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After a moment, he said, “How the hell did you know that?”
“Because I was a gawky thirteen-year-old with a crush on you. I used to hang around the library after school every day watching you watch Miss Schenck.”
“Jesus H. Christ!”
“But then I grew up. And, apparently, you haven’t. I told you, I saw the way you were looking at Frau von Wachtstein, and the way she was looking at you.”
“How was she looking at me?”
“As if she was terrified you were going to embarrass her by saying or doing something stupid. Or that people would see that suckling-calf look on your stupid face and wonder what she’d done to encourage you.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about—”
He stopped mid-sentence.
Frade had come back into the wardrobe.
“What have I interrupted here?” he asked.
“Nothing,” they both said, on top of each other.
“Yeah. Like hell!”
He let that sink in a moment, and then went on: “The maps and the list of rendezvous points are here. Let’s go, Jimmy.”
[SEVEN]
“Lieutenant, the floor—or at least the table—is yours,” Frade said. “This had better not be a waste of everybody’s time.”
Sitting around the table were General Martín, Cletus Marcus Howell, Clete, Dorotea, von Wachtstein, von Dattenberg, Major Habanzo, and Boltitz.
Clete’s pissed about something, Jimmy thought.
God knows what, but what I have to do is kiss his ass, not antagonize him.
“Sir,” Jimmy said politely, “I hope this won’t be a waste of anybody’s time.”
“Okay then, hotshot,” Frade said. “Explain how you’ve broken the Kriegsmarine Code.”
“Sir, I already have part of it. All I have to do is fill in the blanks.”
“Start from scratch. I’m a little slow, and I don’t think I’m the only one who is.”
“From scratch, sir?”
“From scratch, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir. Positions are given in east and west longitude, which means either east or west of Greenwich, England. They are also given in north and south longitude, which means north or south of the equator. They’re written like this.”
He held up a page from the list of rendezvous points that had been removed from the U-405 safe so that everybody around the table could see it. It was a simple document.
Rubber-stamped in red at the top and bottom of the page was GEHEIMST (“Top Secret”). The page had columns of blocks, and in the blocks were numbers giving a position—for example, S54.62785, W68.42647. There were twenty such blocks on the page.
“Sir, there are five pages like this, a total of one hundred position blocks, one of which is the intended landfall of U-234,” Cronley said.
“Hidden by a code which we don’t have,” Frade said.
“Let him finish, Cletus!” General Martín ordered.
