“I hadn’t expected this, but I thought I might want to communicate with Burke quickly. You see, I sight the lamp and then press the button which causes the light in the mirror to flash. It seems a paradox that a light like this can be seen from a distance of even five miles and yet be invisible to one for whom it was not intended, but it is so. I use the ordinary Morse code—two seconds for a dot, six for a dash with a four-second interval.”
“What message did you send?” I asked.
“I told him that Baron Kreiger was at five hundred and one East Fifth, probably; to get the secret service office in New York by wire and have them raid the place, then to come and rescue us. That was Annenberg. He must have come up by that trolley we heard passing just before.”
The minutes seemed ages as we waited for Burke to start the machinery of the raid and then come for us.
“No—you can’t have a cigarette—and if I had a pair of bracelets with me, I’d search you myself,” we heard a welcome voice growl outside the door a few minutes later. “Look in that other pocket, Tom.”
The lock grated back and there stood Burke holding in a grip of steel the undersized Annenberg, while the chauffeur who had driven our car swung open the door.
“I’d have been up sooner,” apologized Burke, giving the anarchist an extra twist just to let him know that he was at last in the hands of the law, “only I figured that this fellow couldn’t have got far away in this God-forsaken Ducktown and I might as well pick him up while I had a chance. That’s a great little instrument of yours, Kennedy. I got you, fine.”
Annenberg, seeing we were now four to one, concluded that discretion was the better part of valor and ceased to struggle, though now and then I could see he glanced at Kennedy out of the corner of his eye. To every question he maintained a stolid silence.
A few minutes later, with the arch anarchist safely pinioned between us, we were speeding back toward New York, laying plans for Burke to dispatch warnings abroad to those whose names appeared on the fatal list, and at the same time to round up as many of the conspirators as possible in America.
As for Kennedy, his main interest now lay in Baron Kreiger and Paula. While she had been driven frantic by the outcome of the terrible pact into which she had been drawn, some one, undoubtedly, had been trying to sell Baron Kreiger the gun that had been stolen from the American inventor. Once they had his money and he had received the plans of the gun, a fatal cigarette would be smoked. Could we prevent it?