News had reached Berlin that the firm of Pollygay & Moxon, a chemical firm on the outskirts of Manchester, were engaged in conducting secret experiments with a new bomb. The news had reached Berlin from a very reliable source. I believed that it had been mentioned after dinner at a well-known Bohemian club in London by an under-secretary in a certain Government department. He had spoken rather boastfully of “something” very deadly which the Government were experimenting with, and our agent, who was one of the party to whom this was told, discovered by a well-timed display of scepticism that the experiments were being conducted by Pollygay & Moxon, and had sent forward the information which, had I been in London, must have gone through me. I put Klein on to the job immediately, and he called in the assistance of Craigmair, who apparently was in touch with workmen in most of the big factories, and fortunately numbered among his acquaintances a wretched German named Bluer, who was employed in the laboratories of the firm. As a matter of fact, we did not know of the existence of Bluer, a dour, taciturn man of the hateful socialistic type who had no patriotism, no love for his Fatherland, and was tainted with poisonous internationalism.[5] This renegade, living in England, with excellent opportunity for serving the Fatherland, had never put himself into touch with the superior authorities, nor had he offered the slightest assistance to the officers of State, and it was only by accident that we discovered his existence. However, his internationalism served one good purpose. Though he might earn his livelihood by preparing deadly weapons for the destruction of his fellow-countrymen, he was in theory an opponent of war, and Mr. Craigmair, after a while, enlisted his sympathies and introduced him to Klein, who said he was an author engaged in writing a book painting war in its most horrible aspects. He also told him that he was compiling as long and as formidable a list of deadly weapons as he could secure. “And when I have finished, my friend,” said Klein, “we shall have the most damning indictment of warfare that the world has ever seen.” This interested Bluer and it was not long before he told of the secret experiments which had been conducted on the firm’s private range with the new hand grenade. “I don’t know how it is made,” said Bluer, “because that is not in my department, and all the chemical experiments have been in the hands of the head chemist, but my brother-in-law is a night watchman and has the entry to the records office and I daresay I could give you a rough idea of what it is like.” I was overjoyed to hear this news, the more so since I had received another, and even more urgent, message from Headquarters, telling me to spare no expense or pains to secure a specification.