But the instant the guard turned a corner of the building to patrol its north side, the gray-haired man crossed the street and approached the bank’s heavy doors.
He pressed his body into the vestibule, took something from an inner pocket of his coat. This was a small leather case containing an assortment of complicated, strangely shaped tools of the finest chromium steel. Some were straight and slender like darning needles. Some had elaborate goose necks. Others had tiny pivotal extensions.
The man used them with amazing speed and dexterity. Before the bank guard returned to his west side beat the man in gray had opened the building’s outer doors and slipped between them. Another set of inner doors faced him.
Now the man in gray drew a flashlight from his pocket, working with still greater care. By attaching a small steel tape to hidden terminals, to insure an unbroken circuit when the doors were opened, he disconnected the sensitive alarm system which protected the bank. Then he used the tools again, probing the secret of this inner lock as he had the first, and entered the bank.
The glow of a single overhead night light sprayed dim radiance on his face. The features of that face were blunted, inconspicuous. But the eyes blazed with a strangely intent, strangely compelling light. They flashed intelligence, magnetism, power, that seemed incongruous to those prosaic features. They suggested that this tall, gray-clad man who had so unceremoniously entered a great banking institution of the city was a figure of force and mystery. They gave the only clue to his identity as one of the most daringly ingenious criminal investigators in the world.
For the gray-clad man was Secret Agent “X,” master of a thousand faces, genius of disguise, pledged to ceaseless warfare against the destructive forces of the underworld.
ONCE again this man whose real name and identity had never been revealed, was following what appeared to be the black shadow of vast, organized crime. Once again he had become an apparent outlaw in his efforts to track down the lawless.
The trail he was following tonight was dim, indefinable as yet. Certain things had made him suspicious. Certain whispers had reached his ever-alert ears. A series of crimes had occurred in many States. They were so perfect, so efficiently worked out in every detail that, to the mind of Agent “X,” they betrayed the stamp of a single master hand. Menace that was nation-wide was reflected in them. Menace like dread, poisonous tentacles reaching out toward many states. Now, true to a pledge he had made to an official high in Washington’s governmental circles, Secret Agent “X” was investigating.
He crossed the lonely interior of the bank on his rubber-soled shoes. He passed the barred windows of the cashiers’ cages; passed the neat desks where the bank’s officials sat in the daytime, moved on toward a stairway leading down to the safe-deposit vaults.
It was in one of these that the Secret Agent’s interest lay. Its contents might reveal or conceal evidence of the strange, dark thing he suspected. If he were right in his suspicion it would send him out to do battle again with the underworld — to fight a wave of terror that threatened to become a veritable juggernaut sweeping and crushing all before it.
At the bottom of the stairway a steel grille rose from floor to ceiling. There was a locked door in the center of it. Behind this was a small room with a desk used by the man who kept the vault records. At the other side of the room was another grille of inch-thick bars, protecting the safe deposit vault where tier upon tier of locked metal boxes gleamed dully. A small bulb burned here also. It was strangely like looking into the mouth of some subterranean hell. The bars made distorted shadows. The metal strong boxes reflected weird lights. The breathless quiet of the huge bank building seemed ominous.
A slender, goose-necked bit of steel in the Agent’s skilled fingers probed the lock aperture in the first grille. The bulb in the vault beyond gave him sufficient illumination. He did not need to use his flashlight. But suddenly, as though some evil thing had breathed on it, the bulb in the vault went out.
The Agent tensed. His hand with the small metal tool in it paused. He waited in absolute darkness. Was this some part of the bank’s alarm system that he had overlooked?
He pocketed his tool, crept cautiously back up the marble stairway to the floor above. The overhead bulb here had gone out, also. The whole great building was utterly dark. He glanced out one of the bank’s barred windows. The corner street light had also been extinguished.
Then Agent “X” heard a noise. It came from beyond the bank’s front doors. It was a single muffled cry; weird, disturbing — a cry of human agony. Agent “X” leaped toward the door, stopped. There was a sound here, too. It was a strange hissing noise, like air coming through some constricted escape — or like the hissing of some giant reptile. It increased each second, seemed to be coming nearer and nearer.
The Agent’s scalp tingled with excitement, curiosity. Fear he had long ago cast out. It had no place in his perilous work with the threat of death always present. But, for good and sufficient reasons, he did not want to be discovered here.
He stepped through the swinging gate into the section set apart with a low partition for the bank’s officials. He crouched behind a desk, stared tensely at the door, listened to that odd noise, trying to identify it. Then he understood.
As though the hiss were a dragon’s fiery breath upon the door, something glowed there, something inhumanly bright. It crept around the lock that Agent “X” had so deftly picked with his delicate tools. It ate a hungry circle in the very metal of the door itself, cutting the lock out of its setting. It was the greedy flame of a white-hot torch. Some one was breaking into the bank.
EVERY muscle taut, Agent “X” waited. He had come to the bank to trace down if possible the source of a hidden menace. Now that menace was manifesting itself dramatically, making its presence felt even before he had accomplished his purpose. The Union Bank Safe Deposit Company was being raided by bandits who worked in the dead of night with amazing skill and speed.
The lock of the door dropped inward with a metallic clink. The heavy door swung open. It seemed to Agent “X” that the darkness of the street outside disgorged at least a dozen masked figures. They entered swiftly, soundlessly. One clicked on a flash. The two nearest to “X,” silhouetted against the hand light, looked like crouching monsters.
“X” saw then that one of them held a sub-machine gun. The man’s finger was crooked like a talon through the blued trigger guard. The wicked snout of the weapon was longer than that of any machine gun muzzle “X” had seen.
A powerful flashlight swept the interior of the bank, settled on the gleaming, clocklike face of the great vault where the bank’s cash assets were kept. One of the bandits barked an abrupt order.
The Secret Agent took his gas pistol from his pocket. He seldom carried lethal weapons. The gun in his hand was effective within a radius of twenty feet. It could knock a man unconscious, swiftly, silently. But it would be futile against a stream of bronze-jacketed machine gun bullets.
The Agent had other defensive equipment. He wasn’t afraid. He waited, trying to see the faces of these men, wondering how they would go about the opening of this great vault with its ponderous mechanism and time-lock.
One of them was bringing forward an elaborate gas torch on rubber-tired wheels like a movable tea table. This was the same implement that had eaten so readily through the heavy bronze doors. “X” saw at once that it was no ordinary acetylene torch. Huge cylinders of super-compressed air whipped the gas at its outlet end into crucible heat. He got a whiff of the gas itself, realized that this was no calcium carbide product. Here was something new.