Mr. Churchill's Secretary (9 page)

For “Gimme Prof!” Maggie was expected to know he meant Lord Cherwell, his science adviser. One night, in a vile humor, he bellowed, “Gimme Pug!” She thought he was going to take off her head when she brought in one of the small, wriggling pug dogs who freely roamed the halls of No. 10, along with Nelson, the cat, and a poodle named Rufus. No, no, no! She was a fool, she was an idiot, and he stamped his feet in frustration. No, by “Pug” he’d meant General Ismay, the link between
Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff Committee, whose face did have certain puggish qualities.

David watched in amusement as Maggie learned her way around No. 10, looking more like a decapitated fowl than a brilliant math scholar. While nothing could quite extinguish her looks, often her red hair would come free from her tortoiseshell clip, creating a halo of fuzzy curls. On the days when she wore makeup, a smudge of mascara would inevitably land on her cheek or flecks of red lipstick migrate to her teeth.

An order from the Old Man to “Gimme moon!” nearly sent Maggie over the edge.

“Why, good evening, Magster,” David said in passing. Then, taking a closer look at her dark-shadowed eyes and slightly hysterical expression, “What’s the Old Man got you running after tonight?”

“He wants the
moon
!” she whispered, biting her lip and trying not to wail in frustration.

“Ah, the moon, you say? Well, that’s easy. I shall get you the moon, my dear Maggie—not to worry.” And with that, he turned on his heel and left.

Maggie sat down at her desk and tried to organize the mountains of papers, with little result.

David returned. “Here you are,” he said, handing her a sheet of paper. It was a schedule of the phases of the moon.

“The
moon
. Of course,” she said, knowing that the phases of the moon were crucial for planning nighttime raids. “Thanks, David. I mean it.”

Finally, late, late one evening after being roared at for more than ten minutes (and she watched the clock tick those minutes away as the Prime Minister shouted, stomped his feet, and kicked the wastebasket), Maggie had had enough.

Something in her face must have changed, for the P.M.
suddenly stopped. “What is it, girl?” he said, jabbing his cigar at her. “Cat got your tongue?”

Maggie was silent.

“Tell me!” the P.M. raged, kicking the wastebasket again, this time hard enough to knock it over. The sound reverberated through the room as papers spilled onto the carpet.

“Sir,” she said, slowly and calmly, “with all due respect, I’m not the enemy. If you plan on treating me like a Soldaten of the Wehrmacht, I’d like to request a transfer.” A pause. “Sir.”

The P.M. blinked. Once, twice.

Three times.

None of the women who typed for him had ever spoken to him like this. How dare she! This, this
—girl
.

But …

Perhaps this was what Clemmie had warned him about in her letter, lecturing him on the danger of being “disliked by your colleagues and subordinates because of your rough sarcastic and overbearing manner.”

His face softened. Perhaps he had been too hard on her. On the whole staff, for that matter.

“But I
need
Hope in my office,” he said, his tone now wheedling, like a little boy’s. “You can’t leave. I simply won’t allow it.”

Maggie understood the risk she had taken in standing up to him—and also that this was as close to an apology as she was ever going to get. “Yes, Prime Minister.”

“Keep Plodding On, Miss Hope. KPO,” the P.M. intoned, making a stabbing motion at the typewriter with his cigar, referring to his motto. “That’s what we do here—KPO.”

*  *  *

“Can’t I just address the letter?” Claire asked, sitting at Pierce’s long walnut desk in his Cadogan Square apartment’s study.

“No, the handwriting inside the letter has to match the outside,” Pierce replied. “Don’t forget that all mail’s opened and read now—we don’t want anything to tip off the government censors.”

Claire reread the words in front of her, then began copying, her handwriting decidedly feminine. “I don’t understand. It just seems like a regular letter to me—the weather is good, the food is terrible, hope you’re well.…”

“Ah, look carefully, my dear,” Pierce said.

Claire read and then shrugged her shoulders.

He rose to his feet and came around behind her. “What do you see if you read down the left-hand margin?”

Claire scanned her eyes down the left side of the page. “It’s in code!” she exclaimed.
“ ‘Reinforcements for the enemy expected,’ ”
she read slowly.

“Exactly,” he said, placing his hand on her shoulder. “And this innocuous letter, in your charming handwriting, will go to some of our dear friends in France and let them know what’s coming. They’ll pass word on to Berlin.”

“How did you get this information?” Claire asked, eyes wide, lips parted.

“Can’t reveal my sources,” said Pierce, stroking her hair. “Let’s just say I have it on good authority.”

David wanted Maggie to succeed at No. 10; after all, he was her friend, and also the one who got her the job. He felt a strange kinship with her. She was American, female, and a bit of a bluestocking. He was Jewish and slept with men—he knew he was tolerated because he
kept his love life a secret, his Jewishness to himself, and had charm, wit, and style to spare.

David had also studied mathematics at university and, like Maggie, was fascinated by numbers, logic, and game theory. He was intrigued by Maggie’s acceptance at M.I.T. for graduate work and asked endless questions. “So what about number theory?” he asked one late night in the office. “Do you know Alonzo Church’s work? What about Wittgenstein’s? Have you heard of Alan Turing? Brilliant fellow, from Cambridge. Wrote ‘Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals.’ ”

Maggie, John, and David were in Mr. Churchill’s study in the Annexe, a cozy, wood-paneled book-filled room that reeked of cigar smoke. The P.M. was preparing for another British foray into Norway, and much of the evening’s discussion was about guns. After the debacle of the first Norwegian invasion, when the Royal Marines were proved unprepared, it was determined they needed rubber sheaths to protect their gun muzzles from the cold. A pharmaceutical company had developed and delivered the prototype, a sample of which John handed to the P.M. He picked it up and looked at it, then looked at the packaging, and then the box.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Won’t do. Won’t do at all.” John and David looked at each other in dismay. They’d worked hard to make sure everything was in order.

“Sir, what won’t do?” John asked, his mouth tightening. “They’re long enough for the muzzles, ten and a half inches, just as we discussed.”

“Labels!” Mr. Churchill said, pounding his fist on the table.

“Labels?” David asked, looking confused.

“Yes,
labels
,” the P.M. insisted. “I want a label for every box, every carton, every packet, saying ‘British,
size medium.’ That will show the Nazis, if they ever recover any of them, who’s the master race!”

Maggie raised one eyebrow.
Does he really mean …?

The P.M. cleared his throat. “My apologies, Miss Hope.”

He does, he does indeed
. She shot a look at John and was pleased to see that he’d colored slightly and was pretending to be engrossed in his notes. Nelson, who’d been curled in an unused chair, decided to roll over and clean his paws.

There was a knock at the door. It was Snodgrass, with his sloped shoulders and dusting of dandruff. “Sir, Mr. Frain is here to see you.”

“Send him in!” roared the P.M.

In walked a tall man with black slicked-back hair and cold, gray eyes. He wore a carefully tailored yet understated suit. He was broad-shouldered and trim through the waist, and walked with a quick and confident stride.

“Good evening, Prime Minister,” the man said. “I hope you remember me. We met at Chartwell a few times—”

“Damn it, man! Of course I remember you,” the P.M. said. “Peter Frain, head of MI-Five. I hear that in your younger days at Cambridge, you were quite the chess player. Scotch?” he said, pouring himself a tumbler. “Macallan. Only twenty-two years but not bad.”

“Neat,” Frain replied, taking a seat opposite Mr. Churchill’s large and imposing mahogany desk. “Yes, I used to play a bit.”

“More than a bit, I heard,” the P.M. continued. “Brilliant, cold-blooded, ruthless—that’s how you’re described.”

Frain accepted his glass. “Before I became a professor at Cambridge. Although academia could be described by those words as well.” Maggie’s lip twitched as she remembered Aunt Edith’s battles for tenure.

“What was your field of expertise? Egyptology?”

Frain nodded before taking a sip. Mr. Churchill looked over to John, David, and Maggie. “Young men, that will be all for tonight. Miss Hope, I’ll need you to take notes.”

John and David left silently. Snodgrass followed, turning and closing the heavy door. As Maggie took a moment to unkink her neck before starting in with note-taking again, she noticed Frain looking at her. It wasn’t a salacious look but instead the kind of look he might give a jigsaw-puzzle piece or a particularly interesting crossword clue.

“A chess player,” the P.M. reiterated. “That’s what we need in times like these. You know, the Lord God told Moses to spy in the land of Canaan. And He told Moses to recruit only the best and brightest. If that advice was good enough for God, it’s good enough for me.” He took a swallow of Scotch.

“But if you recall, sir,” Frain said, “the intelligence gathered by Moses’s spies wasn’t used well. And so the Jews spent forty years wandering the desert.”

“Touché.” He reached for a fresh cigar, cut off the end, and lit it with a flourish. “What news?” he puffed.

“As you know, all of the mathematicians and the like have been gathered to crack German ciphers. We’re recruiting more and more—Cambridge and Oxford men, to be sure—but we’re also running crossword puzzles in the newspapers. The winners get more than the ten-quid prize—they get an all-expenses-paid trip to Bletchley Park.”

“Good, good,” the P.M. said. “What else?”

“Of course, there’s the usual danger posed by spies and fifth columnists—not to mention our old friends the IRA. Our ministers of propaganda have been doing their best to alert the public to the threat.”

“Yes, ‘Keep mum—she’s not so dumb’—good one,
that,” the P.M. said, chewing on his cigar. The poster in question featured a blonde in a low-cut gown.

“And now local law enforcement agencies are being buried in reports of spy sightings—everyone wants to catch one. We’re getting reports about hushed conversations in German, smoke signals, blinking shore lights. We even had one report of a Nazi parachuting right into a woman’s victory garden.”

“What happened with that one?” the P.M. asked.

“False alarm.”

“Any truth to any of it?”

“No, sir,” Frain replied. “We have yet to follow up on a credible threat. However, I do believe that they’re out there. There are undoubtedly sleeper spies here in England, disguised as patriots, just waiting for that one message from Berlin to tell them their mission.”

“Good hunting, Mr. Frain.” They clinked glasses.

Frain cleared his throat, looking over at Maggie, working quietly in the corner.

“Ah, yes,” the Prime Minister said. “Miss Hope—you may be excused.”

Maggie gathered her papers and rose to leave. “Thank you, sir.”

When the thick oak door had closed behind her, Churchill leaned forward. “Any news on that other matter?”

Frain sighed. “We have a witness to the murder of Diana Snyder. Her flatmate saw a man lurking outside the flat the day and approximate time of the murder.”

“Who is he?”

“She didn’t get a good look. It was night, and he was wearing a hat.”

“Jesus Christ, man. All this and the goddamned Nazis, too.” The P.M. pronounced the word in his own idiosyncratic way,
Nazzi
. He took another sip of Scotch and gestured to the door. “And Miss Hope?”

“So far, no IRA connection we can see. Although there
is
that matter … about her father.”

“Doesn’t know, does she?”

“Not a clue, sir.”

“Well, let’s keep it that way, then, shall we?” He raised his glass. “At least for the time being.”

T
HE
P.M.
OFTEN
worked so late into the night that overnight shifts were required.

Bunking down in the Dock, the underground dormitory housing of the War Rooms set aside for junior staff working late, was one of Maggie’s least favorite parts of her job. Lying on the hard, narrow cot, she covered herself with the rough, brown army blanket and looked at the little alarm clock she’d brought from home. It was nearly five in the morning, only two hours until she had to get up and start the whole routine over again. Listening to the dull roar of the subbasement’s air-conditioning, she turned out her flashlight and tried to will her body into sleep. But she was still too keyed up after her marathon day. Her thoughts were racing.