In a deeply shadowed spot between two buildings he stopped, reaching skilled, experienced fingers toward his face. The features of Van Camp disappeared under his touch. He stripped off the volatile substance and the transparent adhesive that had changed his features into a likeness of the criminal lawyer. He took the gray toupee from his head.
There was no time or opportunity for an elaborate disguise. But the Agent carried small tubes and vials of material with him. He used these to create one of his “stock” disguises.
When he emerged from the shadows he no longer resembled Van Camp. Ten years seemed to have fallen from his age. He walked quickly to a lighted boulevard and signaled a cruising taxi. This bore him to the hotel where Van Camp was registered.
The Agent bought himself a paper, strolled casually through the lobby, not glancing to left or right. A spy of the Octopus might be somewhere in the hotel.
His pulse beat increased as he took the elevator to the eighth floor. He had Van Camp’s key now. He folded his paper, walked resolutely along the hall. The instant the elevator door had closed, he entered suite 806 again.
VAN CAMP was still unconscious, exactly as “X” had left him. He was lying peacefully on the couch in the front room, as though asleep. But there was need for fast work. Any instant some sinister agent of the Octopus might arrive.
“X” slipped on a pair of gloves, went through the lawyer’s luggage again. He unstrapped the suitcase, brought out a small portable radio set. This was the thing that his photographic brain had recorded. This was what he had thought of instantly when he’d seen the image of the Octopus on the television screen, and heard the master criminal’s words come through the loudspeaker.
It seemed strange that Van Camp should bring a radio all the way to Chicago. Stranger still, considering that a radio instrument was already in the room, supplied by the hotel itself. It could mean only one thing. Van Camp expected to receive broadcasted signals from his chief. What sort of broadcast — and on what wave length?
The Agent examined tensely the brown radio box in his hands. At first glance it appeared to be an ordinary stock model midget set of cheap make.
But the back of it was sealed up. This was odd. Most radios of this type, he knew, had open backs to make the tubes and terminals easily accessible.
“X” turned one of the two dials which appeared to be wave-length and volume controls. He saw with a glow of excitement that this was a dummy front. The control snapped into some sort of socket with a click when he turned it. He turned the other to a corresponding position. Suddenly the whole front panel of the box came off in his hand. Behind it was another inset panel — and the Agent’s eyes snapped.
Here was a radio set such as he had never seen before. It was, in fact, two miniature sets, exactly alike, housed in the same cabinet; but with separate controls. One side of the panel was red Bakelite, the other blue. There were four control dials altogether; and, in the precise center of the panel, was a small loudspeaker with a screw head above it. This looked like the hand-setting screw of a clock. Then “X” bent forward with abrupt interest, noticing something else.
The front panel of the radio inside was scorched and cracked. There was an odor of burnt varnish and rubber. The whole cabinet was still warm, although Van Camp had been unconscious for nearly an hour! The Agent’s hands tensed. He thought quickly.
This mysterious fire inside the set explained itself. The strange radio bore an important relation to the activities of the criminal organization. And the Octopus, as soon as he had learned that “X” was impersonating Van Camp, had taken pains to destroy it. He had sent out some sort of radio impulse so powerful that it had short-circuited and burned up the mechanism of the set.
“X” snapped the false front back into place, tucked the set under his coat and started for the door. But he froze abruptly in his tracks. A faint sound had come from the doorway into the corridor. It was the metallic scraping of a skeleton key being inserted into the lock. It meant that one or more of the Octopus’s men had arrived to learn what had happened to Van Camp.
Chapter XX
AN emotion deeper than terror filled Agent “X.” Discovery now would mean the death blow to his plans, destroy the progress he had made. Knowing the Secret Agent still lived, the Octopus would change every sign and signal by which he controlled his organization.
“X” leaped to the window, stared down. It was an eight-story drop to the street. He looked along the face of the building, eyes narrowed calculatingly. A narrow ledge ran around the level of the floor he was on. It was a bare four inches wide. But it presented his only chance.
He looked at the radio set tucked under his arm. He couldn’t take that and maneuver the ledge, too. He must sacrifice it or be discovered. The Agent made an instantaneous decision. Another second and the door into the corridor would open.
He put the mysterious radio cabinet down quietly, slipped out of the open window. He stood upright in the cold night air, gripped the outside of the frame, then like a human fly, he crept along the face of the building.
Risking quick death by a plunge to the street, he flattened himself to the building’s side, moved crabwise along the narrow ledge. He passed two lighted windows. Guests of the hotel were unaware of the strange being who moved so close. He came to a fifth window that was open slightly. Was the room empty, or was its occupant asleep? “X” did not know. He must take a chance.
Clinging to his precarious hold, he raised the window softly and slipped into the room. In the dim light inside he saw the mound of a sleeper in a bed. But he cat-footed across the room to the door that led into the hall.
So softly that the sleeper did not stir, Agent “X” opened the door and went out. The corridor was deserted. The man with the skeleton key must have passed into Van Camp’s suite. By a few seconds only Agent “X” had escaped detection. And he dared not go back for the radio set now.
He descended into the lobby, strolled into the night streets….
TWO nights later Secret Agent “X” sat in absorbed concentration before a table in his Chicago hideout. Forty-eight hours of intensive activity lay behind him.
The living room of his hideout had become a mad jumble of apparatus and equipment. He had made purchases from more than a dozen leading radio supply stores in Chicago. He had torn apart, built up, tested a score of complex receiving sets.
There were coils of wire, sheets of metal, dozens of tubes, dozens of condensers scattered about the floor of the apartment. Glue pots and soldering irons added to the confusion. Scraps of foil lay on the floor as though a silver snowstorm had fallen. Every available spot where anything might be set was covered. But in all this clutter and confusion, Agent “X” worked with grim, unswerving persistence.
Before him on the table now was a superheterodyne set which he himself had assembled. This set covered wave lengths from twelve to five hundred and sixty meters. At almost any intensity the audio amplifier gave undistorted output. Trimmer condensers and other balancing devices had been abolished. Static interference had been reduced to a minimum by a low-pass filter circuit of unique design.
Secret Agent “X” had demonstrated his mastery of a branch of science which is a life career for many men. For, with its other qualities, this all-wave set possessed amazing sensitivity.
Broadcasts from many parts of the world had come in on it. Calls from London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles, Detroit — all the great cities of Europe and America. Police calls had come, too. Calls from ships, planes, and from hundreds of private stations.