Justine had been staring at the encrypted message for hours. She was recording her ideas in a clothbound notebook, and there were depressingly few coherent thoughts written in it. Nevertheless, the notebook made her feel strong—hopeful, even. Identical to her godmother’s signature notebooks, it made Justine feel as if Gloria were there, using her favorite teaching tool, incessant questions, to guide her to the answers she needed. The questions sounded in her ear in Gloria’s beloved voice, one after another.
There are a lot of dots. Could you try a variant of Morse code?
Maybe Morse code would work, but Justine couldn’t really see a consistent way to identify dashes. If she counted two dots that were right next to each other as a dash, then she saw something that looked like a recognizable D, but the next cluster of dots made no sense unless she counted three dots as a dash. She labored over dots and dashes for longer than she probably should have, then she gave up.
The area at the center is different from the area framing it. The frame looks truly random, but there are blank areas in the centers. Can you do anything with that?
If Justine had to guess, those blank areas were spaces between words. They were all two spaces wide, but they weren’t all the same height. Many of them were three spaces tall, but three of them were six spaces tall.
Six and nine were both multiples of three, and this made Justine’s heart skip a beat. She was very familiar with a code consisting of letters that were three spaces high and two spaces wide. She quickly counted the width of the dot patterns that she was calling “words.”
Bingo. The width of each word was divisible by two. This made Justine want to kiss her graph paper.
Her imaginary Gloria must have thought she was on the right track because the voice in her head stopped asking questions and let her get to work.
Justine had learned a code constructed of letters that were two spaces wide and three spaces tall at her mother’s knee. On the very day that her mother was told that she would go blind, she’d bought a book called Learning Braille. Isabel, her husband, and their little red-haired daughter had sat at the dinner table, night after night, and learned a communication system built on dots. When the time came that Isabel couldn’t read with her eyes, she could read with her fingers, and so could Gerard and Justine.
It was just possible that Justine was looking at words constructed of braille letters that were all mashed together, with single spaces separating words. It was better than possible. It seemed likely. Justine copied the pattern of the words, just to get a sense of the shape of the message:
XXXXXX
XXXX XXXX XX XXX
XXXXXX XXX XXXXX
XXXXXX XXXX XXXX
XXXX XXXX XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXX XXX XXXXXX
XXXXXX XXX XXXXX
XXXX XX XXXX XX
XXXX XX XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
It made her happy to see the message laid out this way. Seeing the pattern of letters and spaces was a first step to discovering how it was encrypted. Still, the pattern made her want to curse because there were no one-letter words. Presuming she was working with a substitution code, one-letter words were the quickest route to learning to recognize the letters a and i, and vowels were the key to everything.
Well, at least she had now learned that the message didn’t seem to use the word a or the word I, not even once. This was probably by design.
It was time to exercise her braille skills. She had no doubt that she could translate the holes punched in the screen into letters. She might even have been able to read them by brushing her fingers over the back of the screen. She simply doubted that anybody would use an encryption system so simple as mashing braille letters together.
And she was right. As she transcribed each two-by-three block of six squares, she found that every single one of them could be read as a braille letter, but the letters didn’t form recognizable words.
One important thing was obvious. Some of the words were repeated. Here was evidence that this was not a random bunch of holes punched in a screen. It was an intelligible message. It had to be.
But now what? If she needed a decryption device with nested disks that a spy would twirl until it spit out the right letter, then she was sunk. And if the code was based on a printed text key—say, she needed to open a particular Bible to the book of Joshua and use the letters on its first page as a decryption device—then, again, she was sunk. But if this scrambled message was based on a simple substitution code, then she could crack it. Therefore, she was going to bet all her chips on a substitution cipher.
Justine leaned back in her chair and looked at the message as a whole.
DBSCPO
DPNF XJUI NF BOE
DIBOHF UIF XPSME
DIBOHF ZPVS MJGF
GJOE ZPVS QVSQPTF
KVTUJOF
ZPV BSF OFFEFE
TFF UIF XPSME
NFFU NF IFSF BU
OPPO TVOEBZ
KVTUJOF
As she sat pondering the nonsense words, she heard sounds outside her door. She heard bare feet on wood planks and soft breaths. And she heard someone set something gently on the floor.
The footsteps sounded like Georgette’s. Then she turned her eyes to her bedroom window and remembered that someone had come through it to steal something that she’d hidden. Who was outside her door, really?
The thought of someone, perhaps a man, intruding in the female space of The Julia Ladies’ Residence made her feel violated. She shivered and wished for a cardigan to keep her warm, but she didn’t want the mysterious person to hear her moving around. Instead, she sat quietly, goose bumps on her arms, and waited for the sound of quiet footsteps to recede.
***
When Justine felt that she’d heard enough silence, she quietly eased her door open. No one was in the hallway, and there were no lights on that she could see. All she heard were the soft sounds of women sighing in their sleep. Something sat on the floor outside the door, but it was too dark to see what it was.
Without stopping to think that it could be dangerous, she dropped to her knees to get a better look. What she saw on the floor brought tears to her eyes.
In a neat pile sat her algebra book, her introductory physics book, and a battered school notebook. She brought them inside her room and eased the door shut. The books belonged on her shelf with the other books her parents had given her, so she put them there. The notebook was unfamiliar, so she opened it. Inside, she saw pages and pages of lined paper covered with neatly worked-out algebra problems.
Georgette had done everything Justine had told her to do. She had worked through the algebra book, chapter by chapter, showing her work and double-checking her answers. She’d finished a third of the book in a week. There was so much desire in the painstakingly solved problems that Justine couldn’t bear to look at them. She closed the notebook, rested her forehead on it, and let herself cry for a while. Then she set Georgette’s algebra homework carefully on her bookshelf and went back to work.
***
The problem, Justine decided, was that she wasn’t sure where to start.
She could focus on the two-letter words. There were only so many commonly used two-letter words in English, and one of the two letters would be a vowel. But not both. Or at least she hoped she wasn’t dealing with two-letter words made entirely of vowels, because they were a bit specialized. If she was looking at a message about “Io,” the satellite of Jupiter, or “oi,” the British interjection, then she was probably sunk.
There were multiple three-letter words. Presuming that the message was in English, one of those three-letter words was probably “the” and one of them was probably “and.” Either of these would give her three very common letters. Attacking three-letter words would be another reasonable strategy for breaking the cipher.
Justine bent to her work, never once considering that this puzzle, designed just for her, might not be simply a message. It might well be a test.
***
Mudcat lay awake, trying to rationalize away his nerves.
This was not the first time he had recruited an agent. He had always slept well the night before the encounter, despite the fact that every one of the other recruits had been more dangerous than Justine Byrne. For one thing, she was unarmed, to the best of his knowledge. There was no reasonable chance that she would put a bullet in his heart, although he supposed that she might be able to swing that wrench she carried in her back pocket pretty hard. She was at her most dangerous, physically speaking, when she held a torch and a hot rod, but these were poor weapons because they tied her to a single spot. He would not be encountering her when she was anywhere near her welding equipment, so he didn’t need to worry about the torch and rod.
He felt a pang when he realized that he’d never seen her weld, and this was when he knew that he had lost the objectivity that had kept him alive. He imagined her face lit by the reflections of an eye-searing flame and white-hot sparks. Her coppery hair, pulled away from her face into a waterfall of ringlets and fluff, would reflect the torch with its own warm light. This was an image that made his heart constrict, but it wasn’t what he really wanted to see. He wanted her to turn her eyes away from the burning light and pull the protective goggles away from her face. He wanted her to face him, backlit by the glowing torch. He wanted her eyes on him, because they showed her for what she was, pure intelligence and love.
Suddenly, life was very simple. He wanted Justine.
***
Fritz should have been able to sleep, since he’d passed his last night lying awake on the ground outside Justine Byrne’s rooming house, but he couldn’t. He was wracked by adrenaline, because he had decided that it was time to put the final stage of Operation Fritz into motion. If he stayed in America any longer, he would be marooned there, possibly for life. But surely there was someone in Germany who still had the ability to get him out. He just had to reestablish contact with the Fatherland.
His superiors knew where he had been before he lost contact. If a great conflagration were to consume the Michaud plant, the German government—what remained of it—would know that he was alive and that he had accomplished a tremendous disruption. If his organization still existed in any form at all, destruction of the Michaud plant would prompt them to do their best to get him out of America, along with the classified information concerning the construction of Higgins’s planes, ships, and boats that he’d amassed. Information on the Carbon Division would have been the pièce de résistance, but it was not to be. The things he’d been able to learn should be quite enough to earn him a hero’s welcome.
Fritz had been sent to America with a tremendous pack full of fuses and timers and explosives and incendiaries. He’d been trained to assemble these materials into bombs, and he’d been trained in how to use them. He’d even been trained to build devices of destruction from such prosaic items as dried peas, razor blades, and lumps of sugar. He’d spent his entire time at Higgins Industries assembling what he needed to take aim at the Michaud plant. Over the past weeks, he had put his bombs in place, one by one, while he developed a plan for deploying them when the time came.
The Michaud plant was a vast place, so perhaps he couldn’t bring the whole thing down, but he could certainly make a holy mess of it. And if Justine was on the premises when this happened, he could make her choice crystal clear.
She could walk out the doors of the Michaud plant with him, ready for travel and adventure. Or she could be blown to hell right along with it.