There was no limit to the unholy cruelty of the fat fiend before him. Sanzoni was laughing, taunting him.
“You won’t be such a headliner with the janes, Bugs, when your hands look like chewed-off tree stumps. Mike Barney’s gal left him when the boys got through with him. Janes is funny that way. They like pretty things — and a guy with no fingers ain’t pretty.”
An involuntary tensing of the Agent’s muscles made the men with the guns step closer. With a curious, speculative expression in his eyes, “X” estimated the angle that the black guns were pointing. They were aiming low in true gangster fashion. A thin smile curved his lips.
At that moment he heard the brittle laugh of a woman close by, blending with Gus Sanzoni’s. He looked up. Goldie La Mar stood in the doorway. Her hands were on her hips. A mocking light was in her eyes:
“You’d better have stayed in the Big House, Bugs. You came asking for trouble — and you’ve found it!” She turned to Gus Sanzoni “He wanted to know too much when I danced with him a while back. You’ve got his number O. K. He’s just a dirty stoolie.”
The gangster, Regio, was close to “X’s” side now, reaching out to search him — and find the things that would betray “X” as a far more dangerous enemy to Sanzoni than Bugs Gary could ever be. The muzzles of the mobster killers’ guns were held steady, ready to send lead at “X” if he did not submit to Regio’s frisking.
An attempt to escape now seemed suicidal; yet, in the fraction of a second before Regio’s hands entered his pockets, Agent “X” went into swift, death-defying action.
He lunged forward, sweeping Regio out of his path with one flailing arm. A surprised wheeze came from the lips of Sanzoni. The gunmen killers, obeying the orders their chief had given them, pressed triggers. In that brief instant when he flashed through space, bullets thudded against the Agent’s body.
BUT he didn’t cry out, or collapse. He hurtled straight on. His movement hadn’t been a wild plunge of sheer terror, the panicky, maneuver of a fear-crazed man, as it seemed. It had been a calculated, timed action, based on the confidence of a defensive device which Agent “X” had carried when he came here. This was his special bulletproof vest — a shell of case-hardened manganese steel, with a raw silk stuffing and an outer shell of light-weight duralumin. It was worn like a vest. Once before it had saved Agent “X” from annihilation, at the hands of gangsters.
It worked now. The lead from the sub-calibre machine guns missed him except for a few glancing blows. The .45 slugs from the automatics penetrated the outer duralumin shell, but flattened their noses against the inner steel.
Quick as a flash Agent “X” was on hands and knees before an empty electric wall socket near the floor.
The gangsters, thinking their salvo had mortally wounded him, and hoping to get a dying confession from his lips, held their fire now. This was what “X” had counted on. With a lightning movement, he drew something from his pocket. It was a small, curved bit of wire; a simple, but effective device that had served him well before. He thrust this into the socket terminals under the very nose of Sanzoni’s mob.
There was a sputter, a flash of violet light, and every bulb in the Montmorency Club was extinguished as the fuses blew; short circuited by “X’s” wire.
In the ensuing darkness Goldie La Mar screamed shrilly. Sanzoni broke into wheezing curses. The gangsters who had been posted to torture or kill Agent “X” bumped against one another and grappled fiercely.
Agent “X,” crouched low, could see their silhouettes against the glow of a street light that filtered through a window. A gangster came straight toward him. Agent “X” leaped up, struck a chopping blow to the man’s chin, and heard him collapse.
He sprang toward the door then. Sanzoni stepped around from behind his desk and the fist of Agent “X” flashed out to give the fat gangster a breath-jarring punch in his obese stomach.
Sanzoni collapsed gasping over his desk, and “X” sprang through a doorway into the corridor. Pandemonium had broken out in the club now. Shouts, screams, the excited cries of men and women mingled.
Straight across the big ballroom Agent “X” sped. He had verified what he had come to learn; verified the truth of Thaddeus Penny’s report that these were the men who were spreading terror and death over the city. The same men that Mayor Ballantine was giving protection to. It meant that Sanzoni was the ally of the Terror.
He ran down the stairs, saw the form of the doorman coming in to see what all the excitement was about, and leaped past him into the street.
In a moment he had merged with the darkness. And the night around him seemed heavy with mystery; heavy with the sinister threat of the thing he had learned.
He went to one of his hideouts and paced the floor, facing squarely the problem he was up against. He struggled silently, as a chess player might struggle, trying to anticipate and forestall the play of his opponent.
It was obvious that the impulse sent out to raze Baldwin Island operated only that one bomb. Those other silent eggs of death lay waiting, hidden, for the awful call that would bring them to life also. That call might come on the same meter number — merely another series of dots and dashes — or it might come on an entirely different one. And where were the bombs themselves? How could he find them, now that he knew how the Terror had hidden the one on Baldwin Island and knew also the identity of the Terror’s gang?
He got a city map, marked off all the strategic points where bombs would do the most damage. Yet he knew this was only guesswork. It would take days, weeks perhaps, to go over these spots — and meanwhile death and horror hung over the city. Yet if he could only find one bomb, see how the thing worked, learn the exact nature of the new explosive element, perhaps—
The Secret Agent’s mind, functioning like some delicate, precise machine, hit suddenly upon a startling conclusion. He believed he had divined one move at least that the Terror might make. One move that, in the light of facts “X” had unearthed, seemed logical and inevitable. To test this belief Agent “X” stood ready to face the thunderous menace of high explosive once more.
Chapter XIII
LATER that night, between the hours of two and three, Secret Agent “X” approached the Montmorency Club a second time. Sleep was out of the question for him. Restless, dynamic forces drove him on, would not let him be quiet while destruction, fear and horror threatened the community. The thought of those hidden eggs of death, silent and waiting somewhere in the dark city, was a ceaseless spur to his energies.
Since verifying the fact that Gus Sanzoni’s gang was active in the crime wave now engulfing the city, Agent “X” had instructed Hobart and Bates to have their best men watch the doings of the gang.
Through both organizations, working independently, “X” had learned that most of Sanzoni’s men would be out tonight, ravaging certain sections of the city in a series of bold robberies. This meant that Sanzoni’s headquarters in the Montmorency Club would be comparatively deserted. It meant that the stage would be set for Agent “X” to play another surprising role.
Once again he had disguised himself, but not as Bugs Gary. His clothes were black now. His whole face had a swarthy hue. Amongst the shadows he appeared to blend with the night itself. He looked like a burglar or sneak thief once more, as he had on the night he’d gone to Mayor Ballantine’s home.
He drove to within a block of the club, left his car parked, and proceeded on toward the spot where the evil Sanzoni, like a fat, poisonous spider, spread his webs of crime. But “X” knew more about the gangster now. He knew that Sanzoni, for all his evil ways, was under the sway of a greater criminal than himself; knew that he was the cat’s paw that pulled the chestnuts out of the fire for the Terror. And Sanzoni, who divided his loot with the Terror, must have some way of communicating with his superior, some way of handing over the spoils of his bloody work.