Page 99 of The Number of Love
She couldn’t make herself move. She wanted to, but her muscles were locked intotoo still, making her wonder that she’d even managed to rise. She could only stand there, grasping the papers, and watch as he smiled at the admiral, sidled around him, and then finally,finallylooked at her.
He grinned, and her respiration rate shifted again. A hitch that would drop it from its usual twelve breaths a minute to eleven. And then a few short heaves that would raise it to fifteen.
He strode toward her, obviously not suffering the same paralysis—but then, he wouldn’t be. He was a man of action. And she was glad of it, just now. He pulled her against him, and she went gladly into his arms, not caring that the admiral, the guard, and whoever had entered behind Drake were looking on. She wrapped her arms around him and held on. “You made it back,” she said into his coat.
“I did.” His voice was a rumble in his chest, beneath her ear.
“I say, do I get one of those?”
Thetoo stilldissolved into the here and now. She pulled away with a laugh and shot a glare at Camden. “Threat number thirty-two from my list, Camden.”
He made a show of wincing. “No thank you, I rather like my eyebrows.”
Drake shook his head, rolled his eyes, turned up his lips in amusement. And then he reached into his coat and pulled out one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen. A soft, green-papered codebook.
She snatched it from his hands as if it were the last cupful of sugar. “You found it!”
“We foundone, anyway. You’ll have to tell me if it’s the correct one. Cam wasn’t certain.”
She sat again, there on the stairs, and flipped it open. A two-second glance assured her it wasn’t one they already had. But there was only one way to be sure it was what they needed. She spread the telegrams and codebook out on the next step up, twisting around to use the stair as a desk, and got down to work.
“You know, my dear, you could take that upstairs.”
As if she had the patience for that trek. Margot ignored the admiral’s advice and pulled a pencil stub from her pocket. She hadn’t spare paper to use for her usual lists of numbers, but that was all right. Paper was more for form and habit than necessity. But her head would work just fine for now.
She went from codebook to telegram and back again, her smile growing a little more with each sentence that made sense. It was the right one. They’d found it. Soon she was slapping the first short decrypt to the side—the plain text scrawled directly onto the telegrams, each word above its encoded counterpart.
Drake snatched it up while she went to work on the next. “Identify targets for plan B3.” He paused, probably looking at the admiral. “Do we know what that is?”
“No. Where was that one sent from?”
Margot didn’t need to check her notes—she’d already memorized the order of receipt and location. “From Berlin. To here in London. As is the next, if we’re looking at them in order of dates received.” It being no longer than the original, she even then wrote the last word. “This one says, ‘Locate admiralty codebooks.’”
A beat of silence, then Hall snorted. “Well, they’ve failed in that. We’d know it if our codes had been compromised.”
They would, as they had been alerted when the minesweeping code had been. But it could be why this agent had been targeting her. The date on the telegram matched up with when he’d begun appearing.
She went to work on the next message, which was longer. The men chattered on about the mission while she decrypted, until she slid the sheet over toward Drake.
“This one is reporting the death of an Agent Regnitz in the line of duty. Requesting transport of body. ... Regnitz? I don’t recognize that name.”
“It’s a river,” Camden said. “In Bavaria. Aside from that ... it could be a surname, I suppose. Or a code name. Sir?”
Hall’s footsteps sounded, and then there was the rustle of paper exchanging hands. “I don’t recall seeing it in any of our other information.”
Nor did Margot, though she gave it only a passing thought. Her focus was already on the next telegram. A response to the first, it seemed. “Transport was refused. The recipient was instructed to dispose of the corpse however he saw fit and then implement planA22.” She slapped that paper down too. “This next one is also from Berlin but seems to have been sent to England again, sir.”
“Where were the previous two received originally?”
“Madrid.”
She heard the hitch in Drake’s breath. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, since we know it has something to do with Jaeger, and the train was bound for Madrid. I suppose A22 commanded him back here, somehow or another.”
“So it would seem. Though I would still like to know how an agent of the Central Powers managed to slip past us without my knowing it.” Hall’s irritation echoed off the marble stairs.
Margot scratched another word onto the page.
“Or was it two agents, even?” Drake asked. “We know Jaeger is here, given the phone call. He must be working with the man who attacked the girls last night. This bloke seems to have been here for a while—I would bet under the name Niall Walsh originally. Perhaps he helped secret Jaeger in somehow too.”
