocking, sardonic glints in his eyes was a white-haired, craggy-faced man, not Howe, but another — Whitney Blake.
The old financier smiled, but not pleasantly. There was a derisive, brutal twist to his thin-lipped mouth. The eyes of the two men clashed. In “X’s” was a questing light. Blake’s were hard, cruel, uncompromising.
The ladder to Blake’s penthouse was proof to “X” that Blake was at least in on the secrets of the dope ring and in league with Silas Howe. Yet the Agent delayed his accusation. He wanted to verify the truth of these new and startling suspicions. Back in his mind for days how had been a vague intimation, unexpressed even to himself, that Whitney Blake might have some connection with the ring. But it had seemed too fantastic to harbor even for a moment.
“I’m after Silas Howe,” said “X” quietly. “He must be here. I followed him from the apartment below.”
The old financial wolf regarded the Agent with a look of scorn and bitter, mirthless amusement. “My friend, most people in this world know too little. But you, whoever you are, are different! You know too much — far too much. Your curiosity has thrust you into a situation from which you will never escape.”
Blake’s expression changed. It seemed that all the bitterness, all the ruthless ambition of his grasping, callous soul writhed across his face. The man’s body shook with murderous rage. Agent “X” was astounded at the transformation. Gazing into the financier’s eyes was like looking into the black, slimy pit of some pool in hell where living furies lurked. The sudden change revealed the full secret, verified the Agent’s suspicions. Whitney Blake was the Big Boss, not the man who had given the harangue in Karloff’s hideout, but the guiding force of the great dope ring, the master of the pitiable drug-crazed slaves. His cover, his front, had been an even better mask than Silas Howe’s. The man had social position, a nationwide reputation in the financial world. Besides this he was old, supposedly mellowed by age, a donator to many charities, and it was believed that he had an infirmity that made him a helpless cripple.
Much that had puzzled the Agent was cleared up in a flash. He understood why de Ronfort had been murdered, and how Twyning had come to be killed in Blake’s apartment.
“You are the man who plotted to wreck the country to satisfy your ambition,” the Agent accused in a low, tense voice.
For a moment Blake remained silent, staring at the Agent fixedly. Then he parted his thin lips, showing teeth that seemed like the fangs of a wolf.