Authors: Robert Harris
Jericho was not a violent man. He had never hit another person,
not even as a boy, and he knew it was a mercy he had avoided
military service: given a rifle he would have been a menace to no
one except his own side. But there was a heavy brass ashtray on the
table—the sawn-off end of a six-inch shell-case, brimful of
cigarette stubs—and Jericho was seriously tempted to ram it into
Skynner’s smug face. Skynner seemed to sense this. At any rate, he
pulled his bottom off the table and began to pace the floor. This
must be one of the benefits of being a madman, thought Jericho,
people can never take you entirely for granted.
“It was so much simpler in the old days, wasn’t it?” said
Skynner. “A country house. A handful of eccentrics. Nobody
expecting very much. You potter along. And then suddenly you’re
sitting on the greatest secret of the war.”
“And then people like you arrive.”
“That’s right, people like myself are needed, to make sure this
remarkable weapon is used properly.”
“Oh is that what you do, Leonard? You make sure the weapon is
used properly. I’ve often wondered.”
Skynner stopped smiling. He was a big man, nearly a foot taller
than Jericho. He came up very close, and Jericho could smell the
stale cigarette smoke and the sweat on his clothes.
“You’ve no conception of this place any more. No idea of the
problems. The Americans, for instance. In front of whom you’ve just
humiliated me. Us. We’re negotiating a deal with the Americans
that—” He stopped himself. “Never mind. Let’s just say that when
you—when you indulge yourself as you just did, you can’t even
conceive of the seriousness of what’s at stake.” Skynner had a
briefcase with a royal crest stamped on it and “G VI R” in faded
gold lettering. He slipped his papers into it and locked it with a
key attached to his belt by a long chain.
“I’m going to arrange for you to be taken off cryptanalytical
work and put somewhere you can’t do any damage. In fact, I’m going
to have you transferred out of Bletchley altogether.” He pocketed
the key and patted it. “You can’t return to civilian life, of
course, not until the war’s over, not knowing what you know. Still,
I hear the Admiralty’s on the lookout for an extra brain to work in
statistics. Dull stuff, but cushy enough for a man of
your…delicacy. Who knows? Perhaps you’ll meet a nice girl. Someone
more—how shall we say?—more suitable for you than the person I
gather you were seeing.”
Jericho did try to hit him then, but not with the ashtray, only
with his fist, which in retrospect was a mistake. Skynner stepped
to one side with surprising grace and the blow missed and then his
right hand shot out and grabbed Jericho’s forearm. Skynner dug his
fingers very hard into the soft muscle.
“You are an ill man, Tom. And I am stronger than you, in every
way.” He increased the pressure for a second or two, then abruptly
let go of the arm. “Now get out of my sight.”
§
God, but he was tired. Exhaustion stalked him like a living
thing, clutching at his legs, squatting on his sagging shoulders.
Jericho leaned against the outside wall of A-Block, rested his
cheek against the smooth, damp concrete, and waited for his pulse
to return to normal.
What had he done?
He needed to lie down. He needed to find some hole to crawl into
and get some rest. Like a drunk searching for his keys, he felt
first in one pocket and then another and finally pulled out the
billeting chit and squinted at it. Albion Street? Where was that?
He had a vague memory. He would know it when he saw it.
He pushed himself away from the wall and began to make his way,
carefully, away from the lake towards the road that led to the main
gate. A small, black car was parked about ten yards ahead and as he
came closer the driver’s door opened and a figure in a blue uniform
appeared.
“Mr Jericho!”
Jericho stared with surprise. It was one of the Americans.
“Lieutenant Kramer?”
“Hi. Going home? Can I give you a ride?”
“Thank you. No. Really, it’s only a short walk.”
“Aw, come on.” Kramer patted the roof of the car. “I just got
her. It’d be my pleasure. Come on.”
Jericho was about to decline again, but then he felt his legs
begin to crumple.
“Whoa there, feller.” Kramer sprang forward and took his arm.
“You’re all in. Long night, I guess?”
Jericho allowed himself to be guided to the passenger door and
pushed into the front seat. The interior of the little car was cold
and smelled as if it hadn’t been used in a long while. Jericho
guessed it must have been someone’s pride and joy until petrol
rationing forced it off the road. The chassis rocked as Kramer
clambered in the other side and slammed the door.
“Not many people around here run their own cars.” Jericho’s
voice sounded oddly in his ears, as if from a distance. “You have
trouble getting fuel?”
“No, sir.” Kramer pressed the starter button and the engine
rattled into life. “You know us. We can get as much as we
want.”
The car was carefully inspected at the main gate. The barrier
rose and they headed out, past the canteen and the assembly hall,
towards the end of Wilton Avenue.
“Which way?”
“Left, I think.”
Kramer flicked out one of the little amber indicators and they
turned into the lane that led down to the town. His face was
handsome—boyish and square-cut, with a faded tan that suggested
service overseas. He was about twenty-five and looked formidably
fit.
“I guess I’d like to thank you for that.”
“Thank me?”
“At the conference. You told the truth when the others all
talked bull-shit. “Four days”—Jesus!”
“They were just being loyal.”
“Loyal? Come on, Tom. D’you mind If I call you Tom? I’m Jimmy,
by the way. They’d been fixed.”
“I don’t think this is a conversation we should be having…” The
dizziness had passed and in the clarity that always followed it
occurred to Jericho that the American must have been waiting for
him to emerge from the meeting. “This will do fine, thank you.”
“Really? But we’ve hardly gone any distance.”
“Please, just pull over.”
Kramer swerved into the kerb beside a row of small cottages,
braked and turned off the engine.
“Listen, will you, Tom, just a minute? The Germans brought in
Shark three months after Pearl Harbor—”
“Look—”
“Relax. Nobody’s listening.” This was true. The lane was
deserted. “Three months after Pearl Harbor, and suddenly we’re
losing ships like we’re going our of business. But nobody tells us
why. After all, we’re the new boys around here—we just route the
convoys the way London tells us. Finally, it’s getting so bad, we
ask you guys what’s happened to all this great intelligence you
used to have.” He jabbed his ringer at Jericho. “Only then are we
told about Shark.”
“I can’t listen to this,” said Jericho. He tried to open the
door but Kramer leaned across and seized the handle.
“I’m not trying to poison your mind against your own people. I’m
just trying to tell you what’s going on here. After we were told
about Shark last year, we started to do some checking. Fast. And
eventually, after one hell of a fight, we began to get some
figures. D’you know how many bombes you guys had by the end of last
summer? This is after two years of manufacture?”
Jericho was staring straight ahead. “I wouldn’t be privy to
information like that.”
“Fifty! And d’you know how many our people in Washington said
they could build within four months; Three hundred and sixty!”
“Well, build them, then,” said Jericho, irritably, “if you’re so
bloody marvellous.”
“Oh no,” said Kramer. “You don’t understand. That’s not allowed.
Enigma is a British baby. Official. Any change in status has to be
negotiated.”
“Is it being negotiated?”
“In Washington. Right now. That’s where your Mr Turing is. In
the meantime, we just have to take whatever you give us.”
“But that’s absurd. Why not just build the bombes anyway?”
“Come on, Tom. Think about it for a minute. You have all the
intercept stations over here. You have all the raw material. We’re
three thousand miles away. Damn hard to pick up Magdeburg from
Florida. And what’s the point in having three hundred and sixty
bombes if there’s nothing to put in them?”
Jericho shut his eye sand saw Skynner’s flushed face, heard his
rumbling voice: “You’ve no conception of this place any more…We’re
negotiating a deal with the Americans…You can’t even conceive of
the seriousness…” Now, at least, he understood the reason for
Skynner’s anger. His little empire, so painfully put together,
brick by bureaucratic brick, was mortally threatened by Shark. But
the threat came not from Berlin. It came from Washington.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Kramer was saying, “I’ve been here a month
and I think what you’ve all achieved is astounding. Brilliant. And
nobody on our side is talking about a takeover. But it can’t go on
like this. Not enough bombes. Not enough typewriters. Those huts.
Christ! “Was it dangerous in the war, Daddy?” “Sure was, I damned
near froze to death.” Did you know the whole operation almost
stopped one time because you ran out of coloured pencils? I mean,
what are we saying here? That men have to die because you don’t
have enough pencils?”
Jericho felt too tired to argue. Besides, he knew enough to know
it was true: all true. He remembered a night, eighteen months ago,
when he’d been asked to keep an eye open for strangers at the
Shoulder of Mutton, standing near the door in the blackout, sipping
halves of shandy, while Turing, Welchman and a couple of the other
big chiefs met in a room upstairs and wrote a joint letter to
Churchill. Exactly the same story: not enough clerks, not enough
typists, the factory at Letchworth that made the bombes—it used to
make cash registers, of all things—short of parts, short of
manpower…There’d been one hell of a row when Churchill got the
letter—a tantrum in Downing Street, careers broken, machinery
shaken up—and things had improved, for a while. But Bletchley was a
greedy child. Its appetite grew with the feeding. “Nervos belli,
pecuniam infinitam.” Or, as Baxter had put it, more prosaically, it
all comes down to money in the end. The Poles had had to give
Enigma to the British. Now the Brits would have to share it with
the Yanks.
“I can’t have anything to do with this. I’ve got to get some
sleep. Thanks for the lift.”
He reached for the handle and this time Kramer made no attempt
to stop him. He was halfway out of the door when Kramer said: “I
heard you lost your old man in the last war.”
Jericho froze. “Who told you that?”
“I forget. Does it matter?”
“No. It’s not a secret.” Jericho massaged his forehead. He had a
filthy headache coming on. “It happened before I was born. He was
wounded by a shell at Ypres. He lived on for a bit but he wasn’t
much use after that. He never came out of hospital. He died when I
was six.”
“What did he do? Before he got hit?”
“He was a mathematician.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“I’ll see you around,” said Jericho. He got out of the car.
“My brother died,” said Kramer suddenly. “One of the first. He
was in the Merchant Marine. Liberty ships.”
Of course, thought Jericho.
“This was during the Shark blackout, I suppose?”
“You got it.” Kramer looked bleak, then forced a smile. “Let’s
keep in touch, Tom. Anything I can do for you—just ask.”
He reached over and pulled the door shut with a bang. Jericho
stood alone on the roadside and watched as Kramer executed a rapid
U-turn. The car backfired, then headed at speed up the hill towards
the Park, leaving a little puff of dirty smoke hanging in the
morning air.
PINCH
PINCH: (1) vb., to steal enemy cryptographic
material; (2) n., any object stolen from the enemy that enhances
the chances of breaking his codes or ciphers.A Lexicon of Cryptography (“Most Secret”, Bletchley
Park, 1943)
BLETCHLEY WAS A railway town. The great main line from London to
Scotland split it down the middle, and then the smaller branch line
from Oxford to Cambridge sliced it into quarters, so that wherever
you stood there was no escaping the trains: the noise of them, the
smell of their soot, the sight of their brown smoke rising above
the clustered roofs. Even the terraced houses were mostly
railway-built, cut from the same red brick as the station and the
engine sheds, constructed in the same dour, industrial style.
The Commercial Guesthouse, Albion Street, was about five
minutes’ walk from Bletchley Park and backed on to the main line.
Its owner, Mrs Ethel Armstrong, was, like her establishment, a
little over fifty years old, solidly built, with a forbidding,
late-Victorian aspect. Her husband had died of a heart attack a
month after the outbreak of war, whereupon she had converted their
four-storey property into a small hotel. Like the other
townspeople—and there were about seven thousand of them—she had no
idea of what went on in the grounds of the mansion up the road, and
even less interest. It was profitable, that was all that mattered
to her. She charged thirty-eight shillings a week and expected her
five residents, in return for meals, to hand over all their
food-rationing coupons. As a result, by the spring of 1943, She
thousand pounds in War Savings Bonds and enough edible goods
hoarded in her cellar to open a medium-sized grocery store.
It was on the Wednesday that one of her rooms had become vacant,
and on the Friday that she had been served a billeting notice
requiring her to provide accommodation to a Mr Thomas Jericho. His
possessions from his previous address had been delivered to her
door that same morning: two boxes of personal effects and an
ancient iron bicycle. The bicycle she wheeled into the back yard.
The boxes she carried upstairs.