“He had the hots for her, you know. Never did anything about it at Bletchley, far too professional, but I could tell. Of course, they got married after the war.”
“Ah,” Jack said. “Did you keep up contact?”
“I was a witness at their wedding,” she replied. “It was at Southampton registry office the day before they were due to sail, in late 1947. He’d resigned from the navy and they were going to start a new life in Canada. Happened quite a lot with people from Bletchley. Not the marriage, I mean, but getting away. We were all supposed to walk off that last day when Bletchley shut down, to go back to our civilian lives and never talk about it. Oddly, it wasn’t such a problem for the cryptographers like my own future husband, as to them Bletchley was like a kind of special extended research fellowship, and afterward they returned to their universities and carried on doing much the same kind of thing. For the rest of us it was different. It would have been nice for me to tell my children growing up that I’d done something for the war effort.”
“They must know by now,” Costas said.
She nodded. “I told them when the whole Alan Turing story became public. But other than the fact that I worked on the bombe, I haven’t revealed any details. We were sworn to secrecy.”
“Where did Fan and Bermonsey go?” Jack asked.
“To British Columbia. I went to visit her there about twenty years ago, after Ian had died. They’d both been schoolteachers. We had a lovely week together, went whale-watching. I hadn’t realized then that she’d been ill, too. She died soon after I returned.”
“Sorry to hear it,” Costas said.
Jack leaned forward. “Did she ever talk to you about the work that she and Ian did at Bletchley? It might help with the Clan Macpherson mystery.”
She gave him a sudden steely look. “As I said, we were sworn to secrecy.”
“Of course.”
She paused, staring at the photos on the table for a moment, her hands shaking slightly. “But the answer is yes. I didn’t tell you about it when we spoke on the phone, as I wanted to size you up in person. But this is the reason why I wanted you to come here.” She looked at Costas. “There’s a little key in a matchbox in the top drawer of that desk beside you. Find it and use it to open the lower drawer.”
Costas did as he was told, taking the key and pulling the drawer open, revealing a few neatly stacked notebooks and a small pile of envelopes.
“I don’t keep many papers, as you can see,” Louise said. “A legacy from Bletchley days. But there’s a brown envelope with my name and address and a Canadian stamp on it. Fan sent it to me just after I returned from my visit to her.”
“Got it,” Costas said. “Do you want me to open it?”
“Pass it over to me, please.”
She took the envelope and pulled out a three-page typescript letter. She paused, and eyed Jack. “What do you know about the Ahnenerbe?”
“Himmler’s Department of Cultural Heritage, based at Wewelsburg Castle in Bavaria. We’ve bumped into them a few times — their legacy, I mean. They were on the hunt for a couple of artifacts that interested us.”
“The menorah,” Costas said.
“Sacred golden candelabra of the Jews,” Jeremy added, looking at Louise. “Stolen by the Romans when they looted the Temple in Jerusalem, and then vanished.”
“I know what the menorah is,” she said. “Anyway, everyone knows it was stolen from its secret hiding place in Constantinople by Harald Hardrada of Norway. He had it with him when he failed to conquer England in 1066, then took it across the Atlantic to the Viking colonies of Vinland and down to the Yucatán in Mexico, where he had a showdown with the Maya. What happened to it then is anyone’s guess. Probably melted down by the Maya and became part of the gold stolen by the Spanish five hundred years later, then lost in one of those shipwrecks off the Spanish Main.” She gave Jack a mischievous look. “Am I right, Dr. Howard?”
Jack pointed at one of his books on the table. “I’ll even sign it for you if you like.”
Costas smiled. “It’s a great story. One of my favorites. And I can vouch for it, as I was there, trapped inside an iceberg looking for a Viking longship.”
“I’ll have your signature too, then.”
Jack smiled, and then looked serious again. “Why do you mention the Ahnenerbe?”
Louise coughed, suddenly looking frail, and reached back toward the table behind her. Jack saw the small water bottle and got up to pass it to her, unscrewing the top first. She took a sip and then put it in the cup-holder on the arm of her wheelchair, her hand shaking badly. “You know,” she said, “we’ll never have the full story of what really went on at Bletchley. As more of us go, the secrets will die with us. But when Fan wrote that letter, she had decided to tell me everything she knew about that particular operation. She’s left the trail open for someone to follow. Perhaps for you to follow.”
“Will you read it to us?”
“One of you read it. My eyesight’s not so good any more. Fan always typed her letters, so it’s clear enough.” She handed the letter to Costas, who was nearest to her, and turned back to Jack, her eyes suddenly gleaming. “You asked about the Ahnenerbe. Prepare to be amazed.”
14
Prince Rupert Island
British Columbia
July 11 1997
My dear Louise,
We had such a lovely time last week, didn’t we? We always talked of traveling together after the war, and finally we’ve done it. So sad that Ian wasn’t here to enjoy it with us, but then we always did want a “girls only” outing and it did mean we could talk a bit more about Bletchley. With Ian that would have been impossible, because he was haunted by the war, especially during his final illness. He had nightmares where he saw the men from one of the ships his submarine had sunk in the Mediterranean swimming toward him desperately, and he was unable to rescue them.
I know it was frustrating for you, but you were lucky to be just working on the bombe (if that’s really all you were doing…). At least you didn’t have to deal as directly as I did in human lives. After being posted to the special operations hut, I had a hand in how the U-boat decrypts were used. Sometimes they saved lives, and sometimes we chose not to act on them if we thought the Germans might become suspicious. I’m able to tell you this because I know you must have guessed it already. You must have seen how upset I was on occasion. I felt that those men in the merchant ships were my responsibility, and I still think about them every day, about those I couldn’t save and the grief of all of those children growing up without having known their fathers, living out their lives forever under that shadow.
I will, though, never reveal to anyone how we reached those decisions. You and I were both sworn to secrecy, and keeping that bond has become part of who we are. Somehow it has helped me to live with it, feeling that what we did at Bletchley, the way we did it, could still save lives in a future war. But after you left last week, I thought about it and have decided to tell you about one operation that no longer has any bearing on national security. It was an operation within an operation, one of those folds of secrecy at Bletchley, and you’ll understand that I still can’t reveal anything about the bigger picture.
The operation was called Ark. That was the code name used for it by B-Dienst. Their naval intelligence division was involved in all German seaborne operations, and this was one of them, albeit a highly unusual one. When the word first appeared in the Ultra decrypts at Bletchley it was thought to be a code name for a new U-boat patrol line, a wolf pack. The patrol lines surrounding convoy OMS-5 in late April 1943, for example, were named after birds: Meise, blue tit, and Specht, woodpecker. But then an army intelligence officer attached to Hut 8 recognized it from one of the Colossus decrypts of German High Command communications from Berlin, and sourced it to the Ahnenerbe. The SS at Wewelsburg Castle had their own signals section, whose communications were channeled through the High Command, and with Colossus having cracked the Lorenz cipher, we were able to decrypt them. The Ark communications were specifically sourced to a Nazi agent established in Durban in South Africa before the war. They concerned an Ahnenerbe operation to smuggle something back to Germany on an Allied merchant ship. The first of these communications was deciphered toward the end of March 1943.