Beth didn’t really care what the GGG Enigma did or what kind of information it passed. It was just a new puzzle. “Are they transmitting weekly?” Taking the stack from Dilly with one hand, she raised the other to pluck the spectacles off his nose where he’d perched them upside down and drape them back right-side up.

“Messages from Abwehr offices in Tetuán, Ceuta, and Algeciras to Madrid nearly every day. Shipping movements and aircraft spotted near the entrance to the Mediterranean, likely. It goes to Berlin on the standard Abwehr cipher, but this local one is its own beast.”

Yet Beth had an eye for the beast now. You’re just another ugly little four-wheel egg waiting to be cracked, she told the stack of messages, plucking her pencil out of her knotted hair. She had a feel for the way those four-wheels worked; she couldn’t describe it any better than that. Not that it wasn’t hard, painstaking work, of course it was, but she had a sense of what she needed, what kind of message might produce the prized crack. Of course, they were trying to find the message sent on GGG and its corresponding message on the main cipher . . . “I need a GGG message where the time and length of the intercept pinpoints the actual repeat message with a minimum of textual additions—” She gave a yelp of triumph when one landed on her desk. “Come here, you—!”

It took Beth two weeks. She dearly wished she could have had Harry to work on it with her—it would have been much less frustrating—but when that wheel wiring came out of the fug of letters in front of her, she let out a whoop. “I’ve got it,” she said, looking around the room. “With the right-hand wheel locked, standard rodding and charting will pry it the rest of the way open.” She massaged her neck, which she only now realized ached like it had been squeezed in a vise. “Where’s Dilly?” She couldn’t wait to tell him.

Phyllida and Jean were looking at her a little oddly. “Don’t you mean Peter?”

“Peter who?”

“Peter Twinn. From Hut 8? He’s running our section now.”

“What?”

“For God’s sake, Beth. He might be on a different shift rotation, but he introduced himself to the whole section weeks ago. When he took over for Dilly.”

“Well, yes. But that’s only temporary . . . ?” Beth felt the statement trailing upward into a question. She remembered someone giving a speech, Hallo, I’ll be heading things up now, but she’d been eleven hours into a double shift, following the chains down the spiral, barely listening. “I thought Peter was filling in until Dilly was feeling better.” He couldn’t be gone for good. The entire section was now designated Illicit Services Knox—what was ISK without Dilly?

“Dilly isn’t ever going to feel better. Don’t you ever get your head out of the rods and lobsters?” Phyllida drew a short breath. “He is dying.”

“HULLO, DEAR.” MRS. KNOX greeted Beth at the door of Courns Wood, not looking at all surprised to see her there, white faced and twisting her hands. “Did one of the transport drivers drop you?”

“I’ve brought some papers for Dilly.” Files were usually assigned a courier, but Beth had leaped on the chance today. “May I see him?”

“Of course, dear. He’ll be delighted to see you; he talks of you so often. Peggy Rock comes when she can . . .”

Beth cringed with shame as she followed Mrs. Knox up the passage. Peggy had come to visit. Peggy knew Dilly had been cutting back his time at BP since autumn, and why. Beth hadn’t even realized he was coming into work less and less, never mind guessing the reason behind it. She hadn’t seen anything, really, not for months, unless it was in a cryptogram waiting to be deciphered.

Dilly looked up as the library door opened, glasses perched on top of his head. He was sitting in his leather chair facing the long view onto the terrace, and he had a lapful of messages and rods. “Oh, hullo, Beth,” he said absently. “Have you seen my glasses?”

For a moment, Beth couldn’t speak. She wanted to weep, because now that she was actually looking, she could see how thin he was, how his hair, which had once been largely dark, was graying. She walked across the room and took the glasses off the top of his head, her hand shaking. “Here, Dilly.”

He rearranged the specs on his nose, peering up at her. “I see someone’s been telling tales,” he said. “We’d better have a drink.”

He set his papers aside, rose stiffly, and went to the decanter. As he’d done the day Beth made her first break into Enigma, he mixed a gin and tonic. “Drink up. You’ve been working all night, I take it?”

“Yes,” Beth managed to say. “I broke the GGG Enigma.”

“Well done, you!” He beamed. “The best of my Fillies. You and Peggy, and you might be a hair tougher than Peggy.”

“Is something wrong with her?” Now that Beth was looking back on the last few months, at all the things she’d completely ignored, she realized she hadn’t seen Peggy at work for a while either. “I thought she’d changed shifts . . .”

No, Beth told herself brutally. You didn’t think that. She hadn’t even noticed that her favorite colleague, a woman she considered a friend, was gone in the first place.

“Peggy’s a bit run down.” Dilly eased back into his chair, and Beth didn’t miss the pain that flashed across his face. “Pleurisy, but it’s as much nervous exhaustion as illness. She’s been sent home for bed rest.”

Nervous exhaustion. Breakdown. There were a hundred euphemisms at BP, but everyone knew what it meant. It meant you’d cracked, snapped, broken. Peggy Rock, as impervious as her name, had cracked. Beth sat clutching her glass. What else did this day hold?

“She’ll be back.” Dilly seemed quite certain. “It happens, you know. Strain. It gets even the best brains in the business. Sometimes the best brains are the ones that get it worst.”

They sat quietly, sipping.

“How’s Peter Twinn carrying on?” Dilly asked finally. “He’s a good chap, for a mathematician. Promised he’d let my girls work the way they were used to working.”

“Have you really stopped working yourself? This doesn’t look . . .” Beth waved at the messages and rods he’d laid aside.

“Oh, I’m not out of the game. Twinn runs my section day-to-day, but I’ve still got my hand in, working from home where Olive can keep an eye on me. I’ll be at the rods and cribs till they carry me out in a box.”

He laughed, but Beth flinched as if she’d been struck. “Don’t say that. Surely it can’t be as serious as—”

“Lymphatic cancer, m’dear. Had my first surgery right before going to meet the Polish cryptanalysts in ’39, pooling our knowledge on Enigma.” He smiled. “Don’t look so long faced! Some rest and a cruise will put me right, I’m sure.”

Beth wasn’t. He looked so ill . . . How obscene that in the middle of a world-enveloping war, with so many dying in bombing raids and on battlefields, people could still suffer from mundane diseases. Perhaps it was also obscene to be so overwhelmed by one man’s mortality with so many others dying every day, but she couldn’t help it. A small choked noise escaped her before she could stop it.

Dilly handed her a handkerchief, then picked up his pile of messages and decrypts and walked to the library wall, clearly giving her space to compose herself. He pressed an oak panel, and it sprang open to reveal a little wall safe. “As long as I take a few precautions, Travis lets me take home whatever I want. The odd networks, the ones no one has time to work on but me.” He stuffed the heap of paper inside, started to close the door, peered back in, and pulled out a pipe with a murmur of “So that’s where you’ve been hiding.” Then he locked the safe with a key hanging from his watch chain before closing up again. “Can’t leave raw intelligence lying about, even in the middle of Bucks! Now tell me, how’d you break GGG?”

Chapter 33

* * *

FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, FEBRUARY 1942

* * *

What recently wed BP amazon is dashing north as we speak, headed for a romantic weekend in the Lake District with her war-poet husband? Pack your Wordsworth, that’s all BB can say—and does anyone else think all those Lake District poets should have got jobs rather than gassing on about daffodils . . .

* * *

Mab Gray. It sounded like a Bront? heroine, a woman who strode fearlessly across hilltops. Someday, Mab thought, she would stride across hilltops; Francis said his house in Coventry wasn’t far from the countryside. Mab imagined walking along a sunny meadow, picnic basket swinging between them, Lucy running ahead, getting hooked up in golden brambles of gorse. What is gorse, anyway? wondered the London-bred Mab. It sounded picturesque, anyway.