After another night journey across France, the two men alighted from a taxi at the Hôtel Weber, a small, uninviting-looking place with a dingy café beneath. It was then eight o’clock in the morning, and the valet de chambre, a clean-shaven man in shirt-sleeves and green baize apron, showed them two barely furnished rooms with the beeswaxed floors uncarpeted. They held consultation, being joined at once by the detective, Cimino, a short, stout man with small black eyes, and rather shabby clothes.
A few words sufficed to explain the situation.
He had followed Flobecq, unobserved, and had ascertained that on the previous day he had met in the Café de la Paix, a man named Stein, whom he afterwards found was an unattached journalist who wrote for certain of the most unprincipled of the Paris journals.
The two men spent several hours together, and were apparently bargaining. No agreement, he believed, had been arrived at, and they had arranged to meet again that day.
Hubert listened in silence to the man’s story, then, taking a taxi, he drove first to the British Embassy, and thence to an apartment near the Arc de Triomphe, where he was closeted for half an hour with Colonel Guy Maitland, the British military attaché.
Thence, just after half-past ten, he drove to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d’Orsay, and there interviewed one of the permanent staff.
When he emerged he was accompanied back to the Hôtel Weber by a thin, insignificant-looking little man, wearing a bowler hat and grey gloves. The net was gradually being drawn around the famous spy, who had not yet left his room, and was still unconscious of how completely he was now surrounded. Truth to tell, the thin man in black was Berton, a detective inspector of the political department of the Sûreté, attached to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Thus the four men waited impatiently in the hotel, Berton of the Sûreté having telephoned from the little bureau of the proprietor for two plain-clothes agents from the nearest poste of police.
At last Flobecq, on descending the stairs, was met by a waiter who told him that a gentleman was awaiting him in the little private salon on the first floor.
In surprise, he turned into the room indicated, and there came face to face with Hubert Waldron. His cheeks went pale, and he started at the unexpected encounter.