Statues fallen from their pedestals lay like pale ghosts on the weed-grown grass. A summer house, tumbled down and rotting, showed like the skeletal ribs of a great beast.
He picked his way past a fountain that had long since run dry, entering a rear door of the old house. He moved by feeling alone, moved as one familiar with his strange surroundings.
It wasn’t until he was safe inside the house that he flashed on a small light. He was behind the old butler’s pantry now. Ahead of him were great silent rooms where moths burrowed in the once rich carpets and where rats scurried across the floors.
He pulled at a tier of shelves against the pantry wall, and suddenly the shelves swung outward. The man stepped behind them into the darkness of a hidden chamber. He swung the shelves after him, touched a switch, and lights in the strange room came on. It was a hideout containing many peculiar and remarkable objects.
SEATING himself before a three-sided mirror with movable rod lights above it, the man’s long hands began to do strange, mysterious things to his face. Under their magic touch his whole appearance underwent a transformation.
The blunt, roundish features of the business man melted away, disappeared. The eyebrows changed. The hair of the head revealed itself as an elaborate toupee.
Suddenly the man appeared as he really was — as no one, not even his few closest intimates ever saw him.
The rod lights overhead sprayed radiance on brown hair, on smooth-shaven features that had a boyish cast to them. On gray eyes with a steely glint in their depths.
It was only when he turned to pick something off the shelf that light fell on his face at another angle. Then new lines were brought out — lines that made him seem suddenly older — lines of poise and maturity — with the record of countless experiences and adventures written into them.
He stared at his own reflection for a moment, seeming to salute it grimly.
Secret Agent “X”—the man of a thousand faces — a thousand disguises — a thousand surprises.
The man who was a scourge to the criminals prowling the black alleys of the underworld. The man regarded by the police as criminal himself — even now suspected of murder.
He couldn’t set them right, either. He was committed to secrecy and silence; committed to move into terrible dangers and walk into the shadow of the Valley of Death alone.
The police couldn’t know what document reposed in the strong box on a shelf above his head. For an outsider to plumb its secrets would have meant death. The lid of the strong box concealed a charge of terrible explosive to protect its contents from meddlers. But every word of the document was emblazoned in the Secret Agent’s mind. He could have quoted it from memory, word for word, paragraph for paragraph.
It was unsigned, but it bore the coat of arms of the United States Government. And he knew that the telegram which had reached him that day by way of the First National Bank had also come straight from Washington, D.C. Before destroying the latter, the Agent read it again, committing it to memory as he had the document.
Mark Roemer, kidnapped chemist, whose assistant was murdered, employed under cover by Chemical Warfare branch of Army. Was working on important formula. Consequences of his disappearance may be disastrous. Advise you investigate immediately.
This, too, was unsigned; but was couched in a Government code. The Agent alone knew its high source. Between the lines of it he seemed to read a second, more sinister message, written by the trailing claws of crime — claws that were weaving a horrible spider’s web of murder — building a menace so great that no man could say what hydra-headed horror might rise from it.
Mark Roemer kidnapped! His woman assistant murdered! A taxi driver and an underworld character slain — their bodies left like carrion in a vacant lot! And now brave-hearted, shrewd old Bill Scanlon murdered, too! A sinister crime pattern ran through it all.
Agent “X” crumpled the telegram viciously, touched a match to it, dropped it into a metal dish to burn. Even before he had received it, he had been watching the Roemer case, scenting the unseen miasma of horror surrounding it.
The telegram did not state what formula Roemer had been at work upon, what strange thing he had discovered. But Agent “X” had an inkling. If he were right, then the four ghastly murders were forerunners of others even more terrible.
He faced the mirror again, looked at himself.
Secret Agent “X.” Who was he? No one knew. Whispers there were — whispers in a few high places. There were those who said he had the Government’s backing, that he was a lone campaigner in the war being waged on organized crime.
His fingers began to move again. From a shelf cluttered with jars and sticks of grease paint, nose and cheek plates, and dozens of ingenious makeup devices, he selected what he wanted.
He dabbed pigments on his face, covered his skin with a strange volatile substance and sculptured it into new lines. Strips of transparent, tissue-thin adhesive tape changed the contours of his face muscles. He covered his own brown hair with a white, cunningly made toupee, blackened and thickened his eyebrows. As he worked, deftly, surely, his keen eyes studied a photograph on the shelf before him.
Tonight, in his efforts to unravel the mystery and horror of the strangler murders, he was prepared to take a daring, desperate step.
When at last he rose from his seat, he had the exact likeness of the man in the photograph — a distinguished public official. There was the same silvery-white hair. The same gaunt, thin-lipped face. The same shaggy, menacing eyebrows. Once again “X’s” skilled fingers had achieved a seemingly magical disguise.
He changed his suit and overcoat, dressed carefully, slipped a set of mysterious chromium tools into his pocket, and selected two weapons from his strange arsenal. Then he set out, pausing only long enough to start the mechanism of a hidden seismographic machine which would record the vibrations of footsteps if any one entered his hideout during his absence.
He threaded his way through the desolate garden and out onto the dark street.
Turning his face downtown, he strode swiftly along and hailed a passing cab, being careful to keep his coat collar up and his hat brim pulled down. The light in his eyes showed like a steady, glowing flame. He had started on a vengeance quest for the murderer of Bill Scanlon.
Chapter III
THERE was grim method in the movements of Secret Agent “X” after he left his hideout. Step by step, he began to trace the course of the murder wave that had resulted in his old friend’s death.
He went first to a sequestered suburb on the outskirts of the city. Here he dismissed his cab and walked again through the night. He had followed the strangler homicides in the papers as he did all murder cases that threatened to be difficult of solution. He knew what festering spot had first given birth to the cancer of this hideous crime.
He strode swiftly along a street of badly cared for wooden houses, turned a corner, and came to a lot which at first glance appeared to be vacant. But there was a high barbed-wire fence around it. In its center, dimly seen, was a cluster of low, shabby buildings. They were buildings which were huddled together as though drawing away from the scrutiny of prying eyes. They were dark and silent now. Murder had laid its pall of quietude upon them.
Agent “X” had seen pictures of these buildings in the papers. From this place Mark Roemer, the Government chemist, had been kidnapped. Somewhere among those buildings Roemer’s woman assistant, Cora Stenstrom, had met death at the hands of the invisible strangler.