“My innocent Watkins!” Rukh said twittingly. “Do you think it’s true? What have I to do with an unapproachable English woman? It’s only a bait for the Feringhis. You shall send it out in their hearing, and if either of them can read the Morse code, the devil’s in it if he doesn’t give himself away.”
“Beg pardon, sir,” Watkins said, with an appreciative grin. “I didn’t quite catch on.”
“If they move an eyelash I’ll take care they never see the inside of this room again,” Rukh asserted. Watkins made no comment; he did not doubt it.
“Am I to send this to India, sir?” he asked.
“To anywhere or nowhere,” Rukh told him cheerfully. “Reduce the current, so that no one can pick it up. So long as it’s heard in this room, that’s all I want.”
“But when am I to send it, sir?” the man inquired not unreasonably.
“Listen,” the Raja ordered. “I’ll get them in here on the pretext of a little wireless demonstration, and then I’ll tell you to send out an order to Tashkent for champagne. That’ll be your cue. Go ahead—and send slowly.”
“Shall I ask whether I’m to code it, sir?” Watkins was taking every precaution to do exactly as the Raja wished. It always was wisest—and safest also—to do that. But too the man was entering into the spirit of it now. He liked his job.
“You may as well,” Rukh assented. “It’ll give artistic finish to the thing.”
“Very good, Your ’Ighness. But,” he had more to ask, more to provide himself with precautions for, “afterwards, if, as you was saying, they was to try to corrupt me, sir—”