She spoke practically in a whisper. I could feel her close beside me, a warm bundle of rustling inky silk in the inky dark.

“I told you Felix Baer doesn’t trust me. I know you haven’t been able to do anything about it—how could you, really? But I can’t just come clean with Cromwell, either. I also have to answer to my department in Intelligence, and the German navigator—Dietrich Althammer—told me the most extraordinary thing today. He accused Cromwell of using a coding machine that Baer brought here in November. He says Baer had no authorization to give it to Cromwell, and Althammer and Moritz want to convince Cromwell to turn it over to the correct authorities. My department. Except…”

She paused. I didn’t say anything.

“Except Cromwell hasn’t got it. Cromwell doesn’t know anything about it. Yet the Germans think someone’s using it.”

I kept my lips pressed together.

“The thing is, my department has been expecting this particular machine. The German navy and Luftwaffe have used these things since the beginning of the war, since before the war, to generate code for the messages they send each other about their attack plans. Intelligence has an entire operation trying to crack the codes these machines generate, and they can’t do it. Coastal Defense hears German wireless communications flying about all the time, but no one can decode any of it. We already know how their machines work. But if we could capture one and get the settings to go along with it, we’d have a chance of cracking their code. Not just in the North Sea. All over the Atlantic. One machine, and a few pages of paper.

“And Odysseus was supposed to bring us both,” she finished. “But the paperwork was destroyed when the airfield here was bombed, and the machine never turned up.”

The paperwork was destroyed when Windyedge was bombed.

“Oh crumbs,” I breathed. “I didn’t know—none of us knew.”

“Didn’t know what?” Miss Lind asked carefully.

“That it was the only one!”

None of us realized how special it was. Not really.

“Does that mean—” She caught her breath.

“Cromwell doesn’t have it,” she said. “You have it. You have it!”

Her excited voice didn’t get louder—it dwindled to a sharp, hissed whisper. “Who’s ‘us,’ anyway?”

“Jamie and Ellen. And Jane.” I rushed to get the confession over with. “Jamie picks up the code and Ellen drops it off here. I decode it with the settings Felix Baer left. Jane translates the German. Then we know where the U-boats will be.”

“Settings!” She laughed wildly. “You have the settings!”

“We copied the leaflets,” I whispered. “I made copies before Jamie turned them in.”

“Proper little secret society!” she gasped. “My God! Do you know how many scores of codebreakers are frantically trying to crack this technology?”

“No,” I answered, still whispering. “How could we?”