Fawley rose to his feet.
“I gather that I am a free man?” he asked.
“You are a free man,” the Colonel answered calmly. “I do not like you. I do not trust you. I hate these intermeshed political and military eruptions which in a single second destroy the work of years. In letting you go free I submit to authority, but if you care for a warning, take it. You are a self-acknowledged spy. You will be watched from the moment you leave my doors, and if the time should come when you make that little slip which they say all men of your profession make sooner or later, I pray that I may be the one to benefit.”
Fawley sighed as he drew himself up and stood with his hand upon the door-handle.
“I really do not know, Colonel,” he expostulated, “why you dislike me so much. I need not have worked at all. I have chosen to work in the greatest cause the world has ever known—the great cause of peace. I have already risked my life a half-dozen times. Once more makes no difference. Perhaps when you have settled down on your estates with your children and grandchildren you will not regard the man who works behind the scenes quite so venomously…. By the by, if I must submit to perpetual escort, may I beg that you will give me two of your lightest guards? The two who mounted my footboard coming up would break the back axle of my car before we reached Sospel.”
The Colonel looked coldly at his departing guest.
“You need have no fear, Major Fawley,” he said. “You are no longer a prisoner. My motor-bicycle scouts will trace you from the moment you leave to wherever you go and telephone to me their report. I shall get in touch at once with the Chef de la Sûreté of the district. Things may happen or they may not.”
Fawley drew a deep breath of the pine-scented air as he stood outside, lingered for a moment and stepped unhindered into his car. This was the first stage of his desperate mission safely accomplished. Elida had warned him almost passionately that it was the second which would prove most difficult.
Chapter XXVIII
Once more Fawley crossed that huge, spacious apartment at the far end of which Berati sat enthroned behind his low desk, a grim and motionless figure. The chair on his left-hand side was vacant. There was no sign anywhere of Patoni.
“I ought to apologise for my sudden return to Rome, perhaps,” Fawley ventured. “Events marched quicker than I had anticipated. Except for a brief stay at Monte Carlo, I have come here directly from Paris.”
Berati leaned slightly forward. His eyes were like slits of coal-black fire, his lower lip was dragged down, his face resembled a sculptor’s effort to reproduce the human sneer.
“You have been paying quite a round of visits, I understand,” he remarked icily. “London—I scarcely thought that London and Downing Street were places with which we had any present concern.”
“You were misinformed, sir,” Fawley replied calmly. “London and Washington are both concerned in the present situation.”
Berati rang a bell from under his desk, an unseen gesture. In complete silence, so stealthily that Fawley was unaware of their presence until he felt a heavy hand upon each of his shoulders, two of the new Civic Guards had entered the room and moved up to where he stood. They were standing on either side of him now—portents of the grim future.
“You and the Princess,” Berati said harshly, “both of you pretend to have been working for Italy. You have been working for England. The Princess, for all I know, has been working for France—”
“Not exactly correct, sir,” Fawley interrupted. “Of the Princess’s activities I know little except that I believe she was trying to coerce you into signing a treaty with the wrong party in Germany. So far as I am concerned, I will admit that I have deceived you. I professed to enter your service. I never had the intention of working for one nation only. I had what I venture to consider a greater cause at heart.”
Berati glared at him from behind his desk. He seemed to have suddenly become, in these moments of unrestrained anger, the living presentment of the caricatures of himself which Europe had studied with shivering repugnance for the last two years.
“There is one thing about you, Major Fawley,” he said. “There will not be many words between us, so I will pay you a compliment. I think that you are the bravest man I ever met.”
“You flatter me,” Fawley murmured.
“Somehow or other,” Berati went on, “you learnt the most important secrets of the French fortifications. You must have taken enormous risks. I sent five men after you to check your statements, and every one of them lies buried amongst the mountains. Yours was a wonderful and courageous effort, but your visit here to-day is perhaps a braver action still. Do you realise that, Fawley? You must have known that if ever you came within my reach—within my grasp—you would pay for your treachery with your life.”
“I knew there was a risk,” Fawley admitted coolly. “On the other hand, I know that you have brains. I am less afraid of you than I should be of most men, because I think that when you have listened to what I have to say you will probably widen your view. You will realise that the person whom you accuse of betraying her has saved Italy.”
“Fine talk,” Berati sneered.
“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 round 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 w
orking 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
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.”
Someone 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. Everyone 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 human sacrifice.”
Again there came the sound of that horrible, nerve-shattering crash. This time closer at hand. They even fancied that they heard a human cry. Fawley would have stepped into his car, but the staff officer by his side checked him.
“They were flying at over two thousand feet,” he said. “No one could live till the end.”
Fawley pointed upwards to where that faint violet light seemed to have discoloured the whole sky.
“You see that area, General,” he pointed out. “Nothing living could exist within it. No form of explosive could be there which would not ignite. No metal that would not be disintegrated. The man who works the hellnotter has no need to aim. He has an illimitable range, a range which in theory might reach the stars and a field of ever-increasing miles as the ray flashes. A hellnotter is the last word in horrors. It has been your own choice to sacrifice your men, but you will not find a single machine which exists except in charred fragments, or a single recognisable human being. If the squadron to-night, instead of ten aeroplanes, had consisted of a thousand, the result would have been precisely the same. There would not have been a human being alive or a wing of a machine to tell the story.”
Fawley spoke with no elation—sorrowfully though convincingly. Berati spoke only once, and his thoughts seemed far away.
“Von Salzenburg knew. God!”
The violet tinge in the sky seemed to lean in their direction. There was a warning shout from Fawley. In a crowd they dashed into the wide opening of the shelter outside which the cars had stopped. Fawley called out to them.
“Keep well away from the mouth,” he directed. “There was one about a mile up. I heard the humming.”
His voice echoed and re-echoed down the smoothly tunnelled aperture. Bastani opened his lips to reply, but for the next few moments no speech was possible. From outside came a sound like the battering of the earth by some gigantic flail, the crashing of metal striking the rocks, the roar of an explosion. An unnatural calm fell upon them all. They were in almost complete darkness, but when Berati pulled out his electric torch their faces were like white masks in the velvety blackness. Outside in a matter of seconds the fierce rain had ceased. There was the hissing and crackling of flames, a lurid light which for the moment showed them the whole countryside. The silence, which lasted for a few seconds, was broken once more by the screaming of birds and the galloping backwards and forwards of terrified cattle. Bastani pushed his way to the front.
“It is my duty to see something of this in the moment of its opening.”
The French officer in charge remonstrated violently.
“Marshal Bastani,” he begged, “you have been placed in my care. This is all new to us. There may be another explosion. In any case, nothing will have changed if we wait.”
Bastani pushed him gently but with force on one side.
“It is my duty,” he repeated. “I must be the first to investigate. It is for that that I am here.”
He disappeared into the mists outside and they saw the flash of his torch as he turned towards the ascent. The French officer shrugged his shoulders.
“You will bear witness, gentlemen, that I did my best to stop the Marshal. We have had no experience in the after-events of such a cataclysm as this.”
They talked in desultory fashion. Berati smoked furiously. The seconds were drawn out. Conversation was spasmodic and disconnected. Then Fawley, who was nearest to the entrance, pointed out a thin pencil of light between two mountains eastward.
“The morning comes quickly here,” he said. “In half an hour at the most we can leave.”
Almost as he spoke there was another explosion, which shook large fragments of rock from the sides of their shelter. In one place the cement floor beneath their feet cracked. Then there was silence.
“I wish Bastani had stayed with us,” Berati murmured.
***
The dawn through which they started their short ride to Colonel Dumesnil’s headquarters brought its own peculiar horrors. With every yard they found strange distorted fragments of metal—nothing recognisable. A bar of steel transposed into the likeness of a catherine-wheel. What might have been the wing of an aeroplane rolled up like a sheet of paper. At different points on the mountain-side there were small fires burning. At the last bend they came suddenly upon a man walking round in circles in the road. He wore the rags of a portion of torn uniform. One side of his face was unrecognisable. Blood was dripping from a helpless arm.
“Count Bastani! My God!” one of the Italian staff officers cried.
They were near enough to see him now. He looked at them with wild eyes, threw up one arm and called out. Then, as though he had tripped, he fell backwards heavily. There was plenty of help at hand, but Air-Marshal Bastani was dead.
***
In the orderly-room of the French headquarters hidden amongst the hills Colonel Dumesnil’s secretary was seated typing. Dumesnil himself, who had raced on from the pass, rose to his feet mechanically at their entrance. He handed a sheet of paper to Berati, who was the first to stagger in. The latter waved it away.
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