"Excellently well," was the reply of the messenger from the Secret Service Department in the Königgrätzerstrasse. "Germany relies upon you to assist us, as we know you are doing. Count von Wedell has sent you a letter, which I have handed to your friend Féodor."
"Read it, Féodor," said the monk. "There are no secrets in it that may be hidden from our dear friend Hardt."
He spoke the truth. Hardt was the confidential messenger who passed between the Emperor William and Alexandra Feodorovna, and nowadays he was travelling to and fro to Germany always, notwithstanding that Russia was at war with her neighbour.
At Rasputin's bidding I tore open the letter, but found it to be written in cipher.
Therefore I sat down at the little desk and at once commenced to decode it. It was in the German spy-cipher, the same used all over the world by German secret agents—the most simple yet at the same time the most marvellous and complicated code that the world has ever known.
The keys to the code were in twelve sentences that one committed to memory. Hence no code-book need ever be carried. The cipher message, in its introduction, told its recipient the number of the sentences being used—a most ingenious mode of correspondence.
With the paper before me I discovered that in sentence number eight I would find the key. The sentence in question, a proverb something like "Faint heart never won fair lady," I wrote down, and then at once began to decipher the cryptic message from Berlin.
And I read out the following:
"Memorandum No. 43,286.
"From No. 70 to the Holy Father.