All was known--thanks to the brainless fool in whom he had relied! The Government knew. The wild tale the Japanese girl had told had been believed! Had there been suspicions before? He thought of the espionage he had fancied had been kept of late on his movements, of the silent, saturnine faces he had imagined dogged his footsteps. Even his servants, even Ishida, with his blank visage and fantastic English, might be-- He looked sharply at the chauffeur. He was lighting a cigarette in the hollow of his hands; the ruddy flare of the match lit the brown placid face, the narrow, secret-keeping eyes. He tried to _force_ his mind to a measure of control, to look the situation in the face. If Phil failed. If the aëroplane won against darkness and wind--if the bungalow was reached in time, and the machine made harmless. Nothing would happen. Who, then, would believe the girl's wild story? Who could show that he had made it? He had worked at night, alone in his locked laboratory. Besides, it would tell nothing. It would yield its secret only to the master mind. And if its presence on the roof damned anybody, it would not be him! _He_ had not put it there. _He had not been in Yokohama in three days!_ If the aëroplane did not start--he remembered the look on Phil's face when he rushed away!--or if it failed. With its own deadly ray, the very machine would vanish. Phil had not known this--could not have told. The searchers would find nothing! The news would have flashed along the cables that must roll up for him vast sums in the panic of markets. And there would be nothing to bring the deed home to him! Nothing? The warning had been given _before the fact_. The Government had taken alarm. Bureaus were buzzing already. Sooner or later the accusation would be running through the street, swiftly and stealthily, from noble to merchant, from coolie to beggar, from end to end of this seething oriental city--wherein he was a marked man! What mattered it whether there were evidence on which a court would condemn him? The story of his huge _coup_ in the bourses would be told--would rise up against him. He remembered suddenly a tale he had heard--of a traitor to Japan cut to pieces in a tea-house. An icy sweat broke out on his limbs. Where was there any refuge? On a foreign ship? There were many in the bay. He longed with a desperate longing for the touch of a deck beneath his feet, a bulwark of blue water between him and possible vengeance. At Kisaraz' on the Chiba Road, a dozen miles to the north in the curve of the bay, was his summer villa, his frequent resort for week-end. His naphtha launch lay there, always ready for use. He could reach it in an hour. "Get into the tonneau," he said to the chauffeur. "I'll drive, myself."