I had to be very careful not to be seen by Thornton, for it was quite possible, if my suspicions were well founded, that he might know me. And it was well that I did, for I recognised him instantly as Emil Brahe, a German agent of whom we had lost sight for some time. He had formerly been engaged on the Continent and was well known to our men, though of late years he seemed to have dropped out of active work, and we had lost sight of him altogether. I realised now that we had been cleverly tricked: we had believed him to belong to the Berlin branch, while all the time he was living quietly in England, where he did no “business” whatever, and was thus never suspected even by the astute men of the Special Branch.
We had relied much on Madame Gabrielle’s powers to extract information from Madame Bohman, with whom she was already on excellent terms. The pair often sat chatting in the lounge, smoking each other’s cigarettes, and I knew the fair Gabrielle was keenly on the alert for any slip by which Madame Bohman might “give herself away.” The Swedish woman, however, was far too clever and would betray nothing.
Shadowing Thornton, or Brahe, to give him his right name, was Manuel Garcia, a capable ex-detective of the Lisbon police, who was now an agent of the Central Bureau of Counter-Espionage in Paris.
That telegrams were constantly passing between the Swedish engineer and some people in Lyons and Marseilles I knew, and, indeed, I was able to secure copies of some of them. In this way I discovered that these Swedes were on very friendly terms with a banker named Heurteau, who had carried on business in Paris before the war, had afterwards escaped to Zurich, and had long been suspected of being one of the paymasters of the spy bureau in Berlin.
On the morning of the thirteenth, in consequence of what Madame Gabrielle had told me, I took train to Geneva, where I put up at the National. Manuel Garcia followed by the next train, and early next morning I received a telephone message from Madame Gabrielle telling me that Madame Bohman had left the Waldesruhe and was due at Geneva at four o’clock that afternoon.
As a result of this message Garcia and I watched the incoming train, and my assistant followed Madame Bohman in a taxi to a small hotel in the Quai de Mont Blanc. An hour later Garcia himself took a cab to the hotel so as to watch for the arrival of Halbmayr, the real antagonist with whom our duel was being fought out.
Halbmayr, a short, stout, bald-headed man, with perfect manners and the air of a bon viveur, kept his appointment punctually, arriving from Bâle the next day about noon. As he knew me well, I was compelled to remain in hiding, but from my window I was able, with a pair of good field-glasses, to watch Madame Bohman and the German walking together on the Promenade du Lac, evidently engaged in the closest conversation. Garcia, of course, was not far away.
The pair remained together for an hour and a half, and I noticed with amusement that the wily Halbmayr took particular care to select a seat which stood quite in the open, with no shelter of any kind at hand behind which an eavesdropper might lurk. Garcia was thus, of course, effectually kept at a distance, and had no opportunity of gleaning anything from our enemies’ conversation.
Apparently the two, in the course of their earnest conversation, arrived at some definite agreement, for when they at length rose and parted, Halbmayr returned direct to the station, where he had left his luggage in the cloak-room, while the Swedish woman went back to her hotel, leaving for Lucerne an hour later.
By the next train I also travelled with Garcia to Lucerne. Immediately on our arrival we all had a consultation, and we were deep in talk when I received a startling message from Hecq in Paris. It had been sent to him by Johnson-Meads, who had promised to communicate with me through Hecq if any further suspicious matter came under his notice. The message read: