Grasping Stewart's hand he rose.
"We'd better go back," he said simply, brushing the snow from his clothes, "Fay must be about ready to make a full confession."
They walked to the bank of the lake and waited for the return of the operatives in the automobile.
At the club they found Fay ready to make his confession. He had signalled his willingness to do so.
"I was given 20,000 marks to come to America," he said, "I was told to get in communication with German officials here—but they would not have anything to do with me. That is all I can tell you regarding them——"
He stopped. The memory of another day had come to him—a room in an office building in lower New York, in Wall Street. The clamor of traffic and shouts of drivers echoing into a still room. Two men before him, hard, cunning, calculating. And the voice of one suavely suggesting:
"Our positions demand that we must not be known as the directors of any movement of espionage against the United States—if your plan should fail and you should be arrested, we would of course be compelled to repudiate you. Like-wise it would be your duty to say that you had tried to see us but that we had denied you an interview."
His plot had failed, and Fay, true to the in-born traditions of his nationality, was shielding those above him. But even as he realized that the end of his plotting was at hand, he knew that somehow, somewhere his work would be taken up. That the work of the German Government in undermining the peace of this nation would not stop with his failure, that its paid agents would take up the plotting and scheming and destruction where he had given it up.
Fay told them what they already knew, the story of the bomb he had invented, the bomb which was to stop all shipping and which was eventually to be used to blow up the harbor of New York. He told them of his exploits in the trenches, of the fame he had earned for bombing expeditions successfully concluded, of the iron cross that should have been his but had gone to one higher in command, but no other word regarding those others in this country who were backing him.
While the members of the Criminology Club were listening to Fay's confession, two men sat in a room of the Imperial German Embassy at Washington—Count Johann von Bernstorff and one other. Before them was a table littered with blue prints. That the plan they were discussing had been brought to a high degree of practicability, the blue prints bore evidence. Fay, the pawn in the hands of those higher up, was forgotten, his effort overshadowed by a plan the magnitude of which was beyond his wildest dreams. Bernstorff laid a clenched fist heavily on the table.