| "Mr. Jack Williams, |
| "Alfredo Menandez, 6, |
| "Madrid." |
Fairbairn started up, and tugging at his moustache, stared at the envelope over Hillyard's shoulder.
"By Jove!" he said. "We may have got something."
"Let us see!" returned Hillyard, and he opened the envelope.
As he spread out the letter both men laughed. The date of the month had been corrected by the writer—thus:
8
"July 27th, 1916."
There was no doubt any longer in either of these two men's minds that hidden away under the commonplaces of a letter of affection was a message of grave importance.
"They are full of clever tricks in Berlin," said Hillyard cheerfully. He could afford to contemplate that cleverness with complacency, for it was now to serve his ends.
There was a German official of high importance living in the Calle Alfredo Menandez, although not at number 6 in that street. The street was a short one with very few numbers in it; and it had occurred to the German official to point out to the postman in that street that if letters came to English names in that street of which the owners could not be discovered, they were probably for the governess of his children, who had a number of English relations moving about Spain, and was accustomed to receive their letters for them, and in any case, five pesetas would be paid for each of them. Shortly after, letters had begun to arrive addressed to English nonexistent people in the quiet little Calle Alfredo Menandez, sometimes from Allied countries, sometimes from Holland, or from Port-Bou over against Cerbère in Spain; and every one of these found its natural way to the house of the German official. The choice of English names had a certain small ingenuity in that, when passing through the censorship of Allied countries, they were a little more likely to be taken at their face value than letters addressed to foreigners.
So far so good. But the German high official was a very busy person; and letters might find their way into his hands which were really intended for English persons and not for him at all. Accordingly, to make all clear, to warn him that here indeed was a letter deserving his kind attention, that little trifling alteration in the date was adopted; as though a man writing on the 28th had mislaid the calendar or newspaper and assigned the 27th to the day of writing, and afterwards had discovered his mistake. It was no wonder accordingly that hope ran high in both Fairbairn and Hillyard as they read through this letter; although, upon the face of it, it was nothing but a sentimental effusion from a sister to a brother.
"We have got to clear all this nonsense away first," said Hillyard.
Fairbairn took the letter, and placing it on one of the developing dishes, poured over it a liquid from a bottle.
"That won't take very long," he said.
Meanwhile Hillyard busied himself with the second of the two white porcelain dishes. He brought out a cruet stand from a cupboard at the side of the stove and filled the dish half full of vinegar. He added water until the liquid rose within half an inch of the rim, and rocked the dish that the dilution might be complete. Next he took a new copying-pencil from the pen-tray on his bureau and stripping the wood away with his knife, dropped the blue lead into the vinegar and water. This lead he carefully dissolved with the help of a glass pestle.
"There! It's ready," he said.
"I, too," added Fairbairn.
He lifted out of the developing dish a wet sheet of writing paper which was absolutely blank. Not one drop of the black ink which had recorded those sentimental effusions remained. It was just a sheet of notepaper which had accidentally fallen into a basin of water.
"That's all right," said Hillyard; and Fairbairn gently slid the sheet into the dish in front of Hillyard. And for a while nothing happened.
"It's a clever trick, isn't it?" Hillyard used the words again, but now with a note of nervousness. "No unlikely paraphernalia needed. Just a copying pencil and some vinegar, which you can get anywhere. Yes, it's a clever trick!"
"If it works," Fairbairn added bluntly.
Both men watched the dish anxiously. The paper remained blank. The solution did not seem to work. It was the first time they had ever made use of it. The coast slid by unnoticed.
"Lopez was certain," said Fairbairn, "quite certain that this was the developing formula."
Hillyard nodded gloomily, but he did not remove his eyes from that irresponsive sheet.
"There may be some other ingredient, something kept quite secret—something known only to one man or two."
He sat down, hooking his chair with his foot nearer to the table.
"We must wait."
"That's all there is to be done," said Fairbairn, and they waited; and they waited. They had no idea, even if the formula should work, whether the writing would flash up suddenly like an over-exposed photographic plate, or emerge shyly and reluctantly letter by letter, word by word. Then, without a word spoken, Fairbairn's finger pointed. A brown stain showed on the whiteness of the paper—just a stroke. It was followed by a curve and another stroke. Hillyard swiftly turned the oblong developing dish so that the side of it, and not the end, was towards him now.
"The writing is across the sheet," he said, and then with a cry, "Look!"
A word was coming out clear, writing itself unmistakably in the middle of the line, at the bottom of the sheet—a signature. Zimmermann!
"From the General Staff!" said Hillyard, in a whisper of excitement. "My word!" He looked at Fairbairn with an eager smile of gratitude. "It's your doing that we have got this—yours and Lopez Baeza's!"
Miraculously the brown strokes and curves and dots and flourishes trooped out of nothing, and fell in like sections and platoons and companies with their due space between them, some quick and trim, some rather slovenly in their aspect, some loitering; but in the end the battalion of words stood to attention, dressed for inspection. The brown had turned black before Hillyard lifted the letter from the solution and spread it upon a sheet of blotting paper.
"Now let us see!" and they read the letter through.
One thousand pounds in English money were offered for reliable information as to the number of howitzers and tanks upon the British front.
A second sum of a thousand pounds for reliable information as to the manufacture of howitzers and tanks in England.
"So far, it's not very exciting," Hillyard remarked with disappointment, as he turned the leaf. But the letter progressed in interest.
A third sum of a thousand pounds was offered for a list of the postal sections on the British front, with the name, initials and rank of a really good and reliable British soldier in each section who was prepared to receive and answer correspondence.
Fairbairn chuckled and observed:
"I think Herr Zimmermann might be provided with a number of such good and reliable soldiers selected by our General Staff," and he added with a truculent snort, "We could do with that sum of a thousand pounds here. You must put in a claim for it, Hillyard. Otherwise they'll snaffle it in London."
Fairbairn, once a mild north-country schoolmaster, of correct phraseology and respectable demeanour, had, under the pressure of his service, developed like that white sheet of notepaper. He had suffered
Into something rich and strange"
and from a schoolmaster had become a buccaneer with a truculent manner and a mind of violence. London, under which name he classed all Government officials, offices, departments, and administrations, particularly roused his ire. London was ignorant, London was stupid, London was always doing him and the other buccaneers down, was always snaffling something which he ought to have. Fairbairn, uttering one snort of satisfaction, would have shot it with his Browning.
"Get it off your chest, old man," said Hillyard soothingly, "and we'll go on with this letter. It looks to me as if——" He was glancing onwards and checked himself with an exclamation. His face became grave and set.
"Listen to this," and he read aloud, translating as he went along.
"Since the tubes have been successful in France, the device should be extended to England. B45 is obviously suitable for the work. A submarine will sink letters for the Embassy in Madrid and a parcel of the tubes between the twenty-seventh and the thirtieth of July, within Spanish territorial waters off the Cabo de Cabron. A green light will be shown in three short flashes from the sea and it should be answered from the shore by a red and a white and two reds."
Hillyard leaned back in his chair.
"B45," he cried in exasperation. "We get no nearer to him."
"Wait a bit!" Fairbairn interposed. "We are a deal nearer to him through Zimmermann's very letter here. What are these tubes which have been so successful in France? Once we get hold of them and understand them and know what end they are to serve, we may get an idea of the kind of man obviously suitable for handling them."
"Like B45," said Hillyard.
"Yes! The search will be narrowed to one kind of man. Oh, we shall be much nearer, if only we get the tubes—if only the Germans in Madrid don't guess this letter's gone astray to us."
Hillyard had reflected already upon that contingency.
"But why should they? The sleeping-car man is held incomunicado. There is no reason why they should know anything about this letter at all, if we lay our plans carefully."
He folded up the letter and locked it away in the drawer. He looked for a while out of the window of the saloon. The yacht had rounded the Cabo San Antonio. It was still the forenoon.
"This is where José Medina has got to come in," he declared. "You must go to Madrid, Fairbairn, and keep an eye on Mr. Jack Williams. Meanwhile, here José Medina has got to come in."
Fairbairn reluctantly agreed. He would much rather have stayed upon the coast and shared in the adventure, but it was obviously necessary that a keen watch should be kept in Madrid.
"Very well," he said, "unless, of course, you would like to go to Madrid yourself."
Hillyard laughed.
"I think not, old man."
He mounted the ladder to the bridge and gave the instructions to the Captain, and early that evening the Dragonfly was piloted into the harbour of Alicante. Hillyard and Fairbairn went ashore. They had some hours to get through before they could take the journey they intended. They sauntered accordingly along the esplanade beneath the palm trees until they came to the Casino. Both were temporary members of that club, and they sat down upon the cane chairs on the broad side-walk. A military band was playing on the esplanade a little to their right, and in front of them a throng of visitors and townspeople strolled and sat in the evening air. Hillyard smiled as he watched the kaleidoscopic grouping and re-grouping of men and children and women. The revolutions of his life, a subject which in the press of other and urgent matters had fallen of late into the background of his thoughts, struck him again as wondrous and admirable. He began to laugh with enjoyment. He looked at Fairbairn. How dull in comparison the regular sequences of his career!
"I wandered about here barefoot and penniless," he said, "not so very long ago. On this very pavement!" He struck it with his foot, commending to Fairbairn the amazing fact. "I have cleaned boots," and he called to a boy who was lying in wait with a boot-black's apparatus on his back for any dusty foot. "Chico, come and clean my shoes." He jested with the boy with the kindliness of a Spaniard, and gave him a shining peseta. Hillyard was revelling in the romance of his life under the spur of the excitement which the affair of the letter had fired in him. "Yes, I wandered here, passing up and down in front of this very Casino."
And Fairbairn saw his face change and his eyes widen as though he recognised some one in the throng beneath the trees.
"What is it?" Fairbairn asked, and for a little while Hillyard did not answer. His eyes were not following any movements under the trees. They saw no one present in Alicante that day. Slowly he turned to Fairbairn, and answered in voice of suspense:
"Nothing! I was just remembering—and wondering!"
He remained sunk in abstraction for a long time. "It can't be!" at grips with "If it could be!" and a rising inspiration that "It was!" A man had once tried him out with questions about Alicante, a man who was afraid lest he should have seen too much. But Hillyard had learnt to hold his tongue when he had only inspirations to go upon, and he disclosed nothing of this to Fairbairn.
Later on, when darkness had fallen, the two men drove in a motor-car southwards round the bay and through a shallow valley to the fishing village of Torrevieja. When you came upon its broad beach of shingle and sand, with its black-tarred boats hauled up, and its market booths, you might dream that you had been transported to Broadstairs—except for one fact. The houses are built in a single story, since the village is afflicted with earthquakes. Two houses rise higher than the rest, the hotel and the Casino. In the Casino Hillyard found José Medina's agent for those parts sitting over his great mug of beer; and they talked together quietly for a long while.
Thus Martin Hillyard fared in those days. He played with life and death, enjoying vividly the one and ever on the brink of the other, but the deep, innermost realities of either had as yet touched him not at all.
CHAPTER XVII
On a Cape of Spain
The great cape thrusts its knees far out into the Mediterranean, and close down by the sea on the very point a lighthouse stands out from the green mass like a white pencil. South-westwards the land runs sharply back in heights of tangled undergrowths and trees, overhangs a wide bay and drops at the end of the bay to the mouth of a spacious, empty harbour. Eastwards the cape slopes inland at a gentler angle with an undercliff, a narrow plateau, and behind the plateau mountain walls. Two tiny fishing villages cluster a mile or two apart at the water's edge, and high up on the cape's flanks here and there a small rude settlement clings to the hillside. There are no roads to the cape. From the east you may ride a horse towards it, and lose your way. From the west you must approach by boat. So remote and unvisited is this region that the women in these high villages, their homes cut out of the actual brown rock, still cover their faces with the Moorish veil.
There are no roads, but José Medina was never deterred by the lack of roads. His business, indeed, was a shy one, and led him to prefer wild country. A high police official in one great town said of him:
"For endurance and activity there is no one like José Medina between the sea and the Pyrenees. You think him safe in Mallorca and look! He lands one morning from the steamer, jumps into a motor-car, and in five minutes—whish!—he is gone like the smoke of my cigarette. He will drive his car through our mountains by tracks, of which the guardia civil does not even know the existence."
By devious tracks, then, now through narrow gullies in brown and barren mountains, now striking some village path amidst peach trees and marguerites, José Medina drove Martin Hillyard down to the edge of the sea. Here amongst cactus bushes in flower, with turf for a carpet, a camp had been prepared near to one of the two tiny villages. José Medina was king in this region. The party arrived in the afternoon of the twenty-sixth day of the month, all of the colour of saffron from the dust-clouds the car had raised, and Hillyard so stiff and bruised with the intolerable jolting over ruts baked to iron, that he could hardly climb down on to the ground. He slept that night amidst such a music of birds as he had never believed possible one country could produce. Through the night of the twenty-sixth he and José Medina watched; their lanterns ready to their hands. Lights there were in plenty on the sea, but they were the lights of acetylene lamps used by the fishermen of those parts to attract the fish; and the morning broke with the lighthouse flashing wanly over a smooth sea, pale as fine jade.
"There are three more nights," said Hillyard. He was a little dispirited after the fatigue of the day before and the long, empty vigil on the top of the day.
The next watch brought no better fortune. There was no moon; the night was of a darkness so clear that the stars threw pale and tremulous paths over the surface of the water, and from far away the still air vibrated from time to time with the throbbing of propellers as the ships without lights passed along the coast.
Hillyard rose from the blanket on which he and José Medina had been lying during the night. It had been spread on a patch of turf in a break of the hill some hundreds of feet above the sea. He was cold. The blanket was drenched and the dew hung like a frost on bush and grass.
"It looks as if they had found out," he said.
"This is only the second night," said José Medina.
"It all means so much to me," replied Hillyard, shivering in the briskness of the morning.
"Courage, the little Marteen!" cried José Medina. "After breakfast and a few hours' sleep, we shall take a rosier view."
Hillyard, however, could not compose himself to those few hours. The dread lest the Germans should have discovered the interception of their letters weighed too heavily upon him. Even in the daylight he needs must look out over that placid sunlit sea and imagine here and there upon its surface the low tower and grey turtle-back of a submarine. Success here might be so great a thing, so great a saving of lives, so dire a blow to the enemy. Somehow that day slowly dragged its burning hours to sunset, the coolness of the evening came, and the swift darkness upon its heels, and once more, high up on the hillside, the vigil was renewed. And at half-past one in the morning, far away at sea, a green light, bright as an emerald, flashed thrice and was gone.
"Did I not say to you, 'Have courage'?" said José Medina.
"Quick! the Lanterns!" replied Hillyard. "The red first! Good! Now the white. So! And the red again. Now we must wait!" and he sank down again upon the blanket. All the impatience and languor were gone from him. The moment had come. He was at once steel to meet it.
"Yes," said José Medina, "we shall see nothing more now for a long while."
They heard no sound in that still night; they saw no gleam of lights. It seemed to Hillyard that æons passed before José touched him on the elbow and pointed downwards.
"Look!" he whispered excitedly.
Right at their very feet the long, grim vessel lay, so near that Hillyard had the illusion he could pitch a stone on to the conning tower. He now held his breath, lest his breathing should be heard. Then the water splashed, and a moment afterwards the submarine turned and moved to sea. They gave it five minutes, and then climbed down to a tiny creek. A rowing-boat lay in readiness there, with one man at the tiller and two at the oars.
"You saw it, Manuel?" said Medina as he and Hillyard stepped in.
"Yes, Señor José. It was very close. Oh, they know these waters!"
The oars churned the phosphorescent water into green fire, and the foam from the stem of the boat sparkled as though jewels were scattered into it by the oarsmen as they rowed. They stopped alongside a little white buoy which floated on the water. The buoy was attached to a rope; that again to a chain. A mat was folded over the side of the boat and the chain drawn cautiously in and coiled without noise. Hillyard saw the two men who were hauling it in bend suddenly at their work and heave with a greater effort.
"It is coming," said one of them, and the man at the tiller went forward to help them. Hillyard leaned over the side of the heavy boat and stared down into the water. But the night was too dark for him to see anything but the swirl of green fire made by the movement of the chain and the fire-drops falling from the links. At last something heavy knocked against the boat's flanks.
"Once more," whispered the man from the tiller. "Now!"
And the load was perched upon the gunwale and lowered into the boat. It consisted of three square and bulky metal cases, bound together by the chain.
"We have it, my friend Marteen," whispered José Medina, with a laugh of sheer excitement. He was indeed hardly less stirred than Hillyard himself. "Not for nothing did the little Marteen lead the horse across the beach of Benicassim. Now we will row back quickly. We must be far away from here by the time the world is stirring."
The boatmen bent to their oars with a will, and the boat leaped upon the water. They had rowed for fifty yards when suddenly far away a cannon boomed. The crew stopped, and every one in the boat strained his eyes seawards. Some one whispered, and Hillyard held up his hand for silence. Thus they sat immobile as figures of wax for the space of ten minutes. Then Hillyard relaxed from his attention.
"They must have got her plump with the first shot," he said; and, indeed, there was no other explanation for that boom of a solitary cannon across the midnight sea.
José Medina laughed.
"So the little Marteen had made his arrangements?"
"What else am I here for?" retorted the little Marteen, and though he too laughed, a thrill of triumph ran through the laugh. "It just needed that shot to round all off. I was so afraid that we should not hear it, that it might never be fired. Now it will never be known, if your men keep silent, whether they sunk their cargo or were sunk with it on board."
The crew once more drove the blades of their oars through the water, and did not slacken till the shore was reached. They clambered up the rocks to their camp bearing their treasure, and up from the camp again to the spot where José's motor-car was hidden. José talked to the boatmen while the cans were stowed away in the bottom of the car, and then turned to Hillyard.
"There will be no sign of our camp at daybreak. The tent will be gone—everything. If our luck holds—and why should it not?—no one need ever know that the Señor Marteen and his friend José Medina picnicked for three days upon that cape."
"But the lighthouse-keepers! What of them?" objected Hillyard. In him, too, hope and excitement were leaping high. But this objection he offered up on the altars of the gods who chastise men for the insolence of triumph.
"What of them?" José Medina repeated gaily. "They, too, are my friends this many a year." He seated himself at the wheel of the car. "Come, for we cannot drive fast amongst these hills in the dark."
Hillyard will never forget to the day of his death that wild passage through the mountains. Now it was some sudden twist to avoid a precipice, now a jerk and a halt whilst José stared into the darkness ahead of him; here the car jolted suddenly over great stones, then it sank to the axle in soft dust; at another place the bushes whipped their faces; and again they must descend and build a little bridge of boughs and undergrowth over a rivulet. But so high an elation possessed him that he was unconscious both of the peril and the bruises. He could have sung aloud. They stopped an hour after daybreak and breakfasted by the side of the car in a high country of wild flowers. The sun was hidden from them by a barrier of hills.
"We shall strike an old mine-road in half an hour," said José Medina, "and make good going."
They came into a district of grey, weathered rock, and, making a wide circuit all that day, crept towards nightfall down to the road between Aguilas and Cartagena; and once more the sea lay before them.
"We are a little early," said Medina. "We will wait here until it is dark. The carabineros are not at all well disposed to me, and there are a number of them patrolling the road."
They were above the road and hidden from it by a hedge of thick bushes. Between the leaves Hillyard could see a large felucca moving westwards some miles from the shore and a long way off on the road below two tiny specks. The specks grew larger and became two men on horses. They became larger still, and in the failing light Hillyard was just able to distinguish that they wore the grey uniform of the Guardia Civil.
"Let us pray," said Medina with a note of anxiety in his voice, "that they do not become curious about our fishing-boat out there!"
As he spoke the two horsemen halted, and did look out to sea. They conversed each with the other.
"If I were near enough to hear them!" said José Medina, and he suddenly turned in alarm upon Hillyard. "What are you doing?" he said.
Hillyard had taken a large.38 Colt automatic pistol from his pocket. His face was drawn and white and very set.
"I am doing nothing—for the moment," he answered. "But those two men must ride on before it is dark and too late for me to see them."
"But they are of the Guardia Civil," José Medina expostulated in awed tones.
To the Spaniard, the mere name of the Guardia Civil, so great is its prestige, and so competent its personnel, inspires respect.
"I don't care," answered Hillyard savagely. "In this war why should two men on a road count at all? Let them go on, and nothing will happen."
José Medina, who had been assuming the part of protector and adviser to his young English friend, had now the surprise of his life. He found himself suddenly relegated to the second place and by nothing but sheer force of character. Hillyard rested the point of his elbow on the earth and supported the barrel of his Colt upon his left forearm. He aimed carefully along the sights.
"Let them go on!" he said between his teeth. "I will give them until the last moment—until the darkness begins to hide them. But not a moment longer. I am not here, my friend, for my health. I am here because there is a war."
"The little Marteen" was singularly unapparent at this moment. Here was just the ordinary appalling Englishman who had not the imagination to understand what a desperately heinous crime it would be to kill two of the Guardia Civil, who was simply going to do it the moment it became necessary, and would not lose one minute of his sleep until his dying day because he had done it. José Medina was completely at a loss as he looked into the grim indifferent face of his companion. The two horsemen were covered. The Colt would kill at more than five hundred yards, and it had no more to do than carry sixty. And still those two fools sat on their horses, and babbled to one another, and looked out to sea.
"What am I to do with this loco Inglés?" José Medina speculated, wringing his hands in an agony of apprehension. He had no share in those memories which at this moment invaded Martin Hillyard, and touched every fibre of his soul. Martin Hillyard, though his eye never left the sights of his Colt nor his mind wavered from his purpose, was with a subordinate consciousness stealing in the dark night up the footpath between the big, leafy trees over the rustic railway bridge to the summit of the hill. He was tramping once more through lanes, between fields, and stood again upon a hillock of Peckham Rye, and saw the morning break in beauty and in wonder over London. The vision gained from the foolish and romantic days of his boyhood, steadied his finger upon the trigger after all these years.
Then to José's infinite relief the two horsemen rode on. The long, black, shining barrel of the Colt followed them as they dwindled on the road. They turned a corner, and as Hillyard replaced his pistol in his pocket, José Medina rolled over on his back, and clapped his hands to his face.
"You might have missed," he gasped. "One of them at all events."
Hillyard turned to him with a grin. The savage was not yet exorcised.
"Why?" he asked. "Why should I have missed one of them? It was my business not to."
José Medina flung up his hands.
"I will not argue with you. We are not made of the same earth."
Hillyard's face changed to gentleness.
"Pretty nearly, my friend," he said, and he laid a hand on José Medina's shoulder. "For we are good friends—such good friends that I do not scruple to drag you into the same perils as myself."
Hillyard had not wasted his time during those three years when he loafed and worked about the quays of Southern Spain. He touched the right chord now with an unerring skill. Hillyard might be the mad Englishman, the loco Inglés! But to be reckoned by one of them as one of them—here was an insidious flattery which no one of José Medina's upbringing could possibly resist.
At nightfall they drove down across the road on to the beach. A rowing-boat was waiting, and Medina's manager from Alicante beside the boat on the sand. The cases were quickly transferred from the car to the boat.
"We will take charge of the car," said José to his manager, and he stepped into the boat, and sat down beside Hillyard. "This is my adventure. I see it through to the end," he explained.
A mile away the felucca picked them up. Hillyard rolled himself up in a rug in the bows of the boat. He looked up to the stars tramping the sky above his head.
Drowsily he muttered the immemorial line, and turning on his side slept as only the tired men who know they have done their work can sleep. He was roused in broad daylight. The felucca was lying motionless upon the water; no land was anywhere in sight; but above the felucca towered the tall side of the steam yacht Dragonfly.
Fairbairn was waiting at the head of the ladder. The cases were carried into the saloon and opened. The top cases were full of documents and letters, some private, most of them political.
"These are for the pundits," said Hillyard. He put them back again, and turned to the last case. In them were a number of small glass tubes, neatly packed in cardboard boxes with compartments lined with cotton wool.
"This is our affair, Fairbairn," he said. He took one out, and a look of perplexity crept over his face. The tube was empty. He tried another and another, and then another; every one of the tubes was empty.
"Now what in the world do you make of that?" he asked.
The tubes had yet to be filled and there was no hint of what they were to be filled with.
"What I am wondering about is why they troubled to send the tubes at all?" said Fairbairn slowly. "There's some reason, of course, something perhaps in the make of the glass."
He held one of the tubes up to the light. There was nothing to distinguish it from any one of the tubes in which small tabloids are sold by chemists.
Hillyard got out of his bureau the letter in which these tubes were mentioned.
"'They have been successful in France,'" he said, quoting from the letter. "The scientists may be able to make something of them in Paris. This letter and the tubes together may give a clue. I think that I had better take one of the boxes to Paris."
"Yes," said Fairbairn gloomily. "But——" and he shrugged his shoulders.
"But it's one of the ninety per cent, which go wrong, eh?" Hillyard finished the sentence with bitterness. Disappointment was heavy upon both men. Hillyard, too, was tired by the tension of these last sleepless days. He had not understood how much he had counted upon success.
"Yes, it's damnably disheartening," he cried. "I thought these tubes might lead us pretty straight to B45."
"B45!"
The exclamation came from José Medina, who was leaning against the doorpost of the saloon, half in the room, half out on the sunlit deck. He had placed himself tactfully aloof. The examination of the cases was none of his business. Now, however, his face lit up.
"B45." He shut the door and took a seat at the table. "I can tell you about B45."
CHAPTER XVIII
The Uses of Science
It was Hillyard's creed that chance will serve a man very capably, if he is equipped to take advantage of its help; and here was an instance. The preparation had begun on the morning when Hillyard took the Dragonfly into the harbour of Palma. Chance had offered her assistance some months later in an hotel at Madrid; as Medina was now to explain.
"The day after you left Mallorca," said José Medina, "it was known all over Palma that you had come to visit me."
"Of course," answered Martin.
"I was in consequence approached almost immediately, by the other side."
"I expected that. It was only natural."
"There is a young lady in Madrid," continued José Medina.
"Carolina Muller?"
"No."
"Rosa Hahn, then."
"Yes," said José Medina.
José rose and unlocking a drawer in his bureau took out from it a sheaf of photographs. He selected one and handed it with a smile to Hillyard. It was the portrait of a good-looking girl, tall, dark, and intelligent, but heavy about the feet, dressed in Moorish robes, and extended on a divan in Oriental indolence against a scene cloth which outdid the luxuries of Llalla Rookh.
"That's the lady, I think."
Medina gazed at the picture with delight. He touched his lips with his fingers, and threw a kiss to it. His sharp, sallow face suddenly flowered into smiles.
"Yes. What a woman! She has real intelligence," he exclaimed fervently.
José Medina was in the habit of losing his heart and keeping his head a good many times in an ordinary year.
"It's an extraordinary thing," Martin Hillyard remarked, "that however intelligent they are, not one of these young ladies can resist the temptation to have her portrait taken in Moorish dress at the photographer's in the Alhambra."
José Medina saw nothing at all grotesque or ridiculous in this particular foible.
"They make such charming pictures," he cried.
"And it is very useful for us, too," remarked Hillyard. "The photographer is a friend of mine."
José was still gazing at the photograph.
"Such a brain, my friend! She never told a story the second time differently, however emotional the moment. She never gave away a secret."
"She probably didn't know any," said Hillyard.
But José would not hear of such a reason.
"Oh, yes! She has great influence. She knows people in Berlin—great people. She is their friend, and I cannot wonder. What an intelligence!"
Martin Hillyard laughed.
"She seems to have fairly put it over you at any rate," he said. He was not alarmed at José Medina's fervour. For he knew that remarkable man's capacity for holding his tongue even in the wildest moments of his temporary passions. But he took the photograph away from Medina and locked it up again. The rapturous reminiscences of Rosa Hahn's intelligence checked the flow of that story which was to lead him to B45.
"So you know about her?" José said with an envious eye upon the locked drawer.
"A little," said Martin Hillyard.
Rosa Hahn was a clerk in the office of the Hamburg-Amerika Line before the war, and in the Spanish Department. She was sent to Spain in the last days of July, 1914, upon Government work, and at a considerable salary, which she enjoyed. She seemed indeed to have done little else, and Berlin, after a year, began to complain. Berlin had a lower opinion of both her social position and her brains than José Medina had formed. Berlin needed results, and failing to obtain them, proceeded to hint more and more definitely that Rosa had better return to her clerk's stool in Hamburg. Rosa, however, had been intelligent enough to make friends with one or two powerful Germans in Spain; and they pleaded for her with this much success. She was given another three months within which period she must really do something to justify her salary. So much Martin Hillyard already knew; he learnt now that José Medina had provided the great opportunity. To snatch him with his two hundred motor feluccas and his eighteen thousand men from the English—here was something really worth doing.
"What beats me," said Hillyard, "is why they didn't try to get at you before."
"They didn't," said Medina.
Rosa, it seemed, used the argument which is generally sound; that the old and simple tricks are the tricks which win. She discovered the hotel at which José Medina stayed in Madrid, and having discovered it she went to stay there herself. She took pains to become friendly with the manager and his staff, and by professing curiosity and interest in the famous personage, she made sure not only that she would have fore-warning of his arrival, but that José Medina himself would hear of a charming young lady to whom he appealed as a hero of romance. She knew José to be of a coming-on disposition—and the rest seemed easy. Only, she had not guarded against the workings of Chance.
The hotel was the Hotel de Napoli, not one of the modern palaces of cement and steel girders, built close to the Prado, but an old house near the Puerto del Sol, a place of lath and plaster walls and thin doors; so that you must not raise your voice unless you wish your affairs to become public property. To this house José Medina came as he had many times come before, and Chance willed that he should occupy the next room to that occupied by Rosa Hahn. It was the merest accident. It was the merest accident, too, that José Medina whilst he was unpacking his bag heard his name pronounced in the next room. José Medina, with all his qualities, was of the peasant class with much of the peasant mind. He was inquisitive, and he was suspicious. Let it be said in his defence that he had enemies enough ready to pull him down, not only, as we have seen, amongst his rivals on the coast, but here, amongst the Government officials of Madrid. It cost him a pretty penny annually to keep his balance on the tight-rope, as it was. He stepped noiselessly over to the door and listened. The voices were speaking in Spanish, one a woman's voice with a guttural accent.
"Rosa Hahn," said Hillyard as the story was told to him in the cabin of the yacht.
"The other a man's voice. But again it was a foreign voice, not a Spaniard's. But I could not distinguish the accent."
"Greek, do you think?" asked Hillyard. "There is a Levantine Greek high up in the councils of the Germans."
José Medina, however, did not know.
"Here were two foreigners talking about me, and fortunately in Spanish. I was to arrive immediately; Rosa was to make my acquaintance. What my relations were with this man, Hillyard—yes, you came into the conversation, my friend, too—I was quickly to be persuaded to tell. Oh—you have a saying—everything in your melon patch was lovely."
"Not for nothing has the American tourist come to Spain," Hillyard murmured.
"Then their voices dropped a little, and your B45 was mentioned—once or twice. And a name in connection with B45 once or twice. I did not understand what it was all about."
"But you remember the name!" Fairbairn exclaimed eagerly.
"Yes, I do."
"Well, what was it?"
It was again Fairbairn who spoke. Hillyard had not moved, nor did he even look up.
"It was Mario Escobar," said José Medina; and as he spoke he knew that the utterance of the name awakened no surprise in Martin Hillyard. Hillyard filled his pipe from the tobacco tin, and lighted it before he spoke.
"Do you know anything of this Mario Escobar?" he asked, "you who know every one?"
José Medina shrugged his shoulders, and threw up his hands.
"There was some years ago a Mario Escobar at Alicante," and José Medina saw Hillyard's eyes open and fix themselves upon him with an unblinking steadiness. Just so José Medina imagined might some savage animal in a jungle survey the man who had stumbled upon his lair.
"That Mario Escobar, a penniless, shameless person, was in business with a German, the German Vice-Consul. He went from Alicante to London."
"Thank you," said Hillyard. He rose from his chair and went to the window. But he saw nothing of the deck outside, or the sea beyond. He saw a man at a supper party in London a year before the war began, betraying himself by foolish insistent questions uttered in fear lest his close intimacy with Germans in Alicante should be known.
"I have no doubt that Mario Escobar came definitely to England, long before the war, to spy," said Hillyard gravely. He returned to the table, and took up again one of the empty glass tubes.
"I wonder what he was to do with these."
José Medina had opened the door of the saloon once more. A beam of sunlight shot through the doorway, and enveloped Hillyard's arm and hand. The tiny slim phial glittered like silver; and to all of them in the cabin it became a sinister engine of destruction.
"That, as you say, is your affair. I must go," said José, and he shook hands with Hillyard and Fairbairn, and went out on to the deck. "Hasta luego!"
"Hasta ahora!" returned Hillyard; and José Medina walked down the steps of the ladder to his felucca. The blue sea widened between the two vessels; and in a week, Hillyard descended from a train on to the platform of the Quai D'Orsay station in Paris. He had the tubes in his luggage, and one box of them he took that morning to Commandant Marnier at his office on the left bank of the river with the letter which gave warning of their arrival.
"You see what the letter says," Hillyard explained. "These tubes have been very successful in France."
Marnier nodded his head:
"If you will leave them with me, I will show them to our chemists, and perhaps, in a few days, I will have news for you."
For a week Hillyard took his ease in Paris and was glad of the rest in the midst of those strenuous days. He received one morning at his hotel, a batch of letters, many of which had been written months before. But two were of recent date. Henry Luttrell wrote to him: