“Right,” said Donovan. “And now we’ve got that settled, and we’ve three-quarters of an hour to spare, before the bombardment is timed to begin. There are one or two points I’d like to have cleared up. But I wish you’d sit down, Smith, and take a cigar. As head of the Intelligence Department of this kingdom——”
“If you’re quite sure, sir, that there isn’t anything you want me to fetch. A drink, sir?”
“Not for me,” said Donovan. “I want to talk.”
Smith sat down, stretched himself comfortably in a deep chair and lit a cigar.
“What’s the Emperor’s game?” said Donovan. “What’s he after? What the hell does he mean by monkeying round this island ever since I bought it?”
“Well,” said Smith, “I haven’t got what you could call official knowledge of the Emperor’s plans. My orders came to me through Steinwitz, and Steinwitz doesn’t talk unnecessarily.”
The servant manner and the cockney accent disappeared when Smith sat down. He talked to Donovan as one man of the world to another.
“Still,” said Donovan, “you’ve got some sort of idea.”
“Last December,” said Smith, “I was in London keeping an eye on King Konrad Karl. The Emperor liked to know what he was doing. One day I got orders to take delivery of some large cisterns from a firm in Germany, paying for them by cheque drawn on my own account. They were consigned to me as water cisterns. My business was to ship them to Hamburg and hand them over to Captain von Moll. That’s all I was told. But I happened to find out what von Moll’s orders were. He was to land those cisterns in Salissa. I satisfied myself that they were here as soon as I arrived with you on the Ida. Von Moll concealed them very well; but he was a bit careless in other ways. He seems to have lived in the palace while he was here and he left some papers lying about, torn up but not burnt. One of them was a letter from Steinwitz. Phillips, the officer of the Ida, had his eye on those papers. I swept them up and destroyed them.”
“And the cisterns?” said Donovan. “What are they for?”