Below him, evening traffic moved glitteringly. Taxis, private limousines, roadsters and coupés rolled by. A swirling tide of humanity passed along the sidewalk toward the garish lights of the theatre district.
As he watched, figures detached themselves from the crowds, stopped to buy papers at the stands or from one of the newsboys who were screaming shrilly, then moved on, antlike, bearing their bits of white away. There was a note of strident excitement in the continuous clamor of those newsboys.
“Extra! Read all about the big moider! Senator Foster killed! Extra!”
The tall man left his office, went down into the street, got himself a paper and returned. It was the third time he had done so within an hour. He seemed to crave action.
A half dozen earlier editions lay on his desk. This one added little to the news about the murder. The lead of the story was the same.
Senator Ronald Foster (D — Ark.), sponsor of a recent bill asking an appropriation of five hundred thousand dollars to combat the alleged nation-wide activities of a secret society known as the “DOACs,” was found shot to death this afternoon at his home in Washington. D.C. Senator Foster’s family was away. His secretary, Warren Knowlton, cannot be located.It is believed by the police that the senator’s death may in some way be connected with his rigorous efforts to stamp out the spread of the DOAC organization.
The tall man sank into the big chair before his desk again. He found one new item at the end of the murder story of this latest edition. A maid in the senator’s home claimed she’d seen a strange car parked before the driveway some time in the middle of the afternoon.
Carefully the man at the desk cut this item out, adding it to an envelope of clippings in a drawer. Those clippings were from many papers in all parts of the country. They told of strange crimes that had taken place in recent weeks of National Guard barracks and police headquarters raided in the dead of night by weirdly hooded figures; of machine guns, rifles, automatics and ammunition stolen in alarming quantities; of sporting goods stores that had been broken into and stripped of all weapons in Cleveland, Salt Lake City, Buffalo. All this was believed to be the work of the DOACs.
In a dozen other cities, a chain of hideous murders had been reported. Men had been found dead, killed by molten lead poured into their throats. Men with ghastly gray beards of metal covering their chins. This might be the work of the DOACs, too.
The tall man at the desk didn’t know. There was a frown of deep concentration in his intent, burning eyes. His long fingers reached up, touching his face in an absent gesture. That face, completely natural in appearance, was a marvelously clever disguise. The features under it were hidden so well that no one would have guessed their presence. They were concealed as cunningly as the identity of the tall man himself. For “E.E. Winstead” and the mysterious investigator of crime called Secret Agent “X” were one and the same.
THE name was only another cognomen of the Man of a Thousand Faces — the man whose amazing, daring actions had aroused the curiosity of every detective bureau in the country as well as the underworld.
It was a name chosen by Agent “X” in the campaign against crime inspired by a secret message straight from Washington, D.C.
Sensing what the threat of the DOACs might mean, “X” had organized his own secret staff of skilled operatives. He had posted them in every state in the Union.
Little was known about the DOACs. Progress, so far, had been pitifully slight. It was rumored that they planned a dictatorship of America; rumored that disgruntled, discontented people all over the country were joining their secret membership. The symbol of their power was a clenched fist hurling a lightning bolt.
The telephone rang as Agent “X” bent over his clippings. It was a long-distance call from a state nearly a thousand miles away. The voice that came over the wire was that of Jim Hobart, one of the Secret Agent’s most skilled and trusted operatives. There was a quaver of excitement in Hobart’s tone now.
“Calling E.E. Winstead.”
“Winstead speaking.”
“Solder has gone down again, boss. Two more customers in this territory received orders last night. My own firm may have been active. Haven’t been able to locate any parties to the deal. Prospects for advancement look swell. Saw what happened to sponsor of Washington code. What instructions have you?”
Agent “X’s” fingers tightened over the telephone till his knuckles showed white. In those short, innocent-sounding sentences Jim Hobart had got across a message of horror. “Solder has gone down again,” meant that molten lead had been used as a murder weapon once more. “Two more customers in this territory received orders last night,” indicated that there had been two victims. And by his reference to the “sponsor of Washington code” Hobart was telling “X” that he’d seen about Senator Foster’s murder.
The Secret Agent’s voice was devoid of emotion as he answered: “Continue sales work in that territory. Be careful of too rapid promotion. Call me again tomorrow.”
He snapped the receiver up. The burning look in his eyes had deepened. Hobart, ex-police detective, suspended from the city force on graft charges that were the result of an underworld frame-up, had been given employment by the Agent. The ex-dick didn’t know for whom he was working. He thought that Winstead was the assumed name of A.J. Martin, an inquiring newspaper reporter who wanted to get inside facts about the DOACs for his paper.
With Agent “X’s” guidance, Hobart had been able to join the ranks of the DOACs in one of their midwest chapters. But Hobart’s reports, though faithful, had been disappointing to “X.” The rank and file of the DOACs knew little. They merely received instructions and propaganda from an “inner circle,” which Hobart had been unable to penetrate as yet.
Restlessly Agent “X” scanned the paper to see if these other brutal murders in the West had been recorded. They had not. Hobart had given him the news by wire long before it had reached the metropolitan press. Then suddenly Agent “X” started.
His eyes, trained to miss nothing, focused abruptly on the personal columns of this late edition. There in bold type were words that made his pulses hammer.
SECRET AGENT “X”
The group of letters that followed the Agent’s name was as surprising as the public appearance of that name itself. The entry in the personal column read thus:
SECRET AGENT “X.” BTXAM AHMSI GAKIG FMTDC SEMAN KNTGB NADUN GANAM TERAG BNGEP PNDNN ZMHHK STEUV SRDNP GDIOO SAMBG ANHOU LQTBU BVDXM APNLN BKUBD XHUEP PETEN LDENA MANGR ADLKO RAPEA OXAXX.
The Agent tensed in his desk chair. Here was a code message or a cipher-gram. Some one wanted to get in touch with him. Some one had used the personal column of the paper as the only means of doing so.
STARING at the word grouping, “X” knew that they might be in any one of many ciphers.
With fingers that trembled he drew a pad and pencil toward him. It was second nature with him to attempt a solution of any code or cipher he might happen to see.
He jotted down the established frequency table of letters beginning with “E”, one hundred and twenty-six, “T” ninety, “R” eighty-three. This table had been figured out by government experts. It showed the natural frequency of letters as they appeared in the English language, based on a comparative study of one hundred thousand words. But the letters in the newspaper appeared to follow no regular frequency.
The discovery of this eliminated the possibility of a common substitution cipher. “X” reasoned that the man who had written the cipher would not have used code. Without a decoding book, patient weeks of labor were often required before a code could be read. “X” experimented with all the better-known ciphers; then glanced at the first three words again — his own name.