LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

a gold-headed cane and writing sonnets. You know seven or eight languages, and you've covered Europe for ten or twelve years. You've learned the lay of the land and served your country on some pretty big questions."

      The big form leaned forward over the desk and the big voice dropped to a more serious tone. "Kestner, that country needs you now. It needs you as it never quite needed you before. And if you're the American I think you are, you're going to side-step the tulle and organ-music for a few weeks and help this Administration out of a hole!"

      A telephone-call interrupted the chief's words, but never once did his eyes leave the other man's face.

      "Remember, it's not this newspaper war-talk that's worrying us. We're three months ahead of that. And it's not the ship-bombs and the factory-burnings and the labor-plots that are worrying us. We've got plenty of good workers to trail down the rest of that rough-neck stuff. We can handle the Fays and Von Papens and Van Homes and Loudens and Scholzes easily enough, though we can't ​always holler out how much we know about 'em. But there's another gang operating over here that's getting on our nerves. For example, who told both Vienna and Berlin that we'd approached the Danish Minister on the matter of the purchase of the Danish West Indies and gave the Germans a chance to set the Rigsdag against the bill of cession? Who surrendered our vacuum valve amplifier, for picking up wireless, to that same power? Who stole the Pearl Island's mine-field maps for the protection of the Canal? Who gave our new Fort Totten target-firing records to the foreign agent who was taken off the Niew Amsterdam at Kirkwall and carried them in his shoe-sole when arrested? And God knows what might happen before our next dreadnought gets off the stays! And I'm only telling you one-half of what we're up against here, with this second underground band sneaking our data before it can even be reported to the Department itself. You can pretty well see, I guess, what's got to be done by some one from this office. And I'm not the only man who thinks you ought to do it. You can count on the Secretary of the Navy, and, what's more, you can count on the White House!"

      Wilsnach moved, as though to break the silence, ​but Kestner stopped him. Then he turned to the thick-shouldered man at the desk.

      "Let me explain something to you," he began in his cool and even tones. "You know what our work is. It's a bit like tiger-shooting, seductive enough, but still dangerous. It has, as you say, a great deal of rough-neck work, and now and then an occasional risk. When you're young, you're glad enough to face those risks. There's a thrill about it. But to keep on at it, once you're nearing forty, you've got to have a spark of youth that won't go out. You've got to nurse your streak of romance. Now, the trouble is, I find my spark going out. The work doesn't seem romantic to me any more. It seems nearly always humdrum, and very often underhand."

      "It's necessary work," interrupted the other.

      "So is scavenging. And I feel I've done about enough of it."

      "Then keep it up," persisted the chief, "by helping us clear away this final mess."

      "But I'm tired of messes like this. I'm tired of the types they bring you in contact with. I'm tired of the way they have to be rounded up. I'm tired of crook-warrens and gun-play and wire-tapping. ​I want quietness and decency and an acre or two of lawn with a tennis-court at one end and a Japanese tea-house at the other!"

      "Which is exactly what I've been trying to argue you into," promptly pointed out the chief. "You get all those things when you get your rosewood desk at the Embassy—with a silk hat and a state carriage thrown in!"

      "My experience with Embassies," suggested Kestner, "hasn't precisely fixed them in my mind as abodes of quietude."

      "But instead of stewing along the undercrust, you'll be a monument on the upper," said the chief, with a repeated heavy gesture that was almost one of impatience. "And we can leave the Embassies out, for we've got troubles closer than that. We've got one of the shrewdest and completest systems of espionage ever organized to break up. As I've already told you, we've founds leaks from the Navy and from the Aviation Corps. Our cipher codes have been stolen and our wireless adaptations lifted. Our canal fortification plans have been dug out, and we know two different foreign powers are trying to get the secret of our new balanced turbines, to say nothing of the Cross torpedo for which, we know ​beyond a doubt, one Intelligence Department has offered a cool million. And we have every reason to believe the whole business is being engineered by one of the trickiest foreign agents who ever bought a war-map."

      Kestner sighed a little wearily. "And the gentleman's name?" he casually inquired.

      The chief was silent for a moment or two, as though weighing the expediency of making further confession to one still outside the Service. Then he pulled out a drawer and tossed a mounted group-photograph across the desk.

      "That's an enlargement from a moving-picture film showing the crowd that watched the launching of our new submersible destroyer. We stumbled on it by accident. But in that crowd is one face, and if you look at it under the glass you'll see the face of the man who's organized the entire system that we've got to beat. That's about all we know, beyond the fact, apparently, that he's working with foreign people he's brought over for the purpose, people unknown to our operatives here."

      "But who's the man?" repeated Kestner, running a casual eye along the welter of closely crowded figures on the mounted picture.

      ​"Keudell!" was the chief's answer.

      Kestner's hand dropped to the desk-top. "Keudell?" he echoed, a trifle vacuously, as he took up the picture and searched through its serried faces with a narrowing eye.

      "Then you've heard the name?" inquired the chief.

      "Yes, I've heard the name," was Kestner's slowly enunciated answer. "And even Wilsnach here will recognize the face, I imagine."

      "You mean you know the man?"

      "Do we know him, Wilsnach?" Kestner asked, turning to his colleague, bent low over the photograph.

      "That's Keudell," cried out the younger man. "I'd swear it."

      "And what do you know about him?" asked Blynn, turning back to Kestner.

      "For one thing, that I hate him the same as a woman hates a snake."

      "Why?"

      Kestner's answer was neither so prompt nor so direct as it might have been. "Because embodied in him is everything about this life that made it, and still makes it, odious to me."

      ​"Does that mean," asked the chief as he watched Kestner restore the photograph to the desk-top, "that we're not to count on you in this case?"

      Kestner stared for a meditative moment or two at the Washington Monument. Then he turned back to the man at the desk.

      "I'm not the man for this case. But I know the people it belongs to. And I can at least start those people right."

      "What people?" asked the chief.

      "Wilsnach here, for one."

      "And the other?"

      "Is a young woman named Sadie Wimpel."

      "Why this young woman?"

      "Because she knows Keudell the same as a keeper knows a diamond-back!"

      The heavy-shouldered man behind the desk was already on his feet.

      "Then supposing we talk to the Secretary of the Navy for five or ten minutes," he suggested. "And then we'll see if we can't get in to the President himself for a few minutes."

      The other two men had already risen.

      "The first thing we ought to do," explained Kestner, "is to round up Sadie Wimpel."

      ​"That," announced the chief as he crossed to the Inner door, "should not be a difficult matter."

      "Do you happen to know Sadie?" Kestner asked.

      "Sadie Wimpel, gentlemen, is already engaged on this case," announced the chief, with a pardonable note of pride in his voice. "And to-morrow,

Скачать книгу