Enigma (38 page)

“Give it to the others.”

“Oh, don’t be so bloody pious.” From the same drawer Logie
produced a couple of enamel mugs. He blew away some dust and wiped
their insides with his forefinger. “What shall we drink to? You
don’t mind if I join you?”

“The end of Shark? The future?”

Logie splashed a large measure of whisky into each mug. “How
about,” he said, shrewdly, offering one to Jericho, “how about your
future?”

They clinked mugs.

“My future.”

They sat in their overcoats, in silence, drinking.

“I’m defeated,” said Logie at last, using the desk to pull
himself to his feet. “I couldn’t tell you the year, old love, never
mind the day.” He had three pipes in a rack and he blew noisily
through each of them, making a harsh, cracking sound, then slipped
them into his pocket. “Now don’t forget your scotch.”

“I don’t want the bloody scotch.”

“Take it. Please. For my sake.”

In the corridor, he shook Jericho’s hand, and Jericho feared
Logie was going to say something embarrassing. But whatever it was
he had in mind, he thought better of it. Instead, he merely gave a
rueful salute and lurched along the passage, banging the door
behind him.

♦

The Big Room, in anticipation of the midnight shift, was almost
empty. A little desultory work was being done on Dolphin and
Porpoise at the far end. Two young women in overalls were on their
knees around Jericho’s desk, gathering every scrap of waste paper
into a couple of sacks, ready for incineration. Only Cave was still
there, bent over his charts. He looked up as Jericho came in.

“Well? How’s it going for you?”

“Too early to tell,” said Jericho. He found the code book and
slipped it into his pocket. “And you?”

“Three hit so far. A Norwegian freighter and a Dutch cargo ship.
They just went straight to the bottom. The third’s on fire and
going round and round in circles. Half the crew lost, the other
half trying to save her.”

“What is she?”

“American Liberty ship. The James Oglethorpe. Seven thousand
tons, carrying steel and cotton.”

“American,” repeated Jericho. He thought of Kramer.

“My brother died, one of the first”

“It’s a slaughter,” said Cave, “an absolute bloody slaughter.
And shall I tell you the worst of it? It’s not going to finish
tonight. It’s going to go on and on like this for days. They’re
going to be chased and harried and torpedoed right the way across
the bloody North Atlantic. Can you imagine what that feels like?
Watching the ship next to you blow up? Not being allowed to stop
and search for survivors? Waiting for your turn?” He touched his
scar, then seemed to realise what he was doing and let his hand
fall. There was a terrible resignation in the gesture. “And now,
apparently, they’re picking up U-boat signals swarming all around
SC-122.”

His telephone began to ring and he swung away to answer it.
While his back was turned, Jericho quietly placed the half-empty
half-bottle of scotch on his desk, then made his way out into the
night.

♦

His mind, on a fuel of Benzedrine and scotch, seemed to be
wheeling away on a course of its own, churning like the bombes in
Hut 11, making bizarre and random connections—Claire and Hester and
Skynner, and Wigram with his shoulder holster, and the tyre tracks
in the frost outside the cottage, and the blazing Liberty ship
going round and round over the bodies of half her crew.

He stopped by the lake to breathe some fresh air and thought of
all the other occasions when he had stood here in the darkness,
gazing at the faint silhouette of the mansion against the stars. He
half-closed his eyes and saw it as it might have been before the
war. A midsummer evening. The sounds of an orchestra and a bubble
of voices drifting across the lawn. A line of Chinese lanterns,
pink and mauve and lemon, stirring in the arboretum. Chandeliers in
the ballroom. White crystal fracturing on the smooth surface of the
lake.

The vision was so strong that he found he was sweating in his
overcoat against the imagined heat, and as he climbed the slope
towards the big house he fancied he saw a line of silver
Rolls-Royces, their chauffeurs leaning against the long bonnets.
But as he drew closer he saw that the cars were merely buses, come
to drop off the next shift, pick up the last, and that the music in
the mansion was only the percussion of telephone bells and the
tapping of hurrying footsteps on the stone floor.

In the labyrinth of the house he nodded cautiously to the few
people he passed—an elderly man in a dark grey suit, an Army
captain, a WAAF. They appeared seedy in the dingy light and he
guessed, by their expressions, he must look pretty odd himself.
Benzedrine could do funny things to the pupils of your eyes, he
seemed to remember, and he hadn’t shaved or changed his clothes for
more than forty hours. But nobody in Bletchley was ever thrown out
for simply looking strange, or the place would have been empty from
the start. There was old Dilly Knox, who used to come to work in
his dressing gown, and Turing who cycled in wearing a gas mask to
try to cure his hay fever, and the cryptanalyst from the Japanese
section who had bathed naked in the lake one lunchtime. By
comparison, Jericho was as conventional as an accountant.

He opened the door to the cellar passage. The bulb must have
blown since his last visit and he found himself peering into a
darkness as chill and black as a catacomb. Something gleamed very
faintly at the foot of the stairs and he groped his way down the
steps towards it. It was the keyhole to the Black Museum, traced in
luminous paint: a trick they had learned in the Blitz.

Inside the room the light switch worked. He unlocked the safe
and replaced the code book and for a moment he was seized by the
crazy notion of hiding the stolen cryptograms inside it as well.
Folded into an envelope they might pass unnoticed for months. But
when, after tonight, was he likely to pass this way again? And one
day they would be discovered. And then all it would take would be a
telephone call to Beaumanor and everything would be unravelled—his
involvement, Hester’s…

No, no.

He closed the steel door.

But still he couldn’t quite bring himself to leave. So much of
his life was here. He touched the safe and then the rough, dry
walls. He drew his finger through the dust on the table. He
contemplated the row of Enigmas on the metal shelf. They were all
encased in light wood, mostly in their original German boxes, and
even in repose they seemed to exude a compelling, almost menacing
power. These were far more than mere machines, he thought. These
were the synapses of the enemy’s brain—mysterious, complex,
animate.

He stared at them for a couple of minutes, then began to turn
away.

He stopped himself.

“Tom Jericho,” he whispered. “You bloody fool.”

The first two Enigmas he lifted down and inspected turned out to
be badly damaged and unusable. The third had a luggage label
attached to its handle by a bit of string: “Sidi Bou Zid 14⁄2⁄43”.
An Afrika Korps Enigma, captured by the Eighth Army during their
attack on Rommel last month. He laid it carefully on the table and
unfastened the metal clasps. The lid opened easily.

This one was in perfect condition: a beauty. The letters on the
keys were unworn, the black metal casing unscratched, the glass
bulbs clear and gleaming. The three rotors—stopped, he saw, at
ZDE—glinted silver beneath the naked light. He stroked it tenderly.
It must only just have left its makers. “Chiffreirmaschine
Gesellschaft,” read their label. “Heimsoeth und Rinke,
Berlin-Wilmersdorf, Uhlandstrasse 138.”

He pushed a key. It was stiffer than on a normal typewriter.
When he had depressed it far enough, the machine emitted a clunk
and the right-hand rotor moved on a notch. At the same time, one of
the bulbs lit Up.

Hallelujah!

The battery was charged. The Enigma was live.

He checked the mechanism. He stooped and typed C. The letter J
lit up. He typed L and got a U. A, I, R and E yielded,
successively, X, P, Q and Q again.

He lifted the Enigma’s inner lid and detached the spindle, set
the rotors back at ZDE and locked them into place. He typed the
cryptogram JUXPQQ and C-L-A-I-R-E was spelled out letter by letter
on the bulbs in little bursts of light.

He fumbled through his pockets for his watch. Two minutes to
twelve.

He folded the lid back into place and hoisted the Enigma up on
its shelf. He made sure to lock the door behind him.

To the people whom he ran past in the mansion’s corridors, who
was he? Nothing. Nobody. Just another peculiar cryptanalyst in a
flap.

♦

Hester Wallace, as agreed, was in the telephone box at midnight,
the receiver in her hand, feeling more foolish than afraid as she
pretended to make a call. Beyond the glass, two currents of pale
sparks were flowing quietly in the dark, as one shift streamed in
from the main gate and the other ebbed towards it. In her pocket
was a sheet of Bletchley’s wood-flecked, brownish notepaper on
which were jotted six entries.

Cordingley had swallowed her story whole—indeed, he had been, if
anything, a little too eager to help. Unable at first to locate the
relevant file, he had called in aid a pimply, jug-eared youth with
wispy yellow hair. Could this child, she had wondered, this
foetus-face, really be a cryptanalyst? But Donald had whispered
yes, he was one of the best: now the professions and the
universities had all been picked over, they were turning to boys
straight out of school. Unformed. Unquestioning. The new elite.

The file had been procured, a space cleared in a corner, and
never had Miss Wallace made a pencil move more quickly. The worst
part had been at the end: keeping her nerve and not fleeing when
she’d finished, but checking the figures, returning the file to the
Foetus, and observing the normal social code with Donald.

“We really must have a drink one of these evenings.”

“Yes really we must.”

“I’ll be in touch, then.”

“Absolutely. So shall I.”

Neither, of course, having the slightest intention of ever doing
so.

Come on, Tom Jericho.

Midnight passed. The first of the buses lumbered by—invisible,
almost, except for its exhaust fumes, which made a puff of pink
cloud in its red rear lights.

And then, just as she was beginning to give up hope, a blur of
white. A hand tapped softly on the glass. She dropped the telephone
and shone her torch on to the face of a lunatic pressed close to
the pane. Dark wild eyes and a convict mask of shadowed beard.
“There’s really no need to scare me half to death,” she muttered,
but that was in the privacy of the phone booth. As she came out,
all she said was: “I’ve left your numbers on the telephone.”

She held the door open for him. His hand rested on hers. A brief
moment of pressure signalled his thanks—too brief for her to tell
whose fingers were the coldest.

“Meet me here at five.”

♦

Exhilaration gave a fresh energy to her tired legs as she
pedalled up the hill away from Bletchley.

He needed to see her at five. How else could one interpret that,
except as meaning he had found a way? A victory! A victory against
the Mermagens and the Cordingleys!

The gradient steepened. She rose to tread the pedals. The
bicycle waved from side to side like a metronome. The light danced
on the road.

Afterwards, she was to reproach herself severely for this
premature jubilation, but the truth was she would probably never
have seen them anyway. They had positioned themselves quite
carefully, drawn up parallel with the track and hidden by the
hawthorn hedge—a professional job—so that when she came round the
corner and began to bounce over the potholes towards the cottage
she passed them in the shadows without a glance.

She was six feet from the door when the headlights came
on—slitted blackout headlights, but dazzling enough to splash her
shadow against the whitewashed wall. She heard the engine cough and
turned, shielding her eyes, to see the big car coming at her—calm,
unhurried, implacable, nodding over the bumpy ground.

§

Jericho told himself to take his time. There’s no hurry. You’ve
given yourself five hours. Use them.

He locked himself into the cellar room, leaving the key half
turned in the keyhole, so that anyone trying to insert their key
from the other side would find it blocked. He knew he’d have to
open up eventually—otherwise, what was he? Just a rat in a trap.
But at least he would now have thirty seconds’ warning, and to give
himself a cover story, he reopened the Naval Section safe and
spread the handful of maps and code books across the narrow table.
To these he added the stolen cryptograms and key settings, and his
watch, which he placed before him with its lid open. Like preparing
for an examination, he thought. “Candidates must write on one side
of the paper only; this margin to be left blank for the use of the
examiner.”

Then he lifted down the Enigma and removed the cover.

He listened. Nothing. A dripping pipe somewhere, that was all.
The walls bulged with the pressure of the cold earth; he could
smell the soil, taste the spores of damp lime plaster. He breathed
on his fingers and flexed them.

He would work backwards, he decided, deciphering the last
cryptogram first, on the theory that whatever had caused Claire’s
disappearance was contained somewhere in those final messages.

He ran his fingers down the columns of notation to find the
Vulture settings for 4 March—panic day in the Bletchley
Registry.

III V IV GAH CX AZ DV KT HU LW GP EY MR FQ

The Roman numerals told him which three out of the machine’s
five rotors were to be used that day, and what order they were to
be placed in. GAH gave him the rotor starting positions. The next
ten letter pairs represented the cross-pluggings he needed to make
on the plugboard at the back of the Enigma. Six letters were left
unconnected which, by some mysterious and glorious fold in the laws
of statistics, actually increased the number of potential different
cross-pluggings from almost 8 million million
(25×23×21×19×17×15×13×11×9×7×5×3) to more than 150 million
million.