At least another ten seconds passed, then a sepulchral voice spoke:
“Lorenzo Courtney!”
“Right!” The Agent put the same aplomb into his answer as was expressed by his teetering attitude, and the drooping cigarette. He squinted one eye to shut curling smoke out, said: “What’s the idea of keeping a fellow waiting?”
There had been a sinister harshness in the words of the unseen watcher; the harshness of the same voice that “X” remembered hearing in Craig Banton’s office during the fall of the uncanny dark. His one answer was like an insult, or a defiance hurled into the teeth of doom. But it brought the retort he had expected.
“Lorenzo Courtney, why did you not give the signal?”
The Agent’s coolness in the face of this demand was incredible — as fine a bit of acting as he had ever done in his life. He shifted his cigarette, removed it lazily from his mouth, flicked ashes to the floor of the passage.
“You won’t believe it, old man! But — the fact is — I’ve forgotten it!”
The Agent gave an amused titter, and drew a hand across his mouth. His accent had perfectly duplicated the British twang of Lorenzo Courtney. He continued the same suave tones, adding a slight thickness.
“Sorry! You’ll be wanting to use your damned whips on me next. But I was called to the club this evening for a few cocktails — and—” The Agent tittered again. “Frankly this mumbo-jumbo gets on my nerves at times. You ought to thank me for finding my way in.”
A single word came from behind the metal door: “Fool!”
A second passed, while the Agent still waited, hiding the breathless uneasiness he felt. He had thrown one of the strangest and most daringly simple bluffs of his life. Told a member of a hideously vicious gang that he had forgotten a signal which he had never known. Would it, could it possibly work? The Secret Agent had rolled his dice again.
And it appeared that he had won, for abruptly the door moved back. An arm reached out, yanked him angrily inside. A harsh voice spoke in his ear.
“Once perhaps you can get away with this, Courtney. But the Chairman would never allow it a second time. That would mean death! You took the pledge like the rest of us. You are under oath! I shall be forced to tell the Chairman of your conduct.”
The “Chairman.” Agent “X’s” thoughts raced. A moment later he almost started in spite of his iron self-control. For lights blazed above his head. He got a glimpse of his surroundings, and saw that he was in no damp passage or dusty cellar now. He was in a small corridor lined with white marble tiling, and at either end a neat door showed.
THE man standing before him, the man who had questioned him and let him in, was glaring at him now. Glaring through the eyeholes of a silk mask such as “X” had found in the chair in Courtney’s apartment and now carried in his pocket. The mask hid the man’s entire face. But a thrill passed through the Agent. For in that angular frame, that horselike head with its high, narrow forehead, those hunched shoulders, “X” believed he recognized another member of a now defunct banking firm, one Victor Blass, who had had a serious run-in with both the State insurance department and Norman Coe over the legality of guaranteed second mortgages on worthless property. Blass had been a wily scoundrel who had escaped the law. And now apparently he had joined forces with outright criminals. More than that, he was apparently in second command to the mysterious Chairman himself.
The Agent’s excited speculation made him appear to be in a daze.
“Put on your mask, fool!” said Blass. “You shouldn’t have come in without it any more than you should have forgotten the signal. Hurry! The others are ready. It is nearly time for the Chairman to come.”
“X” quickly adjusted the black silk mask of Lorenzo Courtney’s over his head, and Blass gave him a shove toward the door at the farthest end of the corridor.
Agent “X” opened the door and walked into a room that amazed him even more than the marbled entryway had done. For here was a carpeted chamber, with a polished desk, upholstered chairs and ornate electrical fixtures in it. The chairs were ranged around the floor, all facing in one direction, and ten men sat in them.
The group of black-shrouded faces under the glaring lights was weirdly incongruous. Their silence and preoccupied attitudes were strangely sinister. A few turned to stare at “X” as he took his place in a vacant chair. The rest held their gaze straight ahead. At the very end of the room a fine meshed, metal grille rose from floor to ceiling. Behind this was a single chair with a desk beside it. It was toward this desk and chair that the masked men were looking.
Agent “X” waited for the mysterious Chairman to arrive. His pulses were throbbing. It was obvious that this night he was going to see the body at least of the sinister being whose brains were responsible for the activities of the devil-dark gang. The man’s face would be hidden, but his movements, his mannerisms, might give the Agent some clue to his identity.
As the seconds passed “X” glanced at some of the still figures about him. He thought he recognized the bullet-headed, heavy-set form of Chauncey Doeg, the man he had followed here. Doeg, like the others, was awaiting the arrival of the Chairman.
Then abruptly Agent “X” tensed in his chair. The fingers of his right hand pressed involuntarily against its wooden edge. For a change seemed to have come over the room. The bulbs overhead seemed suddenly dimmer. There was an odd humming sound in the air that brought back vivid memories. Light moved before his eyes for a moment. He seemed to hear the terrified shrieks and curses of frenzied men and women in his ears.
THE lights grew dimmer, dimmer. The masked figures around him took on the appearance of weirdly, distorted ghouls, of beings from some unthinkable nightmare. Then they disappeared entirely, and blackness, utter and complete, enveloped the strange room.
“X” was not deluded. He knew that the lights above him had not gone out. He knew that it would be useless to wink his own flashlight on. For this was the same uncanny darkness that had descended on the bank; the same under which innocent people had been scourged brutally with whips that they might not interfere with the looting of the vault.
There were no cries or gasps around “X” now. The masked men evidently expected this to happen, were prepared. There was stillness in the room, until a slight, metallic scrape sounded from behind the grille. Then the faint scrape of a chair, then a voice.
“Greetings! I see you are all here! The meeting is about to begin.”
Agent “X” knew that voice. Its muffled, disguised tones had spoken to him over the telephone in Courtney’s apartment, given him his instructions to come. But it was distorted beyond recognition of the man from whose lips it came. And its words seemed a mockery of his purpose in coming. For it had said: “I see you are all here.”
That meant one thing. This man, this sinister Chairman, whose arrival had been awaited so tensely, wore a mask unlike the others in that room — a mask such as all the raiders on the bank had worn, and which enabled him to see his board of directors now. It meant, beyond a shadow of doubt in the Agent’s mind, that the directors did not know the identity of the Chairman who guided them.
The muffled voice of the unseen man behind the grille continued.
“Today, gentlemen, we have witnessed the complete success of our plans. The method, given a preliminary test a week ago, and which I outlined to you all last night, has proven itself more than adequate. You have read the papers this afternoon. You have seen how our little venture baffled the public and the police. I say ‘little,’ because what we did today is as nothing compared to what we shall do.