It was a strange thing to say to a virtual stranger rather than someone known intimately for years; but then, he was not sure exactly when she had slipped her arm in his, or when they had begun to walk in step, their bodies close.

‘I’m just responding to the exotic feel of the place,’ he said. ‘Does an exotic feel sound good to you?’

‘Bad boy.’ She pulled her elbow in to squeeze his arm. ‘Very bad boy.’

In slow synchrony, they walked on. Pace by pace, Roger felt ever closer to her. Eventually, at the high intersection of seven main halls, she stopped and took his hand.

‘That one,’ she said, ‘is Vertebral Longway, which runs along most of Barbour’s longitudinal axis. The smaller one, over there, leads to where I live.’

Roger swallowed warm saliva.

‘The smaller one, then,’ he said.

Her smile promised softness and abandon.

‘Good,’ she said.

Once inside her apartment, she cupped his face in her hands, then pressed herself against him as they kissed in an explosion of warmth. Then she was clasping his groin, and his excitement leapt, strong and furious.

Incredible.

They kissed and ran their hands over each other. He unfastened her clothing, revealed a sweet breast – she moaned at his light touch – then took her cherry nipple in his mouth.

‘Oh. Oh.’

Finally, she stepped back from him.

‘We don’t …’ she stopped. ‘We’ve only just … It’s fast. I don’t want to rush you.’

‘Whew.’ His exhalation was shaky. ‘Yes. Fast.’

They stared at each other, she with her beautiful breast still exposed.

He had no words.

So beautiful.

He undid his clothing to the waist. Leeja said nothing.

Then they were tangled in each other, pulling clothes, licking and caressing, using their whole bodies as instruments of pleasure, lost together in the maelstrom of warmth and lust, of freedom and love, enjoying each other in a way that seemed as new to her as to him.

The crescendo of orgasm was merely a beginning.

TEN

EARTH, 1941 AD

The Victorian manor house at Bletchley Park was everything it should be. Around the extended grounds, huts were being painted. Gavriela understood, from her briefing with Rupert, that there were eight thousand people stationed on site, and more arriving by the day; yet the place had the air of an underpopulated school for the privileged élite, however plain the huts, however great the contrast with the lustrous panelling inside the house.

Not that she expected to be working in here. Codebreakers kept to the huts. What surprised Gavriela was the number of women: fully half the figures in civilian clothing, along with the majority of the uniformed staff: WRENs fighting the war to as much effect (if less danger) than their husbands and lovers overseas.

On the other side of the ornamental pond, a serious-faced man ran past, dressed in vest and shorts, his eyes intent.

‘That’s AMT,’ said a young WREN beside Gavriela. ‘Turing, right? Last week, he ran from here to London for a meeting.’

‘But that’s’ – Gavriela did the conversion from kilometres – ‘forty miles, isn’t it?’

‘What I mean, he’s nuts.’ She grinned. ‘One of the real geniuses, I reckon. I’m Rosie.’

‘Gabby.’ She was still using the cover name that Rupert had given her. ‘Gabby Woods.’

Rosie’s handshake was straightforward and strong.

‘I guess you’re one of the boffins, then,’ she said. ‘Nice that it’s not only blokes, don’t you reckon?’

‘Just what I was thinking,’ said Gavriela.

‘It’s mostly us girls. But they’re nearly all posh, like. Cheltenham Ladies’ College kind of people.’

‘Oh.’

The Received English of the educated classes was something like Hochdeutsch in its crispness; but there was a whole dimension of the language orthogonal to locality that Gavriela was still getting to grips with.

‘Anyway, Frank will see you now. He’s nice.’

‘Oh,’ said Gavriela again. ‘I hadn’t realized you were here to fetch me.’

‘This way.’

Rosie’s heels clacked Morse code-like along parquet flooring – dot-dash, dot-dash – as she led the way to an unlabelled door, knocked, opened, stood aside. She winked.

As Gavriela went in, a long figure unfolded from a chair, and held out his bony hand to shake.

‘Frank Longfield-Jones,’ he said. ‘Pleased to meet you, and do call me Frank.’

‘I’m Gabby Woods.’

‘Of course you are, dear girl. Now sit down, please, and when Rosie brings the tea and biscuits – ah, there we are.’

He took a small tray off Rosie, who closed the door. Then he handed a cup to Gavriela, took one for himself, and sat back. It was a ritual designed to settle her nerves. With surprise, Gavriela realized it was working.

‘Welcome to Station X.’ Frank’s grin spread his moustache. ‘Lovely name, but we’re the Government Codes and Ciphers School, if you want to know the organization you’re working for. Well done on the crossword, by the way.’

‘Sir? Oh. When I can do the same for The Times, then I’ll be happy.’

Her initial interview included attempting a crossword taken, she assumed, from one of the better German newspapers before the war. It had taken her eight minutes and twenty-seven seconds to complete.

‘Right now,’ said Frank, ‘it’s your facility with technical German, particularly with respect to physics, that’s useful. You’ll find we’re mostly linguists and mathematicians, and some who are both, along with some rather eccentric polymaths.’

If an Englishman was calling his colleagues eccentric, they must be odd.

‘Gabby Woods is a cover name,’ he said. ‘Have I got that right?’

He crossed his narrow legs, in what Gavriela had come to recognize as the languid pose of the public schoolboy.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘My real name is—’

‘No, no, old thing. I don’t need to know that. My point is, most of us are using our real names as worknames, but not everybody. Part of the subterfuge is to pretend that all names used here are real. Do you get my point?’

‘It’s secret work. I understand that. I’m here to learn about codes?’

‘Our organization name, GC & CS, is rather, what, disingenuous. You’ll find we’re not exactly a school, and the work we’re doing is the most important in the war. That’s not just my opinion – it’s his.’

Frank gestured to a photograph of Winston Churchill on the wall.

‘Incidentally,’ Frank went on, ‘our name is due to change by the year’s end. We will then be known as GCHQ, that’s Government Communications Headquarters. Rather more of a give-away, but never mind.’

The point of secret war work was that everything was covert. Throughout her recruitment, which had started with Rupert Forrester chatting to her over sherry in an Oxford pub, she had gained no clues as to the nature of the job they wanted her to do.

‘I’m still not sure of my role,’ she said.

‘That’s rather a good thing, don’t you think?’ Frank’s smile showed longish, tobacco-stained teeth. ‘Our victories are private, you see. Everything we do, it’s just among ourselves.’

‘I don’t feel the need to share things with people.’

‘No, we gathered as much. That makes you ideal. There aren’t many actual Germans here, by the way, though some of German parentage, and rather too many Frenchmen.’

‘The Nazis took my parents and killed them. At least’ – this was hard to say – ‘I hope they’re dead.’

‘I’m very sorry.’

‘My brother moved to Amsterdam to get away from the regime. I don’t know what happened to him.’

It went without saying that Erik had not travelled far enough. The Wehrmacht had rolled over the Netherlands like an avalanche, a vicious cascade, burying resistance.

‘Your loyalty to England, or at least hatred of that fidget Herr Hitler,’ said Frank, ‘is beyond question, or you wouldn’t be here. Now, what I’m about to tell you must sink in, do you understand?’