“I guess I need some rest,” Fannon grumbled, as he palmed the key and slid it into his own pocket.
In the main room some of the men were playing cards or shooting dice; some were reading. Nate Frisch was perusing a magazine with intense interest. He put it down when Binks and Fannon came in, started to say something, but changed his mind and continued his reading. He evidently remembered the halfwit’s previous warning.
Binks said, “Come on through; I’ll show you your bunk.”
Binks had not noticed the swift movement with which Fannon, as they came in, had inserted the rolled piece of leather into the lock of the corridor door to keep it from locking when the door was closed. He led him into a dormitory just beyond the main room. Here there were rows of cots against the walls, each with a number painted in black on the wall above it. Binks stopped before number seventeen.
“This was Tyler’s,” he explained. “Now it’s yours.” He pointed to a pile of clothes on the cot. “All new. The Skull takes care of his servants. Ha, ha!”
Fannon watched him go out through the main room, wondering how his face had become so evilly scarred. All over the place the lights were extremely dim, so that it had been impossible to examine those scars closely. Fannon wondered if the man was as silly as he appeared to be, or whether it was a pose. If a pose, what was the purpose?
He watched through the open door while Binks went through the main room and out into the corridor, watched the heavy, iron-bound door slam shut. He breathed a sigh of relief. Binks had not discovered the leather jammed into the lock. The way was open to get out of there later.
Now he undressed, went into the lavatory and washed, then returned to his cot and lay down. In less than five minutes he was sound asleep.
Two hours later he awoke, almost as if he had set an alarm clock somewhere inside his head to arouse him at that moment. He was refreshed by his sleep, cautious and wary. All around him men were sleeping. Loud snores came from many of them. Only a single night light was burning at one end of the room, and by its glow he distinguished the features of Nate Frisch asleep in the cot next to his.
Soundlessly he arose, and without waiting to dress, he stole out into the main room. It was empty. Evidently there was a curfew hour here, a compulsory bedtime. In his bare feet he was as silent as a cat. He pushed at the heavy door, and it gave under his pressure. The piece of leather had done its work.
HE stole along the outer corridor without encountering a soul, until he came to the wall at the end. He knelt as he had seen Binks do, found a short lever protruding only three inches from the wall. He pulled this downward, and saw the panel in front of him slide out. He stepped into the elevator, found the lever that closed the panel, as well as another one beside it. In a moment he was ascending, and when the cage stopped, he opened the panel, stepped out into the upper corridor.
In the middle, where the dull bulb glowed, he inserted the key he had taken from Binks’ pocket in the little slot, and stepped through the opening when the panel slid out. He decided that the panel was set in motion by an electrical circuit that was closed when the metal key was inserted in the slot. He was now in the passage with the doors, one of which was the room where Tyler was confined. He had carefully counted the doors, knew it was the second one from the end.
He proceeded cautiously now, fully aware that there must be some sort of trap here for the intruder. In front of Tyler’s door he paused a moment, then, standing to one side of the door, he touched the knob with his thumb and index finger, and turned it gently.
His caution saved his life.
For from a cunningly concealed hole in the center of the knob, there catapulted a small needle. A spring had ejected the needle with tremendous force. Anybody seizing the knob to turn it in the natural manner would have received the needle in the palm of his hand. As it was, the needle fell harmlessly to the floor. Fannon picked it up, and his lips set in a grim line as he noted that the tip of the needle was coated with a brownish substance. Probably a deadly poison.
But he was given no time for cogitation. For the turning of that knob had done something else besides eject that needle; it had set off some sort of alarm; for somewhere in the maze of passages, a bell began to ring with clangorous insistence. Fannon realized that he was trapped. So clever a man as the Skull would not have left doors unguarded without setting a trap of some kind for the unwary.
Without trying to get into Tyler’s room, Fannon darted down to the end of the passage, toward the sliding panel he had come through. Quickly he inserted the key, watched the panel slide away underneath the dim electric bulb directly above it. The panel opened, and Fannon started to step through it, then stopped suddenly, halfway across. For on the other side stood Rufe, grinning evilly, a heavy revolver leveled at his heart.
“Lift up your hands!” Rufe grated. “High! Over your head!”
Fannon hesitated, but Rufe thrust the gun forward, finger tense on the trigger, lips snarling.
Fannon raised his hands, stood still.
Rufe taunted him. “I figured there was something phony about you, Mister Fannon! If you was really Frank Fannon, you would of recognized me as the guy that did a job with you ten years ago. But I thought maybe your time in stir kinda ruined your memory. Now I know different. Won’t the Skull be glad to find out that Mister Fannon is — Secret Agent ‘X!’”
Chapter III
THE case of Ainsworth Clegg, mentioned by Secret Agent “X,” posing as Fannon, in his interview with the Skull, had stirred the city as it had seldom been stirred before.
Clegg was an extremely wealthy man, the Chairman of the Board of Paramount Oil. His kidnaping by the Servants of the Skull had been an audacious bit of business in itself, taking place in broad daylight right in front of the Paramount Oil Building on Broad Street. Clegg, a man in his early fifties, was descending from his automobile at ten A. M.
The chauffeur was holding the door for him, when three cars drove into the street, stopping one in front, one behind, and one double-parked alongside Clegg’s limousine, thus blocking it off from view on three sides. From these cars there erupted a score of men armed with machine guns. They did not threaten; they acted.
Two of the gunners raked the street in both directions, clearing it of living beings. Twenty people were killed by that fusillade. Other men struck down the chauffeur, while four of their number seized Clegg and bundled him into the double-parked car.
Then the horde of criminals leaped back into the automobiles and sped away, delivering a parting volley at a radio car that just turned into the street. The radio car was wrecked, the two policemen in it killed.
Pursuit picked them up within three minutes, but the cars separated. Each one was followed for a while, but a strange thing happened in each case. At one point in the chase, each of the cars seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth. One minute they had turned a corner, and the next minute, when the pursuers had come around the same corner, the quarry was gone.
The police conducted a thorough search of the streets where the disappearance had taken place, but with no success. It seemed as if some mighty power of magic had waved a wand and caused the cars, with their vicious occupants and their prisoner, to vanish into thin air.
The hue and cry was tremendous. But the next day it increased in intensity when there was delivered by mail at police headquarters an envelope containing nothing but a single card. On one side of this card was the picture of a Skull. On the other side was a message; a message so preposterous in its demands that it must have been written by a madman. It required that the sum of four million dollars in gold be raised by midnight the same day, as ransom for Clegg. It made no threats, merely contained the one sentence. And it was signed — The Skull.