As he scanned the words carefully, his blood seemed to run cold. Here was the answer to the black mystery he had been investigating for the past thirty-six hours. Here was a criminal document containing a message so terrible that even his own fertile imagination hadn’t conceived of such a thing. It was typewritten on plain bond paper. It said:
To His Honor, the Mayor:
I have in my possession three hundred pounds of an explosive known to science as nitro-picrolene. This is the world’s newest and deadliest detonating agent. A twenty-five-pound bomb of NP is sufficient to raze twenty city blocks.
I have placed a dozen such bombs at strategic points throughout the city. They are concealed beyond possible discovery. Fuse units to be set off by radio impulse are connected with the bombs. From a hidden radio transmitting plant, I can explode these bombs within the space of sixty seconds.
I leave it to your imagination to picture what the results of a dozen such explosions would be. My motives are purely economic. I have selected an underworld executive and a highly trained criminal organization to collect tribute as they see fit. One green and two red lights fired from a signal pistol will identify this group. You will instruct the police not to interfere with their activities. Seventy per cent of all they collect goes to me for the protection I give them. They do not know my identity any more than you.
Being a man of sound judgment and common sense, you will understand that you have no alternative. You must instruct the police along the lines I have indicated. If you do not, the blood of millions may be on your hands.
I have spies everywhere. Any undercover attempt to thwart my plans will only bring catastrophe. Obey, and I will remove the bombs from this city after the group under my protection has collected ten million dollars. Disobey — and destruction will follow.
The Terror.
P.S.: As conclusive proof of the truth of my statement, I have placed a five-pound bomb of NP on Baldwin Island. This will be exploded at midnight on December 15. I suggest that you remove the hundred-odd squatters from the island. Give them any excuse you care to. Search for this bomb if you like. You will not find it. But stay away from the island at midnight of the 15th. It will be razed to water level.
The calm, fearful purport of the paper shocked “X”. He had dealt with scores of criminals. He had ferreted out crimes, blocked vicious onslaughts of the underworld on law-abiding citizens. But never had he run across a scheme as cold-bloodedly ruthless as this. The lives of thousands, perhaps millions, of unsuspecting innocents had been put in jeopardy that a human monster might enrich himself.
Like terrible, slumbering germs of Death, those bombs lay somewhere among the labyrinthine streets of the city. Like germs that would at an instant’s notice grow into a blight of red carnage unparalleled in the country’s history.
“X” HAD a vision of great buildings falling down with terrible impact of tons of steel and stone smashing down to break and rend bodies, crush out human lives, kill and maim. Men, women, and little children would be the victims. If what the Terror said was true, no earthquake or giant tornado would leave behind it a more appalling tide of death and desolation.
For a moment emotion choked in the throat of the Agent “X.” For a moment a passion of loathing such as he had seldom felt in his career held him in its grip. He was conscious of trembling; conscious of standing there in the darkness with his clenched fists and staring eyes. He had an impulse to go to the nearest great radio broadcasting station and send out a warning to the city’s population. If they understood their danger, there would be a general exodus of citizens. They would run fear-stricken from their homes, even leaving their possessions behind to get away from the unseen menace.
But, even as the impulse came, he knew that those who heard would not believe. A few might. Others would be uneasy, but too sluggish to run. Still others, the great majority, would laugh, and say this was only the story of some wild-eyed madman. Nothing so fantastically horrible could exist surely, they would think.
Yet, “X” remembered having read a notice of the squatters being removed from Baldwin Island. The press had kicked up a furor about it. It was an example, they said, of municipal callousness. Without a definite reason, without giving them time to make other plans, the city had swept down and forced the squatters from their shacks. Many with families had protested loudly. Charitable souls had come forward to help them. But there were some among the squatters who stated defiantly that they would not be driven from the only homes they knew. They said they would go back.
And tonight was the 15th! What if some of them had sneaked back? They had no inkling of why they had been driven away. What if a few of the pitiful human derelicts, struggling to keep soul and body together, victims of the great depression, had returned secretly to their homemade shacks? The rest of the world might regard these huts as mere loathsome heaps of old boards, tin cans and stones — eyesores on the landscape. But to those who had built them piecemeal, through long days of toil, they were homes.
Yes, tonight was the 15th, and in a little over an hour the Terror would make good his threat, or fail. If he succeeded, any squatters who had returned to Baldwin Island would be blown into shattered, bloody fragments.
This possibly alone was enough to send Agent “X” out on a mission of mercy. A benefactor as well as an avenger, he could not stand by and see innocent men destroyed.
There was a chance, too, that in a quick energetic survey of the island, with his experience behind him, he might find some clue to those who worked for the Terror. He might even locate the hideous bomb, or find tracks of those who had set it. If there were no squatters remaining, if he could not locate the bomb, then he would be a witness to its detonation — and see if the Terror had been correct in claiming NP as the world’s most terrible explosive.
“X” did not make a complete change of disguise. He stopped at one of his hideouts, doctored up his face slightly, then spent a few moments setting in operation an electrical mechanism that was housed in a cabinet standing on a table. When he left it, cogs were turning inside, and a thin, musical whirring came from the cabinet. Agent “X” went into the street and walked quickly to a garage where he kept one of several cars.
In this he sped to an old deserted dock on the river’s edge. Its piling was rotting away. It had been declared unsafe for use. Its owner had preferred to close it rather than renovate it.
Agent “X” slipped quietly through a high fence which closed off the end of the dock. He walked out on it, stopped suddenly and lifted a loose board.
A black, cavernous opening appeared. He stepped into this, descended a short ladder, and moved ahead on parallel boarding just above the water level. Walking forward and flashing his light, he came to a spot where a small, swift speed boat was moored.
It rested in a cradle of jute-lined bumpers that prevented it from scraping and squeaking. He stepped into the craft, started the muffled engine, and jockeyed out from under the dock’s forward end.
In a moment, the boat was a dark streak in the water, showing no lights, with only a white, ghostly plume of exhaust smoke at its stern.
Chapter VI
SEVERAL times, on his way, Agent “X” avoided police patrol boats. The harbor seemed full of them tonight. Without lights and headed toward Baldwin Island, he knew he would be stopped and questioned if they could catch him. But when one patrol craft came too close, “X” twisted the wheel, stepped on the gas, and went careening across the oily night swells. The throbbing, sixteen-cylinder auto-type engine under the mahogany hood drove the craft along at a swifter pace than even the fast police patrol boats.