The Stolen War Secret/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII
THE WIRELESS WIRE-TAPPER
A MOMENT later Burke came dashing around the curve in the road in Sinclair’s car and the crowd scattered to let him pass. On the front seat with him was Mrs. Hawley.
“Where are they—have you got them?” he cried.
“No,” replied Kennedy, though not in a tone of criticism.
It had been a close race and Burke had done his best, for it had been necessary for him to remain at the club to fire the mortar with the calcium bombs. Without them the power-boat might have slipped away unobserved, but the time taken in getting off had been just a minute too much.
A hasty parley followed and as many cars as could be pressed into service were started out along the possible routes that the fugitives had taken, while Kennedy and Burke sought the telegraph operator at the hotel to spread an alarm as quickly as they could to the neighboring villages through which they might pass.
Sinclair and Mrs. Hawley were engaged in earnest conversation when Craig and Burke returned. She was telling him of the dash they had made from the club, and how she had insisted on accompanying Burke.
It was evident that, whatever might be said of the Mexican acquaintances of Sinclair, Mrs. Hawley had justified Kennedy’s judgment of her and had proved faithful.
Craig had thrown off all disguise now, at least before her, and was questioning her frankly about the character and habits of the people in the cottage, whom we had met once at the caberet. I think even Hattie Hawley was surprised at her own ignorance of the intimate life of her acquaintances, before Kennedy had gone very far. She had known them on the surface pretty well, but with characteristic secretiveness they had succeeded in completely concealing for instance, their domestic arrangements, both in the city and at Seaville.
On other visits to Seaville they had spent much of their time at the hotel, especially on the occasion when Madame Valcour had been there and Sinclair had gone out of his way to entertain the fascinating adventuress. But this time they had evidently come prepared to live more quietly, for they had brought along two Japanese whom she had seen now and then at the Mexican cabaret.
When it was all sifted down, it was practically only at the cabaret and in their dignified mescal debauches that Mrs. Hawley knew them. I think Sinclair was rather pleased than otherwise at it, for he saw that she had been in reality working more to protect their mutual interests in southern Mexico than for any other reason. However, that did not do us much good just at present.
“While we’re waiting for some report,” cut in Kennedy bruskly, after Mrs. Hawley had told what little she could of the story, “suppose we go up the hill and take a look at the cottage.”
He had already started ahead, Burke and I following and Sinclair and Mrs. Hawley bringing up the rear.
We stood for a few moments in the shadow of a hedge while Craig sent Burke, as an expert in that sort of thing, scouting about the house to make sure that it was deserted. Burke quickly returned from the shadow of a barn which had been remade into a garage.
“There doesn’t seem to be a sign of life in the house,” he reported.
“Then let’s take a chance,” decided Craig, who had employed the time in gazing at the wireless mast that was fixed on one of the gables and had interested him the first time he saw the house.
We advanced to the door and, as a precaution, rang the bell while Burke hastily ascertained that the windows were locked also. No one answered, and together we forced the door and burst into the silent and dark house.
IT WAS scantily furnished after the manner of most Summer cottages, but it was not the furniture that interested Craig.
“I’ve been wondering about that wireless business,” he remarked, leading us from room to room.
He paused with an exclamation as he came to a room on the first floor in an extension on the side of the house which gave a view of the bay.
On a mission table before the window were all the paraphernalia of a wireless telegraph outfit. Quickly Kennedy ran his eye over it as he picked up piece after piece. He seemed to be more than usually interested.
“This is a curious type,” I heard him mutter to himself. “It’s not exactly like any other that I’ve seen.”
We gathered about him, none of us knowing much about it, except possibly Sinclair who for the time being seemed to be more interested in the study of Mrs. Hawley than in wireless.
“Spark-gap of the quenched type,” remarked Kennedy jerkily, noting one thing after another. “Break system relay—the operator could overhear any interference while he was transmitting. You make the transformation by a single throw of a six-point switch which times the oscillating and open currents to resonance. That’s it—it can be easily changed from one wave length to another.”
“They always seemed to know more about you than I did,” we overheard Mrs. Hawley saying to Sinclair. “I don’t know—but I used to think you were pretty intimate with them.”
“Only in the same way that I tried to keep on as good terms as I could with the Revolutionists,” he replied with a laugh. “There was no telling which side would come out on top in the end. But how they managed to know so”
“Easy enough,” cut in Craig who had overheard, too. “Look at this wireless wire tapping. It beats even the one I improvised. Why, Sinclair, you couldn’t receive or send a message through the Seaville Station that they couldn’t overhear. They knew every time you sent out your aeroplane for a final—could ‘feel’ it, as it were, through this apparatus.”
Sinclair bent over it and at once recognized the cleverness with which it had been devised.
“It needed only that they were listening in to read that message I sent to my laboratory in New York,” Craig continued. “I half suspected something of the kind and thought I’d give them a chance—but they have been too clever for us—at least in the first round.”
Sinclair was speechless with amazement. While Madame Valcour had been monopolizing his time, some one here had been at work in another direction spying on him, perhaps waiting the most favorable opportunity for using the burglar’s microphone to enter his safe and rob him of the perfected plans of the air-ship.
I tried vainly to piece the scattered events together. Supposing it had been Sanchez, using Valcour, who had stolen the plans and then had entrusted them to Valcour for safe-keeping. Who had got them from Valcour and how? Had it been Morelos? Kennedy’s radio-detective had reported that Alvarez had said Morelos knew nothing of them. I was forced to give it up. We were getting warmer in the search it was true, but as yet there seemed to be more heat than light.
Sinclair, too, appeared to be considering the same problem and with no greater success than I had.
“That’s wonderful,” he remarked glancing over the clever wireless-outfit before us. “But I can’t understand yet about that accident to the aeroplane. Do you imagine these people knew anything about that?”
“I’ve been wondering that myself,” commented Kennedy. “Suppose we hunt through the house a little farther. There seems to be nothing to prevent us.”
“Yes, that’s it,” I put in, “what could have been that terror in the air?”
We followed Kennedy as he went slowly up the stairs, looking from right to left in every room as we went. There was nothing out of the ordinary on the second floor and we mounted on up to the attic where there seemed to be two finished rooms.
Kennedy groped about in the darkness of one room in which was the dormer window of the gable, knocked something down, and finally found the light, switching it on.
“Ah!” he exclaimed as he looked about at a peculiar apparatus filling the room, “I suspected some wireless-power trick. Here it is.”
IT WAS a most unusual collection of coils of wires and other paraphernalia of which I had never seen the like before.
Kennedy turned a switch. A curious crackling, snapping noise issued from the machine. In it we saw a sheet of flame several feet long, a veritable artificial bolt of lightning. The rest of us shrank back in momentary fear at the apparently gigantic forces of nature which seemed let loose in the room.
“Don’t be afraid,” called Kennedy. “I’ve seen all this before. It won’t hurt you. It’s an application of a high-frequency current.”
Whatever it was I could not overcome the awe which it inspired in me. I wondered how the arch-fiend had restrained himself from turning the deadly power on us.
Kennedy continued to experiment gingerly with the apparatus, and finally shut it off.
“That’s all very well,” persisted Sinclair, who had been watching carefully, “but I don’t understand it yet.”
“Don’t you see?” urged Kennedy, looking at the machine with an air of great admiration. “What this fellow has really done is to use a high-frequency current—to appropriate simply the invention of Nikola Tesla.”
We were trying to follow him, and Sinclair nodded acquiescence, comprehending only vaguely.
“What is it based upon?” he asked at length.
“Tesla’s theory,” explained Kennedy, continuing to explore the dormer-window room, “is that under certain conditions the atmosphere, which is normally a high insulator, assumes conducting properties and so becomes capable of conveying any amount of electrical energy.
“I myself have seen electrical oscillations such as those which you saw just now of such intensity that while they could be circulated with impunity through one’s arms and chest, they could be made to melt wires farther along in the circuit. Yet the person through whom such a current was passing at the time actually felt no inconvenience.”
Kennedy was holding us spellbound by this new wonder of science as he elaborated it.
“I have seen a loop of heavy copper wire,” he continued, “energized by such oscillations and a mass of metal within the loop heated to the fusing point, and yet into the space in which this destructive aerial turmoil was going on I have seen men thrust their hands and even their heads without feeling anything or experiencing any injurious after effect. In this form all the energy of all the dynamos at Niagara could pass through one’s body and yet produce no injury. But, diabolically directed, this vast energy has been used to melt the wires in the little dynamo that runs the gyroscope of the aeroplane. That was the cause of the disaster.”
We stood amazed at the ingenuity of it and not a little in awe of the hand and brain that could conceive and wield such an engine of destruction so certainly for their own ends.
“Whom do you suppose could have operated it all?” I asked.
“Operated it all?” he repeated. “As a matter of fact, they seem to me to be entirely distinct systems, although the operator of this system of projecting wireless-power must have used at least a part of the outside apparatus of the wireless wire-tapper for the transmission of his destructive current.”
Just then we heard the tread of feet downstairs and a voice called up—
“Mr. Sinclair!”
“Yes,” answered the inventor.
“We’ve got a report,” called back the voice.
“It’s the operator at the Seaville House,” explained Sinclair, leaving the room hurriedly, followed by Kennedy and the rest of us.
“What is the report?” he inquired.
“The car has been seen along the Sound road—they are evidently heading for the city.”
“Is there no way to intercept them?” inquired Kennedy.
“I’m afraid not,” answered Sinclair slowly. “You see, it is so late that we can’t possibly get any of the constables in the towns, and as for the city, there are scores of routes they can take to enter it, if indeed they attempt it by means of the car at all. No, I’m afraid that is hopeless, now.”
Kennedy had taken a last look about the cottage. They had evidently prepared for flight and everything else that could be taken or destroyed had been removed.
“We’re wasting time here, then,” he concluded. “The best we can do is to follow them to the city and search for them there.”
“There aren’t any trains,” put in the operator.
“I know it,” returned Kennedy. “I wasn’t thinking of trains. We’ll have to make it in Sinclair’s car. We can’t wait until morning.”
Mrs. Hawley insisted on accompanying us, and a few minutes later Kennedy, Sinclair, Burke, Mrs. Hawley and myself were threading our way along the roads leading to New York, making pretty good time in spite of the difficult driving at night.
It was far past midnight when we arrived over the uptown bridge in New York, and arriving there, the question was where to go.
“Why not the cabaret?” suggested Mrs. Hawley. “That was their headquarters. They would not stay there, I suppose, but they might stop there.”
“Good,” agreed Kennedy. “There is at least a chance.”
THE streets were deserted, and it was only a matter of minutes before we pulled up as quietly as we could before the place which, of course, to all outward appearance was closed.
A tap on the door brought no response from the lookout, although that was to be expected. Craig and Burke did not wait longer than to tap, but with the aid of a lever from the car succeeded in forcing the door and entering cautiously, prepared for a surprise.
The place was as still as if it had been deserted. If there had been any one there when we arrived they must have made their escape, perhaps over the roofs.
Upstairs we followed Kennedy and Burke.
As we entered the private dining-room in which we had once attended the strange mescal party, Kennedy turned the switch and flooded the place with light.
Craig uttered a low exclamation.
There lay the beautiful Señora Ruiz, tall, almost imperial in her beautiful gown.
He bent over and tried to lift her up. As he did so, a gold bracelet, unclasped, clattered to the floor.
He picked it up and glanced hurriedly at it. It was hollow. But in that part where it unclasped could be seen a minute hypodermic needle and traces of a brownish liquid.
“A poison-bracelet,” he muttered to himself, looking from it to a long scratch on the fair arm of the Señora. “One in which poison could be hidden so that in an emergency death could cheat the law.”
She was still breathing, but her convulsed face showed that even Kennedy’s hasty restoratives had no effect.
“The others!” exclaimed Burke who stood behind us, looking from the deadly bracelet to the insensible beauty, and slowly comprehending what it all might mean. “The others—she alone knows where and who they are!”
Mrs. Hawley had taken the head of her former friend in her lap and was smoothing it gently, as she looked mutely at Kennedy.
What was to be done? Were the real criminals to escape because we had caught only an accomplice, and she had either chosen or been forced to choose the easiest way of escape?