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

by E. Phillips Oppenheim

“I have no doubt,” he said, “that the man is capable of evil deeds, that he is capable even of assassination, yet I believe that when he is in our presence evil is not with him.”

  “Darned if I get you there,” Mark protested.

  His friend smiled gently.

  “You must make allowances for my outlook, Mark,” he begged. “I have adapted myself to your Western ways and your Western philosophies, but there are some things belonging to my own instinctive beliefs with which I cannot interfere. I, too, can be a mystic sometimes, you know, and I have even some credence in the art of wizardry. I shall, as you would so epigrammatically put it in your own phraseology, take a chance with Jonson.”

  There was finality in Mr. Cheng’s tone. The subject was evidently closed. He strolled across the room with his hands behind his back and stood gazing out of the window over the tops of the lime trees opposite, over the red roofs of the town, up to the fading blue of the distant hills. He stood there motionless for several moments. Without turning his head, presently he spoke.

  “When I come back, Mark,” he said, “the time will have arrived for my pilgrimage into the mountains. I spoke this morning with Pekin. Every day the temples in the southern provinces are being reopened. The President has disappeared. Only a few of his ministers are left. Everywhere the voice of the people is being heard calling, clamouring for government. They are asking for Hou Hsi, the descendant of the Great Empress. The statesmen who will serve us in the future are already at their places, but the time is coming, Mark, when we must disclose ourselves—therefore I must take that journey up into the mountains.”

  “Good luck to you, my friend,” Mark declared as the two young men shook hands. “I may have something to say to you myself when you come back.”

  CHAPTER VI

  Table of Contents

  There is a certain seaward curve in the Moyenne Corniche between Nice and Monte Carlo from which, looking backwards, one can catch a glimpse of the necklace of lights fringing the Promenade des Anglais. Mark, when he reached it, brought his high-powered roadster to a standstill close to the outside wall.

  “Mind if I have a cigarette?” he asked his companion.

  “Of course not,” she answered. “I too, if you please.”

  He produced his case and lighter. Then he swung round in his low seat and looked back across to Cap Ferrat, behind which Nice lay hidden. For several moments he remained speechless. In that fantastic spot they seemed raised so high above the roaring life of the last few weeks that the very tranquillity of it brought him a peculiar sense of rest. Everything down there was going on according to plan, but he himself had escaped for a few hours from the maelstrom. He drew a long breath of relief.

  “My, it’s good to get clear away, even if it’s only for a short spell!” he declared.

  She looked at him curiously.

  “I find it always difficult to make up my mind why you have given yourself over to that amazing enterprise,” she said. “For me it is different. I am just an employee there. I have no responsibilities. For you I think sometimes it must be terrible.”

  “It surely is,” he acknowledged tersely. “Still, there are times when I am glad I have not Cheng’s share of it to handle. Poor old fellow, he hated his journey to London.”

  “How long will he be away?” she asked.

  “Might be back to-morrow—might not be back for a week. I shouldn’t think that he Will stay longer than he can help. I hate having to interview all this swarm of officials who are buzzing around the place.”

  “What made you join up with the Bureau at all?”

  He paused for several moments before he attempted any sort of answer.

  “It is a very serious question that, Catherine,” he said at last. “It is one of the branches of a Trust that came to me—well, because I was my father’s son and had been his fellow worker. If he could have lived a few years longer he could have carried the thing through to the end, alone and without help from anyone, but he just couldn’t. That’s all there is to it. When he felt himself failing he just had time to tie up everything into this Trust.”

  “But Mark,” she went on. “You will not mind, will you, if I ask you one more question? Why have you the control of it? It seems to me that you are terribly young for such a responsibility.”

  “I share it with others,” he reminded her. “I share it with the Vice President of our country, whoever he may be, the Chief Admiral in Command of our naval forces, the Commander in Chief of our Army, the Secretary of War and one or two others.”

  “Of course, that is wonderful,” she admitted. “But how is it that you are in that galère at all?”

  “I happen to be the only one,” he confided, “who really knows how to harness and set in action these new elements.”

  “The only one!” she repeated. “But supposing that anything were to happen to you?”

  He took off his driving glasses, wiped his eyes and smiled.

  “The clue to the secret itself,” he told her, “and the name of my successor are deposited in Washington under the Presidential seal. I suppose if it had not been for that, I should have been assassinated a dozen times over.”

  They were in a sheltered part of the road almost hidden by the shadows of the falling night which had followed so closely upon the passing of the twilight. Occasionally a car raced by, its headlights throwing lurid gashes of illumination up the mountain and over the sides of the precipice, but at that moment the road was deserted. She leaned towards him.

  “Mark,” she whispered.

  “Catherine.”

  “Those messages which you are sending out hour by hour from the observatory—”

  He interrupted her—not sharply but with definite words, definitely spoken.

  “Catherine,” he said, “I don’t want you to ask me any questions I could not answer.”

  Her eyes shone at him through the misty light.

  “You do not think that I, too, have caught the fever, that I am also a spy?”

  “Why, of course, I could never think that,” he assured her with perhaps a little unnecessary emphasis. “I have never opened my mouth upon these subjects except to Cheng, and that was only after he had won the Nobel Prize for his treatise on ‘The Final Peace.’ I will go farther with you than with anyone, though. I will tell you what no one else has been told in plain words. The only time this new destructive agency which I possess has been used in warfare was when the Council sanctioned its employment after the Japanese Fleet had committed an act of war and attempted to seize the Philippines. You know the result of that? The Japanese have lost their place as an International Power for at least another twenty-five years. That is the only time we have ever used the forces which we control in warfare. At the present time I will admit we are using every day one of our minor discoveries—a wireless installation which reduces all others to impotence. We are also using the television which the Council decided some time ago might be exploited for military surveying as apart from regular warfare.”

  “I shall ask no more questions,” Catherine decided abruptly. “Mark, I am afraid to ask any more. We will go on, please. Let us get to Monte Carlo.”

  He smiled as he threw away his cigarette and started the soft purr of his twelve-cylinder engine.

  “You are so wise, Catherine,” he told her. “There is some knowledge which lives with one like a pain. It isn’t worth having but if it comes you can never quite get rid of it. It’s like a fire which can never be put out. You and I will talk of other things this evening.”

  “I agree gladly, Mark,” she said, settling down with a sigh of content. “Notwithstanding that ingenuous countenance of yours and those delightful freckles, which at times give you the appearance of extreme youth, I am beginning to believe that you are really a person to follow and to trust.”

  “It’s good to hear you say so,” he acknowledged earnestly. “I have been living, as you know, practically ever since I left college, with the one idea of carrying
creditably the burden which the old man strapped on to my shoulders. I have had some close shaves, but I managed to come out all right somehow or other. I am talking to you seriously to-night and it is because I want to possess your confidence.”

  “You have it,” she assured him.

  “And because of other reasons,” he wound up, “which I hope to explain later on.”

  She remained demurely but provocatively silent. They were commencing the tortuous descent into the Principality. When they had turned the last corner, however, and were on their way along the straight road with the Sporting Club ablaze with lights on one side and the gaily illuminated gardens on the other, he glanced down at her, smiling.

  “I shall now park the car at the Hotel de Paris,” he announced, “and we will have our first and best cocktail in the bar.”

  Mark swung through the narrow entrance, helped her out and led her to the long comfortable lounge. He gave a prompt order to the linen-coated attendant who had hurried out, smiling, to greet them.

  “Two of the best cocktails on the Riviera, Louis. Your ‘White Ladies’ with sweet lemons, Cointreau, and Gordon’s gin. And look here—get your boy there to telephone to the Sporting Club and ask André to bring me the dinner menu, and see that the flowers have come for the table I ordered, for two, against the wall…Catherine, I am beginning to feel that we are out on a party.”

  She laughed gaily.

  “I have been feeling like that ever since I put on my new frock,” she confided.

  Mark gave the sommelier a hasty order as they took their places at the table a half-hour or so later. Catherine glanced at him in surprise.

  “Another cocktail!” she exclaimed. “Why, we had two in the bar.”

  “Can’t help it,” Mark regretted. “I caught sight of you in the mirror coming down those steps into the restaurant and I heard—well, never mind about that. Catherine, I must tell you, though, that I never saw you look so stunning in my life.”

  She smiled at him across the table.

  “You do not often look at me, Mark.”

  “I—well, we do get sort of absorbed at the Bureau, don’t we?” he pleaded hesitatingly. “But Catherine, you’re beautiful.”

  “I felt that I was going to have a pleasant evening,” she sighed.

  “You should have heard what all those other people were saying,” he went on.

  “I do not think I should have cared much,” she assured him. “I am rather sorry that you had to hear it from others.”

  “That dark blue gown,” he continued. “Just the colour of your eyes, Catherine. And your black hair brushed back like that—I never realised that you had such a beautiful forehead or such a delightful figure. Why, you walked down those steps like a princess.”

  “But I am a princess,” she reminded him.

  For a moment Mark seemed stupefied, then a flood of memory came to his aid.

  “Of course,” he stammered. “I had quite forgotten.”

  “Well, you need not look so worried about it,” she laughed. “It was my cousin Alexander who introduced me to Mr. Cheng. I had been doing some wretched work on a woman’s journal. We agreed from the first that I should come to work as Catherine Oronoff.”

  “Come to think of it, Cheng is a prince himself,” Mark observed. “He has a page of the most picturesque titles.”

  “How did you discover that?” she asked.

  “I saw it in the newspapers when he entered Harvard.”

  “Ah, well,” she smiled. “I remember the time when I would have given my title away for caviar like this! And vodka! Delightful. I never expect to be princess to anyone again. Cheng is different.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It just seemed to me that it was a different matter,” she replied. “I have learnt to live without curiosity. I never ask myself to-day why people do things or leave them alone. Still, since we have come to the subject naturally, I suppose Cheng has some great object in the future at which he aims.”

  “Cheng is an idealist,” Mark said gravely. “To me he seems to reach out even too far, but one can’t tell these days—anything might happen.”

  “What I like about him,” Catherine confided, “is that underneath that calm, unemotional exterior he is desperately in earnest about life. He is deeply religious, he is wonderfully patriotic. All the world who have read his marvellous essay know that he is a great pacifist—and all the time he has, I believe, a really deep affection for that little Chinese girl, the great-great-granddaughter of the old Empress, whom some day he is to marry.”

  “Hard to think of his marrying anyone, isn’t it?” Mark observed.

  “I have never tried,” Catherine confessed. “The idea of that sort of thing in connection with him seems so utterly off the picture.”

  “Anyway, he has a mighty fine brain,” Mark declared. “Cheng is a great man. The only thing I’d be afraid of for him would be that he would expect too much out of life, that he wouldn’t be satisfied with what he got, that when his time comes to realise it he will find that life has cheated him.”

  “He has philosophy,” she meditated. “He has probably counted up very seriously the values fate has to distribute.”

  “We most of us get sold some time,” Mark concluded. “Fate’s all on my side to-night, though.”

  She smiled.

  “That is a very gallant speech.”

  “It’s a very truthful one.”

  A slim young man, pale and with features good enough but worn as though with anxiety or privation, approached their table and bowed to Catherine. She half rose to her feet but he waved her back.

  “Thank you, my cousin,” he said, “but those things are left behind for the moment. Will you present me to your companion?”

  “With pleasure,” she answered. “This is Mr. Mark Humberstone—the Grand Duke Alexander.”

  Mark rose to his feet. The two men shook hands. Alexander’s tone was courteous but a little cold.

  “Are you, too, a great discoverer of hidden forces, Mr. Humberstone?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid I rather live on my father’s reputation, sir,” Mark replied.

  “You work with my friend, Mr. Cheng, in Nice, I believe?”

  “I belong to the International Bureau,” he admitted.

  “An amazing association, I understand,” the Grand Duke said politely. “You will excuse me for a moment, sir.”

  He placed his knuckles upon the table and, leaning a little towards Catherine, began talking to her in Russian. As she listened the careless gaiety of a few minutes ago seemed to pass from her face. Once or twice she interjected remarks. Afterwards she sat quite still. When Alexander had finished he waited for a moment. She looked into his face and answered him in French.

  “Je n’oublierai pas ce que vous m’avez dit, mon cousin.”

  The Grand Duke lingered for a moment but Catherine had the air of one who had finished a conversation which had afforded but little pleasure. Her eyes were bright, she seemed to have drawn herself more upright in her place. He bent over her coldly proffered hand, raised it to his lips and turned away. Even as he went the orchestra struck up one of the popular tunes of the moment. Catherine’s face changed as though by magic. The scornful quiver had left her lips. She leaned towards her companion.

  “We shall dance—yes?” she asked.

  It was a gala dinner at the Sporting Club, and a great many of the habitués of the place had remarks to make about the good-looking young couple who danced so well and to whom the Grand Duke had been talking. Mark was well enough known on the Riviera. He had been a member of the polo team at Cannes, won races with his motor boats, and played some amazing rounds of golf at Mougins and Cagnes. He was only an occasional gambler but his stakes, when he did play, were heavy, and he had the reputation of being a multi-millionaire. Catherine, on the other hand, puzzled everybody. She was distinguished, she was beautiful, she danced superlatively well, and though she was a stranger to everybody el
se she was evidently well known to Alexander, who had finished dinner early and passed on now to the gambling rooms. It was a Russian General, very well known in the Principality, who, after listening to numberless queries with a somewhat cynical smile, set the general curiosity at rest.

  “The young man most of you know, I suppose,” he remarked. “He is the son of Humberstone, the great American inventor, a multi-millionaire, a friend of the mysterious Prince Cheng, and mixed up somehow or other in that curious International Bureau at Nice. The young lady I have never met in society, but she is a first cousin of Alexander’s, the Princess Catherine Oronoff. She occupies herself, I believe, at the Bureau in some sort of research work.”

  “A very interesting trio,” a great lady remarked, handing her fan to her cavalier and rising to dance, “but what I should like to know is—why was Alexander scolding his lovely cousin, and, what did the young man think about it all?”

  CHAPTER VII

  Table of Contents

  The Right Honourable Sir Walter Temperley, British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, was in an unusually hesitant mood. He sat at his accustomed desk in the library of his official residence in Grosvenor Square. His distinguished visitors who had just been ushered in were seated in the comfortable chairs close at hand usually allotted to callers of distinction. Nothing, so far, about the few words interchanged had been of a disturbing character, yet Temperley was conscious of a sense of strain. How was he to learn anything from these two men? The elder, Wang Kai-Hsiung, First Secretary of the Chinese Embassy to the Court of St. James’s, had the reputation of being the most inscrutable and the most silent amongst the diplomatists. This handsome, grave-looking young man who was his companion and whom he treated with so much ceremony had, notwithstanding his conventional attire, more the appearance of a Trappist monk than of the lighthearted, studious and brilliant scholar whom Temperley had known as his son’s friend at Oxford. He opened the interview, however, with a few courteous words of reminiscence.