So skillful had the Agent’s maneuvers been that Doeg was unaware that he was under surveillance. He moved with a lumbering, bearlike stride on along the street, in the same direction that the taxi had been following. At the next corner he turned left, walked two blocks till he came to a section of small shops and old-fashioned brick dwellings, and paused before a cast-iron fence.
Now for the first time he manifested furtive caution. “X” had ducked out of sight in an areaway. From the shadows of this he saw Doeg survey the street in all directions. Then Doeg ran quickly up the front steps of a shuttered house and plunged a key into a lock. An instant later he disappeared from sight.
The Agent waited a full minute. He looked at his watch again. It was now eight minutes of twelve. He came from his hiding place, moved almost invisibly in the shadows, walked around a full block and approached the house which Doeg had entered from the other direction.
Ascending the steps briskly as Doeg had done he made a quick examination of the lock. He had his special chromium tools with him, was prepared to use them if necessary, but he saw at once that an odd-shaped key on Lorenzo Courtney’s ring fitted this door.
In a moment he had opened it and was inside the mysterious house. No slightest sound reached his ears. He waited a moment, then drew his cameralike sound-amplifying mechanism out. To be caught with that in his hand would be to attract certain suspicion and attack if he were seen. But a blundering examination of the building would be equally as bad.
He pressed the disc-shaped microphone to the wall, heard a faint sound and, kneeling, shifted it to the floor. Now footsteps reached his ears plainly. They moved for some time as he listened, grew fainter and fainter, as though they were traversing a corridor or passage. They were obviously on a lower level than himself.
THE AGENT moved down a rear stairway to the basement floor of the house. He was now in a room similar to that of the house where he had almost burned to death.
He pressed his microphone to the floor again, heard the footsteps on a still lower level. His eyes widened. He strode at once to a cellar door, which the shifting beam of his flashlight revealed.
He didn’t need his microphone to guide him now. The dust of these cellar stairs had been disturbed. So had the dust on the cellar floor of this supposedly empty house. Many footprints were visible to the sharp, highly trained eyes of the Secret Agent. Many footprints all leading in the same direction. He followed them across the chamber till they ended close to a seemingly blank wall.
But there were cracks in the plaster before him, and a spot at his feet showed a jumble of ancient iron pipes where the house water connected with the city’s main. There was a shut-off here with a bent handle.
The Agent pressed against the wall ahead of him. It appeared to be rigidly solid. Here was an incomprehensive mystery, a point which might have stopped him — if he had not listened to those retreating footsteps through the earpiece of his sensitive amplifier. But men did not walk through solid walls.
He looked for hidden keyholes, found none. Then made a careful examination of the pipes, till he came to the apparent cut-off. Tentatively he turned this, half expecting to hear the swish and gurgle of water in ancient, rusty pipes. None came, but there was a distinct metallic click, and the solid appearing wall before him seemed suddenly to shiver.
The Agent pressed it again, and now a section of the wall turned on a pivot disclosing a jagged, lopsided doorway, cleverly following the haphazard line of the cracks. The cut-off had been contrived into a simple but effective lock.
The Agent closed the strange door behind him as Doeg must have done, walked on across another cellar room. This time the footprints visible to the Agent’s trained eyes led to a coal bin and disappeared. He plunged through the narrow door of the bin, and saw at once that the square piece of boarding at one corner must be the top of a trapdoor. There was no other possible exit from the coal bin except the window to the street chute, and that was thick with dust.
His questing fingers found a keyhole at the side of the boarding, which another key on Courtney’s ring fitted. He thrust it in, lifted the board cover, and descended a flight of steps. The weight of the cover surprised him till he looked up and saw that it was sheathed on the inside with heavy armor plate.
At the bottom of the steps he found himself in the passage along which Chauncey Doeg’s feet had echoed. His pulses were hammering with excitement. He had seemingly entered a bizarre and fantastic world of secret crime beneath the city’s peaceful life. And these precautions, the hidden doors, the subway-like passages, spoke of infinite power and cunning. The sides of the small passage he was in, hewn from the clay soil beneath the houses, were not fresh. They were at least a month or two old, proving that the brain or brains behind the devil-dark band had plotted crime long in advance of the actual commission.
But the Agent did not pause. Somewhere ahead of him he knew a password would be demanded of him surely — one that he did not know. But his quick brain had devised a daring answer, and he was glad that he had the smell of Courtney’s whiskey on his breath.
The passage curved beneath the ground, till Agent “X” in his excitement lost all sense of direction. The evident premeditation of the thing appalled him. What chance had society against such cunning, ruthless criminals armed with such a weapon as the strange darkness? The average evil-doer would consider a catacomb like this a rare feat. It was only a secondary precaution of the devil-dark gang.
At last the long curving passage ended in another stone wall with a steel door set in it. Here was no lock, no opening, except a narrow slit in the door’s center, now closed on the inside with a plate of metal, and a small signal button beside the frame.
No password had been demanded of the Agent as yet, but here was a barrier just as dangerous. In such a criminal group, each member surely would have his own signal, and “X” did not know Lorenzo Courtney’s password.
Yet he did not stand in uncertainty even for a moment. It was the Secret Agent’s way to act quickly, play hunches, flirt with Death itself. Firmly with no tremor in it, his finger pressed the circular eye in the button’s center and stayed there.
Chapter XIV
FOR a full second he held the button down, then removed his finger and fished in his pocket for a cigarette. If any bell had sounded inside he had not heard it, and he couldn’t risk the use of his amplifier now. His own flash beam had revealed a small electric bulb in the roof of the passageway’s end. Any instant that slit in the center of the door might open, and if it did, and he had his amplifier, he would be caught red-handed.
The cigarette he lighted wasn’t in answer to a nervous craving for nicotine. Neither was it an act of bravado. It was done deliberately to create a certain impression which he wished to give. The cigarette was one of Courtney’s own, cork-tipped, expensive. The Agent let it hang loosely from his lips, swayed on his toes, and hummed beneath his breath as he waited.
Almost a minute passed, and then the bulb over his head and the slit before him glimmered at the same instant. One slid back. The other lighted up with a startling click. But the Agent did not jump.
Still swaying on his toes, his cigarette lax in his mouth, Agent “X” faced the mysterious slit and smiled. He smiled — perhaps into the very face of Death.
For there was no further sound from the opened slit, no visible sign of life or movement. The chamber behind it was obviously black. The light overhead had been so arranged as not to fall into it. Yet “X” knew for a certainty that a human eye was there, an eye hidden, yet scrutinizing him with grim intensity. He sensed with intuitive awareness that he was not approved of.