The anti-British station was still working on, as it did every evening; therefore, three times its bearings were taken, and each result came out the same.
“Thanks, Lowestoft! Thanks, Pevensey! Much obliged!” Geoffrey said over the wireless telephone. “Switching off!”
He looked for a long time at the map, and with the officer-in-charge of direction-finding he discussed the matter for a long time.
“In Copenhagen it should be easy to spot the whereabouts of the secret station. Indeed, upon a large-scale map of Denmark almost the very spot could be determined,” the direction-finding officer said.
Geoffrey lost no time next day when in London in obtaining a large-scale map of Denmark, as well as one of the city of Copenhagen, from a shop in Fleet Street, and a fortnight later, with the aid of an eminent geographer—a friend of his father—he was able, by making careful measurements, to locate the secret Soviet station as being in the Raadhus-Plads.
A week later, having been granted leave of absence from the Marconi Works at Chelmsford upon another pretext, he travelled to the Danish capital, where he put up at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, in the Kongens-Nytorv. In his luggage he carried his own supersensitive receiving set, all of which he had constructed himself.
To the hotel personnel he made it known frankly that he was a wireless engineer, and on a table in the corner of his bedroom overlooking the square he set up his instruments, after hiring from a local garage an accumulator for his valve-filaments—namely, to light up the seven little cylindrical vacuum-tubes of his supersensitive amplifier.
On the night of his arrival in Copenhagen, after dining alone in the big white-and-gold salle-à-manger, he ascended to his room and sat there all the evening with the telephones over his ears. He could hear the British Admiralty working to Malta; Paris working to Warsaw; Carnarvon working to Belmar, and Bordeaux transmitting across the Atlantic. On that starlit night the ether was alive with messages by “spark” and continuous-wave being sent across the seven seas.
For over five hours he listened attentively, but all he heard was the usual commercial messages, most of them in code of various kinds. Then he took off the telephones and went out for a stroll along the Bredgade as far as the Esplenade, in order to refresh himself after his long and unsuccessful vigil.
Next day he wandered about the clean busy streets of the Danish capital, idling before the shops in the Ostergade, the Kjobmager Gade, and the Amargertov, or reading newspapers in the cafés, the Continental, the Bristol, or Otto’s. In spring Copenhagen is always bright and lively, and he found the city quite charming.