But Agent “X” was not terror-stricken, not even surprised. As quickly as Brownell had increased the power of the strange mechanism, his own hand darted to his side pocket. He brought out the helmet mask of Emil de Graf, slapped it over his head, and brought the goggles before his eyes.
The invisible rays had not had time to paralyze his optic nerves. The helmet was instantly effective. He could see Brownell adjusting a gleaming helmet on his own head; hear the man bellowing again.
“Light! You’ll get it this time so it will blind you like a mole — blind you so that you’ll never see again as long as you live — if you live. You’ll get so much light it will split your damned head wide open!”
Brownell gave a final tug to the helmet, reached under a shelf in the room, and drew forth one of the wicked, metal-tipped whips that the devil-dark gang had used.
With a thin smile on his lips behind the helmet he wore, Agent “X” gave the knob of his silver-headed cane a twist. The knob came off. He drew from the cane’s hollow interior another long, snakelike whip.
BEFORE Brownell could use his own lash, before he could even turn to see that the man before him was helmeted like himself, Secret Agent “X” struck. His first blow knocked the whip from the other’s hand, brought a screaming curse to Brownell’s amazed lips. His second blow stopped the bearded man’s forward lunge by laying a biting lash across his chest so stingingly that it almost cut the clothing above it.
Brownell instinctively cowered back as the blinded, stricken victims months ago had done. And Agent “X” plied the whip with the memory of those tortured victims’ screams in mind. He plied it ruthlessly, plied it till Brownell had huddled back into the farthest corner of the room, till he was screaming for the Agent to stop, till his coat showed long rents where the metal tips had struck.
Then Agent “X” stepped forward and snatched the helmet from the man’s head. Brownell screamed even more fearfully now.
“The light! The light!” he cried. “It will blind me! Blind me! Turn off the lever for God’s sake!”
Agent “X” stepped forward and put the lever back to the position it had been in when he entered the room. Then he stood over the cowering Brownell with the whip still in his hand. Words, harshly uttered, grated between clenched teeth. The mild old man, “Burpee,” had become a living, human scourge, a champion of justice.
“Your criminal plot was a clever one,” he said. “It seemed foolproof, and it might have been — except for certain things. Your pose as a public defender gave you unusual opportunities to smell out men with criminal instincts and hound them, ruin them, till they were fit material for your plans. And none of them guessed that the man they hated so was actually their leader. None of them knew that the unseen Chairman who directed their activities was actually — Norman Coe!”
The Agent laughed mirthlessly, staring at the bearded, abject man in the corner. “Norman Coe, head of the Citizens Banking Committee, champion of depositors’ rights!”
“X” opened his portfolio, drew out a tablet and a pencil, thrust them into Coe’s hands. The darkness was lifting now. Coe would soon be able to see again even without his mask.
“Write,” said “X” sternly. “Tell exactly how you tricked your own criminal allies as well as the public. Tell how you discovered the blinding ray in your experiments with flowers; how you thought of it as a cover for desperate crime. Tell how you hid the stolen money for a time in one of the closed banks where your Directors’ Room was; and how you retired from your position on the committee after a time, and supposedly left the country for a visit to England.
“Tell how you changed your name to Brownell and planned to spend your stolen millions in luxurious retirement. Tell how your colossal vanity wouldn’t let you resist the temptation to exhibit your prize flowers. Tell everything, Coe, down to the last detail, and sign it! Or, as surely as I stand here, I’ll turn the light lever over again and blind you, and then whip the life out of you as your fiends did the life of Ellen Dowe!”
Under this terrible threat the trembling hand of Norman Coe wrote. Behind his black beard which had seemed an adequate disguise his bloodless face twitched.
When he had finished at last, Agent “X” pocketed the signed confession and suddenly fired his gas gun full in Coe’s face, knocking him unconscious for many minutes to come. He spent a few moments examining the light producing mechanism, then left the underground chamber as he had come. As he passed through the room where the orchids were, he stopped and gasped abruptly. Every poisonous saffron bloom lay wilted and dead, killed by the increased rays that Coe’s frenzy of rage had loosed for a time. The Agent shrugged, moved on out of the cellar chamber and up into the house.
The incurious gardeners at work outside glanced up, and saw only an old, white-haired man shuffling by again. The Agent walked down the hill as he had come. A faint melodious whistle like the strange call of some wild bird floated after him. It was the eerily unique whistle of Secret Agent “X,” and it indicated now that a baffling and unique case was finally finished.
Within twenty minutes after “X” had left the home of “Brownell,” the police head of the city where the yellow orchids had been exhibited, received Coe’s signed confession along with mysterious but precise details concerning the man at 36 Rose Hill Road and the light-producing mechanism in the cellar room. The police head was an intelligent man who kept abreast of the country’s news events. With an inspector and a dozen picked detectives he went at once to round up a criminal whose capture he knew would be a nationwide sensation, a criminal whose extraordinary cunning had taken the skill of a master crime hunter to match.
Talons of Terror
Chapter I
THE morning sunlight that slanted down across the austere town residence of Lewis Forman, the millionaire railroad magnate, made a striking contrast to the gloomy, half-terrified countenances of the servants who were huddled together in the sitting room.
Police were bustling within and without the palatial mansion. Several police cars sat at the curb. A uniformed officer was on guard at the door.
The broad-shouldered, dynamic man who swung from the taxicab cast a keen, quizzical look at the cars. His hawkish eyes caught the license number of the headquarters sedan immediately before the entrance. He looked up toward the officer on guard, said: “That’s Inspector Burks’ car, isn’t it?”’
The patrolman frowned. “What’s it to you, mister?”
The broad-shouldered man mounted the four steps to the entrance, displayed a press card. “The name is Martin,” he said. “Associated Press. Burks is a friend of mine.”
The cop thumbed toward the door. “You can go up. The inspector is on the second floor — in the bedroom.”
Mr. Martin of the Associated Press nodded, and entered. Down the long hall on the ground floor he caught a glimpse of the sitting room through the open door; saw the servants grouped together in a dazed huddle, with a plainclothes man standing guard. Then he proceeded upstairs.
At the top of the stairs another uniformed officer was on guard. When Martin flashed his press card, he was permitted to enter the bedroom at the end of the hall. Here he found several other newspapermen, police photographers, fingerprint men, and a precinct lieutenant. There was also Inspector Burks who nodded sourly from his position near the bed. Martin returned the nod, glanced toward the bed. The medical examiner’s back barred his vision.