“No. In daylight—in a crowded street. It would then be more efficacious—death resulting within five days to everyone infected.”
“Terrible!” exclaimed the Kaiser’s secret agent—the man of treble personality.
“Yes. But it is according to instructions. See here!” and he took up what appeared to be a small bag of indiarubber—like a child’s air-ball that had been deflated. “This acts exactly the same when filled, only the case is soluble. One minute after touching water or, indeed, any liquid, it dissolves, and thus releases the germs!”
“Gott!” gasped Ortmann. “You are, indeed, a dealer in bottled death, my dear Theodore. Truly, you’ve been inventing some appalling things for our dear friends here—eh?”
The man with the scraggy beard, who was a skilled German scientist, though he posed as a Dutch pastor, smiled evilly, while at that moment the man Meins, who had his eye upon the microscope, beckoned both of them forward to look.
Ortmann obeyed, and placing his eye upon the tiny lens, saw in the brightly reflected light colonies of the most deadly bacilli yet discovered by German science—the germs of a certain hitherto unknown disease, against which there was no known remedy. The fifth day after infection of the human system death inevitably resulted.
“All quite healthy!” declared the great bacteriologist from behind his mask. “What would our friends think if they knew the means by which they came into this country—eh?”
Drost laughed, and, crossing to a cupboard, took out a fine Ribston-pippin apple. This he cut through with his pen-knife, revealing inside, where the core had been removed, one of the tiny tubes secreted.
“They came like this from our friends in a certain neutral country,” he laughed.
From tube after tube Meins took and examined specimens, finding all the cultures virulent except one, which he placed aside.