Chapter 34 The Receiver

Margaret did not go back to her desk. She went to Dorothy's room, which was across the corridor and down the stairs and around the corner, and she knocked on the door and waited, and when Dorothy opened it she carried the folded paper in her hand the way a woman carries a weapon she has not decided to use. Hale sent me a choice, she said. Dorothy stepped aside to let her in, and Margaret sat on the edge of the narrow bed and unfolded the paper and laid it on the blanket between them. On it, in Hale's careful handwriting, was a list of names and dates and the occasional reference to a location that Margaret recognised from the key she had been reading. It was not a message. It was a ledger, half a page long, and at the bottom, in a different hand — the hand of the Fisherman, she knew immediately, because she had seen it in the boathouse, in the margins of Edith Crane's schoolbooks — was a single sentence: The receiver is ready. Who is the receiver? Dorothy asked. I do not know yet, Margaret said. But the receiver is someone who can read the key the way I can, and the receiver is who the Fisherman has been building, the way he built Edith, the way Hale built the Fisherman. And the receiver is who they want me to become. She stood up and walked to the window and looked out at the courtyard, where the rain had begun again, a thin persistent rain that made everything look as if it were being drawn in grey pencil. Voss had died believing that the key was unbroken, but keys are never unbroken. They are only unused. And the Fisherman had not died believing anything. He had died because he had given her the key at the wrong time, or at the right time, and the difference between those two things was something she was still trying to understand. What will you do? Dorothy asked. I will read, Margaret said. She turned back to the bed and picked up the paper and folded it carefully and put it in her pocket. I will read the key, and I will find out who the receiver is, and I will decide whether I am going to join him or stop him. She looked at Dorothy. And if I decide to stop him, I will need your help. If I decide to join him, I will need yours too. Dorothy smiled, a small tired smile that had seen too many mornings like this one. You always need my help, she said. That is the whole point of a partnership. Margaret went back to her desk, and she took out the key, and she set it on the blotter in front of her, and she began to read. She read until the office was dark and the rain had stopped and the city outside her window was full of lights that meant nothing to her and everything to the people who lived in them, and she read until she found the name. The receiver was a woman. Her name was Anne, and she worked in the archives at the British Library, and she had been reading coded messages in the margins of catalogue entries for three years without anyone noticing, the way Edith Crane had read codes in the margins of schoolbooks, the way Margaret had read codes in the margins of Enigma traffic, the way every codebreaker reads codes in the margins of everything. Anne was twenty-eight years old, a graduate of Oxford, quiet and efficient and utterly invisible, and she was the person the Fisherman had been training in secret, the person who had received the master key that Voss had believed was unbroken, and she was the person who was now, at this very moment, sitting in a flat in Bloomsbury, reading a message that had been addressed to her specifically and that had been encoded with a key that only she could read. Margaret wrote down Anne's address, and she wrote down the time the message had been sent, and she wrote down the words that Anne would have read when she decoded it, because she had the key, and she was the receiver, and she had spent five years preparing for this moment without knowing it. The message was simple. Three lines. A time, a place, and a name. The name was Margaret Chase. She was to come to the warehouse on the south bank at midnight. She was to bring the key. And she was to bring the photograph from the boathouse. Margaret sat with the message for a long time, and then she picked up her coat and her bag and the green notebook and the photograph, and she walked out of the office and into the night, and she walked toward Euston, because she had learned by now that the place where you are told to meet is never the place where the meeting actually happens, and the warehouse was a trap, and she was going to walk into it anyway. Because the long night was not over. It was only beginning. And this time, she was not going to look at the ashes. She was going to look at the fire. She passed the drop point at Euston on the way, and she saw a woman standing by the Northern Line entrance, watching the crowd, and the woman's face was ordinary and forgettable, and she was exactly the kind of person who could watch a woman for five years without being noticed, and Margaret walked past her without stopping, without looking, without letting her face show anything at all, and she kept walking, and she did not look back, and she knew, with the certainty of a woman who had decoded a message that predicted her death, that the woman at Euston was not the receiver. The receiver was somewhere else. And the receiver was waiting for her.