Page 20 of Echoes of Betrayal

Lizzie was reminded how much she liked him and how she’d love to trust him fully, but still she hesitated. Being in the field was a lonely business, and she felt it now more than ever. At Baker Street, if she detected an anomaly like this in the cipher room, she would immediately discuss it with Jack, and then if there was no reasonable explanation, they would escalate it to Val. A nostalgic longing clutched at her as she thought of Jack and how well they operated together.

Her older sister Juliet had remarked several times how she envied their working relationship, and as Lizzie sipped her tea and crunched into the sweet biscuit, Juliet’s words echoed in her mind, and she pictured her sister in London. ‘You are so lucky you get to see each other every day and understand each other’s work.’ Juliet had sighed. ‘I worry that when this never-ending war is finally over, Oliver and I won’t have anything left to talk about. What if we’re strangers after all this time, Liz?’

Juliet’s eyes had filled with emotion, and Lizzie had tried to reassure her sister. Juliet and her fiancé had fallen in love in Jersey, and by the time the Beaumont family relocated to London, Oliver had already enlisted in the army, and poor Juliet hadn’t seen him for more than a few snatched days of leave since. It was brutal, and Lizzie counted her blessings when she thought of the millions of couples who had been ripped apart by the war, many of whom would never see each other again.

Lizzie’s thoughts moved to Uncle Luc in Toulouse and how he had reluctantly shared the pain of surviving his term as a prisoner in the Great War. When they discussed it later, Jack told her that men who were now fighting would return scarred for life, whether physically or mentally, even if they were fortunate enough to live. It would be a new battlefield to survive, and Lizzie’s emotions wrung for Juliet because she knew what she feared could be true.

Tom locked his papers away and said he had a few errands to run whilst she wrapped up. He seemed distracted, and she asked him if there was anything on his mind. The SOE agent was operating on his own, and she thought he might appreciate knowing she was ready to help him if he needed it, but he was also trained to keep his cards close to his chest. After mumbling something about the compulsory labour service wreaking havoc in France, and the Milice—the new French police—rounding up young men in Languedoc, he fell silent.

Lizzie pressed on because she was worried about Hannah and Lev. ‘Does this affect Angel and Heart?’ she asked, using their codenames. Her green eyes were full of fear as she whispered the words.

Tom sighed as if taking pity on her. He had met Hannah the previous year when she and Lizzie fled Berlin, and he organised their escape route home. He knew they were close. ‘I can’t say much. Honestly, I don’t know much, but it might. The police are coming down hard on the Maquis in Languedoc, and it’s been radio silence for a while now.’

‘I need to send a message to London,’ Lizzie said.

‘No problem. I’ll leave what you need out for you on my desk and will return later to secure it,’ Tom said.

Lizzie thanked him and moved across to his desk. As far as she knew, Jack was still at Bletchley, but she must get word to him. The strange intercept might just be from crossed diplomatic channels, but something told her it was more than that. One message could easily be a mistake, but two might be a pattern. And it was the precision of the messages that screamed out to her. She must send a warning to Baker Street in case the entire system had been compromised. Now she checked her watch and saw it was approaching one of her arranged schedule times, so she tuned the wireless transmitter to the agreed frequency. Tom had signalled to her to lock the door behind him, which she had done, so there was no danger of being interrupted. He had explained to her soon after her arrival that with such an eclectic mix of staff in the building, it was safest to always lock the door of the cipher room. Now she tapped out her encoded Morse message using her SOE poem code:

Raven. Diplomatic traffic anomaly pattern showing German movements. Swiss source. Await instructions. Missing London. Seagrove.

Lizzie signed off with just those three words. How she longed to say more, but it was against protocol. She glanced at her watch again. The transmission must be short, as the Germans were becoming more competent at triangulating signals. There was nothing unusual about Foreign Office channel traffic, and the various authorities watching Bern would expect it from the Legation, but operating the SOE channel violated the country’s neutrality terms and could be intercepted by Swiss counterintelligence, which would only spell trouble.

Tom reappeared, and she gave him the nod that she had finished.

‘Oh, I forgot to ask. Did you receive your invitation to the Annual Diplomatic Winter Ball? he asked.

Lizzie shook her head. ‘That sounds interesting, but no, I didn’t. Are you going?’

Tom’s eyes sparkled, and she saw that he’d disengaged from whatever had troubled him earlier. ‘I most certainly am. And so are you. Don’t worry, I’ll chase your invitation. Pemberton has probably forgotten to pass it to you. It seems he hasn’t the best of memories when it concerns keeping his staff informed.’

Lizzie walked back to her apartment with a sense of dread gnawing at her chest. Had Hannah and Lev been arrested? Had Lev been caught up in the police sweeps? She prepared a light supper of tea and toast and tried to distract herself from her fear of an ominous fate for The Lavender Network. Her thoughts turned to the Winter Ball. That sounded like the perfect opportunity to reconnect with Ernst Brunner.

Might this be her chance to move things along with the banker? After several failed attempts at engineering a meeting alone at his bank with Pemberton’s blessing, she realised she would need to circumnavigate her boss completely, as he had his own way of doing things which frequently didn’t involve her.

CHAPTER 19

Jack was back at his desk in the hut by eight the following morning. He’d struggled to sleep properly for the first time since he arrived, and his imagination ran wild all night, and he couldn’t settle. Eventually, he rose and pulled back the blinds just as first light edged across the fields. Frost glistened on the hedgerows, and he thought of Lizzie in Bern, surrounded by snow-capped mountains.

He turned from the window and dressed quickly. The embers of the fire had sputtered and died during the darkest hours of the night, and the air was bitter in the room, despite the pale sun in the mottled pink sky. He still found the quiet of the countryside disconcerting after living in central London, but he was growing accustomed to the silence and imagined it would be a shock when he returned to the hustle and bustle of Baker Street.

Fletcher entered the hut a few minutes after him, smart in her Wren’s uniform and clutching a pile of papers in one hand. ‘Sir, something marked for your eyes only arrived overnight.’ She knew better than to ask questions and passed the sealed envelope to him before moving to her desk.

His heart pounded as he opened the envelope and removed the paper, desperately hoping it was from Lizzie. It was silly to worry about her like he did, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that things might not be as they seemed. Things were never as they seemed, he reminded himself, so he was always in a state of hyper-vigilance, but Lizzie was at the Legation and should be perfectly safe. The other day a message arrived for him from Baker Street, but it had been from Val and the disappointment he had felt was crushing.

Jack’s fingers touched the flimsy form bearing the short, typed message, and he pictured the poem code he and Lizzie used, which he had committed to memory. Then he worked through the transposition cipher, letter by letter until the text morphed into words. Within a few minutes he had decoded the message, and it lay before him on a fresh paper on his desk. Jack glanced around out of habit, but Fletcher had already left her desk, and the other workers were engrossed in their own documents.

His eyes circled back to the sign-off, his heart still thumping.

Missing London. Seagrove.

Lizzie was safe, but she was missing him as much as he missed her. The sign-off was one they had shared when their relationship was secret. The irony was that they were openly engaged now, but it made no tangible difference when she was in the field. Their messages still had to be coded, and war still separated them.

Jack ran one hand through his dark, floppy hair as he studied the message. He squinted and lit a cigarette, still holding the transcription and reading it carefully a second time. It was his only tangible connection to Lizzie, and he prolonged it as long as he could.

The anomaly she flagged was strange. Was it tied to the unusual intercept he had noticed about the Eastern Front, or was it merely a coincidence? They both spent a lot of their time studying intercepts and intelligence reports at Baker Street, so it was unusual for either of them to be in a different position within the Allied coding system. Jack scanned the decoded message one last time before lighting the corner of the paper with a match and watching as it burnt bright orange and then crumbled to ashes. He repeated the process with the signals’ form and after checking nothing legible remained in the ashtray, he exited the hut into the stiff wind that whipped around him as he crossed the grounds towards the mansion.

It was like going back in time when Jack stepped into the entrance hall of the Victorian country house. It still held echoes of grandeur, but the faded décor seemed secondary to the urgent purpose of the Government Code and Cipher School. Whispers from elegant balls and dinner parties lingered, and the oak-panelled walls and painted ceilings evoked images of a bygone world. A world when luxury and comfort were the order of the day, and Britain wasn’t fighting for her very breath.