His Majesty's Hope(66)

Freddie punched the other man, and he, too, fell to the ground, whimpering and clutching his face. “No,” Freddie managed. “I’m not leaving you.”

“Think you’re a big man, do you?” the first man sneered. With that he took the broken beer bottle and turned toward Freddie. But when David stepped in front of Freddie, the man thrust it into David’s abdomen.

“Ah!” David screamed. “Jesus!” The man pulled out the bottle, now glistening black with blood. David’s eyes rolled back in his head and he crumpled against the wall.

There was a noise, and a group from the theater approached. One of the women screamed, a gloved hand to her mouth. “What’s going on here?” a man shouted.

The two attackers who’d fallen scrambled to their feet. They ran.

Freddie sank to his knees beside David. “Help him.” He glanced up at the approaching people looking down in shock at all the blood. “Call an ambulance! Someone! Please—help him!” He cradled David’s head in his hands. “Breathe—breathe, damn it!”


It was after midnight at Bletchley Park. In his office, lit by a single green banker’s lamp, windows blinded by thick blackout curtains, Edmund Hope again wrote the numbers Hugh had given him on the green chalkboard on the wall.

He sat back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk, sipping from a mug he’d filled from his flask of gin. The letters and numbers danced in front of his eyes, mocking him.

NAF9H20

51649900161

515700247

51604700350

51595000479

51588900466

51588480049782

5158165005055

515804570056176

515764560058494



He’d already run statistical analyses on the numbers, and had come up with nothing. “Damned onetime pad cipher,” Edmund said. He put one hand over his eyes and massaged his temples.

There was a shadow in the doorway. “Can’t be that bad—can it?” Alan Turing entered, rumpled but still bright-eyed and alert.

“I’ve tried everything,” Edmund admitted. “Everything. But it’s no use—without anything more to go on …”

Turing turned to the chalkboard. Then he looked at Edmund, his brown eyes dancing. “That’s because you’re looking at it all wrong. It’s not a code.”

Edmund looked up, shocked. “What?”

“I said, old boy, ‘It’s not a code.’ It’s a message—and a pretty straightforward one at that.”

Edmund looked back at the letters and numbers on the chalkboard. Turing took a sniff. “Maybe you should go easier on the gin?” Edmund looked down at his mug, then made a pretense of pushing it away. “Look, it’s simple, really,” Turing said. “What stands out in the first line?” He jabbed at it with a finger.

Edmund threw up his hands. “I don’t know. And at this point I’m starting not to care.”

“H two O!” Turing chortled. “Water!” He walked over to the chalkboard. “And what is NaF?”

“Sodium fluoride,” Edmund said, blinking. He sat up, starting to rally. “But what about the nine, then?”

“Nine stashes of the fluoride set to go into water. Look at the nine numbers below—they’re not in code—they’re latitude and longitude symbols. Nine of them.”

Edmund was pulling out a map from his desk. “If that’s so, they’d all be pretty close together …”

“Exactly!” Turing said, clapping Edmund on the back.

Edmund, reading the symbols on the map, said, “They’re all locations close to London.”

“I’m sure you’d have figured this out on your own, but, let me guess—they’re all reservoirs, hence the H two O.”

“My God.” Edmund whistled through his teeth. “So, someone is planning—”

“To drop unknown amounts of fluoride into nine different London water reservoirs.”

“But what would that do? Poison us?”

Turing bit his lip as he thought. “Depends. On how much fluoride and how much water—our two variables. I’m a mathematician, not a chemist—and not God, after all.” He walked out, calling over his shoulder as he left, “And do bathe, Edmund—you smell like a distillery.”


Clara and Cook were in her study, going over dinner plans for the week. “No, no need for anything on Friday or Saturday—I’ll be at the ballet and then the opera.”

“Ma’am …” Cook began. She was a slight woman, with a beakish nose and gray hair covered by a starched white linen cap.

“What?” Clara snapped. “I don’t have all day.”