Kitobni o'qish: «The Bomb-Makers»

Chapter One.
The Devil’s Dice

“Do get rid of the girl! Can’t you see that she’s highly dangerous!” whispered the tall, rather overdressed man as he glanced furtively across the small square shop set with little tables, dingy in the haze of tobacco-smoke. It was an obscure, old-fashioned little restaurant in one of London’s numerous byways – a resort of Germans, naturalised and otherwise, “the enemy in our midst,” as the papers called them.

“I will. I quite agree. My girl may know just a little too much – if we are not very careful.”

“Ah! she knows far too much already, Drost, thanks to your ridiculous indiscretions,” growled the dark-eyed man beneath his breath. “They will land you before a military court-martial – if you are not careful!”

“Well, I hardly think so. I’m always most careful – most silent and discreet,” and he grinned evilly.

“True, you are a good Prussian – that I know; but remember that Ella has, unfortunately for us, very many friends, and she may talk – women’s talk, you know. We – you and I – are treading very thin ice. She is, I consider, far too friendly with that young fellow Kennedy. It’s dangerous – distinctly dangerous to us – and I really wonder that you allow it – you, a patriotic Prussian!”

And, drawing heavily at his strong cigar, he paused and examined its white ash.

“Allow it?” echoed the elder man. “How, in the name of Fate, can I prevent it? Suggest some means to end their acquaintanceship, and I am only too ready to hear it.”

The man who spoke, the grey-haired Dutch pastor, father of Ella Drost, the smartly-dressed girl who was seated chatting and laughing merrily with two rather ill-dressed men in the farther corner of the little smoke-dried place, grunted deeply. To the world of London he posed as a Dutchman. He was a man with a curiously triangular face, a big square forehead, with tight-drawn skin and scanty hair, and broad heavy features which tapered down to a narrow chin that ended in a pointed, grey, and rather scraggy beard.

Theodore Drost was about fifty-five, a keen, active man whose countenance, upon critical examination, would have been found to be curiously refined, intelligent, and well preserved. Yet he was shabbily dressed, his long black clerical coat shiny with wear, in contrast with the way in which his daughter – in her fine furs and clothes of the latest mode – was attired. But the father, in all grades of life, is usually shabby, while his daughter – whatever be her profession – looks smart, be it the smartness of Walworth or that of Worth.

As his friend, Ernst Ortmann, had whispered those warning words he had glanced across at her, and noting how gaily she was laughing with her two male friends, a cigarette between her pretty lips, he frowned.

Then he looked over to the man who had thus urged discretion.

The pair were seated at a table, upon which was a red-bordered cloth, whereon stood two half-emptied “bocks” of that light beer so dear to the Teuton palate. They called it “Danish beer,” not to offend English customers.

The girl whose smiles they were watching was distinctly pretty. She was about twenty-two, with a sweet, eminently English-looking face, fair and quite in contrast with the decidedly foreign, beetle-browed features of the two leering loafers with whom she sat laughing.

Theodore Drost, to do him justice, was devoted to his daughter, who, because of her childish aptitude, had become a dancer on the lowest level of the variety stage, a touring company which visited fifth-rate towns. Yet, owing to her discovered talent, she had at last graduated through the hard school of the Lancashire “halls,” to what is known as the “syndicate halls” of London.

From a demure child-dancer at an obscure music-hall in the outer suburbs, she had become a noted revue artiste, a splendid dancer, who commanded the services of her own press-agent, who in turn commanded half-a-dozen lines in most of the London morning papers, both her prestige and increased salary following in consequence. The British public so little suspect the insidious influence of the press-agent in the formation of modern genius. The press-agent has, in the past, made many a mediocre fool into a Birthday Baronet, or a “paid-for Knight,” and more than one has been employed in the service of a Cabinet Minister. Oh what sheep we are, and how easily we are led astray!

On that wintry night, Ella Drost – known to the theatre-going public as Stella Steele, the great revue artiste whose picture postcards were everywhere – sat in that stuffy, dingy little restaurant in Soho, sipping a glass of its pseudo-Danish lager, and laughing with the two unpresentable men before her.

Outside the unpretentious little place was written up the single word “Restaurant.” Its proprietor a big, full-blooded, fair-bearded son of the Fatherland, had kept it for twenty years, and it had been the evening rendezvous of working-class Germans – waiters, bakers, clerks, coiffeurs, jewellers, and such-like.

Here one could still revel in Teuton delicacies, beer brewed in Hamburg, but declared to be “Danish,” the succulent German liver sausage, the sausage of Frankfort – boiled in pairs of course – the palatable sauerkraut with the black sour bread of the Fatherland to match.

“I wish you could get rid of Kennedy,” said Ortmann, as he again, in confidence, bent across the table towards Ella’s father. “I believe she’s in collusion with him.”

“No,” laughed the elder man, “I can’t believe that. Ella is too good a daughter of the Fatherland.” He was one of Germany’s chief agents in England, and had much money in secret at his command.

Ortmann screwed up his eyes and pursed his lips. He was a shrewd, clever man, and very difficult to deceive.

“Money is at stake, my dear Drost,” he whispered very slowly – “big money. But there is love also. And I believe – nay, I’m sure – that Kennedy loves her.”

“Bah! utterly ridiculous!” cried her father. “I don’t believe that for a single moment. She’s only fooling him, as she has fooled all the others.”

“All right. But I’ve watched. You have not,” was the cold reply.

From time to time the attractive Ella, on her part, glanced across at her father, who was whispering with his overdressed companion, and, to the keen observer, it would have been apparent that she was only smoking and gossiping with that pair of low-bred foreigners for distinct purposes of her own.

The truth was that, with her woman’s instinct, feminine cleverness and ingenuity, she, being filled with the enthusiasm of affection for her aviator-lover, was playing a fiercely desperate part as a staunch and patriotic daughter of Great Britain.

The hour was late. She had hurried from the theatre in a taxi, the carmine still about her pretty lips, her eyes still darkened beneath, and the greasepaint only roughly rubbed off. The great gold and white theatre near Leicester Square, where, clad in transparencies, she was “leading lady” in that most popular revue “Half a Moment!” had been packed to suffocation, as indeed it was nightly. Officers and men home on leave from the battle-front all made a point of seeing the pretty, sweet-faced Stella Steele, who danced with such artistic movement, and who sang those catchy patriotic songs of hers, the stirring choruses of which even reached the ears of the Bosches in their trenches. And in many a British dug-out in Flanders there was hung a programme of the revue, or a picture postcard of the seductive Stella.

There were, perhaps, other Stella Steeles on the stage, for the name was, after all, not an uncommon one, but this star of the whole Steele family had arisen from the theatrical firmament since the war. She, the laughing girl who, that night, sat in that obscure, smoke-laden little den of aliens in Soho, was earning annually more than the “pooled” salary of a British Cabinet Minister.

That Stella was a born artiste all agreed – even her agent, that fat cigar-smoking Hebrew cynic who regarded all stage women as mere cattle out of whom he extracted commissions. To-day nobody can earn unusual emoluments in any profession without real merit assisted by a capable agent.

Stella Steele was believed by all to be thoroughly British. Nobody had ever suspected that her real name was Drost, nor that her bespectacled and pious father had been born in Stuttgart, and had afterwards become naturalised as a Dutchman before coming to England. The cigarette-smoking male portion of the khaki-clad crowd who so loudly applauded her every night had no idea that their idol had been born in Berlin. Isaac Temple, the mild-mannered press-agent whom she employed, had always presented her, both to press and public, and sent those artistic photographs of hers to the Sunday illustrated papers, as daughter of a London barrister who had died suddenly, leaving her penniless. Thus had the suspicious connection with Drost been always carefully suppressed, and Ella lived very quietly in her pretty flat in Stamfordham Mansions, situate just off the High Street in Kensington.

Her father – her English mother, whom she had adored, being long ago dead – lived a quiet, secluded life in one of those rather large houses which may be found on the south side of the Thames between Putney and Richmond. Pastor Drost had, it was believed by the Dutch colony in London, been a missionary for some years in Sumatra, and, on more than one occasion, he had lectured upon the native life of that island. Therefore he had many friends among Dutch merchants and others, who all regarded him as a perfectly honest and even pious, if rather eccentric, man.

At times he wore big round horn-rimmed glasses which grossly magnified his eyes, giving him a strange goggled appearance. The world, however, never knew that Pastor Drost’s only daughter was that versatile dancer who, dressed in next-to-nothing, nightly charmed those huge enthusiastic audiences in the popular revue, “Half a Moment!”

Until three months after the outbreak of war Ella had regarded her father’s idiosyncrasies with some amusement, dismissing them as the outcome of a mind absorbed in chemical experiment, for though none save herself was aware of it, the long attic beneath the roof of her father’s house – the door of which Theodore Drost always kept securely locked – was fitted as a great chemical laboratory, where he, as a professor of chemistry, was constantly experimenting.

After the outbreak of war, by reason of a conversation she one day overheard between her father and his mysterious visitor, Ernst Ortmann, her suspicions had become aroused. Strange suspicions they indeed were. But in order to obtain confirmation of them, she had become more attached to her father, and had visited him far more frequently than before, busying herself in his domestic affairs, and sometimes assisting the old widow, Mrs Pennington, who acted as his single servant.

Two years prior to the war, happening upon that house, which was to be sold cheap, Ella had purchased it, ready furnished as it was, and given it as a present to her father as a place in which he might spend his old age in comfort. But until that night when she had overheard the curious conversation – which she had afterwards disclosed in confidence to her lover, Lieutenant Seymour Kennedy, Flight-Commander of the Naval Air Service – she had never dreamed that her father, the good and pious Dutchman who had once been a missionary, was an enemy alien, whose plans were maturing in order to assist a great and desperate conspiracy organised by the secret service of the German Fatherland.

On a certain well-remembered November evening she had revealed to Kennedy the truth, and they had both made a firm compact with each other. The plotter was her father, it was true. But she was a daughter of Great Britain, and it was for her to combat any wily and evil plot which might be formed against the land which had given birth to her adored mother.

She loved Seymour Kennedy. A hundred men had smiled upon her, bent over her little hand, written to her, sent her flowers and presents, and declared to her their undying affection. It is ever so. The popular actress always attracts both fools and fortunes. But Ella, level-headed girl as she was, loved only Seymour, and had accepted the real, whole-hearted and honest kisses which he had imprinted upon her lips. Seymour Kennedy was a gentleman before being an officer, which could not, alas! be said of all the men in the services in war-time.

Ella Drost was no fool, her dead mother had always instilled into her mind that, though born of a German father, yet she was British, an argument which, if discussed legally, would have been upset, because, having, unfortunately, been born in Berlin, she was certainly a subject of the German octopus. At the time of her birth her father had occupied a very important position among professors – half the men in the Fatherland were professors of something or other – yet Drost had been professor of chemistry at the Imperial Arsenal at Spandau – that great impregnable fortress in which the French war indemnity of 1870 had been locked up as the war-chest of golden French louis.

How strange it was! And yet it was not altogether strange. Ella, whose heart – the heart of a true British girl trained at her mother’s knee – had discovered a curious “something” and, aided by her British airman lover, was determined to carry on her observations, at all hazards, to the point of ascertaining the real truth.

England was at war at the battle-front – and she, a mere girl, was at war with the enemy in its midst.

Three-quarters of an hour later Ella – whose comfortable car was waiting outside the dingy little place – had driven her father home, but on the way she expressed her decision to stay with him, as it was late and her French maid, Mariette, had no doubt gone to bed.

As they stood in her father’s large, well-furnished dining-room, Ella drew some lemonade from a siphon and then, declaring that she was sleepy, said she would retire.

“All right, my dear,” replied the old man. “All right. You’ll find your room quite ready for you. I always order that it shall be kept ready for you. Let’s see! You were here a week ago – so the bed will not be damp.”

The girl bent and imprinted a dutiful kiss upon her father’s white brow, but, next instant, set her teeth, and in her blue eyes – though he did not see it – there showed a distinct light of suspicion.

Then she switched on the light on the stairs, loosened her furs, and ascended to the well-furnished room that was always regarded as hers.

The room in which Ella found herself was large, with a fine double wardrobe, a long cheval-glass, and a handsome mahogany dressing-table. The curtains and upholstery were in pale-blue damask, while the thick plush carpet was of a darker shade.

Instead of retiring, Ella at once lit the gas-stove, glanced at her wristlet-watch, the face of which was set round with diamonds, and then flung herself into a deep armchair to think, dozing off at last, tired out by the exertion of her dancing.

The striking of the little gilt clock upon the mantelshelf presently aroused her, and, rising, she switched off the light and, creeping upon tiptoe, slowly opened her bedroom door and listened attentively.

Somewhere she could hear the sound of men’s voices. One she recognised as her father’s.

“That’s Nystrom again! That infernal hell-fiend!” she whispered breathlessly to herself.

Then, removing her smart shoes and her jingling bangles, she crept stealthily forth along the soft carpet of the corridor, and with great care ascended the stairs to the floor above, which was occupied by that long room, the door of which was always kept locked – the room in which her father conducted his constant experiments.

From the ray of light she saw that the door was ajar. Within, the two men were talking in low deep tones in German.

She could hear a hard sound, as of metal being filed down, and more than once distinguished the clinking of glass, as though her father was engaged in some experiment with his test-tubes and other scientific paraphernalia which she had seen arranged so methodically upon the two long deal tables.

“What has Ortmann told you?” asked Theodore Drost’s midnight visitor, while his daughter stood back within the long cupboard on the landing, listening.

“He says that all is in order. We have a friend awaiting us.”

“And the payment – eh?” asked the man Nystrom, a German who had been naturalised as a Swede, and now lived in London as a neutral. As a professor of chemistry he had been well-known in Stockholm and, being a bosom friend of the Dutch pastor’s, the pair often delighted in dabbling together in their favourite science.

“I shall meet Ernst on Friday night. If we are successful, he will pay two thousand pounds – to be equally divided between us.”

“Good,” grunted the other. “We shall be successful, never fear – that is if Ortmann has arranged things at his end. Himmel! what a shock it will be – eh, my friend? – worse than the Zeppelins!”

Theodore Drost laughed gleefully, while his daughter, daring to creep forward again, peered through the crack of the door and saw the pair bending over what looked like a square steel despatch-box standing upon the table amid all the scientific apparatus.

The box, about eighteen inches long, a foot wide, and six inches deep, was khaki-covered, and, though she was not aware of it at the time, it was of the exact type used in the Government offices.

Fridtjof Nystrom, a tall, dark-haired man, with a red, blotchy face, rather narrow-eyed and round-shouldered, was adjusting something within the box, while old Drost, who had discarded his shabby black pastor’s coat and now wore a dark-brown jacket, took up a small glass retort beneath which the blue flame of a spirit-lamp had been burning, and from it he poured a few drops of some bright red liquid into a tiny tube of very thin glass. Then, taking a small blow-pipe, he blew the flame upon the tube until he had melted the glass and sealed it hermetically.

The blotchy-faced man watched this latter operation with great interest, saying:

“Have a care now, my dear Theodore. The least mishap, and not a piece of either of us would remain to tell the story.”

“Ja! Leave that to me,” answered Ella’s father. “We do not, I agree, desire a repetition of the disaster which happened last week.”

Ella, hearing those words, stood aghast.

A week before all London had been mystified and horrified by a most remarkable explosion which had occurred one night in a house in one of the outer suburbs, whereby the place had been set on fire and utterly demolished. Whoever were present in the house had been blown to atoms, for no trace of the occupants, or of what had caused the disaster, had been discovered. At first it was believed to have been caused by an incendiary bomb dropped from the air, but expert evidence quickly established the fact that something within the house had exploded.

Was it possible that her father and his dastardly companions possessed knowledge of what had actually occurred there?

Suddenly, Drost having handed the tiny sealed tube to Nystrom, the latter proceeded to place it in position within the box, using most infinite care. Then her father turned upon his heel, and came forward to the door behind which his daughter was standing.

In a second Ella had shrunk back noiselessly into the cupboard, which the old man passed in the darkness, and descended the stairs.

He had passed the door of Ella’s room when, having gained the bottom of the stairs, he paused and whistled softly. In a few seconds Nystrom came forth.

“Come, Fridtjof,” he urged in a low whisper. “Let us drink to the success of our expedition to-night, and the victory of our dear Fatherland,” an invitation which his visitor at once accepted.

Ella heard the two men descend, making but little noise, and a moment later she crept into the long, well-lit laboratory where, upon the table, stood the big official-looking despatch-box.

A second’s glance was sufficient to reveal the truth even to her, a woman unversed as she was in such things. It was a most ingeniously-constructed infernal machine which would detonate the quantity of high-explosive which she saw had been placed within.

Though her father had taken the greatest precaution to conceal from his daughter the exact line of his chemical experiments, yet, if the truth be told, Ella and her lover had watched carefully, and Kennedy – who had shared his well-beloved’s suspicions – had ascertained, without doubt, that Drost and Nystrom had been engaged in that long, low room beneath the roof, in treating toluene with nitric and sulphuric acid for several days under heat thus producing tri-nitro-toluene – or trotul – that modern high-explosive, of terrible force, which was rapidly superseding picric acid as a base for shell-fillers.

At a glance Ella saw that the square steel bomb, fashioned like an official despatch-box, was filled with this highly dangerous explosive, and that the thin glass tube which, when broken, would explode it, had already been placed in position. Such a bomb, on exploding in a confined space, must work the most terrible havoc.

In those few seconds the girl verified the suspicion which Kennedy had entertained. Some desperate outrage was to be committed. That was quite certain.

A bomb from a Zeppelin could not cause greater injury to life and property than that ingeniously contrived machine, the delicately constructed fuse of which, fashioned on the lathe by her father’s own hands, could be arranged to detonate at any given time.

A second’s pause, and then the girl, beneath her breath, took a deep oath of vengeance against the ruler of that hated land wherein she had been born.

“Thank Heaven that I am English!” she whispered to herself. “And I will live – and die, if necessary – as an English girl should.”

With those words upon her lips she crept away from the laboratory, down the stairs to her room, and, swiftly putting on her fur coat, she went into the basement, from which she let herself out noiselessly, and then hurried through the night, in the direction of Hammersmith Bridge.

On gaining the bridge, she saw the red rear-light of a motor-car, and knew that it was Kennedy’s. He had drawn up against the kerb, and had been consuming cigarettes waiting in impatience for a long time.

“Well, darling?” he asked, as they met. “I got your message from the theatre to-night. What is in progress?”

“Something desperate,” was her quick reply. “Let’s get into the car and I’ll explain.”

Both entered the comfortable little coupé, and then Ella explained in detail to her flying-man lover all that she had discovered.

The keen-faced, clean-shaven young officer in uniform who, before he had gone in for aviation duties, had graduated at Osborne, and afterwards been at sea and risen from “snotty” to lieutenant, sat beside her, listening intently.

“Just as we thought, darling,” he remarked. “For me, loving you so dearly, it is a terrible thing to know that your father is such a deadly and ingenious enemy of ours as he is. Truly the German plotters are in our midst in every walk of life, from high society down to the scum of the East End. The brutes are out to win the war by any underhand, subtle, and brutal means in their power. But we have discovered one line of their enemy intentions and, with your aid, dearest, we will follow it up and, without exposing your father and bringing disgrace upon you, we’ll set out to combat them every time.”

“Agreed, dear,” declared the girl with patriotic enthusiasm. “I have told you all along of my suspicions. To-night they are verified. Father, and that devilish scoundrel, Nystrom, mean mischief – for payment too – one thousand pounds each!”

“The infernal brutes!” exclaimed the man at her side. “At least it is to you, dear, that this discovery is due. I had no idea what you were after when you sent me that wire to-night.”

“I suspected, and my suspicions have proved correct,” said the girl. “Shall we wait here and follow them? They must cross the river if they intend to go into London to-night – as no doubt they do.”

“Yes. They believe you to be soundly asleep, I suppose?”

“I locked my door, and have the key in my pocket,” replied his well-beloved with a light laugh.

And she, putting her ready lips to his, sat with him in the car at the foot of the long suspension-bridge, waiting for any person to cross.

They remained there for perhaps half-an-hour, ever eager and watchful. Several taxis passed, but otherwise all was quiet in the night. Now and then across the sky fell the big beams of searchlights seeking enemy aircraft, and these they were watching, when, suddenly, a powerful, dark-painted car approached.

“Look!” cried Ella. “Why, that’s that fellow Benyon’s car – he’s a friend of Dad’s!”

Next moment it flashed past, and beneath the dim light at the head of the bridge they both caught a glimpse of two men within, one of whom was undoubtedly Theodore Drost.

“Quick!” cried Ella. “Let’s follow them! Fortunately you have to-night another car, unknown to them!”

In an instant Seymour Kennedy had started his engine, and slowly he drew out across the bridge, speeding after the retreating car over the river, along Bridge Road to Hammersmith Broadway and through Brook Green, in a direction due north.

Through the London streets it was not difficult at that hour to follow the red tail-light of the car in which Drost sat with his bosom friend George Benyon, a mysterious person who seemed to be an adventurer, and who lived somewhere in York or its vicinity.

“I wonder if they are going up to York?” Ella asked, as she sat in the deep seat of the coupé at her lover’s side.

“We’ll see. If they get on to the North Road we shall at once know their intentions,” was her lover’s reply.

Half-an-hour later the pseudo-Dutch pastor and his companion, driven by rather a reckless young fellow, were on the main Great North Road, and Kennedy, possessing a lighter and superior car, had no misgivings as to overtaking them whenever he wished.

On through the night they went, passing Barnet, Hatfield, Hitchin, the cross-roads at Wansford, and up the crooked pebbled streets of Stamford, until in the grey of morning they descended into Grantham, with its tall spire and quaint old Angel and Crown Hotel.

It was there that Drost and his companion breakfasted, while Ella and her lover waited and watched.

Some devilish plot of a high-explosive nature was in progress, but of its true import they were in utter ignorance. Yet their two British hearts beat quickly in unison, and both were determined to frustrate the outrage, even at the sacrifice of their own lives.

At three o’clock in the afternoon Drost and Benyon drew up at the Station Hotel at York, and there took lunch, while Ella and her lover ate a very hurried and much-needed meal in the railway-buffet in the big station adjoining.

Then, after they had watched the departure of the big mud-spattered car which contained the two conspirators, they were very quickly upon the road again after them.

Out of the quiet old streets of York city, past the Minster, they turned eastward upon that well-kept highway which led towards the North Sea Coast.

An hour’s run brought them to the pleasant town which I must not, with the alarming provisions of the Defence of the Realm Act before me, indicate with any other initial save that of J – .

The town of J – , built upon a deep and pretty bay forming a natural harbour with its breakwater and pier, was, in the pre-war days, a popular resort of the summer girl with her transparent blouses and her pretty bathing costumes, but since hostilities, it was a place believed to be within the danger zone.

As they descended, by the long, winding road, into the town, they could see, in the bay, a big grey four-funnelled first-class cruiser lying at anchor, the grey smoke curling lazily from her striped funnels – resting there no doubt after many weeks of patrol duty in the vicinity of the Kiel Canal.

Indeed, as they went along the High Street, they saw a number of clear-eyed liberty men – bluejackets – bearing upon their caps the name H.M.S. Oakham.

The car containing Ella’s father and his companion pulled up at the Palace Hotel, a big imposing place, high on the cliff, therefore Kennedy, much satisfied that he had thus been able to follow the car for over two hundred miles, went on some little distance to the next available hotel.

This latter place, like the Palace, afforded a fine view of the bay, and as they stood at a window of the palm-lined lounge, they could see that upon the cruiser lights were already appearing.

Kennedy called the waiter for a drink, and carelessly asked what was in progress.

“The ship – the Oakham– came in the day before yesterday, sir,” the man replied. “There’s a party on board this evening, they say – our Mayor and corporation, and all the rest.”

Ella exchanged glances with her lover. She recollected that khaki-covered despatch-box. Had her father brought with him that terrible death-dealing machine which he and Nystrom had constructed with such accursed ingenuity?

The hotel was deserted, as east coast hotels within the danger zone usually were in those war days, remaining open only for the occasional traveller and for the continuity of its licence. The great revue star had sent a telegram to her manager, asking that her understudy should play that night, and the devoted pair now stood side by side watching how, in the rapidly falling night, the twinkling electric lights on board the fine British cruiser became more clearly marked against the grey background of stormy sea and sky.

“I wonder what their game can really be?” remarked the young flying-officer reflectively as, alone with Ella, his strong arm crept slowly around her neat waist.