第36章 The Woman at Euston

Margaret did not go home. She went to Brennan's flat above the butcher's shop, and she knocked on the door and waited, and when Brennan opened it she carried the photograph in her hand the way a woman carries evidence she has not decided to use, the way a soldier carries a weapon she has not decided to fire. "I broke the key," she said. Brennan stepped aside to let her in, and Margaret sat on the edge of the narrow bed and unfolded the photograph and laid it on the blanket between them. On it, in the background, was a woman standing by a door, and behind the woman was a building that Margaret recognised — the warehouse on the south bank, the one with the machine in the basement, the one where Eleanor Vane was sitting at the desk, the one where the new war was being fought, the one where the chain had been hidden for five years and was now being revealed, thread by thread, to the woman who had spent her life reading the spaces between the words. "This woman," Brennan said. "She is the one at Euston?" "She is the one who watches," Margaret said. "She is the one who has been watching me for five years. And she is not the receiver. She is the watcher. The receiver is somewhere else. Or she is already here, and I have not seen her yet." Brennan was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "What do you want to do?" "I want to find the receiver," Margaret said. "I want to find Anne at the British Library. I want to find the message that was sent to her. I want to read it, and I want to understand what she was supposed to do, and I want to understand why she was a decoy, and I want to understand who the real receiver is, and I want to understand why Eleanor Vane waited until now to reveal herself, why she waited until Margaret Chase had decoded the message that predicted her death, until she had found the boathouse, until she had uncovered the chain, until she was ready to make the choice that would determine everything." She stood up and walked to the window and looked out at the street below, where the early delivery men were already unloading crates of meat onto the pavement, where the city was waking up, where people were going about their ordinary lives, unaware that across the river from Euston, in a basement lit by a single green-shaded lamp, a woman was about to make a choice that would change everything. "And I want to expose it all," she said. "The warehouse. The machine. The network. Eleanor Vane. Edmund Hale. The man in Helsinki. The woman at Euston. All of it. I am going to write a report, and I am going to send it to everyone who needs to know, and I am going to make sure that the chain is broken, not by joining it, but by destroying it from the outside. I am going to make sure that the truth is told, even if it costs me my life." Brennan nodded. "Then we move fast. Before they move first." They moved fast. Margaret went back to the office, and she sat at her desk, and she read the key until her eyes were burning and her hands were stiff, and she found the second message, and the third, and the fourth, each one more carefully constructed than the last, each one a thread in a net that had been woven over five years and was now being tightened around her. By midday she had a map of the network on her desk, a web of names and dates and drop points and the occasional shorthand symbol that meant, in the language of the new reader, something that made her blood run cold. The receiver was not Anne at the British Library. Anne was a decoy, a false trail, a message designed to lead Margaret here, to this room, to this woman, to the thing that was waiting for her. The real receiver was someone else — someone who had been trained by Eleanor Vane, someone who had received the master key that Voss had believed was unbroken, someone who was now, at this very moment, sitting in a flat in Bloomsbury, reading a message that had been addressed to her specifically and that had been encoded with a key that only she could read, a message that had been waiting five years to be decoded, a message that had been sent by her father, who had died in the Blitz, who had left her a letter that predicted her death and had also, in some way she was only beginning to understand, saved her life. Margaret wrote down the receiver's name. It was not Anne. It was Clara. Clara Hargreaves, a signals analyst at GCHQ, a woman who had been recruited by Eleanor Vane five years ago, a woman who had been given the master key and had been told to wait for the message, and who had now, at last, received it. The message was simple. Three lines. A time, a place, and a name. The name was Margaret Chase. She was to come to the warehouse on the south bank at midnight. She was to bring the key. And she was to bring the photograph from the boathouse. Margaret sat with the message for a long time, and then she picked up her coat and her bag and the green notebook and the photograph, and she walked out of the office and into the night, and she walked toward Euston, because she had learned by now that the place where you are told to meet is never the place where the meeting actually happens, and the warehouse was a trap, and she was going to walk into it anyway, because the long night was not over, but the fire had begun, and the ashes would tell the truth. She passed the drop point at Euston on the way, and she saw the woman standing by the Northern Line entrance, watching the crowd, and the woman's face was ordinary and forgettable, and she was exactly the kind of person who could watch a woman for five years without being noticed, and Margaret walked past her without stopping, without looking, without letting her face show anything at all, and she kept walking, and she did not look back, and she knew, with the certainty of a woman who had decoded a message that predicted her death, that the woman at Euston was not the receiver. The receiver was somewhere else. And the receiver was waiting for her. And Margaret was going to find her, and she was going to confront her, and she was going to break the chain, and she was going to make the fire burn, and she was going to let the ashes tell the truth.