His Majesty's Hope (23 page)

“What kinds of problems?” Maggie asked, as they made their way to the top floor, where she was shown to a tiny room with a sloped ceiling and a round window. It was furnished simply, with a twin bed and a worn rug. A framed portrait of Hitler was displayed on a lace doily on the dresser, next to a candlestick in a green glass holder and a box of matches.

“Oh, you know—young girls. Hormones, boyfriends, and the like. She’s just been unhappy—you certainly have your work cut out for you …” Frau Graf clapped a hand over her mouth. “I’ve done it again! I’ve said too much. You must excuse me,
Fräulein
 …”

“Of course,” Maggie said, reassuringly. “I heard nothing.”

“The candle and matches are in case of a power outage—they’re more frequent here these days, with the bombing. And you’ll be taking dinner in the kitchen with the rest of the staff. I will see you at six.”

Jawohl
. “Thank you, Frau Graf.”

Maggie unpacked, but in the way she was trained—so that
she’d be able to leave at a moment’s notice. She looked out the window. No drainage pipe, and it was a long, long way down.

At dinner, in the servants’ dining room with Frau Graf and Herr Mayer, the gardener and all-around workman, Maggie learned even more about her new employer and his family. She learned that Oberg loved his new summer house in Wannsee. She learned that since his wife had died, he’d had numerous affairs with various actresses and cabaret singers, but never anything serious. She learned that, before the war, he’d been a lawyer and his main love was his work. And that when he returned home after a long day, he’d often spend hours in his study, poring over his files and papers.

Now
that’s
a useful bit of information
, Maggie decided, taking a bite of herring salad.

She also learned that, because he was deaf in one ear, Oberg couldn’t serve in the military. And because of his fanatical party loyalty he had risen high in the ranks. He wasn’t just ambitious—he believed, truly believed in what the Nazi party stood for—the Master Race and Aryan superiority. Moreover, he was a huge favorite of Hitler’s, who considered him an example of all that was German: intelligent, cultured, and refined, as well as a proponent of
Lebensraum
, anti-Semitism,
Führerprinzip
, and
Weltanschauung
.

Herr Mayer explained that Herr Oberg was one of the financial managers in Hitler’s private department, the Chancellery of the Führer.

“What sorts of projects does he work on?” Maggie asked.

“He works under the auspices of State and Party Affairs,” Herr Mayer answered, mouth full of herring, proud of his employer. “He’s extremely important—has a big office near the Tiergarten.”

“Really?” Maggie said. “What’s the project?”

Frau Graf helped herself to more bread.
“Geheime Reichssache,”
she added, putting a finger to her lips.

Secret Reich Matters?
Maggie thought.
Interesting …

“It’s an important project, is all we know,” Herr Mayer added.

“Impressive.”
And good to know, indeed
.

David and Freddie walked out of the Piccadilly Theatre on Denman Street in the West End.

“It’s wonderful to get out and do something fun for a change,” David remarked, as they made their way through the crowd.

“Agreed,” Freddie said. “It was good of Noël Coward to give us all something as light and frothy as
Blithe Spirit
—although it’s getting some criticism.”

“What?” David said, aghast, as they took a right on a shadowy side street. Their evening shoes smacked against the cobblestones. “What was it Emmet Fox said? ‘Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.’ ”

“Oh, they’re saying, ‘How horrible to be making fun of the dead in the midst of war,’ et cetera, et cetera.…” They walked farther down the street, people becoming less frequent, the only light from a half-moon and the stars.

“Nonsense!” David replied, voice booming with post-theater enthusiasm. “I loved it, especially Margaret Rutherford. Now
that’s
what I call stage presence.”

“Shall we go to the White Swan, old thing?” Freddie said, clapping a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Nightcap?”

A shadow moved behind them, and a voice called out, “Bloody pansies!”

David and Freddie whipped around. From the shadows emerged three men, beer bottles in their hands.

“Yeah, because you look like pansies to me. Right, Bill?”

“They dress like pansies, they walk like pansies, they’re going to the White Swan like the pansies all do …”

“So they must be
pansies,
” the first one finished. “Bloody arse bandits.” He broke his bottle against the wall. The smashed pieces rained to the ground. He stood there in the darkness, moonlight glinting off the jagged broken glass.

David and Freddie locked eyes. They were outnumbered. “Look, we don’t want any trouble—” David began.

“You might not want it, but trouble’s here for you, cottager,” said the first man. “Get ’em, boys.”

The two others grabbed David and Freddie and threw them against a brick wall. The man with the bottle inched closer.
“The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.”

Freddie kneed the man who was restraining him, hard, in the groin. “Ooooowww!” As the man howled in pain, he dropped his hands from around Freddie’s neck.

“Run!” David cried.

Freddie punched the other man, and he, too, fell to the ground, whimpering and clutching his face. “No,” Freddie managed. “I’m not leaving you.”

“Think you’re a big man, do you?” the first man sneered. With that he took the broken beer bottle and turned toward Freddie. But when David stepped in front of Freddie, the man thrust it into David’s abdomen.

“Ah!” David screamed. “Jesus!” The man pulled out the bottle, now glistening black with blood. David’s eyes rolled back in his head and he crumpled against the wall.

There was a noise, and a group from the theater approached. One of the women screamed, a gloved hand to her mouth. “What’s going on here?” a man shouted.

The two attackers who’d fallen scrambled to their feet. They ran.

Freddie sank to his knees beside David. “Help him.” He glanced up at the approaching people looking down in shock at all the blood. “Call an ambulance! Someone! Please—help him!” He cradled David’s head in his hands.
“Breathe—breathe, damn it!”

It was after midnight at Bletchley Park. In his office, lit by a single green banker’s lamp, windows blinded by thick blackout curtains, Edmund Hope again wrote the numbers Hugh had given him on the green chalkboard on the wall.

He sat back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk, sipping from a mug he’d filled from his flask of gin. The letters and numbers danced in front of his eyes, mocking him.

He’d already run statistical analyses on the numbers, and had come up with nothing. “Damned onetime pad cipher,” Edmund said. He put one hand over his eyes and massaged his temples.

There was a shadow in the doorway. “Can’t be that bad—can it?” Alan Turing entered, rumpled but still bright-eyed and alert.

“I’ve tried everything,” Edmund admitted. “
Everything
. But it’s no use—without anything more to go on …”

Turing turned to the chalkboard. Then he looked at Edmund, his brown eyes dancing. “That’s because you’re looking at it all wrong. It’s not a code.”

Edmund looked up, shocked. “What?”

“I said, old boy, ‘It’s not a code.’ It’s a message—and a pretty straightforward one at that.”

Edmund looked back at the letters and numbers on the chalkboard. Turing took a sniff. “Maybe you should go easier on the gin?” Edmund looked down at his mug, then made a pretense of pushing it away. “Look, it’s simple, really,” Turing said. “What stands out in the first line?” He jabbed at it with a finger.

Edmund threw up his hands. “I don’t know. And at this point I’m starting not to care.”

“H two O!” Turing chortled.
“Water!”
He walked over to the chalkboard. “And what is NaF?”

“Sodium fluoride,” Edmund said, blinking. He sat up, starting to rally. “But what about the nine, then?”

“Nine stashes of the fluoride set to go into water. Look at the nine numbers below—they’re not in code—they’re latitude and longitude symbols. Nine of them.”

Edmund was pulling out a map from his desk. “If that’s so, they’d all be pretty close together …”

“Exactly!” Turing said, clapping Edmund on the back.

Edmund, reading the symbols on the map, said, “They’re all locations close to London.”

“I’m sure you’d have figured this out on your own, but, let me guess—they’re all reservoirs, hence the H two O.”

“My God.” Edmund whistled through his teeth. “So, someone is planning—”

“To drop unknown amounts of fluoride into nine different London water reservoirs.”

“But what would that do? Poison us?”

Turing bit his lip as he thought. “Depends. On how much fluoride and how much water—our two variables. I’m a mathematician, not a chemist—and not God, after all.” He walked out, calling over his shoulder as he left, “And do bathe, Edmund—you smell like a distillery.”

Clara and Cook were in her study, going over dinner plans for the week. “No, no need for anything on Friday or Saturday—I’ll be at the ballet and then the opera.”

“Ma’am …” Cook began. She was a slight woman, with a beakish nose and gray hair covered by a starched white linen cap.

“What?” Clara snapped. “I don’t have all day.”

“I’ve noticed—well, I’ve noticed some food missing. Bread, mostly, but some meat and cheese, too. Some fruit. Just a little here and there, but I wanted to let you know. I don’t want me or the staff to be accused of stealing …”

Clara looked up from her menus. “It’s nothing you need concern yourself with,” she said to the older woman. Then, “You may go.”

When the heavy door clicked shut behind Cook, Clara allowed herself a smile. “Oh,
Mausi,
” she said. “Stealing crumbs now, are we? But not as clever as you think. And certainly not as clever as I am.”

She picked up the black phone’s receiver and dialed. “Hello, Joseph,” she purred.

On the other end of the line, static cracked and then a man’s voice said, “
Liebling
—how wonderful to hear from you!”

“I just wanted to check in, to see what you’ve learned about our Margareta Hoffman.”

“She left Berlin.”

“What do you mean, she’s left Berlin?”

The line crackled and Goebbels cleared his throat. “The last we know is that she took a typing test for Göring. Wasn’t hired.”

“And then?”

“Then she … vanished. She’s probably left the country by now.”

“What about Gottlieb Lehrer? Surely he must know her whereabouts?”

“A ‘lover’s quarrel,’ ” Goebbels said. “They fought and she left. He allegedly hasn’t heard from her since.”

Clara was silent, her hands snaking around the metal telephone cord.

“Clara? Are you there?”

“She could still be here, in Berlin.”

“Why’s this girl so important to you?”

“Let’s call it a hunch. I don’t believe she is who she says she is.”

“Well, I hope you have more than a ‘hunch’ about Operation Aegir.”

Clara took a sharp breath. The truth was that she hadn’t heard from her contact in some time, and she had no news. “Going well, quite well, of course.”

“Because if it starts to go south—like that Windsor affair—well, Clara, I don’t need to tell you that you’re on thin ice with Canaris, especially these days.… Even I might not be able to save you this time.”

“Of
course
it will go as planned,” Clara snapped. Then, in silkier tones, “Now, about the opera tonight—you’ll be there, yes?”

“What’s the first thing you’re going to do when the war ends?” John whispered to Ernst.

The doctor inspected the incision. “You’re healing nicely,” Ernst said, pulling John’s shirt back down. “After the war is over, I will find my wife, Frieda. And then we will find somewhere to live. Somewhere safe.”

John sat up. Ernst looked over at him. “Are you married?”

“Not married, but as soon as I get home, I’m going to remedy that. My girl—Maggie—she’s the only thing that’s getting me through this mess.”

“Good for you. We’re in the same boat, then.”

“I know she’s back home, waiting for me, praying for me. That’s what keeps me going.”

That night, in her small, tidy room on the top floor of the villa at Wannsee, Maggie finally had a chance to think.

Since she’d returned to London from training, everything had happened so quickly—the mission, the jump, coming to Berlin, meeting up with Gottlieb … Not to mention meeting her mother and learning she had a half sister.