# The Door of Dread/Chapter 8

CHAPTER EIGHT
SADIE WIMPEL sat studying her face in the glass.
"Yuh ain't lookin' so rotten to-night, Duchess,"she ruminated aloud, as she poked a plait of her freshly marcelled hair into place. Then she languidly proceeded to powder her neck and shoulders with a swan's-down "spreader," solemnly studying her own image in the mirror as she did so.
Then a smile broke across her sober young face, for in the doorway behind her she caught sight of Wilsnach, in evening dress, and with a top-coat over his arm.
"Come in!" she sang out over her calcinated shoulder, for her hesitating visitor had shown every sign of vanishing.
"I'll wait," announced the ever decorous Wilsnach.
"Ain't he the timid bird?" Sadie demanded of her mirror, as she gave a finishing touch to her face with the powder-puff. Then she stood up and ​turned about, shaking out her skirt and massaging her trim waist-line with outspread thumb and forefinger. "These dinner gowns ain't none too heavy in the upper-works, are they?" she asked, as she pinned a bunch of violets to her corsage. She looked wistfully up at Wilsnach. There were times when he seemed to touch her spirit with a vague and undefined sense of disappointment.
"How'd I look?" she courageously demanded.
"You look fine, Sadie," acknowledged Wilsnach. "But Kestner seems disappointed that Keudell got away from us."
Sadie sighed.
"And I guess Dorgan ought 'o get a medal as a quarter-miler," she indifferently announced. For Service work loomed small beside the thought of her first Collet creation and a three-hour dinner with Wilsnach. But a small cloud showed itself in the sky of Sadie's hopes.
"I wish we was eatin' alone," she said as she reached for her cloak.
"Were eating!" corrected the other.
"Were eating," dutifully repeated the girl.
"But it's Andelman of the Intelligence Department that we're going to dine with. And I imagine ​his talk is going to help straighten out this Keudell case."
Sadie looked up at him out of wistfully reproving eyes.
"It was nice o' yuh to send me them flowers—those flowers," she told him.
"You deserved them," Wilsnach protested.
For the second time Sadie sighed.
"And I sure got a lot out o' that spiel o' yours in the art gallery," she went on, smiling gratefully as he held her cloak for her.
"We can get there oftener, when this case is over," explained Wilsnach, looking at his watch.
"I'm ready," she announced, her face sobering as she noticed his movement. And she remained silent as they made their way to the street and stepped into the waiting taxicab. She was perversely quiet, too, during the ride to the carriage-entrance of the huge hotel just off the Avenue.
"You ought to enjoy this dinner," Wilsnach' told her, as they made their way through the carpeted corridors to the chambre separée where Kestner was awaiting them.
Still again her wistful eye sought his preoccupied face.
​"I don't expect to," she declared.
"Why not?"
"B'cause business is business, no matter what frills yuh pin on it! And I'd rather be eatin' alone wit' yuh in a forty-cent red-ink dump than dinin' on terrapin wit' foreigners!"
Wilsnach was robbed of the necessity of replying to this somewhat embarrassing confession, since the door of their secluded dining-room had been thrown open and they found themselves confronted by Kestner and another man.
This second man stared at Sadie Wimpel with a glance that was openly antagonistic.
"Who is this girl?" he promptly and somewhat belligerently inquired.
"This," said Kestner as he watched Sadie flush up to the little runway of freckles spanning her well-powdered nose, "is Miss Wimpel."
"And who is Miss Wimpel?"
"I can best describe her," continued Kestner, as he eyed the official so newly arrived from Washington, "as the most valuable woman agent in all the Service."
"And she is to dine with us to-night?" the Washington envoy none too affably inquired.
​Kestner's smile was still punctiliously non-committal. It even broadened a little as Sadie Wimpel whispered back to Wilsnach over her bare shoulder: "I'd a hunch this feed was goin' to be a frost!"
"Since you are the host this evening," Kestner was suavely explaining, "the number of your guests must, of course, depend on your own wishes!"
The edged steel of Kestner's urbanity caused Lieutenant Andelman to stand regarding him for a moment or two of thoughtful silence. Sadie herself, during this tableau, turned away toward the squared circle of the dinner-table. She was embarrassed by both the open hostility of Andelman's manner and by the consciousness of that Collet creation which Wilsnach himself had persuaded her into purchasing. So she stood with rueful and abstracted eyes, staring down at the shimmer of silver and glass, at the center of which stood a vase of Richmond rose-buds half-buried in a circling wreath of smilax. And to cover both her embarrassment and her indignation she deliberately leaned over the table and sniffed with her heaviest grande dame air at the perfume of the clustered Richmonds.
Then, looking over her stooping shoulder and finding Andelman's eyes still fixed on Kestner's ​face, she stooped still closer and studied that cluster of flowers with quick and searching eyes.
"But we were to discuss matters of a somewhat confidential nature," protested the official from Washington. "And this dinner was arranged merely that we might talk without interruption and without danger."
"Miss Wimpel will be quite prepared to take a part in that discussion," Kestner calmly announced. Sadie was standing now with her back to the table and was conscious of the fact that Andelman had once more turned toward her. His glance, she saw, was still a hostile one.
"Then the colleague you spoke of as Romano is not to be with us?" the steely-eyed officer inquired.
"Romano, I regret to say, is elsewhere engaged."
Sadie neither heard Kestner's words nor was she longer conscious of her Collet dinner-gown. She was, in fact, struggling with a problem which seemed to lie beyond her powers of comprehension. That problem had arisen from a discovery which she had made quite by accident. And that discovery had been made as she leaned over the vase of Richmond roses circled with smilax. For cunningly buried in the midst of those innocent-looking flowers ​she had caught sight of a small metallic disk no larger than a watch-case. Yet had this half-hidden disk been a coiled and glimmering snake it could not have startled her more. She had seen such things before. She knew, at a glance, that it was the annunciator of a dictaphone.
Yet she stood watching the three men before her with a face as expressionless as a mask. So absorbed, indeed, did she seem in her own thoughts that her handkerchief fell unnoticed from her gloved fingers. And it was not until the waiter came into the room that Wilsnach noticed the bit of lace and linen as it lay at her feet. Before he could cross to her side and recover it, however, she herself had bent down and picked it up. But that brief stoop had given her a moment's vision of two small silk-covered wires running from the center of the table-bottom to the rug on which the table itself stood.
She knew, then, that there could be no mistake about the matter. She realized that a plan had been perfected whereby every word of their talk could be overheard and recorded by some unseen and unknown auditor. Wherever that auditor might be stationed at the far end of those small fiber-covered threads of metal, he stood virtually a spy on every ​sentence that might be uttered at their table. But the problem that confronted her was whether that annunciator had been placed there by Kestner himself, or by an enemy of Kestner's.
She had no time to give the matter further thought, however, for the three men were already advancing to their places. And Andelman, with his cocktail glass in his hand, was smiling across the table at the drooping-lidded girl in the dropping-bosomed Collet dinner-gown. For by this time Sadie was mmistakably drooping-lidded. One of the lessons which life had taught her was, when in doubt, to assume an outward mien of utter meekness.
"I am sorry," said the envoy from Washington, "that official discretion made me for even a moment seem inhospitable!"
Sadie disliked the man, and it took a struggle for her not to show it.
"It ain't troublin' me," she replied, as she tugged at the shoulder-straps of her gown. Then she suddenly remembered Wilsnach's stern admonition as to her verbs. So for the second time she blushed visibly as she amended her reply. "It isn't troubling me!"
​"Then what can I possibly do to make amends?" inquired the officer, facing her.
She looked calmly and deliberately at the smiling face, nettled by the fact that there was more than a touch of mockery in its smile. Yet she herself laughed a little as she turned about to the vase of roses that stood between them.
"Yuh c'd square yourself," she quietly announced, "by lettin' me pin a couple o' them roses on me new armor-plate!"
She was maintaining an inspection of both Andelman and Kestner as she spoke. She was still watching them as she promptly leaned forward, with an arm outstretched, wondering from which of the men the sign of betrayal was to come.
It was Andelman who spoke. He spoke sharply, with a quick sign of command to the waiter so close to Sadie's elbow.
"Alphonse," he said, "give the lady two of the Richmond rose-buds, please!"
And with that command the mystery stood no longer a mystery.
Sadie, for a voluptuous second or two, sat staring down at the new shoulder-length white gloves ​of which she was so inordinately proud. Then having digested her victory, she looked up at Andelman.
"I'd rather pick me choose," she demurred, with one rounded arm still stretched languidly out across the table. Her fingers were within six inches of the innocent-looking vase before the waiter, for all his celerity of movement, could interpose.
"Pardon, madame," he murmured as he stooped over the table. Yet as he did so he crowded in so close to the girl's forward-bent body that she was compelled to shrink back into her chair.
"You will find Alphonse's taste irreproachable," said Andelman, once more able to smile.
Sadie did not answer him, for at the moment her mind was occupied with the drama in front of her. Kestner, she saw, had not moved. He merely sat viewing her with a casual indifference touched with amusement. Wilsnach, it is true, looked about him a little puzzled, but to be puzzled was habitual with the interrogative-souled man from the Paris office.
Andelman was the man! That much the voice of Sadie's instincts at once proclaimed to her. It was Andelman who had promptly betrayed the tension under which her maneuver had placed him. It was Andelman who, for all his pose of care-free ​gallantry, pointedly watched the deft-fingered waiter as the latter meagerly broke off two of the buds which drooped loosely over the edge of the vase. Sadie then knew not only that Andelman was the man, but that the waiter called Alphonse stood not altogether ignorant of the situation. The fact that he had chosen two buds which in no way served to screen the center of the vase, and the further fact that he had broken these off short rather than withdraw their stems from the tangled company of their fellows, confirmed his position as an accomplice of the Washington official who, for some unknown reason, was working against the interests of her chief.
"Yuh may be long on taste," she calmly announced, as she took the two buds from the waiter's fingers, "but yuh're suttinly short on stems!"
"Is madame not pleased?" asked the waiter. There was almost a challenge in his inquiry. It was Andelman himself who spoke up sharply.
"Alphonse, bring the oysters! And also, if you please, a violet-pin for the lady!"
Kestner's indolent eye followed the waiter's figure as he departed. Then the secret agent turned back to his host.
​"Why was it Brubacher himself didn't run over for this talk?" Kestner casually inquired.
"Brubacher was not so intimately in touch with the new code movements as I am myself. Captain Oliver made that clear, I thought, in his talk over the telephone with you."
Kestner nodded.
"How long have you been doing code work for the Department?" he next asked. Andelman smiled at the question. He seemed to be glad of the chance of talking again.
"As far back as the war with Spain. I had an under-secretaryshrip in Barcelona at the time, and devised a system of keeping our people at Paris in touch with the movements of the enemy's battleships and torpedo-boats and that sort of thing. There were, as you may remember, some forty-four of them altogether. I adopted the two French words of 'achete' and 'vendez' to stand for 'arrived' and 'departed,' and then prepared a code-list of possible ports where these boats might arrive or depart. I did this by giving each the name of some particular stock listed on the French Exchange. Each boat, in turn, was represented by a certain number, so when I wired Paris to buy or sell so ​many shares of such and such a stock, it meant the arrival or departure of such and such a boat from such and such a point."
It was Sadie who spoke next.
"Yuh're the first Navy man I ever heard speak of 'em as boats!" she murmured as she looked up at him with languidly drooping lashes.
"I'm sorry to give offense!" was Andelman's acidulated retort. But the languid-eyed girl made note of the fact that the dart had not missed its mark.
"Oh, it ain't offensive," she lazily acknowledged. "It's only funny!" Then, seeing Wilsnach's reproving eye on her, and misjudging the cause of that critical side-glance, she cried in hasty amendment: "It isn't offensive!"
"And what was the data you were to present to me?" inquired Kestner, as he squeezed a slice of lemon over his Blue Points.
Andelman looked at him for a silent moment.
"My first duty was to learn from you just what progress you have been making."
"Progress in what?"
"In tracing out the different leaks from our two Departments."
​"It is Wilsnach here who is doing that work. I am merely a sort of overseer, in this case."
"But it was you who wired in the last report to the Washington authorities."
Kestner smiled.
"And that is the data you wish?"
"Yes."
"But why repeat what has already been incorporated in my official reports?"
If there was a sting behind his words the man from Washington preferred to ignore it. Sadie found a wayward satisfaction in the conclusion that the two men were not destined to be kindred souls. It would make her task easier, she felt, when her chance should come.
"But, don't you see, I've got to know what's been done before I can outline what still remains to be done," patiently expounded the Washington envoy. "And you know as well as I do that the situation is a serious one."
"It is even more serious than you imagine," acknowledged Kestner. And again Sadie's eye sought her chief's, as though behind that curt announcement might lie some hidden meaning.
"And in view of that fact," Andelman continued, ​"I have a plan, by means of which, provided we can work harmoniously together, we can surely round up all of this stolen data. But unless we work together I think there's small chance of either your plan or mine succeeding. So the sooner we get down to hard-pan, the better!"
Kestner, in spite of the persistently patient tone of Andelman^s talk, betrayed no immediate intention of getting down to hard-pan. And Sadie, to her secret relief, began to realize that her chief was more set on acquiring information than on divulging it.
"But in a case like this you never do get down to hard-pan," Kestner was parrying, "until you make your haul. And we haven't yet made our haul."
"Precisely," agreed his host. "But what I must know is what steps have been taken toward that haul."
Kestner's glance was a distinctly combative one.
"Am I to understand that the Washington authorities are questioning our method of procedure?"
Wilsnach, at this tartly-put interrogation, looked about with mild surprise at his chief. The latter, Wilsnach inwardly remarked, seemed less stable and less urbane than usual. For once he seemed to have ​lost control of his nerves. Even Sadie Wimpel sat a little bewildered by Kestner's unwonted acerbity. Yet she watched him quietly, from under studiously veiled eyes, wondering what his game could possibly be, and just when her chance for a word of warning to him would come.
"Of course your methods are not under question," the smiling Andelman was saying. "But before the two of us can cooperate in this thing we must each know where the other stands."
Kestner did not seem disposed to deny this. He merely became more earnest.
"Then where do you stand with regard to the theft of what they're calling the Wheel Code?" he asked.
Andelman hesitated, with his glance resting questioningly on Wilsnach and the woman at his side.
"You can talk as freely before these two as you can before me," announced Kestner. "But, in the first place, what the devil is the Wheel Code?"
Andelman smiled with patience if not altogether vith pleasure.
"Since your hesitation seems to hinge on some doubt as to my knowledge of official affairs, I'll be very glad to explain a code which, as you probably ​know, is used by both the Navy and the Army. The device itself merely depends on the use of two disks, on the same center. There's a series of numbers on one; on the other an arrangement of letters and certain codified service-words. Now, once a key-relation is determined on, the sender picks out his message, and the receiver, placing his disks according to the predetermined key-relation, reads this otherwise undecipherable message without any great trouble. What made the loss of this code of ours especially costly, however, was that the 'filler' or 'blind' words incorporated in the cipher—very much after the fashion of the duck that barked like a dog, in the old conundrum—took months and months of hard work for the two Departments to work out."
"But what was the use of these blind words, as you call them, in a code like that?" asked Wilsnach.
"Merely to insure secrecy! These fillers are put in as a stumbling-block, for the code-expert of the enemy to bark his shins on. For, once your enemy has messages enough to work with, he can eventually decipher any code ever devised by human intelligence."
"Now we do seem to be getting down to hard-pan," Kestner suddenly exclaimed. "You say this ​Japanese officer has possession of our Wheel Code—"
"I have said no such thing," cut in Andelman, with his slightly puzzled eyes on the other man's face.
"But the Department has just said so," maintained Kestner.
Sadie, realizing that her chief had at last committed himself to a positive statement, endeavored to kick at his shins under the table. But he was beyond her reach. Wilsnach, wincing visibly, stopped eating to stare at her in silent reproach.
Andelman, for the fraction of a second, seemed to be at sea. But before he could speak again Kestner was facing him with an earnestness even more marked than before.
"My own belief is that Washington is taking an exaggerated view of this whole situation. There's been a leak or two, but that is no excuse for getting hysterical over it. And if this Japanese officer boasted that he had our Silberton Code, I don't even believe he's stolen it. You know as well as I do that the Japanese are the trickiest code-makers on earth. This code expert of theirs probably got hold of a number of our messages, months or even ​years old. Then, working them out on lines of classification, and resorting to a few imaginative guesses, he stumbled on the key to the whole thing!"
Andelman sat in thoughtful silence, at the end of this speech. Kestner waited for several moments: then he swung unctuously back to his theme.
"Any code can be worked out in that way. There isn't a cipher-code in the Service, land or sea, that isn't vulnerable to the expert, once he has time enough and reason enough for working it out."
Andelman's slowly awakening smile was one of patient forbearance.
"You are altogether wrong. How could a foreigner, for example, derive any earthly good from a knowledge of the Navy Department's new wireless Clock Code?"
"Why not?" asked Kestner.
"Because the significance of every cipher depends not only on the hour of the day, but on the minute of that hour, at which it is despatched, the same message, I mean, sent at twenty different times during the day may mean twenty entirely different things. And the chronometrical determination of each cipher value, again, is protected by our adaptation of the Hovland Keyboard Cipher,—you've ​doubtless heard our Navy officers speak of it as the Keyboard."
"Why the Keyboard Cipher?" asked Wilsnach.
"Because the transmitting machine—for wireless, of course,—is a good deal like an ordinary typewriter, with keys to close a certain number of 'contacts' for each letter. But the cipher-language is produced by first switching the letter-keys, the same as a mischievous boy might do on a typewriter—mixing 'em up in a hopeless mess. The receiving operator, of course, works with a keyboard correspondingly switched and at the same time combined about the same as the numeral sequence of a safe-lock. In wireless, of course, this shuts out the outsider. It stops eavesdropping. Since the decodification is done automatically, and printed on the tape of the receiving apparatus, it does no good for the outsider to try to tune in!" Andelman laughed as he took a sip of wine. "Sounds pretty complicated, doesn't it? But it's about two hundred times more complicated than I could ever make it sound, for it's just by its infinite complicatedness that it is made secret."
Kestner, who seemed deep in thought, did not comment on this statement.
​"But I thought our Bobine Whisperer had superseded all that?" he finally ventured. And Sadie, watching from the other side of the table, felt sure that she saw a secret eye-flash pass some secret message between Andelman and the waiter called Alphonse, as the latter lifted away the empty oyster-plates.
"Why should the Bobine Whisperer supersede the Hovland adaptation?" inquired Andelman, with his eyes on Kestner's impassive face.
"Because both Scrivner and Oliver have acknowledged its superiority." Kestner looked up at Andelman with sudden surprise on his face. "You knew it was the Bobine Whisperer specifications which were stolen, didn't you?"
It was a direct interrogation, but Andelman did not directly reply to It. For just a moment his eyes rested absently on the vase of Richmond roses. Then he turned smilingly to Sadie Wimpel and Wilsnach.
"Perhaps our friends here would like you to give them a description of this mysterious Whisperer," he finally ventured.
It was at this point that Sadie turned to Wilsnach with the carelessly put command: "Gimme a card ​and pencil! For we had a code at the Convent that used to stump 'em ev'ry time!"
Then straight down the card, Chinese style, she smilingly penciled the words: "Roses have tin ears!"
She smiled again as she looked down at her minutely inscribed column. She was still smiling as she passed it over to Kestner, who for a moment hesitated about taking it.
He glanced at the card for only a second or two. Then shook his head with disapproval.
"Sadie, that's indecent!" he angrily announced, as he proceeded to tear the card into shreds, and having tossed these pieces contemptuously toward the center of the table, he turned deliberately away from her, once more facing Andelman. "We're here to discuss Service business, and not make jokes!"
For the third time that evening a flush mantled Sadie's sophisticated young face. Andelman noted it, and not without approval. For a moment, too, his hungry eyes rested on the scattered fragments of pasteboard. It was the waiter, who, having carefully placed plates before each of the guests, turned to remove the litter of paper-ends from the table-cloth.
​Sadie promptly defeated this end by insolently and half-angrily blowing the card-fragments back into Kestner's lap. He ignored the maneuver, for his mind seemed set on more serious things. He even frowned a little when the bland-eyed Wilsnach broke in with one of his apparently uninspired interrogations.
"But just what is the Bobine Whisperer?" the methodic-minded man from the Paris office was inquiring.
Andelman, for some unknown reason, permitted the ghost of a smile to flit for a moment about his lips. Then he leaned patiently back in his chair as Kestner began to speak.
"Since we've all united in the task of keeping this Bobine Whisperer secret from getting out of America," began Kestner, "it won't be a loss of time to try to give you an inkling of what it is. But please correct me," he added, as he again turned smilingly toward Andelman, "if I make mistakes. The Bovine Whisperer is our improvement on the Bellini and Tosi rectangular aerial device for wireless. That is to say, two aerials at right angles are so attached to both sending and receiving apparatus as to permit of the transmission of unequal currents. ​By a simple enough law of mechanics which I needn't go into here, these two electro-magnetic forces are made to unite, not unlike a fireman's water screen made by the interjection of two hose streams. The Hertzian waves are projected in a single vertical plane, capable of being instantly alternated by the Bobine device, and because of the fact that this apparatus can transmit messages a hundred miles without their waves being perceptible to intervening operators, it has been called the Whisperer."
"Exactly—the Whisperer!" said Andelman.
"It gives an admiral a chance for absolutely secret communication between his different units," pursued Kestner. "It also puts a stop to the danger of 'jamming,' which helped the Germans out in their South Pacific fight with the British, as it did the Russians when they had the Austrians shut up in Przemysl. But it does still more than this. It makes possible the determination by triangulation of the position of any foreign operator whose messages have been intercepted. This means it can decipher the position, and also the speed, of any hostile ship, or, for that matter, any hostile squadron, once its sending-zone has been invaded. And what that ​means to a foreign power has been very well instanced by the fact that the specifications for this device are among those stolen by our same Oriental friend who got the new submarine and the new coast-gun plans!"
It was Sadie Wimpel who looked up sharply at Kestner's last words. Through his welter of wireless technicalities her untutored mind had caught no feeblest ray of light. She was not ignorant, however, of who had got both the submarine and the coast-gun plans. And she knew it was not an Oriental.
It dawned on her, suddenly, that Kestner was not telling the truth, that he was deliberately and studiously lying to the thoughtful- faced envoy from Washington. But his reason for doing so was something more than she could fathom.
"Then this Oriental is the man we must round up?" Andelman was asking.
"Wouldn't that be your suggestion?" parried Kestner, with his gaze fixed on the other man.
The other man shrugged a non-committal shoulder. He seemed undecided as to his stand. And from his very indecisiveness Kestner appeared to derive a discreet yet definite satisfaction.
​None of this satisfaction, however, imparted itself to the restless-minded Sadie. Her chief, for once in his life, seemed obtuse. He had scoffed at her warning. And now, speech by speech, he was not only handing his secrets out to a man who had no right to them, but was also tossing the most sacred information of the Service into a metal ear hidden amid a cluster of roses not three feet away from him. And the thing could not go on.
Sadie found it hard to hit on a feasible plan of action. The best she could do, she finally decided, would be to slip away to the hotel office, on the pretext of telephoning, and there write out a second message of warning to Kestner. This could be done on a telegraph blank, and after her return to the table a page could deliver the message. In that way, she felt, Kestner could receive it without unduly arousing Andelman's suspicions. And then he would be free to act as he saw fit.
Sadie finally decided to put this plan into execution. She saw that it would be best, however, to leave the table when the waiter himself was engaged at its side. She did not care to be followed. So as the talk went on she impatiently awaited the return of that discreet-eyed functionary.
​Yet it was this waiter himself, when he stepped back into the room, who made the first move. He somewhat bruskly interrupted Andelman's talk with the announcement that there was a long-distance call awaiting him at the office. And this waiter, Sadie noticed, was not so inwardly calm as his outward appearance might indicate.
"Find who is calling!" commanded Andelman, with a distinct note of annoyance. Then he turned to Kestner again, repeating an inquiry if it could be true that the new Army satchel-wireless designs, based on the "Whisker Wireless" of the French Intelligence Corps, had been among the secrets so mysteriously and so ingeniously stolen from Headquarters. Then he stopped talking, for the waiter once more stood close behind him. This servant's face, Sadie now noticed, was moist with a faint dewing of sweat-drops.
"It is Washington, sir, that wants you!" he announced.
"But who?" irritably demanded Andelman.
"I think they said the Navy Department, sir!"
Andelman's manner changed.
"Then you'll excuse me for a minute or two?" he graciously implored, as he rose from his chair. ​And Kestner watched him in silence until he left the room. It was not until the waiter followed, carrying away a trayful of empty dishes, that Sadie spoke up.
"That man's a fake," she promptly announced.
It was Wilsnach, still watching the door, who made a sudden hissing sound for silence.
"Why do you say that?" Kestner quietly inquired.
"B'cause I know it," was her quick retort.
"I am equally aware of the fact," was Kestner's even-toned reply.
Wilsnach paused in the act of lighting a cigarette to stare at his chief.
"How do you know it?" he demanded.
"For the last two days I find my private telephone wire has been tapped. My steps have been dogged, and a decoy message which I sent out was intercepted. Such incidents, naturally, point only to one thing!"
"But why couldn't we have been given a tip?" demanded Wilsnach.
"I wanted to be sure of my ground. And it was only an hour before sitting down to this table I verified my suspicion that Andelman was in no way officially connected with any Washington ​. I have just further verified it by the matter of the Bobine Whisperer. While I have given not a little of my time and thought to the working out of such a device, there is, at present, no such thing in existence!"
"And that ain't all!" announced Sadie.
"What else?" asked the indifferent-eyed Kestner.
"As I tried to tell yuh b'fore, the guy's gotta dictaphone planted in that bunch o' roses there!"
"He's got a—"
Kestner, instead of re-echoing the rest of that sentence, suddenly sprang to his feet. He leaned over the table, pushed back the loose cluster of dark crimson buds, stared there for a second or two and then sat down again.
"So that's his game!" he ejaculated. Then before either Wilsnach or Sadie could speak, he was on his feet again.
"Quick!" he cried to Wilsnach, as he leaned over the vase and with one fierce jerk freed the annunciator from its wires. "They've heard every word we've been saying! Get the waiter! Go right to the kitchen if you have to!"
"Couldn't it be done more quietly, as he comes back, and—"
​"Comes back? He won't be back here any more than Andelman will! Hurry, man, hurry, or they'll be away before we can get to the doors!"
Kestner, who had pushed the annunciator into his pocket, was already half-way across the room.
"And what 'm I to do?" demanded the indignant-eyed Sadie. She had small relish for being thus elbowed out of a movement in which she should have been the chief factor.
"Anything you like," was Kestner's abstracted message as he disappeared from sight. Wilsnach was rounding the table to follow him. But Sadie, knowing what she knew, caught him firmly by the sleeve of his coat.
"Yuh just wait a minute!" she commanded. "Who's that Oriental guy the chief's been talkin' about?"
Wilsnach tried to shake her off.
"I don't know!"
"Did he ever tell yuh he knew a Jap had got those plans?"
"No," said the tugging Wilsnach. "Three hours ago he said everything pointed to one man and only one man!"
"Wait! What man?"
​"Wallaby Sam!"
Sadie at once released the bewildered and still struggling Wilsnach.
"Then where's your Wallaby Sam?'* she called after him, remembering what Dorgan had already told her.
"That's what we'd give our eye teeth to know!" was Wilsnach's answer as he slipped out through the door.
Sadie looked after his disappearing figure. Then she gathered up her wraps, powdered her nose and quietly but resolutely proceeded down to the rotunda of the big hotel. From there, perceiving neither Andelman nor Wilsnach nor Kestner, she strolled on to the starter's office, at the carriage entrance, and called for a taxicab.
"Where to?" was the question put to her.
For one moment she hesitated. Then she said with determination: "Hotel Alsatia!"