Page 105 of The Number of Love
“Will it bother you if I look over your shoulder as you work? The faster to see what appears?”
She shook her head. They often worked as a team in here, looking at the same papers, correcting one another, contradicting one another. “Not a bit.”
The message was longer than the others had been. Long enough that it made her chest tighten. How much time did they have? Midnight, he’d said. What happened at midnight? They didn’t have but three hours now until they found out.
She got to it. She only paid attention to the first words, enough to be sure they were coherent, proof that she was using the right code. But after that she ignored the actual meanings and focused on the details. Encrypted word to number, number to German word, German word to English word.
“He’s describing a location.” Drake leaned an elbow onto her desk. “‘Follow the Thames inland ... when the river turns ninety degrees toward the south, watch for a cluster of church steeples.’ Have we a map of London and the surroundings around here anywhere?”
“Hall has one, I believe,” de Grey said.
Drake patted her shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”
“Mm.” She kept working while he was gone. And it must have taken him quite a while to find what he was looking for, because she was penning the last word into place when finally he came back into the room, Hall himself a step behind him. Drake spread the map on an unused desk and began tracing a finger along it.
“What comes after the part about the steeples?”
She read it to him, turning on her chair to better face him. “‘This is the northmost apex. Follow the river another seven kilometers—’”
“That would be Woolwich.” Drake glanced up, face grave. “Keep reading. But I have a feeling I know where he’s leading them.”
She finished, up to “‘this is your mark,’” watching his finger trace along the map as she did so. The question already burning her tongue. “Is that where he told you to go? Where he has Dot?”
He nodded toward the decrypt. “Is there anything else?”
There was, and it made her pulse slow to a dull throb. “He says he recommends no fewer than two dozen Gothas set out to ensure that at least five reach the mark.”
The admiral stepped forward, blinking rapidly. “A bombing raid. He knew I would send a team with you, yes, and didn’t care. The more we send in, the more who would die with you when those bombs fell.”
“While I leave the codebook a safe distance away.” Drake’s lips had gone thin and tight. He motioned to Hall. “I told him about that part, too, of course.”
“And I agree that our so-dubbed Emergency Code is the perfect answer. Compromising it is no great thing at all.”
Margo had expected nothing else. She stood and moved to look over Drake’s shoulder. “What’s the target?”
He tapped a finger to the map. “It’s the Woolwich munitions factory.”
Her muscles went still, frozen for a moment. Even if only a few planes made it, even if only a few bombs fell, that would be catastrophic. It wouldn’t take much to turn the factory itself into a bomb, killing not only Dot but innocents by the hundreds. Perhaps the thousands. “No.”
Drake pushed away from the table. “It isn’t enough to just go in and get Dot out. We have tostopthem. Not just him, butthem. How do we do that?”
Culbreth and de Grey had both given up their own work and had gathered round the map. Culbreth tapped something near the mouth of the Thames. “We alert the RFC and RNAS, for starters. There’s no great risk to our operations in telling them—the Germans won’t know they’ve tipped us off, they’ll just assume we had a scout in the air who spotted them. Then we can get our own lads up in the air to take out as many as they can and get the antiaircraft guns ready.” He lifted his brows in Hall’s direction.
DID nodded. “Do it.”
Culbreth spun for the door.
De Grey turned that way too. “And we can have them sound the sirens in that part of London. The residents ought to have ample time to get to the underground shelters and out of the city.”
Hall was still nodding. These were safe actions, precautionary ones. Actions that, as Culbreth had pointed out, wouldn’t alert the German High Command to the fact that they’d broken their codes and thereby inspire them to change them entirely. They would assume the Gothas had been spotted. Room 40’s secrecy would be upheld.
Even so. When other squadrons that large had made their way across the Channel, their defenses hadn’t succeeded in blocking themall. A few always slipped through. And though their bombs hadn’t seemed to be aimed at specific targets, with detailed information like what Dieter Regnitz had provided, that would change.
Unless ... unless thedetailscould be changed. She gripped Drake’s arm, looking at the admiral. “We can send them a supposed correction, sir, as you’ve done before. Misinformation—an updated message with a new target.” For Drake’s benefit, she added, “We write a message in their code and send it, supposedly from Regnitz. We just need a decoy target. Something that won’t harm anyone.”
Hall gave her a small, tight smile. “The very solution I was going to recommend.”
Drake was still staring at the map. “An abandoned building. I know of a few near there. I can write out the directions as he did. You can turn it into code.”
