by Talbot Mundy
“Chak-sam,” Grim answered,
“‘Plane, of course?”
“If you can manage it. For God’s sake, Mac, get word to them at Delhi not to tie us up with red tape. Tell ’em anyone may have the credit. What we want is leave to cut loose and behave like crazy men.”
“I’ll do my best. But just how crazy?”
“From the hour I land in India, I’m Dorje! His technique is to be mysterious and let no one see him. I’ll force his hand or bust. You fellows game?”
We nodded. “Maybe I look meek, but I’m a tough guy,” said the babu. “Was in jail in U.S.A. and know all about bloody murder. Nobody can scare me, except emancipated wife.”
“And, Mac, will you make sure Baltis gets to India?”
“I will. Who wants her here!”
That evening McGowan brought us secret news of the Italian disaster — the first of three terrific ones in three days — the explosion of the arsenal near Genoa that killed a thousand men. The earthquake made it easy for the censors to exclude it from the news; and when it did leak out it was blamed on the anti-Fascisti, seventeen of whom were hanged and others sent to life imprisonment. He also told us that a big ‘plane would be ready first thing in the morning, for India, via Baghdad.
CHAPTER 27. “Deify me, and I bu’st. But I bu’st you also!”
Grim was jubilant.
“Can you stay awake?” he asked us. We had had four hours’ sleep on cots and sofas in McGowan’s apartment. “We can sleep in the ‘plane,” he suggested. “There’ll be nothing else to do. There’ll be another big one tuned up and waiting for us in Baghdad. It’s a rotten trip. Nothing to do but bump the bumps and hear the engines sing until we get to Delhi. Listen to this.”
He began to read us excerpts from a pile of papers in a box marked secret that McGowan had left with him. They were decoded cablegrams received during the past twenty-four hours and they provided the first real glimpse that any of us except Grim had into McGowan’s actual importance in the secret service network. There are probably not ten men in the whole world, foreign editors of newspapers included, who are kept so accurately posted as McGowan as to the details of subversive events. There was hardly a sentence from any cablegram that could have been published without causing a panic somewhere.
Unemployment and increasing discontent in England, Germany, the United States, Belgium, Spain, Austria, Portugal, Scandinavia, Australia, South Africa — the list was endless.
“Deify me and I bu’st!” observed Chullunder Ghose. “But I bu’st you also! Verb sap. Easiest way to dispose of inconvenient phenomena is to call same frauds or miracles. Diabolize or deify. It is true that Asia looks for coming of Lord Maitreya and new dispensation. Has been looking for a long time. Hope deferred maketh the heart grow more and more inclined to listen to hot-air salesman. Am same. Frequently have contemplated going into the Maitreya business — was prevented by a too keen sense of humor. Cannot laugh at self and at same time be a super-Jupiter. Am Munro-ish also like U.S.A. — nervous of competition. What succeeds by saying one thing can be house-of-cardishly upset by someone saying something else. As unimportant babu, slander is my best advertisement. But as King of the World I can tolerate neither truth nor lies nor competition. Am intolerable. Prick me and I blow up!”
“How can you prick a man you can’t find?” Jeff objected.
“Dorje’s strength consists in being undiscoverable. His agents all seem to be pretty futile people, and they don’t know where he is. Perhaps Baltis has seen him; but have any of the others? Probably ninety per cent of ’em don’t even know they are Dorje’s men.”
“Exactly,” said Grim. “That’s how he has got away with it and how we catch him. If we don’t, he has the world whipped, because he is doing what every conqueror has always done — playing on the world’s ignorance and jealousy, and using propaganda of all three kinds, secret, political and religious, backed up by drastic violence. Every conqueror has had something new to sell, and Dorje has gone them all one better, this being an age of science. Dorje has discovered something they’ve known in Tibet for centuries: how to send out thought-waves so that other people get them. Thought wave-lengths are like radio wave-lengths, only different in degree and impulse. This wave-length reaches one kind of person — that, another. Very few guess what is happening to them. So he needs hardly any organization; he makes use of other people’s.
“For instance, in Italy he can stir the anti-Fascist element. In France, the Communist. In Russia, the anti-Communist. In England, the unemployed. In India, any and every one of a dozen political and a hundred religious factions — each against the other, and the lot against the British. In China, Communist against Nationalist. There isn’t a country in the world he can’t reach.”
I objected. “There can’t be force enough in one man’s brain to send out waves to all the people in the world. It needs horsepower, for instance, to send out radio.”
“But,” Grim answered, “if the energy is there already and all Dorje has to do is use it, what then? He doesn’t have to create it. Nobody creates energy. A machine, or a gun, or a brain, or a human body is only a rather clumsy means of using the same energy that turns the world around. A so-called dynamic man is merely one adjusted by temperament or training to a certain sort of thought-wave, or energy-wave, or whatever you like to call it. He responds to and distributes that particular type of energy. That is what Dorje understands. And what I don’t doubt that he also understands is what Chullunder Ghose just hinted at:
“He can’t stand competition — mustn’t tolerate it for a moment.”
“You?” I asked him. “Do you mean that? Are you going to compete?”
He nodded. “Force him out into the open. Why find Dorje? Why not make him come and find me?”
“He will send his thugs instead, with a bottle of ‘death’s breath,’” I suggested.
“Yes,” he said, “we’ll have to take tall chances.”
“Same are like tall women,” said Chullunder Ghose. “They look impressive but are not so deadly as the short ones. You should see my wife — height four feet seven, but emancipated — very.”
Then McGowan came, with news of Baltis. “All O.K. She’ll arrive in Delhi shortly after you chaps. Dammit, I feel sorry for her. She perfectly understands she’s being imshied off to India to serve as bait. She might commit suicide.”
“Not she,” Grim answered. “Everybody has faith in something. Hers is in reincarnation. She honestly believes she was the Queen of Sheba, and Anne Boleyn, and all the rest of ’em. That’s the crazy side of her religion. The sane side is, she’ll endure anything rather than kill herself, because that would cause her to reincarnate as a foredoomed failure. No. She’d kill Dorje or me. But herself? I think not.”
CHAPTER 28. “In indelible ink?”
Every tourist in the world knows what happened. While we were speeding toward Delhi in a ‘plane provided for us by the Royal Air Force, McGowan and his staff were sending cablegrams in code to London giving a detailed explanation of Dorje’s cipher, and London was distributing the information to all the governments of the civilized world through the embassies and legations, along with a careful description of Dorje’s “thunderbolts” and the glass flasks containing his “death’s breath.”
Consequently tourists were exasperated by the questions they were forced to answer at every frontier they crossed, and by the minute inspection of their baggage. Droves of them were detained for special enquiries and were less annoyed by that than by the evasiveness and apparent indifference of their own ambassadors and consuls to whom they complained.
Like most emergency precautions, those were probably overdone. However, numbers of Dorje’s thunderbolts were found in baggage that looked innocent, and numbers of probably innocent people were hard put to it to explain how, when and where the things were hidden among their belongings. Some of those are still in prison and extremely likely to remain there for a long time, along with the guilty, of
whom many had unenviable records and were consequently easy to convict.
But those intense and annoying precautions, though they undoubtedly reduced disaster to a minimum, did not prevent the Hull, the Essen and the Angora explosions that caused so much havoc, and the latter of which, by destroying all reserves of ammunition, prevented the Turkish army from annihilating the invading Kurds. There were also serious disasters caused by the examination of the captured thunderbolts; incautious officials turned the plugs in the thread at the end, with the result that fires were started and electric light plants put out of commission along with trolley systems, telephones and factories that used electric current. Governments were unanimous in keeping silence about Dorje. For one thing, there was no evidence against him — that is to say, no legal evidence, because the thunderbolts destroyed themselves and left no trace. It might have been much wiser to tell the truth and so unite all factions in one indignant and alert defence against a common foe; but it seemed at the moment more convenient to all the governments to blame their pet domestic adversaries. So those arrested were accused, according to the country in which they happened to be at the moment, as Communists, “Reds”, Anarchists, Fascists, anti-Fascists, Monarchists, Republicans, Carlists, Semites, anti-Semites, revolutionaries pure and simple, counter-revolutionaries, Socialists or anti-socialists as the case might be. In more than one country the Pope was accused of conspiring to conquer the world by force of arms and even nunneries were searched for hidden stores of arms and ammunition.
In India there were nearly as many explanations as there are factions. Gandhi was an obvious suggestion; in prison though he was, it was simple to associate him and his followers with the awful affair at Cawnpore, where the arsenal exploded on the day we landed and a quarter of the city, along with thousands of men, women and children, was obliterated. But the Hindus blamed it on the Moslem fanatics; the Moslems blamed it on the Hindu Nationalists; and the Sikhs blamed both or either; while a number of noisy agitators of the opportunist type accused the British-Indian Government, asserting that the explosion had been deliberately caused, to provide an excuse for drastic military measures. And incredible though that was, thousands of ignorant people believed it, and not only in India; it crept into print in a number of countries.
On the other hand, there was a saner, less sensational report that the explosion had been caused by agents of the Afridis who were then invading the Peshawar district on the North-West frontier and who were too well armed, and too well informed and organized not to be at least suspected of collaboration with powerful interests in India itself.
Delhi — or at least that part of it where the new great Government buildings stand and the official nerves of India meet in one imposing but too vulnerable ganglion — was in a state of tension such as even India had not produced since the days of the Mutiny. The Intelligence Department, normally the best informed and most efficient in the world, was as overloaded as a switch-board on the New York Stock Exchange when millions of shares are dumped on to a slumping market. The office into which we were led by a uniformed guide was as quiet as a morgue — too quiet. There were too many sentries. Officers walked much too calmly through the waiting-room and down the corridors, betraying tension by an overdone restraint. And when a voice fell on the silence it was as startling as a pistol shot in church.
We were kept waiting forty minutes before we were shown into the office of a general who was glad to see Grim but was not so cordial toward Chullunder Ghose.
“I have had dealings with you,” he remarked. “You are on my black book.”
“In indelible ink?” the babu asked him, and the general nodded.
“Then please tear out the entire page, general sahib. My Akashic record is already bad enough without another one in this world also. Besides, I have credentials — new ones, uncontaminated yet.”
Grim gave the general a letter from McGowan in which the babu was emphatically praised and recommended. The general read it, scowled and refused to yield:
“I don’t care. I refuse to take him into confidence. He has a bad record and has been in prison three times to my knowledge.”
“On the other hand,” said Grim, “I understand him and he understands me.”
“Do you think he has reformed?” asked the general.
Chullunder Ghose gulped. “Never! Am not so contemptible! Reformers and reformed are all dishonest scoundrels. The rest are honest scoundrels, of whom self am Admirable Crichton. You put a reformer or a reformed person in your job, and see how soon Dorje, for instance, will abolish the job altogether! Respectability? I don’t give a damn for it! Am last equationist. That is to say, appearances may go to the devil unless they serve my purpose; and the only problem that concerns me is, what do you or I intend to do about it? Life is a personal business. I am personally pleased to work for Jimmy Jimgrim sahib against Dorje; but for you I would not work on any terms whatever. If you feel about me as I do about you, we will both of us go to the devil; but I think the devil would receive me pleasantly, whereas your brass hat and your shoddy morals would annoy him. That is my opinion, and if I were a lawyer I would charge you money for it.”
“You may leave the room,” said the general, and I saw a flicker in the wrinkles at the corner of Grim’s eye. Chullunder Ghose went, waddling out importantly, and when the door had closed behind him the general continued, smiling: “That is the worst of that man. One of the best we ever had in some ways, but incorrigibly impudent. I can’t have dealings with him. If you care to trust him, you must do so at your own risk and on your own responsibility.”
“I think it’s just a question of understanding him,” Grim answered. “He’s a rare bird. He would ten times over rather die than let a man down.”
“Well, you manage him. As a matter of fact, Grim, if the situation weren’t so serious I should have to dispense with you and Ramsden. I can’t employ you. I can’t put you on the pay roll.”
“Do you mean you won’t recognize me?”
“Officially, no. Personally you and I have been friends since the day we first met. If you go after Dorje I can’t protect you or even promise to back you up in any way whatever. You must act in your private capacity with no more than my personal encouragement and good will.”
“Suits me,” said Grim. “Do you know where Dorje is?”
“Nobody knows.”
“If he were in Delhi you would hear of it, of course?”
“Within the hour, most likely. Within the day, at any rate.”
“If his presence in Delhi were reported to you, would you dare not to arrest him?”
“I can dare anything. But what’s the idea?”
“I am Dorje.”
The general stared, leaned back and drummed his fingers on the desk.
“There is no other possible way to uncover him,” said Grim.
“His very loose organization has got a bit out of hand and gone off half- cocked before he was ready. It’s a cinch he’s lying low and covering his tracks; he won’t move a finger to protect the fools who made the big mistake.”
“Do you suspect where he is?” asked the general.
“Probably in Chinese Turkestan. Perhaps in Tibet.”
“Then how can he possibly know what has been happening during the past ten-twenty days? I can swear he has not used wireless; we’d have caught that in a minute. There’s a single wire to Lhasa; I have a record of every message, both ways, since the wire was first installed. The same goes for the wire to Ladakh. Of course, the Chinese have a wire of their own from somewhere in Turkestan to Peking, but it takes about a week to get a message through and it has to be transmitted so many times that it arrives all garbled. Do you suppose the Russians have run a wire that we don’t know of, over the Pamirs?”
“No,” Grim answered. “Dorje is as much a problem to the Russians as to all the rest of us. Dorje is using thought-waves, of a scientifically determined wave-length, to send code numbers to individuals all over the world who hav
e been trained to get them. We have a book they use to interpret the numbers.”
“Yes,” said the general, “McGowan rushed a photostatic copy to me, in the ‘plane that brought you.”
“There must be another book,” said Grim, “containing other numbers and another set of words — phrases — sentences, that someone — very likely only one man, or a woman — uses to send messages to Dorje. He would not be likely to entrust that to more than one or two people, even if he could find more than one or two people in the world who could be trained and trusted. Otherwise, they might start sending messages to one another. There is some one person, somewhere, who can get the world news — probably it’s someone in a foreign office, or at any rate a government department — someone high up — who is sending code — thought-messages to Dorje. I believe that code book and that person are in India.”
“Why?”
“Several reasons. It would be easier to teach an Indian to work the trick. In a certain degree the Indians are used to it; it would only need developing and training. Again: Dorje has not been getting all the news.”
“What makes you think so?”
“His message that we caught in Egypt, ordering his agents to discontinue action and wait for orders. A ruthless devil such as Dorje must be, in receipt of information that his agents had produced major disasters in a dozen countries, would be likely to order them all to cut loose and wreak general havoc. Why not? So it looks as if his information man is hampered by the censorship. Isn’t the censorship screwed tighter here than anywhere?”
“The thread might break if we took one more turn at it!”
“I’m guessing, but I think that information man is probably a rather high official here in Delhi — someone who had access not so long ago to all the bulletins, but who somehow or other no longer has it. If so, you can find him by a process of elimination. However, don’t move too fast. Give him time to get word through to Dorje that there’s someone here in Delhi masquerading as himself.”