The Summons (novel)/XIV
It has been said that Hillyard joined a service with its traditions to create. Indeed, it had everything to create, its rules, its methods, its whole philosophy. And it had to do this quickly during the war, and just for the war; since after the war it would cease to be. Certain conclusions had now been forced by experience quite definitely on Hillyard's mind. Firstly, that the service must be executive. Its servants must take their responsibility and act if they were going to cope with the intrigues and manoeuvres of the Germans. There was no time for discussions with London, and London was overworked in any case. The Post Office, except on rare occasions, could not be used; telegrams, however ingenious the cipher, were dangerous; and even when London received them, it had not the knowledge of the sender on the spot, wherewith to fill them out. London, let it be admitted, or rather that one particular small section of London with which Hillyard dealt, was at one with Hillyard. Having chosen its men it trusted them, until such time as indiscretion or incapacity proved the trust misplaced; in which case the offender was brought politely home upon some excuse, cordially thanked, and with a friendly shake of the hand, shown the door.
Hillyard's second conclusion was that of one hundred trails, ten at the most would lead to any result: but you must follow each one of the hundred up until you reach proof that you are in a blind alley.
The third was the sound and simple doctrine that you can confidently look to Chance to bring you results, probably your very best results, if you are prepared and equipped to make all your profit out of chance the moment she leans your way. Chance is an elusive goddess, to be seized and held prisoner with a swift, firm hand. Then she'll serve you. But if the hand's not ready and the eye unexpectant, you'll see but the trail of her robe as she vanishes to offer her assistance to another more wakeful than yourself.
In pursuit of this conviction, Hillyard steamed out of Palma Bay on the morning of the day after his interview with José Medina, and crossing to the mainland cruised all the next night southwards. At six o'clock in the morning he was off a certain great high cape. The sea was smooth as glass. The day a riot of sunlight and summer, and the great headland with its high lighthouse thrust its huge brown knees into the water.
The Dragonfly slowed down and dawdled. Three men stood in the stern behind the white side-awning. Hillyard was on the bridge with his captain.
"I don't really expect much," he said, seeking already to discount a possible disappointment. "It's only a possibility, I don't count on it."
"Six o'clock off the cape," said the captain. "We are on time."
"Yes."
Both men searched the smooth sea for some long, sluggish, inexplicable wave which should break, or for a V-shaped ripple such as a fixed stake will make in a swiftly running stream.
"Not a sign," said the captain, disconsolately.
"No. Yet it is certainly true that the keeper of that lighthouse paid an amount equal to three years' salary into a bank three weeks ago. It is true that oil could be brought into that point, and stored there, and no one but the keeper be the wiser. And it is true that the Acquitania is at this moment in this part of the Mediterranean steaming east for Salonika with six thousand men on board. Let's trail our coat a bit!" said Hillyard, and the captain with a laugh gave an order to the signal boy by his side.
The boy ran aft and in a few seconds the red ensign fluttered up the flagstaff, and drooped in the still air. But even that provocation produced no result. For an hour and a half the Dragonfly steamed backwards and forwards in front of the cape.
"No good!" Hillyard at last admitted. "We'll get on to the Acquitania, and advise her. Meanwhile, captain, we had better make for Gibraltar and coal there."
Hillyard went to the wireless-room, and the yacht was put about for the great scarped eastern face of the Rock.
"One of the blind alleys," said Hillyard, as he ate his breakfast in the deck-saloon. "Next time perhaps we'll have better luck. Something'll turn up for sure."
Something was always turning up in those days, and the yacht had not indeed got its coal on board in Gibraltar harbour when a message came which sent Hillyard in a rush by train through Madrid to Barcelona. He reached Barcelona at half past nine in the morning, took his breakfast by the window of the smaller dining-room in the hotel at the corner of the Plaza Cataluna, and by eleven was seated in a flat in one of the neighbouring streets. The flat was occupied by Lopez Baeza who turned from the window to greet him.
"I was not followed," said Hillyard as he put down his hat and stick. Habit had bred in him a vigilance, or rather an instinct which quickly made him aware of any who shadowed him.
"No, that is true," said Baeza, who had been watching Hillyard's approach from the window.
"But I should like to know who our young friend is on the kerb opposite, and why he is standing sentinel."
Lopez Baeza laughed.
"He is the sign and token of the commercial activity of Spain."
From behind the curtains, stretched across the window, both now looked down into the street. A youth in a grey suit and a pair of orange-coloured buttoned boots loitered backwards and forwards over about six yards of footwalk; now he smoked a cigarette, now he leaned against a tree and idly surveyed the passers by. He apparently had nothing whatever to do. But he did not move outside the narrow limits of his promenade. Consequently he had something to do.
"Yes," continued Baeza with a chuckle, "he is a proof of our initiative. I thought as you do three days ago. For it is just three days since he took his stand there. But he is not watching this flat. He is not concerned with us at all. He is an undertaker's tout. In the house opposite to us a woman is lying very ill. Our young friend is waiting for her to die, so that he may rush into the house, offer his condolences and present the undertaker's card."
Hillyard left the youth to his gruesome sentry-go and turned back into the room. A man of fifty, with a tawny moustache, a long and rather narrow face and eyeglasses, was sitting at an office table with some papers in front of him.
"How do you do, Fairbairn?" Hillyard asked.
Fairbairn was a schoolmaster from the North of England, with a knowledge of the Spanish tongue, who had thrown up schoolmastering, prospects, everything, in October of 1914.
"Touching the matter of those ships," said Hillyard, sitting down opposite to Fairbairn.
Fairbairn grinned.
"It worked very well," said he, "so far."
Hillyard turned towards Lopez and invited him to a seat. "Let me hear everything," he said.
Spanish ships were running to England with the products of Cataluna and returning full of coal, and shipowners made their fortunes and wages ran high. But not all of them were content. Here and there the captains and the mates took with them in their cabin to England lists of questions thoughtfully compiled by German officers; and from what they saw in English harbours and on English seas and from what secret news was brought to them, they filled up answers to the questions and brought them back to the Germans in Spain. So much Hillyard already knew.
"A pilot, Juan de Maestre, went on board the ships, collected the answers, made a report and took it up to the German headquarters here. That Ramon Castillo found out," said Fairbairn. "Steps were taken with the crew. The ships would be placed on the black list. There would be no coal for them. They must be laid up and the crews dismissed. The crew of the Saragossa grasped the position, and the next time Juan de Maestre stepped on board he was invited to the forecastle, thumped, dropped overboard into the salubrious waters of the dock and left to swim ashore. Juan de Maestre has had enough. He won't go near the Germans any more. He is in a condition of extreme terror and neutrality. Oh, he's wonderfully neutral just now."
"We might catch him perhaps on the rebound!" Hillyard suggested.
"Lopez thinks so," said Fairbairn, with a nod towards Baeza.
"I can find him this evening," Baeza remarked.
The three men conferred for a little while, and as a consequence of that conference Lopez Baeza walked through the narrow streets of the old town to a cafe near the railway station. In a corner a small, wizened, square man was sitting over his beer, brooding unhappily. Baeza took a seat by his side and talked with Juan de Maestre. He went out after a few minutes and hired a motor-car from the stand in front of the station. In the car he drove to the park and went once round it. At a junction of two paths on the second round the car was stopped. A short, small man stepped out from the shadow of a great tree and swiftly stepped in.
"Drive towards Tibidabo," Baeza directed the driver, and inside the dark, closed car Baeza and Juan de Maestre debated, the one persuading, the other refusing. It was long before any agreement was reached, but when Baeza, with the perspiration standing in beads upon his face, returned to his flat in the quiet, respectable street, he found Martin Hillyard and Fairbairn waiting for him anxiously.
"Hecho!" he cried. "It is done! Juan de Maestre will continue to go on board the ships and collect the information and write it out for the Germans. But we shall receive an exact copy."
"How?" asked Hillyard.
"Ramon will meet a messenger from Juan. At eight in the morning of every second day Ramon is to be waiting at a spot which from time to time we will change. The first place will be the cinema opposite to the old Bull Ring."
"Good," said Hillyard. "In a fortnight I will return."
He departed once more for Gibraltar, cruised up the coast, left his yacht once more in the harbour of Tarragona and travelled by motor-car into Barcelona.
Fairbairn and Lopez Baeza received him. It was night, and hot with a staleness of the air which was stifling. The windows all stood open in the quiet, dark street, but the blinds and curtains were closely drawn before the lamps were lit.
"Now!" said Hillyard. "There are reports."
Fairbairn nodded grimly as he went to the safe and unlocked it.
"Pretty dangerous stuff," he answered.
"Reliable?" asked Hillyard.
Fairbairn returned with some sheets of blue-lined paper written over with purple ink, and some rough diagrams.
"I am sure," he replied. "Not because I trust Juan de Maestre, but because he couldn't have invented the information. He hasn't the knowledge."
Lopez Baeza agreed.
"Juan de Maestre is keeping faith with us," he said shortly, and, to the judgment of Lopez Baeza, Hillyard had learnt to incline a ready ear.
"This is the real thing, Hillyard," said Fairbairn, pulling at his moustache. "Look!"
He handed to Martin a chart. The points of the compass were marked in a corner. Certain courses and routes were given, and fixed lights indicated by which the vessel might be guided. There was a number of patches as if to warn the navigator of shallows, and again a number of small black cubes and squares which seemed to declare the position of rocks. There was no rough work in this chart. It was elaborately and skilfully drawn, the work of an artist.
"This is a copy made by me. Juan de Maestre left the original document with us for an hour," said Fairbairn, and he allowed Hillyard to speculate for a few seconds upon the whereabouts of that dangerous and reef-strewn sea. "It's not a chart of any bay or water at all. It's a plan of Cardiff by night for the guidance of German airships. Those patches are not shallows, but the loom in the sky of the furnaces. The black spots are the munition factories. Here are the docks," he pointed with the tip of his pencil. "The Jesus-Maria brought that back a week ago. Let it get from here to Germany, as it will do, eh? and a Zeppelin coming across England on a favourable night could make things hum in Cardiff."
Hillyard laid the sketch down and took another which Fairbairn held out to him.
"Do you see this?" Fairbairn continued. "This gives the exact line of the nets between the English and the Irish coasts, and the exact points of latitude and longitude where they are broken for the passage of ships, and the exact number and armament of the trawlers which guard those points."
Hillyard gazed closely at the chart. It gave the positions clearly enough, but it was a roughly-made affair, smudged with dingy fingers and uneven in its drawing. He laid it upon the table by the side of the map of Cardiff and compared one with the other.
"This," he said, touching the roughly-drawn map of a section of the Channel, "this is the work of the ship's captain?"
"Yes."
"But what of this?" and Hillyard lifted again the elaborate chart of Cardiff by night. "Some other hand drew this."
Fairbairn agreed.
"Yes. Here is the report which goes with the charts. The chart of Cardiff was handed to the captain in an inn on shore. It came from an unknown person, who is mentioned as B.45."
Hillyard seized upon the report and read it through, and then the others upon the top of that. Cloth, saddlery, equipment of various kinds were needed in England, and a great sea-borne trade had sprung up between the two countries, so that ships constantly went to and fro. In more than one of these reports the hieroglyph B.45 appeared. But never a hint which could lead to his detection—never anything personal, not a clue to his age, his business, his appearance, even his abode—nothing but this baffling symbol B.45.
"You have cabled all this home, of course," Hillyard observed to Fairbairn.
"Yes. They know nothing of the B.45. They are very anxious for any details."
"He seems to be a sort of letter-box," said Hillyard, "a centre-point for the gathering in of information."
Fairbairn shook his head.
"He is more active than that," he returned, and he pointed to a passage here and there, which bore him out. It was the first time that Martin Hillyard had come across this symbol, and he was utterly at a loss to conjecture the kind of man the symbol hid. He might be quite obscure, the tenant of some suburban shop, or, again, quite prominent in the public eye, the owner of a fine house, and generous in charities; he might be of any nationality. But there he was, somewhere under the oak-trees of England, doing his secret, mean work for the ruin of the country. Hillyard dreamed that night of B.45. He saw him in his dreams, an elusive figure without a face, moving swiftly wherever people were gathered together, travelling in crowded trains, sitting at the dinner-tables of the great, lurking at the corners of poor tenements. Hillyard hunted him, saw him deftly pocket a letter which a passing stranger as deftly handed him, or exchange some whispered words with another who walked for a few paces without recognition by his side, but though he hurried round corners to get in front of him and snatch a glance at his face, he could never come up with him. He waked with the sunlight pouring in between the lattices of his shutters from the Plaza Cataluna, tired and unrefreshed. B.45! B.45! He was like some figure from a child's story-book! Some figure made up of tins and sticks and endowed with malevolent life. B.45. London asked news of him, and he stalked through London. Where should Hillyard find his true image and counterpart?
•••••••
It is not the purpose of this narrative to describe how one Christobal Quesada, first mate of the steamship Mondragon, utterly overreached himself by sending in a report of a British hospital ship, sure to leave the harbour of Alexandria with gun-carriages upon her deck; how the report was proved to be a lie; how it was used as the excuse for the barbarous sinking of the great ships laden with wounded, and ablaze from stern to stern with green lights, the red cross glowing amidships like a wondrous jewel; how Christobal Quesada was removed from his ship in a French port, and after being duly arraigned for his life, met his death against a prison wall. Fairbairn wrote to Martin Hillyard:
"The execution of Quesada has put an end to the whole wicked question. So long as the offender was only put in prison with the certainty of release at the end of the war, whilst his family lived comfortably on German money, the game went merrily on. But the return of the "Mondragon," minus her executed mate, has altered the whole position. Juan de Maestre has nothing whatever to do nowadays."
Hillyard smiled with contentment. He could understand a German going to any lengths for Germany. He was prepared to do the same himself for his country. But when a neutral under the cloak of his neutrality meddles in this stupendous conflict for cash, for his thirty miserable pieces of silver, he could feel no inclination of mercy.
"Let the neutrals keep out!" he murmured. "This is not their affair. Let them hold their tongues and go about their own business!"
He received Fairbairn's letter in the beginning of the year 1916. He was still no nearer at that date to the discovery of B.45; nor were they any better informed in London. Hillyard could only wait upon Chance to slip a clue into his hand.