LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Never in my life,” Fawley assured him, “have I made a statement which I could not prove. What I am going to disclose now is the greatest secret which has existed in Europe for a hundred years. If it is your wish that I should continue in the presence of these men, I will do so. For reasons of policy, I should advise you to send them away. I am unarmed: your person is sacred from me. I give you my word as an American officer that I shall not raise my hand to save my life. I do pray for one thing, however, and that is that the few words I have to say now are spoken for your ear only.”

      “Search this man for arms,” Berati commanded.

      Fawley held out his hands. The two guards went over him carefully. The contents of his pockets were laid out upon the table.

      “The Signor has no weapon,” one of the two men announced.

      “Wait outside the door,” Berati ordered.

      The men retired. Fawley returned the various articles they had left upon the table to his pockets. He waited until the door was closed.

      “General Berati,” he said, “on the twenty-fourth of May or thereabouts you intended to launch the most amazing aeroplane attack which history has ever dreamed of—some thousand aeroplanes were to have destroyed utterly Nice, Toulon, and Marseilles and swept around upon Paris. A German army, munitioned and armed by Soviet Russia, was to have joined hands with forty divisions of Italians upon the eastern frontier of France. Roughly, these were your plans.”

      “It is fortunate indeed,” Berati sneered, “that the man who knows them so well is the man who is about to die.”

      “We are all about to die,” was the indifferent response. “The length of our lives is merely a figure of speech. In comparison with the cause for which I am fighting, my life is as valueless as a handful of dust.”

      There was a light in Fawley’s eyes which Berati had never seen before. In spite of himself, he was impressed.

      “What is this cause of yours?” he asked.

      “By this time you should have known,” Fawley answered. “Remember, I went through the war. I started as an ardent soldier. The profession of arms was to me almost a sacred one. I took it as an axiom that the waging of war alone could decide the destinies of the world. I came out at the end of the war a broken man. The horror of it had poisoned my blood. For two years I was recovering my health mentally and physically. I came back into the world a crank if you like, a missionary if you will, but at any rate, a man with a single desperate purpose. It made a man of me once again. My own life became, as I have told you, worthless except in so far as I could use it to carry out my purposes. Washington alone knew the truth and they thought me crazy. Two people in England divined it. To the official classes of every other nation in Europe I was just a Secret Service agent working for himself, for his own advancement, and because he loved the work. Italy—I came to you. I cared nothing for Italy. Germany—I went to Germany. I cared nothing for Germany. France—I very nearly mortally offended, but I cared nothing for France. What I did care for was to cherish the great ambition which has come to fruition after years of suffering. To do something—to devote every atom of energy remaining to me in life—to tear out of the minds of men this poisonous idea that war is the sane and inevitable method of dealing with international disputes.”

      Berati sat with his chin raised upon his hand, sprawling across the table, his eyes fixed upon his visitor.

      “France has made the first sacrifice,” the latter went on. “I am hoping that Italy will make the second. I ask you to send a messenger, General Berati, across to the French Embassy and to request them to hand you a letter which they are holding, addressed to you in my care. I tell you frankly that I dared not bring it myself across the frontier or travel with it to Rome, but the letter is there. When you see what it contains, I will finish my explanation.”

      “That means,” Berati said, “that I shall have to keep you alive for another half an hour?”

      “It would be advisable,” Fawley acquiesced.

      CHAPTER XXIX

       Table of Contents

      Down on the coast, the marvellous chain of lights along the Promenade des Anglais and the illumination of Monte Carlo shone pale in the steady moonlight, but up in the clefts of the mountains by the straggling frontier line, the mists were rolling, and at the best there were occasional glimpses of a vaporous twilight. From down in the deep valleys came the booming of a dying mistral. Stars were few—only the reflection of a shrouded moon wrapped at times in a sort of ghostly illumination the white-topped caps of the distant mountains. Berati shivered in his fur coat, as he leaned back in the open touring car. Fawley, pacing the road, continually glanced skywards. The two other men—one a staff officer of the Italian flying command, the other a field marshal of the army—scarcely took their eyes from the clouds. In the distance was a small escort of Chasseurs Alpins. They stood like dumb figures at the bend of the curving road, veritable gnomes of the darkness in their military cloaks and strange uniform. There was no need for silence but no one spoke. It was Berati at last who broke through the tension.

      “It is the hour?” he asked.

      “Within five minutes,” Fawley answered.

      “We run some risk here, perhaps?” Berati continued, in his thin querulous voice.

      “An experiment like this must always entail risk of some sort,” the staff officer observed.

      Dumesnil held a small electric torch to his watch.

      “The first should be here in ten minutes,” he announced.

      “Guido Pellini is the pilot,” Berati muttered.

      “Much too brave a man to be the victim of such a ghastly enterprise,” one of the Italian staff officers declared.

      “I agree with you,” Fawley said emphatically. “It was Air Marshal Bastani here who insisted upon the test being carried out in such a fashion. It was he who asked for the ten volunteers.”

      “I asked only,” the Marshal announced harshly, “for what our brave Italian soldiers offer always freely—the risk of their lives for the good of their country. I myself have a nephew in the clouds somewhere.”

      Some one whispered a warning. There was an intense silence. They all heard what sounded like the muffled thunder of a coming earthquake from the sides of the mountain. The ground beneath their feet trembled, startled birds flew over their heads. From the unseen distance they heard, too, the trampling of a flock of goats or sheep galloping madly towards the valley. The sound died away.

      “The dynamos,” Fawley muttered. “The hellnotter is at work.”

      They listened again. Another sound became audible, a sound at first like the ticking of a watch, then unmistakable. Somewhere in the hidden world above an aeroplane was travelling. Every one was now standing in the road. Berati was breathing heavily. The excitement amongst the group was such that Bastani, the Chief of the Italian Air Staff, found himself moaning with pent-up anxiety. Then, when their eyes were red with the strain of watching, there shot into the sky a long, ever-widening shaft of light—pale violet light—which seemed to illuminate nothing, but stayed like a ghastly finger piercing the clouds. There was a second rush of light, this time towards the sea. The intervening clouds seemed to melt away with its passage, until it burst like a rocket into a mass of incongruous flame and then passed onwards and upwards. Through the silence of the night came a crash from the other side of the precipice, as though a meteor had fallen. The staff officer saluted.

      “A brave man,” he muttered, “dead!”

      “It was a ghastly test, this,” Fawley observed sorrowfully. “There was no need. The thing could have been proved without

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