The call to Washington is through, I suppose?”
“You should be connected in half an hour, sir.”
“Very well. Send in General Burns the moment he arrives.”
Henry Malcolm, the doyen of private secretaries, took his leave. For another twenty minutes the Prime Minister studied the atlas with its pencilled annotations and the pile of memoranda which had been left upon his desk. A queer, startling situation! No one could make out quite what it meant. Willoughby Johns, as he pored over the mass of miscellaneous detail which had been streaming in for the last forty-eight hours, was inclined to wonder whether after all there was anything in it. Another war at a moment’s notice! The idea seemed idiotic. He took a turn or two up and down the room, with its worn but comfortable furniture, its spacious, well-filled bookshelves. His familiar environment seemed in some way a tonic against these sinister portents…There was a tap at the door. Malcolm presented himself once more.
“General Burns was at the Foreign Office, sir,” he announced. “He will be around in five minutes.”
The Prime Minister nodded. He glanced at his watch. Still only seven o’clock. A telephone message from Washington to wait for and he had been up at six. He listened to the subdued roar of traffic in the Buckingham Palace Road and the honking of taxis in the park. Men going home after their day’s work, without a doubt, home to their wives and children. Or perhaps calling at the club for a cheerful rubber of bridge and a whisky and soda. What a life! What peace and rest for harassed nerves! Dash it all, he would have a whisky and soda himself! He rang the bell twice. A solemn but sympathetic-looking butler presented himself.
“Philpott,” his master ordered, “a whisky and soda—some of the best whisky you have—and Schweppe’s soda water—no siphons.”
“Very good, sir,” the man replied, rather startled. “Would you care for a biscuit as well, sir?”
“Certainly. Two or three biscuits.”
“Mr. Malcolm was saying that you had cancelled the dinner with the Cordonas Company to-night, sir.”
“Quite right,” Willoughby Johns assented. “No time for public dinners just now. I will have something here later on after the call from Washington has been through.”
The man took his departure only to make very prompt reappearance. The whisky and soda was excellent. The Prime Minister drank it slowly and appreciatively. He made up his mind that he would have one every night at this hour. He hated tea. It was many hours since lunch, at which he had drunk one glass of light hock. Of course he needed sustenance. All the doctors, too, just now were preaching alcohol, including his own. Nevertheless, he felt a little guilty when General Burns was ushered in.
“Come in, General,” he welcomed him. “Glad I caught you. Take a chair.”
Burns, the almost typical soldier, a man of quick movements and brusque speech, took the chair to which he was motioned.
“My time is always at your disposal, sir,” he said. “I very seldom leave before nine, anyway.”
The Prime Minister crumpled up his last piece of biscuit and swallowed it, finished his whisky and soda, and stretched himself out with the air of a man refreshed.
“What is all this trouble down south, Burns?” he asked.
The General smiled sardonically.
“We leave it to you others to discover that, sir,” he replied. “We only pass on the externals to you. I don’t like the look of things myself but there may be nothing in it.”
“You started the scare,” the Prime Minister reminded him reproachfully.
“I beg your pardon, sir, I would not call it that,” the other protested. “What I did was to send in a report to the Foreign Office, as it was my duty to do, that there were at the present moment in Monte Carlo and Nice a larger number of Secret Service men of various nationalities than I have ever known drawn towards one spot since 1914.”
“Who are they? Is there any report of their activities, further than these formal chits and despatches?” Willoughby Johns asked.
“They scarcely exist by name, sir. There have been seven men from the eastern section of the newly established Italian Secret Service staying in Monte Carlo at once. They mingled freely with every one and gambled at the tables, but recently five of them are said to have disappeared completely. There have been various reports about them but nothing authentic.”
“What do you imagine yourself has happened to them?” the Prime Minister enquired.
The General shrugged his shoulders.
“My opinion, sir, is,” he said, “that they got lost in the mountains and fell into the hands of people who have an ugly way with strangers. They take their risks, of course, but no one has complained. Then there is a Frenchman there, Marquet. One of the cleverest agents who ever breathed. He sits in an easy-chair in the Hôtel de France lounge practically the whole of the day, but somehow or other he gets to know things. Then there were two Germans—Krust, the great industrialist, who is supposed to be a supporter of the Crown Prince, and another one whom I do not know. We have our own two men; one of them has a villa and never leaves Monte Carlo and the other resides in Nice. Finally, if I may mention his name, there is the American, Major Fawley, who is reported to have been drowned at the entrance to the harbour but whom we have heard of since in Germany. He would be a useful man to talk to if we could get hold of him.”
“Ah, yes, Major Fawley,” the Prime Minister reflected.
“Fawley’s report about affairs in Berlin, if he ever got there, would be extraordinarily interesting,” the General remarked.
The Prime Minister looked vague.
“I thought it was one of the peculiarities of the man,” he observed, “that he never made reports.”
“He is a remarkable traveller. One meets him in the most unexpected places. He believes in viva voce reports.”
The Prime Minister stroked his chin.
“I suppose you know that he is in London, Burns?” he asked.
“Only half an hour ago. We were not, as a matter of fact, looking out for him. We were interested in the wanderings of the Princess di Vasena and we tracked her down to Major Fawley’s rooms at the Albany.”
“Your men are good workers,” the Prime Minister approved.
“Espionage in London is easy enough. You must appreciate the fact, though, sir, that to have a man like Fawley working outside the department, who insists upon maintaining this isolation, makes it rather difficult for us.”
“That is all very well, General,” the Prime Minister declared impatiently. “Personally, I hate Secret Service work, but we have to make use of it. We are up against the gravest of problems. No one can make out what is going on in Rome or in Berlin. We are compelled to employ every source of information. Fawley is invaluable to us but you know the situation. We are under great obligations to him and he has done as much, without the slightest reward or encouragement, to bring about a mutual understanding between Washington and Downing Street as was possible for any human being. He works for the love of the work. He will accept no form of reward. All that he asks is
