The Prime Minister's Secret Agent(8)

“My God,” Bratton whispered. “They’re mapping out which ships are in Pearl Harbor and where. Is it possible that they’re …?” He left the rest hanging.

“Of course not!” Kramer snapped. “They’d be fools to attack Pearl—and besides, the water’s too shallow for torpedoes. No,” he said decisively, turning away, “this is just Japanese research at its most exacting. The Japs are fussy that way, you know.”

“How long does it usually take to get these decrypts translated?”

Kramer pulled at his collar. “We’re short-staffed here. These are diplomatic messages—of very little consequence as far as we’re concerned. We have piles of them. Not enough linguists on staff to translate them fast enough. The diplomatic messages are of the lowest priority and are worked on when there’s nothing else to do. Which is never.”

Bratton held fast to the decrypt. “Do you mind if I take this? Get a proper version?”

“Suit yourself.” Kramer pointed to the shelves and shelves of untranslated decrypts. “We have about twenty thousand more, waiting to be translated, if your boys in brown would like to lend a hand.”


Back in his own office, in the Intelligence Section of the War Department, Bratton put down the decrypt. “So they’re dividing Pearl Harbor into a grid …”

He looked to the map of the Pacific he had mounted on the wall. It bristled with yellow pushpins, signifying Japanese ships on various sections of the blue paper.

He went to his desk drawer and selected a larger tack. This one was red.

With it, he pierced the black dot over Pearl Harbor.



Clara Hess had been up since before the sunrise and was pacing the length of her room in the Tower of London, back and forth, back and forth, like a caged jungle cat.

Occasionally, she’d stop to do a few sets of push-ups or sit-ups or jack-knives, but then resumed pacing. Despite the fact that her platinum-blond hair was growing in and showing gray and dirty-blond roots—and despite her one wandering eye—she was still as beautiful as Marlene Dietrich.

It had been more than three months since she’d arrived in London from Berlin, as evidenced by the scratch marks on the wall by her bed she’d made with her fingernails. While Clara had once been a high-level Abwehr officer, she had failed at a series of missions. To escape punishment by the SS, she’d staged the ultimate ploy—she defected to Britain in Switzerland and turned herself over to SOE. Her line was that she wanted to negotiate peace between Germany and England. Of course that wasn’t possible and she knew it, but it was her story and she stood by it, telling anyone who would listen.

She’d hoped her insider’s knowledge of the Abwehr, and the Nazi party itself, would prove irresistible to the British. She’d also hoped to work with her daughter, Margaret Hope, to disseminate the information. She wouldn’t share information without Maggie.

And so all she did each day was exercise on the hard stone floor, the tedium relieved only by the arrival of plain meals on trays, brought by silent guards.

Sometimes, overcome by frustration and boredom, she would scream, and hurl herself at the thick wooden door. Her voice, unused to vocalization of any kind in her solitary confinement, quickly grew raw, and her body bruised. Outside, the two yeomen of the guard would glance at each other and shrug. They were under strict orders not to open the door, not to interact with her, not to speak with her, not to be manipulated by her.

Clara had only one visitor, her first husband and Maggie’s father, Edmund Hope. He’d seen her when she’d first arrived. Now he was encouraging her to cooperate with MI-5, regardless of Maggie’s involvement.

“She’s not going to talk to you. Forget about her,” he said about their daughter as they walked the length of the Tower Green outside the Queen’s House under the watchful eye of yeoman guards—an unexpected privilege for Clara.

“I can’t,” she insisted. “I won’t.”

“Because she brought you down—or because she’s your daughter?” Then, “Or both?”

“She’s the one who wants to hurt me. She wants to see me executed!”

Edmund frowned. “She can’t hurt you. And all you have to do to remain alive is talk to someone. Anyone. Even me, for that matter. There’s no reason you need Maggie involved.”

“She won’t talk to me—and I’m stuck here, like some sort of zoo animal. I’m Clara Hess, for God’s sake! And she’s an ungrateful bitch of a daughter and it’s all her fault.

“And for that I’m going to make her pay.”