Enigma (40 page)

“They’ve found the boat, sir,” said Leveret. “Blood in the
bottom.”

♦

Just before three o’clock, Jericho had the first message
deciphered.

TO THE OFFICE OF THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF.
URGENT. DISCOVERED TWELVE KILOMETRES WEST SMOLENSK EVIDENCE HUMAN
REMAINS. BELIEVED EXTENSIVE, POSSIBLY THOUSANDS. HOW AM I TO
PROCEED? LACHMAN, OBERST, FIELD POLICE.

Jericho sat back and contemplated this marvel. Well, yes, Herr
Oberst, how are you to proceed? I die to know.

Once again he began the tedious procedure of replugging and
re-rotoring the Enigma. The next signal had been sent from Smolensk
three days later, on 9 February. A, N, O, K, H, B, E, F, E, H,
L…The exquisite formality of the German armed forces unfolded
before him. And then a null, and then G, E, S, T, E, R, N, U, N, D,
H, E, U, T, E.

Gestern und heute. Yesterday and today.

And so on, letter by letter, inescapably, remorselessly—press,
clunk, light, note—stopping occasionally to massage his fingers and
straighten his back, the whole ghastly story made worse by the
slowness with which he had to read it, his eyeballs pressed to the
crime. Some of the words gave him difficulty. What was
mumifizierfi
? Could it be
mummified
? And
Sagemehl
geknebelti
;
Gagged with sawdust
?

PRELIMINARY EXCAVATION UNDERTAKEN IN FOREST
NORTH DNIEPER CASTLE YESTERDAY AND TODAY. SITE APPROXIMATELY TWO
HUNDRED SQUARE METRES. TOPSOIL COVERING TO DEPTH OF ONE POINT FIVE
METRES PLANTED PINE SAPLINGS. FIVE LAYERS CORPSES. UPPER MUMMIFIED
LOWER LIQUID. TWENTY BODIES RECOVERED. DEATH CAUSED BY SINGLE SHOT
HEAD. HANDS BOUND WIRE. MOUTHS GAGGED CLOTH AND SAWDUST. MILITARY
UNIFORMS, HIGH BOOTS AND MEDALS INDICATE VICTIMS POLISH OFFICERS.
SEVERE FROST AND HEAVY SNOWFALL OBLIGE US SUSPEND OPERATIONS
PENDING THAW. I SHALL CONTINUE MY INVESTIGATIONS. LACHMAN, OBERST,
FIELD POLICE.

Jericho took a tour around his little cell, flapping his arms
and stamping his feet. It seemed to him to be peopled with ghosts,
grinning at him with toothless mouths blasted into the backs of
their heads. He was walking in the forest himself. The cold sliced
his flesh. And when he stopped and listened he could hear the sound
of trees being uprooted, of spades and pickaxes ringing on frozen
earth.

Polish officers?

Puck?

The third signal, after a gap of eleven days, had been sent on
20
th
February. Nach Eintreten Tauwetter
Exhumierungen im Wald bei Katyn fortgesetzt…

FOLLOWING THAW KATYN FOREST EXCAVATIONS
RESUMED EIGHT HUNDRED YESTERDAY. FIFTY-TWO CORPSES EXAMINED.
QUANTITIES OF PERSONAL LETTERS, MEDALS, POLISH CURRENCY RECOVERED.
ALSO SPENT PISTOL CARTRIDGE CASES SEVEN POINT SIX FIVE MILLIMETRE
STAMPED QUOTE GECO D UNQUOTE. INTERROGATION LOCAL POPULATION
ESTABLISHES ONE EXECUTIONS CONDUCTED NKVD DURING SOVIET OCCUPATION
MARCH AND APRIL NINETEEN HUNDRED AND FORTY. TWO VICTIMS BELIEVED
BROUGHT FROM KOZIELSK DETENTION CAMP BY RAIL TO GNIEZDOVO STATION
TAKEN INTO FOREST AT NIGHT IN GROUPS ONE HUNDRED SHOTS HEARD. THREE
TOTAL NUMBER VICTIMS ESTIMATED TEN THOUSAND REPEAT TEN THOUSAND.
ASSISTANCE URGENTLY REQUIRED IF FURTHER EXCAVATION
DESIRED.

Jericho sat motionless for fifteen minutes, gazing at the
Enigma, trying to comprehend the scale of the implications. This
was a secret it was dangerous to know, he thought. This was a
secret big enough to swallow a person whole. Ten thousand Poles—our
gallant Allies, survivors of an army that had charged the
Wehrmacht’s Panzers on horseback, waving swords—ten thousand of
them trussed, gagged and shot by our other, more recent, gallant
Allies, the heroic Soviet Union? No wonder the Registry had been
cleared.

An idea occurred to him and he went back to the first
cryptogram. For if one looked at it thus:

HYCYKWPIOROKDZENAJEWICZJPTAKJHRUTBPYSJMOTYLPCIE

—it was meaningless, but if one rearranged it thus:

HYCYK, W, PIORO, K., DZENAJEWICZ, J.,PTAK, J.,
HRUT, B., PYS, J., MOTYL, P-

—then out of the chaos was conjured order. Names.

He had enough now. He could have stopped. But he went on anyway,
for he was never a man to leave a mystery partially solved, a
mathematical proof only half worked-out. One had to sketch in the
route to the answer, even if one had guessed at the destination
long before the journey’s end.

Enigma settings for German Army key Vulture, 2 March 1943:

III IV II INK JP DY QS HL AE NW CU IK FX
BR

An Ostubaf Dorfmann. Ostubaffoi Obersturmbannführer. A Gestapo
rank.

TO OBERSTURMBANNFUHRER DORFMANN RHSA ON ORDERS
OFFICE COMMANDER IN CHIEF NAMES OF POLISH OFFICERS IDENTIFIED TO
DATE IN KATYN FOREST AS FOLLOWS

He didn’t bother to write them down. He knew what he was looking
for and he found it after an hour, buried in a babble of other
names. It wasn’t sent to the Gestapo on the 2
nd
, but
on the 3
rd
:

PUKOWSKI, T.

A few minutes after 5 a.m., Tom Jericho surfaced, molelike, from
his subterranean hole, and stood in the passage of the mansion,
listening. The Enigma had been returned to its shelf, the safe
locked, the door to the Black Museum locked as well. The
cryptograms and the settings were in his pocket. He had left no
trace. He could hear footsteps and male voices coming towards him
and he drew back against the wall, but whoever they were they
didn’t come his way. The wooden staircase creaked as they passed
on, out of sight, up to the offices in the bedrooms.

He moved cautiously, keeping close to the wall. If Wigram had
gone looking for him in the hut at midnight and failed to find him,
what would he have done? He would have gone to Albion Street. And
seeing Jericho hadn’t turned up there, he might by now have roused
a considerable search party. And Jericho didn’t want to be found,
not yet. There were too many questions he had to ask, and only one
man had the answers.

He passed the foot of the staircase and opened the double doors
that led to the lobby.

You became her lover, didn’t you, Puck? The next after me in the
great revolving door of Claire Romilly’s men. And somehow—how?—you
knew that something terrible was going on in that ghastly forest.
Wasn’t that why you sought her out? Because she had access to
information you couldn’t get to? And she must have agreed to help,
must have started copying out anything that looked of interest.
(“She’d really been much more attentive of late…”) And then there
came the nightmare day when you realised—who? your father? your
brother?—was buried in that hideous place. And then, the next day,
all she could bring you was cryptograms, because the British—the
British: your trusty Allies, your loyal protectors, to whom the
Poles had entrusted the secret of Enigma—the British had decided
that in the higher interest they simply didn’t want to know any
more.

Puck, Puck, what have you done?

What have you done with her?

There was a sentry in the Gothic entry hall, a couple of
cryptanalysts talking quietly on a bench, a WAAF with a stack of
box files struggling to find the doorhandle with her elbow. Jericho
opened it for her and she smiled her thanks and made a rolling
motion with her eyes, as if to say: What a place to find ourselves
at five o’clock on a spring morning, and Jericho smiled and nodded
back, a fellow sufferer: Yes, indeed, what a place.

The WAAF went one way and he went the other, towards the morning
star and the main gate. The sky was black, the telephone box almost
invisible in the shadows of the arboretum. It was empty. He walked
straight past it and pushed his way into the vegetation. Sir
Herbert Leon, the last Victorian master of the Park, had been a
dedicated arborist, planting his realm with three hundred different
species of tree. Forty years of re-seeding, followed by four years
without pruning, had turned the arboretum into a labyrinth of
secret chambers, and here Jericho squatted on the dry earth and
waited for Hester Wallace.

By five fifteen it was clear to him she wasn’t coming, which
suggested she had been detained. In which case, they were almost
certainly looking for him.

He had to get out of the Park, and he couldn’t risk the main
gate.

At five twenty, when his eyes were thoroughly used to the dark,
he began to move northwards through the arboretum, back towards the
house, his bundle of secrets heavy in his pocket. He could still
feel the effects of the Benzedrine—a lightness in his muscles, an
acuteness in his mind, especially to danger—and he offered a prayer
of thanks to Logie for making him take it, because otherwise by now
he’d be half-dead.

Puck, Puck, what have you done?

What have you done with her?

He came out cautiously from between two sycamores and stepped on
to the lawn at the side of the mansion. Ahead of him was the long,
low outline of the old Hut 4, with the mass of the big house behind
it. He skirted it and went around the back, past some rubbish bins
and into the courtyard. Here were the stables where he’d started
work in 1939, and beyond those the cottage where Dilly Knox had
first pried into the mysteries of the Enigma. Drawn up in a
semicircle on the cobbles he could just make out the gleaming
cylinders and exhausts of half a dozen motorcycles. A door opened
and in the brief glow he saw a dispatch rider, padded, helmeted and
gauntleted, like a medieval knight. Jericho pressed himself against
the brickwork and waited while the motorcyclist adjusted his
pillion, then kicked the machine into life and revved it. Its red
light dwindled and disappeared through the rear gate.

He considered, briefly, trying to get out using the same exit,
but reason told him that if the main entrance was probably being
watched, then so was this. He stumbled on past the cottage, past
the back of the tennis courts, and finally past the bombe hut,
throbbing like an engine shed in the darkness.

By now a faint blue stain had begun to seep up from the rim of
the sky. Night—his friend and ally, his only cover—was preparing to
desert him. Ahead, he could begin to make out the contours of a
building site. Pyramids of earth and sand. Squat rectangles of
bricks and sweet-smelling timber.

Jericho had never before paid much notice to Bletchley’s
perimeter fence, which turned out, on inspection, to be a
formidable stockade of seven-foot-high iron stakes, tapering at
their tips into triple spears, bent outwards to deter incursion. It
was as he was running his hands over the galvanised metal that he
heard a swish of movement in the undergrowth just beyond it, to his
left. He took a few steps backwards and retreated behind a stack of
steel girders. A moment later, a sentry ambled past, in no great
state of alertness, to judge by his slouched silhouette and the
shuffle of his step.

Jericho crouched lower, listening as the sounds faded. The
perimeter was perhaps a mile long. Say, fifteen minutes for a
sentry to complete a circuit. Say, two sentries patrolling.
Possibly three.

If there were three, he had five minutes.

He looked around to see what he could see.

A two-hundred-gallon drum proved too heavy for him to shift, but
there were planks, and some thick sections of concrete drainage
pipe, both of which he found he was able to drag over to the fence.
He started to sweat again. Whatever they were building here, it was
going to be vast—vast and bombproof. In the gloom the excavations
were fathomless. “
FIVE LAYERS CORPSES. UPPER MUMMIFIED LOWER
LIQUID
…”

He upended the pipes and stood them about five feet apart. He
laid a plank on top. Then he hefted a second set of pipes on to the
first, picked up another length of timber and staggered over with
it balanced on his shoulder. He set it down carefully, making a
platform with two steps—about the first practical thing he had made
since boyhood. He climbed on to the rickety structure and seized
the iron spears. His feet scrabbled for a purchase on the rails.
But the fence was designed to keep people out, not in. Fuelled by
chemicals and desperation, Jericho was just able to pull himself
astride it, twist, and lower himself down the other side. He
dropped the last three feet and stayed there, squatting in the long
grass, recovering his breath, listening.

His final act was to put his foot through the railings and kick
away the planks.

He didn’t wait to see if the noise had attracted attention. He
set off across the field, walking at first, then trotting and
finally running, sliding and skidding over the dewy grass. There
was a big military camp to his right, concealed by a line of trees
only just now materialising. Behind him, he could sense the dawn on
his shoulders, brightening by the minute. He looked back only when
he reached the road, and that was his last impression of Bletchley
Park: a thin line of low, black buildings—mere dots and dashes
along the horizon—and above them in the eastern sky an immense arc
of cold blue light.

♦

He had been to Puck’s digs once before, on a Sunday afternoon a
year ago, for a game of chess. He had a vague memory of an elderly
landlady who doted on Puck pouring them tea in a cramped front
room, while her invalid husband wheezed and coughed and retched
upstairs. He could remember the game quite clearly, it had a
curious shape to it—Jericho very strong in the opening, Puck in the
middle, and Jericho again at the end. A draw agreed.

Alma Terrace. That was it. Alma Terrace. Number nine.

He was moving quickly—long strides and an occasional, loping
run—keeping to the side of the pavement, down the hill and into the
sleeping town. Outside the pub lingered a soapy smell of last
night’s beer. The Methodist chapel a few doors down was dark and
bolted, its blistered sign unchanged since the outbreak of war:
“Repent ye: for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” He went under
the railway bridge. On the opposite side of the road was Albion
Street, and a little further along the Bletchley Working Men’s Club
(“The Co-Operative Society Presents a Talk by Councillor A.E.
Braithwaite: The Soviet Economy, Its Lessons for Us”). After
another twenty yards he turned left into Alma Terrace.