“I don’t care,” answered Hillyard savagely. “In this war why should two men on a road count at all? Let them go on, and nothing will happen.”
José Medina, who had been assuming the part of protector and adviser to his young English friend, had now the surprise of his life. He found himself suddenly relegated to the second place and by nothing but sheer force of character. Hillyard rested the point of his elbow on the earth and supported the barrel of his Colt upon his left forearm. He aimed carefully along the sights.
“Let them go on!” he said between his teeth. “I will give them until the last moment — until the darkness begins to hide them. But not a moment longer. I am not here, my friend, for my health. I am here because there is a war.”
“The little Marteen” was singularly unapparent at this moment. Here was just the ordinary appalling Englishman who had not the imagination to understand what a desperately heinous crime it would be to kill two of the Guardia Civil, who was simply going to do it the moment it became necessary, and would not lose one minute of his sleep until his dying day because he had done it. José Medina was completely at a loss as he looked into the grim indifferent face of his companion. The two horsemen were covered. The Colt would kill at more than five hundred yards, and it had no more to do than carry sixty. And still those two fools sat on their horses, and babbled to one another, and looked out to sea.
“What am I to do with this loco Inglés?” José Medina speculated, wringing his hands in an agony of apprehension. He had no share in those memories which at this moment invaded Martin Hillyard, and touched every fibre of his soul. Martin Hillyard, though his eye never left the sights of his Colt nor his mind wavered from his purpose, was with a subordinate consciousness stealing in the dark night up the footpath between the big, leafy trees over the rustic railway bridge to the summit of the hill. He was tramping once more through lanes, between fields, and stood again upon a hillock of Peckham Rye, and saw the morning break in beauty and in wonder over London. The vision gained from the foolish and romantic days of his boyhood, steadied his finger upon the trigger after all these years.
Then to José’s infinite relief the two horsemen rode on. The long, black, shining barrel of the Colt followed them as they dwindled on the road. They turned a corner, and as Hillyard replaced his pistol in his pocket, José Medina rolled over on his back, and clapped his hands to his face.
“You might have missed,” he gasped. “One of them at all events.”
Hillyard turned to him with a grin. The savage was not yet exorcised.
“Why?” he asked. “Why should I have missed one of them? It was my business not to.”
José Medina flung up his hands.
“I will not argue with you. We are not made of the same earth.”
Hillyard’s face changed to gentleness.
“Pretty nearly, my friend,” he said, and he laid a hand on José Medina’s shoulder. “For we are good friends — such good friends that I do not scruple to drag you into the same perils as myself.”
Hillyard had not wasted his time during those three years when he loafed and worked about the quays of Southern Spain. He touched the right chord now with an unerring skill. Hillyard might be the mad Englishman, the loco Inglés! But to be reckoned by one of them as one of them — here was an insidious flattery which no one of José Medina’s upbringing could possibly resist.
At nightfall they drove down across the road on to the beach. A rowing-boat was waiting, and Medina’s manager from Alicante beside the boat on the sand. The cases were quickly transferred from the car to the boat.
“We will take charge of the car,” said José to his manager, and he stepped into the boat, and sat down beside Hillyard. “This is my adventure. I see it through to the end,” he explained.
A mile away the felucca picked them up. Hillyard rolled himself up in a rug in the bows of the boat. He looked up to the stars tramping the sky above his head.
“And gentlemen in England now a-bed.”
Drowsily he muttered the immemorial line, and turning on his side slept as only the tired men who know they have done their work can sleep. He was roused in broad daylight. The felucca was lying motionless upon the water; no land was anywhere in sight; but above the felucca towered the tall side of the steam yacht Dragonfly.
Fairbairn was waiting at the head of the ladder. The cases were carried into the saloon and opened. The top cases were full of documents and letters, some private, most of them political.
“These are for the pundits,” said Hillyard. He put them back again, and turned to the last case. In them were a number of small glass tubes, neatly packed in cardboard boxes with compartments lined with cotton wool.
“This is our affair, Fairbairn,” he said. He took one out, and a look of perplexity crept over his face. The tube was empty. He tried another and another, and then another; every one of the tubes was empty.
“Now what in the world do you make of that?” he asked.
The tubes had yet to be filled and there was no hint of what they were to be filled with.
“What I am wondering about is why they troubled to send the tubes at all?” said Fairbairn slowly. “There’s some reason, of course, something perhaps in the make of the glass.”
He held one of the tubes up to the light. There was nothing to distinguish it from any one of the tubes in which small tabloids are sold by chemists.
Hillyard got out of his bureau the letter in which these tubes were mentioned.
“‘They have been successful in France,’” he said, quoting from the letter. “The scientists may be able to make something of them in Paris. This letter and the tubes together may give a clue. I think that I had better take one of the boxes to Paris.”
“Yes,” said Fairbairn gloomily. “But — —” and he shrugged his shoulders.
“But it’s one of the ninety per cent, which go wrong, eh?” Hillyard finished the sentence with bitterness. Disappointment was heavy upon both men. Hillyard, too, was tired by the tension of these last sleepless days. He had not understood how much he had counted upon success.
“Yes, it’s damnably disheartening,” he cried. “I thought these tubes might lead us pretty straight to B45.”
“B45!”
The exclamation came from José Medina, who was leaning against the doorpost of the saloon, half in the room, half out on the sunlit deck. He had placed himself tactfully aloof. The examination of the cases was none of his business. Now, however, his face lit up.
“B45.” He shut the door and took a seat at the table. “I can tell you about B45.”
CHAPTER XVIII
The Uses of Science
IT WAS HILLYARD’S creed that chance will serve a man very capably, if he is equipped to take advantage of its help; and here was an instance. The preparation had begun on the morning when Hillyard took the Dragonfly into the harbour of Palma. Chance had offered her assistance some months later in an hotel at Madrid; as Medina was now to explain.
“The day after you left Mallorca,” said José Medina, “it was known all over Palma that you had come to visit me.”
“Of course,” answered Martin.
“I was in consequence approached almost immediately, by the other side.”
“I expected that. It was only natural.”
“There is a young lady in Madrid,” continued José Medina.
“Carolina Muller?”
“No.”
“Rosa Hahn, then.”
“Yes,” said José Medina.
José rose and unlocking a drawer in his bureau took out from it a sheaf of photographs. He selected one and handed it with a smile to Hillyard. It was the portrait of a good-looking girl, tall, dark, and intelligent, but heavy about the feet, dressed in Moorish robes, and extended on a divan in Oriental indolence against a scene cloth which outdid the luxuries of Llalla Rookh.
“That’s the lady, I think.”
Medina gazed at the picture with delight. He touched his l
ips with his fingers, and threw a kiss to it. His sharp, sallow face suddenly flowered into smiles.
“Yes. What a woman! She has real intelligence,” he exclaimed fervently.
José Medina was in the habit of losing his heart and keeping his head a good many times in an ordinary year.
“It’s an extraordinary thing,” Martin Hillyard remarked, “that however intelligent they are, not one of these young ladies can resist the temptation to have her portrait taken in Moorish dress at the photographer’s in the Alhambra.”
José Medina saw nothing at all grotesque or ridiculous in this particular foible.
“They make such charming pictures,” he cried.
“And it is very useful for us, too,” remarked Hillyard. “The photographer is a friend of mine.”
José was still gazing at the photograph.
“Such a brain, my friend! She never told a story the second time differently, however emotional the moment. She never gave away a secret.”
“She probably didn’t know any,” said Hillyard.
But José would not hear of such a reason.
“Oh, yes! She has great influence. She knows people in Berlin — great people. She is their friend, and I cannot wonder. What an intelligence!”
Martin Hillyard laughed.
“She seems to have fairly put it over you at any rate,” he said. He was not alarmed at José Medina’s fervour. For he knew that remarkable man’s capacity for holding his tongue even in the wildest moments of his temporary passions. But he took the photograph away from Medina and locked it up again. The rapturous reminiscences of Rosa Hahn’s intelligence checked the flow of that story which was to lead him to B45.
“So you know about her?” José said with an envious eye upon the locked drawer.
“A little,” said Martin Hillyard.
Rosa Hahn was a clerk in the office of the Hamburg-Amerika Line before the war, and in the Spanish Department. She was sent to Spain in the last days of July, 1914, upon Government work, and at a considerable salary, which she enjoyed. She seemed indeed to have done little else, and Berlin, after a year, began to complain. Berlin had a lower opinion of both her social position and her brains than José Medina had formed. Berlin needed results, and failing to obtain them, proceeded to hint more and more definitely that Rosa had better return to her clerk’s stool in Hamburg. Rosa, however, had been intelligent enough to make friends with one or two powerful Germans in Spain; and they pleaded for her with this much success. She was given another three months within which period she must really do something to justify her salary. So much Martin Hillyard already knew; he learnt now that José Medina had provided the great opportunity. To snatch him with his two hundred motor feluccas and his eighteen thousand men from the English — here was something really worth doing.
“What beats me,” said Hillyard, “is why they didn’t try to get at you before.”
“They didn’t,” said Medina.
Rosa, it seemed, used the argument which is generally sound; that the old and simple tricks are the tricks which win. She discovered the hotel at which José Medina stayed in Madrid, and having discovered it she went to stay there herself. She took pains to become friendly with the manager and his staff, and by professing curiosity and interest in the famous personage, she made sure not only that she would have fore-warning of his arrival, but that José Medina himself would hear of a charming young lady to whom he appealed as a hero of romance. She knew José to be of a coming-on disposition — and the rest seemed easy. Only, she had not guarded against the workings of Chance.
The hotel was the Hotel de Napoli, not one of the modern palaces of cement and steel girders, built close to the Prado, but an old house near the Puerto del Sol, a place of lath and plaster walls and thin doors; so that you must not raise your voice unless you wish your affairs to become public property. To this house José Medina came as he had many times come before, and Chance willed that he should occupy the next room to that occupied by Rosa Hahn. It was the merest accident. It was the merest accident, too, that José Medina whilst he was unpacking his bag heard his name pronounced in the next room. José Medina, with all his qualities, was of the peasant class with much of the peasant mind. He was inquisitive, and he was suspicious. Let it be said in his defence that he had enemies enough ready to pull him down, not only, as we have seen, amongst his rivals on the coast, but here, amongst the Government officials of Madrid. It cost him a pretty penny annually to keep his balance on the tight-rope, as it was. He stepped noiselessly over to the door and listened. The voices were speaking in Spanish, one a woman’s voice with a guttural accent.
“Rosa Hahn,” said Hillyard as the story was told to him in the cabin of the yacht.
“The other a man’s voice. But again it was a foreign voice, not a Spaniard’s. But I could not distinguish the accent.”
“Greek, do you think?” asked Hillyard. “There is a Levantine Greek high up in the councils of the Germans.”
José Medina, however, did not know.
“Here were two foreigners talking about me, and fortunately in Spanish. I was to arrive immediately; Rosa was to make my acquaintance. What my relations were with this man, Hillyard — yes, you came into the conversation, my friend, too — I was quickly to be persuaded to tell. Oh — you have a saying — everything in your melon patch was lovely.”
“Not for nothing has the American tourist come to Spain,” Hillyard murmured.
“Then their voices dropped a little, and your B45 was mentioned — once or twice. And a name in connection with B45 once or twice. I did not understand what it was all about.”
“But you remember the name!” Fairbairn exclaimed eagerly.
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, what was it?”
It was again Fairbairn who spoke. Hillyard had not moved, nor did he even look up.
“It was Mario Escobar,” said José Medina; and as he spoke he knew that the utterance of the name awakened no surprise in Martin Hillyard. Hillyard filled his pipe from the tobacco tin, and lighted it before he spoke.
“Do you know anything of this Mario Escobar?” he asked, “you who know every one?”
José Medina shrugged his shoulders, and threw up his hands.
“There was some years ago a Mario Escobar at Alicante,” and José Medina saw Hillyard’s eyes open and fix themselves upon him with an unblinking steadiness. Just so José Medina imagined might some savage animal in a jungle survey the man who had stumbled upon his lair.
“That Mario Escobar, a penniless, shameless person, was in business with a German, the German Vice-Consul. He went from Alicante to London.”
“Thank you,” said Hillyard. He rose from his chair and went to the window. But he saw nothing of the deck outside, or the sea beyond. He saw a man at a supper party in London a year before the war began, betraying himself by foolish insistent questions uttered in fear lest his close intimacy with Germans in Alicante should be known.
“I have no doubt that Mario Escobar came definitely to England, long before the war, to spy,” said Hillyard gravely. He returned to the table, and took up again one of the empty glass tubes.
“I wonder what he was to do with these.”
José Medina had opened the door of the saloon once more. A beam of sunlight shot through the doorway, and enveloped Hillyard’s arm and hand. The tiny slim phial glittered like silver; and to all of them in the cabin it became a sinister engine of destruction.
“That, as you say, is your affair. I must go,” said José, and he shook hands with Hillyard and Fairbairn, and went out on to the deck. “Hasta luego!”
“Hasta ahora!” returned Hillyard; and José Medina walked down the steps of the ladder to his felucca. The blue sea widened between the two vessels; and in a week, Hillyard descended from a train on to the platform of the Quai D’Orsay station in Paris. He had the tubes in his luggage, and one box of them he took that morning to Commandant Marnier at his office on the left bank of the riv
er with the letter which gave warning of their arrival.
“You see what the letter says,” Hillyard explained. “These tubes have been very successful in France.”
Marnier nodded his head:
“If you will leave them with me, I will show them to our chemists, and perhaps, in a few days, I will have news for you.”
For a week Hillyard took his ease in Paris and was glad of the rest in the midst of those strenuous days. He received one morning at his hotel, a batch of letters, many of which had been written months before. But two were of recent date. Henry Luttrell wrote to him:
“My battalion did splendidly and our debt to old Oakley is great. There is only a handful of us left and we are withdrawn, of course, from the lines. By some miracle I escaped without a hurt. Everybody has been very generous, making it up to us for our bad times. The Corps Commander came and threw bouquets in person, and we hear that D.H. himself is going out of his way to come and inspect us. I go home on leave in a fortnight and hope to come back in command of the battalion. Perhaps we may meet in London. Let me hear if that is possible.”
The second letter had been sent from Rackham Park, and in it Millie Splay wrote:
“We have not heard from you for years. Will you be in England this August? We are trying to gather again our old Goodwood party. Both Dennis Brown and Harold Jupp will be home on leave. There will be no Goodwood of course, but there is a meeting at Gatwick which is easily reached from here. Do come if you can and bring your friend with you, if he is in London and has nothing better to do. We have all been reading about him in the papers, and Chichester is very proud of belonging to the same mess, and says what a wonderful thing it must be to be able to get into the papers like that, without trying to.”
Hillyard could see the smile upon Lady Splay’s face as she wrote that sentence. Hillyard laughed as he read it but it was less in amusement as from pleasure at the particular information which this sentence contained. Harry Luttrell had clearly won a special distinction in the hard fighting at Thiepval. There was not a word in Harry’s letter to suggest it. There would not be. All his pride and joy would be engrossed by the great fact that his battalion had increased its good name.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 549