"All this information," he exclaimed, "going back and forth with absolute impunity!"
"Until to-day," Singleton breathed out from full lungs. "Great day this for the service!"
But Napier sat appalled. No ship to leave our harbors, but its character and course might be known to the enemy lying in wait! He began to believe things he'd scoffed at. It was true, then, the Germans had coded in their secret-service ciphers every naval base, every ammunition center, every camp, every war-vessel of the British fleet. He said as much, with raging in his heart.
"And while ship after ship, crew after crew, goes down, what is our secret service doing!"
One member of it was blowing smoke-rings. Not till the supply of smoke gave out, did Singleton fall back on words:
"You hear very little about the English secret service, and you hear a lot about the German. That, to begin with, is an advantage, greater than you can appreciate. I don't propose to subtract from it. But there's no law against my talking about the German system. Their greatest technical flaw is that they lose themselves in a wilderness of detail. Their men will know all about the trajectory and penetration of the fourteen-inch gun, and they'll understand so little the men who make the guns that our quarrels among ourselves, our industrial unrest, is taken to mean that we're ready to consent to 'a German peace.' They'll report reams—we've seen 'em, got 'em docketed in our drawers—reams about the ordnance factories of the Argyle works. But as for the new projectile we're turning out a few hundred yards away, they'll have no more idea of that—till it goes whistling and roaring through their compact formations—than they have that the money they're still secretly supplying to Pforzheim comes straight to our Intelligence Department. All the same, where the Germans fail isn't in brains. Trouble with the ruck of 'em is, they go from the extreme of sentimentality at one end, to the extreme of brutality at the other. Pforzheim! A sort of modern Werther, with a capacity for cruelty that would turn a South Sea cannibal sick. This woman, too. Risk her own life and lose Pforzheim his, colossal business in hand, and goes on like the heroine of a shilling shocker. Can't resist collecting all the silly 'properties.' Simply dotes on the paraphernalia, pistol, and what not. One of the unwritten rules of the service: 'Make no memoranda. Carry no documents; only by rare exception carry arms.' She goes putting down compromising details, in a letter, for the amateurish pleasure of airing her 'inside knowledge' of the British Cabinet, and making use of invisible ink. No self-respecting British spy would be caught dead with most of the truck she'd collected in that box."
Napier had the very soundest conviction that, however poorly Singleton thought, or pretended to think, of Miss Greta's qualifications, he had set a guard of some sort at every possible avenue of escape. The woman was already as much a prisoner as any badger in the bottom of a bag. "If she's a specimen of the amateur," Napier said, "Heaven save us from the professional!"
Singleton laughed. "Heaven would need to look lively. I'd hate to be the custodian of damaging secrets with a fellow like Grindley about. You'll see." He struck his fist on the table. "A hundred pound sterling to a German pfennig, Grindley'll come back with that message from the Dutch agent neatly decoded. Oh, Grindley's immense!" Singleton rolled one long leg over the other, luxuriating in Grindley's immensity. "We aren't supposed to know each other—Grindley and I. But who wouldn't know Grindley! As a matter of fact, I introduced him to the chief, and the chief luckily isn't a stickler for the continental rules in this business. We English humanize it. What's the result? We totally mystify the rule-ridden Hun, and we've got the most efficient secret service in the world."
"Have we?" Napier started involuntarily at the sound of the motor turning off the high road and running now through the plantation with a muffled hum. "Here comes the—amateur!"
No acumen was required to read the fact that, in Napier's opinion, Singleton underestimated the noxious power of the amateur agent.