"Did he say anything else? About the crossword puzzles?"

"Yeah, he said he remembered I was good at them and that most Americans weren't able to solve English crosswords. Do you think they could already be looking for spy messages in crosswords, like the D-Day thing you told me about?"

"No. He's going to offer you a job at Bletchley Park. Remember how I told you BP recruited anyone they thought might be good at decoding-mathematicians and Egyptologists and chess players? Well, they recruited people who were good at crosswords, too. They even had the Daily Herald sponsor a crossword contest, and then offered jobs at the Park to all the winners. But they were still short of decoders, and they were always looking for potential prospects. When did you say he was coming back from London?"

"I'm not sure. Tomorrow or the next day."

"You need to get out of there tonight, then."

"Hang on. Maybe I should take the job. If Gerald's staying at Bletchley Park-"

"No, that's a dreadful idea. You'd never get out. They couldn't afford to let people leave because of the secrets they knew, so anyone who worked at BP was there for the duration. You need to get out of there tonight."

"But I just got a lead on Phipps."

"Eileen will have to follow it up for you. Is there a train out tonight? You probably won't be able to get to London-the raids are too bad-but you can at least get out of Bletchley."

"But I don't see what all the hurry is. Why can't I just turn the job down, now that I know what he's going to ask? I already told him I was having treatments on my foot. I could tell him I have to have surgery-"

"That won't be enough of an excuse. It's a desk job, and remember, Dilly Knox has a limp."

"Well, then, I just tell him I'm not interested."

"An American reporter who smuggled his way aboard a boat so he could get to Dunkirk isn't interested in being involved in the most exciting espionage work of the war? He won't buy it."

She was right. Someone like Tensing, who'd been so determined to return to action that he'd defied his doctor's orders, would never understand why Mike was turning down a chance to "get back in the war"-especially since Mike had told him that was why he was seeing Dr. Pritchard. He'd begin to wonder what was behind the refusal and start snooping around. And find out he'd lied about Dr. Pritchard.

"You need to get-" A deafening whistle drowned out the end of Polly's sentence. Another bomb, he thought, and then realized it was a train.

He glanced at his watch: 8:33. The train from Oxford. "Sorry, I didn't hear what you said. A train's coming in."

"I said, get out of there now," Polly said urgently. "If Tensing's thinking of offering you a job, he may already be doing a background check and have realized you're not who you say you are. You can't take the risk of running into him and-" There was a screech, and the line went dead.

"Polly?" he said. "Polly?"

"I'm sorry, sir," the operator said. "There's a disruption on the line. I can attempt to reconnect you, if you like."

But if the disruption was a bomb, the lines might not be repaired for days, and Mike was just as glad. If he talked to Polly again, she'd just insist he get out, and she was right, he had to, but there was no need to do it tonight. Tensing wouldn't be back before tomorrow at the earliest, and he didn't know where Mike was living. And since Mike hadn't got his room through the billeting office, it would take Tensing a while to find him, and by the time he'd tried the pub and then the hotels, Mike would have found out whether Phipps was in Little Howard. "Thanks, I'll try later," he told the operator, hung up, and stepped out of the phone booth.

The train had apparently arrived. Passengers were coming along the platform. An elderly army officer, two WAVEs, a- Jesus, it was Ferguson, and, just stepping down from the train after him, was Tensing. They hadn't looked this way yet. Instinctively, Mike ducked back into the phone booth, but it was useless as a hiding place, and there wasn't enough time for him to hobble across the station and out the door before they saw him. Mike lurched through the other door to the deserted eastbound platform, and all the way down to the end of it, listening for pursuing footsteps and trying to think what to do.

Polly was right-he needed to get out right now. But not on this train. With his luck, Tensing would have left his hat on it or something and come back to catch him in the act of leaving. He'd have to take the next one. It wasn't till 11:10, but he'd still better stay here. If he tried to go back to Mrs. Jolsom's for his bag, he was liable to run straight into Tensing. Or Dilly's girls. He needed to sit right here, out of sight.

But if he didn't go collect his bag and Tensing did manage to find out where he'd been staying, his suddenly disappearing and leaving his luggage behind would look wildly suspicious, and Mrs. Jolsom was bound to tell him. And if Tensing concluded he was a spy, that would do as much or more damage as his being caught by Tensing and offered a job. And even if Tensing was suspicious of him and that was why he'd come back early, he wouldn't go to Mrs. Jolsom's. He'd try the pub first-and the hotels, and by the time he got around to knocking on boardinghouse doors, Mike would be long gone.

He waited another fifteen minutes on the platform to give Tensing and Ferguson time to get well away from the station, then hurried back to Mrs. Jolsom's, taking a roundabout route so he didn't have to pass Dilly's girls' house or the Bell, and looking carefully in all directions before he crossed each street.

It was after ten by the time he got to Mrs. Jolsom's. May be she'll have already gone to bed, and I can leave her a note, he thought hopefully, but she opened the front door before he could put his latchkey in the lock. She was wearing an apron and drying her hands on a tea towel. "Oh, it's you, Mr. Davis," she said. "I was doing the washing up and heard someone at the door. How are you this evening?"

"Not very well, I'm afraid," he said, following her into the kitchen. "I don't know if I told you, but I came here for medical treatment. For my foot. I've been seeing Dr. Granholme in Leighton Buzzard, and I was sure he could help me, but he said he couldn't, and sent me to Dr. Evers in Newton Pagnell, and he says I'll have to have surgery, so he's sending me to Dr. Pritchard in Banbury," he said, giving the wrong villages for all three doctors in the hope that when Tensing couldn't find him, he'd conclude Mrs. Jolsom had got the names and places mixed up. "The problem is, he wants to do the surgery right away, so I can't give you the two weeks' notice you-"

"Oh, you mustn't worry yourself over that," Mrs. Jolsom said, drying a cup and saucer and putting them away in the cupboard. "I only asked for that because of the boarders from the Park going off without bothering to notify me." She folded the tea towel and hung it over the edge of the counter. "Or not coming at all, and me left holding the room for weeks. And do you know what the billeting officer said when I told him? He said he didn't know anything about it. He even denied sending the letter!"

The letter. That day in the lab, when Phipps had returned from his drop, he'd said he'd sent the letter. Could it have been the letter reserving a place to stay? But he was supposed to have come through in the summer, not the fall.

You don't know that, Mike thought. July was when the recon and prep was, not necessarily the assignment. Maybe that was why the first drop had been necessary-because of the lodging shortage and the necessity of making arrangements months in advance. And if there'd been increased slippage on his drop, Mrs. Jolsom would have been left holding the room. Which was why she had the only vacancy in Bletchley.

I should have made that connection, Mike thought.

"Do you leave in the morning, Mr. Davis?" Mrs. Jolsom was asking.

No, tonight, he started to say, and then remembered there wasn't a train to Banbury till morning. "Yes, but I need to go see Dr. Pritchard first, so I'll probably be leaving before you're up. Your boarder who didn't show up, what was his-"

The doorbell rang. Jesus, Mike thought, it's Tensing. I shouldn't have underestimated him.

Mrs. Jolsom took off her apron and went to answer it. Mike tiptoed to the kitchen door and opened it a crack. A man's voice, and Mrs. Jolsom answering him, but he couldn't make out what they were saying.

Mike heard the front door shut and moved away from the kitchen door. Mrs. Jolsom came in. "It was a young man looking for a room."

What if it was Phipps? "Did he leave?" Mike asked, then ran to the door, opened it, and looked out, but he couldn't see anyone on the blacked-out street. "What did he look like?" he asked Mrs. Jolsom, who'd followed him to the door.

"He was an older gentleman," Mrs. Jolsom said, clearly taken aback. "Why?"

"I thought it might be a patient I met yesterday at Dr. Pritchard's," Mike said, cursing himself. Talk about behaving suspiciously. "I was going to tell him I could get out tonight so he could move in. I can go to a hotel."

"I wouldn't think of doing that to you, Mr. Davis," she said, "and certainly not for someone who would come looking for a room this time of night. You stay as long as you like." She started for the stairs. "Good night."

Mike reached across and put his hand on the railing to stop her. "I just didn't want to leave you stuck with a vacant room like that boarder of yours who didn't show up-"

"Oh, you mustn't worry about that, Mr. Davis." She patted his hand. "I quite understand your needing to leave. Is it quite a serious surgery?"

If he said yes, she'd ask a bunch of worried questions, but if it wasn't serious, then why was it so urgent? And either answer would get them back to the subject of her boarder who hadn't showed up, and he had to know his name. Before the 11:10 train.

"I should imagine I'll come through all right," he said. "It's funny the billeting officer making a mistake like that. They're usually extremely efficient. You said the billeting officer said there'd been a miscommunication. Couldn't you have got the dates wrong or-"

"I most certainly did not," she said, bristling. "Miscommunication? The billeting officer wouldn't even admit he'd sent me the letter, when his signature was right there on it." She marched into the parlor and came back with a letter. "There's his name, plain as day, Captain A. R. Eddington."

She thrust the letter in Mike's face. It read, "Billeting order for Professor Gerald Phipps, arriving 10 October 1940."

You lived from day to day in the war ... you might suddenly hear that someone you were very fond of had been killed.

-FANY AMBULANCE DRIVER Dulwich-Summer 1944 FLIGHT OFFICER STEPHEN LANG TELEPHONED MARY NINETEEN times over the next two weeks. She instructed the other girls to tell him she was out on a run or fetching supplies. "Or tell him I was hit by a V-1," she said to Talbot in exasperation when he rang up for the sixteenth time. "Tell him I'm dead."

"I doubt that would stop him," Talbot said. "You do realize you're only making things worse, don't you? There's nothing a man finds so attractive as a woman who plays hard to get."

"So you think I should go out with him? Fairchild's my partner, and Stephen's her true love. She's been mad about him since she was six!"

"I'm only saying that the more you run, the more he'll pursue you."

"So what do you think I should do?"

"I've no idea."

Mary had no idea either. She obviously couldn't go out with him-just the fact that he wanted her to was killing poor Fairchild-and she didn't dare talk to him on the telephone. But he refused to take no for an answer.

"I think you should go out with him, Triumph," Parrish said, "and use the occasion to convince him Fairchild's the one he should be going out with."

Which had been a dreadful idea ever since the days of the American Pilgrims, when John Alden had attempted to persuade Priscilla Mullins to go out with Miles Standish, and Priscilla had said, "Speak for yourself, John." The last thing she needed was for Stephen to say, "Speak for yourself, Isolde."

She wondered if John Alden had been a time traveler, who'd then had no idea how to get out of the muck-up he was in. And it was a muck-up. Everyone at the post got involved, and Reed and Grenville were both furious with Mary. "I think it's positively skunky to steal another girl's man," Grenville said, and when Mary attempted to explain, she added, "Well, you must have done something."

"Look at her," Reed whispered, glancing over at Fairchild. "She's absolutely heartbroken."

She was, though she hadn't said a word of reproach to Mary. She hadn't said anything to her. She was silent on their runs, except for saying, "I need a stretcher over here!" and "This one's got internal injuries," and at the post she kept carefully out of hearing of the telephone, but she was obviously suffering. And Mary was clearly responsible for that suffering, which meant either her being here had altered events, which was impossible-historians couldn't do that-or that her coming between Fairchild and Stephen didn't matter, that they wouldn't have got together even if she hadn't been here. Because Stephen had been killed.

Of course he'd been killed. He was not only tipping V-1s but living in the middle of Bomb Alley. And hundreds of thousands of charming young men just like him had been killed at Dunkirk and El Alamein and Normandy.

But it will kill Fairchild, she thought, and was afraid it might have done exactly that. She wouldn't have been the first person in World War II to have lost someone and volunteered for dangerous duty. And Mary couldn't help feeling that if Fairchild did that, it would have been her fault, that both their deaths would be on her head. If she hadn't been here and pushed Talbot into the gutter, Talbot wouldn't have wrenched her knee. She wouldn't have had to substitute for her, and Stephen would never have come to the post.

Or perhaps he would have. Perhaps he'd have asked Talbot out to dinner, and exactly the same thing would have happened, with Talbot the villain. Or perhaps Talbot would have gone to that dance they never got to and met a GI who promised her nylons, and he'd made a date with Talbot for that day, and she'd asked Fairchild to drive to Hendon in her place. And she and Stephen had fallen in love on the way to London, and they'd have had a wartime wedding and lived happily ever after.

Fairchild could just as easily have driven him through Golders Green or down Tottenham Court Road and they'd both have been killed, Mary told herself. And either way, you can't change the outcome. If you could have, the net wouldn't have let you come through.

But just because historians couldn't affect events didn't mean they should intentionally create problems, so she made certain she was unavailable when Stephen rang up, spent her off-duty time away from the post, and volunteered to go after the supplies the Major constantly wangled out of other posts, hoping Stephen would get bored and turn his attentions to Fairchild, where they belonged.

But he continued to ring her up. Fairchild looked more and more wan, and nothing, not even the arrival of a new ambulance-which the Major had managed against all odds to talk HQ out of-stopped the FANYs from discussing "poor Fairchild."

And on the first of September, the Major made it worse by issuing a new duty roster on which she and Fairchild were no longer partnered, leading to endless speculation over whether she or Fairchild had asked for the change.

Mary was almost grateful when the V-2 attacks began in September. It gave them all something else to think about, and it gave Stephen's squadron a new challenge. His calls became less frequent and then ceased as the RAF wrestled with the problem of how to stop these new, much more deadly attacks.

Even Spitfires had no chance of catching up to the V-2s-they flew at nearly four thousand miles an hour, which was faster than the speed of sound, and took only four seconds to reach their target. As a result, there was no siren or warning rattle. The only sound they made was a sonic boom, and if one heard that, one had already survived the explosion.

The rockets struck out of nowhere, and it was amazing just how terrifying that was. Even the unflappable FANYs began staying indoors and stealing surreptitious glances at the sky when they were on a run. Sutcliffe-Hythe moved all her belongings down to the cellar, and Parrish told a GI who wanted to take her to a jitterbugging contest that she had to stay in and wash her hair.

On the way home from a run one morning, they saw a group of children with suitcases and with pasteboard tags around their necks being loaded onto buses. "What's happening?" Mary asked.

"They're being evacuated to the north," Camberley explained, "out of range."

Reed said wistfully, "I wish I could go with them."

The damage from the V-2s was terrifying, too. Instead of smashed houses, there were entire flattened areas, so obliterated it was impossible to tell what had been there. The number of victims taken away from incidents in mortuary vans went up sharply, and so did the number who died en route to hospital. Some casualties simply vanished, vaporized by two thousand pounds of explosives. And the things the FANYs saw at the sites became markedly more grisly and unspeakable.

But within the month they'd adjusted to the V-2s and invented a new-and totally spurious-mythology regarding them. "They never land where any other rocket's hit," Maitland pronounced, "because of the magnetism. So we're perfectly safe while we're at the incident. The trick is in getting there."

But they had that covered as well. "They never come till an hour after the first V-1 volley of the day," Sutcliffe-Hythe said, and Talbot reported that one of her beaus at the motor pool had told her the V-2 motor wouldn't work when it got cold, so the number would be less as winter approached-neither of which was true. But it made it possible for the FANYs to face sleeping and working and driving to incidents every day, knowing they might be blown to bits at any moment.

And by the time another fortnight had passed, they were back to discussing clothes-Mary's blue organdy had got a tear in the skirt, and there was a debate over whether to mend the sheer cloth or take out an entire width-and men. Sutcliffe-Hythe had met an American sailor from Brooklyn named Jerry Wojeiuk, and Parrish had broken it off with Dickie.

Unfortunately, they also went back to discussing "poor Fairchild." "Perhaps you could get engaged to someone else," Reed suggested to Mary when Stephen began telephoning again.

"Or married," Maitland put in-suggestions which were so ridiculous that it was a relief when Talbot came in and said the Major wanted her to drive to Streatham to pick up bandages.

"I suppose I've got to drive Bela Lugosi," Mary said.

"No, it's in the shop. And Reed's not back yet. She had to drive the Octopus to Tangmere. Your luck is in. You get to drive the new ambulance. Camberley's going with you. I'll tell her to meet you in the garage."

But when the passenger door opened, it was Fairchild who got in. "Camberley's feeling under the weather. She asked me to fill in for her," she told Mary, and sat silently as Mary pulled out of the garage and set off for Streatham. She wondered if she should try one more time to explain about Stephen, but she was afraid she'd only make things worse.

Streatham couldn't give them any lint or bandages. "We're nearly out ourselves. Those horrid V-2s," the FANY at the post told them. "I'm going to have to send you to Croydon for them."

Croydon? Croydon had been hit by more rockets than any other borough, and it was outside the area Mary'd memorized. "Couldn't we get them from Norbury?" she asked. "It would be a good deal closer."

The officer shook her head. "They're worse off than we are. I've telephoned, and Croydon said they'd have them ready for you so you won't need to wait."

Well, that was something, and no ambulance post had been hit in 1944. Which didn't help as far as the way there and back were concerned. I'll just have to drive very fast and hope the Germans aren't paying attention to British Intelligence tonight.

At least she didn't have to worry about Fairchild's talking distracting her-she sat stonily silent. And Mary had no attention to spare for conversation. She had all she could do to find the post in the blanketing darkness. The FANYs would have a dreadful time dealing with their incidents tonight. There was no moon at all and a heavy October mist that seemed to swallow up the headlamps. She couldn't see a thing.

It took her over an hour to find the post in Croydon, and then the FANY on duty couldn't find the supplies. "I know they were set aside," she said vaguely, and looked all over while the sirens went three separate times. She finally had to box up more lint and bandages and make Mary fill up a different requisition form.

By the time she'd finished, Fairchild was in the ambulance in the driver's seat. Mary considered telling her she should drive because she knew the way, but the set look on Fairchild's face made her decide not to. They'd only waste more time in arguing, and she wanted to get out of there before the sirens went again.

She climbed in the passenger side, and Fairchild drove along Croydon's blacked-out high street and turned onto the road to Dulwich. Good, Mary thought. In another ten minutes we'll be safely back inside the area I've memorized.

Fairchild pulled the ambulance over to the side of the road and stopped. "What are you doing?" Mary asked.

Fairchild switched off the ignition and pulled on the hand brake. "I lied about Camberley," she said. "I was the one who asked to change shifts so I could come with you. I needed to talk to you, Mary." Mary. Not Triumph or DeHavilland or even Kent. "That is, if you're still speaking to me." Fairchild's voice faltered. "After the beastly way I've behaved to you. Are you?"

It was too dark to see her face, but Mary could hear the anxiety in her voice. "Of course I am," she said. "You haven't been beastly, and I wouldn't blame you if you had been. But can't we discuss this when we get home?" Or at least inside the area where she'd memorized the rockets?

"No," Fairchild said. "This can't wait. Yesterday Maitland and I pulled a thirteen-year-old boy out of the wreckage of his house in Ulvers-croft Road. It was a V-2. His mother was killed. Direct hit, nothing left of her at all. The boy kept sobbing that he'd been angry with her for making him sleep in the Anderson, and he had to tell her he was sorry he'd called her an old cow. It was dreadful watching him, and I began thinking about how either of us might be killed at any moment, too, and how important it is to mend things before it's too late."

"There's nothing to mend," Mary said. "Let's at least go somewhere warmer to talk. There's a Lyons in Norbury. We'll have a cup of tea-"

"Not till I've told you how sorry I am for the way I've been acting. It's not your fault that Stephen fell in love with you and not me-"

"He's not in love with me. He's only interested because I represent a challenge by refusing to go out with him."

"But that's what I wanted to tell you. You should go out with him. I'd much rather he was in love with you than Talbot or someone else who might hurt him."