Eleanor walked into the radio room. The air was thick with the smell of cigarette smoke and burned coffee. A half-dozen or so operators, all women younger than herself, clacked out messages or hunched over papers, decoding electric signals from the field, which were received at the transmission station at Grendon Underwood, then sent to Norgeby House by teleprinter. Fairy godmothers, the women at London headquarters were called by agents in the field. Each assigned to a specific agent or three or five, they waited loyally for the broadcast like a dog waiting for its master to come home.
Eleanor studied the blackboard that covered the front wall of the room, scanning the names chalked on it for her girls. The radio transmissions were scheduled for twice weekly at regular intervals, exchanges where London could send information about drops of personnel or equipment and receive correspondence from the field. They might come more often, if there was an urgent matter, or less if it was not safe for an operator to transmit. Ruth, whom they’d poached from the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, was on the schedule, as was Hannah, who had lost a child in the Blitz.
Marie’s name was up on the blackboard, too, signaling that a transmission was expected this evening. It had been a week since Marie had dropped blind into that field north of Paris. There had been an initial communication from another W/T in a neighboring circuit, saying that Marie landed. Marie had missed her first scheduled broadcast three days earlier. A few hours’ delay in a transmission was not uncommon. The Germans might have isolated her signal and blocked it. But three days might mean something more.
Eleanor felt her panic rise, then pressed it down neatly again into faint concern. Early on, she had learned not to get attached to the girls. Eleanor knew each of them personally, their background and history, their strengths and weaknesses. She remembered the first time she deployed one of the girls, a young Scottish girl called Angie who was to be dropped into Alsace-Lorraine. In that moment everything they had planned and prepared for was actually being set in motion, all of her plans and work come to fruition. The reality hit Eleanor then: the girl would no longer be under her control. Eleanor grew nervous, almost panicked and ready to call it all off. Something washed over her, a protectiveness. A maternal instinct, she might have called it, if she had any idea what that felt like. It had taken everything she had to go through with sending the girl.
The exercise of deploying the girls hadn’t gotten any easier with time. She felt a sense of ownership, was vested in their well-being. She also knew the statistics, though, the very great odds that some would not survive. The practical reality was that some of them might not be coming back. Sentimentality would only cloud her judgment.
“Ma’am?” said one of the girls, an earnest, ginger-haired operator called Jane. Eleanor looked up from the pouch. “There’s a transmission. From Marie.” Eleanor leaped to her feet and sprinted to Jane’s station. There was Marie’s code name, Angel, at the bottom of the page. Eleanor had never liked it for the way that it bespoke death. She had meant to change it, but things had gotten busy and there hadn’t been time.
“You have the worked-out key?” Jane nodded, then handed Eleanor the slip of paper containing the cipher that Marie would have used to code the message in the field.
As she began to decode the message, Eleanor wondered if it might be garbled, as the girls’ transmissions so often were, owing to weather interfering with the radio signals or circumstances forcing the W/Ts to rush. But the message was neat and clean. “In the Cardinal’s nest. Eggs safe.” Eleanor ran her fingers over the page, hearing Marie’s voice in the text typed across the page. “The Cardinal” was a reference to Vesper, and “eggs” meant her radio had arrived intact.
The text was unremarkable and smooth, indistinct. It might have been written by anyone. Marie’s heaviness on the first letter, the hallmark of her fist print, was lighter than usual.
Eleanor scanned the message for Marie’s security checks, the mistakes she had been trained to include to verify her identity. She knew Marie’s bluff check was to substitute a p for the thirty-fifth letter, but the message wasn’t long enough for that. Nor did it contain a c where she should have substituted for a k, her true check. Eleanor cursed the code instructor who, in trying to create unique checks that would not be easily detected, had gotten too sophisticated and failed to give Marie checks that would have been usable in every transmission.
Eleanor studied the paper once more. Something felt off. She turned to Jane. “What do you think?”
Jane read the message through horn-rimmed glasses once, then again. “I’m not certain,” she said slowly. But Eleanor could tell from Jane’s face that she was worried, too.
“Is it her?” Eleanor pressed. She pictured Marie that night at Tangmere. Marie had seemed nervous, as if having doubts, Eleanor could see. But they all had doubts right before going. Good God, how could they not?
“I think so,” Jane said, her voice more hopeful than definite. “The message is so brief. Maybe she was just rushed.”
“Maybe,” Eleanor repeated without conviction. Other than the fist print being a bit light, there was nothing else to support her uneasiness. But she felt it nevertheless.
“What do you want to do?” Jane asked, returning to her own desk. They had at best a few minutes to transmit back to Marie. Eleanor needed Jane to send a message to Marie about the arms drop that was scheduled for the following Tuesday so that the Vesper circuit could organize a reception committee, locals who would receive the munitions and store them for the partisans. But if Marie had been somehow compromised, the information would fall into the wrong hands.
I need to send her a personal message, Eleanor thought. Something that only Marie would know. She hesitated. Airtime was scarce and precious and it was risky to keep an operator transmitting any longer than absolutely necessary. But she needed to confirm with Marie that it was really her—and nothing was amiss. “Tell her I’m holding the butterfly.” It was a veiled reference to Marie’s locket necklace, the one that she had confiscated the night Marie left. Though she wasn’t quite sure, she sensed the necklace had meant a great deal to Marie. Something to do with her daughter, perhaps. Surely the message would prompt a personal response.
Eleanor held her breath as Jane coded and sent the message. Two minutes passed, then three. She imagined Marie receiving it, willed the girl to say something to reassure them it was her. The message came: “Thank you for the information.” No recognition of the personal reference, nothing to confirm that it was really Marie. Eleanor’s heart sank.
But the fist print was familiar now, heavy on the first word now like Marie’s. “It looks like her this time, doesn’t it?” Jane said, seeking reassurance.
“Yes,” she replied. Marie had been told time and again in training not to talk about herself or her background, or to broadcast personal information. Perhaps in replying generically to Eleanor’s message, she was just following orders.