The Agent didn’t hesitate. Before ten the Blue Comet was roaring through the cloud banks, headed south. It lacked a few minutes of noon when the ship touched its wheels to the ground at Boiling Field, Anacostia, D.C. The plane taxied to the hangars, and soon “X” was riding a bus into Washington. He didn’t go directly to the Capitol building. Instead, he took a taxi to a street of furnished apartments.
A key on his ring gained him admittance to one house. He went upstairs boldly to a small, completely equipped apartment, where dust on the furniture showed that it hadn’t been occupied for a considerable time. From a closet he hauled out a wardrobe trunk, neatly packed with dozens of suits and uniforms — a trunk such as a master character actor might own, or a vaudeville quick-change artist.
From the wardrobe trunk the Agent selected a striped suit such as a race-track tout or a betting commissioner might affect. He went to work with his pigments and plastic materials. In a few moments his deft fingers had rearranged the contour of his face. His features became hawkish, his complexion a prison pallor. A judicious application of a belladonna derivative dilated his pupils, giving his eyes a stary look.
A derby canted rakishly, a Malacca cane, and spats gave him the overdressed appearance of a sport.
It was this individual—“Danny Dugan” he called himself — who stood on the designated square in the Capitol rotunda at the appointed hour. He looked decidedly out of place, but he had the rough-and-ready air of a person used to third degrees, a person who could maintain a short tongue under the longest ordeal of bulldozing. The role was part of a desperate strategy “X” had devised.
ON the stroke of the half hour, a quietly dressed man, tall, rather frail in build, and certainly not a criminal in appearance, approached “X” and asked him the time of day. The Agent tensed. This was the beginning. Possibly he was heading into peril that would end in another nightmarish atrocity, with him the victim. There was a limit to a man’s powers. If the DOACs penetrated his disguise, if they decided on a summary execution of any aide of the Agent, he’d have no more chance than a spy facing an enemy’s firing squad.
The DOAC representative looked like a well-dressed, insignificant clerk, but, on closer inspection, murder smoldered in hard, cruel eyes.
“Thirty minutes short of four o’clock,” said the Agent, giving the countersign ordered in the cipher from the DOACs.
“Come with me,” said the representative, eyeing the Agent coldly.
The tall man led “X” to the Capitol grounds, and indicated a black sedan parked in the roadway. A hard-faced chauffeur sat at the wheel. “X” got into the car. The tall man followed, and presently the machine was rolling along the graveled road to Pennsylvania Avenue.
The DOAC representative smiled at the Agent.
“You are not ‘X,’” he said softly, abruptly. “The orders specifically stated that ‘X’ was to be on the square. My friend, I fear you are heading into trouble meant for another!”
The Agent pretended he was startled. No matter what happened, he had to stay in character, had to maintain the pose of Danny Dugan, sport and jailbird. He began chattering volubly.
“Naw, I ain’t the boss, pal,” he said, talking out of the side of his mouth. “I’m Dugan, Danny Dugan. I just shook the warden’s mitt at Meadow Stream, after two years in the big house. I’m a right guy, pal. Sure t’ing. A fly cop found some policy slips that accidentally got into my pockets, an’ the judge was a mug. He slapped me over the wall for a two-year hitch. That’s where I got this silvery complexion.”
The Agent was building himself up for a third degree. He felt sure it was coming, and he wanted it to seem that he was used to being browbeaten by a ring of hard-eyed coppers. As a petty crook, a cheap tout and a wise guy, to whom abuse was no novelty, he would have a better chance of carrying off his denials. For the DOAC leaders would think it logical that the feared and hated “X” would not take such an irresponsible character into his confidence, but would trust him to serve as messenger only.
“A fella named Martin, one of them reporter guys,” went on the Agent, “met me when I got out of the big house, an’ said he knew a gent who’d give a smart cluck like me a job. That was what I wanted, because I wasn’t wishing to get no more policy slips in my clothes. Running errands an’ carrying messages, an’ such. I wasn’t on the all-day trot more than a week when I learned the fella who shelled out the twenty-five per was this “X” lug. Take it from me, pal, I ain’t been eating right since.”
The DOAC emissary smiled thinly, and placed a hand on the Agent’s shoulder, as though to reassure him. “X” ground his teeth. He wanted to shrink from the touch as he would from that of a cobra. The representative’s teeth clicked. There was a sardonic curl to his lips, a cruel, mocking gleam in his ferretlike eyes.
He touched the Agent’s neck with a finger. On that finger was a thimble, and to it attached a sharp spur. The spur pricked “X’s” skin, drew blood. The Agent — now Danny Dugan, the jabberer — uttered a howl. Such an outburst a man like Dugan might give in protest against a practical joke. There was no suspicion of intense fear in his voice.
The Agent guarded against showing his inner chaos. The spur on that thimble had been dipped in a drug, he knew. Almost at once a deep drowsiness engulfed him. He felt his senses slipping into oblivion. He fought for control, struggled to peel back the film of sleep that was enveloping his brain.
The effort was futile. Everything was washed in haze. He heard a taunting laugh, but it seemed far away. He had the sensation of floating through air, and then sensation ceased.
Chapter XIII
IT might have been hours, or it might have been minutes before the Agent regained consciousness. He didn’t know. He awoke in a room illuminated by a ghostly light from a phosphorescent glare that covered the ceiling. The pall of death seemed to hover over the chamber. A musty odor assailed his nostrils, an odor that suggested long-imprisoned air, air defiled by bodies that age had crumbled to dust, air such as permeated ancient tombs.
In this sinister recess a dozen hooded figures were seated. They were silent, motionless as mummies. But through slits in their wraithlike hoods, eyes glittered wickedly. They seemed like loathsome, revolting ghouls contemplating a corpse. They sat like a council of specters, gathered to render judgment over a helpless mortal.
Beyond the walls of this eerie chamber arose low moans, unnerving sounds of torture. The Agent heard the clank, clank, clank of chains, the steady drip of water. Once there was a shrill, piercing shriek, followed by insane cackling laughter. Was this the abode of the mad?
The Agent wondered if he were in the clutch of delirium, if this gloom-pervaded square of horror was a figment of a wild, torturing nightmare. But he didn’t wonder long. For a low, unearthly voice came from the hooded figure in the center of the group. The words rolled out as though from an orgiastic incantation of savage rites preluding a human sacrifice.
“You are not Secret Agent ‘X,’” intoned the awesome voice. “You are Danny Dugan. You are a part, an accessory to the plan to thwart the movements of the DOACs. We command ‘X’ to appear before this tribunal. He defies the power of the DOACs. Therefore, we will strike. You die, Danny Dugan. Then Betty Dale will follow you!”