“What’s that?”

“Never mind. What I’m saying is, I don’t need a lot of young cockerels chesting about, competing with each other. Women”—Dilly leveled a finger at Beth—“are more flexible, less competitive, and more inclined to get on with the job in hand. They pay more attention to detail, probably because they’ve been squinting at their knitting and measuring things in kitchens all their lives. They listen. That’s why I like fillies instead of colts, m’dear, not because I’m building a harem. Now, drink your gin.”

Beth drank it. Mrs. Knox brought their breakfast, retreating with another tranquil smile, and a wave of hunger nearly flattened Beth. “I don’t know if I can do it again,” she found herself admitting even as she balanced the plate on her lap. No food had ever tasted so good.

“Yes, you can. Practice makes perfect. I’ve turned more schoolgirls into first-rate rodders than I can count.”

“I didn’t exactly get much training when I started.”

Dilly chewed a forkful of his own omelet. “That’s because I want you coming to it fresh and inventive, not with every instinct and impulse trained out of you. Imagination, that’s the name of the game.”

“It’s not a game.” Beth had never contradicted a superior in her life, but in this cozy library overlooking a tangled garden, none of the ordinary rules seemed to apply. “It’s war.”

“It’s still a game. The most important one. You haven’t seen an Enigma machine yet, have you? Monstrous little things. The air force and naval machines have five possible wheels, which means sixty possible orders depending on which three are picked for the day. Every wheel has twenty-six possible starting positions, and the plugboard behind it has twenty-six jacks. That makes one hundred and fifty million million million starting positions . . . and then the Jerries change the settings every twenty-four hours, so every midnight we have to start over. That’s what we’re up against. The Italian Enigma machine isn’t quite such a beast—no plugboard—but it’s quite bad enough.” Dilly toasted her with a tilted smile. “It’s odds to make you weep, which is why we must think of it as a game. To do otherwise is sheer madness.”

Beth was trying to figure out how many zeroes there were in one hundred and fifty million million million, and couldn’t do it. They kept spiraling behind her eyelids in five-block chunks, 00000 00000 00000, down into the rose’s heart. “If the odds are that bad, we won’t ever do it.”

“But we are. The Polish cryptanalysts were reading German Enigma traffic since the early thirties, and breaking back in after every change until ’38—we’d be nowhere without them, and now we’ve picked up the torch.” Another silent toast for the Poles. “Bit by terrible bit, we’re doing it.”

“Do the Germans really have no idea?”

“None. Our fellows are very careful at the top level, how they use the decrypted information we give them. I understand there are rooms of intelligence chaps here who do nothing but mock up plausible ways our information could have been found by some other source than breaking Enigma.” Dilly waved a hand. “Not our business, that part. But they must be doing it right, because the Jerries don’t seem to have realized we’re reading their post. German arrogance—they’ve got their perfect machine, their unbreakable system, so how could anyone possibly be getting around it? Especially a lot of scrubby English lads and lasses in the middle of the countryside, going at it with nothing more than pencil stubs and a little lateral thinking?”

“What’s lateral thinking?”

“Thinking about things from different angles. Sideways, upside down, inside out.” Dilly set his empty plate aside. “If I was to ask what direction a clock’s hands go, what would you say?”

“Um.” Beth twisted her napkin. “Clockwise?”

“Not if you’re inside the clock.” Pause. “See?” He smiled.

“. . . Yes,” said Beth Finch.

THERE WERE NO smiles the following day when she reported for her next shift. Dilly looked preoccupied, shoving Beth some new crib charts. “No Italian Enigma today. The Hut 6 lads need help getting through this lot; it’s piling up and it’s critical. German Enigma, mostly the Red traffic . . .”

Beth automatically coiled her plait up on the back of her head, jamming another pencil through to keep it off her neck, waiting for the nerves to swamp her as they had every day for weeks. The terrible fear that she’d fail, that she was stupid and useless and wasting everyone’s time.

The fear came, the worry, the nerves—but much diminished. What Beth primarily felt was hunger: Please, God, let me do it again.

Chapter 13

September 1940

Your shoes, Miss Churt, proved broken beyond repair. I hope you will allow me to replace them, with my apologies for ruining their predecessors. —F. Gray

Mab let out a surprised hmph, footsteps slowing as she came into Bletchley village. A package had come in her batch of post, which like everyone else’s was delivered to Bletchley Park from a PO Box in London, then sorted and sent to each hut section to be picked up after shift. Mab had torn open the envelope from Lucy first (another crayon drawing of a horse, this one with a purple mane), then turned to the package with its brief cover note. She caught her breath as she lifted out a pair of shoes: no staid replacement for her now-deceased sensible pumps, but patent-leather slings with a French heel, not too fancy for day, but perfectly gorgeous.

“Apology accepted, Mr. Gray.” Mab grinned at the shoes. “Pity I didn’t have you lovely things last night.” She’d had a dinner date with Andrew Kempton—Hut 3, sweet fellow, bit of a bore, getting quite starry-eyed. Mab thought he’d make a very decent husband, the sort who wore starched pajamas and made the same jokes over every Sunday roast. She’d allowed a good-night kiss after dinner, and if things kept progressing, she might allow him a button on her blouse . . . No more than one, unless things proved serious. A girl couldn’t let herself be carried away in the heat of the moment—that was for men, who had nothing to lose.

Mab was humming Bing Crosby’s “Only Forever” as she came into the house. The sound of the radio drifted from the parlor—everyone was gathered round, Mr. Finch fiddling with the dial. The voice of Tom Chalmers over the BBC filled the room. “. . . can see practically the whole of London spread around me. And if this weren’t so appalling . . .”

Osla was standing with enormous eyes, arms wrapped around her own waist. Beth leaned against her mother, who clutched her hand rather than pushing her aside as she’d been doing lately to punish Beth for getting a job. Mab took another step, staring at the radio.

“The whole of the skyline to the south is lit up with a ruddy glow, almost like a sunrise or a sunset—”

Osla spoke in a monotone. “The Germans are bombing London.”

THE PRIME MINISTER’S bulldog voice, coming through the radio: “No one should blind himself to the fact that a heavy, full-scale invasion of this island is being prepared with all the usual German thoroughness and method . . .”

Churchill sounded so calm, Mab thought. How could he? The iron hammer of the Luftwaffe had turned away from the RAF airfields to pound London into glass. Over the radio Mab had listened frozen to descriptions of flame billowing, buildings collapsing, wave after wave of German bombers pulsing overhead dropping incendiaries on the East End docks from London Bridge to Woolwich. There was nothing there of military value, nothing.

Only Londoners.

Those monsters, Mab thought. Those monsters.

Churchill’s voice bulled on: “Every man and woman will therefore prepare himself to do his duty . . .”

Duty? Mab thought. Over four hundred dead had been reported after the morning of the first raid alone. Her knees had given out when she was finally able to put a call through to her family and hear Lucy’s bright chattering voice. “It was loud! Mum and I ran underground—”

“Did you?” Mab had slid down to the hall floor, back against the wall. Oh, Lucy, why didn’t I bring you with me? Why didn’t I make Mum leave?

And now here they were, days later, and Churchill was intoning, “This is a time for everyone to stand together, and hold firm . . .”

Bugger that, thought Mab.

“No,” said Hut 6’s head of section, the moment Mab accosted him the next day. “Leave will not be granted for you to go to London to see if your boyfriend is safe.”

“It’s my mother and sister, not my boyfriend, and I don’t need a full day. Just half—”

“You think everyone else isn’t asking for the same thing? Go back to work, young lady.”

“If you’re hoping the chief staff officer will overrule your hut and grant you leave,” Harry Zarb greeted Mab as she stamped toward the mansion, “he won’t.”