Margot sat on the bottom step, staring at the doors through which Drake always entered. The admiral was pacing. Back and forth, back and forth across the tiled floor. Fifteen steps one direction, a one-eighty, fifteen the other, repeat. Perhaps because he had far more concerns than she did. The Erri Barro had met with more delays. The vice admiral, under orders by Jellicoe, would be setting up floodlights tonight to try to catch U-boats slipping by and force them down, away from the lights and into the anti-sub nets. New reports had come in from South America of cereal that they suspected was tainted with anthrax.

Anthrax. Margot didn’t pace. She sat. Too still, Maman would have said. Not a muscle moving that wasn’t required to keep her breathing, so that her mind could tick through it all. Line it up into neat columns and add the numbers.

She had thought too highly of herself. Of her work here. She had thought herself important enough to try to be stopped. She had thought it her fault that her mother had died. Because it had been her fault they’d been so hunted in Belgium.

But it hadn’t been about her. Not this time. If the man who’d stolen Williams’s name had targeted her, it wasn’t because of her actual abilities—he clearly didn’t know her or he wouldn’t have tried to mug her in an alleyway. She’d just been one of many possible targets for him—that was all that made sense. And even if he had known her real position here . . . Margot was just one of many cryptographers. Part of a machine that would keep on ticking just fine without her. Stopping her wasn’t a priority anymore. Maman had simply . . . died. Because everyone did. It hadn’t seemed right that she’d died now—but asking why now would be the wrong question.

The better one was, when would it have been better? There would never have been a right time for her to lose her mother. There would never have been a reason that wouldn’t have struck her as wrong. A heart attack—too much like her father. A stroke—too much like her grandmother. Involved in some accident—too much a coincidence when there were so many enemies in the world.

She’d heard it said so often that there were no coincidences, and she must have begun to believe it. But there were. Of course there were. The law of large numbers—the certainty that everything would happen, sooner or later, given enough instances. Probability insisted on it. Two spouses could and would die of the same ailment, years and miles apart. Random fact.