A sudden bleeping from the transmitter cut across my thoughts. Merle frowned as she scribbled down the characters.
“What is it?”
“That prefix I was telling you about.” She was still writing as she spoke. “It’s from Team Felix. There must have been a raid.”
I thought of Miranda and the men I’d last seen disappearing into the sand dunes. I didn’t know which of the Resistance groups they’d joined. Would any of them have been caught up in the attack? I wondered if Merle would have any way of finding out.
“What will you do?” I asked.
“Send a message back—something completely neutral that won’t alert the Germans to the fact we know what’s happened.” She bit the end of the pencil in her hand. “I hope to God they haven’t got their hands on the codebooks. If they have, we won’t be able to communicate with anyone until we can get a new set out to France.”
“You’d have to start from scratch? With new codes?”
“Yes.”
The machine began to bleep again. Merle’s pencil flew to the pad of paper. She was standing on the other side of the desk from me. I could read what she was writing down, even though it was upside down. The message said: “C’est la saison des vendanges.”
“It’s time to harvest the grapes?” I glanced up at her, uncomprehending.
She blew out a breath. “That means the books are safe. The Germans will only get the radio.”
“And the operator?”
“Yes.” She looked away. Clearly this was something she’d had to learn to deal with—the trauma of knowing that the message she’d just written down was probably the last thing the person sending it would do before they were executed.
On the third evening I was on my own. Merle’s mood had been gloomy as she’d prepared me for my shift. Details had come through of two more raids on Resistance houses in Brittany. That meant that three of the precious transmitters we’d delivered to France had been taken in the space of a fortnight. Far worse was the news that six people had been killed during the attacks and two were missing, probably being held prisoner.
Five of those killed were local people, Bretons who had put their lives on the line by joining the Resistance. One of them was a woman—a teacher, Merle told me, who was only twenty-three years old. One of our own agents had died. Miranda was one of the two who were missing.
“Do you think she’s been arrested?” I knew I shouldn’t ask, that the answer was likely to haunt my dreams, but I couldn’t help myself.
“That’s the most likely explanation. They’ve probably sent her to one of the prison camps.” Merle was fiddling with the handset, not looking at me.
“But she could have escaped, couldn’t she? The Germans might not have realized she’s one of ours.”
“That’s possible.” Merle nodded. “There have been agents who have escaped.”
“But you don’t think it’s likely?”
“I think it’ll be a miracle if she’s still alive. The agents know what’s in store for them if they’re captured. They probably didn’t tell you—they’re given suicide pills, concealed in their clothes.”
I thought of Miranda, laughing as she’d told me about the childhood visits to her father’s patients putting her off a career in medicine. She’d looked so young.
Please, God, don’t let her be dead, or in any kind of pain.
In the light of what Merle had said, it seemed a forlorn prayer.
“I have to go now.” Merle put down the handset. “You’ll be all right, won’t you?”
During my first week I didn’t move more than a few inches from the transmitter. I was terrified of missing something, or of not getting a message down fast enough. But as the days went on, I became more confident. The situation in Brittany seemed to have calmed down somewhat. There was no more news of raids—most of the messages I received were about ammunition supplies or possible sites for airdrops. Each time the machine bleeped into life, I hoped for word of the missing agent Miranda. But no one I communicated with had any idea what had become of her.
The next Monday, Merle wanted me to do a double shift. “I wouldn’t ask,” she said, “but it’s the Cuckoo Feast.”
I looked up from the machine, mystified. “What’s that?”
“A festival they have in the village every year,” she replied. “It goes back to the Middle Ages.”