The shutters were probably a Stockman renovation, so he could work up here at night and not show it. The electric lighting was certainly his doing. A stand-up lamp stood in the center of the floor beside a library table big enough to lay out the corpse of even the tall Sir Albert.
The wireless telegraph setup was certainly his doing.
There it was, as expected, a jumble of condensers and transformers, tuning coil and induction coil, ammeter and helix, antenna switch and spark discharger. And at the uncluttered front edge of the table were the two things the jumble served: the transmission key and the head phones.
This was where Sir Albert Stockman transmitted and received coded messages with his bosses in Germany and his underlings wherever they were lurking.
In considering the wireless, the object that had led me here, I’d taken some steps toward it at an angle past the library table. I knew there were other objects of interest on the tabletop, and I turned my beam to them now.
A stack of books on the near end.
That much I’d seen out of the corner of my eye and I expected more. There was a stray volume near the center, but the table was otherwise clear.
I stepped to the wireless table, hoping to find a notebook or a scrap of paper with a message. There was nothing. The key block was even squared up to the edge of the table; the headset’s wire was neatly coiled.
I knew Al, understood his ways. I needed to be careful to leave everything precisely as it now was. And this thought made me visualize his next visit here, which reminded me of the clock ticking in my head.
I clenched off the next breath.
I could not hear the orchestra. Had they finished? Had Stockman shut this thing down quick?
But I was, after all, in a flint tower six storeys above and five hundred feet away from that plinky little sextet and that middle-aged voice. Still, all I could hear was the accelerating beat of my heart and the heavy hiss of the silence in Stockman’s aerie.
I moved to the northern loophole and opened the wooden shutter. I leaned in, as if to fire an arrow, and turned my ear to the opening.
And yes. The sound of strings faintly drifted this high and slipped in through the slit in the stone. I could not hear her voice, but she was out there singing. At the moment, about how long a way it was to Tipperary.
I closed the shutter, strode to the eastern loophole, and closed its shutter as well. I returned to the table in the center of the room. I switched on the reading lamp, extinguished my flashlight, stuffed it into my pocket, sat on a bent-wood chair.
I put my hand to the stack of books, which also had been squared up to the edge of the table.
I took up each, one by one, thumbed them, looking for marks. All that they yielded were their titles.
The System of British Weather of the British Islands.
The Weather of the British Coasts.
The Fourth Report on Wind Structure published by the Authority of the Meteorological Council.
Surface Wind Structure Analysis. This one from His Majesty’s Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.
And another big seller from the Brits’ meteorological boys: The Beaufort Scale of Wind-Force, Being a Report of the Director of the Meteorological Office upon an Inquiry into the Relation Between the Estimates of Wind-Force According to Admiral Beaufort’s Scale and the Velocities Recorded by Anemometers Belonging to the Office.
I restacked the books precisely.
And then, the one stray book near the center of the table: The Britannica Year-Book 1913. Not stray, really. Simply separate, for it too had been placed with a squared-up kind of precision.
This book I understood at once. It was the present code book for the Germans.
I carefully noted its position, its orientation, and I pulled it before me. Not much larger than a novel, dusky green, twelve hundred onion-skin thin pages. I opened it and thumbed for hand notes. No words. But occasionally the first two or three or last two or three letters of a word were underlined in pencil. On page 27, about the Balkan War: ag was underlined in against; ste in step; ity in inability. The Germans’ numbered codes — indicating page and line and word — probably had a way to indicate whole words, but they could also spell out words in a pinch or a rush. I tried to fit these underlinings together, forward and backward, just to make sure, but my suspicion was soon confirmed: they were simply highlighted here for quick use.
I put the book back exactly where it had been and, unaware I was even doing it, I stretched out my left leg. I heard a soft clatter onto the floor. I got up, circled the table.
Several pieces of wide, heavy paper, rolled together, were lying on their side near where they’d no doubt been sitting on end, beneath the table. I picked them up, spread them carefully in the light on the tabletop.
They were three contiguous ordnance survey maps, tracking the Thames River from the Isle of Thanet, County Kent, to London.
No marks.
Precious little else here.
I rolled the maps together once more and placed them standing on the floor beneath the table where I reckoned they’d been.
I returned to the chair, set it in its previous place, put my hands on the top of its cane back, and leaned a little against it.
Had I missed something in this room? I looked around. It was bare but for the two tables. I imagined Stockman sitting in this chair alone, shut off from the world, high above the sea, in this circle of pale yellow light, in his wooden chair, reading. These books. Other books that were gone now. Deciphering telegrams from Berlin. Happy in the quiet. Fussily keeping the edges of things straight. Planning. Planning what?
Winds and weather didn’t quite add up.
If there was nothing more than this, I could think on these things later. I needed to go. Joe Hunter needed to be protected.
I switched off the stand-up lamp.
I moved to the eastern loophole, unhooked it, opened it, as it was when I arrived.
Though it was still a very small sound, I heard it at once. Coming through the loophole from the east, from out in the strait.
The sound of an engine.
From over the strait, I realized.
I could hear the distant drone of gasoline engines. I was willing to bet they were Maybachs, two-hundred horsepower each, attached in fours to Zeppelins. Stockman’s bravado at the torch lighting buzzed into my head along with them. He knew they were coming. They knew where he was. He was lighting their way into the mouth of the Thames.
I went out of the tower room, but I did not descend. I went up the inner staircase and emerged through an upright metal door set in a stone enclosure built into the courtyard corner of the parapet. I moved toward the eastern wall, passing beneath my daylong landmark, the massive Union Jack. I looked up as I went by. The flag hung straight down, barely stirring. It was a perfect night for the Zepps. No moon, a high ceiling, the air gone almost still.
I stood at the parapet and looked into the thin gruel of the night. I could hear the orchestra again, distantly, from up here in the open. It was directly behind me, playing “There’s a Long, Long Trail.” Mother was still working on the wartime standards. She hadn’t even begun to encore.
She and the crowd were about to get a fright.
I strained to hear the engines above the music. And there they were. Nearer now. The drone had become a hammering, the piston fire itself almost distinguishable. I strained to see them. And then the stars were moving and then I realized with a quick grab in my throat just how low the Zeppelins were and how near, and they were rushing this way, still only a few dollops of light, perhaps from their undercarriages, but also a vast thickening of the dark above.