live, he might
be persuaded to furnish some clue to the headquarters of the
miscreants.

* * * * *

And behind the conspirators loomed the unknown figure that signed
itself the Invisible Emperor--in the communications that poured in to
the White House and to the rulers of other nations. In the threats
that were materializing with stunning swiftness.

Who was he? Rumor said that a former European ruler had not died as
was supposed: that a coffin weighted with lead had been buried, and
that he himself in his old age, had gone forth to a mad scheme of
world conquest with a body of his nobles.

It had been practically a state of war since the shipment of gold,
guarded by a detachment of police, had been stolen in broad daylight
outside Baltimore, the police clubbed and killed by invisible
assailants--as they claimed. The press was under censorship, troops
under arms, and it was reported that the fleet was mobilizing.

In the midst of it all, Washington shopped, danced, feasted, flirted,
like a swarm of may flies over a treacherous stream.

Intelligence was alert. As Dick started to drive away from the
Slovakian Embassy, a man stepped quickly to the side of the car and
thrust an envelope into his hand. Dick opened it quickly. He was
wanted by Colonel Stopford at once, not at the camouflaged
Headquarters at the War Department, but at the real Headquarters where
no papers were kept but weighty decisions were made. And to that
devious course the Government had already been driven.

Dick parked his car in a side street--it would have been under
espionage in any of the official parking places--and set off at a
smart walk toward his destination. Nobody would have guessed, from the
appearance of the streets, that a national calamity was impending. The
shopping crowds were swarming along the sidewalks, cars tailed each
other through the streets; only a detachment of soldiers on the White
House lawn lent a touch of the martial to the scene.

* * * * *

The building which Dick entered was an ordinary ten-story one in the
business section; the various legal firms and commercial concerns that
occupied it would have been greatly surprised to have known the
identity of the Ira T. Graves, Importer, whose name appeared in modest
letters upon the opaque glass door on the seventh story. Inside a
flapper stenographer--actually one of the most trusted members of
Intellige