21 Greatest Spy Thrillers in One Premium Edition (Mystery & Espionage Series)

by E. Phillips Oppenheim

  There was a murmur of assent, but not one of them could look away from the screen. The voice of the man who had passed on to them that awful secret had ceased. They watched like men paralysed. Not one of them realised that the miracle worker of his generation, the man who had helped to make his country almighty, was already facing the one insoluble problem.

  The date of the opening of this story is April the fourteenth, 1947, some years after the granting of independence to the Philippine Islands by the United States, and subsequent to the attempted seizure of these islands by Japan, a proceeding which was followed by the greatest naval débâcle in the world’s history, when the Japanese Fleet, at its full strength, was totally destroyed in the Pacific Ocean by a single battleship of the United States Navy, equipped with the full range of the Humberstone discoveries.

  * * *

  The characters in this story are entirely imaginary and have no relation to any living person.

  CHAPTER I

  Table of Contents

  At 10:43 on a morning when the deep blue sea of the Mediterranean was flecked with whitecaps and the clear outline of the Estérels suggested a mistral, Mr. Jonson stepped from his compartment in the Train Bleu and, with a suitcase in either hand, alighted upon the platform at Nice. Refusing with dogged politeness the clamorous offers of a crowd of blue-shirted porters, he carried his own bag gage, gave up his ticket at the barriers and summoned a small carriage.

  “Le Café des Oiseaux Noirs, Number Seventeen, Avenue Laperle,” he told the cocher. “It is in the direction of the old town.”

  The cocher glanced a trifle curiously at his passenger, whipped up his steed and drove off. The latter leaned back amongst the frowsy cushions, produced a cigarette from a neat black metal case and commenced to smoke it with enjoyment. Nice was, he reflected, looking around him, a handsome, populous place, worthy to have become the head quarters of the great institution with whose operations he hoped presently to be connected. The cocher turned round and addressed him.

  “Monsieur understands without a doubt that the Avenue Laperle is outside the radius?”

  His client grinned.

  “Monsieur understands nothing of the sort,” he replied. “Monsieur intends to pay the sum indicated upon the dial, with a suitable pourboire, and any dispute upon arrival will be referred to the nearest gendarme.”

  The cocher flicked the air with his whip and turned surlily around. There was something about the brusque air of the small, rosy-cheeked man who had taken possession of his voiture which made it doubtful whether argument would be worth the trouble.

  “We shall see,” was all he muttered. “Oh, yes, we shall see.”

  Without undue haste on the part of anyone concerned, with many wheezes from the horse, creakings of the ancient vehicle, hoarse encouragements and flicks in the air with his whip from the unsavoury looking cocher, the end of the journey arrived at last. It was without a doubt an unprepossessing neighbourhood. There was little to be discerned of the beauty of one of the Riviera’s principal watering places. The building before which they had stopped was solidly built but was a somewhat sinister-looking tenement house, the ground floor of which was occupied by an apparently low-class café. The pavement was squalid. A sluggish canal, a turgid depository of filth, loomed unpleasantly near on the other side of the way. The cocher pointed to the dial.

  “For the voyage itself, monsieur,” he announced, “one demands three francs and forty centimes. To return one must ascend the hill. It is an awkward neighbourhood. Monsieur will remember that in granting the pourboire.”

  Mr. Jonson counted out five francs with great care.

  “In the matter of pourboires,” he said, “I am a generous fellow. Take that and drive your crazy vehicle off to hell. May I never see it again! It smells. It pleases me not. Be off!”

  Mr. Jonson grasped his bags and stepped out. The cocher, suddenly dumb, accepted his money and, with a carefully thought-out mixture of argument and abuse absolutely unuttered, drove off.

  “A type,” he muttered to himself. “I wonder!”

  The man was perhaps wise. It was one of the worst quarters of Nice and the flap of his passenger’s hip pocket drawn somewhat tightly over his rotund limbs pronounced the fact that he was not a man who took risks. The cocher drove off, but it took him the rest of the day to forget his fare.

  Mr. Jonson seated himself in a discreet corner at a three-legged table of unsavoury appearance, with a bag on either side of him, and summoned a waiter. The latter, dressed in a shabby pullover and a worn pair of trousers with shoes which gapingly displayed the absence of socks, came wearily up. He showed no surprise at the sight of a client obviously of better circumstances than the few others scattered about the place and, though his eyes dwelt for a moment upon the bags, curiosity seemed a dead impulse in him.

  “Monsieur désire?” he muttered.

  For answer Mr. Jonson tore off a marginal strip of paper from the journal which, wrapped round its stick, lay on a neighbouring table. With a stump of lead pencil which he produced from his pocket he traced a number—1009—and passed it to the man. The latter glanced at it, took the paper, and crumpled it in the palm of his hand.

  “Monsieur désire?” he repeated.

  “Un café simple,” Mr. Jonson replied.

  The waiter departed. On his way he stopped before one of the receptacles for ashes which stood in the place. The crumpled and torn fragments of the scrap of paper which had been handed to him were added to its contents. After wards the man lumbered on and disappeared round an angle of the café. Mr. Jonson disposed himself to wait. As a matter of fact he waited for a very short time. Within five minutes a woman approached his table bearing a tray. She set the contents before him—a metal coffee pot, a single cup, and saucer.

  “It is what Monsieur desires?”

  He looked at her curiously. She was a stout woman but her black stuff dress was neat and in good repair. Her enormous bosoms were forced back in their place by the tightness of her bodice. She had magnificent black hair smoothly brushed and a faint moustache upon her upper lip. Her eyes were hard and bright. She might have been any age between twenty-five and forty-five.

  “Monsieur chooses a strange place to drink his coffee,” she remarked.

  Monsieur smiled.

  “My name is Jonson,” he said. “I have come to see the jackdaws.”

  The woman looked around.

  “Do not drink that muck,” she enjoined. “There is better awaits you.”

  “I come now?” he asked.

  Once more she glanced lazily around to the right and to the left. She stepped out onto the pavement through the opened door. All the time she seemed to be looking nowhere. All the time Mr. Jonson felt that there was nothing she did not see.

  “Now as well as any time,” she replied carelessly. “Monsieur must carry his own bags.”

  “That is what Monsieur would much prefer,” was the smiling assent.

  Out through the back quarters into a villainous-looking courtyard, along a dark passage from which branched several mysterious alleyways, out into another street, a broader street with a row of lime trees on the other side, a street that might not perhaps have been so bad except that the wind was bending back the branches of the trees and raising clouds of stinking dust. The woman pointed to a door in the building from which they had emerged, a few yards up the street.

  “Monsieur will find what he wants,” she said, “if he mounts three flights of stairs and knocks at the door of the room Number Seven.”

  “And if I do not find it,” he muttered, “I suppose I shall find trouble.”

  “One takes one’s risks,” she answered, “when one comes to see the jackdaws. If you please it is well. If you are not acceptable—Well,” she added with a wicked smile, “it is a neighbourhood where things happen.”

  Mr. Jonson took up his bags, parted with one temporarily to open the outside door, picked it up again and passed into a small hall devoid of furni
ture, yet also devoid of the sickening evidences of filthy neglect of the Café which he had just left. He mounted to the first floor and found indications there that the building had once been the habitation of people of consequence. The doors had a solid appearance and the metal numbers attached to each were of brass. The second floor was better still. There was light here, for the windows had been cleaned, and from one of them he caught glimpses of the town below and a distant peep of the sea. Here were three more rooms: Four, Five and Six. Once more he mounted, and this time things showed still further improvement. There was a large oaken door with a very visible Number Seven facing him. On the right there was a window and a balcony. The walls were clean and had apparently recently been washed. There was an electric push-bell immediately in front of him. Mr. Jon son held his finger steadily upon it. Even before he had had time to remove it, the door was opened. A young woman, plainly dressed, but of neat and distinguished appearance, looked out at him. For the second time that morning Mr. Jonson told himself that these people knew their business. In those few seconds he felt that this girl had scrutinised his every feature and had arrived at an impression concerning himself and his clothes. It almost seemed as though she had seen through the worn exterior and realised the contents of the bags.

  “This, perhaps,” Mr. Jonson suggested, removing his hat with great politeness, “is the Bureau of which I am in search?”

  “Monsieur by his question has made that apparent,” she replied.

  Mr. Jonson and his two bags disappeared behind the door. They were swallowed up in Room Number Seven of the far-reaching annex of the Café des Oiseaux Noirs.

  Mr. Jonson was beginning to be very much interested indeed in this novel byway leading out to the great road of adventure along which he had steadily made his way since his arrival at manhood. Up to the moment of his being ushered into that barely furnished but somehow impressive-looking apartment and finding himself alone with a young woman, whose distinction he was well able to appreciate, he had found the opening-up of this episode of his career a little disappointing. Everyone knew that Nice was a city of mysterious cafés and bands of criminals with secret haunts, and that there were parts of the city into which it was unsafe to venture without police protection. There was an element of staleness in the whole affair which was suddenly dissipated by the appearance upon the scene of his present companion. He leaned slightly back in the easy chair which he had been invited to occupy, and he looked across at the young woman with steady, appraising eyes.

  “I begin to find it more difficult than I expected, Mademoiselle,” he confided, “to enlist myself as a member in your famous society. It is for that purpose I an here.”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “I wonder what you know about us really?” she enquired.

  “Very little,” he acknowledged. “I have heard you called the Foreign Legion of Espionage.”

  She nodded her head gravely.

  “The idea is not a bad one.”

  “But whereas,” Mr. Jonson continued, “to join the Foreign Legion the formalities are of a usual type and no penalty seems to be attached to rejection, with you things are different. One has heard of men—and women, too—who set out blithely to become one of your number and who have never been heard of again.”

  “Quite true,” she admitted tolerantly. “But you must remember this, Mr. Jonson. These people to whom you allude have been emissaries of the police or emissaries of the foreign powers against whom we have been working. They have come with the idea of double-crossing some special operation in which we have been engaged. We have reckoned them up and studied their past and when we have discovered that their real object in joining us was to frustrate our plans, we have dealt with them as our principals thought fit. Neither Mr. Humberstone nor Mr. Cheng are lenient men to deal with in such circumstances.”

  “Now, how do I stand?” he asked her. “I have sent you references from two places which we will not mention in Asia, from Paris and from Moscow. I have done work in the underworld; but now official positions, where there is really scope for enterprise, scope for a man who is not afraid to risk his life, are few. I have come to you as an honest man. I wish to work for you and not against you.”

  “Then,” she said, changing her position a little as though to avoid the sunlight which was flooding into the room, “it is a pity that you tried to deceive us about your nationality.”

  He nodded thoughtfully.

  “Yes,” he acknowledged, “that was perhaps a mistake. Yet if I had told you the whole truth I doubt if I would have received this invitation to visit you.”

  “Of that I am not so sure,” she said. “It is strange that a man who wields the power Mr. Humberstone wields, who was the instigator and who is now the inspiration of an amazing International Bureau of Espionage, should be such a passionate lover of the truth. I have known him to risk the whole success of a great coup rather than have his principal agent tell a direct lie.”

  “It is illogical, that,” Mr. Jonson declared.

  “Very likely,” she assented, “but it does not alter the fact that you have come to us with a lie upon your lips. Others before you have found their way to the Café des Oiseaux Noirs, have even in one or two cases reached this chamber, but that has been the end—they have never found their way back into the world.”

  “Supposing I make a clean breast of it,” Mr. Jonson suggested amiably.

  The girl smiled at him. It became more and more apparent that in her quiet way she was remarkably attractive. She tapped a cigarette upon the table and lit it.

  “Is not that just a trifle ingenuous?” she asked. “When we found out that a part of your story was not true it goes without saying that we set ourselves to discover the actual truth.”

  Mr. Jonson seemed to grow a little smaller in his chair. He wondered whether those blue eyes, which he admired so much beneath their silky eyebrows, were really blue or whether there was not a glitter of steel in them. Had he been led into a death trap, he wondered. From where he sat he could see the trees waving in some gardens opposite and hear the clang of the electric cars. He read the sign on the smoky orange-coloured building on the other side of the square—the Gendarmerie. He smiled thoughtfully. He began to feel that he was safe. The girl read his thoughts.

  “I should not be overconfident if I were you,” she said. “You would be the first man who has ever reached this room under false pretences and left it unharmed.”

  Nevertheless Mr. Jonson continued to smile. For a few seconds the girl was busy. There was a confusion of telephones. She handled the situation skillfully, with swift fingers and a voice that changed curiously as she spoke through the various instruments. Finally she leaned back in her chair.

  “You will know what is going to happen to you directly,” she announced.

  Mr. Jonson nodded gravely.

  “Would you have any objection to telling me something about your principals?” he enquired.

  She looked across at him speculatively.

  “Do you mean that you do not know?”

  Mr. Jonson coughed slightly.

  “I have heard various stories,” he confided. “I have been told, for instance, that the man who runs this establishment is a young American scientist—Mr. Mark Humberstone, son of the great inventor.”

  “Well?”

  “Then, on the other hand,” Mr. Jonson continued, “I have been told that there is someone of greater importance who keeps always in the background and who is seldom seen outside his suite of rooms here.”

  “And this mysterious person’s name?” she asked.

  “You yourself alluded to him just now as Mr. Cheng—” There was a brief silence. The girl tapped with her fingers upon the desk.

  “At least,” she said, “you need not concern yourself for the present with idle rumours. There is such a person as Mr. Cheng, of course, but you are not likely to see much of him. Mr. Mark Humberstone is our acting principal.”

  The d
oor was opened and closed. A young man smiled pleasantly at the girl as he advanced into the room. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and he carried himself with the easy swing of an athlete. His hair was slightly disarranged, his costume the blue shirt of a matelot and a pair of grey flannel trousers. The coat which he had been carrying he tossed lightly into a chair.

  “Good morning, Mademoiselle,” he greeted her. “Forgive my ruffled-up appearance. I have been having half an hour in the gymnasium.”

  She nodded and pointed to where Mr. Jonson had risen to his feet. The young man swung round and scrutinised the visitor.