Fritz loaded the freshly assembled devices into the satchel he took to work on a daily basis. Run-of-the-mill factory workers didn’t need to carry much more than a lunchbox, but he had carried empty satchels for a long time. His coworkers were now accustomed to seeing him with them. Over the past few weeks, he had begun filling the big bag every morning with one or more explosive devices. They were crafted from the materials he’d brought from Germany, augmented with odds and ends from the hardware store that would be blasted by his bombs into stupendous shrapnel.
His job took him all over the plant every day. Nobody kept track of him from minute to minute, so he could be anywhere. Or he could be nowhere if he had something offsite he needed to do.
It had been no small trick to plant boxes loaded with explosive death in the plant’s quieter corners, but he’d done it. They might well remain undisturbed right where they were until the war was over—but not if he set the timing devices he had carefully attached to the explosives hidden inside. He would spend the coming morning doing this. Once he had begun, there would be no turning back.
The wooden boxes were completely unobtrusive, marked only with a subdued green stamp that looked like an inventory code but actually served to mark the boxes for Fritz. To Fritz and only to Fritz, those green stamps said, “Beware! High Explosives!”
Most of the bombs were small, capable of dealing out significant damage to perhaps a fifty-foot radius. Bits of shrapnel might fly much farther, depending on air currents and physical distances and the whims of God. Only the incendiary devices had the potential to bring the whole factory down, so he had tucked most of them into the shadows of fuel tanks, which had their own potential for throwing flames. And then he had hoped for the best. This, too, was in the hands of God. Or of the devil, because he didn’t have to burn the whole plant down to put thousands of people into an ear-blasting hell.
Absent an all-out conflagration, the Carbon Division was harder to reach with his instruments of destruction, but he had managed. One of the incendiary devices was in the hands of someone else, the witless mole who had given him the only access to the Carbon Division that he was ever likely to get without the help of Justine Byrne. He’d explained her mission as that of a simple courier, taking a classified message to another spy behind those double doors. Then he’d packed a device in her lunchbox, telling her that he’d make her rich if she set it on the shelf where everybody kept their lunchboxes and then walked away. He also told her that he’d know if she looked inside and he would kill her if she did.
She would likely die, either way. The bomb would be going off just at noon. It had to. He could not let anyone wonder why his mole had no lunch.
He’d retained two of the incendiary devices for the most important placement of all. Tucked among the wooden boxes that always sat outside the Carbon Division’s loading dock, their flames would destroy the mysterious room where the black-and-silver devices acquired their final form. Those flames would also block an important escape route for the people inside, as would the devices he had placed on either side of the big double-door entry.
His goal was to make enough heat and light and noise to generate press coverage that would be seen in Germany, thus attracting someone willing to rescue him from this hellhole country. If he destroyed the mysteriously important Carbon Division, his superiors would be too grateful to leave him in the Louisiana swamps to rot. And if his superiors had been consumed by the war in Europe, then there was always the Japanese. Somebody would want to rescue the hero who had pulled off such a tremendous act of spycraft.
***
Justine awoke to a slight scraping sound. Rolling over in bed, she saw three notes being slid under her door. Two of them were in envelopes, and the other was just a torn sheet of scratch paper folded in half. It was barely daylight, so somebody was really intent on getting a message to her. Or three.
Ordering her body to wake up and be vigilant because weirdness was afoot, she went to the door and picked up the notes. She guessed that the folded scratch paper was from Mrs. Guidry, since she didn’t believe in wasting good paper to communicate with her tenants.
The envelopes, though, were different. Unfamiliar. One of them was clearly marked with Justine’s full name and The Julia’s street address, written in black with a fountain pen by someone who had gotten good grades in penmanship. Below the formality of these lines was a note written with a blue ballpoint pen in Mrs. Guidry’s more hen-scratchy handwriting. It said, “Somebody put this through the mail slot sometime during the night.”
The second envelope was plain and white, just like the first one, although it was made of cheaper paper. It lacked a full address, being marked only with “Justine Byrne” printed with a black ballpoint pen. The handwriting was perfectly legible, although less elegant than the other envelope’s beautiful penmanship. This one, too, bore a note from Mrs. Guidry saying that it had come through the mail slot.
These envelopes were interesting and unexpected, so she set them aside for more scrutiny and unfolded the note from Mrs. Guidry first. She’d gotten notes on these ragged-edged sheets of scratch paper before and their messages were always simple and straightforward. They were also usually infuriating, like the time she’d gotten a complaint that her light had been on until the wee hours of the night. And it had, but who had it bothered, really? She’d just finished committing the same infraction again, which was probably the topic of this scrawled note.
She plopped down on her bed and spread the note from Mrs. Guidry on her lap. Immediately, she wished that it had been a complaint about her late-night habits.
Your boss called. He wants you to come in to work today.
The paper might be raggedy, but the message was crisp and clear, and it dictated how Justine was going to respond to the coded invitation to a mysterious meeting. It would be problematic to say she was too sick to work and then show up a few hours later at the trash pen, healthy as a horse. People would ask questions she didn’t want to answer. It looked like she needed to work at least one more day before deciding whether to walk away from Higgins forever.
This meant that she was going to have to find a way to make her weary self stand on an assembly line for yet another ten hours. And she wasn’t even going to get a real lunch break, because this was the day that Mr. Higgins was speaking at the plant.
The scorched skin of her right arm burned and ached, as if to remind her of how important the events of this day were going to be. She needed to reapply the ointment that Jerry had given her.
She was in the midst of mulling over the best way to execute an incomplete plan—take the bus, work till noon, take a lunchtime meeting with someone who might have tried to burn her to death…and then what?—when she remembered that she’d gone to bed without deciding whether she was actually going to keep the meeting. It seemed that she’d decided in her sleep.
She turned her attention to the cheaper envelope, the one marked with just her name by a ballpoint pen. Sliding her finger under its sealed flap, she pulled out a one-page note hand-printed on plain, inexpensive paper.
Dear Justine,
I need to talk to you. I need to explain myself and I need to apologize. Please meet me for lunch down by the loading dock. It’s supposed to be a beautiful day and that will be a nice place to sit in the sun and eat and just talk in private. Everybody else will be watching Mr. Higgins speak, so we’ll have time to ourselves and I want that very much.
Please come.
I’ll be waiting for you.
Sincerely,
Martin
Justine had been doing a very good job of blocking the memory of Martin’s lips on hers, and now it came roaring back. She closed her eyes, hoping to blot out memories of the sight of him, but all this did was focus her mind on the scent of his cologne and the sound of his voice asking her to go away with him.
She wanted to be someplace else. She had been slow to realize this, but she knew it now. But did she want to run away with Martin? Her feelings for him were a confusing morass of anger, attraction, and curiosity about a man who pretended to be simply affable while harboring thoughts of political ferment and travel to faraway lands.
Martin was an interesting question, but her answer to the problem of Martin didn’t matter, and neither did her desire to be somewhere else. Not today. Today, she needed to figure out who was sabotaging a key part in the manufacture of an atomic bomb, and she needed to get that information to somebody who knew what to do with it. Until then, her own desires could wait.
Having clarified her thoughts, Justine was able to recognize the most important thing that Martin’s note told her. If he wanted to meet her at noon at the loading dock, then he couldn’t be the person who had left the coded message, because it had asked her to meet at the trash pen at noon.
Opening the second envelope, she could see two things immediately.
First, the note came from the same person who had sent her a message encoded on a screen. And second, the person was in a hurry. Or the person wanted Justine to read it in a hurry. Or both.
Like the encrypted message, this one was written in a facsimile of braille, but it was written in flat dots of ink that only a sighted person could read, and quickly, because the writer had removed all elements of confusion. The letters were not smashed together, and they were not garbled by the Caesar Cypher. They said what they meant.
Most importantly, the message was meant to be read only by her, because the message was in German, and Justine was pretty sure that there weren’t many people in her general vicinity who read both German and braille. Someone who wasn’t Justine would probably have needed a trip to the library to read the two-line note:
Es gab unerwartete Probleme.
Ruf mich an: Galvez 1869.
Someone wanted her to know that there had been unforeseen problems. That same someone also wanted her to call Galvez 1869.
Justine was coming to understand that she didn’t have to do something just because somebody told her to do it. Was she going to dial this number?
What did she have to lose? Even if the person could somehow tell that she was calling from The Julia, this was not news for someone who had left a note for her there. And, if the voice that answered the phone was one she recognized, there was an excellent chance that this would tell her who the saboteur was.
Absolutely, she was going to dial the number. But first, she had to deal with an idea that had come to her in her sleep. It was so exciting that she had to take a moment to think it through. After due consideration, she whispered out loud, “I think this could work.” Then she spread out a sheet of stationery and wrote a note that began with these words:
Dear Mr. Higgins,
I have reason to believe that the secret operations of Higgins Industries’ Carbon Division are in jeopardy.
She seriously doubted that Mr. Higgins was a traitor, considering how thoroughly his inventions had trounced, and were still trouncing, the Allies’ enemies. If it was safe to tell anybody her suspicions, it was safe to tell Andrew Higgins. And, finally, she knew how to get this message to him.
***
Justine stood alone in The Julia’s parlor, lit only by early morning light seeping through its old windows. She held a receiver to her ear and listened to a phone ring. The next sound she heard would be the voice of the person who had sent her the encrypted message asking her to come away and change the world. Did she want somebody to answer or not?
The sound of a genial “Hello” knocked the wind from her lungs. The urge to answer “Hello, this is Justine” was strong. That was the normal way one conducted telephone calls with people one knew, so it was a good thing that she couldn’t draw a breath. She needed to think.
Justine had expected to hear Charles’s voice. He had been the one whispering German words in her ear. Wasn’t it reasonable to expect him to be the one writing her messages in German?
She’d been hiding her own truth from herself. She knew now that she had wanted Charles to be the one waiting for her at the trash pen at noon, asking her to join him on impractical voyages that were somehow supposed to change the world. If she had found him there, asking her to do that, she would have warned him that she’d discovered his sabotage, knowing that this meant he must go or face prosecution as a traitor. And, just possibly, she would have gone with him if he had asked.
She hoped she would have had the strength to say no, but now she would never know, because he was not the person speaking to her. What was she supposed to say to the words, “Is someone there? Hello?” She didn’t know. She just knew that they weren’t being spoken in Charles’s voice.
How was she supposed to answer Jerry, kind and jovial Jerry, as he said again, “Hello?”
Justine might have run away with Charles. She might even have run away with Martin. Until the encrypted message had dangled the possibility of escape in front of her eyes, she hadn’t even known how badly she wanted to flee the drudgery of her life. She was shocked to realize how trapped she felt. She would do almost anything to stop being a nameless gear in the vast machinery that was keeping a world at war.
But she wouldn’t run away with Jerry. She had already hurt Georgette enough.
She replaced the receiver on its cradle so gently that Jerry probably never heard it happen. Then she went upstairs to her room, so that she could choke down a can of beans and get ready for yet another grueling and mindless day. She would be doing this job for the rest of the war and a similarly mindless one for the rest of her life. She might as well eat something so that she didn’t have to do her stupid job for ten hours on a stupid Sunday on a stupid empty stomach.