Title	The Code
Author	David Juhren
ISBN#	978-1-60820-169-3 (print) $14.99
	978-1-60820-170-9 (ebook) $6.99
Release Date	May 2010
Cover Artist	Deana C. Jamroz
Paperback:	188 pages
Available At:	MlrBooks (ebook)
	Amazon.com (paperback)

London, 1941, and Roger Mathews, a special attache with the U.S. is teamed up with British captain Clive Westmore to execute a secret plan to secure the final key to solving the Nazi’s secret codes from within occupied France. Complicating matters, the two are instantly attracted to each other, beginning a romantic involvement whose tender alliance can only make more intricate their already convoluted mission.

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Chapter I: Enigma

February, 1941

Roger dropped the cigarette and stomped it out with his loafer. Seconds later, another bomb exploded. About a quarter of a mile away, but still in the Whitehall area, he suspected. It rumbled like a giant, so different from thunder-an ominous, man-made sound he knew he would never forget.

The Nazis are really dishing it out to London tonight, he thought, standing on the rooftop of his blacked-out apartment building. The structure, like the others in the neighborhood, had been built in the latter part of the last century, and had at one time been dwellings for more affluent inhabitants. Designed, in fact, to be so posh that when the neighborhood was constructed, the streets were torn up, and re-cobbled in broadly curved promenades. All of the buildings in the neighborhood looked alike; four stories high, with columned facades, white gingerbread latticework, and second story faux balconies with French doors. But age had taken its toll on the neighborhood, reducing it from its former elegance to that of middle class. The cobblestones had been paved over, yet the water-stained buildings were still architecturally superb, and retained their distinct beauty, like older women who have kept their attractiveness despite unflattering sags and bulges.

The U.S. Embassy had given strict orders that all personnel were to either report to the embassy itself or follow the Londoners down into the Underground. Roger, however, was known by most of his friends to take unnecessary chances with his life, all twenty-eight years of it, as if death might bring some kind of release, and tonight would be no exception. Roger was a political attaché at the U.S. Embassy. His father had worked for the State Department, too, during the Great War, but the elder Mathews had been stationed in Paris. It was through his father’s contacts in Washington that he had landed his job-he and his father preferring an ocean between them. Now, the embassy was doing its best to secretly help the English in its war with Nazi Germany. Despite the fact that the United States would prefer not to enter the war anytime soon, any one of a number of clandestine activities the Americans were doing to assist the British could easily and quickly drag the U.S. into the melee. (continue reading…)