The Prime Minister's Secret Agent

by Susan Elia MacNeal

  She looked out the window, to the sheep grazing in the neighboring fields, in the shadow of mountains. Maggie watched them until she felt calmer.

  “Thank you, Mr. Burns.” She reached for the letter in her marked mail cubby and opened it. She frowned as she read the contents.

  “Everything all right, Miss Hope?”

  She didn’t receive that many letters. Occasionally a postcard from David, Mr. Churchill’s chief private secretary at Number 10—with funny pen-and-ink cartoons illustrating his favorite expressions: Merciful Minerva and Jumping Jupiter. Sarah sent letters in loopy scrawl on hotel stationery from around Britain, on tour with the Vic-Wells Ballet. And Chuck wrote less now that her husband, Nigel, was stationed in the Mideast and she was taking care of their baby, Griffin, almost three months old. And of course there was RAF pilot Captain John Sterling, now working once again for Mr. Churchill. But after what had happened between them in London last summer, after their return from Berlin, Maggie didn’t expect any letters from him.

  But in fact, everything was not all right. The letter was regarding Maggie’s house—the house on Portland Place in Marylebone that she’d inherited from her Grandmother Hope and moved to in ’38. The house she’d lived in with flatmates Paige, Sarah, Chuck, and the twins. The house that, after everything that had happened with the attempted assassination of Mr. Churchill, the planned bombing of St. Paul’s, and Paige’s death, she’d wanted nothing to do with. She’d let out to a lovely couple—he a high-level mucketymuck at the Treasury and she a young wife with the Wrens.

  According to the letter, the house had sustained significant bomb damage. Her tenants—who had survived—had moved.

  “Fine, fine, Mr. Burns,” Maggie murmured. “Everything’s just fine.”

  But her face said otherwise. She hadn’t been to the house in over a year, yes—but it was still a part of her, part of her family, part of her past, a past that had grown ever more complicated and confusing the more she learned about it. And now it had been bombed. Was she sad? Angry at the Luftwaffe? Maybe even just a little bit relieved to be free of the responsibility of it and forced to move on? It doesn’t matter anyway, she decided. Probably all for the best. She crumpled the letter and threw it into the waste bin.

  Burns shifted his weight from side to side. “You know, Miss Hope, I served, too—over in France, in the trenches. I was a soldier then. Oh, you wouldn’t know it now, but once I was young—almost handsome, too. We all were, back then. Saw a lot of my friends killed, better men than I ever was, and killed any number myself.”

  “Mr. Burns—no one died. Truly. It’s just a house—my house—that was bombed. But no one was hurt. And houses can—perhaps someday—be rebuilt.”

  Mr. Burns didn’t seem to hear her, lost in his own memories. “I don’t remember their faces, but I still think of them. What I try to remember is the Christmas truce—Christmas of ’14, we had a cease-fire over in France. We sang songs, if you can believe—us with ‘Silent Night,’ and them with ‘Stille Nacht.’ Same melody, though. We even had a game of football, that afternoon, the ‘Huns’ versus the ‘Island Apes.’ Then, the next day, back to the killing business …”

  He shook his head. “I’ll leave you to read your telephone message, Miss Hope.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Burns.” Maggie turned her attention to the message Gwen had written out:

  Sarah Sanderson called to say that the Vic-Wells Ballet is performing La Sylphide at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. She may be going on as the Sylph (and she specified, “the lead sylph, not one of the idiot fairies fluttering uselessly in the background”). She’ll put house seats on hold for you and truly hopes you’ll make it!

  Long-legged and high-cheekboned, Sarah was one of Maggie’s closest friends. At first Maggie had found her intimidating—Sarah was so worldly, after all, so beautiful and glamorous, with the slim figure of a runway model, dark sparkling eyes, and long dark hair. But she had an irresistible sense of humor and was given to witty retorts in a decidedly Liverpudlian accent.

  Maggie had only seen Sarah a few times since they’d parted ways in London the summer of the attempted bombing of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and missed her. If it was at all possible, she’d make it to Sarah’s performance. The trouble was the Black Dog. Would the Black Dog let her? Sometimes it was hard to know. He was always ready to strike, but would he go for her throat? She walked back to the entrance hall, Mr. Burns not far behind.

  “Miss Hope?” Gwen asked from her seat at the reception desk.

  Maggie blinked. “Yes, Twelve.”

  “Are you—are you going to go to Edinburgh to see your friend dance in the ballet? Because that sounds so very exciting and glamorous—and, quite frankly, fun.”

  Fun. What’s fun anymore? The Black Dog growled low in his throat and bared his teeth. But he didn’t strike.

  “Miss Hope?” Mr. Burns said. “I’ll arrange for the time off, if you’d like to go.”

  Maggie crumpled the message and threw it into the trash bin. “Thank you, but I won’t be needing it, Mr. Burns.”

  She turned back to the girl. “Carry on, Twelve!”

  Then she pivoted on her heel to make her way to the back garden and down to her trainees, whom she’d sent to run on the beach.

  I can’t, Sarah, I just can’t do it, she thought. I’m sorry, so very sorry.

  Take it up with the Black Dog.

  Chapter Two

  As the winter sun was rising in Arisaig, Scotland, it was setting over Kagoshima Bay in Japan—a deep inlet on the south coast of the island of Kyūshū, Japan’s southwesternmost island and the port for the city of Kagoshima. The bay was shallow and well protected, just like Pearl Harbor, which made it ideal for Admiral Yamamoto’s war games.

  Isoroku Yamamoto was the newly appointed and highly decorated Admiral of the rengo kantai—the combined fleet of Japan’s Imperial Navy. He was in his midfifties, short and slim, with cropped graying hair cut so short that his skull showed white beneath the bristles. White gloves hid the loss of his two fingers at the Battle of Tsushima. The Admiral wasn’t what anyone would call handsome, but he had a certain wry charm, and when he smiled his face lit up.

  Yamamoto excelled at all games of strategy, including poker, mah-jongg, and shogi—Japanese chess—and loved to gamble. He was also the man behind the questionnaire Dušan Popov’s Nazi handler wanted to take with him to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

  But Yamamoto didn’t want to fight. And certainly not with the United States of America, earning him the nickname “the Reluctant Admiral.” He didn’t believe Japan should have withdrawn from the League of Nations or that Japan should have signed the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

  But when the United States had placed an embargo on scrap metal shipments to Japan, closed the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping, and stopped oil and gasoline exports, relations between Japan and the U.S. grew ever more strained. Japan would have to either agree to Washington’s demands or use force to gain access to the resources it needed.

  Yamamoto stood on the deck of his ship in the cold wind, his breath visible, watching the long-range fighter planes with red suns painted on their wings engage in a mock attack of the ships in port. He held binoculars and looked through, muttering, “Perfect.” As Yamamoto gazed at the Mitsubishi Zeros silhouetted against a leaden sky, the wind changed direction.

  Behind him, an officer cleared his throat. “Here’s the latest intel, sir.” The young naval officer saluted, then handed him decrypts from Consul Nagai Kita in Pearl Harbor. “And Kita and Yoshikawa also sent these.”

  The officer handed over a packet of postcards, which Yamamoto flipped through. Greetings from Pearl Harbor! read one. Aloha! exclaimed another. Wish you were here! Yamamoto’s lip twitched at the irony. All the postcards had glossy color photographs showing a clear aerial view of Pearl Harbor.

  “I want every pilot to have one of these,” Yamamoto ordered, raising his voice to carry over the wind. �
��They should all have one taped to the dashboard of their planes.” He looked at the young man. “Tell Kita we’ll need more.”

  The officer saluted, his cheeks flushed from the cold. “Yes, sir!”

  Yamamoto looked through the binoculars again. “I wish the General Staff could see this,” he muttered.

  “Sir?” The young officer hesitated, unsure whether to stay or go.

  “They think that naval engagements are won by whoever has the most battleships. The war in Europe is being fought by the Luftwaffe against the RAF. Ships have nothing to do with it anymore.”

  “They won’t have a chance against our pilots at Pearl Harbor, sir.”

  Yamamoto lowered the binoculars. The young man’s ears turned red; he knew he’d spoken out of turn.

  “I hope our differences may be resolved through diplomacy—peace is always better than war. Always. And anyone ignorant enough to want to go to war with the United States should think about that—especially General Tōjō and his Army hotheads!”

  The young man cringed. “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s the Army leaders who are at fault—a bloodthirsty lot.” The Admiral looked at the young sailor. “Take a message from me to Commander Fuchida when he lands, saying congratulations on a brilliant drill.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The young man left and once again Yamamoto peered through his binoculars. “Genda’s mad plan is a gamble,” he muttered, watching the planes. “Six aircraft carriers, planes with modified shallow-water torpedoes, an attack on a Sunday at dawn … Refueling, weather … If we achieve a surprise attack …”

  The Admiral shook his head. “No, it is up to the diplomats to prevent all this. They must prevent this.”

  What Yamamoto didn’t know was that the reports they were sending from Honolulu to Tokyo were being decoded in Washington, DC. And not just by the Japanese Embassy, but by the Americans, as well. The Americans had broken the Japanese diplomatic code, which they called “Purple.”

  At the U.S. Navy headquarters, an anonymous limestone office building on DC’s National Mall, Lieutenant Commander Alvin D. Kramer was also reading Kita’s reports, sometimes decrypting them faster than the Japanese Embassy did. A tall, thin man with the gaunt face of an ascetic, he was responsible for evaluating the intercepts and distributing them to the Navy’s higher-ups. His dark-blue uniform was spotless, the white of his collar matched the white of his hair, and the gold bars and stars of his epaulets glinted under the office’s fluorescent ceiling lights.

  Kramer’s fiefdom was in the Main Navy and Munitions Buildings on B Street: a large airless, windowless room where men translated intercepted messages and women typed, the clatter of keys punctuated by the occasional shrill ring of one of the many telephones. The scent of ink and correction fluid hung in the stale air. The walls were lined with shelf upon shelf of files containing untranslated Japanese diplomatic decrypts, stacked so high that some could only be accessed by ladder. There just wasn’t enough interest, or enough manpower, to translate all of them as they poured in.

  And so most of the messages from Consul Kita in Honolulu waited to be translated, often for weeks, sometimes for months. Above the heads of the workers was a line of clocks with black hands, ticking away the hours, minutes, and seconds in Tokyo, Washington, London, Moscow, Berlin, and Rome.

  Colonel Rufus Bratton was two minutes late for his meeting with Kramer. In a sea of blue naval uniforms, Bratton stood out in his Army-issue brown coat and khakis, and the brown hat he carried under his arm. He was short and stocky, with an earnest face and balding pate. His buttons strained under the bulge of his stomach. The men who worked for him had nicknamed him “Grumpy,” after the dwarf in Snow White.

  “Good morning, Colonel Bratton.” Kramer’s secretary looked up from her typewriter. Dorothy Edgars was new, but she’d made it her business to learn the names and faces of the key players in the office. She was in her late thirties, with dark hair streaked with gray pulled back into a severe bun. She’d landed the job because she’d spent over seven years in Tokyo, and was certified to teach Japanese at the high school level. “Would you like coffee, sir? Or tea?”

  Bratton did his best to smile—but from him it looked more like a grimace. “No, thank you, Mrs. Edgars.” There was just the hint of a South Carolina twang in his voice.

  Dorothy walked to a door marked ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE TO THIS ROOM with a brass letter slot marked CLASSIFIED MATERIAL ONLY and knocked.

  “What?” barked an irritated voice from inside.

  “Colonel Bratton is here to see you, Lieutenant Kramer,” she called, unruffled.

  There was a pause, then the door swung open. “Come in, come in,” Kramer snapped to Bratton. “You’re late.”

  Bratton glanced up at the clocks lining the walls of the inner sanctum. “Not by Japanese time,” he remarked. The men were a study in contrasts—one in blue, one in brown. One tall and one short, one lean and one stout. They were an unlikely pair, but had been forced to work together. For there was no central authority when it came to reading all the Japanese intercepts collected from the Army, Navy, and SIS, no clear-cut point of responsibility.

  The political struggles between the two U.S. military branches had become so divisive that the Navy was charged with handling the decryption of Japanese Purple messages on the odd-numbered days of the month and the Army on the even. They would each then distribute the information on the opposite. And while Kramer and Bratton had been ordered to work together on the decrypts, neither was pleased with his assignment.

  Bratton took off his overcoat and hung it with his hat on a brass hook on the back of the door. The room was small, with maps of the Pacific tacked up to the walls, pushpins indicating different battles. In the center was a long wooden table, with a complex, three-part machine.

  “I’ve been working with you for months now,” Bratton said, rubbing his hands together to warm them, “but I still can’t get over how you make your Magic.” Magic was the name that had been given to the decoding and translating project, while Purple was the name of the diplomatic code.

  Kramer allowed himself a pinched, proud smile. “Thank you, Colonel Bratton.” The first machine, which looked like a typewriter, intercepted all diplomatic correspondence between Japanese embassies and Tokyo. The correspondence, in the code named Purple, was typed in, then fed into the next machine, which looked like a wooden box with wires, buttons, and switches, connected by wires to the first. The messages were deciphered in there, and then came out from the third machine, another typewriter, connected by still more wires to the decryptor, decoded and in Japanese. Then skilled personnel had to be found to translate them—which was difficult, since few Americans were proficient at Japanese.

  There was a knock at the door. “The latest intercept, sir,” an intelligence officer said, holding a sheaf of papers.

  “Might as well get on it, even if there’s no one around to translate.”

  “Yes, sir.” The young officer sat at the first typewriter, the coded documents in front of him. He began typing. As he did, lights began to wink and blink on the deciphering machine in the middle. On the far end, the typewriter began typing automatically, like a player piano.

  Slowly, as if by supernatural forces, a document in Japanese was being typed out by the last machine—a coded message from Kita at the Japanese Consulate in Hawaii to the Japanese Navy.

  “At least the President’s back on the distribution list now,” Kramer said. He walked to a chalkboard against the far wall and gestured to a list of twelve names: “the twelve apostles,” the only men authorized to see the decrypts. The list read:

  ULTRAS

  THE PRESIDENT

  SEC. OF STATE

  SEC. OF WAR

  SEC. OF THE NAVY

  ARMY

  GEN. G. C. MARSHALL

  BRIG. GEN. L. T. GEROW

  BRIG. GEN. S. MILES

  NAVY

  ADM. H. R. STARK

  RADM. R. K. TU
RNER

  CAPT. R. E. INGERSOLL

  CMDR. A. H. MCCOLLUM

  LT. CMDR. E. WATTS

  The words THE PRESIDENT had been crossed out in chalk when decrypts had been found in the White House wastebasket and Roosevelt stopped receiving them because of security concerns. Now he was back on, the yellow chalk line erased but still visible.

  “I’m glad the President’s reading them again, but I’m concerned that the Chief of the Air Corps isn’t on the list. And what about our overseas commanders? What about Admiral Kimmel in Hawaii, for Pete’s sake?” Bratton asked. “He’s head of the whole Pacific Fleet!”

  “We’re lucky that even the President’s getting them these days—these are extremely sensitive documents,” Kramer admonished, heading back to the typewriter with the decrypted message. “Not so much for their content, but if the Japanese ever found out we’d broken their diplomatic code …”

  He pulled out the typed piece of paper. “Since the Navy and Army are sharing these now, for ‘information, evaluation and dissemination’—here you go. I don’t read Japanese—can’t make out a damn thing without the translator.”

  Bratton accepted the paper. He had basic knowledge of Japanese characters and could make out the gist of the memo. This particular memo, from Consul Kita in Honolulu to Admiral Yamamoto at sea, divided Pearl Harbor into five distinct zones, with the locations and numbers of U.S. warships indicated on a grid. It read:

  THE WARSHIPS AT ANCHOR AT PEARL HARBOR ON NOVEMBER 27, 1941, ARE:

  1. Alongside Ford Island East—one Texas-class battleship, total one.

  2. Alongside Ford Island West—one Indianapolis-class, one unidentified-type heavy cruiser, total two.

  3. Vicinity of Ford Island, East and West—seven light cruisers of Honolulu- and Omaha-class, 26 destroyers.