No Dawn for Men by James Lepore Page B

in Fleming had kept him from denouncing Billie as a fool for ever trusting her so-called college friend. Now he was doubly glad he had kept his counsel. The shocked look on her beautiful face reminded him of just how much a child she was, a child thrown against her will into a pit of vipers, one of whom she felt surely was her friend. Perhaps her eyes were now opening.
    “My dear Billie,” Fleming said, finally, “I envy your naïveté. I respect it, actually. There is a purity to it, a goodness that is rare in this world. But the Nazis have taken Austria, the Sudetenland, and made them into police states just as they have of Germany. Do you think Goering, Himmler, Goebbels and their ilk are patriots? No, far from it. They are indulging in personal fetishes and amassing fortunes, while gleefully enacting Hitler’s insane policies.”
    “And Kurt?” Billie said. “You believe he is one of them?”
    “Yes.”
    “It can’t be . . .”
    “He’s a Nazi through and through.”
    “Ian . . .”
    “I’m sorry.”
    More silence, while Billie composed herself, pulled her face into a sort of mask of acceptance. Fleming’s heart melted at this effort of hers.
    “I’ll light a fire,” Billie said at length, her voice low, close to a whisper. “It’s cold up here.”
    “Good idea,” Ian said. “While you’re doing that I have something to attend to.”
    Fleming had assumed that Himmler’s SS would be out in force looking for the Shroeder party, that Kurt Bauer was a liar and had played Billie for a fool. He had therefore insisted, despite Billie’s plea for speed, that they travel south via back roads. It would not do for the Nazis to intercept a car containing Franz Shroeder’s daughter and an English reporter heading toward Deggendorf. It had taken them almost eight hours as opposed to the five or six the trip south normally took, but he had been right. If troops were at the abbey, they were also covering the main roads and railroad stations along the way.
    Putting these thoughts aside, the Englishman reached for the small canvas duffle bag he had lugged with him from Berlin and pulled out the two-way backpack radio that Bletchley had had made for him specially and that Hans the bartender had delivered to his room at the Adlon just before he and Billie had headed south. He could hear Billie’s movements behind him and the crackling of the kindling that their ruddy-faced innkeeper had left in the room’s large stone fireplace for them. The attic room, which Ian had specifically asked for, was cold, but soon it would be warm, at least in the vicinity of the fireplace.
    He lifted the heavy radio by its side handles and set it down in the middle of the small room. Then he pulled up the antenna and set the frequency selector to random. Hans had said that the dry cell battery, which made the bloody thing so heavy, was fresh, but had packed him an extra one anyway. They last only thirty minutes or so at the most, his lab trainer at Bletchley had told him, so make the most of your time. When the neon indicator turns red, change the battery. Otherwise, just push the on switch, and speak your caller ID into the handset.
    “What are you doing?” Billie asked.
    Fleming had lifted the handset, but not turned the radio on. The moment has come, he said to himself.
    “Frequency hopping,” he said.
    “Frequency hopping?” Billie was eyeing the radio like it was something that had landed in the room from outer space.
    “Yes,” Fleming said. “Do you know Hedy Lamarr?”
    Silence. Then, “Do you ?”
    “I do, in fact. I met her in Paris in the spring. She was going through a divorce at the time.”
    “Ian . . . What is that machine?”
    “It’s a two-way radio. Half-duplex, point-to-point.”
    “What in the world . . . ?”
    “It’s a long story, Billie. I’m going to get us help.”
    “But won’t the Nazis be listening? I understand they monitor all of the frequencies all of the