How I Became a Spy

by Deborah Hopkinson

  “Also, if by any chance you or Philippe make it back to London, this means you’ll be suspected of working for the Nazis. Most likely you’ll be considered a risk and put into prison for the rest of the war—just in case the allegations are true.”

  “In other words, it’s all part of the traitor’s plan,” I said. “It’s a plot to undermine us.”

  Maurice nodded. “I’m afraid he’s been getting away with this for some time. Somehow. Because I heard about something similar happening to two other agents who escaped to England. No one believed their story, and they’ve been put in Brixton Prison in London.”

  I felt like a heavy weight had fallen on me. “It’s so horrible! One traitor in London is working with the Nazis to weaken the resistance. And his actions are sending innocent agents into the clutches of the Nazis.”

  “Yes, it’s insidious. And most likely the Germans are sending false reports about everything. But someone in London is making sure the Nazis are in the loop, receiving information, explosives, and agents….” He paused.

  “And any early alerts about the time and place for the invasion could land right in the hands of the enemy,” I whispered. “But what can we do?”

  “We have to abandon SYCAMORE. It’s too dangerous to continue our work, at least for the time being,” Maurice said. “I’m heading to Paris in the morning.”

  “Should I go with you?”

  He shook his head. “No, I have another idea. It will be…very dangerous, Marie. I’m not sure it will work.”

  He hesitated, but I’d already realized what I had to do. “I must get to London and try to stop this. Otherwise, more agents will die. The invasion itself could be at risk if details are leaked to the Germans.” I looked Maurice straight in the eye. “But how? How can I find the traitor? It seems impossible.”

  For the first time, Maurice grinned. “Perhaps it is not as impossible as you imagine. Philippe did overhear some information that could help: the code name of the traitor. And I just happen to have an idea for how you might trap him—or her….”

  He whispered the code name in my ear. And then we made a plan.

  The Truth

  When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

  —Sherlock Holmes, in The Sign of the Four

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I thought that I could be much more useful in France, pushing the Germans out, than in England doing paperwork. I applied to the Inter-Services Research Bureau.

  —Pearl Witherington Cornioley, SOE agent

  “That’s it,” Eleanor whispered. “November stops there.”

  “We have to decode this last part,” said David. “It must have details about her plan.”

  I nodded, grabbing Violette’s notebook. “It should be easy if she used the same system as before. And this last section is very short too. It’s not even a page. What’s December in French, Eleanor?”

  “It’s décembre.”

  “Eight letters. If we add twelve to that, since it’s the twelfth month, we get a shift of twenty.” I grabbed my cipher wheel and turned it. “That means the cipher alphabet starts with U.”

  Eleanor and David peered over my shoulder at the string of text that began the last part of Violette’s journal:

  I translated a few letters, using a shift of twenty. The first four letters were H, E, J, and Z. I shook my head. “This isn’t going to work.”

  “Maybe she was on her journey here in December and couldn’t write until January,” David suggested.

  “Good idea. January is janvier in French, Bertie,” said Eleanor. “That would be a shift of seven plus one, since it’s the first month of the year.”

  I tried a shift of eight, with a cipher alphabet beginning with the letter I. A minute later, I shook my head. “That’s not it either.”

  We used our cipher wheels to test out various possibilities. We tried a shift of four, for the number of letters in Violette’s last name, Romy. We tried beginning the cipher alphabet with the letter L, for London. We tried a shift of eighteen, adding up one plus nine plus four plus four, for the year, 1944.

  We twirled the wheel again and again.

  “Nothing. Nothing works!” I cried. “But we have to solve it. This message might include the code name of a traitor—and details of the trap she set for him.”

  A trap that is set for tomorrow night, I thought.

  “I wonder if knowing more about her organization would help. It’s not the same as the OSS, where Father works. Violette called it…let’s see, the SOE.” Eleanor scanned the transcribed pages. “And somewhere in the beginning I think she mentions something about Baker Street. But we would have no idea exactly where it is.”

  “Uh, um…actually we do,” I told them.

  “What?” Eleanor and David said together.

  “I am pretty sure the SOE, the Special Operations Executive, is inside a building at 64 Baker Street. Even though the sign on the outside says something different: the Inter-Services Research Bureau.”

  “Hey, that’s just down the road from 221B Baker Street,” David said. He turned to Eleanor. “That’s not a real place. It’s the fictional home of Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Yes, and very early in her training, Violette finds out that a nickname for SOE agents is the Baker Street Irregulars, who were the kids Sherlock used to get information.”

  “Hold on a minute, Bertie,” Eleanor put in. “Something doesn’t make sense to me. On Saturday afternoon, I tracked you to a building on Baker Street. But Violette doesn’t give an exact address in her notebook. Why…how did you know to go there?”

  “Well, uh, it’s like this. You were following me. But I was tailing someone else. Someone who might work there,” I replied. “I don’t know his name or what he does. I just call him Q—short for quarry.”

  “So why were you following him, Bertie?” David asked.

  “Well, I first spotted him the night of the air raid. He was running in the same direction as you, Eleanor. He might…he might even have been following you and Violette, though I can’t say for sure.”

  “What? And you’re just telling me now?” she cried, slamming her fist down on the table. “I don’t believe this, Bertie. I thought we were a team.”

  “We…we are. And I was planning on telling you but…well, I didn’t know how he fit into the mystery. I still don’t. And I didn’t want to scare you.”

  “Scare me? Most likely you just wanted to solve this mystery all by yourself.” Eleanor began stuffing papers into her knapsack. “I can’t believe you’ve been keeping this secret.”

  She started to get up but I reached out a hand. “Don’t go, Eleanor. I’m sorry.”

  All at once, Eleanor sank down. She took in a deep breath. And then she whispered, “I have a confession. I’ve been keeping a secret too. Bertie, I told you that Violette asked me to keep the notebook until Friday and then she’d contact me, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, she had time to tell me a little more. Violette said if I didn’t hear from her by Friday, then I should take the notebook to my father and ask him to get it to the highest American official in charge of the invasion that he could.” Eleanor paused. “She said the notebook contained the truth. And if things didn’t go as planned, we should try to get someone to believe it.”

  If things didn’t go as planned.

  David let out a low whistle. “All the more reason to figure this out now. It might contain evidence that Q is the one sending agents into the arms of Germans.”

  “Or it could be someone else,” I said.

  They both looked at me, wide-eyed.

  “Not that I have any ideas,” I added quickly. “I’m just saying that we still don’t have all the facts. And it might reveal how she planned to trap him.
”

  “But what can we do?” Eleanor asked. “Today is Wednesday and Violette said she’d set the trap for tomorrow night.”

  We were all quiet. My head spun with questions: Was Violette in hiding? Would she be able to follow through on springing the trap, whatever it was? Was she even alive?

  I decided not to mention the wild ideas I’d had about Jimmy and George. They’d probably just been unfounded suspicions. But another possibility popped into my mind. If Jimmy had been Violette’s boyfriend, maybe her disappearance was totally unrelated to her work as a secret agent.

  I shook my head to clear it. I was getting off track. We needed to focus on decoding the rest of Violette’s journal.

  Eleanor bit her lip. Tears glistened in her eyes, but they didn’t fall. “We don’t have enough time! I don’t see how we can do it.”

  David said quietly, “Sometimes people do the impossible. Remember, Bertie, what Mr. Turner told us about the Danish people rescuing their Jewish neighbors? And look at me, and the others who came here on trains. Thousands of us are here, and alive, only because a few people did what others thought couldn’t be done.”

  David paused and took a breath. “Eleanor, all I’m saying is we can’t give up. Not yet. We still have time before it gets dark. I think we need to get help from an expert. Let’s try to find Leo Marks at his father’s bookshop. We need to find out everything he knows about ciphers. And we don’t have a moment to lose,” he went on, stuffing papers into his knapsack. “It’s like Sherlock rousing Watson and saying, ‘Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!’ ”

  “Yes, let’s go.” Eleanor shot to her feet.

  “You too, Little Roo!” I said.

  Spy Practice Number Three

  ATBASH CIPHER

  The Atbash cipher was originally developed to encode the Hebrew alphabet; it gets its name from Hebrew letters. However, it can be used with any alphabet.

  This cipher works by reversing the alphabet, so that A becomes Z, B becomes Y, and so forth. Since it doesn’t rely on a key or clues, it is very easy to break. For this reason, no hints are needed to decode this message. But it is also longer than the other practice messages. And while there are spaces between cipher letters, they do not represent actual word breaks.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.

  —Sherlock Holmes, in The Hound of the Baskervilles

  According to David, Watson and Holmes were in a cab ten minutes later, rattling along to Charing Cross Station. As for us, twenty minutes later, we stood outside the Palace Theatre, on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road.

  David pointed. “That’s it over there: 84 Charing Cross Road. Mr. Marks and his partner, Mark Cohen, specialize in old and rare books.”

  “Maybe Bertie and I can find a useful book on codes while you talk to Mr. Marks,” Eleanor suggested.

  The musty shop was full of old books, packed close together on tall wooden shelves. When Eleanor asked a clerk for titles on cryptology, he showed us to an area near a back stairway leading to an upper floor.

  “This one looks interesting.” Eleanor sat on the floor to browse through it. LR plopped down beside her, sniffing hopefully at her knapsack.

  “Wow, look at this: a whole section of books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,” I whispered, scanning the titles on the shelves. “Some of them look ancient.”

  “Don’t get distracted, Bertie,” Eleanor told me. “And forget about buying one of those. They’re probably first editions—that’s the original version when it was first published.”

  I scowled at her. “I know that.” Still, I felt a little out of place.

  David had lingered behind to ask if Mr. Marks was available. “He’s busy at the moment,” I heard the clerk say. “His office is upstairs. May I tell him what this is about?”

  “I’m just coming down now,” said a voice. “What is it, young Frank?”

  “There’s a boy here to see you.”

  “Oh, hello, Mr. Marks. I’m not sure you remember me. I’m David Goodman and the Rosens are my foster family,” David said.

  I peeked out from behind my shelf to see David in conversation with a middle-aged gentleman with thinning hair. “You told us once that your son, Leo, got interested in codes by reading Edgar Allan Poe. I’m doing a school report on…on secret codes in detective stories. I’d love to ask Leo some questions.”

  At that moment, I heard footsteps on the staircase. A voice called out, “Hullo. I’m Leo Marks. How can I help you?”

  I couldn’t see the newcomer at first. Then he moved into my line of sight. I held on to the shelf and gasped.

  Because there was no doubt. No doubt at all.

  Eleanor came up behind me, LR in her arms. She whispered, “What’s wrong, Bertie? What is it?”

  “That’s him,” I murmured.

  “Who?”

  “Q. Leo Marks is Q.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Each student is given a personal identity prefix and a security check, so that the origin of the message can be established and its authenticity guaranteed.

  —SOE Manual

  “What do we do now?” Eleanor murmured.

  “Nothing. Let’s just listen for a few minutes. Maybe they’ll move so we can sneak out past him,” I whispered. “Don’t let LR bark or whine. I don’t want him to notice her.”

  Or us, I thought.

  From my hiding spot, I could see that the elder Mr. Marks had stepped away. David was spinning a very believable tale to Leo—at least I thought so.

  “I want to mention different sorts of codes in my report,” David was saying. “I’ve heard of a Caesar cipher and that one where you do the alphabet in reverse. What’s it called again?”

  “An Atbash cipher,” answered Leo. “It derives its name from four Hebrew letters.”

  “Oh, of course. I should’ve remembered that: Atbash comes from the letters aleph-tav-beth-shin,” David said. “Aleph is the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet, and it gets encrypted to tav, the last letter. Beth is the second, and gets encrypted to shin, the second to last. It’s like saying A-Z-B-Y.”

  “That’s right. Although it was originally used with Hebrew, we can do the same thing with the English alphabet. It’s not a very robust cipher, however.”

  “That’s why I wanted to ask you about other kinds,” David said. I smiled. David was good at this. I poked my head out, then drew it back fast.

  “We should leave,” Eleanor whispered in my ear.

  “In a minute,” I murmured. “Let’s just hear a little more.”

  “Of course, a substitution cipher doesn’t even have to use letters,” Leo was saying. “If you’ve ever read the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Adventure of the Dancing Men,’ you know that Holmes cracks a cipher in which stick figures are substituted for letters.”

  “Oh, I know that story! He solves it by frequency analysis and the process of elimination, right?”

  “Precisely,” said Leo. “That’s where you look for the most common two- and three-letter words and then try to discover patterns. For instance, the most common three-letter words in English are the, and, for, was, and so on. And then there are two-letter words such as of, to, in, is, and it.”

  “It seems like that method must take a long time,” David said. I knew he must be thinking about Violette’s last message. We didn’t have much time left.

  “It does get easier with practice,” Leo told him. “Now then, another interesting cipher is the mixed-alphabet cipher with a key word.”

  “Mixed-alphabet cipher with a key word,” David repeated. “What’s that?”

  “This one depends upon a key word or phrase, which is written out first as
the beginning of the cipher alphabet. So if DAVID was your key word, D would stand for A, A would stand for B, V for C, and so on. The rest of the alphabet follows after the key word, skipping the letters you already used. It’s easier to see it written out. Here, let’s go to the desk in the back and I’ll show you.”

  For a minute, I thought we’d be found out. I held my breath as they passed on the other side of the shelf. “Now’s our chance, Eleanor.”

  Outside, we waited on the corner, out of sight. David joined us a few minutes later. “Why did you leave? I was looking for you. I would’ve introduced you to Leo. Gosh, he knows a lot! I definitely think we should try a key word cipher next.”

  “Go on, Bertie. Tell him,” Eleanor urged.

  “Tell me what?”

  “Listen, David. We left for one reason. Leo Marks is Q.”

  “What?” he exclaimed. “What does that mean?”

  “Come on.” Eleanor pulled on David’s sleeve. “Let’s walk while Bertie explains.”

  “I think it might mean that Leo Marks and Violette work for the same organization. We know now that it’s the SOE, with its office at the Inter-Services Research Bureau at 64 Baker Street,” I began, navigating around other pedestrians so we could walk together—and not trip on LR’s lead. “I bet Leo Marks is the code master Violette mentioned.”

  “Do you think he might also be the traitor, the double agent?” asked Eleanor.

  David looked doubtful. “Leo is Jewish, like me. He wouldn’t be helping the Nazis.”

  “It does seem unlikely. But then why didn’t Violette go straight to him when she came to London?” Eleanor said. “Why did she want me to keep the notebook?”

  “Maybe it would help to make observations like Sherlock would,” David mused. “For one thing, Leo is about Violette’s age. He’s in his early twenties. So he’s probably not high up in the organization. Maybe Violette figured he wouldn’t be able to do much. And remember, Maurice told Violette he suspected the traitor was someone at the top.”