Jules Pierrot, owner-manager of the store, seeing a fortune vanishing before his eyes, ran from a back office. He was wringing his white hands, biting his lip, his small, immaculately dressed figure bobbing along. Consternation twisted his pink-and-white face with its carefully waxed mustache.
“Stop! Stop!” he screamed, “Help! Police!” In a frenzy that was almost hysterical he flung himself toward the man who was pilfering the trays.
The machine gun instantly clattered with a ruthless, measured note. Its snout quivered like the black, evil head of a snake lashing itself in fury.
Bullets slapped and slashed against the spotless vest of Jules Pierrot. He gasped, screamed piercingly, and flopped to the floor in a thrashing, grotesque heap. Crimson oozed from his clothing sogging it down. Crimson dribbled from his open, gasping mouth. The bandit leader at the counter calmly ignored the horrible squirming of the dying man. Jules Pierrot kicked pitifully, then lay very still.
Another of the gang came in from outside. The clerks, frozen with fear at the sight of their employer murdered before their eyes, obeyed meekly when they were ordered to open the safe. Some of the shop’s most treasured possessions were stored in this. Every flashing stone and bit of gold was scooped into the bandit’s pockets or the canvas sack of the leader. Systematically, surely, ruthlessly, the raid went on.
FIVE blocks away from the scene of the crime a small, compact coupé hurled furiously ahead. A man was hunched in it, his knuckles showing hard and white as they pressed the black rim of the wheel.
Under the instrument panel before him a hidden radio blared out police calls. The strident voice of the announcer gave the news of the Pierrot robbery in a numbered headquarters’ code.
“Cars seventeen and twenty-six,” it said. “Go to Forty-eight Vanderbilt Avenue. Number nineteen. Cars seventeen and twenty-six.”
The man at the coupé’s wheel wasn’t a detective or policeman. He had no official connection with any law-enforcing body in the land. Yet he knew what No. 19 meant. A store was being robbed. Another crime was being committed in a city already terrorized by the black wave of lawlessness that seemed to be engulfing it.
The coupé driven by the man corresponded to neither of the numbers that the police announcer had called. Yet the concealed short-wave radio beneath its instrument panel was as efficient as that in any official cruiser. The coupé itself was fifty per cent more efficient.
Its tonneau and chassis housed a collection of uniquely strange mechanisms. Sheathed armor plating of finest manganese steel was hidden beneath the enameled aluminum body, making it practically bulletproof. Small racks of tear gas bombs, and flares were slung underneath, ready to be released at the merest touch on hidden levers. A special, electric-field detector behind a sliding panel in the driver’s door made it possible for the owner to guide the car along a highway at night without lights, utilizing the presence of parallel telephone wires alone.
Sensitive audiophonic ears in the car’s roof could pick up sounds at great distances. These were only a few of the amazing devices that its inconspicuous exterior concealed. Outwardly commonplace, the car was as mysterious as its driver.
Behind the prosaic features of the man at the wheel was hidden an identity that the police of a dozen cities had speculated upon, an identity that the underworld feared and hated; yet knew nothing definite about — the identity of the man called Secret Agent “X”!
Scores of rumors had run rife about him. Plots, by the law and the lawless alike, had been laid to trap him. Dark schemes had been hatched to blot him out of existence, by means of poisons, knives and bullets. Yet he still remained alive, an active menace to evil-doers, one of the most daringly unique criminal investigators in all the world. He was a genius of disguise, a master of a thousand faces, a person pledged to ceaseless warfare against the destructive, disintegrating forces of crookdom.
The features showing now formed an elaborate disguise, as impenetrable as scores of others he had worn. Volatile plastic substances, overlaid above flesh-tinted pigment, followed the contours of his own face, yet changed it, so that even his own parents would not have known him. His hair was a carefully made toupee. His features were mediocre and inconspicuous.
Yet the odd burning light in his eyes seemed to hint at personal magnetism and great intellectual powers. Behind that disguised face a formidable brain seemed to be at work — and was. Agent “X” was on the trail of crime again, out to do battle with evil and match his wits against a mystery that was as sinister as it was deep.
The radio before him still sounded, calling the police cars. And, as his own coupé sped onward toward the scene of the crime, he suddenly saw one of them.
A green roadster shot out of a side street, roared into Vanderbilt Avenue. Agent “X” swung around on screaming tires and followed it. The police car’s siren was wailing. The men in it were hawk-faced, clean-cut, alert. A sawed-off shotgun was in the hands of one. They seemed ready to do their duty in an effort to save life and property, and beat off a gang of desperate bandits.
The shattered glass front of the jewelry store came into sight. Agent “X” pressed down on the brake pedal of his roadster and tensed. He saw the black bandit car, saw the men with guns standing outside the shop, saw the heap of shattered window glass and the raided display racks. But he was watching the two cops as closely as he was the bandits.
And, as he looked, a strange, seemingly inexplicable thing occurred. One of the killers on the sidewalk turned and saw the approaching police cruiser. He spoke sharply to a companion. The man he had addressed yanked a small pistol from his belt, aiming not at the oncoming car, but straight into the air. His hand jerked. Something shot from the pistol’s muzzle.
THERE was a streak in space, a sudden, brilliant flash of green light. A fiery ball like a Roman candle hovered for a moment in the air. It drifted earthward, went out slowly, sparks issuing from it, and two more balls of fire from the pistol’s muzzle followed it. These were a bright, livid crimson, like some devil’s eyes, disembodied and drifting weirdly through space.
The effect of the three flashes on the police car was instantaneous. Hardly slackening its speed, its siren still screeching madly, it swung around a corner, headed at right angles to the block where the robbery had taken place.
Tense, straining over his wheel, Agent “X” watched and listened. The cruiser’s siren, like a mournful banshee wail, was growing dimmer now. Increasing distance lessened its note. There could be no doubt about it — the cruiser had made a deliberate detour at sight of those red-and-green flashes. And Agent “X” had recognized the lights. An experienced airman, he knew a Very pistol when he saw one. It was a device used by flying men to signal their comrades night and day in the sky.
And it had been used as a signal now — a signal for the police not to meddle in what was going on. A signal for them to shy off from the scene of a murderous robbery. They were doing it, too — obeying, for some strange reason, a command from the underworld which they were officially pledged to fight.
Agent “X” could not understand it. Trained to probe the most difficult enigmas, here was a mystery so bizarre and forbidding that it was like a challenge hurled into his very face. If the police were bowing to signals from criminals, what chance did the law-abiding citizens of the city have? Was it graft that made them do it? That seemed unlikely, for “X” had had experience with most of the heads of the department. They were honest, determined men, enemies of his though they might be.
Something unbelievably sinister seemed to be in the wind. Some force, unknown to “X”, but hideously real, must have made those cruising cops yield to the signals of a criminal band. And it wasn’t the first time it had happened. Other cops in the past week had done the same thing — turned tail and run like rabbits when those mysterious green and red signals flashed. What uncanny power did the underworld wield? Even Agent “X” could not guess.