Below the great oil painting of Kaiser Wilhelm, in the Imperial German Embassy at Washington, a slightly wrinkled, nervous man sat at a massive desk, an almost obsolete German dictionary before him, his fingers running the pages, figuring out the numbers, then running them again, his lips repeating the numerals of many a scattered sheet of paper before him, repeating, re-repeating, then matching up those numerals with the page numbers and word numbers of the old dictionary.
Quite still the room was, except for the whirr of the pages and the slight crinkle of the many sheets of papers as he referred from one to the other. There was little need for reference, however, for every page bore the same numerals, the same messages written in strange conglomerations of numbers that were apparently meaningless—even to many of the persons who had brought or sent them to this wrinkled, nervous being who sat beneath the painting of the Kaiser. And reason enough—for those pages of numbers, those jumbled sequences of numerals, were nothing more nor less than the smuggled code messages by which Wilhelm Hohenzollern, Emperor of Imperial Germany, sent his daily instructions via the great wireless at Nauen, Germany, to the man who directed his spider's web of spy activity in the United States, Count Johann von Bernstorff, Imperial Ambassador!
