The shock of the explosions had gone upward. Agent “X” glanced toward the ceiling again. Then his pulses quickened. For three of the fans in the airshaft had blown out, forcing a rent in the sheet metal ceiling.
He stepped out into the room excitedly. The floor was so hot it scorched the soles of his feet. On all sides of him was heat, stench, ruin. But the iron ladder against the wall still showed in the eerie light of the smoldering chemicals.
The Agent leaped toward it, sidestepping a sticky, sooty mass that still bubbled and smoked. He grasped the ladder, drew his hand away. The metal was so hot it burned his flesh.
He tore his handkerchief in two, wet both halves with more of the ammonia solution, grasped the cloth in his palms. Heedless of the pain he ascended the ladder toward that rent in the ceiling.
With hammering pulses, the Agent reached its top, drew himself up through the rent to the crossbeams of the ceiling, stood a moment. It was suffocatingly hot here. The fumes of the chemicals, still smoldering below, blinded him, made him choke. He moved nearer the wall of the big air shaft, cupped a hand over his eyes. Then he clicked on a small flashlight.
There was no continuation of the ladder here. But a water pipe led up along the brick walls of the shaft. It was held fast by clamps set in the mortar. The Agent seized it determinedly. A man less agile, less certain of the interplay of nerve and muscle, could never have made that climb.
Several times he stopped when it seemed he could maintain his grip no longer. He clung desperately, knees braced against the rough brick wall, hands painfully singed, clutching the pipe. To let go now meant death, a sickening drop that would crash him on the beams of the laboratory ceiling far below.
He did not know what awaited him at the top of the pipe. But the coolness of the air increased. This shaft went right up through the heart of the factory building.
The Agent climbed on through age-long seconds. Somewhere, far below him, he heard sounds of human activity now. With muscles almost paralyzed from the long tension of holding and climbing, the weight of his body seemed to have increased many times.
Then, in the darkness, he saw a ghostly something. He clung with one hand, reached out. The lighter spot against the blackness of the smoky brick wall was a window. It gave into some attic room of the big factory. It was unlocked.
The Agent raised it, risking instant death as he clung with one throbbing hand. It took a painful effort to get the sash up. Then at last he thrust an arm across the sill, gripped the edges of it, clutched with the other.
In a moment his head and shoulders were through. He paused, elbows wedged in the narrow frame, then heaved himself over on to the floor inside.
FOR almost five minutes he lay in what amounted to a coma. During that time the splendid, dynamic forces of his body seemed to go through a process of rejuvenation. It was this ability of the Agent’s to take punishment that had brought him before through situations so fearful that it seemed flesh and blood could not endure them.
He rose to his feet at last. He was alone in this dusty loft. He crept back to the window, thrust his head out and listened.
Far down, through the rent in the metal ceiling of the laboratory, he could see the dim play of light. It might be the smoldering chemicals flaring up again. It might be the glow of a hand torch. He could not tell which. But there were no sounds of pursuit.
And why should there be? It was against all reason to suppose that anyone could have survived that holocaust in the laboratory. Rising clouds of soot and chemical fumes would obscure any tracks he might have made. The Octopus’s men would not suspect the escape.
A grim, hard light appeared in the Agent’s eyes. Somehow, he had to locate the place from which the Octopus had made his television broadcast. And he suddenly remembered an article among Van Camp’s possessions which had surprised him at the time. Now he suspected its significance. And he must get possession of it — ahead of the Octopus’s men.
Stealthily he began looking for a way down from his lofty hideout. He found a steel stairway leading to the next floor. There were elevators in the building; but these had long since been out of commission.
The Agent descended floor after floor, listening always for some sound. Ten floors above the street he took from his pocket a small instrument that looked like a folding, vest-pocket camera. It was the tiny, portable amplifying device which he had often used in his work with criminals.
He pressed the disc microphone on its black cord to the wall; put the body of the instrument, which was the earphone, to his head. He turned on the delicate rheostat controls.
But no sounds of foot vibrations reached him. Here was concrete proof that his escape to the top of the building had not been suspected.
The section of the factory building he was in came to the eighth floor level. The roof of another wing showed. The Agent went out on this, walked silently along under the stars till he came to the framework of a fire escape which led to the ground.
He stopped to get his bearings. There must be a secret alarm system on the high wall enclosing the factory on two sides. This he must avoid; and he must avoid, too, that side of the building where the shop of Colosimo Rici was located. Cautiously he descended to the factory yard at the fire escape’s bottom.
He approached the factory wall, looked up, paused. For seconds he marveled at the Octopus’s cunning. Before his understanding eyes was an alarm system no man would expect to find in such a place — the latest scientific protection device known to modern penology.
A series of three glass lenses was set in the factory building at the end of the wall. These lenses, hidden from the street outside by a projecting bit of boarding, focused along the wall at levels of one, two, and three feet.
THE barbed-wire on top of the wall was only a blind. A man might be careful not to touch it, thinking it was electrically charged. He might jump the wall, clearing it and the wire entirely — and still those hidden lenses would record on some dial below the fact of his presence.
For, to the Agent’s experienced eye, they were the lenses of the invisible infra-red, photo-electric alarm system, used in some of the most modern State penitentiaries.
Any opaque body, passing between those lenses and the photoelectric eye that received the rays at the opposite end of the wail, would instantly give warning.
Agent “X” made no attempt to climb over the wall. His one means of escape lay in the side of the building facing directly on the street. He moved around the junk-filled factory yard, locating at last an old spindle of insulated wire. He cut off fifty feet of this, rolled it up and climbed the fire escape to the second floor.
He opened a window on this floor on the side of the building directly over the street. He looped the wire through a radiator pipe inside, so that it hung double down the outside wall of the building. Then, hanging by the wire, he closed the window to within a few inches, and made the descent to the street.
The wire hung down still, but Agent “X” had both ends. He pulled on one, winding it in till the other snaked up, passed through the pipe and came down. He was out of the building now, with no clues left behind except that one window partially open. It was not noticeable from the street.
The darkness swallowed Agent “X” as he hurried away. He did not go to the drive-yourself car parked two blocks distant. Criminal eyes might be watching that. He chose the darkest, most unfrequented streets.