Chapter 40 The Report Goes Out

The report went out on the first Monday of December, 1943, and Margaret Chase stood in Dorothy's room and watched it go the way a woman watches a ship leave a dock: with the particular stillness of someone who has done everything that can be done and has nothing left to do but wait for the news to come back. Brennan had taken the copies — one to Scotland Yard, one to the Home Office, one to a sympathetic editor at a newspaper that still printed the truth when it could, one to a member of Parliament who had asked questions about the chain once and had been told, quietly, to stop asking. Margaret had kept the original, folded in her pocket next to the key and the photograph, the way a soldier keeps the flag she means to plant. The response came faster than she had expected. It came on Tuesday, in the form of a letter from the Home Office, typed on official stationery and signed by a man whose name she did not recognize. The letter acknowledged receipt of her report and informed her, with the courteous finality of a door being closed, that her concerns had been noted, that the matters she had raised were the subject of an ongoing inquiry, and that she was to consider herself relieved of her duties at Bletchley Park pending the outcome of that inquiry, in accordance with the provisions of the Official Secrets Act. It came on Wednesday, in the form of a paragraph in the newspaper — a short, careful paragraph, buried at the bottom of an inside page, describing an "irregularity" in the handling of classified materials at a government signals station, and naming no names, and making it clear, to anyone who knew how to read the space between the words, that the woman who had written the report had been dismissed, and that the report itself had been dismissed with her. It came on Thursday, in the form of two men in dark suits who knocked on Dorothy's door at seven in the morning and asked, politely, for Miss Chase to accompany them to an office in Whitehall where she was asked, politely, to sit in a room that smelled of paper and dust and to answer, politely, the same questions she had already answered in her report, until it became clear that the questions were not being asked to find the truth but to bury it. "Miss Chase," the man across the desk said, and his voice was the administrative voice, the voice of a man who had spent his career saying nothing that could be used against him, the voice of the chain itself, "you have made a considerable fuss. Your report has been read. Your concerns have been examined. The matter has been found to be without substance. The men you accuse are men of unimpeachable reputation. The network you describe does not exist. The message you decoded — the one that predicted your death — was a German disinformation operation, designed to unsettle a valuable codebreaker, and it succeeded beyond the enemy's hopes. You are not a traitor, Miss Chase. You are a victim. And the kindest thing this office can do for you is to help you forget that any of it ever happened." Margaret looked at him across the desk, and she felt the cold settle into her chest, the cold she had felt in the hangar, in the boathouse, in the weeks after Pemberton drowned, the cold of a woman who has spent her life reading messages and decoding ciphers and finding truths that others had tried to hide. She had known they would do this. She had known it before she had sent the report, the way she had known, on the night she had decoded the message that predicted her death, that the truth is not always comfortable, that the truth is not always kind, that the truth is not always safe, but that the truth is always necessary, always essential, always the only thing that matters. "There is a copy of the report in the hands of a member of Parliament," she said. "There is a copy in the hands of a newspaper editor. There is a copy in the hands of a man at Scotland Yard who has been asking questions about the chain for two years. You can dismiss me. You can bury my report. You can make me forget that any of it happened. But you cannot make the copies forget. And the copies will not stop asking questions just because I have been silenced." The man across the desk smiled the smile of a man who had heard every possible answer and had never once been surprised by one. "The copies," he said, "have been handled. The member of Parliament has been persuaded to withdraw his interest. The editor has been persuaded to print a correction. The man at Scotland Yard has been reassigned to a post where his questions will not trouble anyone. You are alone, Miss Chase. That is the thing you have never understood. You have always been alone. The chain is not a network of traitors. It is a network of reasonable men, doing reasonable things, in reasonable ways, and the only unreasonable person in the room is you." Margaret stood up, and she smoothed her skirt, and she walked to the door, and she turned, and she looked at the man across the desk with eyes that were cold and clear and entirely without fear. "You are wrong," she said. "I am not alone. I have never been alone. There is a woman in a cell at Scotland Yard who knows the chain is real. There is a receiver in Bloomsbury who knows the key is real. There is a man in Helsinki who knows the reader is real. And there is a codebreaker, sitting in this room, who knows that the message that predicted her death was not written by the enemy — because the enemy does not know her name, and the man who wrote it does, and the man who wrote it is sitting in an office on Whitehall, signing requisitions and reading mail and pretending that the chain does not exist." She opened the door, and she stepped into the corridor, and she did not look back, and she heard the man behind her say, in the administrative voice, the voice that had never once been surprised, "You will be watched, Miss Chase. You will be followed. You will be silenced, if it becomes necessary. This is not a threat. This is a kindness. The chain does not want to hurt you. The chain only wants you to stop." Margaret walked out of the building and into the grey London morning, and she did not go home, because home was not safe, because the chain had men in every street and eyes in every window and the administrative voice in every office. She went to Brennan's flat above the butcher's shop, and she knocked on the door, and Brennan opened it, and she stepped inside, and she saw his face, and she knew, before he spoke, that something had gone wrong. "They took Edith," he said. "They moved her out of Scotland Yard this morning. I do not know where. And they took the woman at Euston — the watcher, the one who has been following you for five years. They took her too. The chain is closing its ranks, Margaret. It is gathering its people inside the walls, so that no one can ask them questions. And the only people left outside the walls are the ones it means to silence." Margaret sat on the edge of the narrow bed, and she folded her hands, and she felt the cold settle into her chest, the cold she had felt a thousand times, the cold of a woman who has learned that the truth is not always comfortable, that the truth is not always kind, that the truth is not always safe. She had sent the report. The report had been buried. She had been dismissed. She had been watched. And the chain, which she had believed she could break from the outside, had simply closed the door on her. "I have three days," she said. "Three days?" "The message that predicted my death," Margaret said. "The fire is scheduled for December the fifteenth. That is the day the chain intends to kill me — not because I am a threat, but because the prediction must come true. They cannot have a codebreaker walking around alive after the message said she would die. The prophecy is the order, Brennan. They have been waiting for this date since January. And I have three days to prove that the chain is real, and that the message was written by a man in an office on Whitehall, and that the fire is not prophecy but murder." Brennan looked at her for a long moment. "And if you cannot prove it in three days?" Margaret took the key from her pocket, and she took the photograph from her pocket, and she laid them on the blanket between them, and she looked at the key the way she had looked at it in the hangar, in the boathouse, in the weeks after Pemberton drowned — the key her father had left her, the key that was never unbroken, only unused. "Then the fire will come," she said. "And I will be ready for it. Because the one thing the chain has never understood — the one thing it has never been able to calculate — is that I have been reading messages that predict my death for a year, and I have never once believed that the ending was written."