Page 58 of The Words Beneath the Noise

We sat in the cellar, listening to distant patrols, waiting for darkness and the aircraft that would take me home.

I thought about Brandt. About the look on his face in that final moment, surprise more than pain, the incomprehension of a man who hadn't expected to die on a Tuesday afternoon in the French countryside.

I'd given him that death. Me and my rifle and Art's coordinates.

Another ghost to carry. Another face to see when I closed my eyes.

But also, maybe, a step closer to ending this war. One less officer coordinating German signals. One more crack in the machinery that kept the killing going.

I had to believe it mattered. Had to believe the weight was worth carrying.

Otherwise, what was any of it for?

The Lysander came at midnight, a shadow dropping out of darker sky.

I ran to meet it, climbed aboard, felt the aircraft lift and bank and carry me north toward England. Toward safety. Toward Art.

The pilot didn't speak. I didn't want him to. Just sat in the cramped fuselage and watched France fall away beneath us, and thought about the man I'd killed and the man I was going home to.

Brandt was dead. The mission was complete. Command would be pleased.

And I would carry this, like I carried all the others, until the weight finally broke me or the war finally ended.

Whichever came first.

Dawn was breaking when we landed on English soil. Grey light, familiar cold, the smell of wet grass and aviation fuel.

Major Hartley was waiting on the tarmac. He shook my hand, said something about a job well done, mentioned debriefing and reports and all the administrative machinery that turned killing into paperwork.

I nodded in the right places. Said the right things. Performed the role of competent soldier completing a successful mission.

But my mind was already elsewhere.

Already calculating the distance to the estate. Already imagining Art's face when I walked through the door. Already feeling the weight of the rifle case in my hand and wondering if he'd look at me differently now that I'd used his intelligence to take a life.

Probably not. He understood. Better than most, he understood what we were.

Weapons. Both of us. Different kinds, different methods, same war.

TWELVE

NOTES AND GUILT

ART

German words assembled themselves into death sentences with mathematical precision.

Koordinaten: 51.5074 Nord, 0.1278 West.

London. Central London. Coordinates that translated to streets I'd walked, buildings I'd visited, people I'd never met but whose lives I'd just been handed on a sheet of paper covered in encrypted Wehrmacht communications.

My pencil hovered over the decrypt form. Hand cramped from hours of writing, fingers stained black with ink, but I couldn't make myself finish the translation. Because once I wrote it down officially, once I filed it up the chain, those coordinates became actionable intelligence. Became part of the machinery that decided who lived and who died.

Became my responsibility.

My left leg had started bouncing under the desk. Rapid, repetitive motion that helped bleed off the anxiety building inmy chest like pressure in a boiler. Bounce bounce bounce. Heel down, toe up, heel down, toe up. Ruth had stopped commenting on it months ago, had learned it was just part of how my body regulated itself when my brain was overloaded.

Right now my brain was very, very overloaded.