The Prisoner in the Castle

by Susan Elia MacNeal

Nothing but static.

  “Mayday,” she called again desperately. Then, “Scarra out.”

  Sayid stood in the doorway, carrying two axes. Maggie drew in her breath; but he merely handed one to her. “You take care of this radio,” he told her, swinging the other over his shoulder. “And I’ll take care of the one on the boat.”

  * * *

  —

  Under cover of rain and darkness, a figure wearing a mackintosh and carrying a flashlight made its way down the dock. It jumped onto the fishing boat, lashed by icy rain. Dripping water, the shadow slipped inside the wheelhouse, moving to the instrument panels and controls, finding the vessel’s radio. The figure swayed. Even though the boat was moored, the water was turbulent, making balance difficult. Hail struck the windows like thrown pebbles. The gloved hand flipped on several switches and the device hummed to life, the lights blinking on. The hand experimented with the dials, trying to pick up a signal. The set buzzed with static, then crackled.

  There were charts rolled into tubes stored below the navigation table. Using the flashlight, the person took the maps out, seeking precise coordinates. Letting the maps fall to the floor, the figure grabbed hold of the wooden steering wheel with one hand for balance, while the other switched on the radio, twisting the dials and turning the volume all the way up.

  The individual continued to explore the airwaves, picking up a few faint messages, trying to tune to the frequency of the German U-boat that was patrolling the Irish Sea and listening in. A sigh of relief—the set was in working order. Once again, the fingers flipped the switch back to Transmit. “Come in, Ulster Lady. Come in. Over,” a voice said. Nothing. Another try. “Come in, Ulster Lady. This is Petrus.”

  Nothing. Then a crackle of static and a faint Come in, Petrus. This is Ulster Lady, over.

  “I need a pickup. Coordinates are latitude 57° 00' 50" north and longitude minus 6° 13' 20" west. Over.”

  Copy that. You’re asking for a pickup at latitude 57° 00' 50" north and longitude minus 6° 13' 20" west. There was a long hiss and more static. When? Over.

  “As soon as the storm breaks. Based on a trip of nine kilometers to the pickup point and a speed of eight to twelve knots, I will leave an hour prior to pickup. Estimated window, between seventeen and nineteen hundred hours. Over.”

  Estimated pickup window between seventeen and nineteen hundred hours. Over.

  “Correct. Over.”

  Copy, Petrus. Out.

  Smiling, the figure picked up the ax from the floor and smashed the radio.

  * * *

  —

  Oberleutnant zur See Haupt Alaric Weber, U-135’s intelligence officer, put the microphone down. He was on the bridge of the submarine, a claustrophobic, dank metal tube bristling with pipes, dials, and glowing red buttons. A sign above his head warned, HEISS! BITTE NICHT BERÜHREN! Hot! Do Not Touch!

  A faint haze had settled within the boat, causing his face to shine; at periscope depth, everything was slick with condensation. The air was low in oxygen, causing mental slowness, making it hard for cuts to heal and difficult to light cigarettes.

  And then there was the smell. There was little water available for bathing, and most of the crew showered only every ten days or so. Laundry was out of the question. The result was a unique odor, a stew of sweat, diesel fuel, cigarette smoke, hydraulic fluid, cooking oil, and sewage. The constant humidity allowed mold and mildew to fester throughout the boat, as well as large cockroaches the crew could never quite seem to eradicate.

  Weber looked up and caught the captain’s eye as he walked into the control room. “It’s our ghost, Herr Kaleu,” the intelligence officer said, using the diminutive form of Kapitänleutnant, as tradition dictated. “Has something important. Wants a pickup.”

  Weber was one of Admiral Canaris’s Abwehr agents, working for the German military intelligence service. He was bald, with a fringe of dark hair over his ears, and angled eyebrows that always conveyed an expression of surprise. He was a Berliner, but a surprisingly silent one, preferring to read Thomas Mann rather than play cards with the others. Worse, he seemed to have no bad habits, not smoking, drinking, or using profanity, unusual on a submarine. Underneath those comically slanted eyebrows, Weber’s actual expression rarely changed from guarded.

  “And where is our ghost, Herr Weber?” Kapitänleutnant Ferdinand von Siemens was short, golden-haired, aristocratic in accent and bearing, and sported a signet pinkie ring. He was also short-tempered, foulmouthed, and feared by his crew. He had once been handsome, but now modeled the same sunken eyes, gray pallor, and unkempt beard as his fellow submariners.

  “Off the west coast of Scotland, sir.” Weber rattled off the coordinates. “Wants a pickup between seventeen hundred hours and nineteen hundred hours.”

  “Weather?”

  “There’s a bad storm there now. It’s expected to blow over just around the time of the requested pickup.”

  “All right, let’s head in closer to shore in preparation, Schäffler,” the Kapitänleutnant ordered.

  “Aye, sir.” First Officer Kurt Schäffler was a round-faced, green-eyed Bavarian, with an easygoing manner that made him a favorite among the crew.

  “We’ll come fifteen kilometers from the pickup point and circle, Schäffler.”

  “Yes, sir.” There was disappointment in the first officer’s voice. Schäffler found their assignment, waiting for one of Admiral Canaris’s spies, uninteresting and would rather have been hunting down Allied ships in wolf packs with his fellow submariners. Still, there was an upside to coming in so close to the Scottish islands. “Sir…”

  “What is it?” The Kapitänleutnant picked up the weather report.

  “There are sheep on those islands, sir.”

  He continued reading. “Mmm?”

  “Sheep are good to eat,” Schäffler continued. “Perhaps while we’re waiting for our spy, we could go to one of the deserted islands and pick up a sheep or two? Roast mutton—now that would make a nice change from all the canned rations…”

  “Schäffler, the weather’s execrable. Far too rough for a rubber raft to get to shore,” the Kapitänleutnant barked. “I will not jeopardize the safety of my crew, not even for mutton. No. Sheep.”

  The first officer’s eyes registered deep disappointment. “Aye, sir.”

  Weber turned back to the transmitter. “I’m sending a message to Canaris.” He composed the message, encoded it on the Enigma machine, then sent it via Morse code, using special Abwehr settings. The message would go first through BdU, the Kriegsmarine headquarters in northern France, then to the Abwehr radio center near Hamburg, then to Canaris’s office in Berlin. “Telling him we’ll pick up his agent tomorrow. I’ll leave out the bit about the sheep.”

  * * *

  —

  “You look like Mickey Mouse,” Malcolm Miller told his partner, Howard Grant. Miller was a retired engineer from Edinburgh. The two men hunched over a receiver and radio direction finder in the back of an unmarked truck with four tall vertical antennae. They were pulled over on the shoulder of a deserted dirt road on the west coast of Scotland, not far from Fort William. The mobile voluntary interceptor was just one of many requested by Frain to augment the specificity of the directional finding stations and locate the transmission to the U-boat.

  “Mickey what?” grumbled Grant. He, too, was retired, a former surgeon from Aberdeen. He was also an amateur radio enthusiast, in addition to being a breeder of lavender point Siamese cats. He had a beaky, prominent nose, and his neck was wrapped in a chunky hand-knit scarf. “What do you mean?”

  Miller, the green lights of the control panel shining on his bald and sun-spotted head, spun the dial to scan through target frequencies. “You mean who—and I’m saying you do. Look like Mickey Mouse, that is. The cartoon,” he explained. “Your headphones are like mouse ears.”

&
nbsp; Grant was not amused. “I’m doing serious work here!”

  “Right, right. Of course you are.”

  “Wait!” Grant put his hands to the offending earphones.

  Miller raised his shaggy eyebrows. “What is it?”

  “Just a plane.” Grant took off the headset. “Oi, my ears hurt. I have cauliflower ears.”

  “Mouse ears.” Miller rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Cauliflower brains, more likely.”

  “Well, you, my friend, have something else for brains, something I won’t say,” Grant said, taking a swig from his mug of cold tea. Then, in milder tones: “Not bad work, really. Though I’d rather be a young man on the front lines.”

  “I was in the Great War, in the trenches. I’ve already done my duty,” Miller countered. “Happy with this little operation to do my bit. Even though I doubt we’ll ever hear anything.”

  “Well, they must suspect something, don’t you think? Otherwise, why are we here?”

  Miller rummaged through a rucksack and found a knit cap, slipping it over his bald head. “At least it gets me away from the missus for a night or two.”

  As the pair slumped to wait in silence, a rapid beeping began, indicating the signal was active. “Yes!” Grant exclaimed. He put the headphones on again and listened intently, dictating numbers to Miller. They already had information from two other stations. With three geographically dispersed stations receiving the same signal call, they could chart the location.

  Miller whistled through his teeth. “It triangulates perfectly.”

  Grant pulled at the map. “Let me see.” The pencil marks indicated the source of the radio transmission somewhere in the inner Hebrides. “Where the hell is that?”

  Miller squinted down. “Says ‘Isle of Scarra.’ ” He looked up and grinned at his partner. “Guess that those mouse ears are good for something after all.”

  * * *

  —

  From the windows of the train from Euston Station, David watched the dark slate sky change to pale gray as dawn broke and the orange sun rose. His destination was Watts Park, about half a mile southeast of the village of Hanslope in the Borough of Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire. Once a great house built by a textile fortune heir, Watts Park was now commandeered by the British government and used for the storage of war-related documents.

  From the train station, he walked the half mile to the house, his brogues crunching on the gravel of the sweeping front drive. After signing in at the front office and showing his identification, David was driven in a jeep down a dirt road to a wooded area. There, in the high-security compound, stood the warehouse SOE shared with MI-5 and MI-6 to house top-secret documents.

  David was admitted through a set of double doors by a frowning Coldstream Guard; the corridor beyond led to a dim, cavernous warehouse. “Thanks,” he told the guard, flipping on the light switches. “I’ll take it from here.” In the frigid air were rows upon rows of metal file cabinets, each neatly labeled TOP SECRET in red ink.

  He walked aisle after musty aisle, sidestepping puddles from the leaking ceiling, his footsteps loud on the cement floors. At last he found the cabinets he was looking for, from the “Inter-Services Research Bureau.” He searched in vain through file upon file, page after page.

  As the minutes turned to an hour, and then two, David’s fingers grew stiff with cold. He blew on them, then shifted his weight from one frozen foot to the other. He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for—he just had a grim suspicion that if Maggie couldn’t be found, there was something shifty going on. People, even people in SOE, didn’t just vanish. “Hammering Hephaestus…” he grumbled, continuing to rifle through paper-stuffed files.

  “Are you still there, sir?” called the guard.

  “Yes, indeed—and I’d dearly love a cup of hot tea if you can spare one!” David called back.

  “No food or drink allowed in the file areas, sir.”

  “Of course not,” David muttered, flipping up his coat’s collar against the cold.

  “Do you know how long you’ll be, sir?”

  “As long as I need!” David shouted. Finally, he pulled out two pages stapled together and headed RE: The ISRB Operation at Isle of Scarra. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he murmured.

  At the top was the usual stamp TOP SECRET, but this one, interestingly enough, had Copy No. 3 of 3 written under the stamp. Only three copies of something—well, that wasn’t very many. It appeared to be from Colonel Martens to Colonel Bishop, with a carbon copy sent to a name David didn’t recognize. As far as David could tell, the document was, as Martens had said, about a secret SOE training camp on the Isle of Scarra, a small island off the western coast of Scotland.

  But as he read further, his brow furrowed:

  The prison will be jointly operated by MI-6 and SOE, and called a training camp. It will be operated from Killoch Castle on the Isle of Scarra. Unsafe agents are not to be given the real reason for their imprisonment until they arrive. As far as they must know, when they leave SOE, they are merely receiving more specialized training before undertaking their next mission. The families of the prisoners will be informed only that they are on active duty. Prisoners will continue to be paid and have their salaries deposited in their accounts, as they would on active duty. Prisoners are allowed no outside contact. Prisoners are allowed no telephone calls, no letters, and no radio transmissions. The Isle of Scarra is declared a prohibited zone under the Defense Regulations. The local police and coast guard will be informed only that it is a secret government training facility. If any civilians should discover the existence of the prison, they will be silenced under orders from the Ministry of Information. Likewise, journalists. When the war is over, a committee will report on which, if any, of the agents will be admitted back into society.

  “What the devil?” David muttered, returning the file to its proper place. “ ‘Which, if any, agents will be admitted back into society’? What the hell is going on up there in the hinterland? And, Mags, what in God’s name have they done to you?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Icy rain, driven by furious winds, hit the castle’s windows in a relentless tattoo. Even with her bedroom door locked and a chair pushed up against the knob, Maggie had managed to doze only fitfully. In her dreams, Quentin’s fox was alive and being pursued through the woods by a pack of rabid dogs. Then she was the fox and the dogs had cornered her, barking, fangs bared, bloodlust blazing in their eyes. Maggie jerked awake, coated in metallic sweat, the bedclothes in a tangle around her feet.

  And now, a new problem: a potential German spy in their midst. But he—or she—would never find out what she knew. The war won’t be lost on my watch.

  To calm herself, Maggie thought about numbers. She deeply missed math, its logic, its order, the peculiar joy of working a problem to its conclusion. How simple math was, even the most sophisticated equations, compared to the horrors humans created. In reality, there was no order. When humans entered the calculation, the center never held.

  She deliberately slowed her breathing as she turned on the bedside lamp and focused on a brown water stain on the ceiling. But her thoughts were still terrifying. Seven dead in five days. And now, day six. Who will die today?

  And will it be me?

  She couldn’t lie still any longer. As her thoughts spun and churned, she slipped out of bed and opened the blackout curtain. The storm raged on, causing enormous white-capped rollers in the bay. Torn branches and downed trees littered the lawn. There will be no boat today. No rescue.

  Adrenaline surged through her, clearing the fog of exhaustion and fear. All I have to do is survive. The insanity of it all caused her lips to twitch with the shadow of a smile. Survive, she decided. Outfox and endure. I survived Berlin. I survived Wannsee. I survived Windsor and Paris, the Blitz and the Blackout Beast. No craven, two-bit Nazi stool pigeon is goi
ng to kill me—or anyone else on this island.

  There was nothing to do but wash up and get dressed. After a cold splashing from the bath’s shower hose, she threw on training coveralls, thick socks, and boots. Her first order of business was to check on Lady Beatrix and try to convince her to come downstairs.

  * * *

  —

  At the top of the tower’s stairs, Maggie knocked. “Lady Beatrix?”

  “I told you, it’s Bea Granville now,” rang a voice, and then the door opened. “Your friend’s already here.”

  Maggie looked past the woman to see Sayid on one of the chairs, a white bandage around his head. “My word,” she said, walking to him. “What happened to you?”

  “I went out to destroy the boat’s radio,” he said slowly, as if in great pain. “But someone must have come up behind me—cracked me on the back of the head. Whoever did it probably left me for dead on the lawn, but I regained consciousness a few hours later.”

  “Any recognizable features?” Maggie asked.

  “Nothing. Couldn’t even tell if it was a man or woman.”

  Lady Beatrix walked over to both of them. “You poor dear,” she said to Sayid, taking the seat beside him.

  “What happened to the radio?” Maggie asked.

  “When I came to, I went to the boat. The radio was already destroyed and the ax I borrowed from McNaughton was on the floor.”

  “So, the spy could have made one last transmission.”

  “Yes.”

  She searched his face, looking for any trace of deception, and found none. “Well, I’m glad you’re all right,” she said, smiling down at him. “Thank goodness.” She turned to Beatrix. “I think you should come downstairs with us this morning.”

  “Oh no—I couldn’t possibly—”

  “I think it’s the safest way to proceed. If one of the others finds you, let’s just say I’m not convinced they won’t kill first. You have no idea how tense things are down there.”