第30章 The New Key

Margaret Chase came home to London on the morning of the first of April, in the cold grey rain that 1947 did so well, and she went straight to the office because there was nowhere else to go. The satchel went to Brennan in a sealed bag, the list of names went to a vault, and the key, the new key, the one Voss had said his handlers believed unbroken, went into the safe in her own room, where it lay in the dark like a thing that knew it was being watched. The paper that Helmut Voss had pressed into her hand with his last strength had taken her three days to decode. It was written in the same old cipher, built on the same reused bones, and it was the last lesson he had ever taught her. On it, in his cramped and careful script, were the four names of the assets he had placed for Moscow in Britain, and under the names, in a block of his own, a single word and a date. Meridian. September 1942. Margaret sat with the paper on her desk for a long time. The four names were nothing to her, names of civil servants and a junior officer she had never heard of, and Brennan's people were already moving on them. But Meridian was the word that would not let her alone. It had been underlined twice, and beside it, in a hand that shook, was written: signs the requisitions. Ask him what he signed in September of 1942. She spent the next day in the records room at Eastcote, and the day after that at Scotland Yard, and on the evening of the third day she found it. A requisition form, dated the fourteenth of September 1942, authorizing the transfer of certain personnel records to the office of the deputy administrator of Hut 6. A form that had been signed, in a hand she had seen a hundred times without seeing it, by the man who now signed the requisitions for the office where Margaret kept her own desk. Edmund Hale had been the deputy administrator of Hut 6 in 1942. He had been the supervisor who retired in the spring of 1943, a month or two after Edith Crane resigned, a month after Margaret decoded the message that predicted her death. And he had not retired. He had been transferred, quietly, to the new organisation, where he signed the requisitions and read the mail and knew, in the way that administrators know everything, every name that passed through the office and every file that was opened in it. Margaret sat in her room with the requisition form on the desk in front of her and the word Meridian turning over in her mind, and she understood that she had been working in the same building as the man who had signed the order that drowned Alan Pemberton for two years without ever once thinking to look at him. She went to see Edith Crane on the morning of the fourth day, in the grey visiting room at Scotland Yard. Edith looked older than she had in the hangar, and thinner, and she looked at Margaret with the same pale eyes and the same stillness, the stillness of a woman who had built her life on being invisible and had nowhere left to hide. You went to see the teacher, Edith said. It was not a question. I went to see Helmut Voss, Margaret said. He is dead. He was shot in Flensburg, trying to come in from the water. Edith was silent for a long moment. Then she said, I told you the war is never over. I told you the hand that wrote the keys is still writing them. Did you believe me? I believe you now, Margaret said. She took the photograph from her coat, the torn photograph from the boathouse, and she laid it on the table between them. Was this him? Was this the teacher? Edith looked at the photograph for a long time, and something moved in her face, something that might have been grief or might have been the recognition of an old debt finally being paid. That is the last photograph taken of him, she said. The corner is torn because I tore it. He was standing there, and I tore his face out of the picture because I could not bear to look at it. I was seventeen. I did not understand that you cannot tear a face out of a life. He called himself Olafsen, Margaret said. But his real name was Helmut Voss, and he was Abwehr, and he built you into a network and let you fall when you were spent. And he told me, in Flensburg, that the order to take Alan Pemberton from the water did not come from Germany. It came from London. It came from the man who signs the requisitions. Edith looked up, and her eyes were very bright. So you found him, she said. I always wondered if someone would. The teacher built the wall I hid behind, but he never built the foundation. That was Meridian. Meridian signed the order that sent me to the lake in September of 1942. Meridian signed my resignation in 1943, and made sure no one asked where I had gone. And Meridian signed the transfer that brought him into the building where you keep your desk. He has been watching you for years, Miss Chase. He has been watching all of us. Why? Margaret asked. Why would a man in the British service sign an order to drown a codebreaker and hide a German agent? Edith Crane smiled, a thin and tired smile. Because he believed the war was over in 1942, she said. Because he believed Germany would win, and he chose his side early, the way my teacher chose his. And when Germany lost, he did not change his side. He only changed his reader. The new war has been coming for a long time, Miss Chase. Meridian has been writing keys for the new reader since the day the old one died. Margaret left the prison with the photograph in her pocket and the word Meridian in her head, and she walked back to the office through the grey London rain, thinking about the man who signed the requisitions, the man whose hand she had seen a hundred times on the papers that crossed her desk. She passed his door on the way to her own, and she did not look in, because she was not ready for him to see her looking. Dorothy was waiting in her room, sitting on the edge of the desk with a cup of tea that had gone cold in her hands. She looked at Margaret the moment she came through the door, and she said, you found him. I found him, Margaret said. And I do not know what to do with him. Then we will find out together, Dorothy said. We always do. Margaret sat down at her desk and unlocked the safe and took out the new key, the key that Voss had said his handlers believed unbroken, and she laid it on the blotter in front of her. It was a list of numbers and letters, a genuine cipher key, and it was the most dangerous thing she had ever held in her hands, because it was also the most valuable. With it, she could read the traffic of the new reader. With it, she could prove who Meridian was, and what he had signed, and what he had done. With it, she could finally finish the work that had been left unfinished in the winter of 1943. But the key was a gift, and gifts from the water always carry a price. Voss had been killed the moment he tried to give it to her. The Fisherman, the man who had taught the teacher, was still out there, writing keys, watching the coast, waiting for the flood that was coming. And somewhere in the basement of the building, the machines were clicking and chattering, the last morse of an old war and the first morse of a new one. Margaret Chase picked up her pencil, and she began to work. The long night was over. The new one was beginning. And this time, she was not going to look at the ashes. ---