"You will have _carte blanche_, and you may use any means you think fit within--and, by special arrangement, without--the law to round up the Alpha Triangle. I am convinced that the menace with which we are faced is the greatest in the history of crime." "I'm glad to have your support," said Storm. "I more than scent rodents myself! But I thought I was in for some job persuading the authorities I wasn't an alarmist." The peer nodded absently and stirred his coffee. He seemed hardly to have heard Kit's remark, and when he spoke again it was in the same mechanical way as before, as though he neither anticipated nor required interruption. "Strictly between ourselves, Captain Arden, I know the secret of the Alpha Triangle." He pushed away his plate and lighted a cigar. "That, I think, should surprise you. You will ask, also, why I do not place my information at the service of the police. There is a reason for that--a reason which I cannot explain to you now, but which will be clear to you when, and if, you run the gang to earth. The Alpha Triangle is an organisation which came into existence originally for the purposes of revenge--the purpose for which it was organised by a genius who, I sometimes think, is mad. You have, of course, been interested in the murder--it was murder, by the way--of Joubert, a few months ago. That was the first crime of the Triangle, and yet I offer for your contemplation the paradox that until five minutes before the murder there was no Alpha Triangle." Storm sat without comment, although he was literally amazed at the confession he had just heard. Lord Hannassay, whose eyes throughout had been fixed vacantly on the opposite wall, after the fashion of a child repeating a lesson, looked at him suddenly and surprised that look of consternation.