by Kate Quinn
Not that other matters didn’t intrude, however.
“Osla, do you see the traffic in your section on the Fleet Air Arm?” Beth spoke in a low rush, abruptly sitting down beside Osla in the canteen. “I need to know what planes go down. What the casualty rates are.”
“Oh, Beth.” Osla looked at her billet-mate, who had been pulling more shifts than ever since Harry left for training. Her complexion looked like ash. Osla pushed her plate over. “Eat my kippers. You’re skinny as a hat rack.”
“Just give me the numbers!”
Osla pushed a curl behind one ear. Her head ached, her hands were yellow from applying makeup to her legs after her last pair of stockings bit the dust, and oh, yes, she still woke up every morning thinking Philip and waiting for the accompanying stab of agony. So far the plan of utterly ignoring a broken heart on the theory that it wasn’t important during wartime was not really working terribly well.
“I see some of the traffic about the Fleet Air Arm,” she told Beth, who looked every bit as dead inside as Osla felt.
“Are the odds as bad as for the RAF?”
Osla chose her words carefully. “When they’re shot down, they’re . . . things are much more final than with the RAF. Because they can’t bail out over land and make their way home.”
“Tell me if you see anything about—”
“I’m not allowed, Beth. I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.” Beth’s voice scaled up. “We’re not over an open telephone line, we’re not out in public. We’re inside BP. You can tell me.”
“It’s not your—”
“Osla.” Beth was getting looks across the crowded canteen now, hunched toward Osla with everything in her body saying please.
A pause, and Osla found herself nodding. “I’ll look up the latest traffic.” A minor breach in secrecy, but one everyone let slide—the huts were too full of women keeping anxious eyes on husbands and brothers at the front for there not to be a little discreet information trading. Osla couldn’t stop herself from looking for the Whelp, now that it had sailed for the Pacific, no matter how many times she told herself it wasn’t her business any longer. Why couldn’t hearts simply be reset, dialed back until they felt no more than the usual sympathy one felt for any man heading to war? Looking at Beth’s reddened eyes, Osla thought her billet-mate might be wondering the same thing.
“Thank you,” Beth said, low voiced. “I’m sorry to ask.”
“Oh, plug it, if I can’t bend a rule just a little for you of all people, what am I good for?” Osla felt a sudden rush of affection. All right, she didn’t have Philip, but she had friends. More than the daytime friends like Sally Norton and the other translators; she had friends like Beth whom she would never have met if not for this war. Strange, quirky, brilliant Beth, who had recently confessed in a midnight heart-to-heart that she was deathly afraid of having no work like this once the war was done.
“I have to get back to my section,” Beth said now, and in a blink was back to being crisp and calm. The workload was killing everyone else with this run-up toward the invasion, but for Beth it seemed to be revivifying. Osla envied her.
She worked on the week’s issue of Bletchley Bletherings, then realized as soon as she got back to her block that it would have to be scrapped. There was much bigger news for BB than a lampoon of the Highland Reel Club.
“The date’s been finalized,” said their head, looking over the assembled naval section. “Sixth June. Last hours of the fifth, if the weather’s good to us.”
Osla felt her fingernails digging into her palms.
“All leave has been canceled,” he went on. “Our focus is now on intercepts regarding positions of German mines in the channel. Good hunting, ladies.”
Osla exhaled slowly. Maybe this was the purpose she’d been driving for the entire war, the time and place to finally prove herself. In three short weeks, amphibious vessels would be clawing through channel waters for Normandy.
Let’s sweep their path.
She reached for her German dictionary. Mine, mine-laying, mine ship . . .
Time to buckle down.
Chapter 61
* * *
FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, JUNE 1944
* * *
Cancel leave, cancel meals, cancel sleep. The day is set.
* * *
Bit by bit, Beth cracked the rose open.
“It’s because the phrases are so short,” she told Dilly. She conjured him up leaning against the desk opposite, poking his pipe. “There’s so little to get a grip on. Probably because the Soviets were just trading dummy messages.”
He nodded. “And?”
“I need a longer message.” Beth gnawed her lip, ignoring the odd looks she was getting from the fellows at the nearest desk. “Did the Y-station get any more on this frequency?”
His eyes twinkled. “Why don’t you check?”
Beth put in the request, laying aside the tight-furled cipher she’d come to think of as Rose. Ciphers and keys had been named after colors, animals—why not flowers? Shark and Dolphin were naval ciphers, she’d heard from some incautiously gossiping Hut 8 fellows . . . she diverted herself from the thought, because Hut 8 meant Harry, and the thought of Harry still speared Beth so sharply, all she could do was shy away from the wound.
She tackled Abwehr as soon as it came in. Just days till the invasion; all Bletchley Park was wound as tight as a clock spring. Everyone was turning up for shift early and going home late. “They’re working you girls to death!” their landlady at Aspley Guise exclaimed.
It’ll be worth it, Beth thought, if we get our foothold on those beaches. Beth’s contribution to Operation Overlord was deception pure and simple. The most trusted double agents who had been tracked through Abwehr and turned against the Third Reich were all singing the same song back to Berlin: that the invasion would take place at Pas-de-Calais.
So far, every Abwehr message Beth cracked was saying that Berlin had swallowed it.
“How do you girls keep this pace up?” Giles groaned, sprawled in a tweed heap of limbs behind his desk. “You’re all bally inhuman.” Peggy and Beth looked at each other, shrugging. This was just going to be another Matapan. They’d done it before; they’d do it again.
But there were always a few hours before midnight when things slowed down, and every night Beth found herself heading back into the furls and byways of Rose. Word had come back from the request she’d filed for all traffic flagged by Dilly and all associated frequencies. “It was filed as low priority,” the clerk said.
“I’ll take it.” A whole, lovely page to work with, not these frustrating scraps. “If the type of indicator on this machine is the same as the regular Enigma,” she muttered, pencil flying, “it would look the same, but maybe . . .”
She had her foot in the door.
It was the fifth of June.
“NOW’S THE TIME to go back to your billet and get some sleep,” Peter Twinn directed at sundown. “Starting midnight, it’s all hands.”
Most of ISK headed for the door, but Beth went back to her desk. After midnight the invasion traffic would swallow everything—she’d rather work Rose than try to catch a few hours’ restless sleep or try not to think about whether Harry was already in a plane headed for the channel. Surely he wasn’t finished training yet, but she’d heard horror stories about pilots rushed into cockpits with just a handful of flight hours . . .
She gave a hard blink and banished Harry, reaching for the long Rose intercept. She got one wheel position, an R, and after evaluating a dizzying number of key-blocks, put a Z into the next. Beth looked at that for a while, then wondered if the message might have been wired to the key C-Z-R, for czar. It was supposedly a Russian intercept . . .
She poked her head next door, where ISK now had Typex machines set up. All the decodists had left; Beth hesitated a moment, then took a crack at the nearest machine. It took a while to figure out how to set it up, but eventually Beth got the wheels lock
ed into CZR for a starting position, then sat down and began painstakingly typing the ciphered message in.
“What’s that?” Peggy’s voice sounded behind her, but Beth didn’t turn around.
“Go away.”
“Hang on, let me see . . .”
“Peggy, go away.”
Heels clicked off, offended, and slowly the deciphered message unspooled. “Come on, you.” All Beth wanted to see was if it came clear; she didn’t care what it said—probably it was dummy traffic, the Russians experimenting with a captured machine. Beth just wanted to know that she’d broken it. If she could crack Rose, she could crack anything that would come at her in the invasion rush.
She was so used to seeing clumps of gibberish turn into clumps of German, it took her tired brain a moment to realize what she was seeing. It wasn’t German; it was English. She raised her eyebrows, hesitated, then carried the sheet back to her desk, got the folder with the rest of the intercepts, and tried running them through on the CZR setting. Machine settings changed every midnight, but sometimes operators got sloppy . . .
Not this time. It all came out rubbish, so Beth abandoned the Typex machine and went back to the decrypted message. She began separating the five-letter clumps into words, but her eyes raced ahead of the pencil.
Beth stopped dead.
“I’M SORRY, COMMANDER Travis isn’t in yet.”
Beth stared at the middle-aged woman typing placidly behind her desk. The mansion was eerily quiet, half the offices deserted. “I need to speak with him. It’s urgent.”
“Everything’s urgent today,” the woman sighed. “He’ll be in by midnight. Everyone’s coming in at midnight.”
Midnight? That was more than four hours away. Beth could hear her own heart thudding. She was clutching the folder of Rose messages to her chest like a shield. “I need to speak to him now,” she repeated. It was all she’d been able to think when she read the cipher message in English.
“Well, he’s probably getting a few hours of sleep. If you’ll leave your folder—”
“No.”
“Then I’m afraid I can’t help you,” the woman said, clearly out of patience.
“Listen, you dozy cow—”
“You listen, Miss Finch. Simmer down, or I’ll have you tossed out on your ear.”
Beth stumbled out, her mouth dry. She came to a halt between the stone griffons flanking the mansion’s entryway, at an utter loss. The lawn stretched green and smooth down to the lake, but no codebreakers were playing rounders today in the long summer twilight. Men and women alike moved at a sharp clip between blocks, and the sky lowered gray and ominous. South of here, beaches designated Omaha, Utah, Sword, Juno, and Gold rippled with calm, unbloodied waves. They wouldn’t stay unbloodied for long.
What am I supposed to do? Beth looked at her folder with the decrypted message and its horrifying revelations. She couldn’t take it back to ISK—anyone might have seen it there, sitting on her desk while she tried to run the other Rose messages through the Typex. It was in English; anyone could have wandered by and read it—Peggy had come up behind her while she was putting it through the Typex machine. Had she seen? Had one of the others seen? What if—
Stop panicking, Beth told herself, but couldn’t think where to go, what to do. She couldn’t leave it unattended. She couldn’t trust anyone in ISK. And when Travis came in, would he listen to her? The invasion launched in a matter of hours. Nothing would be more important, today and tomorrow, than that. Not even what she’d read in the decrypted message.
So keep it safe, she thought. Until it can be dealt with.
For now, “safe” was not Bletchley Park.
She thrust the folder under her cardigan and went through BP’s gates at a flat sprint, heading for the nearest corner. She had never hitched a ride from a stranger in her life, but she hitched one now, flagging an ancient Vauxhall rumbling through town. “Sir, it’s an emergency. Can you run me up the road to Courns Wood?”
Chapter 62
* * *
FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, 5 JUNE 1944
* * *
Take heed . . . how you awake our sleeping sword of war.” Good old Shakespeare. It may be a different enemy today than in Henry V’s era, but the sentiment remains the same as we look toward France.
Godspeed, boffins and debs.
* * *
Waiting for the transport bus?” Giles was sauntering along with that fair-haired ISK colleague of Beth’s—Peggy, Mab remembered, that was her name—and the two of them fell in beside Mab as she passed through Bletchley Park’s gates.
“I was off at the usual time, but I’ll return at midnight for the crush.” Mab shifted her handbag from one arm to the other, trying to avoid Giles’s gaze. She was still so embarrassed at having fallen apart in his bed, she could barely look at him.
He frowned. “You look like you haven’t been sleeping, Queen Mab.”
“I haven’t.” She’d cut down on the gin, and without its comforting haze she tossed and turned for hours before dropping off. Last night the dreams had all been of chasing Lucy through a choking maze of ash and rubble, and she’d wakened herself weeping.
“Well, that won’t do,” Peggy said briskly. “We need everyone fresh for tonight. Quite a thing, isn’t it?” She nodded in the direction of the village. “We know the invasion is happening, and they don’t have a clue.”
“I’m not worrying about it until barges hit beachheads,” Giles shrugged. “Have either of you seen Beth? I wanted to ask her to a concert or something after the imminent rush.”
“She was at ISK when I last saw her.” Peggy sounded irritated. “She bit my head off.”
“I’m thinking maybe I’ve got a chance with her, now Harry’s out of the picture . . .”
“She’ll bite your head off too. I don’t know how she’s got any friends left.” Looking at Mab. “I must say, you and Osla are more forgiving than I would be.”
“What do you mean?” Mab frowned.
“You mean the Coventry raid?” Giles asked Peggy.
“Yes, I was—”
Mab stopped on the corner. “What about the Coventry raid?”
Peggy looked chagrined. To Mab, every detail of her face stood out in peculiar clarity: the fair flyaway hair, the thin intelligent face. “Have I put my foot in it? Look, I assumed after your husband’s funeral, she would have apologized for . . .”
Mab’s ears buzzed as though she stood inside a beehive. “For what?”
“Not warning you all to stay away from Coventry. I assumed she didn’t, or else you’d never have gone. Beth broke an advance report about the raid—I was at the next desk.” Peggy’s eyebrows went up. Giles looked shocked. “. . . She didn’t tell you?”
Chapter 63
Beth?” Mrs. Knox blinked in surprise, opening the door. “What on earth—child, you’re white as a sheet.”
“I’m sorry to disturb you.” Beth felt the folder under her cardigan nearly burning through her blouse. “I need to get into Dilly’s study.”
Thank God Mrs. Knox was a woman accustomed to not asking questions. She led Beth inside, toward the library. It was nearly dark; when she switched on the lamp, the pool of yellow light threw shadows like gargoyles across the shelves of books. Beth looked at the cracked leather armchair where Dilly had so often sat, and nearly wept. Dilly, why did you have to die? It all would have been easy if he were alive. He’d have known what to do with the dynamite she’d decrypted.
But Dilly had been resting in his grave since last February, and Beth was on her own.
As soon as Mrs. Knox departed, Beth flung herself at Dilly’s desk. He’d kept the key on his watch chain for as long as Beth had known him; where was it now? She gave a sob of relief when her frantic fingers sifted through the piles of old paper and found a familiar small brass key. She went to the panel in the wall and swung it out on its invisible hinge to reveal the safe. A turn of the key, and it opened—empty.
Slipping the fo
lder of Rose-ciphered messages out of her cardigan, Beth hesitated. Most of them were still unbroken—she was tempted to take over Dilly’s desk and see if she could crack any more. But time was slipping away, and she had to be back at BP by midnight. She looked at the first report, the only one she’d broken. The beginning was garbled and hadn’t come out, but the message’s middle lines in English were clear. She already had them memorized.
—possibility is intriguing, but for now we have our own methods. Please convey our thanks to your source inside ISK and assure our continued interest in any further information. The usual compensation.
There was some sort of code name as a signature, a word Beth didn’t know. That wasn’t the part that had frozen her to her marrow when she read it.
Your source inside ISK.
These weren’t just dummy messages. Someone inside Bletchley Park had been passing information . . . and given the age of this traffic, they’d been doing it since ’42.
“Did you suspect?” she whispered aloud, looking at Dilly’s chair. But her simulacrum was silent tonight. Surely he hadn’t realized—if the secrecy of Bletchley Park was compromised, the Rose cipher would have been assigned its own section, not left to a dying man in his private library. No, Dilly had only taken it on because Rose was different, interesting, an anomaly. His last puzzle.
My puzzle now, Beth thought, and locked the folder away, closing the wall panel over the safe. If something as secret as Enigma decrypts had to be taken off Park property, at least the Knox safe had already been approved as a secure location. Beth didn’t dare take it back to Aspley Guise, and she couldn’t leave it at ISK, either.
Someone there was a traitor.
Who? she thought in a twist of utter wretchedness—because they were precious to her, every single one. Peggy, who had taught her how to rod; Giles, who said she was the best cryptanalyst he’d ever seen and didn’t sound resentful admitting it; Jean and Claire and Phyllida and all the rest of Dilly’s team who had worked with her on the Matapan crisis . . . one of them was selling information from Bletchley Park?
