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

by E. Phillips Oppenheim

  “They will bring you the aperitif of which you are so fond,” he said, “also cigarettes. Mine, I know, are too strong for you.”

  “They taste too much of opium,” Immelan remarked.

  Prince Shan’s eyes grew dreamy as he gazed through a little cloud of odorous smoke.

  “There is opium in them,” he admitted. “Believe me, they are very wonderful, but I agree with you that they are not for the ordinary person.”

  The soft-footed butler presented a silver tray, upon which reposed a glassful of amber liquid. Immelan took it, sipped it appreciatively, and lit a cigarette.

  “Your man, Prince,” he acknowledged, “mixes his vermouths wonderfully.”

  “I am glad that what he does meets with your approval,” was the courteous reply. “He came to me from one of your royal palaces. I simply told him that I wished my guests to have of the best.”

  “Yet you never touch this sort of drink yourself,” Immelan observed curiously.

  The Prince shook his head.

  “Sometimes I take wine,” he said. “That is generally at night. A few evenings ago, for instance,” he went on, with a reminiscent smile, “I drank Chateau Yquem, smoked Egyptian cigarettes, ate some muscatel grapes, and read ‘Pippa Passes.’ That was one of my banquets.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Immelan remarked thoughtfully, “you are far more western in thought than in habit. The temperance of the East is in your blood.”

  “I find that my manner of life keeps the brain clear,” Prince Shan said slowly. “I can see the truth sometimes when it is not very apparent. I saw the truth last night, Immelan, when I sent Sen Lu to die.”

  Immelan’s expression was indescribable. He sat with his mouth wide open. The hand which held his glass shook. He stared across the bowl of lilies to where his host was looking up through the smoke towards the ceiling.

  “Sen Lu was a traitor,” the latter went on, “a very foolish man who with one act of treachery wiped out the memory of a lifetime of devotion. In the end he told the truth, and now he has paid his debt.”

  “What do you mean?” Immelan demanded, in a voice which he attempted in vain to control. “How was Sen Lu a traitor?”

  “Sen Lu,” the Prince explained, “was in the pay of those who sought to know more of my business than I chose to tell—who sought, indeed, to anticipate my own judgment. When they gathered from him, and, alas! from my sweet but frail little friend Nita, that the chances were against my signing a certain covenant, they came to what, even now, seems to me a strange decision. They decided that I must die. There I fail wholly to follow the workings of your mind, Immelan. How was my death likely to serve your purpose?”

  Immelan was absolutely speechless. Three times he opened his lips, only to close them again. Some instinct seemed to tell him that his companion had more to say. He sat there as though mesmerised. Meanwhile, the Prince lit another cigarette.

  “A blunder, believe me, Immelan,” he continued thoughtfully. “Death will not lower over my path till my task is accomplished. I am young—many years younger than you, Immelan—and the greatest physicians marvel at my strength. Against the assassin’s knife or bullet I am secure. You have been brought up and lived, my terrified friend, in a country where religion remains a shell and a husk, without comfort to any man. It is not so with me, I live in the spirit as in the body, and my days will last until the sun leans down and lights me to the world where those dwell who have fulfilled their destiny.”

  Immelan drained the contents of the glass which his unsteady hand was holding. Then he rose to his feet. The veins on his forehead were standing out, his blue eyes were filled with rage.

  “Blast Sen Lu!” he muttered. “The man was a double traitor!”

  “He has atoned,” his companion said calmly. “He made his peace and he went to his death. It seems very fitting that he should have received the dagger which was meant for my heart. Now what about you, Oscar Immelan?”

  Immelan laughed harshly.

  “If Sen Lu told you that I was in this plot against your life, he lied!”

  The Prince inclined his head urbanely.

  “Such a man as Sen Lu goes seldom to his death with a lie upon his lips,” he said. “Yet I confess that I am puzzled. Why should you plan this thing, Immelan? You cannot know what is in my mind concerning your covenant. I have not yet refused to sign it.”

  “You have not refused to sign it,” Immelan replied, “but you will refuse.”

  “Indeed?” the Prince murmured.

  “You are even now trifling with the secrets confided to you,” Immelan went on. “You know very well that the woman who came to you last night is a spy whose whole time is spent in seeking to worm our secret from you.”

  “Your agents keep themselves well informed,” was the calm comment.

  “Yours still have the advantage of us,” Immelan answered bitterly. “Now listen to me. I have heard it said of you—I have heard that you claim yourself—that you have never told a falsehood. We have been allies. Answer me this question. Have you parted with any of our secrets?”

  “Not one,” the Prince assured him. “A certain lady visited this house last night, not, as you seem to think, at my invitation, but on her own initiative. She was not successful in her quest.”

  “She would not pay the price, eh?” Immelan sneered. “By the gods of your ancestors, Prince Shan, are there not women enough in the world for you without bartering your honour, and the great future of your country, for a blue-eyed jade of an Englishwoman?”

  The Prince sat slowly up. His appearance was ominous. His face had become set as marble; there was a look in his eyes like the flashing of a light upon black metal. He contemplated his visitor across the lilies.

  “A man so near to death, Immelan,” he enjoined, “might choose his words more carefully.”

  Immelan laughed scornfully.

  “I am not to be bullied,” he declared. “Your doors with their patent locks have no fears for me. When you walk abroad, you are followed by members of your household. When you come to my rooms, they attend you. I am not a prince, but I, too, have a care for my skin. Three of my secret service men never let me out of their sight. They are within call at this moment.”

  His host smiled.

  “This is very interesting,” he said, “but you should know me better, Immelan, than to imagine that mine are the clumsy methods of the dagger or the bullet. The man whom I will to die—drinks with me.”

  He pointed a long forefinger at the empty glass. Immelan gazed at it, and the sweat stood out upon his forehead.

  “My God!” he muttered. “There was a queer taste! I thought that it was aniseed!”

  “There was nothing in that glass,” the Prince declared, “which the greatest chemist who ever breathed could detect as poison, yet you will die, my friend Immelan, without any doubt. Shall I tell you how? Would you know in what manner the pains will come? No? But, my friend, you disappoint me! You showed so much courage an hour ago. Listen. Feel for a swelling just behind—Ah!”

  Immelan was already across the room. The Prince touched a bell, the doors were opened. Ghastly pale, his head swimming, the tortured man dashed out into the street. The Prince leaned back amongst his cushions, untied a straw-fastened packet of his long cigarettes, lit one, and closed his eyes.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  Table of Contents

  Nigel was just arriving at Dorminster House when Maggie returned from her ride. He assisted her to dismount and entered the house with her.

  “There is something here I should like to show you, Maggie,” he said, as he drew a dispatch from his pocket. “It was sent round to me half an hour ago by Chalmers, from the American Embassy.”

  “It’s about Gilbert Jesson!” Maggie exclaimed, holding out her hand for it.

  Nigel nodded.

  “There’s a note inside, and an enclosure,” he said. “You had better read both.”

  Maggie opened out the former:
/>   MY DEAR DORMINSTER,

  I am afraid there is rather bad news about Jesson. One of our regular line of airships, running from San Francisco to Vladivostok, has picked up a wireless which must have come from somewhere in the South of China. They kept it for a few days, worse luck, thinking it was only nonsense, as it was in code. Washington got hold of it, however, and cabled it to us last night. I enclose a copy, decoded.

  Sincerely yours,

  JERE CHALMERS.

  The copy was brief enough. Maggie felt her heart sink as she glanced through the few lines:

  Report dispatched London. Fear escape impossible. Good-by.

  JESSON.

  “Horrible!” Maggie exclaimed, with a shiver. “I thought he was in Russia.”

  “So did we all,” Nigel replied. “He must have come to the conclusion that the key to the riddle he was trying to solve was in China, and gone on there. Look here, Maggie,” he continued, after a moment’s hesitation, “do you think anything could be done for Jesson with Prince Shan?”

  Maggie was silent. They were standing in a shaded corner of the hall, but a fleck of sunshine shone in her hair. She was still a little out of breath with the exercise, her cheeks full of healthy colour, her eyes bright. She tapped her skirt with her riding whip. Nigel watched her a little uneasily.

  “Prince Shan is calling here this afternoon,” Maggie announced. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “What are you going to say to him?” Nigel asked bluntly.

  There was a short, tense silence. Even at the thought of the crisis which she knew to be so close at hand, Maggie felt herself unnerved and in dubious straits.

  “I do not know,” she said at last. “For one thing, I do not know what he wants.”

  “What he wants seems perfectly plain to me,” Nigel replied gravely. “He wants you.”

  Maggie made a desperate effort to regain the lightheartedness of a few weeks ago.

  “If you believe that,” she said, “your composure is most unflattering.”

  There was a ring at the front doorbell, and a familiar voice was heard outside. Maggie turned away to the staircase with a little sigh of relief.

  “Naida!” she exclaimed. “I remember now I asked her for a quarter past one instead of half-past. You must entertain her, Nigel. I’ll change into something quickly. And of course I’ll speak to Prince Shan. We mustn’t lose a minute about that. I’ll telephone from my room in a few minutes, Naida. Nigel will look after you.”

  Naida came down the hall, cool and exquisitely gowned in a creation of shimmering white. Nigel led her into the rarely used drawing-room and found a chair for her between the open window and the conservatory. At first they exchanged but few words. The sense of her near presence affected Nigel as nothing of the sort had ever done before. She for her part seemed quite content with a silence which had in it many of the essentials of eloquence.

  “If the history of these days is ever written by an irascible German historian,” Naida remarked at length, “he will probably declare that the destinies of the world have been affected during this last month by an outburst of primitivism. Do you know that I have written quite nice things to Paul about you English people? Honest things, of course, but still things which you helped me to discover. And Prince Shan, too. I think that when he rode here through the clouds, he believed in his heart that he was coming as a harbinger of woe.”

  “You really think, then, that the crisis is past?” Nigel asked.

  She nodded.

  “I am almost sure of it. Prince Shan returns to China within the course of the next few days.”

  “We have lived so long,” Nigel observed, “in dread of the unknown. I wonder whether we shall ever understand the exact nature of the danger with which we were faced.”

  “It depends upon Prince Shan,” she replied. “The terms were Immelan’s, but the method was his.”

  “Do you believe,” he asked a little abruptly, “that the attempt on Prince Shan’s life last night was made by Immelan?”

  There was a touch, perhaps, of her Muscovite ancestry in the cool indifference with which she considered the matter.

  “I should think it most likely,” she decided. “Prince Shan never changes his mind, and I believe that he has decided against Immelan’s scheme. Immelan’s only chance would be in Prince Shan’s successor.”

  “Why is China so necessary?” Nigel asked.

  She turned and smiled at her companion.

  “Alas!” she sighed, “we have reached an impasse. The great English diplomat asks too many questions of the simple Russian girl.”

  “It is unfortunate,” he replied, in the same vein, “because I feel like asking more.”

  “As, for example?”

  “Whether you would be content to live for the rest of your life in any other country except Russia.”

  “A woman is content to live anywhere, under certain circumstances,” she murmured.

  Karschoff, discreetly announced, entered the room with flamboyant ease.

  “It is well to be young!” he exclaimed, as he bent over Naida’s fingers. “You look, my far-away but much beloved cousin, as though you had slept peacefully through the night and spent the morning in this soft, sunlit air, with perhaps, if one might suggest such a thing, an hour at a Bond Street beauty parlour. Here am I with crow’s-feet under my eyes and ghosts walking by my side. Yet none the less,” he added, as the door opened and Maggie appeared, “looking forward to my luncheon and to hear all the news.”

  “There is no news,” Naida declared, as the butler announced the service of the meal. “We have reached the far end of the ways. The next disclosures, if ever they are made, will come from others. At luncheon we are going to talk of the English country, the seaside, the meadows, and the quiet places. The time arrives when I weary, weary, of the brazen ticking of the clock of fate.”

  “I shall tell you,” Nigel declared, “of a small country house I have in Devonshire. There are rough grounds stretching down to the sea and crawling up to the moors behind. My grandfather built it when he was Chancellor of England, or rather he added to an old farmhouse. He called it the House of Peace.”

  “My father built a house very much in the same spirit,” Naida told them. “He called it after an old Turkish inscription, engraven on the front of a villa in Stamboul—‘The House of Thought and Flowers.’”

  Maggie smiled across the table approvingly.

  “I like the conversation,” she said. “Naida and I are, after all, women and sentimentalists. We claim a respite, an armistice—call it what you will. Prince Karschoff, won’t you tell me of the most beautiful house you ever dwelt in?”

  “Always the house I am hoping to end my days in,” he answered. “But let me tell you about a villa I had in Cannes, fifteen years ago. People used to speak of it as one of the world’s treasures.”

  When the two men were seated alone over their coffee, Nigel passed Chalmers’ note and the enclosure across to his companion.

  “You remember I told you about Chalmers’ friend, Jesson, the secret service man who came over to us?” he said. “Chalmers has just sent me round this.”

  Karschoff nodded and studied the message through his great horn-rimmed eyeglass.

  “I thought that he was going to Russia for you,” he said.

  “So he did. He must have gone on from there.”

  “And the message comes from Southern China,” Prince Karschoff reflected.

  Nigel was deep in thought. China, Russia, Germany! Prince Shan in England, negotiating with Immelan! And behind, sinister, menacing, mysterious—Japan!

  “Supposing,” he propounded at last, “there really does exist a secret treaty between China and Japan?”

  “If there is,” Prince Karschoff observed, “one can easily understand what Immelan has been at. Prince Shan can command the whole of Asia. I know they are afraid of something of the sort in the States. An American who was in the club yesterday told us they had spent over
a hundred millions on their west coast fortifications in the last two years.”

  “One can understand, too, in that case,” Nigel continued, “why Japan left the League of Nations. That stunt of hers about being outside the sphere of possible misunderstandings never sounded honest.”

  “It was unfortunate,” Prince Karschoff said, “that America was dominated for those few months by an honest but impractical idealist. He had the germ of an idea, but he thrust it on the world before even his own country was ready for it. In time the nations would certainly have elaborated something more workable.”

  “You cannot keep a full-blooded man from clenching his fist if he’s insulted,” Nigel pointed out, “and nations march along the same lines as individuals. Its existence has never for a single moment weakened Germany’s hatred of England, and the stronger she grows, the more she flaunts its conditions. France guards her frontiers, night and day, with an army ten times larger than she is allowed. Russia has become the country of mysteries, with something up her sleeve, beyond a doubt, and there are cities in modern China into which no European dare penetrate. Japan quite frankly maintains an immense army, the United States is silently following suit—and God help us all if a war does come!”

  “You are right,” Karschoff assented gloomily. “The last glamour of romance has gone from fighting. There were remnants of it in the last war, especially in Palestine and Egypt and when we first overran Austria. To-day, science would settle the whole affair. The war would be won in the laboratory, the engine room and the workshop. I doubt whether any battleship could keep afloat for a week, and as to the fighting in the air, if a hundred airships were in action, I do not suppose that one of them would escape. Then they say that France has a gun which could carry a shell from Amiens to London, and more mysterious than all, China has something up her sleeve which no one has even a glimmering of.”