The Spy with 29 Names by Jason Webster

Author:Jason Webster
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-04-03T07:00:00+00:00

22

England, Northern France and Southern Germany, 5 June 1944

MAVIS RARELY READ the full texts of the messages that she deciphered at Bletchley Park. A sentence, or half-sentence – that was enough to break into the coded text and then the rest would be passed on to the analysts. And she did not ask questions: it was not how things were done. But she saw enough to get some idea of what was going on – aspects of the war that ordinary civilians and even the majority of fighting men were unaware of.

It was the first week in June and the weather had been nice over the weekend, although storms were predicted for the coming days. She was on a train, heading to London from the station that sat at the bottom of the hill from Bletchley Park.

Dilly Knox, her beloved mentor, had died a year before, shortly after Mavis had married. Keith Batey was one of the code-breakers in Hut Six working on the German naval Enigma. She and Keith had tried to hide their relationship from the others at Bletchley for as long as possible, until some sharp-eyed colleague noticed that, mysteriously, the two always managed to coincide for mealtimes in the canteen. Dilly had joked that mathematicians were not much fun, but Mavis had gone ahead with the wedding anyway. She was Mavis Batey now, sharing a passion for crosswords and puzzles with her husband.

There were plenty of people in the carriage that Monday, gazing out at the budding green countryside through the grimy windows: mothers, businessmen in suits, servicemen and women in uniforms of many shades, from many parts of the globe. The war was now in its fifth year and the world had changed – even here, rolling over the quiet fields. The Luftwaffe was not dropping quite so many bombs over English cities as it once had, but there were rumours of a new terrifying Nazi weapon to come. She worried about her parents; their house to the south-east of London was in the direct firing line of whatever it might eventually turn out to be.

The Germans were no longer triumphant as they had been, however. In North Africa, on the Eastern Front, and now in Italy, they were slowly being pushed back.

But there was more than enough fight left in Hitler’s forces. The call from Moscow for a Second Front – a real second front; what was happening in the Mediterranean did not count – was finally being heard. Britain was awash with US soldiers, shipped over the Atlantic to help fight the Nazis. A new attack was imminent, almost certainly in France. What no one except a very, very few could say, however, was where in France the attack would come, or more importantly, when. Certainly nothing was being given away on the radio or in the newspapers. But judging by the numbers of GIs around, and the endless manoeuvres and exercises, even the least observant would conclude that it could not be too far off.

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