“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.”