第33章 The Office of Edmund Hale

The office was on the second floor of a building on Whitehall that Margaret had passed a thousand times without noticing, because it was not the kind of building that demands attention. It was grey stone, plain windows, a door with a brass plate that read simply: DEPUTY ADMINISTRATOR. She walked up the steps at twenty minutes to three, and she pushed the door open, and she found herself in a corridor that smelled of floor polish and old paper, and she followed the corridor to the end, where a woman in a navy dress sat behind a desk and looked up at her with an expression of mild surprise. Can I help you? I am here to see Mr. Hale, Margaret said. Miss Margaret Chase. The woman made a note on a pad. Mr. Hale is expecting you, Miss Chase. Please wait a moment. She picked up the phone on her desk and spoke into it, and then she set it down and looked at Margaret again. He will see you now. Margaret walked through the door the woman had opened for her, and she found herself in a room that was exactly what she had expected and exactly what she had not. It was an administrator's office — desks, files, a telephone, a window looking out onto a courtyard that was too small to be called a garden — and it was also the room where the war had been fought, because on the wall behind the desk there was a framed photograph of the Queen, and on the shelf beside it there was a row of files stamped with the words TOP SECRET, and in the safe under the desk there was a key, and somewhere in the building beneath them all a machine was ticking, sending messages across the sea to a man in Helsinki who had asked Margaret Chase to watch the woman at Euston. Edmund Hale stood up when she entered. He was a tall man, thin, with silver hair and a face that had been handsome once and had settled, in middle age, into the pleasant blankness of a man who had never been required to express an opinion that was not already someone else's. He extended his hand, and she took it, and his grip was dry and cool and entirely professional. Miss Chase, he said. Thank you for coming. I understand you have been busy. So have you, Margaret said. She did not sit down. I have been reading your requisition forms. September 1942. The fourteenth. You signed the order to transfer personnel records to this office. I have been trying to understand why. Hale's expression did not change. It was the face of a man who had spent forty years saying nothing that could be used against him. I sign many requisition forms, he said. I am the deputy administrator. That is my job. Not that one, Margaret said. That one, specifically. Because on the same day, a codebreaker named Alan Pemberton was dragged from the sea off the North Sea coast and buried at the bottom of the estuary, and the order to do it was not German. It was British. It came from this building. And it was signed by you. Hale was quiet for a long moment. Then he sat down, and he folded his hands on the desk in front of him, and he looked at her with eyes that were pale and entirely without threat. You think I killed him, he said. No, Margaret said. I think you signed the paper that killed him. There is a difference. He nodded slowly, as if she had said something reasonable. There is. He leaned back in his chair. You are a clever woman, Miss Chase. You always were. Edith told me about you, in the months before she resigned. She said you had a mind like a lockpick. I did not believe her until I saw what you could do with a cipher. Then you know who I am, Margaret said. I know what you are, Hale said. You are a codebreaker. You are the woman who decoded the message that predicted your death. You are the woman who went to Norfolk and found the boathouse and the tin box and the photograph with the torn corner. You are the woman who received a key from a dead man and has been reading my traffic ever since. You are also, I suspect, the woman who is about to make a choice that will determine whether she continues to be any of those things. Margaret felt the cold settle into her chest, the cold she had felt in the hangar, in the boathouse, in the weeks after Pemberton drowned. You are the Fisherman, she said. No, Hale said gently. I am not the Fisherman. I am the man who taught the Fisherman how to fish. The words hung in the air between them, and for a moment Margaret could not breathe. She had spent five years looking for the Fisherman, the German instructor who had taught Edith Crane to hide things in plain sight, and she had found him in Flensburg, and he had died in the water, and she had thought the chain was broken. But the chain was not broken. The chain went back further, to a man who had taught the teacher, who had built the wall that Edith had hidden behind, who had signed the requisition that had drowned Alan Pemberton, and who was now sitting in a grey office on Whitehall, waiting for her to decide what to do next. Why? she managed to say. Why did you sign the order? Because it was the right thing to do, Hale said. And because it was the only thing I could do. You see, Miss Chase, I did not choose the side I was on. The side chose me. The war was never ours to fight. It was a war between people who had already decided what the world would look like after it was over, and I was one of the people who had to make sure the world looked the way they wanted it to. Alan Pemberton was a problem. He was a good codebreaker. He was also a man who had seen something he was not supposed to see, and he had started asking questions that led back to this room, to this desk, to me. The order was not about killing him. It was about silencing him. And when silence is not enough, drowning is very effective. He stood up and walked to the window and looked out at the courtyard, and his back was to her, and his voice was calm, the voice of a man giving a lecture to a bright student. The new reader is not an enemy of this country, Margaret. He is a friend. A patient friend. He has been waiting for the right moment to speak, and that moment is now. You have the key. You can read the messages. You can tell your government what the reader is planning, and you can stop him before he begins. Or you can do what every codebreaker wants to do — sit with the key and read and read and read, because the reading is the point, and the meaning is secondary, and the stopping is nobody's business but the reader's. Margaret looked at his back, at the silver hair, at the hands that had signed the requisition, and she thought about Voss, dead in the water off Flensburg, and about Edith Crane, sitting in a prison cell at Scotland Yard, and about the message that had come from Helsinki, and about the warehouse on the south bank, and about the woman at Euston who had been watching her without her knowing it. What do you want from me? she asked. I want you to make a choice, Hale said. He turned to look at her, and for the first time she saw something in his face that was not administrative calm. It was not anger. It was not fear. It was impatience, the impatience of a man who has been waiting a long time for someone to understand. I want you to read the key. I want you to find out what the reader is planning. And then I want you to tell me whether you are going to stop him, or whether you are going to join him. He held out his hand, and in his palm was a piece of paper, folded small, and on it, in a hand Margaret recognised from the files at Eastcote, was a single word: Choose. She took the paper. She did not unfold it. She put it in her pocket, next to the photograph from the boathouse, and she turned and walked out of the office, and she walked down the corridor, and she walked out of the building, and she stood on the steps and looked at the grey sky and she felt the weight of the paper in her pocket, and she knew, with the same certainty that had walked her into the hangar and into the boathouse and into the safe in her room, that she was standing at the edge of a decision that would not let her go. The long night was over. The new one had begun. And the question was not whether she would look at the ashes. The question was whether she would look at the fire.