Enigma (7 page)

A narrow, ill-lit corridor, perhaps twenty yards long, stretched
in front of him, with a dozen doors leading off it. The wooden
partitions were flimsy and the noise of a hundred people working at
full stretch leaked from room to room—the clump and thud of boots
and shoes on the bare boards, the hum of conversation, the
occasional shout, the scrape of chair legs, the ringing of
telephones, the clack clack clack of the Type-X machines in the
Decoding Room.

The only tiny difference was that the walk-in cupboard on the
right, immediately next to the entrance, now had a nameplate on it:
“Lt. Kramer US Navy Liaison Officer”.

Familiar faces loomed towards him. Kingcome and Proudfoot were
whispering together outside the Catalogue Room and drew back to let
him pass. He nodded to them. They nodded in return but didn’t
speak. Atwood hurried out of the Crib Room, saw Jericho, gawped,
then put his head down. He muttered, “Hello, Tom,” then almost ran
towards Research.

Clearly, nobody had ever expected to see him again. He was an
embarrassment. A dead man. A ghost.

Logie was oblivious, both to the general astonishment and to
Jericho’s discomfort. “Hello, everybody.” He waved to Atwood.
“Hello, Frank. Look who’s back! The prodigal returns! Give them a
smile, Tom, old thing, it’s not a ruddy funeral. Not yet, anyway.”
He stopped outside his office and fiddled with his key for half a
minute, then discovered the door was unlocked. “Come in, come
in.”

The room was scarcely bigger than a broom store. It had been
Turing’s cubbyhole until just before the break into Shark, when
Turing had been sent to America. Now Logie had it—his tiny
perquisite of rank—and he looked absurdly huge as he bent over his
desk, like an adult poking around in a child’s den. There was a
fireproof safe in one corner, leaking intercepts, and a rubbish bin
labelled CONFIDENTIAL WASTE. There was a telephone with a red
handset. Paper was everywhere—on the floor, on the table, on the
top of the radiator where it had baked crisp and yellow, in wire
baskets and in box files, in tall stacks and in piles that had
subsided into fans.

“Bugger, bugger, bugger.” Logie had a message slip in his hands
and was frowning at it. He took his pipe out of his pocket and
chewed on the stem. He seemed to have forgotten Jericho’s presence
until Jericho coughed to remind him.

“What? Oh. Sorry, old love.” He traced the words of the message
with his pipe. “The Admiralty’s a bit exercised, apparently.
Conference in A-Block at eight o’clock with Navy brass up from
Whitehall. Want to know the score. Skynner’s in a spin and demands
to see me forthwith. Bugger, bugger.”

“Does Skynner know I’m back?” Skynner was the head of
Bletchley’s Naval Section. He’d never cared for Jericho, probably
because Jericho had never concealed his opinion of him: that he was
a bombast and a bully whose chief war aim was to greet the peace as
Sir Leonard Skynner, OBE, with a seat on the Security Executive and
a lease on an Oxford mastership. Jericho had a vague memory of
actually telling Skynner some of this, or all of it, or possibly
more, shortly before he was sent back to Cambridge to recover his
senses.

“Of course he knows you’re back, old thing. I had to clear it
with him first.”

“And he doesn’t mind?”

“Mind? No. The man’s desperate. He’d do anything to get back
into Shark.” Logie added quickly: “Sorry, I don’t mean…that’s not
to say that bringing you back is an act of desperation. Only, well,
you know…” He sat down heavily and looked again at the message. He
rattled his pipe against his worn yellow teeth. “Bugger, bugger,
bugger”

Looking at him then it occurred to Jericho that he knew almost
nothing about Logie. They had worked together for two years, would
regard themselves as friends, yet they’d never had a proper
conversation. He didn’t know if Logie was married, or if he had a
girl.

“I’d better go and see him, I suppose. Excuse me, old love.”

Logie squeezed past his desk and shouted down the corridor:
“Puck!” Jericho could hear the cry being taken up somewhere in the
recesses of the hut by another voice. “Puck!” And then another:
“Puck! Puck!”

Logie ducked his head back into the office. “One analyst per
shift co-ordinates the Shark attack. Puck this shift, Baxter next,
then Pettifer.” His head disappeared again. “Ah-ha, here he comes.
Come on, old thing. Look alive. I’ve a surprise for you. See who’s
in here.”

“So there you are, my dear Guy,” came a familiar voice from the
corridor. “Nobody knew where to find you.”

Adam Pukowski slid his lithe frame past Logie, saw Jericho and
stopped dead. He was genuinely shocked. Jericho could almost see
his mind struggling to regain control of his features, forcing his
famous smile back on to his face. At last he managed it. He even
threw his arms round Jericho and hugged him. “Tom, it’s…I had begun
to think you were never returning. It’s marvellous.”

“It’s good to see you again, Puck.” Jericho patted him politely
on the back.

Puck was their mascot, their touch of glamour, their link with
the adventure of war. He had arrived in the first week to brief
them on the Polish bombe, then flown back to Poland. When Poland
fell he had fled to France, and when France collapsed he had
escaped across the Pyrenees. Romantic stories clustered around him:
that he had hidden from the Germans in a goatherd’s cottage, that
he had smuggled himself aboard a Portuguese steamer and ordered the
captain to sail to England at pistol-point. When he had popped up
again in Bletchley in the winter of 1940 it was Pinker, the
Shakespearian, who had shortened his name to Puck (“that merry
wanderer of the night”). His mother was British, which explained
his almost perfect English, distinctive only because he pronounced
it so carefully.

“You have come to give us assistance?”

“So it seems.” He shyly disengaged himself from Puck’s embrace.
“For what it’s worth.”

“Splendid, splendid.” Logie regarded them fondly for a moment,
then began rummaging among the litter on his desk. “Now where is
that thing? It was here this morning”

Puck nodded at Logie’s back and whispered: “Do you see, Tom? As
organised as ever.”

“Now, now, Puck, I heard that. Let me see. Is this it? No. Yes.
Yes!”

He turned and handed Jericho a typewritten document, officially
stamped and headed “By Order of the War Office”. It was a billeting
notice, served on a Mrs Ethel Armstrong, entitling Jericho to
lodgings in the Commercial Guesthouse, Albion Street,
Bletchley.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what it’s like, old thing. Best I could
do.”

“I’m sure it’s fine.” Jericho folded the chit and stuffed it
into his pocket. Actually, he was quite sure it warn’t fine—the
last decent rooms in Bletchley had disappeared three years ago, and
people now had to travel in from as far away as Bedford, twenty
miles distant—but what was the point in complaining? On past
experience he wouldn’t be using the room much anyway, except to
sleep in.

“Now don’t you go exhausting yourself, my boy,” said Logie. “We
don’t expect you to work a full shift. Nothing like that. You just
come and go as you please. What we want from you is what you gave
us last time. Insight. Inspiration. Spotting that something we’ve
all missed. Isn’t that so, Puck?”

“Absolutely.” His handsome face was more haggard than Jericho
had ever seen it, more tired even than Logie’s. “God knows, Tom, we
are certainly up against it.”

“I take it then we’re no further forward?” said Logie. “No good
news I can give our lord and master?”

Puck shook his head.

“Not even a glimmer?”

“Not even that.”

“No. Well, why should there be? Damn bloody admirals!” Logie
screwed up the message slip, aimed it at his rubbish bin and
missed. “I’d show you round myself, Tom, but the Skynner waits for
no man, as you’ll recall. All right with you, Puck? Give him the
grand tour?”

“Of course, Guy. As you wish.”

Logie ushered them out into the passage and tried to lock the
door, then gave up on it. As he turned he opened his mouth and
Jericho nerved himself for one of Logie’s excruciating
housemaster’s pep talks—something about innocent lives depending on
them, and the need for them to do their best, and the race being
not to the swift nor the battle to the strong (he had actually said
this once)—but instead his mouth just widened into a yawn.

“Oh, dear. Sorry, old thing. Sorry.”

He shuffled off down the corridor, patting his pockets to make
sure he had his pipe and tobacco pouch. They heard him mutter
again, something about “bloody admirals”, and he was gone.

♦

Hut 8 was thirty-five yards long by ten wide and Jericho could
have toured it in his sleep, probably had toured it in his sleep,
for all he knew. The outside walls were thin and the damp from the
lake seemed to rise through the floorboards so that at night the
rooms were chilly, cast in a sepia glow by bare, low-wattage bulbs.
The furniture was mostly trestle tables and folding wooden chairs.
It reminded Jericho of a church hall on a winter’s night. All that
was missing was a badly tuned piano and somebody thumping out “Land
of Hope and Glory”.

It was laid out like an assembly line, the main stage in a
process that originated somewhere far out in the darkness, maybe
two thousand miles away, when the grey hull of a U-boat rose close
to the surface and squirted off a radio message to its controllers.
The signals were intercepted at various listening-posts and
teleprintered to Bletchley and within ten minutes of transmission,
even as the U-boats were preparing to dive, they were emerging via
a tunnel into Hut 8’s Registration Room. Jericho helped himself to
the contents of a wire basket labelled “Shark” and carried them to
the nearest light. The hours immediately after midnight were
usually the busiest time. Sure enough, six messages had been
intercepted in the last eighteen minutes. Three consisted of just
eight letters: he guessed they were weather reports. Even the
longest of the other cryptograms was no more than a couple of dozen
four-letter groups:

JRLO GOPL DNRZ LOBT—

Puck made a weary face at him, as if to say: What can you
do?

Jericho said: “What’s the volume?”

♦

“It varies. One hundred and fifty, perhaps two hundred messages
a day. And rising.”

The Registration Room didn’t just handle Shark. There was
Porpoise and Dolphin and all the other different Enigma keys to log
and then pass across the corridor to the Crib Room. Here, the
cribsters sifted them for clues—radio station call signs they
recognised (Kiel was JDU, for example, Wilhelmshaven KYU), messages
whose contents they could guess at, or cryptograms that had already
been enciphered in one key and then retransmitted in another (they
marked these “XX” and called them “kisses”). Atwood was the
champion cribster and the Wrens said cattily behind his back that
these were the only kisses he had ever had.

It was in the big room next door—which they called, with their
solemn humour, the Big Room—that the cryptanalysts used the cribs
to construct possible solutions that could be tested on the bombes.
Jericho took in the rickety tables, the hard chairs, the weak
lighting, the fug of tobacco, the college-library atmosphere, the
night chill (most of the cryptanalysts were wearing coats and
mittens) and he wondered why—why?—he had been so ready to come
back. Kingcome and Proudfoot were there, and Upjohn and Pinker and
de Brooke, and maybe half a dozen newcomers whose faces he didn’t
recognise, including one young man sitting bold as you please in
the seat which had once been reserved for Jericho. The tables were
stacked with cryptograms, like ballot papers at an election
count.

Puck was muttering something about back-breaks but Jericho,
fascinated by the sight of someone else in his place, lost track
and had to interrupt him. “I’m sorry, Puck. What was that?”

“I was saying that from twenty minutes ago we are up to date.
Shark is now fully read to the point of the code change. So that
there is nothing left to us. Except history.” He gave a weak smile
and patted Jericho’s shoulder. “Come. I’ll show you.”

When a cryptanalyst believed he’d glimpsed a possible break into
a message, his guess was sent out of the hut to be tested on a
bombe. And if he’d been skilful enough, or lucky enough, then in an
hour, or a day, the bombe would churn through a million
permutations and reveal how the Enigma machine had been set up.
That information was relayed back from the bombe bays to the
Decoding Room.

Because of its noise, the Decoding Room was tucked away at the
far end of the hut. Personally, Jericho liked the clatter. It was
the sound of success. His worst memories were of the nights when
the building was silent. A dozen British Type-X enciphering
machines had been modified to mimic the actions of the German
Enigma. They were big, cumbersome devices—typewriters with rotors,
a plugboard and a cylinder—at which sat young and well-groomed
debutantes.

Baxter, who was the hut’s resident Marxist, had a theory that
Bletchley’s workforce (which was mainly female) was arranged in
what he called “a paradigm of the English class system”. The
wireless interceptors, shivering in their coastal radio stations,
were generally working-class and laboured in ignorance of the
Enigma secret. The bombe operators, who worked in the grounds of
some nearby country houses and in a big new installation just
outside London, were petit-bourgeois and had a vague idea. And the
Decoding Room girls, in the heart of the Park, were mostly
upper-middle–class, even aristocratic, and they saw it all—the
secrets literally passed through their fingers. They typed out the
letters of the original cryptogram, and from the cylinder on the
right of the Type-X a strip of sticky-backed paper, the sort you
saw gummed down on telegram forms, slowly emerged, bearing the
decrypted plaintext.