too long and it was now well above the four inches permitted by wartime regulations. She savored the excess with a mix of guilt and defiance. She did not linger, though, but washed quickly. Time to get back to Norgeby House, to begin her wait anew. It was not just Marie she was worried about. They’d had no word from Josie for two weeks and Brya’s last transmission had been weak as well. It was as though the girls were sliding from her fingers, their voices growing weaker in the darkness of the storm.
Eleanor got out of the tub and dried, then reached for her robe. She had just started to dress when there was a knocking down below. She listened to see if it was one of the usual early morning sounds, the milkman swapping out the bottles, lorries making deliveries down the street. But it had been an actual knock at the door. There were voices, her mother’s low and puzzled, a male one tense and urgent. Dodds, the butler at headquarters who also doubled as her driver. He was at least an hour ahead of schedule to pick her up—and he never got out of the car to fetch her. Eleanor dressed quickly, still buttoning as she went down the stairs.
For the first time, Dodds stood in the doorway, looking out of place and uncomfortable. “What is it?” Eleanor asked.
Dodds shook his head, not wanting to speak in front of Eleanor’s mother, whose eyes were wide, realizing once and for all that her daughter did not have a job in one of the high street shops. Eleanor grabbed her bag from its peg by the door and raced out the door after Dodds without a word. Her hair flew out behind her and as she sat in the back of the car, she began rolling it into a knot with her fingers. “Tell me.”
“The Director said to get you in a hurry. Something about the transmissions.” Eleanor’s heart stopped as she imagined a thousand different scenarios, all of the things that could have gone wrong. She kept coming back to just one.
“Bloody hell,” she swore. She never should have left headquarters. She pressed her foot against the floor of the car, willing Dodds to go faster even as they skidded too quickly across the rain-slicked streets.
When the car pulled up in front of Norgeby House, the Director himself was waiting for her at the door—a sign more alarming than the predawn summons itself. “It’s a message I don’t quite understand,” he said, casting aside his usual discretion and speaking in the corridor as they walked toward the radio room. “From one of the southern networks.” Not Vesper’s circuit, she realized with faint relief. “Something doesn’t look right.”
He handed her a piece of paper, an already decoded message asking for the details of an arms drop. But the W/T who sent it was male—not one of hers. Eleanor exhaled slightly. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m not familiar with this operator.” She wondered why the Director had called her in at this hour regarding a transmission that had nothing to do with her girls. “If you’d like, I can pull his file and compare the fist print.”
The Director shook his head grimly. “No need. One of the radio operators flagged the message because it is supposed to be from an agent called Ray Tompkins.”
“Tompkins was captured at a safe house outside Marseille nearly three weeks ago,” Eleanor said, recognizing the name.
“Exactly. This message cannot possibly be from him.”
A cold chill ran up Eleanor’s spine as she looked at the note once more. “It could be someone else from his team,” she ventured hollowly, knowing as she spoke that the words weren’t true.
The Director shook his head. “The other two members of that circuit who knew how to transmit were arrested days earlier. No, I’m afraid we must assume the worst—someone else has gotten hold of the radio and is using it.”
Eleanor let the reality sink in. One of their radios had been captured weeks ago, and someone (the Germans, presumably) had gotten the crystals and the codes to keep playing it back, as if it was still operational. But would the Germans really have dared to play back the radios of the captured agents, knowing they might not have the security checks quite right and risking detection? Yes, because it had worked. She thought back over the not-quite-right transmissions. They had been short at first, tentative questions. Only after