Three days ago, the intercept boys in Waterhouse’s section picked up a brief flurry of Arethusa messages, exchanged between a hidden transmitter somewhere in Manila and a mobile one in the South China Sea. Catalinas were vectored toward the latter, and picked up diminishing radar echoes at first, but found nothing when they arrived on the scene. A team of journeyman codebreakers jumped on those messages and started trying to tear them apart by brute force. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, the old hand, went for a stroll along the Manila Bay seawall. A breeze suddenly rose from the bay. He stopped to let it cool his face. A coconut fell from the top of a tree and smashed into the ground ten feet away. Waterhouse turned on his heel and went back to the office.