The afternoon of December 16th, 1914--the 135th day of the war--was grey
and gloomy in Northumberland Avenue, that short thoroughfare of high
uniform hotels and buildings.
The street-lamps had just been lit around Trafalgar Square when Lewin
Rodwell passed out of the big hall of the Constitutional Club, and down
the steps into the street. At the moment a newsboy dashed past crying
the evening papers.
The words that fell upon Rodwell's ear caused him to start; and,
stopping the lad, he purchased a paper, and, halting, read the bold,
startling headlines: "Bombardment of the East Coast this morning: Great
destruction of seaside towns."
"Ach!" he murmured with a grin of satisfaction. "Ach! Number 70 was
not slow in acting upon my message. Instead of the German Fleet falling
into the trap, they have taught these pigs of English a lesson. Not
long ago one Minister declared that if the German Fleet did not come out
of the Kiel Canal, that the brave British would dig them like rats out
of a hole. Good! They have come out to respond to that challenge," and
he laughed in grim satisfaction. "Let's see what they've done."
Turning upon his heel, in his eagerness to learn the truth, he
reascended the broad steps of the Club, and in the hall seated himself
and eagerly devoured the account which, at that moment, was thrilling
the whole country.
The paper stated, as all will remember, that the German ships having, by
some extraordinary and unknown means, succeeded in evading the diligent
watch kept upon them in the North Sea, had appeared on the Yorkshire
coast early that morning. A German battleship, together with several
first-class cruisers, had made a raid, and shelled Hartlepool,
Scarborough and Whitby. At the three towns bombarded much damage was
done, hotels, churches and hospitals being struck; and, according to the
casualty list at that moment available, twenty-nine persons had been
killed and forty-six wounded at Hartlepool; two killed and two wounded
at Whitby, and thirteen casualties in Scarborough. The paper added that
the list of casualties was believed to be very much greater, and would,
it was thought, amount to quite two hundred. British patrol boats had
endeavoured to cut off the Germans, whereupon the latter had fled.
Lewin Rodwell, having read the leading article, in which the journal
loudly protested against the bombardment of undefended towns, and the
ruthless slaughter of women and children, cast the paper aside, rose and
again went out.
As he walked in the falling twilight towards Pall Mall, he laughed
lightly, muttering in German, beneath his breath: "That is their first
taste of bombardment! They will have many yet, in the near future.
They laugh at our Zeppelins now. But will they laugh when our new
aircraft bases are ready? No. The idiots, they will not laugh when we
begin to drop bombs upon London!"
And, hailing a taxi, he entered it and drove home to Bruton Street,
where Sir Boyle Huntley was awaiting him.
The man with the bloated, red face and loose lips greeted his friend
warmly as he entered the quiet, cosy study. Then when Franks, Rodwell's
man, had pulled down the blinds and retired, he exclaimed:
"Seen this evening's paper? Isn't it splendid, Lewin! All your doing,
my dear fellow. You'll get a handsome reward for it. Trustram is very
useful to us, after all."
"Yes," was the other's reply. "He's useful--but only up to a certain
point. My only regret is that we haven't a real grip upon him. If we
knew something against him--or if he'd borrowed money from one of our
friends--then we might easily put on the screw, and learn a lot. As it
is, he's careful to give away but little information, and that not
always trustworthy."
"True," was Sir Boyle's reply. "But could we not manage to entice him
into our fold? We've captured others, even more wary than he,
remember."
"Ah! I wish I could see a way," replied Rodwell reflectively, as he
stood before his own fireplace, his hands thrust deep into his trousers
pockets.
"To my mind, Lewin, I foresee a danger," said the stout man, tossing his
cigarette-end into the grate as he rose and stood before his friend.
"How?"
"Well--last night I happened to be at the theatre, and in the stalls in
front of me sat Trustram with young Sainsbury, the fellow whom we
dismissed from the Ochrida office."
"Sainsbury!" gasped the other. "Is he on friendly terms with Trustram,
do you think?"
"I don't think, my dear fellow--I am certain," was the reply. "He had
his girl with him, and all three were laughing and chatting merrily
together."
"His girl? Let me see, we had him watched a few days ago, didn't we?
That's a girl living up at Hampstead--daughter of a Birmingham
tool-manufacturer, Elise Shearman, isn't she?" remarked Rodwell slowly,
his eyebrows narrowing as he spoke.
"I believe that was the name. Olsen watched and reported, didn't he?"
asked the Baronet.
"Yes. I must see him. That young fellow is dangerous to us, Boyle--
distinctly dangerous! He knows something, remember, and he would have
told his friend Jerrold--if the latter had not conveniently died just
before his visit to Wimpole Street."
"Yes. That was indeed a lucky incident--eh?"
"And now he is friendly with Charles Trustram. How did they meet, I
wonder?"
"Trustram was, of course, a friend of Jerrold's."
"Ah--I see. Well, we must lose no time in acting," exclaimed Lewin
Rodwell in a low, hard voice. "I quite realise the very grave and
imminent danger. We may be already suspected by Trustram."
"Most probably, I think. We surely can't afford to court disaster any
further."
"No," was Rodwell's low, decisive answer, and he drew a long breath.
"We must act--swiftly and effectively."
And then he lapsed into a long silence, during which his active brain
was ardently at work in order to devise some subtle and deadly plan
which should crush out suspicion and place them both in a position of
further safety.
At the moment, the British public believed both men to be honest,
patriotic supporters of the Government--men who were making much
sacrifice for the country's welfare.
What if the horrible and disgraceful truth ever became revealed? What
if they were proved to be traitors? Why, a London mob would undoubtedly
lynch them both, and tear them limb from limb!
One man in England knew the truth--that was quite plain--and that man
was young Sainsbury, the clerk who had accidentally overheard those
indiscreet words in the boardroom in Gracechurch Street.
Lewin Rodwell, though ever since that afternoon when he had been so
indiscreet he had tried to hide the truth from himself, now realised
that, at all hazards, the young man's activity must be cut short, and
his mouth closed.
Sir Boyle remained and dined with him. As a bachelor, and an epicure,
Lewin Rodwell always gave excellent dinners, dinners that were renowned
in London. He had a French _chef_ to whom he paid a big salary--a man
who had been _chef_ at Armenonville, in the Bois, in Paris. Upon his
kitchen Rodwell spared nothing, hence when any of those men--whom he
afterwards so cleverly made use of to swell his bank-balance--accepted
his hospitality they knew that the meal would be perhaps the best
procurable in all London.
Many are the men-about-town who pride themselves upon their knowledge of
the gastronomic art, and talk with loving reflections of the soups,
entrees, and what-not, that they have eaten. Most of such men are what
may be termed "hotel epicures." They swallow the dishes served at the
fashionable hotels--dishes to the liking of their own palates possibly--
smack their lips, pay, and are satisfied. But the real epicure--and he
is indeed a _rara avis_--is the one who knows that the thin-sliced grey
truffle, light as a feather, cannot be put on a fillet in London, and
that "sea-truffles" have never been seen in the Metropolis.
To be a real epicure one must be a cosmopolitan, taking one's
_bouillabaisse_ in Marseilles, one's red mullet in Leghorn, one's
caviare at eleven in the morning in Bucharest, one's smoked fish and
cheese in Tromso, one's chicken's breasts with rice in Bologna, and so
on, across the face of the earth. To the man who merely pretends to
know, the long gilt-printed menu of the smart London hotel becomes
enticing to the palate, but to the man who has eaten his dinner under
many suns it is often an amusing piece of mysteriously-worded bunkum.
Lewin Rodwell and his friend the Birthday Baronet sat down together to a
perfectly-cooked and perfectly-served repast. Franks, the quiet,
astute, clean-shaven man, a secret friend of Germany like his master,
moved noiselessly, and the pair chatted without restraint, knowing well
that Franks--whose real name was Grunhold--would say nothing. It was
not to his advantage to say anything, because he was a secret agent of
Germany of the fifth class--namely, one in weekly receipt of sixty
marks, or three pounds.
Rodwell was apprehensive, unhappy, and undecided. Truth to tell, he
wanted to be alone, to plot and to scheme. His friend's presence
prevented him from thinking. Yet, after dinner, he was compelled to go
forth with him somewhere, so they went to the _revue_ at the Hippodrome,
and on to Murray's afterwards.
It was half-past two o'clock in the morning when Rodwell re-entered with
his latch-key and, passing into his den, found upon his writing-table a
rather soiled note, addressed in a somewhat uneducated hand, which had
evidently been left during his absence.
Throwing off his overcoat, he took up the note and, tearing it open,
read the few brief unsigned lines it contained. Then, replacing it upon
the table, he drew his white hand across his brow, as though to clear
his troubled brain.
Afterwards he crossed to the small safe let into the wall near the
fireplace and, unlocking it, took forth a little well-worn
memorandum-book bound in dark blue leather.
"Cipher Number 38, I think," he muttered to himself, as he turned over
its pages until he came to that for which he was in search.
Then he sat down beneath the reading-lamp and carefully studied the
page, which, ruled in parallel columns, displayed in the first column
the alphabet, in the second the key-sentence of the cipher in question--
one of forty-three different combinations of letters--and in the third
the discarded letters to be interspersed in the message in order to
render any attempt at deciphering the more difficult.
In that cleverly-compiled little volume were forty-three different
key-sentences, each easy of remembrance, and corresponding in its number
of letters with about two-thirds, or so, of the number of letters of the
alphabet. From time to time it changed automatically, according to the
calendar and to a certain rule set forth at the end of the little
volume. Hence, though the spy's code was constantly being changed
without any correspondence from headquarters--"Number 70 Berlin"--yet,
without a copy of the book, the exact change and its date could not be
ascertained.
Truly, the very best brains of Germany had, long ago, been concentrated
upon the complete system of espionage in Great Britain, with the result
that the organisation was now absolutely perfect.
Taking a sheet of ruled paper from one of the compartments in the
American rolltop desk before him, Lewin Rodwell, after leaning back
wearily in his chair to compose himself, commenced, by reference to the
pages of the little book before him, to trace out the cipher equivalents
of the information contained in the note that had been left for him by
an unknown hand in his absence.
He opened the big silver cigarette-box at his elbow, and having taken a
cigarette, he lit it and began reducing the information into cipher,
carefully producing a jumble of letters, a code so difficult that it had
for a long time entirely defied the British War Office, the Admiralty,
the Foreign Office, and the French Secret Service.
Though marvellously ingenious, yet it was, after all, quite simple when
one knew the key-sentence.
Those key-sentences used by "Number 70 Berlin" in their wonderful and
ever-changing secret code--that code by which signal lights were flashed
across Great Britain by night, and buzzed out by wireless by day--were
quite usual sentences, often proverbs in English, such as "A little
knowledge is a dangerous thing," "A man and his money are soon parted,"
"Give one an inch and he'll take an ell," "Money makes the world go
round," and so on.
Simple, of course. Yet the very simplicity of it all, combined with the
constant change, constituted its greatest and most remarkable secrecy.
The great Steinhauer, with his far-reaching tentacles of espionage
across both hemispheres, held his octopus-like grip upon the world, a
surer, a more subtle and a more ingenious hold than the civilised world,
from the spies of Alexander the Great down to those of President Kruger,
had ever seen.
With infinite care, and because the information concerning certain naval
movements in the Channel was urgent, he produced a mass of letters with
words in German interspersed--a cipher message which resulted a
fortnight later in one of our battleships being sunk in the Channel,
with only eighty survivors. Of the message the following is a
facsimile:--