She watched as Frankie looked from her to Mark, then back again, braced for what he was going to say. She could not tell from his expression if he was angry or amused.
“I wasn’t expecting you back so soon,” she offered.
“Yeah, well, remember that woman you asked me to check on?” Frankie looked uneasily at Mark, as if unsure he should speak in front of him.
“It’s okay. Mark knows everything.”
“I was over at immigration earlier, checking on some things for Sammy’s adoption papers. I saw my buddy at customs. He found her entry file.”
“Eleanor’s?”
“There wasn’t much to it. She came to America a day or two before she died, arrived by plane.”
Grace nodded, her heart sinking again. She knew that much from the passport she’d seen at the consulate. What had she expected, really? A customs form could hardly tell what had gone on inside Eleanor’s mind, what she was doing in New York and whether it related to her betrayal of the girls. “Thank you,” she said to Frankie, still grateful for his efforts to help her.
“The only other thing in the file was this.” He pulled a small tablet from his jacket and opened it, pointing at the notation he had made. “This was the address she listed as her destination in America.” Grace scanned the entry. Her spine began to tingle. An apartment in Brooklyn. And below it, in Frankie’s chicken-scratch writing, the entry from the log: “Person(s) receiving.” As she read the name he’d scribbled below it, her blood ran cold.
“I have to go,” Grace said, reaching for her bag. “Thank you!” She kissed Frankie so hard on the cheek that he fell back in his chair.
“Do you want me to come with you?” Mark called after her.
But Grace was already out the door. There were some things a woman had to do alone.
Chapter Thirty
Eleanor
London, 1946
“Eleanor.” The Director looked up from his desk. It had been four days since she’d left Zurich. She stood unannounced in the door to his office now, paper in hand. “I wasn’t expecting you back so soon. How was your trip to France?”
“In France, I found nothing.”
He leaned back in his chair and reached for his pipe. “Well, that’s too bad. I’m grateful to you for trying, but we always knew it might be a wild goose chase with nothing to come of it after so much time. Hopefully it has at least put some of your questions to rest.”
“I didn’t say nothing came of it,” she interjected. “I said I found nothing in France. But then I had the opportunity to go to Germany and interview Hans Kriegler.”
“Germany.” The Director paused, unlit pipe dangling in midair. “Kriegler’s being tried at Nuremberg, isn’t he? How did you ever manage that?”
“I managed. I was able to speak with him at Dachau, where he was being held, before he was transported. He led me to this.” She held out the document from the vault. “You knew that the Germans had the radio set. And yet you kept broadcasting classified information.”
He took the paper from her. “Eleanor, that’s preposterous!” he blustered, a beat too quickly before reading it. “I’ve never seen this document before in my life.”
She held out her hand. But it wasn’t the return of the paper she was seeking. “The transmission log. Let me see it. And don’t tell me it was lost in the fire,” she added, before he could respond. “I know you kept a copy of your own.” The Director regarded her unflinchingly. Then his expression changed to one of resignation. He turned to the file cabinet behind him, dialed the combination of the safe lock and twisted the handle. The drawer popped open and he handed the thick file to her.
Eleanor thumbed through the pages and pages of transmissions between London and F Section, organized by date. Then she came to it, a copy of the transmission she’d gotten from Kriegler. London had received it after all. It was identical to the paper Kriegler had given her, except for the received stamp—and the second sheet of paper stapled behind it. “Message not authenticated,” the second sheet said, a warning flag from the operator who had received the message. And then a separate notion: “Continue transmissions.” Someone had issued a directive to keep transmitting despite the warning that the message was a fraud. And though she had never seen it in her life, the memorandum had been printed on Eleanor’s own letterhead.
“You kept this from me.”
“I didn’t include you,” he corrected. As if that made a difference. She had kept transmitting, unaware that the concerns she had raised over and over to the Director had in fact been substantiated to SOE by the Germans themselves. But her superiors, the Director and God knew who else, had kept the information from her so that they could keep transmitting. And it had gotten the girls arrested, cost them their lives. She had long suspected something was wrong, that the broadcasts were not authentic. But the notion that her own agency would willingly sacrifice its own people was staggering.
“You knew that if I saw this, I would stop the transmissions altogether. You should have stopped the transmissions. You were broadcasting to the Germans, sensitive information that put all of our agents at risk.”
He stood up. “I had no choice. I was acting on orders.” How many times had she read that in the reports of captured German war criminals, who said they were powerless, that they had no choice but to commit the atrocities by their own hands? Then the Director sat up straighter. “But even if that were not the case, I still would have done it. When we realized that the Germans had the radio, it was an opportunity to feed them information about operations—false information that would redirect their defenses elsewhere ahead of D-Day. And it worked—surely if the Germans hadn’t thought we were amassing forces elsewhere, Allied casualties would have been much worse. If that blasted radio operator hadn’t flagged the message that was supposed to be from Tompkins, it would have kept working. It worked,” he repeated, as if to convince himself.
“Not for my girls,” Eleanor replied sharply. “Not for the twelve who never came home, or for the other agents like Julian who were killed.” The information London had fed to the Germans over the radio had revealed their locations and activities, led directly to their capture.
“Sometimes a few must be sacrificed for the greater good,” he said coldly.
Eleanor was dumbfounded. She had worked for the Director; supported him. The strategic way he approached the difficult work they’d had to do, deploying agents like chess pieces on a board, was one of the things she respected most about him. She had never imagined him to be like this, though: cold, cynical. “This is outrageous. I’m going to Whitehall.”