“Tensing recruited you?” Jonathan was asking, as excited as when he’d been fourteen, and Ernest was suddenly reminded of Colin Templer. “You’re a spy?”

“Nothing so glamorous, I’m afraid,” Ernest said. “When I’m not delivering parcels I spend most of my time at a desk. And speaking of parcels, I’d better deliver the one I brought and get going.”

He reached for his duffel bag, but the Commander stopped him. “You can’t go yet, not without telling us what all’s happened to you since we saw you last.”

I faked amnesia, nearly killed Alan Turing, got knocked unconscious by a collapsing wall, faked my own death, and met the Queen.

“It’s a long story,” he said.

“We got plenty of time.” The Commander pulled out a chair for him. “Sit down. You can’t go out in that gale. You want some coffee? Some stew?”

He remembered the Commander’s stew. “Coffee, thanks.” He sat down. There were things he needed to find out, too.

The Commander sloshed over to the coffeepot. “Jonathan, see if you can find that brandy we were saving for the end of the war,” he said. He fished a mug out of the litter of opened cans and charts on the table, poured coffee into it, and handed it to Ernest.

The mug didn’t look like it had been washed since the last time he’d been on the Lady Jane. Ernest sipped cautiously at it. I should have had the stew, he thought.

“Here it is,” Jonathan said, bringing the brandy over.

“Are you sure you want to open that?” Ernest asked. “Won’t it be bad luck to drink it before the war’s over?”

“It’s as good as won already,” the Commander said, “or it will be a month from now, isn’t that right, Kansas?”

And here was the perfect place for his propaganda, the perfect chance to say the invasion couldn’t happen till July twentieth at the earliest and mention FUSAG and Patton and Calais. Better than perfect. If they got captured by the Germans and were interrogated, they could help corroborate Intelligence’s deception efforts.

But they’d saved his life as much as he’d saved theirs. He owed them the truth, and since he couldn’t tell them who he really was, he could at least tell the truth about this. “That’s right,” he said. “Only we need the Germans to think it’s mid-July.”

The Commander nodded. “So Hitler won’t bring his tanks up. And you need him to think it’s Calais for the same reason.” And at Ernest’s look of surprise, “The last two weeks we’ve been minesweeping in Calais harbor to convince them that’s where the invasion’s coming. You think it’ll fool them, Kansas?”

“If it doesn’t, we won’t win this war.”

“Then we’d better see to it that it does. Hold out your mug.” He added a dollop of brandy to Ernest’s coffee and to Jonathan’s and then poured himself a mugful and sat down. “Now, then,” he said. “Tell us what you’ve been up to.”