His plot had failed, and Fay, true to the in-born traditions of his nationality, was shielding those above him. But even as he realized that the end of his plotting was at hand, he knew that somehow, somewhere his work would be taken up. That the work of the German Government in undermining the peace of this nation would not stop with his failure, that its paid agents would take up the plotting and scheming and destruction where he had given it up. Fay told them what they already knew, the story of the bomb he had invented, the bomb which was to stop all shipping and which was eventually to be used to blow up the harbor of New York. He told them of his exploits in the trenches, of the fame he had earned for bombing expeditions successfully concluded, of the iron cross that should have been his but had gone to one higher in command, but no other word regarding those others in this country who were backing him. While the members of the Criminology Club were listening to Fay's confession, two men sat in a room of the Imperial German Embassy at Washington--Count Johann von Bernstorff and one other. Before them was a table littered with blue prints. That the plan they were discussing had been brought to a high degree of practicability, the blue prints bore evidence. Fay, the pawn in the hands of those higher up, was forgotten, his effort overshadowed by a plan the magnitude of which was beyond his wildest dreams. Bernstorff laid a clenched fist heavily on the table. "It will be the greatest achievement Imperial Germany has yet brought about in America," he said, and his visitor smiled. "And it will make America our unwilling ally." CHAPTER IX. THE MUNITIONS CAMPAIGN The conference over the blue prints in Ambassador Von Bernstorff's rooms in Washington was followed by months of seeming inaction on the part of Germany's paid agents. While war held its dreadful sway over Europe and armies battled, some for right and in defense of a broken kingdom, the others for territory and conquest at the behest of a war-mad ruler, the manufacture of munitions for the warring nations and especially the Allied armies received an impetus which started their humming with feverish activity.