Chapter 49

The tiny lake at Bletchley Park sometimes froze thick enough in wintertime for skating. Some off-duty codebreakers were playing hockey today, bashing sticks around the ice, but Beth ignored them. She stood on the bank, looking at the beaten-steel sky, thinking of Coventry. Francis and Lucy—Mab’s daughter. Osla and Mab. . .

I can’t tell them, Beth thought, breathing raggedly. Not ever.

Couldn’t tell them how all hell had broken loose in ISK, tearing Beth away from the message she’d been decrypting about the Coventry raid. . . someone shouting about Allied forces and North Africa. Suddenly everyone had been gathering round the radio, breathless with excitement. It was the kind of turnaround that made all the double shifts worthwhile, Beth thought—the moment you finally understood what you’d been working on for so many months. “So that’s what Operation Torch was, ” she’d marveled, hearing of Allied landings in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria, and Dilly’s women had all cheered because now they could look back at the October rush and realize what they’d done. Because they’d cracked the Spy Enigma, the German agents had been turned and forced to feed false information about where Operation Torch’s convoys were headed. Because of ISK, Operation Torch had hit like a bolt from the blue and Rommel in his desert headquarters was having a very, very bad time of it.

Beth hadn’t come back to the message about the Coventry raid for hours, and when she did, her duty had seemed quite clear. She’d just witnessed the importance of secrecy firsthand—even the slightest leak outside Park walls could have turned Operation Torch into a slaughter. You can’t tell Osla or Mab, she’d thought, filing the Coventry message. You swore an oath. So when she bid them goodbye in the canteen later that morning, knowing they were off to catch the Coventry train, she’d done it with barely a hitch. What were the odds, after all, in a city well accustomed to bolting for air-raid shelters at the first blare of a siren, that her friends would be hurt?

You were wrong, Beth thought now, breath catching painfully.

But it didn’t matter. What was the point of telling now, when the damage was done?

So she gulped a breath, took the secret, and mentally filed it away as she stood beside the frozen lake. She had begun to find it quite easy, dividing life into compartments. There was the code and everything that came with it. And there was everything else—her friends, her family, Harry, everyone—who had to come second.

The code came first.

When Coventry and all its losses were neatly boxed up, Beth waved to the hockey players and picked her way across the icy lake path, pausing midway as she saw a mass of Hut 8 cryptanalysts spilling across the lawn, cheering at the top of their lungs. Brilliant Joan Clarke, whom Dilly wished he’d poached for his section; Rolf Noskwith drinking directly out of a wine bottle—and Harry, veering away from the pack and picking Beth up, swinging her over the frosty grass.

“We did it, we bloody did it! A pinch off U-559—we’re back in. We’re back in the bloody U-boat traffic! ”

“Harry! ” She kissed him jubilantly, every worry that had been consuming her falling away. “I knew you’d get in. ”

People were spilling out of huts and blocks, letting out cheers as the news spread. The U-boat blackout had gone on too long not to be common knowledge at BP, even if no one outside Hut 8 knew details. “Christ, Beth, ” Harry was whispering into her hair, still holding on to her like a lifeline. “I wish I could tell you how we got in. I wish you’d been there. ”

“You can’t tell me anything, it’s all right, I don’t care—”

He kissed her again, hands pulling through her hair, and Beth heard ripples from the people around them. It would be all over Bletchley Park in hours: little Beth Finch and Harry Zarb who had a wife and child at home. She didn’t care what people thought. It wasn’t an important secret.

Not like the one she’d just buried.

Ten Days Until the Royal Wedding

November 10, 1947

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