“Please land me as soon as you can,” she told the cops. “I’ll want to turn in a story to my paper.”
The harbor patrolmen nodded. They seemed relieved when the boat finally edged into a small municipal dock.
CROWDS had gathered along the waterfront. Faces were tense with curiosity and apprehension. Questions were being asked in a dozen different tongues.
Betty and the Agent pushed through the buzzing throngs whose interest had been aroused by the mysterious explosion. These people didn’t know that the tall man in the wet clothing could have told them more about it than the police. They didn’t guess that the two before them had come together through the very jaws of Death.
Agent “X” summoned a taxi and took Betty back to her apartment to change her ill-fitting clothes. He cautioned her not to mention the men on the island or the fact that she had seen the location of the bomb. At the apartment door he said a hurried good-night and gave the cab driver another address. He stopped at last in the middle of a block, paid the taxi man off, and walked a hundred yards farther on. Here he went into the rear door of an empty house, the same hideout he had visited just before his trip to Baldwin Island.
Even before changing his wet clothing, he strode up to the odd apparatus that stood in a wooden cabinet on the table. It was a special type radio receiver. Simple as the thing appeared externally, it was a monument to the talent of Agent “X” in a field of science which many men made their life work. It represented hours of patient research, amazing inventiveness, and a deep knowledge of the principles of mechanics and radio engineering.
He called it a “radio wave camera,” and it was perhaps the only one of its kind in existence — a machine for taking permanent impressions of invisible radio waves. On a large revolving cylinder of white paper, operated by delicate clockwork mechanism, visual records of all the radio waves picked up within a given space of time were made.
The meter length of the great broadcasting stations showed here. Also calls corresponding to amateur stations, police cruisers, ships in the air and ships at sea.
More than five hundred tiny styluses, dipped in red ink and poised above the paper cylinder, were ever ready to descend and make their lines, as radio impulses operated electromagnets beneath them. All the broadcasts of the evening had made visual imprints. Each of those tiny, intermittent red lines corresponded to some orchestra, some speaker, singer or comedian in one of the big studios.
At other points on the white cylinder, code from ships at sea showed. The machine was extraordinarily apt at picking up this, the dots and dashes being plainly visible.
But Agent “X” at the moment was interested in none of these. He shut off the revolving mechanism, drew the cylinder from its drum, and ran his eye along a transverse blue line that had the figure twelve above it.
Twelve o’clock — the zero hour at which the awful bomb had been detonated! Had the Terror been lying? Was it an ordinary clockwork bomb, or had radio impulse really done the work?
The Secret Agent’s fingers trembled slightly. His eyes blazed with interest. The Terror had not lied. His talk of radio impulse, like his bomb on Baldwin Island, was no bluff.
There, just one minute before twelve, was a red imprint that one of the tiny needles had made. Four long marks, two shorts, and four more longs. They had been written by a stylus set in action by a wave-length of approximately nineteen meters. They ended just before midnight, did not appear again, and had not appeared before all evening according to the cylindrical chart. As though the Terror had written his signature in blood, those tiny crimson lines on the paper roll were visible proof of his existence.
Agent “X” straightened. He had done what no one else in the city had even thought of doing — made a record of the radio impulse which had exploded the bomb. He had its wave-length now, had proof of the Terror’s appalling cunning. He would set one of his operatives to watching that wave-length at all times, in the hopes of locating the point of broadcast.
He changed his clothes quickly. Then phoned the Hobart Agency and listened in to a report from Bates. But neither organization, though they had worked faithfully all evening, had been able to pick up information valuable to “X.”
IT was the next morning that the Secret Agent thought of another possible source of information. His methods were often strange. Throughout the city and the country he had made acquaintances in odd places. The underworld knew him only as a legendary scourge. The police considered him a desperate criminal. But to many, to the poor, weak, and down-trodden, he had been a friend and benefactor.
None of these knew his real identity. But, going abroad in one or another of his amazing, brilliant disguises, he had made many loyal friends. In the Chinese quarter he was esteemed as a distinguished member of the famous Ming Tong. As Mr. Martin, newspaperman, he had been a friend and benefactor to many newsboys. In the disguise of a ragged tramp he had delved into the most impoverished depths of human society, made contacts with beggars, hobos, and down-and-outers. And often, beneath their dirt and rags, he had found brave humor, courage and shining human worth that shamed the upper rungs of society.
Now, because he was working in the dark against murderous criminals, he thought of a man, a friend of his, who lived always in utter darkness.
In his small car, Agent “X” sped down into the narrow, winding streets of the city’s tenderloin district. Here squalor and poverty showed on all sides. Here smells rose from the cluttered pavements to compete with the mustiness of the buildings that fringed them. Yet, close at hand, only a few blocks away in fact, was a section inhabited by criminals; with gaudy dance halls, drinking dens, gambling joints, and small unlicensed eating places.
On an alley-like street at the edge of these slums, close to this area of tinsel and crime, Agent “X” stopped. He got out of his car, strolled along the narrow pavement in the role of a plainly dressed young man — with no particular destination in mind. But his eyes were alert. He was definitely looking for some one.
The morning bustle of the section had begun. Pushcarts loaded with fruit, vegetables, and sea food rattled by. The streets were filling up with early shoppers, old women with kerchiefs over their heads, young children sent out to buy a few pennies’ worth of food.
The Agent noted all these, but his gaze drifted on. He crossed the alley, came to a wider street at the edge of the criminal quarter, paused at a corner to look in both directions. Then suddenly a flitting smile curved his lips.
A thin, scarecrow of a man with sightless sockets for eyes, was coming down the block. He was walking steadily, surely, along the pavement, with no cane to guide him. His head was tilted back. He was sniffing the cool morning air. Before him, tied around his middle with a piece of string, was a small tray holding a few packets of chewing gum; Agent “X” knew this man.
Thaddeus Penny was his name. Once, disguised as a character, “Robbins,” “X” had helped Penny, saved him from being thrown out of his small furnished room for the non-payment of rent. Since then “X” had often met Penny, and the blind beggar was ever grateful to the man he knew only as Robbins.
Agent “X” walked forward now. Penny was blind, stone blind, having lost his eyesight years before in a tenement fire. But, because of his affliction, his wits and all his other faculties seemed to have grown keener. He could walk about without a cane, could read by means of the Braille system, could identify men by their voices and the minute sounds they made.
THE blind beggar suddenly paused as “X” came opposite. He cocked his head to one side, listening. Intelligence brightened his sensitive, sightless face. Agent “X” moved by, watching. Penny turned around then, looked after him, as though those empty sockets were gifted with some strange second sight. But “X” knew the blind man was receiving impressions through his ears alone. He paused, returned, and as he passed this time, Thaddeus Penny spoke: