Four Feet Above The Cut

Norfolk, Virginia, 1943. Alma Deming got away with it.An innocent man is in a federal cell for her work. Her employer has given her a commendation for assisting the investigation. And she has been promoted to run the shipping cage at the film exchange, which means that from now on, nobody signs for a print but her.Then Washington recalls four hundred and six prints for the silver in their emulsions, and fourteen of them are coming home from Buenos Aires with eleven inches of her handwriting inside.She cuts the strip out of the first one in four minutes. Then she puts a loupe on her own splice, out of habit, and finds the pattern has already copied itself onto the film that was lying against it in the roll. Four feet above the cut and four feet below. A quarter of the density, softened at the edges, and perfectly readable.She removed eleven inches. The print made copies.By 1944 Berlin has stopped asking about ships. They want to know what is standing on the ground in Virginia, and there is no chandler’s board and no laundry list that will tell her. So a woman with a delivery truck and a standing pass sits at the back of a dark camp theatre twice a month with a manifest on her knee, and reads the American order of battle off the shoulders of the eight hundred men in front of her.By March 1945 nine submarines have left Norway. The United States Navy, reading their signals, believes they are carrying rockets meant for New York. Convoys are rerouted. Escort carriers are put on a barrier line. Men stand on the beach at Virginia Beach every night with field glasses.Alma Deming is the only person on the American coast who knows the submarines are carrying nothing at all.She cannot prove it. She cannot tell anyone without explaining how she knows. And the men who could confirm it are in a building in northern Virginia with no name on the gate, being asked about a weapon that does not exist.Book two of Blank Leader, and the conclusion of the duology begun in Eleven Inches of Silence.