Daniel Silva - The Unlikely Spy

He rose and took a step toward the door.

Jenny pedaled until her legs burned-through the village, past the church and the cemetery, over the sea creek. The air was filled with the sound of the storm and the rush of the sea. Rain lashed against her face and the wind nearly blew her over.

Jenny spotted her father's bicycle in the grass along the track and stopped next to it. Why leave it here? Why not ride it all the way to the cottage?

She thought she knew the answer. He was trying to sneak up without being seen.

It was then she heard the sound of a shotgun blast from Sean's barn. Jenny screamed, leapt from her bicycle, and let it fall next to her father's. She ran across the meadow, thinking, Please, God, don't let him be dead. Don't let him be dead.

Approximately one hundred miles north of Hampton Sands, Charlotte Endicott pedaled her bicycle into the small gravel compound outside the Y Service listening station at Scarborough. The ride from her digs at a cramped guesthouse in town had been brutal, wind and rain the entire way. Soaked and chilled to the bone, she dismounted and leaned her bicycle next to several others in the stand.

The wind gusted, moaning through the three huge rectangular antennas that stood atop the cliffs overlooking the North Sea. Charlotte Endicott glanced up at them, swaying visibly, as she hurried across the compound. She pulled open the door of the hut and went inside before the wind slammed it shut.

She had a few minutes before her shift began. She removed her soaking raincoat, untied her hat, and hung them both on a dilapidated coat-tree in the corner. The hut was cold and drafty, built for utility, not comfort. It did have a small canteen, though. Charlotte went inside, poured herself a cup of hot tea, sat down at one of the small tables, and lit a cigarette. A filthy habit, she knew, but if she could hold a job like a man she could smoke like one. Besides, she liked the way they made her look-sexy, sophisticated, a little older than her twenty-three years. She also had become addicted to the damned things. The work was stressful, the hours brutal, and life in Scarborough was dreadfully boring. But she loved every moment of it.

There had been only one time when she truly hated it, the Battle of Britain. During the long and horrible dogfights, the Wrens at Scarborough could listen to the cockpit chatter of the British and German pilots. Once she heard an English boy screaming and crying for his mother as his crippled Spitfire fell helplessly toward the sea. When she lost contact with him, Charlotte ran outside into the compound and threw up. She was glad those days were over.

Charlotte looked up at the clock. Nearly midnight. Time to go on duty. She stood and smoothed her damp uniform. She took one last pull at her cigarette-smoking wasn't allowed in the hole-then crushed it out in a small metal ashtray overflowing with butts. She left the canteen and walked toward the operations room. She flashed her identification badge at the guard. He scrutinized it carefully, even though he had seen it a hundred times before, then handed it back to her, smiling a little more than necessary. Charlotte knew she was an attractive girl, but there was no place for that sort of thing here. She pushed open the doors, entered the hole, and sat down at her regular spot.

It gave her a brief chill-as always.

She stared at the luminous dials of her RCA AR-88 superheterodyne communications receiver for a moment and then slipped on her earphones. The RCA's special interference-cutting crystals allowed her to monitor German Morse senders all across northern Europe. She tuned her receiver to the band of frequencies she had been assigned to patrol that night and settled in.

The German Morse senders were the fastest keyers in the world. Charlotte could immediately identify many by their distinctive keying style, or fist, and she and the other Wrens had nicknames for them: Wagner, Beethoven, Zeppelin.

Charlotte didn't have to wait long for her first action that night.

A few minutes after midnight she heard a burst of Morse in a fist she did not recognize. The cadence was poor, the pace slow and uncertain. An amateur, she thought, someone who didn't use their radio much. Certainly not one of the professionals at BdU, the Kriegsmarine headquarters. Acting quickly, she made a recording of the transmission on the oscillograph-a device that would in effect create a radio fingerprint of the signal called a Tina -and furiously scribbled the Morse message onto a sheet of paper. When the amateur finished, Charlotte heard another burst of code on the same frequency. This was no amateur; Charlotte and the other Wrens had heard him before. They had nicknamed him Fritz. He was a radio operator aboard a U-boat. Charlotte quickly transcribed this message as well.

Fritz's transmission was followed by another burst of sloppy Morse by the amateur, and then the communication went dead. Charlotte removed her headset, tore off the printout of the oscillograph, and marched across the room. Normally she would simply pass on the Morse transcripts of the messages to the motorcycle courier, who in turn would rush them to Bletchley Park for decoding. But there was something different about this communication-she could feel it in the fist of the radio operators: Fritz aboard a U-boat, an amateur somewhere else. She suspected she knew what it was, but she would have to make a damned convincing case. She presented herself to the night supervisor, a pale exhausted-looking man called Lowe. She dropped the transcripts and the oscillograph on his desk. He looked up at her, a quizzical expression on his face.

"I could be completely wrong, sir," Charlotte said, mustering the most authoritative voice she could, "but I think I just overheard a German spy signaling a U-boat off the coast."

Kapitanleutnant Max Hoffman would never get used to the stench of a U-boat that has been submerged too long: sweat, urine, diesel oil, potatoes, semen. The assault on his nostrils was so intense he would gladly stand watch on the conning tower in a gale rather than stay inside.

Standing in the control room of U-509, he could feel the throb of its electric motors beneath his feet as they wheeled in a monotonous circle twenty miles from the British coastline. A fine mist hung inside the submarine, creating a halo around every light. Every surface was cool and wet to the touch. Hoffman liked to imagine it was dew on a spring morning, but one look at the cramped claustrophobic world he inhabited robbed him of that fantasy very quickly.

It was a tedious assignment, sitting off the coast of Britain for weeks on end, waiting for one of Canaris's spies. Of Hoffman's crew only his first officer knew the true purpose of their mission. The rest of the men probably suspected as much, since they weren't on patrol. Still, things could be worse. Given the extraordinary loss rate among the Ubootwaffe -nearly 90 percent-Hoffman and his crew were damned lucky to have survived this long.

The first officer came onto the bridge, face grave, a sheet of paper in his hand. Hoffman looked at the man, depressed by the notion that he probably looked just as bad: sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, the gray pallor of a submariner, the unkempt beard because there was too little fresh water to waste on shaving.

The first officer said, "Our man in Britain has finally surfaced. He'd like a lift home tonight."

Hoffman smiled, thinking, Finally. We pick him up and head back to France for some good food and clean sheets. He said, "What's the latest weather?"

"Not good, Herr Kaleu," the first officer said, using the customary diminutive form of kapitanleutnant. "Heavy rains, winds thirty miles per hour from the northwest, seas ten to twelve."