Citadel (16 page)

Again a long and ghastly silence.

“Well, then, Professor,” said Gubbins, “that
being the case, I think we've taken you from your
work at Bletchley long enough. And we have been
absent from our duties as well. Captain St. Florian
needs rest and rehabilitation. Basil, I think all present
will enthusiastically endorse you for decoration,
if it matters, for an astonishing and insanely
courageous effort. Perhaps a nice promotion, Basil.
Would you like to be a major? Think of the trouble
you could cause. But please don't be bitter. To win
a war you throw out a million seeds and hope that
some of them produce, in the end, fruit. I'll alert
the staff to call—”

“Excuse me,” said Professor Turing. “What exactly
is going on here?”

“Ah, Professor, there seems to be no reason for
us to continue.”

“I daresay you chaps have got to learn to listen,”
he said.

Basil was slightly shocked by the sudden tartness
in his voice.

“I am not like Captain St. Florian, a witty ironist,
and I am not like you three high mandarins
with your protocols and all that elaborate and
counterfeit bowing and scraping. I am a scientist.
I speak in exact truth. What I say is true and nothing
else is.”

“I'm rather afraid I don't grasp your meaning,
sir,” said Gubbins stiffly. It was clear that neither he
nor the other two mandarins enjoyed being addressed
so dismissively by a forty-year-old professor
in baggy tweeds and wire-frame glasses.

“I said listen.
Listen!
” repeated the professor,
rather rudely, but with such intensity it became instantly
clear that he regarded them as intellectual
inferiors and was highly frustrated by their rash
conclusion.

“Sir,” said General Cavendish, rather icily, “if
you have more to add, please add it. As General Sir
Colin has said, we have other duties—”

“
Secret
code!” interrupted the professor.

All were stupefied.

“Don't you see? It's rather brilliant!” He
laughed, amused by the code maker's wit. “Look
here,” he said. “I shall try to explain. What is the
most impenetrable code of all to unlock? You cannot
do it with machines that work a thousand
times faster than men's brains.”

Nobody could possibly answer.

“It is the code that pretends to be a code but
isn't at all.”

More consternation, impatience, yet fear of
being mocked.

“Put another way,” said the professor, “the code
is the absence of code.”

No one was going to deal with that one.

“Whoever dreamed this up, our Cambridge librarian
or an NKVD spymaster, he was a smart fellow.
Only two people on earth could know the
meaning of this communication, though I'm glad
to say they've been joined by a third one. Me. It
came to me while running. Great for clearing the
mind, I must say.”

“You have the advantage, Professor,” said Sir
Colin. “Please, continue.”

“A code is a disguise. Suppose something is disguised
as itself?”

The silence was thunderous.
“All right, then. Look at the pages.
Look at
them
!”

Like chastened schoolboys, the class complied.

“You, St. Florian, you're a man of hard experience
in the world. Tell me what you see.”

“Ah …” said Basil. He was completely out of
irony. “Well, ah, a messy scrawl of typical eighteenth-
century handwriting, capitalized nouns,
that sort of thing. A splotch of something, perhaps
wine, perhaps something more dubious.”

“Yes?”

“Well, I suppose, all these little religious symbols.”

“Look at them carefully.”

Basil alone did not need to unlimber reading
spectacles. He saw what they were quickly enough.

“They appear to be crosses,” he said.

“Just crosses?”

“Well, each of them is mounted on a little hill.
Like Calvary, one supposes.”

“Not like Calvary. There were three on Calvary.
This is only one. Singular.”

“Yes, well, now that I look harder, I see the hill
isn't exactly a hill. It's segmented into round, irregular
shapes, very precisely drawn in the finest line
his nib would permit. I would say it's a pile of
stones.”

“At last we are getting somewhere.”

“I think I've solved your little game, Professor,”
said General Cavendish. “That pile of stones, that
would be some kind of road marker, eh? Yes, and
a cross has been inserted into it. Road marker, that
is, marking the path, is that what it is? It would be
a representation of the title of the pamphlet,
The
Path to Jesus
. It is an expression of the central
meaning of his argument.”

“Not what it
means
. Didn't you hear me? Are
you deaf?”

The general was taken aback by the ferocity
with which Professor Turing spoke.

“I am not interested in what it means. If it
means something, that meaning is different from
the thing itself. I am interested in what it
is
. Is, not
means.”

“I believe,” said the admiral, “a roadside marker
is called a cairn. So that is exactly what it is, Professor.
Is that what you—”

“Please take it the last step. There's only one
more. Look at it and tell me what it is.”

“Cairn … cross,” said Basil. “It can only be called
a cairncross. But that means nothing unless …”

“Unless what?” commanded Turing.

“A name,” said Sir Colin.

Hello, hello
, said Basil to himself. He saw where
the path to Jesus led.

“The Soviet spymaster was telling the Cambridge
librarian the name of the agent at Bletchley
Park so that he could tell the agent's new handler.
The device of communication was a 154-year-old
doodle. The book-code indicators were false, part
of the disguise.”

“So there is a man at Bletchley named Cairncross?”
asked Sir Colin.

“John Cairncross, yes,” said Professor Turing.
“Hut 6. Scotsman. Don't know the chap myself,
but I've heard his name mentioned—supposed to
be first-class.”

“John Cairncross,” said Sir Colin.

“He's your Red spy. Gentlemen, if you need to
feed information to Stalin on Operation Citadel,
you have to do it through Comrade Cairncross.
When it comes from him, Stalin and the Red generals
will believe it. They will fortify the Kursk
salient. The Germans will be smashed. The retreat
from the East will begin. The end will begin. What
was it again? ‘Home alive in '45,' not ‘Dead in
heaven in '47.'”

“Bravo,” said Sir Colin.

“Don't
bravo
me, Sir Colin. I just work at sums,
like Bob Cratchit. Save your bravos for that human
fragment of the Kipling imagination sitting over
there.”

“I say,” said Basil, “instead of a
bravo
, could I
have a nice whisky?”

Thanks to Otto Penzler for commissioning this short-form experiment for me and badgering me until I finished. Barrett Tillman was indispensable on German aviation, Lenne Miller on general editing and proofreading, and Gary Goldberg on cyber transmissions. Naturally all failures of taste, plot, and nerve devolve solely to me.

Stephen Hunter graduated from Northwestern University in 1968. He was a journalist for the
Baltimore Sun
from 1971 to 1996, then he moved to the
Washington Post
, where he stayed until his retirement in 2008. In 1998, Hunter won the ASNE Distinguished Writing Award in the criticism category. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for his authoritative film criticism in the
Washington Post
. Hunter is the author of the popular Bob Lee Swagger series, and in 2007 his novel
Point of Impact
was made into the successful Hollywood blockbuster
Shooter
, staring Mark Wahlberg. Hunter lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with his wife.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016 by Stephen Hunter

Cover design by Mauricio Díaz

978-1-5040-2671-0

Published in 2016 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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