He finished tying his shoe and stood up. Several men were standing around smoking and apparently waiting for someone. I need to buy some cigarettes, he thought. No, a pipe. He could spend a long time filling it, trying to light it, patting his pockets for matches. For now, he glanced impatiently at his watch and scanned the people coming out. He didn’t see Phipps, though there were several sandy-haired, spectacled, tweed-clad men, and he caught a glimpse of two more inside the grounds.

Let’s hope I don’t have to sneak inside to find him, Mike thought, though if he did, at least it wouldn’t be hard. There was a fence but no barbed wire, and the gate’s bar wasn’t even lowered. It didn’t look at all like a military installation, let alone the site of the most closely guarded secret of the war. It looked like Balliol in midterm. The young women walking between the buildings, file folders clasped to their breasts, could be students; the men playing a game on the lawn could be the cricket team.

He could imagine what the regimented, spit-and-polish Germans would make of this place and its inhabitants. Maybe that was why they’d never figured out that the British had cracked the Enigma code. It wouldn’t have occurred to them that these giggling young women and disheveled daydreamers could be a threat. The Nazis would have had nothing but contempt for Dilly’s girls and the stammering Turing.

Which was why they’d been defeated. They shouldn’t have underestimated them. And he’d better not underestimate them either. For all he knew, the scruffy professor smoking over by the gate or the blonde dabbing powder on her nose worked for British Intelligence and would shortly knock on his landlady’s door to “ask him a few questions.” In which case he’d better get out of here before he attracted their attention.

He waited till a staff car pulled up to the gate and the guard leaned in the window to talk to the driver and then casually joined the stream of people walking back to town. Once there, he bought a pipe, tobacco, and a newspaper, went to the lobby of the Milton, looked around to make sure Wilson or Menzies wasn’t there, and sat down in a chair by the window to wait for the four o’clock shift change and look for Gerald.

When he didn’t see him, he followed two men who looked like cryptanalysts to a pub, ordered a pint of ale, and spent the evening nursing it and observing everyone who came in.

He did the same thing at a different pub over the next few nights. The first night he pretended to be reading a newspaper, but it was awkward seeing over it, so the next night he folded it open to the crossword and pretended to be working it, like he had in the hospital sunroom at Orpington. That way he could stare thoughtfully into space—as if trying to think of an answer—while scanning the room, though he wasn’t sure it was necessary. No one paid any attention to him. The men either talked in heads-bent-together groups, scribbled busily, or sat with their heads in a book—Haas’s Atomic Theory, Broglie’s Matter and Light, and, in one instance, an Agatha Christie. He’d have to tell Eileen.