Waging War (19 page)

His arms wrapped around me from behind and I
turned and flung myself into him. He stroked my hair and murmured
soothing sounds until the tears had calmed down enough for me to
breathe without gasping. “I’m sorry,” I whispered into his
neck.

I swiped the wet streaks from his skin when
I stepped back from him, then pulled the hem of my t-shirt up to
wipe my face. His hands went around my bare waist, and his touch
made my breath catch. “Why are you sorry? What’s this about?”
Archer wiped a lingering tear from my cheek as his eyes searched
mine. I mentally debated the risks of sounding like the idiot I’d
been if I spilled it all.

And because being an idiot wasn’t the worst
thing that could happen, I gave him the short version of my fear
about the cure, my jealousy about whatever life he’d had before me,
and my sadness at the solitude he must have known for so many
years. I was about to Clock without him, to a version of him I
didn’t know, and I was pretty much a walking emotional disaster.
The word-vomit-fest took less than five minutes, and I’d managed to
at least get the tears and snot under control by the time the
others came out of the library.

Ravi was back in his wheelchair looking
tired after the few minutes spent on his feet. Stella, on the other
hand, looked like the visit had invigorated her. She saw my face
and gave me an understanding smile.

“Would you boys like to see the Colossus
they’ve reconstructed in the H block? It’s the National Museum of
Computing now, of course, but you may still recognize the building,
and you’ll certainly recognize the machine.”

Ravi’s energy sparked at the idea. “Oh yes!
I’d heard they built it using plans drawn from memory.”

Archer’s arm tightened around me as we
followed them out. Ringo had taken over the job of pushing Ravi’s
wheelchair and managed to provide support to Stella as well. I knew
it was selfish of me to have Archer by my side, but I needed just
another minute or two until my knees didn’t threaten to buckle with
every step.

“The British government ordered all but two
of the Colossus machines destroyed after the war. They didn’t want
the rest of Europe to realize they’d broken the Lorenz cipher,”
Archer explained. “The Russians were still using Lorenz, and I
believe we continued to break their codes until about 1960, when it
was finally revealed to them that we had Colossus. At that point
the last two machines were broken up, and, as I understand it,
thrown down coal holes. Consequently, the world didn’t realize
until recently that the English were at the forefront in computing.
Credit has always gone to the Americans for their ENIAC
innovations.”

“That’s what you guys get for having so many
secrets,” I smirked.

“It seems the Americans may have been the
ones to let slip to the Russians that we’d broken their code,”
Archer shot back.

Oh. Touché.

Ravi and Stella carried on the conversation
with memories of working on the Colossus machines, and Archer held
me back a step so we could speak privately.

“I had fallen deeply in love with you in
1888, but then you were gone, and I had a new life to navigate. The
first years passed quickly enough as I still lived in a world with
which I was familiar. Watching my father’s decline was difficult,
of course, and it was perhaps fortunate that I hadn’t made friends
at Kings College from which to have to hide myself, but for the
most part I tried to pretend I wasn’t a monster and dreamt about
the time we could be together again.”

I held my breath, not even bothering to
protest the ‘monster’ comment. I could feel the “but” part of the
conversation coming.

“And then England went to war. You had
warned me, of course, but no amount of foreknowledge could have
prepared me for the sheer human devastation. It was in the Great
War that I accepted that my monstrousness couldn’t hold a candle to
what I’d seen others do, and it was worse than you can ever imagine
at the front lines. The term ‘shell shock’ was coined during that
war, and so many, many had it. But emotional injuries were
considered weak, concussive brain injuries hadn’t been studied yet,
and unstable, damaged men were sent back to the front lines.”
Archer’s voice trailed off, and he looked away from me as he spoke.
I sensed he was with his memories more than with me.

When he continued, he spoke directly to me.
“Twenty-one years later, when Britain entered World War II, a new
crop of young men volunteered for the madness, believing their
patriotic duty could be served in a few months. Their shell-shocked
fathers and I knew better, and I was determined to stay off the
front lines of that war. I needed very much to continue to believe
in the goodness of humanity, because war is terrifying. And
terrified people make choices they’d never make if the
circumstances were different.”

There was something he wasn’t telling me,
and I’d never heard such hesitancy from him before. He was staring
into the distance again, unfocused and not present.

“Archer? What is it,” I said quietly.

This time his eyes didn’t return to mine. “I
thought it could continue where we’d left off. I thought I could
find you and marry you and live the life I’d dreamed of, because
I’d left the war behind me where it couldn’t touch you. But I
should have known it would catch up to me. Monsters always get
theirs in the end.”

The resignation in his voice scared me.
“What are you talking about? I don’t understand.”

He inhaled shakily. “There was someone.
Someone important to me.”

And … there it was. I clamped down on
muscles that threatened to shake and made my expression as passive
and neutral as I could manage.

Archer stumbled on, deliberately not looking
at me. “There was a mission in France. The intensity of surviving
overcame … my control … everything.”

“You slept with someone. That’s what you’re
saying?”

He closed his eyes as if wincing at the
words. “The memory is a blur.”

It was the wince that got me. I usually only
got nauseous around Mongers, but nausea suddenly wrapped its fist
around my stomach and twisted. My heart pounded and I flushed with
heat, but I forced my voice into something normal. “Was it
Nancy?”

Archer hesitated. “I truly can’t say. She
was dynamic and fascinating, and I did go to France with her, but
so much of that time is missing from my memory.”

My voice dulled. “You don’t remember.”

His eyes had locked onto mine, as if they
begged for my understanding. “It may be the shell shock … from the
Great War. Even now, anything explosive makes my mind just … blank
for a moment. I lose my bearing and feel as though I’m underwater,
as though sound and movement go into slow motion.”

I couldn’t even process what he was saying.
It was too much information, and every bit of it sucked. “So,
you’ve basically had PTSD for a hundred years?”

“A form of it, I’m sure. Memory loss is a
typical symptom of what they began to call battle fatigue.”

“But wouldn’t your virus have healed
it?”

He gave me an odd look. “Only part of the
damage was physical, and psychiatric help doesn’t keep my
hours.”

The fist in my stomach twisted tighter.

Archer stopped walking. “Why is my shell
shock the focus of your inquiry? I would have thought you’d want to
know …” His voice trailed off, and I thought I’d never seen Archer
at such a loss for words.

“That I’d want to know about your
lover?”

He winced. Good. I was cringing inside at
the term, the thought, and everything about the idea.

“I really don’t, Archer. I get why you told
me. Running into the two of you getting cozy together would be
phenomenally awkward, and more than a little bit painful, but I
really wish I didn’t have to know. I mean, it was like, seventy
years ago, and you hadn’t seen me in more than fifty years.
Rationally, it doesn’t make sense for me to even care.”

“But do you?” he asked quietly.

Finally, he was meeting my eyes again. I
exhaled. “Yeah, I care.”

“I’m sorry, Saira. As I said, I know it
happened, though I don’t have any of the details. But I thought you
should know, so maybe you won’t hate me when you return.”

Ringo, Ravi, and Stella were waiting for us
at the entrance to a long, cement block building. I took Archer’s
hand and threaded my fingers through his. “I couldn’t hate
you.”

I could feel the tension begin to seep out
of him. “Thank you.”

“But don’t do it again,” I said. “You’re
mine.”

He gripped my hand tightly. “Yes, I am.”

Colossus

Ringo held the door for us, and Archer went
to push Ravi’s wheelchair. Ringo whispered to me as I passed him.
“Are ye alright?”

I smiled a little too brightly. “I’m
fine.”

“Liar.” His eyes searched mine for a brief
moment, but he didn’t press the issue. It wasn’t my story to tell,
and dissecting my feelings at that moment was about as appealing as
dissecting the formaldehyde squid eyeball that squirted eye juice
at me in fifth grade.

The first room we entered was set up for
visitors to see the history of the Tunney machine, including a
listening station where the encoded messages would have been
received and instantly translated into teletype tape by Wrens. It
was a really well done exhibit that looked like the Wrens had just
stepped out for a cup of tea.

The next room held a giant machine covered
with valves and wires that was nearly as tall as the ceiling and
practically filled the room. I couldn’t even imagine how all the
parts worked together to find the code key from hundreds of
millions of possibilities, and even though the cell phone in my
pocket was a technological giant in comparison, this machine could
give anything an inferiority complex.

“We used to dry our laundry on top of it.”
Stella’s voice was quiet in the room, and I turned to find her
watching me. She was smiling. “The girls in the other huts were
jealous that our woolen stockings would dry in time to wear home,
while theirs were always still damp from the walk to work. It was
one of the perks of working with Colossus. The other perk was
working with those two men.” She nodded toward the other room where
I could still hear Ravi expounding on the life of a Colossus
engineer.

“What was he like then? Archer, I mean.”

Stella had moved next to me at the railing
and was looking at Colossus as she spoke. “He was very serious, as
if he knew that the work we were doing here meant life or death. It
did, of course, but we didn’t know that at the time. It wasn’t
until the Bletchley Park archives were declassified that the
statistics began to come out. Your President Eisenhower credited
our work as having shortened the war by two years. And certainly,
we were instrumental in the success of the D-Day landings in
1944.”

I gasped at the realization that I’d
forgotten something so important. “When was D-Day?”

“June 6
^th
. Wrens were absolutely
glued to the teletype machines translating the enormous number of
messages that came through from German high command. It was around
that time that Archer was sent to France with the SOE mission to
help the French resistance fighters to stop the 2
^nd
SS
Panzer Division from getting to Normandy. There were no men
available to replace him, so Ravi promoted me to help him keep the
beast running.”

June 6
^th
. A day when all English
eyes would be focused across the channel at Normandy. Tom would
know the date. Could his mission in London be planned around the
Allied D-Day invasion? It seemed too horrible to contemplate. No
matter how disillusioned Tom had become, I didn’t think he would
actually betray his country.

“There was a note attached to a piece of
tape, like the stuff that ran through Colossus. They found it in
the bedroll in the hidden room, and it was addressed to Ravi. Did
you see that?”

Stella’s eyes widened and she shook her
head. “I didn’t. One of the curators asked me about Ravi, and of
course I told them his full name, but I didn’t know why. What was
the note?”

I showed her the photo on my phone.

She seemed startled. “June 4th, 1944. The
day I got engaged. It was just before Archer left for France.”

“Ravi remembers having seen this message
when it came out of Tunny. He said you took it up to the
mansion.”

“I often did take messages up to Colonel
Marks. But I never read them.”

“The torn tape is only part of the message,
and Archer wanted Ravi to find the other piece.”

“Those tapes were always tearing, and this
piece of tape isn’t actually the message itself. It’s the teletype
transcription of the encoded message. It was run through Colossus
purely for the purposes of determining that day’s code
settings.”