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Prince Max stood by his desk in a shifting sea of paper – letters, envelopes, memos, notepads. His hands were full, the desk top was covered, every drawer was open, the carpet littered.

The prince looked up at us with a flushed and despairing face. “I cannot find it!” he cried, his chest heaving. “I had it, I had it in my hands only moments ago, but it has gone! Where is it? Where?” He flung his arms wide, and paper flew like confetti.

“Your Highness, this is Doctor Watson. He – ”

“I had it moments ago, Mr Holmes! Moments! Yet now it has gone!”

“Have you had the paper since Count Hoffenstein left, Your Highness?”

Awareness flickered briefly in the prince’s strained face. “I had just taken it out of my pocket when Hans announced him, and I …” He turned his wild eyes on me. “I have always kept it in my inside pocket, always from the first, and when the new message came … I must … I must … Where is it?“

He was shaking from head to foot, panting for breath.

“Your Highness,” I said firmly, grasping his arm, “you should be in bed.”

“No, no, doctor, I cannot. Not until I have found it. I cannot otherwise answer, you understand … No, no, no!”

Between the three of us we finally managed to get the poor prince into bed, and, with Hans on one side and I on the other, to keep him under the covers until exhaustion at last claimed him. The respite, I knew, would be brief.

Meanwhile Holmes had quickly gone through the prince’s outer clothing, removed a small ring of keys from a buttoned pocket, and returned to the office. When I joined him, he was sitting at the desk, on which now lay neat piles of papers, staring thoughtfully at one page, which had been ruled off into regular squares, all filled with letters.

“Your verdict was correct, Holmes,” I said. “The prince is very sick and I’m afraid worsening.”

Holmes looked at me with distant eyes in which awareness of my presence only slowly dawned. “Do you know the cause?”

“Some kind of influenza, I think,” I replied. “It’s spreading fast among the troops on both sides of the front.”

“The outcome?”

“Some survive, though few when they’re as close to pneumonia as the prince.”

“Pneumonia,” Holmes repeated grimly. “So at best he’ll be incapacitated for days. Can you do nothing to hasten recovery? Time is so precious, Watson, even hours may make the difference between whether hundreds – thousands – live or die.”

“I have had some small success with injections of morphine,” I said. “I have nothing else.”

“Then by all means try the injections, doctor. I had hoped that the prince might come to himself long enough to remember something – anything – that would help me with this, but …” He handed me the following.

I stared at the meaningless rows of consonants in bewilderment. “This is the latest message from the President of the United States?”

Holmes nodded. “I believe so. Certainly it is on American paper, was stored in a locked inner drawer of the prince’s desk, and is obviously in code.”

“Then what had the prince lost? Or was that merely a delusion of his illness?”

“Far from it, doctor. What he had lost – to be precise, what Count Hoffenstein carried away with him – is the key to this and all such communications from the American president. The prince kept it, as he said, in an inner pocket, and had no doubt just taken it out in order to read this message with its aid when the count forced his way past Hans and entered.

“Whether or not the count knew that the prince had, moments before, received this page from the president I do not know, thought I should think it highly likely. Certainly he used the prince’s near delirium to remove the paper from wherever the prince had hastily shoved it – child’s play for a man like the count.”

I looked again at the page I held, with no more enlightenment than before. “What on earth would the key to this be like?”

“A page of lightly transparent paper of the same size and shape and with the same squares ruled on it, but with the random letters that are added as mere disguise blacked out. By placing that page over this, one can see at once