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 locked 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? ”

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