Their raid accomplished, the desperate men who had robbed Pierrot’s Jewelry Shop came out of the store and crossed the pavement. “X” stepped on the gas, racing the car forward again. One of the gang looked up and saw him coming. Once more the Very pistol flashed its green-and-red lights, but “X” paid no attention. He drove straight ahead.
Seeming to sense that here was no cop or detective who could be coerced; seeing a lone man driving a small, unofficial looking coupé, the bandits ran toward their own sedan. One of them stopped long enough to send a burst of bullets toward “X”. They punctured the aluminum shell, but stopped harmlessly against the manganese steel beneath. But a cobweb hole appeared in the non-shatterable windshield, and a chunk of lead whistled dangerously close to the Agent’s head. Still he came on, a fighting gleam in his eyes, hoping by direct action to find out who these men were and by what mysterious means they had cast a spell over the police.
THE gunman leaped into the sedan. Its door slammed shut. With a screech of gears and a pale feather of smoke from its exhaust it shot away from the curb. Agent “X” followed.
The car ahead seemed to have a super-powerful motor. Its pick-up was incredible. In that first minute it leaped away from the Agent. But his small coupé was devised for the highest speeds, also.
He touched a lever beside his hand. This connected the regular feed line with a special tank set close to the car’s gas filter. High-test fuel under pressure, containing a percentage of liquid hydrogen, newest of fueling agents, mixed with the gasoline supply. He pressed the accelerator. The small car seemed to hurl itself ahead.
It ate up the distance between itself and the other larger vehicle. A rear window slid up. Once again the black snout of a machine gun quivered and flamed. The gangsters were firing for “X’s” tires, not knowing that those innocent black rims had fine-meshed steel screening hidden under the pliable rubber. Bullets hit them but glanced off. The bandit aimed for the windshield again. And Agent “X” rocked the car from side to side with deft twists of the wheel, spoiling the killer’s aim.
Ten blocks were traversed. Police cars were conspicuous by their utter absence. The whole department seemed to be lying low. Not even a cop on patrol was in evidence. And then suddenly another large car turned into the street behind Agent “X”. He saw it in his rear-vision mirror, thought for a moment it was a squad car. Then he caught a glimpse of an ugly, bloated face hidden by a mask. His heart leaped. Here was evidence that the robbers were part of a large, organized band.
An instant later more proof came. As though in answer to some signal sent out, or as if acting on prearranged orders, a third car swung out of a side street ahead of him. It turned the corner slowly, but instantly put on speed. It was on his own side of the street. He would have to pass it parallelly, and from the open side windows a half dozen gun muzzles projected.
Here were killers regimented and organized to the highest possible efficiency. Here was a death car, waiting to riddle him with steel-jacketed lead. He wasn’t even sure that his armor plate would stand such a salvo at close range. Certainly the force of it would destroy his windshield and side windows, and, if a stray bullet didn’t lodge in his body, he would have only luck to thank.
But he couldn’t stop. The speedometer needle had touched eighty. His tires were making a humming screech on the pavement. His “souped-up” motor was roaring like a Niagara beneath its vibrating hood. To turn a corner or thrust brakes home now meant swift destruction — just as surely as the vehicle ahead stood for grim death. Yet the hands of Agent “X” were steady as rock as he raced forward to meet his fate.
Chapter II
A HUNDRED feet separated him from the car ahead. Fifty. Twenty-five. As the muzzles of the gangster submachine guns lifted to pour a deadly, withering, broadside fire into his speeding coupé, Agent “X” pressed back with his heel at a spot under the seat.
There was a faint click, a whir as a tiny, high-speed electric motor was set in motion. The piston of an air-pump moved with lightning rapidity inside a piece of mechanism as delicately constructed as a watch. A white chemical in solution was sprayed thickly into the interior of the coupé’s hot exhaust pipe. At the same moment Agent “X” shoved the cut-out open, leaving a vent directly behind the roaring engine.
Clouds of black, impenetrable vapor shot out from under his car, rising on all sides in a dense curtain.
His coupé was hidden as though a pall of soot had dropped upon it. Through the blackness, the thunderous reports of his unmuffled, “souped-up” engine made a din like a battery of guns going into action. The smoke screen enveloped the gangster car as well as his own, blinding them, preventing any accurate aim.
Agent “X” braked slowly and pulled to the left. There was danger of a sudden, terrible smash-up, if the gangster driver lost his head and made some panicky maneuver.
“X” shut off his engine suddenly, and, in the deathly silence which followed, as his car shot ahead under its own momentum, he heard the shrill scream of brakes as the gangster car was slowed.
He continued brake pressure himself, driving in utter darkness, with only the instrument board light and his sense of direction to guide him, and he saw the speedometer needle go steadily down.
When his tremendous momentum had been checked, when the car was barely creeping ahead, he swung still farther to the left, guiding the coupé expertly till the fat tires were brushing the curb. The sound ceased in a moment. Agent “X” swung the wheel at once, pulled his coupé into a side street, heading off at an angle from the route he had been following.
He pressed the button under the seat a second time, stopped the pump mechanism and closed the cut-out. Accelerating slowly, he drew out of the black smoke cloud. It had risen to the housetops now. Long, eerie arms of dark vapor, whipped by the wind, seemed a ghostly symbol of the black crime mystery he was battling.
He drove away from the gangsters. No use following them now. The car containing those who had robbed Pierrot’s shop would be blocks away. He had saved his life by a comparatively simple trick. The Agent had been ambushed by waiting cars before. He never allowed himself to be caught in the same situation twice. The black smoke cloud was his answer to a danger he had anticipated before it arrived.
The sirens of fire engines were screaming as he drove away from the spot where the smoke screen had been laid. He passed a red truck with men hanging to glittering brass-work, roaring toward the scene of his escape. Some one had turned in a double alarm, thinking the black vapor meant an explosion or a fire. The bells of other engines were clanging. Three fire companies were converging on the spot. None of them guessed that the small innocent-looking coupé they passed had been the cause of it all.
Agent “X” didn’t wait to observe the excitement and consternation his smoke screen had left in its wake. It had served its purpose.
He passed two patrolling policemen. They were far from the scene of the Pierrot robbery. Yet he noticed that their faces looked tense and uneasy. They did not stride along with the confident aplomb of their class. There was a furtive, almost apologetic manner about them. Something deeper than the fierce criticism with which the press of the city had been lashing the police department of late lay behind this. The law was falling down. The police seemed to be hiding their heads in the face of the worst crime wave the community had known for years. Murders, robberies, stick-ups, burglaries were occurring night and day. They had been increasing for the past week, and still the department appeared to be doing nothing to cope with the situation.