He only hoped that it would give him fifteen minutes’ strength before the final rigor set in. In that time, he must find the Ghoul.
But he was without a weapon. He had lost Morgan’s automatic in the battle in the laboratory. He was looking about the room for some sort of an instrument that would spell death for the Ghoul, when a sound at the other end of the laboratory caused him to turn around.
A door flung open and he saw the slight, lovely figure of a woman running toward him. It was the blue-eyed, pseudo-Chinese girl who served in China Bobby’s dope den. She stopped five feet from him and stared, wide-eyed with horror. “Bill, darling!” With a sob, she flung herself into his arms and clung passionately to him. “I heard that the Ghoul no longer trusted you,” she sobbed out. “I was afraid — afraid he might use the Amber Death…. Your hands — already yellow!”
She turned from the Secret Agent. “Don’t worry. There’s a way out! You have to oxydize the chemical producing the Amber Death. If you get it in time, everything will be all right. That’s how they prevent the Amber Death from reaching the extortion victim’s right hand.” She fairly flew around the room, dumping chemicals into a glass beaker. “Watch the door, Bill. I’m through with the Ghoul! If he comes in here, kill him!”
The strange, unexpected entrance of the girl could be explained only by the fact that Bill Morgan was evidently some one who was very dear to her. As soon as she had entered the room, “X” recognized her voice. In fact, he had suspected from the very first that she was Drew Devon so disguised as to lend Oriental atmosphere to the opium palace and at the same time enable the Ghoul to have a person he trusted watching over the opium den at all times.
“X” watched Drew Devon work. She was mixing a strange concoction. He knew that if she failed in her efforts to halt the creeping death, he would have not only lost his life but also the chance of ridding the earth of the Ghoul. He looked down at his hand. The flesh was faintly tinged with yellow. He knocked the back of his hand against the edge of the work table. It rapped out like a wooden thing and there was no feeling in it.
Pale beneath the yellow paint she wore on her face, Drew Devon turned toward him. She filled a huge hypodermic syringe with the pinkish fluid from the beaker. She peeled back both sleeves of his coat, jabbed the needle into his flesh, and pumped the pinkish liquid into his blood stream.
“The other arm, quickly,” she whispered. And again the needle went home.
A TINGLING sensation raced through “X’s” body. But he had yet to regain his old strength. Drew Devon hurried back to the shelves, filled a clean beaker with liquid from a bottle, and handed it to him. “Drink this,” she commanded.
He took the beaker and drank gratefully. It had contained some stimulant not altogether unfamiliar to “X”.
“Feeling better?” she asked with a smile.
“A lot,” “X” replied. Already the stiffness had passed from his legs and arms. “Where’d you learn—”
“Vardson taught me,” she said quickly. “I’ve helped him in the laboratory. But we mustn’t stay here.”
“Right! I’m goin’ back after that damned Ghoul!”
Drew Devon seized both of his arms. “Bill! You can’t! Come, we’ll go to my room, until I can plan a way for us to escape. You can’t match wits with the Ghoul! Oh, I’ve risked everything to save you. I can’t lose you now. Next time, he might throw you into the ant pit as he has Vardson. Come quickly!”
Holding him by the hand, Drew Devon led him through a door, and into a hall. At the end of the hall and down a short flight of steps, she stopped in front of the door of her room. Taking a key from the pocket of her Oriental garb, she unlocked the door.
It was a small room, but comfortably furnished. She forced “X” to sit down into a chair. Going to a table, she selected a cigarette, lighted it, and regarded him through half-closed eyes for a few minutes. Suddenly, she got up, crossed the room and kissed him impulsively. She sat down on the arm of the chair and dropped her arm over his shoulder. Her face close to his she whispered dreamily:
“Don’t know why I love you, Bill. Don’t know why I staked everything on saving you.”
“X” looked into the lovely face and frowned. “Love me as much as you did that rich slob of a Calvert?” he demanded.
Drew Devon recoiled from him, stood up. “Bill! Jealous, after all I’ve done for you? You know I hated Calvert. I had some old letters he’d written me. I was trying to collect five grand on them, and he wouldn’t come across. The piker! Satisfied?”
“X” shook his head. “Not yet, Drew.”
The girl’s yellow-tinted forehead crimped into a tight frown. For a moment, fury possessed her to such an extent that she could not speak. When she had found her tongue, she spoke in an icy whisper: “So, I am Drew, am I? An error on your part! So I save the man I think to be Bill Morgan, and he calls me Drew — a name he has never known me by! Now, I know you — Secret Agent ‘X’!”
WITH the speed of a striking snake, her hand darted inside her garment, and reappeared with a small, black automatic. The pistol cracked almost as soon as she had drawn it. But at the first movement of the girl toward the hiding place of the weapon, “X” had leaped to his feet.
He swerved slightly to the right and the shot spent itself on the wall behind him. She had no time to pull the trigger again before “X” had seized the gun and twisted it from her hand. He turned the muzzle toward her.
“Tell me where Betty Dale is!” he demanded.
For a moment, Drew Devon’s eyes were riveted in terror on the gun in the Agent’s hands. Then a smile curved her lips. “I do not think Secret Agent ‘X’ would kill a woman. I am taking advantage of your gallantry.”
“X’s” left hand sought the pocket of his coat, and flashed out again. The hypodermic needle, which he had filled previous to his impersonation of Morgan, stabbed into the woman’s arm. A shrill cry of terror died in her throat as she fell forward into “X’s” arms.
He carried her to a little closet at one side of the room, and placed her on the floor. He removed the black wig the woman wore and slipped it into his pocket. Then he took a pair of Oriental pajamas, similar to the ones Drew Devon wore, from a clothes hanger in the closet. These he concealed under his coat.
He turned next to the woman’s dressing table. Removing the small tube of plastic volatile material from the heel of his left shoe, he lost no time in making slight but effective alterations in his make-up. He added deep lines in his cheeks, a crook in his nose, and removed the black wig which had been part of his Morgan disguise. Then armed with the little automatic he had taken from Drew Devon, he opened the door and stepped into the hall.
“X” knew that he would have to go down into the prison cells on the floor below. It was there that he must first look for Betty Dale. At the end of the hall, instead of opening the door that led into the second laboratory, he turned to the door at his left. This door yielded when he used one of the keys that he had removed from Morgan’s pockets. Down another short hall he came to what appeared to be a blank wall.
A careful search under the beam of his flashlight revealed a tiny black button near the base of the panel. He knew that this was a door leading into China Bobby’s office — the connecting link between the half-caste’s dope den and the underground realm of the Ghoul. Without further hesitation he pressed the button. An electric signal burred; the panel slid back.
The office of China Bobby was empty. “X” went to the half-caste’s desk and examined the switchboard that he had seen China Bobby use. It was covered with perhaps a dozen different buttons, each one marked with a letter. He had to take a chance on the button marked “C” opening the door into the cells in which the Ghoul kept his prisoners. At a touch of the button, another panel slid back and “X” recognized the dark stone stairway that led to the catacombs below.