on the train with it now. They'll guard the truck until it leaves here.'
'I think, sir, that we should keep the existence of our extra security quiet for now.'
'Why?' asked Harding.
'Because someone went to a lot of effort to hide this delivery from us, and maybe from the rest of the hospital staff. Villard may be planning to hit the truck en route. He'd have time to get away with a fortune in penicillin before anyone even knew it was gone.'
'So we let him have a go at it?' Harding asked, as if I had just gone around the bend.
'We shouldn't tip our hand too soon. We might have a chance to trap him and his accomplices.'
'How?' asked Kaz, as he dumped sugar into his coffee.
'We keep quiet about the Rangers guarding the penicillin for now. If we let the information out late tonight, whoever is working with
Villard will try to get word to him. We have to watch the phones, to see if anyone tries to get to the radio, or whether someone leaves the hospital for no reason. Then we'll have them.'
'And if his inside person doesn't manage to get word out, Villard will still try to hit the truck.'
'Yes sir. That's why I want to be in that truck when it makes the pickup.'
Harding eyed me, trying to figure out what was going on. I didn't usually volunteer, and with Diana safe here, he probably thought I'd be angling to stay put. He started to say something but stopped as a couple of officers sat down at the table next to us.
'I'll think about it,' he said in a low voice. 'Meantime, we'll keep it zipped about the escort. Lieutenant Kazimierz, you work on this.' He produced the notebook that I had given him last night. Kaz flipped through the pages. He frowned.
'What's the matter?' I asked.
'I am not certain, but this looks much more complicated than the other code you showed me. That was actually a substitution cipher, really not a code at all.'
'What's the difference?' I asked.
'Ciphers are different from codes. When you substitute one word for another word or sentence, you have a code. When you mix up or substitute letters, you have a cipher. You can also combine codes and ciphers by substituting one word for another and then mixing up the result. There are two types of ciphers also. Substitution ciphers replace letters with other letters or symbols, keeping the order in which the symbols fall the same. Transposition ciphers keep all of the original letters intact, but mix up the order. Of course, you can use both methods, one after the other, to further confuse anyone who intercepts the message.'
'I'm confused,' I admitted. I had stopped following his explanation before he was half done.
'Look here,' said Kaz, warming up to his subject. 'These last pages do seem to be the same shorthand cipher we saw before. The words look intact. But here, on these pages, the letters are all in five letter groups. Here, there are just numbers in groups of three, separated by a dash. 45-16-4, 109-22-26, 8-31-38, and so on. No logical order.
Whoever set this up used a number of different techniques, and then used the substitution cipher for quick messages.'
'When we're done here, find a quiet place and work on it,' Harding said.
He didn't like it and neither did I. We had both thought deciphering the contents of the notebook would be a quick fix to a tough problem. It would allow us to bring evidence to Ike of corruption at high levels within the Vichy French regime here, a reason to clean house. But it wasn't going to be that easy.
'All right, Boyle, tell us what you found out in Bone,' Harding said, leaning back and sipping his coffee.
I told them about Le Bar Bleu, but not the room upstairs, or the fact that I'd burned the place down. I told them about the depot, finding Diana, and how I got the notebook, but not about shooting Mathenet in the foot. I told them about The Crossroads being the code name for the detention center in the desert, to which Villard now had moved the last of his slave laborers and his hijacked supplies, waiting for the highest bidder. Germans, Arabs, the Mafia, everyone on the wrong side of the war or the law was probably itching to get their hands on the new wonder drug. I didn't tell them about promising Diana I'd get the rest of the prisoners out of his hands, since I had no idea how I could pull that off. By the time I finished figuring out what to leave in and what to leave out, I had only one question left. I refilled my cup with hot coffee and took a doughnut. Reporting is hard work.
'You know the thing that bothered me was how Villard and Bessette got this smuggling operation set up so quickly, as if they had known ahead of time about the hospital being opened here and even about the penicillin and how valuable it would be.'
'Right,' said Harding. 'What did you come up with?'
'I think I have it figured out. Bessette's family is involved in shipping between Algeria, France, and Portugal. I bet they use the ships for smuggling as well. He has a brother, Jules, who lives in Blackpool, England, where the 21st General Hospital was posted before being transported here. It'd be easy for Bessette to send a letter with a sailor going to Portugal with instructions to hand it off there to someone on a neutral vessel headed for England. When that sailor arrives, he simply mails the letter at a local post office.'
'Because the British censor international mail, but not internal mail,' Kaz said, nodding his head.
'What about getting information back to Algiers?' Harding asked. 'That wouldn't be so easy.'
'It wouldn't have to be done the same way,' said Kaz, quickly. 'They could have set up a simple code, word for word. Jules could write back, 'My good friend, John, will be visiting London in three weeks.' That could actually mean someone named John would be in Algiers in six weeks, depending on whatever previous arrangement they made for signifying numbers and places.'
'But even so, how could they have found out? Everything about the invasion was top secret,' Harding said.
'But Major, what does top secret really mean? Just how secret is it?' I asked.
'Well, a lot of people did have to know,' admitted Harding… 'Planning staff, logistical staff, civil affairs. As the date got closer, the circle of those in the know grew larger and larger.'
'Would the Medical Corps be in that circle?'
Harding let that question hang in the air for a minute as he thought.
'They'd have to be, especially to prepare for the kinds of indigenous diseases they'd have to deal with,' he finally said.
'And certainly if they were involved in the testing of a new miracle drug,' added Kaz.
Harding took more coffee, poured milk into it and tapped his spoon on the edge of the thick ceramic mug. Clink clink clink.
'I don't like what I'm hearing. You're suggesting that a U.S. Army officer would betray secret plans for the invasion of North Africa for personal gain. But I agree it's possible. Does your speculation fit with Lieutenant Kazimierz's information?' Harding nodded at Kaz.
'Scotland Yard is quite familiar with Jules Bessette and his associates in Blackpool,' Kaz said, leaning forward and lowering his voice, even though the tables around us were empty. 'I first called the Provost Marshal's office, and they referred me to Scotland Yard, and I was told that Jules Bessette is suspected of everything from running the black market to murder, but he is very careful. They have no concrete evidence against him or anyone in his organization
Except…' Kaz stopped and took a sip of coffee. He loved the drama of all this.
'Okay, I'm hooked,' I said. ' Except for what?'
'Except for the case of Sergeant Frederick Hotchkiss, of the 21st General Hospital, who supposedly deserted.'
'He was the supply sergeant before Casselli,' I said.
'Yes. The man who drove off in a jeep one night never to be seen again. But the jeep was, or the engine, at least. It was found in a local garage.'
'Let me guess, a garage owned by Jules Bessette,' I said.
'Exactly!'
'So why didn't they arrest Bessette?' Harding asked.
'He owned the garage but was seldom there. Scotland Yard had their eye on it as a link in a black market operation. Vehicles could come and go from a garage without arousing suspicion. Someone reported that Hotchkiss had been seen at the garage the day he deserted. The Provost Marshal's office and Scotland Yard searched the
