CHAPTER IX
THE SECRET OF OUR NEW GUN
Ray and I were in Newcastle-on-Tyne a few weeks after our success in frustrating the German plot against England.
Certain observations we had kept had led us to believe that a frantic endeavour was being made to obtain certain details of a new type of gun, of enormous power and range, which at that moment was under construction at the Armstrong Works at Elswick.
The Tyne and Tees have long ago been surveyed by Germany, and no doubt the accurate and detailed information pigeon-holed in the Intelligence Bureau at Berlin would, if seen by the good people of Newcastle, cause them a mauvais quart d'heure, as well as considerable alarm.
Yet there are one or two secrets of the Tyne and its defences which are fortunately not yet the property of our friends the enemy.
Vera was in Switzerland with her father.
But from our quarters at the Station Hotel in Newcastle we made many careful and confidential inquiries. We discovered, among other things, the existence of a secret German club in a back street off Grainger Street, and the members of this institution we watched narrowly.
Now no British workman will willingly give away any secret to a foreign Power, and we did not suspect that any one employed at the great Elswick Works would be guilty of treachery. In these days of socialistic, fire-brand oratory there is always, however, the danger of a discharged workman making revelations with objects of private vengeance, never realising that it is a nation's secrets that he may be betraying. Yet in the course of a fortnight's inquiry we learned nothing to lead us to suspect that our enemies would obtain the information they sought.
Among the members of the secret German club—which, by the way, included in its membership several Swiss and Belgians—was a middle-aged man who went by the name of John Barker, but who was either a German or a Swede, and whose real name most probably ended in "burger."