The names of Bernstorf, Von Papen, Boy-Ed, and other former leading agents of the kaiser in the United States flashed through his mind, and he was curious to know what sort of men directed their activities from central headquarters. It was not long before his curiosity was rewarded with visual evidence.
Lieut. Ellis and Lieut. Vollmer walked up a broad flight of flagstone steps to the second floor and into the waiting room of a large suite of offices. There they were met by a girl of freshman high-school age, who evidently served in the capacity of office boy.
"Have the office boys all been drafted for military service?" Irving asked himself as his companion answered the girl's questions.
They were directed to wait a few minutes, which they accordingly did, and in a quarter of an hour were ushered into the presence of a mild-eyed man whose least prepossessing characteristic was the undependability of the mildness of his gaze. Irving had not been long in the room with him before he realized that the fellow's "gentleness" was a carefully cultivated "attribute," schemed, plotted, and devised to qualify him for the shrewdest and most subtle of government secret service. He was a large man of good proportions, with a mustache that stood out like a tooth-brush parted in the middle and a very fair and well rounded face. Although he might have passed for thirty-five years of age, Irving subsequently learned that he was nearly ten years older. He answered to the title of "the baron," addressed familiarly by Lieut. Vollmer.
"Here he is," said the latter, who seemed to think this was all the introduction needed.
Irving bowed, and "the baron" bowed. There was no shaking of hands between them.
"Very well," said the intelligence official, indicating thereby that the announcer's duty was performed and that he might now retire. Vollmer did as suggested by the manner of the receiving nobleman, and Irving and his world-plotting host were alone.
"I have heard your story from Lieut. Vollmer," "the baron" began. "He said you had a message tattooed on your arm. Let me see it."
Irving took off his coat, rolled up his shirt sleeve and exhibited for inspection the "cubist art cryptogram" on his left forearm. The official gazed at it closely a minute or two; then said:
"Just wait a minute and I'll have it read."
He lifted a telephone receiver to his ear and called out a local number through the transmitter. Presently he was talking to the desired department.
"Send Kiehler and Joe Weber in here," he said.
Three minutes later two middle-aged men entered. Neither of them was of striking appearance. In fact, each had a rather stolid look, but it was not long before Irving realized that there was some real mechanical, if not imaginative, ability underneath their apparent stupidity.
"Take this young man into your office and read that cipher message on his arm," ordered "the baron."
The two cryptogram readers bowed and one of them requested Irving to follow. They left the office and proceeded to another on the top floor of the building.
It was a very light suite of rooms that Irving now found himself in. One room particularly was supplied with the best of daylight illumination through a skylight overhead. It reminded Irving of an architectural drafting room. Half a dozen men were seated at as many desks working as diligently over record and manuscript material before them as so many college students "cramming" for a trigonometry or chemistry exam. Irving was conducted to an unoccupied desk in a remote corner of the room and there he and his two companions sat down and the consultation began.
The two cryptologists, however, had little to say. They seemed to have little interest in Irving save as to the cipher message he had brought for them to translate. They exhibited no surprise when the boy spy rolled up his sleeve and disclosed the manner in which he had conveyed his message. They seemed to have become so accustomed to the discovery of unusual things that nothing could astonish them. Stolidity of manner was a term that fitted them exactly, but certainly not unqualified stolidity. Irving felt almost as if their eyes burned right into his arm.
They worked diligently for more than an hour over the boy's bared arm, frequently jotting down characters on tabs of paper before them. At last they finished and informed him that he might go.
"Go where?" Irving inquired.
Without answering, one of the men picked up the receiver of a telephone and put it to his ear. He gave a number to the operator and soon he was talking to someone. The waiting boy was sure that the person "at the other end" was "the baron."
"Go back to the hotel and remain there for instructions," the man at the 'phone said presently, as he hung up the receiver.
Irving left the building, intending to take a cab to the hotel. He had scarcely reached the street, however, when it suddenly occurred to him that he had no money with him.
"I'll have to walk," he mused. "Well, it isn't very far and I can make it easy before suppertime. But I wonder if I'll get through with this uniform. Well, I'll use my nerve and see what happens."
He started out briskly, but observed as he went that he attracted attention from a good many persons on the street, some of them soldiers. Undoubtedly it was his nerve that got him through, but he could not avoid several times turning his head with whatever nonchalance he could command and stealing glances to the right and left and behind. After looking back two or three times, he became curious regarding the purpose of a middle-aged man in civilian clothes whom he had observed in front of the intelligence building as he came out of the main entrance.
"I wonder if that fellow is following me?" he said to himself, a little nervously.
He walked a few squares farther, then stopped and looked into a tailor show-window. He remained there several minutes, really interested in the display and the prices. With a kind of meditative look, he glanced down the street, but could see nothing of his supposed shadower. Then he moved on again, turned a corner, walked half a square, and suddenly faced about as if he had made a mistake in his direction and must retrace his steps.
The middle-aged man in civilian clothes, who was not more than a hundred feet away, turned almost as suddenly as the boy in Canadian khaki had turned and entered a cafe that he seemed about to pass.
"I'm being followed," muttered the spy with a real chill of alarm. "I wonder what's up. Have they found something wrong with that message? Did those cryptogram readers discover that the message had been tampered with?"