Chapter 64 The Forecast

The laundering of a miracle proved to be mostly paperwork performed at speed. Brennan spent Wednesday being charming at a wing-commander who owed him from the Hayes affair, and by Wednesday night a Coastal Command patrol log contained, quite legitimately, a sighting: submerged contact estimated ahead of convoy CW.22, Flamborough sector, bearing such-and-such, investigated, negative, but noteworthy. The sighting was true in the way that mattered, having been arranged to occur where the numbers said the wolves would wait. A rerouting signal followed at dawn, dressed as routine caution, initialled by officers who would spend years believing their own prudence had authored it. Thursday came grey and suitable for wolves. The attack fell anyway, further north, on the old lanes the convoy no longer walked — torpedoes chasing arithmetic that had already packed and left — and the escort sank one U-boat whose crew would never know they had died defeating a probability memorandum. Of convoy CW.22, one straggler lagged out of station and took a torpedo at dusk. Nine men drowned. Eleven ships' worth of expectation had been beaten down to one ship's grief, and the difference lay that night in Margaret's room like a stone she kept turning over: nine names, saved without knowing it, and nine families sent the other telegram, because the memorandum's margin of error had eaten them. "We did not save the convoy," she said to Vane, in the voice she used for auditing herself. "We saved most of it. I want to remember the distinction, because the day I stop paying for the remainder is the day I start writing schedules myself." "That day is further off than you fear and closer than you think," Vane said. "The fact that you price it at all is the bond holding. Now sleep, child. Tomorrow the ministry wakes up and finds that somebody read its diary, and it will want to know who." The ministry woke exactly on schedule. By Monday the counting-house basement had acquired new padlocks and a memorandum of inquiry; by Tuesday, Sir Owen's telephone had developed the tone of a man being strangled politely in committee. Somebody had acted on information that existed in exactly one sealed place. The leak hunt ran uphill with the inevitability of water, and it arrived where water arrives — at the lowest point holding the most pressure. Only one person outside the annex could read that machine's meanings. Her name was known. Her recent travels were known. Her refusal of official employment was known, and refusals, in committees, convert to suspicion at the standard exchange rate. Sir Owen summoned her on Wednesday and offered her a throne. "It need not be grand," he said, softer than ever, watching her across the desk. "A consultancy. A salary with a dull title. The engine works for the Crown openly, under your hand, with proper minutes — and you would be surprised, Miss Chase, how many problems that solves. Mine. Yours. The unfortunate impression created by this inquiry, which I confess is drifting toward you like weather." He folded his hands. "You have made yourself the only reader of a national asset. Institutions cannot love what they cannot employ." Margaret looked at him with something almost like affection, because he was honest the way administrators are honest, about the wrong unit of account. "Sir Owen," she said, "I have signed one document in my life that governs this, and it says I will read what is true, record it, publish it, and write no man's fate. Your offer asks me to read in private and publish by permission. That is the throne, and I have watched what thrones cost from the cheap seats." She stood. "Find your leak somewhere that leaks." His face performed regret without being moved by it. "Then I am sorry," he said, and meant several things. The whisper campaign began within the week, professionally, the way weather begins at sea. Nothing printable — a difficulty among colleagues; foreign travel unexplained; a woman whose loyalty the ministry continued, of course, to presume. The word *compromised* was heard in a corridor by a friend of Frazer's and reported to Margaret verbatim, because in March 1944 that word was a slow verdict wearing a preliminary hearing. Two countries had begun, in their different dialects, the sentence the machine had promised: *she will be called a traitor.* She came home on the Friday evening to find the second page inside her door, and knew the script before the porter's tread had faded on the stair. *Refusal received and, frankly, admired. You were offered employment and chose vocation; the two are confused so often that the distinction is becoming rare. Understand the position instead. The office I serve stays vacant by design, and vacant offices fill from below, in the dark, by weight. My hand is fed on Sundays. It writes schedules, and the schedules keep approximate faith, and men move convoys because of them. Meet the hand, Miss Chase — Sunday, nineteen hundred, the corner you know — or decline, and inherit its sentences second-hand like everyone else. The choice of who reads me has narrowed to two women in England, and only one of us is free on Sundays.* There was no signature. There never was. Brennan read it standing, put it down, and said, in his flattest inventory voice, "It is either an invitation or a witness statement, and either way it wants us in a doorway with one exit." "Yes," Margaret said, and found, examining herself honestly, that the dominant emotion was not fear but professional offence. Somewhere off Kingsway, a machine that summed beautifully was being fed her week by a man with clean nails, and the man had just complained, in effect, that she was hard to schedule. "Then we go to the corner," she said. "But we choose the doorway, and it will have two exits, because I have read enough invitations to know that the polite ones are the ones you survive."