"The Gull Island game," he said in his guarded voice, "isn't over and ended."
Napier stood waiting.
"We've got one of our best men there this minute, personating Carl Pforzheim." Taylor nodded in the face of Napier's stark astonishment. "Your friend Singleton. He's managed the Gull Island job from the beginning. Went up again the day after you were there. Wirelessed the German agent at Amsterdam that he'd had wind of a raid on the island. He was going to destroy every trace and get out. Singleton saw to it that the truth of that much was verified, and duly reported to the Wilhelmstrasse. He promised them—still, of course, in the character of Pforzheim—to get back to the island as soon as it was safe. Well, he has got back."
"What the devil could he tell of any use to Germany that wasn't fatal to us?" Napier demanded.
"You don't yet appreciate the situation," Taylor said softly. "It's a post of special advantage just because the man in charge can choose his own time to be there. He can give important information that reaches Germany the merest trifle too late, or information that he knows they've had already from another quarter. They're fond of verifying their intelligence. And he tells them things they want to believe and can't check—things they have to take his word for, things that will throw dust in the eyes they count on seeing clearest. I tell you, Gull Island is one of the cogs in the wheel of the British machine. You won't mind if I'm frank? Well, then, you'd have hard work to commit any indiscretion"—Taylor rubbed it in—"that would serve Schwarzenberg's ends so well as to enable her to warn the Germans that a British decoy was nesting in Carl Pforzheim's place."
As he stood there, a prey to increasing uneasiness, Napier had his further glimpse of one of the disintegrating effects of wartime: the unknown quantity in character. How that had been forced home! Taylor had seemed "one of the best." No one in the British service was more trusted, and, Napier's instinct told him, no one more justly. None the less, Napier didn't see headquarters writing "all this" from the other side.
"I suppose," he found himself saying, "I oughtn't to ask you how you heard about the decoy duck on the island?"
"Well"—Taylor reflected an instant,—"after all, my instructions—yes, I'll tell you. I have it on the best possible authority. Ernst Pforzheim told me."
"Ernst! Ernst Pforzheim is in an English prison, or rather, he was before—"
"Exactly. Before he became of such use to our side. Clever dog as that fellow Singleton is, he couldn't have worked the Gull Island oracle without Ernst Pforzheim's help."