My two friends frankly recognized the affair at the house in Pimlico as a serious reverse. Not only had Clubfoot made away with one of the Chief’s most expert and trusted agents, but he had also eluded the trap laid for him and arranged matters so as to leave in the hands of his pursuers not a single accomplice against whom anything more serious than a simple misdemeanour could be proved. In itself the check was bad enough, but its results were even more grave. The long list of unexplained crimes was beginning to sap at the _moral_ of the Service: there were resignations among the weaker vessels whom crises of this nature invariably expose; and even the Chief, most dogged and equable of mortals, who had his own private reasons for anxiety, began to look worried. It therefore redounds the more to his credit that at this juncture, some three weeks after Clubfoot’s escape by river from the house of Pimlico, the Chief should have taken a decision that, it is safe to predict, in any walk of life other than the Secret Service, would have been denounced as sheer lunatic foolhardiness. Once more Grundt had vanished away into the Ewigkeit. It was as though the vast bulk of the master spy had dissolved into thin air. One clue, and one clue only—and that nothing better than a report based on more than doubtful authority—was forthcoming pointing to his presence in Germany. A “double-cross”—one of those versatile gentlemen who carry on espionage for both sides—sent word that a friend of his had seen a burly lame man whose appearance answered the description of Clubfoot lunching at a small café on one of the islands in the Havel, the river outside Berlin. No corroboration was obtainable and nothing more was heard directly of the redoubtable German until one morning the Chief found in his mail a letter from Dr. Grundt, posted in the West Central postal district of London, asking for an interview. This the Chief decided immediately to grant. By the rules of the game he knew that the meeting would be privileged. In according it he was aware that he undertook to allow his visitor to come and go unmolested. Such encounters are not uncommon in the Secret Service. The “double-crosses” form, as it were, an invisible bridge between the most inveterate adversaries and, within the limit of strange unwritten moral laws in this most immoral of avocations, there are pacts and understandings that not infrequently are laid down at meetings no whit less bizarre than the memorable interview between Clubfoot and the Chief. With characteristic consideration the big man sent for my two friends and informed them of Dr. Grundt’s request. “It’s . . . it’s incredible, sir,” said Desmond Okewood. “He wouldn’t have the nerve,” his brother Francis put in. “Clubfoot would,” grimly observed the Chief, and pitched a letter on the desk in front of them. “Read it for yourself!”