She looked at him and waited.
"We spoke in confidence," he said. "You must respect that much. We spoke in strict confidence!"
"I'll give you that much, Peter," she answered. "But no more. I cherish you as a family friend. But don't come to me with any of your bloody cloak-and-dagger stuff ever again. It's a dishonorable, dirty activity. I don't like it. I refuse to take part in it."
She turned away.
"Laura…?" he called as she left. "Good luck to you, Laura. I mean it. Good luck to you."
But she never looked back. She felt Peter Whiteside's eyes boring into her for several hundred yards as she hiked. Only once did she look over her shoulder and that was from a considerable distance. Peter was just a distant figure in black by then. Very small, he was, and very undistinguished and unimportant from that perspective. She was angry with herself for ever allowing him to get her so upset. What kind of world was it, after all, where grown men played such games?
*
She took the bus from High Street. When she arrived home there were raindrops again. She pushed through the iron gate before her father's home and, once indoors, saw the day's post waiting for her.
The letter from Stephen was on top. She set down her book and opened it. She began to read as she walked upstairs, thinking her father might be napping.
At the top of the stairs she stopped. She reread, as if Stephen's handwriting made no sense. But it did make sense. And her old Stephen had emerged from his year-and-a-half rumination.
…There is nothing in the world more precious than you, Laura… my own fault that you left me… more than anything else, I pray for your safe and early return… darling, Laura…
The phrases leaped out at her. It was as if a prayer had been answered. Laura yelled with joy. She ran from room to room looking for her father.
He was not in his bedroom, nor the sitting room. Her concern grew as she rushed downstairs, the letter still in her hand, and moved to his study where he often fell asleep on the couch. She still did not see him. She ran to the music room, the conservatory, and the library.
"Papa?… Papa!" No answer. She returned to the front door, where he often left a note if he had been called away suddenly. No note. And his raincoat was still on its hanger in the closet.
Frantic, she turned and looked in the kitchen in the rear of the main floor.
Then she saw her father. She stared in horror through the kitchen window and saw her father on the lawn behind the house. He was slumped in a frightful angle against one of his prized pear trees. From the distance, his face seemed ashen and lifeless, his arms at his side like those of a marionette with severed strings.
Then Laura was moving faster than she had ever moved in her life, She was down the back stairs to the pantry, out the back door, and across twenty yards of garden.
"No! No!" she shrieked, tears flowing down her cheeks now, mingling with the raindrops that failed to rouse her father.
Nigel Worthington did not move.
She slid to her knees beside him, embraced him, and yelled again, shaking him as if to raise him from the dead, and for half of a tormented moment, she thought that was exactly what she had done.
Dr. Worthington's eyes flickered dumbly, failed to focus, wandered, then zeroed in on his daughter.
"Papa!" she cried, half a gasp, half a plea.
"What the…?" he asked. He raised his arm and put it around Laura's shoulder.
"Can't a man take a nap without scaring his daughter half to death?" he asked.
She was crying so hard she was laughing now, or maybe it was the other way. "No!" she said. "Not under a tree in the rain!"
He looked around. He heard the rustle of raindrops on his fruit trees.
"It doesn't rain under trees," he protested mildly. "It only rains on trees." He paused, rallied, wakened some more, and added, "What's Stephen got to say?" he asked. "The good-for-nothing parson wrote to you, did he?"
“He loves me, Papa!" she said. "He still loves me! I'm booking passage. I'm going home!"
Nigel Worthington hugged his daughter as hard as he could. He laughed with her in a way in which he had once laughed with her mother. Then he reminded her of something that he had always believed; that sometimes things work out on their own.
Laura laughed with him, grinned, and nodded, now comfortable in the fact that, like Eleanor of Aquitaine, two men loved her and there were no silly rumors about the devil's tale beneath her skirts.
Or none, at least, that she had heard. She booked passage on a ship back to New York the next morning. On a whim, she choose the French Line over Cunard.
NINETEEN
On Monday, August 28, the German ambassadors to Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg announced that the Third Reich would respect the sovereignty and neutrality of those countries. On Wednesday, Hitler received from Britain a warning not to attack Poland, and on Thursday, Hitler published the terms of a peace plan which he claimed Poland had rejected. In reality, the terms had never been presented.
On the same evening, Siegfried transmitted triumphantly at eleven o'clock. He no longer used the German language. Instead, he switched to the German naval code, a complex five-digit cipher system drawing upon a code book given him that morning by Duquaine. The book contained several thousand numerical five-digit code groups, each one representing a different word, letter, or phrase.
The complete code book would have been of extreme interest to either the F.B.I. or M.I. 6-they had been able to capture only a partial one. The entire code book might have revealed, for example, that the five-digit group for ship was 54734. But the book would not reveal the key to the German High Command's system of super-encipherment. This was the additive, a second five-digit group known only to the particular spy and his spymaster. The additive might be 12121. With the additive, in such an enciphered message the word ship would appear as 54734 plus 12121, or 66855. Since each spy might use a different additive, the result was a virtual infinity of codes.
Siegfried prepared his message in advance. His hand was diligent upon the telegraph key. He reminded Hamburg that some handsome flowers had been planted aboard the Adriana. Then he added that the Adriana had pulled out of port the preceding evening. She was unescorted and would develop severe engine problems as soon as she reached the continental shelf. The German Navy could then pursue the matter.
Hamburg asked Siegfried if he wanted a new assignment. The spy answered that he already had given himself a grand one and added-to a long silence from the other end-that this would be his final assignment.
Hamburg replied with a clarification request. Siegfried shot back: CLARIFICATION IN DUE COURSE. YOUR SIGNAL AS HOPELESS AS YOU ARE. END. CQDXVW-2
Then Siegfried shut down, his total transmission time being ninety-seven seconds. He congratulated himself. Short and to the point. The way it should be done. Siegfried loathed unnecessary risks.
"Crap!" an irate Bluebird said to another. "He's gone."
The blips had disappeared so quickly that the Bluebirds had fumbled the opportunity. The first sixty-two seconds of Siegfried's transmission had been lost while a Bluebird groped for the wire recorder. The rest had been recorded. Wheeler and Cochrane were telephoned at their homes.
"We picked up the man who discusses flowers in German," a Bluebird told Cochrane over the telephone. "Or, what I mean is, sir, that we picked up his signal. Just his signal, sir."
Cochrane started to Bureau headquarters, as did Wheeler. They met on the marble steps and charged into Deciphering and Cryptology to find Hope See Ming and Lanny Slotkin furiously working cipher combinations.
"No good!" said Lanny, a stall away from Mrs. Ming. “No good at all!”