"Barlow," he directed, speaking over the long-distance phone to the operative in New York, "the Department of Justice has just reported that Doctor Albert is in receipt of a doc.u.ment of some kind--probably a letter of instruction from Berlin--which it is vital that we have at once. Our information is that the message is written on a slip of oiled paper carried inside a dummy lead pencil. It"s possible that the doctor has destroyed it, but it isn"t probable. Can you get it?"
"How far am I allowed to go?" inquired Gene, hoping for permission to stage a kidnaping of the German attache, but fully expecting these instructions which followed--orders that he was to do nothing that would cause an open breach, nothing for which Doctor Albert could demand reparation or even an apology.
"In other words," Barlow said to himself, as he hung up the phone, "I"m to accomplish the impossible, blindfolded and with my hands tied. Wonder whether Paula would have a hunch--"
Paula was Barlow"s sweetheart, a pretty little brunette who earned a very good salary as private secretary to one of the leading lights of Wall Street--which accounted for the fact that the operative had learned to rely upon her quick flashes of intuitive judgment for help in a number of situations which had required tact as well as action. They were to be married whenever Gene"s professional activities subsided sufficiently to allow him to remain home at least one night a month, but, meanwhile, Paula maintained that she would as soon be the wife of an African explorer--"Because at least I would know that he wouldn"t be back for six months, while I haven"t any idea whether you"ll be out of town two days or two years."
After they had talked the Albert matter over from all angles, Paula inquired, "Where would your friend with the saber scar be likely to carry the paper?"
"Either in his pocket or in the black bag that he invariably has with him."
"Hum!" she mused, "if it"s in his pocket I don"t see that there is anything you can do, short of knocking him down and taking it away from him, and that"s barred by the rules of the game. But if it is in the mysterious black bag.... Is the doctor in town now?"
"Yes, he"s at the Astor, probably for two or three days. I left Dwyer and French on guard there while I, presumably, s.n.a.t.c.hed a little sleep.
But I"d rather have your advice than any amount of rest."
"Thanks," was the girl"s only comment, for her mind was busy with the problem. "There"s apparently no time to lose, so I"ll inform the office the first thing in the morning that I won"t be down, meet you in front of the Astor, and we"ll see what happens. Just let me stick with you, inconspicuously, and I think that I can guarantee at least an opportunity to lift the bag without giving the German a chance to raise a row."
Thus it was that, early the next day, Gene Barlow was joined by a distinctly personable young woman who, after a moment"s conversation, strolled up and down Broadway in front of the hotel.
Some twenty minutes later a man whose face had been disfigured by a saber slash received at Heidelberg came down the steps and asked for a taxi. But Barlow, acting under directions from Paula, had seen that there were no taxis to be had. A flash of his badge and some coin of the realm had fixed that. So Dr. Heinrich Albert, of the German emba.s.sy, was forced to take a plebeian surface car--as Paula had intended that he should. The Secret Service operative and his pretty companion boarded the same car a block farther down, two other government agents having held it sufficiently long at Forty-fourth Street to permit of this move.
Worming their way through the crowd when their prey changed to the Sixth Avenue Elevated, Gene and Paula soon reached points of vantage on either side of the German, who carried his black bag tightly grasped in his right hand, and the trio kept this formation until they reached Fiftieth Street, when the girl apparently started to make her way toward the door. Something caused her to stumble, however, and she pitched forward right into the arms of the German, who by that time had secured a seat and had placed his bag beside him, still guarding it with a protecting arm.
Before the foreigner had time to gather his wits, he found himself with a pretty girl literally in his lap--a girl who was manifestly a lady and who blushed to the tips of her ears as she apologized for her awkwardness. Even if the German had been a woman-hater there would have been nothing for him to do but to a.s.sist her to her feet, and that, necessarily, required the use of both hands. As it happened, Doctor Albert was distinctly susceptible to feminine charms, and there was something about this girl"s smile which was friendly, though embarra.s.sed.
So he spent longer than was strictly essential in helping her to the door--she appeared to have turned her ankle--and then returned to his seat only to find that his portfolio was missing!
Recriminations and threats were useless. A score of people had left the car and, as the guard heartlessly refused to stop the train before the next station, there was naturally not a trace of the girl or the man who had accompanied her. By that time, in fact, Barlow and Paula had slipped into the shelter of a neighboring hotel lobby and were busy inspecting the contents of Doctor Albert"s precious brief case.
"Even if there"s nothing in it," laughed the girl, "we"ve had the satisfaction of scaring him to death."
Gene said nothing, but pawed through the papers in frantic haste.
"A slip of oiled paper," he muttered. "By the Lord Harry! here it is!"
and he produced a pencil which his trained fingers told him was lighter than it should be. With a wrench he broke off the metal tip that held the eraser, and from within the wooden spindle removed a tightly wrapped roll of very thin, almost transparent paper, covered with unintelligible lettering.
"What"s on it?" demanded Paula.
"I"ll never tell you," was Barlow"s reply. "It would take a better man than I am to decipher this," and he read off:
"I i i t f b b t t x o...."
"Code?" interrupted the girl.
"Sure it is--and apparently a peach." The next moment he had slipped the paper carefully into an inside pocket, crammed the rest of the papers back into the brief case, and was disappearing into a phone booth.
"Better get down to work, dear," he called over his shoulder. "I"m going to report to the office here and then take this stuff down to Washington!" And that was the last that Paula saw of him for a week.
Six hours later Barlow entered the chief"s office in the Treasury Department and reported that he had secured the code message.
"So New York phoned," was the only comment from the man who directed the destinies of the Secret Service. "Take it right up to the Navy Department and turn it over to Thurber, the librarian. He"ll be able to read it, if anybody can."
Thurber, Gene knew, was the man who was recognizedly the leading authority on military codes and ciphers in the United States, the man who had made a hobby as well as a business of decoding mysterious messages and who had finally deciphered the famous "square letter" code, though it took him months to do it.
"He"ll have to work faster than that this time," thought Barlow, as he made his way toward the librarian"s office on the fourth floor of the big gray-stone building. "Time"s at a premium and Germany moves too fast to waste any of it."
But Thurber was fully cognizant of the necessity for quick action. He had been warned that Barlow was bringing the dispatch and the entire office was cleared for work.
Spreading the oiled paper on a table top made of clear gla.s.s, the Librarian turned on a battery of strong electric lights underneath so that any watermark or secret writing would have been at once apparent.
But there was nothing on the sheet except line after line of meaningless letters.
"It"s possible, of course, that there may be some writing in invisible ink on the sheet," admitted the cipher expert. "But the fact that oiled paper is used would seem to preclude that. The code itself may be any one of several varieties and it"s a matter of trying "em all until you hit upon the right one."
"I thought that Poe"s story of "The Gold Bug" claimed that any cipher could be read if you selected the letter that appeared most frequently and subst.i.tuted for it the letter "e," which is used most often in English, and so on down the list," stated Barlow.
"So it did. But there are lots of things that Poe didn"t know about codes." Thurber retorted, his eyes riveted to the sheet before him.
"Besides, that was fiction and the author knew just how the code was constructed, while this is fact and we have to depend upon hard work and blind luck.
"There are any number of arbitrary systems which might have been used in writing this message," he continued. "The army clock code is one of them--the one in which a number is added to every letter figure, dependent upon the hour at which the message is written. But I don"t think that applies in this case. The cipher doesn"t look like it--though I"ll have to admit that it doesn"t look like any that I"ve come across before. Let"s put it on the blackboard and study it from across the room. That often helps in concentrating."
"You"re not going to write the whole thing on the board?" queried the operative.
"No, only the first fifteen letters or so," and Thurber put down this line:
I i i t f b b t t x o r q w s b b
"Translated into what we call "letter figures,"" he went on, "that would be 9 9 9 20 6 2 2 20 20 24 15 18 17 23 19 2 2--the system where "a" is denoted by 1, "b" by 2, and so on. No, that"s still meaningless. That repet.i.tion of the letter "i" at the beginning of the message is what makes it particularly puzzling.
"If you don"t mind, I"ll lock the door and get to work on this in earnest. Where can I reach you by phone?"
Barlow smiled at this polite dismissal and, stating that he would be at headquarters for the rest of the evening and that they would know where to reach him after that, left the office--decidedly doubtful as to Thurber"s ability to read the message.
Long after midnight Gene answered a ring from the phone beside his bed and through a haze of sleep heard the voice of the navy librarian inquiring if he still had the other papers which had been in Doctor Albert"s bag.
"No," replied the operative, "but I can get them. They are on top of the chief"s desk. Nothing in them, though. Went over them with a microscope."
"Just the same," directed Thurber, "I"d like to have them right away. I think I"m on the trail, but the message is impossible to decipher unless we get the code word. It may be in some of the other papers."
Barlow found the librarian red-eyed from his lack of sleep and the strain of the concentration over the code letter. But when they had gone over the papers found in the black bag, even Thurber had to admit that he was checkmated.
"Somewhere," he maintained, "is the one word which will solve the whole thing. I know the type of cipher. It"s one that is very seldom used; in fact, the only reference to it that I know of is in Jules Verne"s novel _The Giant Raft_. It"s a question of taking a key word, using the letter figures which denote this, and adding these to the letter figures of the original letter. That will give you a series of numbers which it is impossible to decipher unless you know the key word. I feel certain that this is a variation of that system, for the fact that two letters appear together so frequently would seem to indicate that the numbers which they represent are higher than twenty-six, the number of the letters in the alphabet."
"One word!" muttered Barlow. Then, seizing what was apparently a memorandum sheet from the pile of Albert"s papers, he exclaimed: "Here"s a list that neither the chief nor I could make anything of. See? It has twelve numbers, which might be the months of the year, with a name or word behind each one!"
"Yes," replied Thurber, disconsolately, "I saw that the first thing. But this is October and the word corresponding to the number ten is "Wilhelmstra.s.se"--and that doesn"t help at all. I tried it."
"Then try "Hohenzollern," the September word!" snapped Barlow. "This message was presumably written in Berlin and therefore took some time to get over here."