D-Notice Bill Walker (online e book reading txt) 📖

With one last look to see that everything was back in its proper place, the boy scampered down the stairs, leaving the ghost of his father and his unanswered questions behind.

THE FATHER: 1941

Chapter Two

Michael Thorley slipped the heavy Bakelite headphones from his ears, feeling the rush of cooler air play across his lobes, making them tingle like the jab of a thousand tiny needles. He sighed, rubbed his tired, burning eyes with the thumb and forefinger of one hand while the other, holding a pencil, completed the translation in swift short strokes.

He’d just spent the last eight hours glued to an obscure radio station in Upper Silesia listening to farm reports droned in a stentorian monotone extolling the latest wheat and potato harvests. And it was up to him to take down every blasted word. Now that the farm reports had ended, the station would play Wagner’s Ring Cycle opera for the rest of the evening—all eight hours of it. It was time to pack it in.

Disgusted, Thorley threw the pencil onto the table next to the receiver and scanned the room through the omnipresent haze of tobacco smoke, wondering just what he’d done to deserve this stygian fate.

Barely ten by ten, with cracked, yellowed plaster and mahogany wainscoting scarred by years of neglect, the “Radio Room” was a rabbit warren squirreled away in the northeast corner of the Foreign Office building. It was home to five other men, each with his own receiver and headphones, listening intently while scribbling away on a pad of what they laughingly called paper: unlined straw-colored foolscap, hole-punched on one edge.

The irony was that no more than five stories below him lay the busiest address in London. At all hours of the day, one could get a bird’s-eye view of history being made down there at Number 10 Downing Street, where Churchill and his cabinet constantly came and went, busily conducting the war.

And here he was listening to blather. What he wouldn’t give to sit in just one of those meetings.

Snapping out of his reverie, Thorley mentally transformed the loops and whorls of the Pitman shorthand into the King’s English.

Boring. It was all so bloody boring he wanted to scream. And yet it was vital. His superiors—the old men who dressed in tweeds or expensive Savile Row suits and spoke of gardens and pheasant hunting in the measured tones of Oxford and Cambridge—wanted to know every detail of the German harvest. How better to know the state of the enemy’s fighting man, than to know if he was going to have a full belly the following winter. And there was the rub.

It was vitally important, yet utterly without challenge. A second-year language student could have done the work, but not without the airtight security clearance Thorley possessed. And then again, someone had to listen to all the minutiae, the drivel that came out of Hitler’s Third Reich, for amongst the dross might lay that inestimable pearl of truth that would mean the difference between victory...or utter disaster.

Shaking his head, Thorley gathered up the last of his translations.

“You all right, Michael?”

Thorley looked up and saw that the man next to him had his headphones off and was gazing at him with an expression consisting of equal parts concern and curiosity.

Cursed with a head of blazing red hair and a mass of freckles that covered every inch of his gangling six-foot frame, Roger Hornsby had the look of an innocent schoolboy. It was a look that engendered immediate trust, and had, on more than one occasion, engendered members of the opposite sex right into bed.

“I’m sorry, did you say something?” Michael asked, frowning at something on his pad. He erased one of the characters and replaced it with one very similar, then glanced at Roger.

Roger lifted a ginger eyebrow, his face splitting into a wry grin. “I asked you if you were all right. You look a bit knackered.”

Thorley nodded and stood, grabbing up his foolscap. “That’s the word for it,” he said, placing the headphones on the chair for the next listener. “I’ve bloody well had it.”

“Then Dr. Roger suggests that we raise a pint or two across the way. My treat.”

“Now that is an occasion,” Michael said, smiling for the first time. “Unfortunately, I must miss that epochal moment. Lillian’s making a bit of tinned beef this evening.”

“Good Lord, where on earth did she scare that up?”

Michael shrugged his narrow shoulders, the glint of humor still in his eyes. “She won’t say. Claims it’s a state secret.”

“My missus is always prattling on about such things, too. Ah, well, to wives and secrets, then,” Roger said, hoisting an imaginary glass. “I suppose now I’ll have to find some female companionship, instead of your sterling company.”

Michael laughed. “You’re a rotter, Hornsby, a real rotter.”

“Count on it, old boy,” Roger said, a sly grin crinkling the corners of his eyes.

Michael nodded to the others, grabbed his Trilby hat and gas mask box off the coat stand, and walked down the narrow hall until he reached the typists’ room, where he handed off his sheaf of papers to an owlish girl with milk-bottle glasses. “Just the usual,” he said.

The girl shrugged, placed the papers on the table next to her and immediately began clacking away on her Underwood, her expression one of grim determination.

From the typists’ room, Thorley took the stairs to the ground floor and was almost out the door when one of the Wrens came running. “Mr. Thorley, sir, please wait!”

Thorley turned, reluctantly. “Yes?”

The girl, a young slip of a thing with a mousy brown pageboy and bright red lipstick, thrust an envelope into his hands. Thorley started to shove it into his coat pocket.

“I’m sorry, sir, but you’re to read it