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Intelligence. This achievement by Hermia—unique for a woman—had won her promotion to head of the Denmark desk.
    The package contained some of the fruits of her foresight. There was a batch of reports, already decrypted for her by the code room, on German military dispositions in Denmark: army bases on the central island of Fyn; naval traffic in the Kattegat, the sea that separated Denmark from Sweden; and the names of senior German officers in Copenhagen.
    Also in the package was a copy of an underground newspaper called Reality. The underground press was, so far, the only sign of resistance to the Nazis in Denmark. She glanced through it, reading an indignant article which claimed there was a shortage of butter because all of it was sent to Germany.
    The package had been smuggled out of Denmark to a go-between in Sweden, who passed it to the MI6 man at the British Legation in Stockholm. With the package was a note from the go-between saying he had also passed a copy of Reality to the Reuters wire service in Stockholm. Hermia frowned at that. On the surface, it seemed a good idea to publicize news of conditions under the occupation, but she did not like agents mixing espionage with other work. Resistance action could attract the attention of the authorities to a spy who might otherwise work unnoticed for years.
    Thinking about the Nightwatchmen reminded her painfully of her fiancé. Arne was not one of the group. His character was all wrong. She loved him for his careless joie de vivre. He made her relax, especially in bed.But a happy-go-lucky man with no head for mundane detail was not the type for secret work. In her more honest moments, she admitted to herself that she was not sure he had the courage. He was a daredevil on the ski slopes—they had met on a Norwegian mountain, where Arne had been the only skier more proficient than Hermia—but she was not sure how he would face the more subtle terrors of undercover operations.
    She had considered trying to send him a message via the Nightwatchmen. Poul Kirke worked at the flying school, and if Arne was still there they must see one another every day. It would have been shamefully unprofessional to use the spy network for a personal communication, but that did not stop her. She would have been found out for sure, because her messages had to be encrypted by the code room, but even that might not have deterred her. It was the danger to Arne that held her back. Secret messages could fall into enemy hands. The ciphers used by MI6 were unsophisticated poem codes left over from peacetime, and could be broken easily. If Arne’s name appeared in a message from British intelligence to Danish spies, he would probably lose his life. Hermia’s inquiry about him could turn into his death warrant. So she sat in her boot room with acid anxiety burning inside her.
    She composed a message to the Swedish go-between, telling him to keep out of the propaganda war and stick to his job as courier. Then she typed a report to her boss containing all the military information in the package, with carbon copies to other departments.
    At four o’clock she left. She had more work to do, and she would return for a couple of hours this evening, but now she had to meet her mother for tea.
    Margaret Mount lived in a small house in Chelsea. After Hermia’s father had died of cancer in his late forties, her mother had set up home with an unmarried school friend, Elizabeth. They called each other Mags and Bets, their adolescent nicknames. Today the two had come by train to Bletchley to inspect Hermia’s lodgings.
    She walked quickly through the village to the street where she rented a room. She found Mags and Bets in the parlor talking to her landlady, Mrs. Bevan. Hermia’s mother was wearing her ambulance driver’s uniform, with trousers and a cap. Bets was a pretty woman of fifty in a flowered dresswith short sleeves. Hermia hugged her mother and gave Bets a