“Never mind. Get the inspector. It’s a matter of life and death.”
The sergeant grumbled and complained, but at the end of a minute he had made switchboard connections. Another voice sounded over the wire.
“This is Inspector Burks. What’s it all about? What do you want?”
In quick, breathless sentences Betty Dale relayed the message that the Agent had asked her to deliver — the message announcing Sir Anthony Dunsmark’a abduction — and the inspector’s voice rose into a harsh irritable rasp.
“That’s impossible! You’re lying! The Victoria, the boat he’s on, hasn’t even docked. She’s still at quarantine. I know because I’ve got cops waiting to look out for him. Who the hell are you, lady?”
But Betty Dale didn’t answer. She had done her duty, done what the Secret Agent had asked. She hung up quickly and left the store before the police tried to trace the call.
INSPECTOR BURKS at the other end of the wire jangled the receiver futilely. His pale face had turned a shade paler. There was an uneasy look in his eyes. The girl who had called him up and refused to give her name was obviously a nut. What she had told him couldn’t be true. Dunsmark couldn’t be kidnapped before the Victoria landed. But still he was uneasy. And he wasn’t a man to let anything pass.
Growling in his throat, still irritable from having been waked up, he lifted the receiver again and demanded the ship-to-shore service.
“Get me the steamer Victoria—now in the harbor. Let me speak to her captain.”
In a moment the call had leaped through the air across the harbor by wireless telephone. The voice of the captain buzzed in his ear. Inspector Burks asked a blunt question.
“Is Anthony Dunsmark still on board? This is the head of the city homicide squad.”
The captain answered quickly.
“Sir Anthony left nearly an hour ago. The police commissioner came and got him.”
There was an instant of dead silence, then Burks spoke hoarsely.
“The commissioner — say — he wouldn’t do that without letting me know.”
“It was the commissioner I tell you — there’s no doubt about it”
“What the hell!” exploded Burks. He was beginning to tremble now. He was beginning to sense that something somewhere was terribly wrong. It wasn’t like the commissioner to do such a thing without informing the heads of his departments.
With shaking hands, Burks dialed the commissioner’s house and got the commissioner’s red-haired wife.
“I want to speak to Charlie,” said the inspector.
“He hasn’t been home all evening. He’s out with the boys again — playing cards, I suppose. You’ll probably find him at MacDorsey’s.”
Burks knew who MacDorsey was — one of the city’s richest political bosses. He made the telephone dial buzz like an angry bee, and when he got MacDorsey on the wire his voice was a husky croak.
“Better not interrupt the commish,” said MacDorsey. “He’s drawing for a royal flush.”
“I’ve got to speak to him. It’s important.”
Burks gulped for air when he heard the commissioner’s polished voice, a little chiding now at being disturbed during off hours.
“What is it, inspector? More grief I suppose?”
“Did you go out in a boat tonight, chief, and take that Englishman, Anthony Dunsmark, off the Victoria?”
“Did I what? Say, have you gone crazy, Burks? What are you talking about?”
“You didn’t get him off about an hour ago?”
“No. Say! I’ve been here with the boys all evening. What the hell’s the matter with you!”
“Dunsmark’s been kidnapped, chief. The ‘Torture Trust’ has got him. The captain of the Victoria says someone who looked like you grabbed him off the boat. I’ve been tipped off to where he is. I’m going to raid the place.”
The commissioner’s tone was apoplectic.
“For God’s sake don’t let this get into the papers! We’ll all look sweet. I’ll sit in at the raid. Where is it?”
In brief sentences Burks told him. Then he made the wires hot. His rasping voice started the various departments in action, got other inspectors on the job. He asked that trucks of the emergency squad be sent out, asked the boiler squad to cooperate, and ordered all available men of the homicide squad rounded up.
Half dressed, with his shoes unlaced and his collar unbuttoned, he sent his own car roaring down town through the night-darkened streets.
THE biggest raid in the history of the city police was under way. Telephone wires were humming. Captains and sergeants were bawling orders.
A green, high-speed truck of the emergency squad, cops clinging to the brass rails on its sides, came hurtling out of a side street and roared down town with its siren screaming. Two motor-cycle cops joined it, clearing the way, adding their horns to the din.
Private cars drew aside. Pedestrians scuttled to safety. Inspector Burks, his face bleak, drove madly, holding his own horn down.
The tip-off, whoever had given it, had been complete. And he had made his own instructions complete also. No one was to act until he arrived on the scene to direct the raid.
He found grim-faced men waiting in the dark streets around the old warehouse. There was the glint of dim light on riot guns and on the black, wicked snouts of automatics held in steady hands.
Sergeant Mathers, roused from sleep, his eyes bloodshot, came up for instructions.
“Throw a cordon around the whole building,” said Burks. “Circle the block. Don’t let any one get out.”
Stealthy-footed men approached the building from all sides. “Those houses in the rear,” said Burks. “Watch them, too.”
A sleek, official car with a uniformed chauffeur slid to a halt, then crept through the lines of detectives. The commissioner himself had arrived, his mouth under its mustache a hard, straight line. Someone had put him in a bad spot. Someone had made him appear ridiculous.
“Let’s get going,” he snapped.
The raid began then. Men with axes, sledge hammers, and crowbars started battering in the doors. Powerful searchlights mounted on the trucks of the emergency squad flashed on, sweeping the sides of the big building, making the dark evil streets as bright as day. Patrolmen and plain-clothes detectives poured in, battering down doors and racing along corridors.
It was Inspector Burks himself who first saw a spectral black-robed form ahead of him. The man flashed into sight for a moment around a passage angle, and Burks saw the evil glitter of eyes behind the slitted hood.
“Halt!” he said. “Stand where you are or I’ll shoot.”
The hooded man ignored the warning. He tried to spring up a flight of stairs.
There was the harsh crack of an automatic. Burks had been a dead shot in his day. The man on the stairway screamed and spun around. He tottered, clutched at the wall. Then his body slumped and rolled backwards. He collapsed on the floor of the passage and lay still.
Burks ran forward and snatched the hood loose. Then he gave a swift gasp of surprise.
“God! Albert Bartholdy — one of the D.A.’s snooty assistants. No wonder the cops didn’t have a chance.”
There was a blue hole in the side of Albert Bartholdy’s head. One member of the “Torture Trust” would never plot evil again.
But a patrolman with a riot gun down the corridor cursed in pain. Two sinister gray-clad figures had appeared ahead of him as if by magic. One of them had flung a glittering tube of liquid. It was only by a miracle of good luck that the cop stepped aside in time.
The tube smashed against the wall close to his head. Reeking chemical fumes filled his nostrils. Drops of seering acid struck his cheek.