Enigma (32 page)

Hester fluttered the first cryptogram triumphantly. “Here it is.
One hundred and nine exactly.”

“OK. Fine. So that goes through—straight away, presumably,
because Berlin replies: VVVCPQ R QRU HHVA. Message received and
understood, I have nothing for you, Heil Hitler and good night. All
very smooth and methodical. Right out of the manual.”

“That girl in the Intercept Hut said he was precise.”

“What we don’t have, unfortunately, is Berlin’s replies.” He
riffled through the log sheets. “Easy contact on the
9
th
as well, and again on the 20
th
.
Ah,” he said, “now on the 2
nd
of March it looks to
have been more tricky.” The form was indeed a mass of terse
dialogue. He held it up to the light. Smolensk to Berlin: QZE, QRJ,
QRO. (Your frequency is too high, your signals are too weak,
increase your power.) And Berlin snapping back: QWP, QRXIO (observe
regulations, wait ten minutes) and finally an exasperated QRX (shut
up). “Now this is interesting. No wonder they suddenly start to
sound like strangers.” Jericho squinted at the carbon copy. “The
call sign in Berlin has changed.”

“Changed? Absurd. Changed to what?”

“TGD.”

“What? Let me see that.” She snatched the form out of his hand.
“That’s not possible. No, no. TGD simply isn’t a Wehrmacht call
sign.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I know it. There’s a whole Enigma key named after TGD.
It’s never been broken. It’s famous.” She had started to wind a
lock of hair nervously around her right index finger. “Notorious
might be a better word.”

“What is it?”

“It’s the call sign of Gestapo headquarters in Berlin.”

“Gestapo?” Jericho fumbled through the remaining log sheets.
“But all the messages from March the 2
nd
onwards,”
he said, “that’s eight out of the eleven, all the long ones,
including the four in Claire’s room—they’re all addressed to that
sign.” He gave the forms to her so she could check for herself and
sat back in his seat.

A gust of wind stirred the branches above them, sending a shower
of rainwater rattling like a volley across the windscreen.

♦

“Let’s try and construct a thesis,” said Jericho after a minute
or two, as much to hear a human voice as anything. The random
pattering of the downpour and the crepuscular gloom of the forest
were beginning to affect his nerves. Hester had pulled her feet up
from the sodden floor and was huddled up very small on the front
seat, staring out at the forest, hugging her legs, occasionally
massaging her toes through her damp stockings.

“March the 4
th
is the key day,” he went on.
(Where was I on 4 March? In another world: reading Sherlock Holmes
in front of a Cambridge gas fire, avoiding Mr Kite and learning to
walk again) “Up to that day, everything is proceeding normally. A
signals unit hibernating in the Ukraine, dormant all winter, has
come to life in the warmer weather. First, a few signals to Army HQ
in Berlin, and then a burst of longer traffic to the Gestapo—”

“That’s not normal,” said Hester scathingly. “An Army unit
transmitting reports in a Russian-front Enigma key to the
headquarters of the secret police? Normal? I’d call that
unprecedented.”

“Quite.” He didn’t mind being interrupted. He was glad of a sign
she was listening. “In fact, it’s so unprecedented, someone at
Bletchley wakes up to what’s happening and starts to panic. All
previous signals are removed from the Registry. And just before
midnight on that same day your Mr Mermagen telephones Beaumanor and
tells them to stop interception. Ever happen before?”

“Never.” She paused, then moved her shoulder slightly in
concession. “Well, all right, maybe, when traffic’s very heavy, a
low-priority target might be neglected for a day or so. But you saw
the size of Beaumanor. And that’s not as big as the RAF’s station
at Chicksands. And there must be a dozen smaller places, maybe
more. We’re always being told by people like you that the whole
point of the exercise is to monitor everything?”

He nodded. This was true. It had been their philosophy from the
beginning: be inclusive, miss nothing. It isn’t the big boys who
give you the cribs—they’re too good. It’s the little fellows—the
long-forgotten incompetents stuck in out-of-the-way places, who
always begin their messages “situation normal, nothing to report”
and then use the same nulls in the same places, or who habitually
encipher their own call-signs, or who set the rotors every morning
with their girlfriend’s initials…

Jericho said: “So he wouldn’t have told them to stop on his own
authority?”

“Miles? God, no.”

“Who gives him his orders?”

“That depends. Hut 6 Machine Room, usually. Sometimes the Hut 3
Watch. They decide priorities.”

“Could he have made a mistake?”

“In what sense?”

“Well, Heaviside said Miles called Beaumanor just before
midnight on the 4
th
in a panic. I was wondering:
what if Miles had been told earlier in the day that this unit was
no longer to be intercepted, but forgot to pass on the
message.”

“Eminently possible. Likely, in fact, knowing Miles. Yes, yes of
course.” Hester turned round to face him. “I see what you’re
driving at. In the time between Miles being told to pull the plug
and the order reaching Beaumanor, four more messages had been
intercepted.”

“Exactly. Which came into Hut 6 late on the night of the
4
th
. But by then the order had already been issued
that they weren’t to be decoded.”

“So they just got caught up in the bureaucracy and were passed
along the line.”

“Until they ended up in the German Book Room.”

“In front of Claire.”

“Undecrypted.”

Jericho nodded slowly. Undecrypted. That was the crucial point.
That explained why the signals in Claire’s bedroom had showed no
signs of damage. There had never been any strips of Type-X decode
gummed to their backs. They had never been broken.

He peered into the wood but he didn’t see trees, he saw the
German Book Room on the morning after the night of 4 March, when
the cryptograms would have arrived to be filed and indexed.

Would Miss Monk herself have rung the Hut 6 duty officer, or
would she have delegated the task to one of her girls? “We’ve got
four orphan intercepts here, without the solutions. What, pray, are
we supposed to do with them?” And the reply would have
been—what?

Oh, Christ! File them? Forget them? Dump them in the bin marked
CONFIDENTIAL WASTE?

Only none of those things had happened.

Claire had stolen them instead.

“In theory?” Weitzman had said. “ On an average day? A girl like
Claire would probably see more operational detail about the German
armedl forces than Adolf Hitler. Absurd, isn’t it?”

Ah, but they weren’t supposed to read it, Walter, that was the
point. Well-bred young ladies wouldn’t dream of reading someone
else’s mail, unless they were told to do so for King and country.
They certainly wouldn’t read it for themselves. That was the reason
why Bletchley employed them.

But what was it Miss Monk had said of Claire? “She’d really
become much more attentive of late…” Naturally she had. She had
begun to read what was passing through her hands. And at the end of
February or the beginning of March she had seen something that had
changed her life. Something to do with a German rear-echelon
signals unit whose wireless operator played Morse code to the
Gestapo as if it were a Mozart sonata. Something so utterly
“un-boring, darling”, that when Bletchley had decided they couldn’t
bear to read the traffic any more, she had felt compelled to steal
the last four intercepts herself.

And why had she stolen them?

He didn’t even need to pose the question. Hester had reached the
answer ahead of him, although her voice was faint and disbelieving
and almost drowned out by the rain.

“She stole them to read them.”

♦

She stole them to read them. The answer slid beneath the random
pattern of events and fitted it like a crib.

She stole the cryptograms to read them.

“But is it really feasible?” asked Hester. She seemed bewildered
by the destination to which her logic had led her. “I mean, could
she really have done it?”

“Yes. It’s possible. Hard to imagine. Possible.”

Oh, the nerve of it, thought Jericho. Oh, the sheer breathtaking
bloody nerve of it, the cool deliberation with which she must have
plotted it. Claire, my darling, you really are a wonder.

“But she couldn’t have managed it on her own,” he said, “not
locked away at the back of Hut 3. She’d have needed help.”

“Who?”

He raised his hands from the steering wheel in a hopeless
gesture. It was hard to know where to begin. “Someone with access
to Hut 6 for a start. Someone who could look up the Enigma settings
for German Army key Vulture on March the 4
th
.”

“Settings?”

He glanced at her in surprise, then realised that the actual
workings of an Enigma was not the sort of information she would
have needed to know. And in Bletchley, what you didn’t need to know
you were never told.

“Walzenlage,” he said. “ Ringstellung. Stecker-verbindungen.
Wheel order, ring setting and cross-plugging. If Vulture was being
read every day, they’d already have had those in Hut 6.”

“Then what would you have had to do?”

“Get access to a Type-X machine. Set it up in exactly the right
way. Type in the cryptograms and tear off the plaintext.”

“Could Claire have done that?”

“Almost certainly not. She’d never have been allowed anywhere
near the decoding room. And anyway she wasn’t trained.”

“So her accomplice would have needed some skill?”

“Skill, yes. Arid nerve. And time, come to that. Four messages.
A thousand cipher groups. Five thousand individual characters. Even
an expert operator would need the best part of half an hour to
decode that much. It could have been done. But she would have
needed a superman.”

“Or woman.”

“No.” He was remembering the events of Saturday night: the sound
downstairs in the cottage, the big male footprints in the frost,
the cycle tracks and the red rear light of the bicycle shooting
away from him into the darkness. “No. It’s a man.”

If only I’d been thirty seconds quicker, he thought. I’d have
seen his face.

And then he thought: Yes, and maybe got a bullet in my own for
my trouble: a bullet from a stolen Smith and Wesson.38,
manufactured in Springfield, Massachusetts.

He felt a sudden prickle of ice-cold moisture on the back of his
wrist and glanced up. He followed its trajectory to a spot in the
roof, just before the windscreen. As he watched, another dark
bubble of rainwater slowly swelled, ripened to a rich rust colour,
and dropped.

Shark.

He realised guiltily he had nearly forgotten it.

“What’s the time?”

“Almost five.”

“We should be getting back.”

♦

He rubbed at his hand and reached for the ignition.

The car wouldn’t start. Jericho twisted the key back and forth
and pumped away frantically at the accelerator but all he managed
to coax from the engine was a dull turning noise.

“Oh, hell!”

He turned up his collar, got out and went round to the boot. As
he opened the lid a brace of pigeons took off behind him, wings
snapping like firecrackers. There was a starting handle under the
spare can of petrol and he inserted that into the hole in the front
bumper. “You do this the wrong way, lad,” his stepfather had told
him, “and you can break your wrist.” But which was the right way?
Clockwise or anticlockwise? He gave the handle a hopeful tug. It
was horribly stiff.

“Pull out the choke,” he shouted to Hester, “and press your foot
down on the third pedal if she starts to fire.”

The little car rocked as she slid across into the driver’s
seat.

He bent to his task again. The forest floor was only a couple of
feet from his face, a pungent brown carpet of decaying leaves and
fir cones. He heaved a couple more times until his shoulder ached.
He was beginning to sweat now, perspiration mingling with the
rainwater, dripping off the end of his nose, trickling down his
neck. The insanity of their whole undertaking seemed encapsulated
in this moment. The greatest convoy battle of the war was about to
start, and where was he? In some primeval bloody forest in the
middle of bloody nowhere poring over stolen Gestapo cryptograms
with a woman he barely knew. What in the name of reason did they
think they were doing? They must be—he tightened his grip—crazy…He
jerked viciously on the starting handle and suddenly the engine
caught, spluttered, nearly died, then Hester revved it loudly. The
sweetest sound he’d ever heard, it split the forest. He slung the
handle into the boot and slammed the lid.

The gearbox whined as he reversed along the track towards the
road.

♦

The overhanging branches made a tunnel of the soaking lane.
Their headlights glinted on a film of running water. Jericho drove
slowly around and around the same course, trying to find some
landmark in the gloom, trying not to panic. He must have taken a
wrong turning coming out of the clearing. The steering wheel
beneath his hands felt as wet and slippery as the road. Eventually
they came to a crossroads beside a vast and decaying oak. Hester
bent her head again to the map. A lock of long black hair fell
across her eyes. She used both hands to pile it up. She clenched a
pin between her teeth and muttered through it: “Left or right?”

“You’re the navigator.”

“And you’re the one who decided to drive us off the main road.”
She skewered her hair savagely back in place. “Go left.”