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“Here? What do you mean?”
“Here in A”
“What makes you say that?”
“Look at the operation to grab Clyde off the Liled the Acrobat into the express car Only thirty-six hours later in New Mexico, halfway across the continent, they wrecked the train and had horsemen and mounts positioned to spirit Clyde across the Mexican border and onto a train Five to one, they had a ship waiting in Veracruz And they organized the entire operation in the few short days after Clyde gave their Marzipan Boys the slip in New York Don’t you see, Joe? This is a gigantic outfit with a continental reach I’ll bet you ten to one, Krieg secretly owns Aents hole up”
In dead silence, and in movements so lithe he seemed to flow like oil, Christian Semmler roamed up and down a stairwell concealed in the center of the I The hidden shaft let him enter every floor fro everything On the penthouse story, he pressed his eye to a spy hole The cine a scene of a couple kissing good-bye in their parlor as the man went off to war
Semmler descended three floors to watch Irina Viorets busy at her desk, fe notes to a telegrapher tapping in a far corner, and the telephone pressed to her ear Though the walls that encased his secret stairere thick, he fancied he smelled her perfume
Floor by floor he descended, peering through spy holes at scene shops, carpenters, and seahts, fil loaded into canisters He stopped to watch an entire ten- presented to Imperial Company salesmen, ould take it to the exhibitors and distributors around As, with one glaring exception: the sound-recording studio on the fourth floor
Christian Seeable eye It was antiquated — even though the equipment was the latest available — because words and music were recorded here as feebly as they had been when Edison and his corao Grim proof of how antiquated was the makeup of the band of tru into an acoustical horn Where were the violins? Where was the double bass? Where was the piano? Where was the tympani? Nowhere! None of those instruments could be recorded faithfully The saxophone played for the string bass The clarinet was supposed to fill in for the violins Banjos attempted to keep the beat The untutored listener of the recorded wax disc would assume that the piano had never been invented
General Major Sehth floor for another look at the one h the spy hole as Clyde Lynds’s eager assistants scurried He saw that Lynds had had a cot runted approval at the sight The scientist as key to surs on the fourth floor hat Fritz Wunderlich’s dru, Seht with a cold seon with a gun to his head
Selided up the stairs to his lair on the ninth floor, confident that he had Clyde Lynds exactly where he needed hi And, despite Isaac Bell’s repeated interference, the grand sche as it was destined to
General Major Christian Se in China and Africa, he had seen firsthand foreigners’ weaknesses and their strengths, and he knew better than any other officer in the kaiser’s arainst all the world at once
The Donar Plan — Se to life in a rainstore on the Rominter Heath that was the jewel of his wife’s dowry Kaiser Wilhelular honor that aristocrats vied for at court Semmler had stocked the estate with that in mind, but in fact the kaiser had always cast a wareneral major He called Semmler a man’s man and a soldier’s soldier, and he chortled over rue battles in Peking and with the Boers behind the English lines
Semmler suspected another reason for His Majesty’s favor He was acutely aware of his long arorilla” or “nant career in an army that revered the handsome features that epitoly But the kaiser’s own appearance was blighted by a birth defect — a withered ar froees from the mirror felt a kinship?
When they were driven indoors by the rain, Semmler invited the kaiser into his library and entertained hi cavalry, ar dreadnoughts of Wilhelh Seas Fleet
“Behold, Your Majesty, the neeapon of all”