The Agent said, “You can crawl out of there now. You’re through.” His voice was flat, with a strange bitterness. He saw mental pictures of the atrocities at the bazaar, saw the lifeless forms of Fowler and Grace.
The man within the armor spoke, no longer metallically, resonantly, but in a human voice, full of anger. “You fool! What good is this going to do you? You need me. Even if your face is changed, there are enough papers in the safe deposit box to identify you to the police. Wherever you went you’d be recognized as one of the robots — you’d be seized in an hour!” Clearly, he was taken in by the Agent’s makeup, believed him to be one of the robots.
At the sound of his voice, Secret Agent “X” had nodded to himself as if in confirmation of a suspicion. He said. “I am not one of your robots, Fred Barton. I am the instrument which brings you to the bar of justice!”
The man within the armor of the monster gasped. “Who are you?”
“X” did not answer. He was unstrapping the padding from the metal armor of the huge figure, still keeping his foot on that arm.
His suspicions were confirmed. The man within that shell was Fred Barton. Fred Barton, who was supposed to have been kidnaped; Fred Barton who had just consigned his friend, Jack Larrabie, to horrible death by fire!
It took fifteen minutes to get him out of that cumbersome suit of combination armor and padding. The Agent was careful to prevent him from using that deadly right arm that controlled the secret of the burning death.
He snapped a pair of handcuffs on young Barton’s wrists when he dragged him out of the shell of armor. Barton tried to resist, struggled with maniacal strength. But the Agent twisted his arms in a punishing grip, and tightened the cuffs.
Barton stood there, breathing heavily, his face flushed, while “X” knelt beside the monster’s suit, found the tube that ran from the underneath metal finger in the right hand to a compact tank strapped on the inside of the back.
He looked up at Barton. “You were always a clever chemist, Barton. This gas that you use here — it could have made you famous; you would have been hailed as a leader in your field — the discoverer of an invisible gas that ignites upon contact with organic substance! Why did you employ it in this way?”
Barton’s youthful face twisted into a leer of malice and hatred. “You’ve ruined the greatest scheme the world has ever known! In a short time I would have had more power than any king or emperor!” He took an impulsive step forward. “Whoever you are, you must be clever, ingenious, to have fought me this way. Why not join me? There will be little reward for you in turning me over to the police compared to what I can offer you. With the secret of that gas, two such men as you and I could achieve world empire. What do you say!”
“X” paid no attention to the mad offer of partnership in crime. He gazed speculatively at Barton, reflecting that there were strange motives in the world which impelled men to do mad things. This young man, possessed of wealth, education, culture, had turned to crime because of those very endowments which the world envied; surfeit of good fortune had made life empty — boring for him; and his brilliant mind had sought in crime the thrills that his jaded appetite craved.
“X” said aloud, “You had no regard even for your own father. You permitted him to think you were kidnaped — so that you would be free to appear as the monster!”
Barton waved the comment away impatiently. “What of it!” His voice became wheedling; eager. “Will you join me? You and I — nobody could stop us. We could climb the heights of power together!”
“X” shook his head. “And meet the same fate that your other partners met?”
Barton jerked his head up, eyes startled.
The Agent went on inexorably. “Of course you had partners. You didn’t operate on those convicts’ faces yourself — it was Jack Larrabie here that did that. And Harry Pringle, too. He planned the jail break because of his intimate knowledge of the layout of the State Prison — his father is the deputy police commissioner.”
Barton stared at the Agent, fascinated, as he went on. “And Ranny Coulter — another of your jaded young thrill-seekers. This is his father’s house. The whole row belongs to his father. He furnished your headquarters. You were all going to take turns at acting as the monster. But you killed them all, one after the other, when you found you didn’t need them any longer.”
The Agent spoke bitterly now. He pointed an accusing finger. “Barton, you are the worst of the lot — for you betrayed even your own associates.
“I have no sympathy for you — only for your father, for the fathers of Larrabie, and Coulter, and Pringle. I am thinking of the disgrace, the shame that you four thrill-seeking egomaniacs have brought upon their heads!”
Barton asked fiercely, “Who are you, anyway?”
“You may call me — Secret Agent ‘X’!”
Barton’s body tautened. He raised his manacled hands in the air, leaped at “X” in a furious, desperate, fanatical onslaught. He brought his joined hands down in a chopping blow at the Agent’s skull.
But “X” had jumped inside his guard, so that the steel cuffs glanced off his shoulder. The Agent at the same time swung a hard right fist to Barton’s middle, doubling him up. Barton sagged weakly to the floor. There were tears of defeat in his eyes. His breath, taken away by that blow, came in short gasps. His hands fumbled in his vest pocket, came out with a small pellet. They flashed upward, and the pellet disappeared in his mouth. He gulped, and swallowed.
Now he smiled grotesquely. “I’ve saved you the trouble of calling the police!” he said. “You win, Sec—”
His whole body stiffened, his face became crimson, and he collapsed.
The Agent stooped beside him. He was dead.
Chapter XXII
NOW Secret Agent “X” worked swiftly, but with purpose. He stepped to the desk, rummaged through drawers, until he found a sealed envelope. He ripped this open, inspected the sheet of paper within. It was headed, “Formula for nitrocetylene.” Below it were chemical symbols which the Agent took care not to look at. He did not want the responsibility of possessing the knowledge of that hideous, death-dealing gas.
Slowly, somberly, he ripped the paper to shreds, touched a match to them.
Then he stepped out of that room of horror, into another passage. At the end of this passage was a curtained doorway. “X” parted the curtains, peered through. He saw that the doorway opened upon a platform in a large room. Before the platform, rows of chairs were arranged in a semicircle. And the chairs were occupied — all but two of them, by the figures of the robot-like ex-convicts.
They were evidently awaiting the arrival of their master upon the platform; they must have been summoned for a meeting which would never take place now.
One of the robots noticed the crack in the curtains, started up in his chair. “X” gave him no time to warn the others. He held in his hand three glass capsules, larger than the one he had used in his escape from the police car on Brooklyn Bridge. They were colored red; they contained, not ammonia, but the anesthetizing gas which the Agent used in his gun. He stepped through the curtains, onto the platform, and hurled the three capsules among the convicts.
He did not wait to see the effects; he knew that within a matter of seconds they would be rendered unconscious by that swiftly vaporizing gas, would remain that way for hours.