第3章 The Prediction

The prediction came true on the eleventh day. Margaret had received a second intercept, this one sent not by the German naval intelligence service but by a different source entirely. The message was shorter, more direct, and it confirmed what she had feared: she was right, someone was watching her, and the date was real. The second message read simply: Three days. Find the dead man. Margaret showed the message to Commander Wright, who read it with a growing sense of alarm. He ordered Margaret to remain at the park at all times, to not leave her quarters after dark, and to report any unusual activity to the security office immediately. But Margaret knew that she could not simply hide. The message had given her a clue—find the dead man—and she intended to follow it. She did not know what the dead man was, or whom he referred to, but she was determined to find out. She began her investigation the following morning, starting with the nameless dead man who seemed to be at the center of the threat. She searched the personnel files, looking for anyone who had died at Bletchley or in the vicinity, anyone whose death had been suspicious or unexplained. She found nothing in the official records, but she did find a reference to a man named Thomas Webb, a codebreaker who had died in a fire at his home in May 1942. Thomas Webb had been a junior mathematician, assigned to Hut 6, working on Army and Air Force Enigma traffic. He had been quiet and unassuming, a man who kept to himself and who was not particularly well-liked by his colleagues. His death had been ruled an accident—a electrical fault in his heating system had caused a fire that consumed his house and killed him in his sleep. But Margaret had a feeling that Thomas Webb's death was not an accident. The second message had mentioned the dead, and Thomas Webb was the only dead man she could find who was connected to the codebreaking operation. She decided to visit Thomas Webb's family, to learn more about him and about the circumstances of his death. But before she could make the trip, she received a third message. This one was even more direct. It read: Stop digging. You will regret it. Margaret carried the third message straight to Commander Wright and waited in his office while he read it standing, one hand pressed flat against the desk as though the paper might otherwise move. We have a problem, he said without preamble. A second message has been intercepted, this one addressed to you specifically. It contains a threat. I know, Margaret said. I received it this morning. Who sent it? I do not know. The message was encoded in a cipher that I have not seen before. It is not standard Enigma, and it is not any of the known German codes. It is something else entirely. Commander Wright sat down heavily in his chair. This is serious, Margaret. Very serious. We cannot ignore a threat like this, not when it comes from inside the park. I know. We need to find out who sent it. We need to find out who is behind this. And we need to do it quickly, before whatever they are planning comes to pass. Margaret nodded. I intend to. How? By finding the dead man, Margaret said. Thomas Webb. I think his death is connected to this. I think someone killed him, and I think I am next. She worked late into the evening, long after the huts had emptied and the boilers had thumped into their nightly silence. The implications of the afternoon were not lost on her: the third message had arrived within hours of her first inquiry after Thomas Webb, which meant her questions were being overheard, reported, and answered from somewhere close at hand. Whoever watched her did not merely know her name. They knew what she was reading, and they objected to her reading it, and they could reach across the fence of Bletchley's security as easily as breathing. Through the frosted pane she could see the parade ground, white under a sliver of moon, and beyond it the dark belt of trees where the park ended. She took stock of what she actually possessed, the way she would tally an inventory before a journey. Two warnings and a threat. A dead junior mathematician whose file was thinner than his talent warranted. A date three days out that the messages treated as fixed and certain. And one fact nobody had given her but that she had earned: fires, however carefully arranged, left evidence behind, and somebody had decided in May of 1942 that Thomas Webb's discoveries were worth more than his life. She understood that she had crossed some invisible boundary. That morning she had been a codebreaker with a personal problem, one who could still have handed everything to Commander Wright and returned to her tables. Now she was an investigator, and investigators, unlike decoders, could not resign. The dead man had no one else. His family believed he had fallen asleep beside a faulty heater, and the lie would stand forever unless someone moved it, and the someone, whichever way she turned it, was her. The radiator ticked as it cooled, and she pulled her coat from its hook and turned back to the desk to prepare, because preparation was the one weapon nobody could confiscate from her. On a sheet of paper she wrote the three questions that mattered. Who had access to Webb's work? Who could dress a threat in German clothing and post it through English air? Who gained a quieter world if she stopped digging on Thursday morning? Under each question she wrote two names, and she noticed that the same name kept arriving under all three, and she sat very still with her pencil lifted, unwilling to think it and unable to stop. It occurred to her, then, that she was not afraid in the way she had expected to be. She thought of her father, who had walked into smoke to see whether anyone was left alive, and of her mother, who had not once in three years asked what Margaret did behind the wire. She thought of Thomas Webb, young probably, photograph missing from his file, who had found something beautiful and true in the numbers and been killed for the finding. Someone owed that boy an accounting. If the same account held her own name in the debit column, then so be it. The future was three days wide, and beyond it nothing she could cipher. But she had faced worse adversaries than a hidden correspondent—she had faced the Blitz, and grief, and the slow years of pretending that both were behind her—and she had learned that courage was mostly arithmetic: one fear at a time, subtracted daily, until the balance tipped. She sealed Webb's file reference inside a stamped envelope addressed to herself, posted it in the box by the gate on her way to breakfast, and went to find out everything there was to know about electrical faults. ---