“They’re much-wanted dyes! The man who was slain in Switzerland said the formulae to these two colors would be found in the boxes. They may be there, but we haven’t found them!�
MacKeenon lowered a blind and turned. He sniffed with the scent of a baffled hound. The pouches at the side of his cheeks dropped, his teeth showed beneath curled gums. Fay wheeled upon him suddenly and was startled at the inspector’s appearance. It was as if the old dog had snarled in silence.
“We’ll continue,� broke in Sir Richard as he shoved the box upon the table. “The game isn’t lost! There’s a key to the cipher in the embassy.�
“Have you tried everything?� asked Fay. “How about these cipher experts? I’ve heard they can cipher anything. There’s a Russian in Dartmoor who used to talk to the whole gallery by tapping on his bars. All you had to know was the key-word and deduct the numbers it represented from the numbers he sent. The quotient would be the message.�
“We’ve tried that,â€� snapped Sir Richard. “Believe me, Fay, that was the first thing tried. It’s the Nihilist key-word cipher! Fifty of the keenest brains in Europe and America have worked on this thing. It does not follow Bacon’s biliteral cipher or Poe’s cryptogram. It has some of the marks of an old Italian cipher used in the time of Pope Alexander. It isn’t that! It has already driven one professor of mathematics mad. He cross-indexed it and tried it backward. He found a queer average in the repetition of certain letters. They followed no sane rule. For that reason he went insane. More may go mad if this thing isn’t solved. It represents the final triumph over Germany—the winning of the commercial war which is upon us!â€�
Fay drew his head back into the shadow. He still retained the ringing timbre of Sir Richard’s voice. The energetic chief of the Intelligence Division had once been on a mission to the States. He had learned much that was American on that visit.
“Damnit!� he heard Sir Richard blurt. “We’re
not children! We have defeated the Germans on the field of battle. Why can’t we solve a simple cipher?�
“What did you pay for it?� Fay shot the question out of the shadow and watched its effect on Sir Richard’s features.
“Pay for it? What do you mean, Fay?�