A light tattoo on a panelling, an answering tattoo, another staccato and the panel slid back and the odour of black cigars was heavy on the air as Lanagan stepped into a small compartment, the panel slipping noiselessly shut behind him as his guide disappeared. At a table were seated two men, facing him.
One of the two he recognised: Koshloff. But the other! Lanagan looked hard. There could be no mistake; those features had been looming from the front pages of the papers too frequently for any mistake. Lanagan stood without speaking, but before his mind’s eye was dancing the front page of to-morrow’s _Enquirer_. He would lay a seven column lead across that page that would carry around the world.
“You have the packet? Yes? Would you present it?”
Then, in a low voice to the other, as Lanagan calmly placed the sealskin wallet upon the table, Koshloff murmured:
“Assuredly my superiors must know their business. But I cannot comprehend the disappearance of Carlos and the transfer of the pin and packet to the stranger. It must be in order, however. Our system has never failed.”
He turned a shrewd gaze upon Lanagan, studying him intently.
“Just as soon as I am permitted to,” replied Lanagan with perfect truth.
“Strange,” muttered Koshloff in the other’s ear. “Peculiar. It is the answer. We have no choice. It must be in order.”
Without more ado the packet was opened and Koshloff presented the slip in silence to his companion. That man, of massive, intellectual forehead and deep set, penetrating eyes, scanned it carefully and pondered long, Koshloff watching him with half closed but eager eyes.
“Tell your Imperial Master,” said the other, turning sharply upon Lanagan and speaking with clean incisiveness, “that you met the Secretary of State in person, and that the Secretary, speaking for his excellency the President, says, that the answer of the President is--yes.”
The Secretary of State, ten days disappeared from Washington, out here on the western fringe of the continent, pledging the attitude of the United States in the threatened Russo-Japanese conflict and not a line in any paper in the world to indicate the whereabouts of the Secretary, his business, or the definite attitude of the United States in the impending conflict!