The Door of Dread: A Secret Service Romance.

Front matter

THE DOOR OF DREAD

An adroit and attractive young woman.

THE DOOR OF DREAD A Secret Service Romance

Chapter 1

THE DOOR OF DREAD

CHAPTER ONE

WHAT'S your name?"

"Sadie Wimpel."

"And your home?"

"Anywhere under me hat!"

The heavy-jowled man with the incongruously alert side-glance looked up across the polished desktop.

"What do you mean by that?"

"That me home's mostly where I happen to be."

He studied her with an eye as wistful as an old hound's eye in winter. She looked as dapper and neat, in her trim-cut tailor-made gown, as a well groomed polo pony. And under her neatness of limb was a suggestion of strength, and under her strength a trace of audacity, and under that audacity a touch of restiveness.

"Have you ever been in Europe?"

"Sure!"

"Where?"

"About all over the lot," was the languid response.

"I asked you where?"

"Well, Odessa, Budapest, Palermo, Petersburg, Rome, the Riviera, Paris, Ostend, Amsterdam, the2"

"That'll do!" cut in the man at the desk.

"Quite some little pilgrim, ain't I? the trim-figured young woman in the Bendel hat had the effrontery to ask.

The man at the desk fingered a paper-weight fashioned from an old coin-die of the Philadelphia Mint.

"Supposing you tell me what you know about this Fletcher report leak," he quietly suggested.

There was a rustle of silk as Sadie Wimpel crossed her knees.

"Admir'l Fletcher roped out a Navy report showin' how and why a foreign fleet could land in the United States. Sen'tor Lodge s'bmitted that report to the Senate. But before doin' it he told 'em the report ought 'o be printed in confidence, as they put it, and the motion was carried. Secret'ry Daniels, yuh see, didn't want any foreign guy gettin' next to the data in that report. It'd be LIke advertisin' your safe-combination to2"

"I know all that."

"Well, there was a certain foreign guy got hold o' that report."

"Who was it?"

"A capper for Keudell."

"But who?"

"The same capper that got hold of our secret signal code book from the destroyer Hull last summer."

"How do you know that?"

"B'cause I'm a friend of a friend of a friend of the boob of an ensign who gave up the book and faced a court-martial for it, a few weeks ago, on the Oregon."

"Where was the Oregon when that court-martial was held?"

"Anchored in San Francisco Bay," was the girl's answer.

For a moment or two Chief Blynn of the Secret Service stared out of the broad window of the Treasury Building. Just beyond that window was the Washington Monument, and behind that the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, where the electric elevators were rising and dipping with their afternoon crowds, and into B Street was swarming a motley throng of designers and engravers and plate-printers, side by side with stitchers and counters and sizers, with steel-press men and bull-gangers and oil-burners from the Ink Mill, all hurrying homeward after the day's work. They were part of a machinery which took on a touch of nobility because of its labyrinthine intricateness, because of its sheer unguessed complexities. Yet they were a mere company in that vast army which Chief Blynn and his agents were appointed both to appraise and protect. And they brought home to the haggard-eyed official so meditatively watching them a hint of the more immediate complications confronting him.

"You said you'd done Secret Service work before?" he asked, as he turned back to the girl.

"Yes."

"Where?"

"In Europe."

"Anywhere else?"

"Right here in America."

"For whom?"

"For yuh!"

The chief looked ponderously up from the papers in which he had pretended to be so pertinaciously interested. It was an old trick of the chief's, that of masking his mental batteries behind an escarpment of manuscripts.

"Then why haven't I a record of that work?"

"I guess you didn't know I was doin' it."

"Why?"

"Because I was actin' for Kestner."

"Of the Paris office?"

"Yes."

"And with anybody else?"

The girl hesitated.

"Yes; with young Wilsnach as well."

The chief glanced down at his pages of script.

"On what case?"

"The Lambert counterfeitin' case."

"Then why aren't you still acting with Kestner?"

"Because he's quittin' the Service."

"Who told you that?"

"Wilsnach."

"Does Wilsnach tell you everything he knows?"

Sadie Wimpel uncrossed her knees.

"Not by a long shot!"

"But working together that way, the two of you naturally became more or less confidential?"

A slight flush showed under the rice-powder on the woman's sophisticated young face.

"I was wise to Kestner's duckin' the buggy long before Wilsnach ever opened his peep about it."

"How did that happen?"

"Because I knew the skirt who was cannin' his purfession'l chances by marryin' him."

"Does marriage always do that?"

"When a slooth settles down it ain't wise to stack too high on him stayin' the curly wolf o' the singed-cat crib."

The chief puzzled for a moment or two over this apparently enigmatic statement.

"Then it's Wilsnach you want to swing in with on this new work?"

"Not if I have to crowbar me way into it."

"But why are you so sure you can help the Service out in this case?"

"I never said I wanted to help the Service out."

"Then what do you want to do?"

"I want 'o see Wilsnach make good."

For just a moment a smile flickered about the face of the pendulous-jowled man at the desk. It made the watching girl think of heat-lightning along an August sky-line.

"But how do you know Wilsnach is going to be put on this case?"

"Because he's the only man yuh've got who can round up that gang."

Again a meditative silence fell over the man at the desk. Then he threw aside his pose of hostility, as a man makes ready for work by throwing off his coat.

"Sadie, how old are you?" he quickly inquired.

"Good night!" was the girl's grimly evasive answer.

"You said your name was Wimpel. Have you any other?"

"None worth mentionin'."

"You mean you're not a married woman?"

"Not on your life!"

"And never were?"

A shadow crossed the pert young face under the Bendel hat.

"Me for the single harness!" she announced, with a shrug.

He sat pondering her for a silent moment or two.

"What nationality are you?"

"Come again," said the puzzled girl.

"Are you a good American?"

"I won't gamble on the 'good.' But ain't bein' just Amurican about enough in times like these?"

"It's enough!" acknowledged the man at the desk, with a sigh.

"But what I wanted to get at is, where did your parents come from?"

"Me mother was Irish."

"And your father?"

"Search me!"

The dew-lapped head moved slowly up and down. Then came still another moment of silence.

"Now, Sadie, there's a door you're keeping shut between the two of us."

"A door?" echoed the girl.

"Yes, a door that you don't seem willing to open; a door that seems to lead out on other days." He raised a heavy hand at the flash of alarm in her wide-open young eyes. "But I'm going to let that door stay shut, my girl; for as long as it stays that way it needn't count with either one of us."

"I don't quite get yuh," murmured the not altogether tranquil young woman. "And what's the game, anyway, wit' all this third-degree stuff?"

"Have I seemed too inquisitive?"

"No-o-o-o! But when yuh get me thumb-prints and me weight, tub-side, yuh'll just about have me record, won't yuh ?"

The chief smiled as he bent over the papers in front of him.

"My dear girl, we've had your record here for the last five years. That's part of our business."

"Hully gee!" said the girl, stiffening in the chair where she sat. Then, furrowing her young brow, she craned apprehensively about at the intimidating sheets of closely-written script.

"But that's not the point, Sadie," pursued her inquisitor. "The point is that you're a remarkably clever young woman."

Sadie Wimpel, under her rice-powder, turned promptly and visibly pink.

"Aw, Chief, cut out the con!"

"But I mean it." The girl shook her head.

"I'm a mutt and I know it. And I've been as nervous as a cat since I breezed in here, for when yuh swivel-chair boys throw a scare into me I flop straight back to me Eight' Ward talk. But plant me outside wit' the hotel broads and I can pull the s'ciety stuff so's Ida Vernon'd look like an also-ran!"

"You're not only clever, Sadie, but you're attract . You're young and you're good to look at. And the fact that you're a distinct deviation from type makes you especially valuable for the work we're going to lay out for you."

A secretarial-looking young man in glasses entered the room and stepped softly to the chief's desk. There he murmured a discreet word or two and as softly left the room. Chief Blynn's hand went out and touched a buzzer-button on his desk-end. Insignificant as that movement was, the girl's quick eye detected a valedictory note in it.

"Then yuh're goin' to gimme that work?" she asked as she rose to her feet.

"That depends on your friend Kestner."

"Where does Kestner come in?"

"He comes in through that door in two minutes. He and Wilsnach, in fact, are waiting out there to talk this case over with me."

"So Wilsnach's there too?" said the girl, staring at the door.

"Yes, Sadie; but I've got to deny you the pleasure of seeing him. I want you to step out this other way, and go straight back to your room at the Raleigh. Then I want you to wait there until I call you up. And to-night after dinner either Shrubb or Brubacher will come and explain just what has to be done !"

The heavy-bodied man was on his feet by this time, piloting her toward the door on the far side of the room. But the girl hung back for a moment.

"There's just one thing, Chief," she ventured, with a hand-movement toward the written sheets on the desk-top. "Have yuh gotta put Wilsnach wise to all that dope there?"

"What dope?"

"About me black velvet past!"

The chief laughed.

"That's an operative's report on the Warren pearl-smuggling case," he explained. "But in the matter of that door I happened to mention, I said it would stay shut, Sadie, and shut it stays!"

"I get yuh!" she announced, as she passed out of the room. But flippant as her words were, there remained in them a tremulous note of gratitude.

Chief Blynn swung about, still smiling, as the door on the opposite side of the room opened. The next moment he was shaking hands with Kestner and Wilsnach of the Paris office.

"Kestner," the head of the Service said as he sank into his swivel-chair, "I want you to come back."

"My fighting days are over," announced the man who had said good-by to the Service. Yet he looked with no unfriendly glance at the ponderous face in which was set the shrewdest pair of eyes he had ever stared into.

"Then make this your last fight," almost pleaded the official, who plainly was not greatly given to petitioning for favors.

"Try the younger men," Kestner smilingly suggested. "Give Wilsnach here a chance on the case."

The man from the Paris office shifted a little uneasily.

"Wilsnach was on the case for a week," explained the chief, "and yesterday he asked me to wire for you."

There was open reproof in Kestner's glance at his colleague of other days.

"Wilsnach knows I came to America for quite another purpose," he explained; "for the somewhat personal, though trifling, purpose of getting married."

"My dear fellow, by all means get married," began the man at the desk. "But—"

"But at once tear off on a beagle-chase around the world after some verminous criminal with a weak for ten-cent bed-houses and traveling steerage!"

"This chase will not take you out of America," corrected Chief Blynn. "That much I can guarantee."

"But it will take me out of my club and my newer way of looking at things," explained the patient-eyed Kestner. "You see, I seem to be developing a sort of philosophic sense of humor, and that leads to self-criticism, and that in turn keeps whispering to me that gum-shoeing and gray hairs don't always go well together!"

"So what you want is peace with honor, the same as the rest of this country that's sleeping on a volcano!"

"I've had enough of the volcano, at any rate."

"Well, for a family man who's tired of eruptions, I should think an embassy secretaryship, say Rome for ten months, then London for a year, and then one of the quieter Continental Embassies itself, would be just about the right thing to keep the rust off."

Kestner turned and eyed the older man; but that older man disregarded his stare.

"This isn't loose talk, Kestner. We can't expect you to come back without making it worth while for you. But you know the way things stand with the Administration. You know the Navy people can't afford to let much more of their stuff get out. And when you land your people you'll get your post. That's as sure as taxes and death!"

"You could do it inside of a month," prompted the bland-eyed Wilsnach.

"There are occasions," said the solemn-eyed Kestner, "when a month may seem a very long space of time."

"Isn't an ambassadorship sometimes worth three or four weeks of waiting?" inquired the man at the desk. "I know a few guys who've worked twenty years for 'em!"

"But I'm not working for ambassadorships."

"D' you mean you don't even want one?" was the somewhat acidulated inquiry.

"It's a great honor, and a great opportunity," acknowledged Kestner. "But when I work for my country I don't do it with one hand in the pork-barrel!"

The chief's gesture was one of heavy impatience.

"This thing's already been thought over and talked over. Foreign posts aren't passed around like trading-stamps. They go to the men equipped for them—and from this year those men are going to need greater equipment than flashing a gold-headed cane and writing sonnets. You know seven or eight languages, and you've covered Europe for ten or twelve years. You've learned the lay of the land and served your country on some pretty big questions."

The big form leaned forward over the desk and the big voice dropped to a more serious tone. "Kestner, that country needs you now. It needs you as it never quite needed you before. And if you're the American I think you are, you're going to side-step the tulle and organ-music for a few weeks and help this Administration out of a hole!"

A telephone-call interrupted the chief's words, but never once did his eyes leave the other man's face.

"Remember, it's not this newspaper war-talk that's worrying us. We're three months ahead of that. And it's not the ship-bombs and the factory-burnings and the labor-plots that are worrying us. We've got plenty of good workers to trail down the rest of that rough-neck stuff. We can handle the Fays and Von Papens and Van Homes and Loudens and Scholzes easily enough, though we can't always holler out how much we know about 'em. But there's another gang operating over here that's getting on our nerves. For example, who told both Vienna and Berlin that we'd approached the Danish Minister on the matter of the purchase of the Danish West Indies and gave the Germans a chance to set the Rigsdag against the bill of cession? Who surrendered our vacuum valve amplifier, for picking up wireless, to that same power? Who stole the Pearl Island's mine-field maps for the protection of the Canal? Who gave our new Fort Totten target-firing records to the foreign agent who was taken off the Niew Amsterdam at Kirkwall and carried them in his shoe-sole when arrested? And God knows what might happen before our next gets off the stays! And I'm only telling you one-half of what we're up against here, with this second underground band sneaking our data before it can even be reported to the Department itself. You can pretty well see, I guess, what's got to be done by some one from this office. And I'm not the only man who thinks you ought to do it. You can count on the Secretary of the Navy, and, what's more, you can count on the White House!"

Wilsnach moved, as though to break the silence, but Kestner stopped him. Then he turned to the thick-shouldered man at the desk.

"Let me explain something to you," he began in his cool and even tones. "You know what our work is. It's a bit like tiger-shooting, seductive enough, but still dangerous. It has, as you say, a great deal of rough-neck work, and now and then an occasional risk. When you're young, you're glad enough to face those risks. There's a thrill about it. But to keep on at it, once you're nearing forty, you've got to have a spark of youth that won't go out. You've got to nurse your streak of romance. Now, the trouble is, I find my spark going out. The work doesn't seem romantic to me any more. It seems nearly always humdrum, and very often underhand."

"It's necessary work," interrupted the other.

"So is scavenging. And I feel I've done about enough of it."

"Then keep it up," persisted the chief, "by helping us clear away this final mess."

"But I'm tired of messes like this. I'm tired of the types they bring you in contact with. I'm tired of the way they have to be rounded up. I'm tired of crook-warrens and gun-play and wire-tapping. I want quietness and decency and an acre or two of lawn with a tennis-court at one end and a Japanese tea-house at the other!"

"Which is exactly what I've been trying to argue you into," promptly pointed out the chief. "You get all those things when you get your rosewood desk at the Embassy—with a silk hat and a state carriage thrown in!"

"My experience with Embassies," suggested Kestner, "hasn't precisely fixed them in my mind as abodes of quietude."

"But instead of stewing along the undercrust, you'll be a monument on the upper," said the chief, with a repeated heavy gesture that was almost one of impatience. "And we can leave the Embassies out, for we've got troubles closer than that. We've got one of the shrewdest and completest systems of espionage ever organized to break up. As I've already told you, we've founds leaks from the Navy and from the Aviation Corps. Our cipher codes have been stolen and our wireless adaptations lifted. Our canal fortification plans have been dug out, and we know two different foreign powers are trying to get the secret of our new balanced turbines, to say nothing of the Cross torpedo for which, we know beyond a doubt, one Intelligence Department has offered a cool million. And we have every reason to believe the whole business is being engineered by one of the trickiest foreign agents who ever bought a war-map."

Kestner sighed a little wearily. "And the gentleman's name?" he casually inquired.

The chief was silent for a moment or two, as though weighing the expediency of making further confession to one still outside the Service. Then he pulled out a drawer and tossed a mounted group-photograph across the desk.

"That's an enlargement from a moving-picture film showing the crowd that watched the launching of our new submersible destroyer. We stumbled on it by accident. But in that crowd is one face, and if you look at it under the glass you'll see the face of the man who's organized the entire system that we've got to beat. That's about all we know, beyond the fact, apparently, that he's working with foreign people he's brought over for the purpose, people unknown to our operatives here."

"But who's the man?" repeated Kestner, running a casual eye along the welter of closely crowded figures on the mounted picture.

"Keudell!" was the chief's answer.

Kestner's hand dropped to the desk-top. "Keudell?" he echoed, a trifle vacuously, as he took up the picture and searched through its serried faces with a narrowing eye.

"Then you've heard the name?" inquired the chief.

"Yes, I've heard the name," was Kestner's slowly enunciated answer. "And even Wilsnach here will recognize the face, I imagine."

"You mean you know the man?"

"Do we know him, Wilsnach?" Kestner asked, turning to his colleague, bent low over the photograph.

"That's Keudell," cried out the younger man. "I'd swear it."

"And what do you know about him?" asked Blynn, turning back to Kestner.

"For one thing, that I hate him the same as a woman hates a snake."

"Why?"

Kestner's answer was neither so prompt nor so direct as it might have been. "Because embodied in him is everything about this life that made it, and still makes it, odious to me."

"Does that mean," asked the chief as he watched Kestner restore the photograph to the desk-top, "that we're not to count on you in this case?"

Kestner stared for a meditative moment or two at the Washington Monument. Then he turned back to the man at the desk.

"I'm not the man for this case. But I know the people it belongs to. And I can at least start those people right."

"What people?" asked the chief.

"Wilsnach here, for one."

"And the other?"

"Is a young woman named Sadie Wimpel."

"Why this young woman?"

"Because she knows Keudell the same as a keeper knows a diamond-back!"

The heavy-shouldered man behind the desk was already on his feet.

"Then supposing we talk to the Secretary of the Navy for five or ten minutes," he suggested. "And then we'll see if we can't get in to the President himself for a few minutes."

The other two men had already risen.

"The first thing we ought to do," explained Kestner, "is to round up Sadie Wimpel."

"That," announced the chief as he crossed to the Inner door, "should not be a difficult matter."

"Do you happen to know Sadie?" Kestner asked.

"Sadie Wimpel, gentlemen, is already engaged on this case," announced the chief, with a pardonable note of pride in his voice. "And to-morrow, as Madame Fatichiara, the world-renowned astrologist, I might add, she will be doing the decoy-duck act just off Broadway!"

Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

IT was six days after his conference in Washington that Kestner was breakfasting in his rooms overlooking San Diego Bay. He had his reasons for privacy, and nursed no inclination, apparently, to mingle with the gayer company thronging the wide verandas and corridors of that huge hostelry which seemed to exist only for laughter and music and dancing and love-making.

Yet the table was laid for two, and as Kestner sat before his iced Casaba he might have been seen to glance repeatedly and impatiently down at his watch. His look of anxiety, in fact, did not pass away until a telephone-bell rang and the hotel-office announced the arrival of Lieutenant Keays.

"I'm sorry to be late," proclaimed this young lieutenant, as Kestner admitted him and at the same moment dismissed the waiter.

The newcomer, who bore a startling resemblance to Wilsnach of the Paris office, inspected the laden breakfast table with evident relief. It was, how , a rejuvenated Wilsnach, an airy and summery Wilsnach in white cricketer's flannel, carrying a roll-brim Panama and a bamboo swagger-stick. "But to rig out in this get-up takes time."

Kestner, as they took their seats, cast a somnolently critical eye over his younger colleague. "You'll do!" he finally announced.

"But just why am I Lieutenant Keays?" inquired the man in cricketer's flannel.

"Because, my dear fellow, your arrival has been duly heralded in the evening papers," Kestner announced, "and there are one or two persons, quite outside official circles, who are rather interested in your new war-plane."

"My new war-plane?"

"Yes; which you have brought with you from the Brooklyn Navy Yard—at least, the specifications are now with you."

Kestner handed an oblong packet of papers across the table to his inquiring-eyed colleague.

"Then you've actually been finding something out?" Wilsnach asked.

"I've found out quite a number of things," was Kestner's quiet-toned answer, as he squeezed a slice of lemon over his fried sand-dabs. "And not the least important is the fact that Wallaby Sam is working with Keudell."

Wilsnach looked up in astonishment.

"That's a sweet pair to have against us!" he solemnly affirmed.

"But this seems to be only a side-show," Kestner explained. "The main-top, we must remember, is back in New York. It's only outpost work we're doing here, Wilsnach, for it's Sadie they've planted at the center of things."

A shadow crossed Wilsnach's face.

"But will it be safe for that girl, working alone there?"

Kestner smiled.

"You'd rather have her here?" he inquired.

"Couldn't she help us out, on a case like this?"

"But this case, Wilsnach, is off the main line. And you needn't worry about Sadie Wimpel not being able to take care of herself. In the meantime, however, we've got our own work cut out for us."

"Along what lines?"

"I'm not quite sure myself, yet. You see, I've had to keep under cover and remain a purely nocturnal animal, so to speak. And that's counted against me."

"Why under cover?"

"Because one of the facts I've dug out is that the sweet-scented couple we spoke of a moment ago have got Anna Makaieff operating for them, and operating right here in this hotel."

"Makaieff?" cogitated Wilsnach. "That name's new to me."

"Well, it isn't to me—and I've had the dictaphone annunciator on the end of this jointed bamboo fishing-pole covering her window every night it was open."

"Where does she come from?"

"Her father was an Anglicized Pole and her mother a music-hall singer in Paris. She was trained for the stage herself, but married before she was twenty. Then she went to India with an English army-officer who knew nothing of her antecedents. There she hitched up with a Russian grand-duke and ran away to the Orient, where she was soon deserted, and had to live by her wits. Keudell found her there when he was buying up German coast-defense data, and took her to Vienna, where she learned two or three more languages, and how to dress, and a few of the tricks of the international spy trade. She was four years in Petrograd, and those four years, I'd venture, cost the Russian government a good many million rubles in military leaks. Then she rather dropped out of things for a few years, for she actually fell in love with a young artist and stuck to him like a bur until the family railroaded the boy out of the country. To-day she's an exceptionally adroit and attractive woman of the panther type, at the dangerous age of thirty, and with her claws this time set in the flesh of a Lieutenant-Colonel Diehms out here."

"And has Diehms been—?" Wilsnach seemed reluctant to put his fellow-officer's fall into words,

"I'm afraid so."

"Poor devil!"

"Yes, poor devil, for he has a wife and two children at Wilmington, and Shrubb wires me they're the right sort!"

"And does the Makaieff woman dream you're on her trail?"

"Naturally not, or she'd even let Diehms out of her claws to get away. It makes me sick to see that poor devil dancing about with her. He's like a man in a trance."

"Could she care for him?"

"Not a rap! What she's after is Navy informa . Why, she had possession of every detail of our L-1 ten days after it was launched at the yards of the Fore River Shipbuilding Company and three weeks before its acceptance trials by the Navy people themselves. And now she's after our new airship specifications. That seems to be her main object. But incidentally she's picking up any Army or Navy secret that she can get her hands on. So the only thing for this man Diehms to do, when the truth comes out, is to shut himself up and quietly blow his brains out."

"But can you afford to let him do that?"

"I can't exactly say, just yet. But our panther has hypnotized him. For example, you read last week about the aviation tests over here at the North Island school? You probably read how Lieutenant Taylor, of the Aviation Corps, established an endurance record for eleven hours and twelve minutes on only thirty gallons of gasoline. That was with our new Farlow motor. Keudell and his people to-day have full specifications of that motor in their possession. Anna Makaieff is the agent who got it for them—though it didn't come from Diehms. And inside another ten days, if no one interferes with her activities, she'll know as much about our secret adaptation of the Crozier-Buffington disappearing carriage for coast-defense guns as the Chief of Ordnance himself. So that gives you a slight hint of why this very handsome young lady from Austria has to be rounded up."

Wilsnach poured himself out a second cup of coffee. "She won't be easy to corner, I imagine."

"The hardest part is Diehms, with that decent family to pull down after him," was Kestner's meditative reply. "The poor devil can't be saved, of course. But I find it isn't easy to get the thought of that Wilmington home out of my head."

"And the woman doesn't worry you ?"

"What good is a woman of that type? She's like a cat in a squab-pen. The sooner her hide is nailed to the aviary door, the better. She's merely a sneak-thief in spangles. She's nothing more than a penny-weighter with a Paris accent, or a lush-dip with the grande dame air." Kestner's gesture was one of half-wearied disgust. "She's just panther—which means cat written large. What I'm trying to tell you is that she's carnivorous, and always will be, for wherever your panther wanders you are going to find her feeding on somebody's flesh and blood. And we'd all prefer that she wandered about in some other part of the world."