Read Chapter 12: The Turn of the Screw

Vance didn’t look up when Hartley closed the billet door behind him. She was sitting on the edge of his cot, turning the printed note over in her fingers. The lamp threw long shadows across her face, and for a moment she looked older than her twenty-nine years.

“You’ve been holding this since last night.” It wasn’t a question.

Hartley crossed the room and took the note from her. *You are digging your own grave.* He’d read it so many times the words had lost their menace, become just ink and paper. Now, with Vance here, they felt sharp again.

“I needed someone I could trust,” he said. “That leaves a short list. You’re on it.”

Vance set her jaw. “Then stop dancing, William. What do you have?”

He told her everything. Whitaker’s phantom brother. Brandt’s confirmation of Tommy Pryce. Hayes’ bruise and the missing diary. The insignia card under his door. He left nothing out, not even the burned recorder or Finch’s vanishing act. When he finished, the silence in the room was thick enough to choke on.

Vance stood and walked to the window. The camp lights flickered through the blackout blinds. “You’ve been carrying this alone for three weeks.”

“I didn’t know who could carry it with me.”

She turned. “You still don’t. But I’m telling you now—I’m not the mole. And I believe you’re not either.”

“That’s a start.”

“It’s a rope bridge over a ravine.” She came back to the cot and sat down. “You need proof. Something that makes him move before he buries another body.”

Hartley rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Every avenue I try, Brandt burns it. Finch disappears. Cole gives me riddles about 1945. Whitaker stays in his billet, smiling at me over breakfast like we’re old friends.”

“Then stop going to them.” Vance’s voice dropped. “Make him come to you.”

He looked up. “What do you mean?”

She pulled a pencil from her pocket and began sketching on the back of an envelope. “You leave something tempting. Something a mole would kill to read. And then you watch who goes looking for it.”

“That’s basic tradecraft, Sally. The problem is bait. What do I have that he doesn’t already know about?”

Vance smiled—a thin, knowing thing. “You have a cipher. One he’s never seen.”

“The isolation tape.” Hartley felt the weight of it in his chest. “Morrison doesn’t know it exists. Mason’s held it since Hamburg.”

“Exactly. A fresh code, used only between London and the tunnel. If the mole gets his hands on a copy of that cipher, he can sell it to Brandt and earn his pension. And you know who would come sniffing for it?”

“Whitaker.”

“Or whoever’s feeding him.” Vance tore the sketch off the envelope and handed it to him. “You plant it in a book. A codebook, something official-looking. Leave it in your office where someone with access could find it. Then you wait.”

Hartley turned the paper over in his hands. “It’s clever. But it’s also a trap for whoever takes the bait. If they get suspicious, we lose our only chance to smoke him out.”

“You haven’t got another chance, William. Brandt’s burned your channel. Finch is gone. The next move the mole makes might be against you, not Hayes.” She held his gaze. “You need him to reach. And when he does, you cut his hand off.”

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he nodded. “All right. I’ll do it tonight.”

Vance stood and smoothed her uniform. “Don’t tell me where you plant it. I don’t want to lie convincingly when Morrison asks me about my day.”

“That’s grim.”

“That’s Berlin.” She paused at the door. “But William—if you see me looking for that book tomorrow, you’ll know something’s wrong. Because I won’t be searching for it. I’ll be hunting the man who took it.”

She left before he could answer.

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The book was a technical manual on field telephony, dense with diagrams and frequencies. Hartley wedged a folded sheet of paper—covered in indecipherable symbols, a paste-up of the actual isolation cipher—between pages 214 and 215. He left the book on his desk corner, slightly askew, the way a man in a hurry might leave it.

Then he went to bed and did not sleep.

By morning, the book was gone.

Hartley stood in his office, staring at the empty corner of his desk. He’d been gone for exactly forty minutes—breakfast, a walk across the parade ground to check his reflection in the mess window. Long enough for someone to slip in, take the book, and vanish.

He forced himself to breathe. The trap had sprung. Now he needed to watch. Whitaker would be nervous, maybe too eager to speak. Cole might mention the missing manual. Morrison would demand an inventory.

Vance would be the signal. She’d told him to look for her when the book disappeared.

He went to her billet. Empty. The duty roster showed she was meant to be in the cipher room by 0800. She wasn’t there either.

By noon, no one had seen Lieutenant Vance.

By dusk, Hartley had searched every corner of the camp. Her coat was gone. Her sidearm was in the armory. Her diary—a thing she kept religiously—was missing from her footlocker.

The book was gone. Vance was gone. And no one—not Whitaker, not Cole, not the night sentry—had seen a damn thing.

Hartley sat on Vance’s cot, staring at the bare pillow. His trap had snapped shut on empty air. Or worse—it had caught something he hadn’t meant to lose.

He pressed his palms into his eyes. Outside, the Berlin dark was coming down like a curtain.

He had one option left. He didn’t know if it was the smartest or the stupidest thing he’d ever done.

He reached for the field telephone and wired a message to London. It was encoded in a cipher only three people still used.

The one Finch had taught him.