Part 13

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 glass, 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 substituted 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 repetition 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 'Wilhelmstrasse'--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."

"By George! that's so! A variation of the 'clock code' as well as Verne's idea. Here, read off the letters and I'll put them on the board with the figures representing Hohenzollern underneath. Take the first fifteen as before."

When they had finished, the blackboard bore the following, the first line being the original code letters, the second the letter figures of these, and the third the figures of the word "Hohenzollern" with the first "h" repeated for the fifteenth letter:

I i i t f b b t t x o r q w s b b

I ii t f bb tt x o r q w s bb 9 35 20 6 28 46 24 15 18 17 23 19 28 8 15 8 5 14 26 15 12 12 5 18 14 8

"Why thirty-five for that double 'i' and twenty-eight for the double 'b's'?" asked Barlow.

"Add twenty-six--the total number of letters in the alphabet--to the letter figure for the letter itself," said Thurber. "That's the one beauty of this code, one of the things which helps to throw you off the scent. Now subtracting the two lines we have:

"1 20 12 1 14 20 9 3 6 12 5 5 20

"We've got it!" he cried an instant later, as he stepped back to look at the figures and read off:

"A t l a n t i c f l e e t

"It was a double code, after all," Thurber stated when he had deciphered the entire message by the same procedure and had reported his discovery to the Secretary of the Navy over the phone. "Practically infallible, too, save for the fact that I, as well as Doctor Albert, happened to be familiar with Jules Verne. That, plus the doctor's inability to rely on his memory and therefore leaving his key words in his brief case, rendered the whole thing pretty easy."

"Yes," thought Gene, "plus my suggestion of the September word, rather than the October one, and plus Paula's quick wit--that's really all there was to it!" But he kept his thoughts to himself, preferring to allow Thurber to reap all the rewards that were coming to him for the solution of the "double code."

* * * * *

"Do you know what the whole message was?" I inquired, as Quinn stopped his narrative.

"You'll find it pasted on the back of that copy of _The Giant Raft_," replied the former operative. "That's why I claim that the book ought to be preserved as a souvenir of an incident that saved millions of dollars and hundreds of lives."

Turning to the back of the Verne book I saw pasted there the following significant lines:

Atlantic Fleet sails (from) Hampton Roads (at) six (o'clock) morning of seventeenth. Eight U-boats will be waiting. Advise necessary parties and be ready (to) seek safety. Success (of) attack inevitable.

"That means that if Thurber hadn't been able to decipher that code the greater part of our fleet would have been sunk by an unexpected submarine attack, launched by a nation with whom we weren't even at war?" I demanded, when I had finished the message.

"Precisely," agreed Quinn. "But if you'll look up the records you'll find that the fleet did not sail on schedule, while Dr. Heinrich Albert and the entire staff from the house on Massachusetts Avenue were deported before many more weeks had passed. There was no sense in raising a fuss about the incident at the time, for von Bernstorff would have denied any knowledge of the message and probably would have charged that the whole thing was a plant, designed to embroil the United States in the war. So it was allowed to rest for the time being and merely jotted down as another score to be wiped off the slate later on.

"But you have to admit that a knowledge of Jules Verne came in very handy--quite as much so, in fact, as did a knowledge of the habits and disposition of white mice in another case."

"Which one was that?"

Quinn merely pointed to the top of his bookcase, where there reposed a stuffed white mouse, apparently asleep.

"That's a memento of the case," replied the former operative. "I'll tell you of it the next time you drop in."

XIII

THE TRAIL OF THE WHITE MICE

"The United States Secret Service," announced Bill Quinn, "is by long odds the best known branch of the governmental detective bureaus. The terror which the continental crook feels at the sound of the name 'Scotland Yard' finds its echo on this side of the Atlantic whenever a criminal knows that he has run afoul of the U. S. S. S. For Uncle Sam never forgives an injury or forgets a wrong. Sooner or later he's going to get his man--no matter how long it takes nor how much money it costs.

"But the Secret Service, strictly speaking, is only one branch of the organization. There are others which work just as quietly and just as effectively. The Department of Justice, which had charge of the violation of neutrality laws, banking, and the like; the Treasury Department, which, through the Customs Service and the Bureau of Internal Revenue, wages constant war on the men and women who think they can evade the import regulations and the laws against illicit manufacture of alcohol; the Pension Bureau of the Interior Department, which is called upon to handle hundreds of frauds every year; and the Post Office Department, which guards the millions of dollars intrusted to the mails.

"Each of these has its own province. Each works along its own line in conjunction with the others, and each of them is, in reality, a secret organization which performs a vastly important service to the nation as a whole. When you speak of the Secret Service, the Treasury Department's organization comes immediately to mind--coupled with a panorama of counterfeiters, anarchists, revolutionaries, and the like. But the field of the Secret Service is really limited when compared to the scope of the other organizations.

"Look around this room"--and he made a gesture which included the four walls of the library den in which we were seated, a room in which the usual decorations had been replaced by a strange collection of unusual and, in a number of instances, gruesome relics. "Every one of those objects is a memento of some exploit of the men engaged in Secret Service," Quinn went on. "That Chinese hatchet up there came very close to being buried in the skull of a man in San Diego, but its principal mission in life was the solution of the mystery surrounding the smuggling of thousands of pounds of opium. That water-stained cap was fished out of the Missouri after its owner had apparently committed suicide--but the Pension Bureau located him seven years later, with the aid of a fortune teller in Seattle. At the side of the bookcase there you will find several of the original poison-pen letters which created so much consternation in Kansas City a few years ago, letters which Allison of the Postal Inspection Service finally traced to their source after the local authorities had given up the case as impossible of solution.

"The woman whose picture appears on the other wall was known as Mrs. Armitage--and that was about all that they did know about her, save that she was connected with one of the foreign organizations and that in some mysterious way she knew everything that was going on in the State Department almost as soon as it was started. And there, under that piece of silk which figured in one of the boldest smuggling cases that the Treasury Department ever tackled, is the blurred postmark which eventually led to the discovery of the man who murdered Montgomery Marshall--a case in which our old friend Sherlock Holmes would have reveled. But it's doubtful if he could have solved it any more skillfully than did one of the Post Office operatives."

"What's the significance of that white mouse on the mantelpiece?" I inquired, sensing the fact that Quinn was in one of his story-telling moods.

"It hasn't any significance," replied the former government agent, "but it has a story--one which illustrates my point that all the nation's detective work isn't handled by the Secret Service, by a long shot. Did you ever hear of H. Gordon Fowler, alias W. C. Evans?"

"No," I replied, "I don't think I ever did."

"Well, a lot of people have--to their sorrow," laughed Quinn, reaching for his pipe.

* * * * *

No one appears to know what Fowler's real name is [continued the former operative]. He traveled under a whole flock of aliases which ran the gamut of the alphabet from Andrews to Zachary, but, to save mixing things up, suppose that we assume that his right name was Fowler. He used it for six months at one time, out in Minneapolis, and got away with twenty thousand dollars' worth of stuff.

For some time previous to Fowler's entrance upon the scene various wholesale houses throughout the country had been made the victims of what appeared to be a ring of bankruptcy experts--men who would secure credit for goods, open a store, and then "fail." Meanwhile the merchandise would have mysteriously vanished and the proprietor would be away on a "vacation" from which, of course, he would never return.

On the face of it this was a matter to be settled solely by the Wholesalers' Credit Association, but the Postal Inspection Service got into it through the fact that the mails were palpably being used with intent to defraud and therefore Uncle Sam came to the aid of the business men.

On the day that the matter was reported to Washington the chief of the Postal Inspection Service pushed the button which operated a buzzer in the outer office and summoned Hal Preston, the chap who later on was responsible for the solution of the Marshall murder mystery.

"Hal," said the chief, with a smile, "here's a case I know you'll like. It's right in the line of routine and it ought to mean a lot of traveling around the country--quick jumps at night and all that sort of stuff."

Preston grunted, but said nothing. You couldn't expect to draw the big cases every time, and, besides, there was no telling when something might break even in the most prosaic of assignments.

"Grant, Wilcox & Company, in Boston, report that they've been stung twice in the same place by a gang of bankruptcy sharks," the chief went on. "And they're not the only ones who have suffered. Here's a list of the concerns and the men that they've sold to. You'll see that it covers the country from Hoquiam, Washington, to Montclair, New Jersey--so they appear to have their organization pretty well in hand. Ordinarily we wouldn't figure in this thing at all--but the gang made the mistake of placing their orders through the mail and now it's up to us to land 'em. Here's the dope. Hop to it!"

That night, while en route to Mount Clemens, Michigan, where the latest of the frauds had been perpetrated, Preston examined the envelope full of evidence and came to a number of interesting conclusions. In the first place the failures had been staged in a number of different localities--Erie, Pennsylvania, had had one of them under the name of "Cole & Hill"; there had been another in Sioux City, where Immerling Brothers had failed; Metcalf and Newman, Illinois, had likewise contributed their share, as had Minneapolis, Newark, Columbus, White Plains, and Newburg, New York; San Diego, California; Hoquiam, Washington, and several other points.

But the point that brought Hal up with a jerk was the dates attached to each of these affairs. No two of them had occurred within six months of the other and several were separated by as much as a year.

"Who said this was a gang?" he muttered. "Looks a lot more like the work of a single man with plenty of nerve and, from the amount of stuff he got away with, he ought to be pretty nearly in the millionaire class by now. There's over two hundred thousand dollars' worth of goods covered by this report alone and there's no certainty that it is complete. Well, here's hoping--it's always easier to trail one man than a whole bunch of 'em."

In Mount Clemens Preston found further evidence which tended to prove that the bankruptcy game was being worked by a single nervy individual, posing under the name of "Henry Gerard."

Gerard, it appeared, had entered the local field about a year before, apparently with plenty of capital, and had opened two prosperous stores on the principal street. In August, about two months before Preston's arrival, the proprietor of the Gerard stores had left on what was apparently scheduled for a two weeks' vacation. That was the last that had been heard of him, in spite of the fact that a number of urgent creditors had camped upon his trail very solicitously. The stores had been looted, only enough merchandise being left to keep up the fiction of a complete stock, and Gerard had vanished with the proceeds.

After making a few guarded inquiries in the neighborhood of the store, Preston sought out the house where Gerard had boarded during his stay in Mount Clemens. There he found that the missing merchant, in order to allay suspicion, had paid the rental of his apartment for three months in advance, and that the place had not been touched since, save by the local authorities who had been working on the case.

"You won't find a thing there," the chief of police informed Hal, in response to a request for information. "Gerard's skipped and that's all there is to it. We've been over the place with a fine-tooth comb and there ain't a scrap of evidence. We did find some telegrams torn up in his waste basket, but if you can make anything out of 'em it's more than I can," and he handed over an envelope filled with scraps of finely torn yellow paper.

"Not the slightest indication of where Gerard went?" inquired Preston as he tucked the envelope in an inside pocket.

"Not a bit," echoed the chief. "He may be in China now, so far as we know."

"Was he married?"

"Nobody here knows nothin' about him," the chief persisted. "They do say as how he was right sweet on a girl named Anna Something-or-other who lived in the same block. But she left town before he did, and she 'ain't come back, neither."

"What did you say her name was?"

"Anna Vaughan, I b'lieve she called herself. You might ask Mrs. Morris about her. She had a room at her place, only a few doors away from where Gerard stayed."

The apartment of the man who had vanished, Preston found, was furnished in the manner typical of a thousand other places. Every stick of furniture appeared to have seen better days and no two pieces could be said to match. Evidently Gerard had been practicing economy in his domestic arrangements in order to save all the money possible for a quick getaway. What was more, he had carefully removed everything of a personal nature, save a row of books which decorated the mantel piece in one of the rooms.

It was toward these that Preston finally turned in desperation. All but one of them were the cheaper grade of fiction, none of which bore any distinguishing marks, but the exception was a new copy of the latest Railroad Guide. Just as Preston pounced upon this he heard a chuckle from behind him and, whirling, saw the chief of police just entering the door.

"Needn't worry with that, young man," he urged. "I've been all through it and there ain't nothin' in it. Just thought I'd drop up to see if you'd found anything," he added, in explanation of his sudden appearance. "Have you?"

"No," admitted the postal operative. "Can't say that I have. This is the first piece of personal property that I've been able to locate and you say there is nothing in this?"

"Nary a clue," persisted the chief, but Preston, as if loath to drop the only tangible reminder of Gerard, idly flipped the pages of the Guide, and then stood it on edge on the table, the covers slightly opened. Then, as the chief watched him curiously, he closed the book, opened it again and repeated the operation.

"What's the idea? Tryin' to make it do tricks?" the chief asked as Hal stood the book on edge for the third time.

"Hardly that. Just working on a little theory of my own," was the response, as the post-office man made a careful note of the page at which the Guide had fallen open--the same one which had presented itself to view on the two other occasions. "Here, would you like to try it?" and he handed the volume to the chief. But that functionary only shrugged his shoulders and replaced the Guide upon the mantelpiece.

"Some more of your highfalutin' detective work, eh?" he muttered. "Soon you'll be claimin' that books can talk."

"Possibly not out loud," smiled Hal. "But they can be made to tell very interesting stories now and then, if you know how to handle 'em. There doesn't seem to be much here, Chief, so I think I'll go back to the hotel. Let me know if anything comes up, will you?" And with that he left.

But before returning to the hotel he stopped at the house where Anna Vaughan had resided and found out from the rather garrulous landlady that Gerard had appeared to be rather smitten with the beautiful stranger.

"She certainly was dressed to kill," said the woman who ran the establishment. "A big woman and strong as all outdoors. Mr. Gerard came here three or four nights a week while she was with us and he didn't seem to mind the mice at all."

"Mind the what?" snapped Preston.

"The mice--the white mice that she used to keep as pets," explained the landlady. "Had half a dozen or more of them running over her shoulders, but I told her that I couldn't stand for that. She could keep 'em in her room if she wanted to, but I had to draw the line somewhere. Guess it was on their account that she didn't have any other visitors. S'far as I know Mr. Gerard was the only one who called on her."

"When did Miss Vaughan leave?" Hal inquired.

"Mrs. Vaughan," corrected the woman. "She was a widow--though she was young and pretty enough to have been married any time she wanted to be. Guess the men wouldn't stand for them mice, though. She didn't stay very long--just about six weeks. Left somewheres about the middle of July."

"About two weeks before Gerard did?"

"About that--though I don't just remember the date."

A few more inquiries elicited the fact that Mrs. Vaughan's room had been rented since her departure, so Preston gave up the idea of looking through it for possible connecting links with the expert in bankruptcy.