So saying, he again measured the distance from the door, being on his knees the while. Then, still on his knees and taking the long gimlet, he screwed it into the plaster and worked hard until the steel slowly entered the wall, driving a small hole through it and at the same time throwing out a quantity of white dust upon the floor.
“It’s through?” he exclaimed presently, and withdrawing the tool, placed his eye to the small round hole.
“Excellent. Now we’ll take the wires through.”
Again the man, Dick Allen, opened the door noiselessly, and creeping out with a coil of twin wires, unrolled it from his hand and, as he went down the corridor, placed it beneath the edge of the strip of thick green carpet, and into a sitting-room four doors along.
He laid the two twisted wires still beneath the carpet, and carrying them behind a heavy settee, he took from his pocket what looked like a good-sized nickel-plated button. The front of it was, however, of mica, a tiny brass screw set in the centre. To it he carefully attached the fine silk-covered wires, tightening the screw securely. Then, taking a big safety-pin from his pocket, he attached the button to the back of the settee, where it was completely hidden.
The microphone-button hung there as a hidden ear in that luxuriously-furnished room.
When he returned to his companion he found that she had already driven in a tin-tack, around which she had twisted the two wires. To pass the wires beneath the door was impossible, as they would have to run over a long stretch of stone and somebody might trip over them.
Afterwards she put on her hat and fur coat, and the pair left the big Hôtel du Parc and strolled down the wide, bustling boulevard, the Rue Noailles, in that great city of commerce, Marseilles. The hotel they had left was not so large nor so popular as the great Louvre et Paix, which is perhaps one of the most cosmopolitan in all the world, but it was nevertheless well patronised. At the Louvre most travellers passing to and from India and the Far East stay the night, after landing or before embarking, so that it is an establishment with a purely cosmopolitan clientèle. But the Parc was a quieter, though very aristocratic hotel, patronised by British peers and wealthy Americans on their way to the Riviera or the East, and also by foreign potentates when landing in Europe.
The truth was that when the Moorish Minister of the Interior—the white-bearded old Moslem who had come over on an informal visit to the French President—arrived in Marseilles accommodation could not be found for him at the Louvre et Paix. So he had naturally gone to the Parc, where the best suite had been placed at his disposal by the officials at the Quai d’Orsay.
News of this had reached Dick Allen on his arrival from Nice, and Freda, posing as an English society woman, had taken another suite for the purpose of keeping observation upon the old Moorish Minister, whom his English friend Barclay had arrived in Marseilles to visit.