Not content with that, he also smashed every spare valve, and then destroyed the insulation upon two transformers of the receiving set, thus putting the whole station out of action.
Afterwards he relocked the door and made his way back past the castle and out upon the high road which led down to Nagy-Károly. Through the greater part of the night he walked, until at a small mountain village he was able to induce a peasant to harness a horse and drive him into the town.
Before nine o’clock that morning he called upon the chief of police, and through a man who spoke French, gave him a description of the secret wireless set, and of the dastardly plot to kill him and dispose of his body by burying it in the forest.
At once the police official was on the alert, for the Schloss Zenta, he said, belonged to a certain young Count Böckh, who was a minor, and at the university of Budapest. He had never heard of the Baron, who had, no doubt, established himself there unknown to its rightful owner, but pretending to the servants that he had rented it furnished. This was later on ascertained to be a fact.
Within an hour urgent telegrams were exchanged between the Ministry of Police in Budapest and the chief at Nagy-Károly, so that at noon, when the Baron and Koblitz put in an appearance at the railway station—intending to fly after finding that Falconer had gone and that the secret wireless station had been put out of action—they were at once arrested and sent by the next train under escort to Budapest.
Later, after much inquiry, the police discovered that the pseudo-Baron—whose real name was Franz Haynald, a well-known revolutionist—had, with Koblitz and a number of others, formed a great and widespread political plot, financed by Germany, to effect a union with Hungary and Bavaria. Austria was to be overthrown, Vienna occupied jointly by Bavarian and Hungarian troops, and Czecho-Slovakia was to be blindfolded by creating a revolution in Jugo-Slavia. The idea was, with the aid of Tzarist Russia, to establish a great “New Germany,” which was to be more powerful than ever, and become mistress of the world.
This certainly would have been attempted—for the erecting of that powerful wireless station was one of the first steps—had not Geoffrey Falconer acted with such boldness and decision.
Haynald, with Françoise—who was the daughter of the man Koblitz—Koblitz himself, the servant Karl, and twenty others are all now undergoing long sentences of imprisonment.