Authors: Robert Harris
She started to prattle on to Weitzman about “3A” and “3M” and
all the staffing memos she’d written and how no one appreciated her
difficulties. As if to prove her point, at that moment the door
opened and a woman came in with a stack of files so high she had to
wedge her chin on top of them to keep control. She let them fall on
the table and there was a collective groan from Miss Monk’s girls.
A couple of signals fluttered over the edge of the table and on to
the floor and Jericho, primed for action, swooped to retrieve them.
He got a brief glimpse of one—
BATTLE HEADQUARTERS GERMAN AFRIKA KORPS
LOCATED MORNING THIRTEENTH £ THIRTEENTH ONE FIVE KILOMETRES WEST OF
BEN GARDANE £ BEN GARDANE
—before it was snatched out of his hands by Miss Monk. She
seemed for the first time to become aware of his presence. She
cradled the secrets to her plump breast and glared at him.
“I’m sorry, you are—who are you exactly?” she asked. She edged
to one side to block his view of the table. “You are—what?—a friend
of Claire, I take it?”
“It’s all right, Daphne,” said Weitzman, “he’s a friend of
mine.”
Miss Monk flushed again. “I beg your pardon, Walter,” she said.
“Of course, I didn’t mean to imply—”
Jericho cut in: “I wonder, could I ask you, has she done this
before? Failed to turn up, I mean, without telling you?”
“Oh no. Never. I will not tolerate slacking in my section. Dr
Weitzman will vouch for that.”
“Indeed,” said Weitzman, gravely. “No slacking here.”
Miss Monk was of a type that Jericho had come to know well over
the past three years: mildly hysterical at moments of crisis;
jealous of her precious rank and her extra fifty pounds a year;
convinced that the war would be lost if her tiny fiefdom were
denied a gross of lead pencils or an extra typist. She would hate
Claire, he thought: hate her for her prettiness and her confidence
and her refusal to take anything seriously.
“She hasn’t been behaving at all oddly?”
“We have important work to do. We’ve no time here for
oddness.”
“When did you last see her?”
“That would be Friday.” Miss Monk obviously prided herself on
her memory for detail. “She came on duty at four, went off at
midnight. Yesterday was her rest day.”
“So I don’t suppose it’s likely she came back into the hut, say,
early on Saturday morning?”
“No. I was here. Anyway, why should she do that? Normally, she
couldn’t wait to get away.”
I bet she couldn’t. He glanced again at the girls behind Miss
Monk. What on earth were they all doing? Each had a mound of
paperclips in front of her, a pot of glue, a pile of brown folders
and a tangle of rubber bands. They seemed—could this be right?—to
be compiling new files out of old ones. He tried to imagine Claire
here, in this drab room, among these sensible drones. It was like
picturing some gorgeous parakeet in a cage full of sparrows. He
wasn’t sure what to do. He took out his watch and flicked open the
lid. Eight thirty-five. She had already been missing more than half
an hour.
“What will you do now?”
“Obviously—because of the level of classification—there’s a
certain procedure we have to follow. I’ve already notified Welfare.
They’ll send someone round to her room to turf her out of bed.”
“And if she isn’t there?”
“Then they’ll contact her family to see if they know where she
is.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Well, then it’s serious. But it never gets that far.” Miss Monk
drew her jacket tight across her pigeon chest and folded her arms.
“I’m sure there’s a man at the bottom of this somewhere.” She
shuddered. “There usually is.”
Weitzman was continuing to give Jericho imploring glances. He
touched him on the arm. “We ought to go now, Tom.”
“Do you have an address for her family? Or a telephone
number?”
“Yes, I think so, but I’m not sure I should…” She turned towards
Weitzman, who hesitated fractionally, shot another look at Jericho,
then forced a smile and a nod.
“I can vouch for him.”
“Well,” said Miss Monk, doubtfully, “if you think it’s
permissible…” She went over to a filing cabinet beside her desk and
unlocked it.
“Coker will kill me for this,” whispered Weitzman, while her
back was turned.
“He’ll never find out. I promise you.”
“The curious thing is,” said Miss Monk, almost to herself, “that
she’d really become much more attentive of late. Anyway, this is
her card.”
♦
Next-of-kin: Edward Romilly.
Relation: Father.
Address: 27 Stanhope Gardens, London SW.
Telephone: Kensington 2257.
Jericho glanced at it for a second and handed it back.
“I don’t think there’s any need to trouble him, do you?” asked
Miss Monk. “Certainly not yet. No doubt Claire will arrive at any
moment with some silly story about oversleeping—”
“I’m sure,” said Jericho.
“—in which case,” she added shrewdly, “who shall I say was
looking for her?”
“Auf Wiedersehen, Fraulein Monk.” Weitzman had had enough. He
was already half out of the room, pulling Jericho after him with
surprising force. Jericho had a last vision of Miss Monk, standing
bewildered and suspicious, before the door closed on her schoolroom
German.
“Auf Wiedersehen, HerrDoktor, undHerr…”
♦
Weitzman didn’t lead Jericho back the way they had come. Instead
he bundled him out of the rear exit. Now, in the cold daylight,
Jericho could see why he had found it so difficult stumbling around
out here the other night. They were on the edge of a building site.
Trenches had been carved four feet deep into the grass. Pyramids of
sand and gravel were covered in a white mould of frost. It was a
miracle he hadn’t broken his neck.
Weitzman shook a cigarette out of a crumpled pack of Passing
Clouds and lit it. He leaned against the wall of the hut and
exhaled a sigh of steam and smoke. “Useless for me to ask, I
suppose, what in God’s name is going on?”
“You don’t want to know, Walter. Believe me.”
“Troubles of the heart?”
“Something like that.”
Weitzman mumbled a couple of words in Yiddish that might have
been a curse and continued to smoke.
About thirty yards away, a group of workmen were huddled around
a brazier, finishing a tea break. They dispersed reluctantly,
trailing pickaxes and spades across the hard ground, and Jericho
had a sudden memory of himself as a boy, holding hands with his
mother, walking along a seaside promenade, his spade clattering on
the concrete road behind him. Somewhere beyond the trees, a
generator kicked into life sending a scattering of rooks cawing
into the sky.
“Walter, what’s the German Book Room?”
“I’d better get back,” said Weitzman. He licked the ends of his
thumb and forefinger and nipped off the glowing tip of his
cigarette, slipping the unsmoked portion into his breast pocket.
Tobacco was far too precious to waste even a few shreds.
“Please, Walter…”
“Ach!” Weitzman made a sudden gesture of disgust with his arm,
as if sweeping Jericho aside, and began making his way, unsteadily
but wonderfully quickly for a man of his age, down the side of the
hut towards the path. Jericho had to scramble to keep pace with
him.
“You ask too much, you know—”
“I know I do.”
“I mean, my God, Coker already suspects I am a Nazi spy. Can you
believe that? I may be a Jew, but for him one German is no
different from another. Which, of course, is precisely our
argument. I suppose I should be flattered.”
“I wouldn’t—it’s just—there’s nobody else…”
A pair of sentries with rifles rounded the corner and strolled
towards them. Weitzman clamped his jaw shut and abruptly turned
right off the path towards the tennis court. Jericho followed him.
Weitzman opened the gate and they stepped on to the asphalt. The
court had been put in—at Churchill’s personal instigation, so it
was said—two years earlier. It hadn’t been used since the autumn.
The white lines were barely visible beneath the frost. Drifts of
leaves had collected against the chain-link fence. Weitzman closed
the gate after them and walked towards the net post.
“It’s all changed since we started, Tom. Nine-tenths of the
people in the hut I don’t even know any more.” He kicked moodily at
the leaves and Jericho noticed for the first time how small his
feet were; dancer’s feet. “I’ve grown old in this place. I can
remember a time when we thought we were geniuses if we read fifty
messages a week. Do you know what the rate is now?”
Jericho shook his head.
“Three thousand a day.”
“Good God.” That’s a hundred and twenty-five an hour, thought
Jericho, that’s one every thirty seconds…
“Is she in trouble, then, your girl?”
“I think so. I mean, yes—yes, she is.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. I like her. She laughs at my jokes. Women
who laugh at my jokes must be cherished. Especially if they are
young. And pretty.”
“Walter…”
Weitzman turned towards Hut 3. He had chosen his ground well,
with the instinct of a man who has been forced at some time, as a
matter of personal survival, to learn how to find privacy. Nobody
could come up behind them without entering the tennis court. Nobody
could approach from the front without being seen. And if anyone was
watching from a distance—well, what was there to see but two old
colleagues, having a private chat?
“It’s organised like a factory line.” He curled his fingers into
the wire netting. His hands were white with cold. They clenched the
steel like claws. “The decrypts arrive by conveyor belt from Hut 6.
They go first to the Watch for translation—you know that, that’s my
post. Two Watches per shift, one for urgent material, the other for
back-breaks. Translated Luftwaffe signals are passed to 3A, Army to
3M. A for air, M for military. God in heaven, it’s cold. Are you
cold? I’m shaking.” He pulled out a filthy handkerchief and blew
his nose. “The duty officers decide what’s important and give it a
Z-priority. A single Z is low-grade—Hauptmann Fischer is to be
transferred to the German Air Fleet in Italy. A weather report
would be three Zs. Five Zs is pure gold—where Rommel will be
tomorrow afternoon, an imminent air attack. The intelligence is
summarised, then three copies are dispatched—one to SIS in
Broadway, one to the appropriate service ministry in Whitehall, one
to the relevant commander in the field.”
“And the German Book Room?”
“Every proper name is indexed: every officer, every piece of
equipment, every base. For example, Hauptmann Fischer’s transfer
may at first seem quite worthless as intelligence. But then you
consult the Air Index and you see his last posting was to a radar
station in France. Now he is going to Bari. So: the Germans are
installing radar in Bari. Let them build it. And then, when it is
almost finished, bomb it.”
“And that’s the German Book?”
“No, no.” Weitzman shook his head crossly, as if Jericho were
some dim student at the bottom of his class at Heidelberg. “The
German Book is the very end of the process. All this paper—the
intercept, the decode, the translation, the Z-signal, the list of
cross-references, all these thousands of pages—it all comes
together at the end to be filed. The German Book is a verbatim
transcription of all decoded messages in their original
language.”
“Is that an important job?”
“In intellectual terms? No. Purely clerical.”
“But in terms of access? To classified material?”
“Ah. Different.” Weitzman shrugged. “It would depend on the
person involved, of course, whether they could be bothered to read
what they were handling. Most don’t.”
“But in theory?”
“In theory? On an average day? A girl like Claire would probably
see more operational detail about the German armed forces than
Adolf Hitler.” He glanced at Jericho’s incredulous face and smiled.
“Absurd, isn’t it? What is she? Nineteen? Twenty?”
“Twenty,” muttered Jericho. “She always told me her job was
boring.”
“Twenty! I swear it’s the greatest joke in the history of
warfare. Look at us: the hare-brained debutante, the weakling
intellectual and the half-blind Jew. If only the master race could
see what we’re doing to them—sometimes the thought of it is all
that keeps me going.” He held his watch up very close to his face.
“I must get back. Coker will have issued a warrant for my arrest. I
fear I have talked too much.”
“Not at all.”
“Oh, I have, I have.”
He turned towards the gate. Jericho made a move to follow but
Weitzman held up a hand to stop him. “Why don’t you wait here, Tom?
Just for a moment. Let me get clear.”
He slipped out of the court. As he passed by on the other side
of the fence, something seemed to occur to him. He slowed and
beckoned Jericho closer to the wire netting.
“Listen,” he said softly, “if you think I can help you again, if
you need any more information—please, don’t ask me. I don’t want to
know.”
Before Jericho could answer he had crossed the path and
disappeared around the back of Hut 3.
♦
Within the grounds of Bletchley Park, just beyond the mansion,
in the shadow of a fir tree, stood an ordinary red telephone box.
Inside it, a young man in motorcycle leathers was finishing a call.
Jericho, leaning against the tree, could hear his singsong accent,
muffled but audible.
“Right you are…OK, doll…See you.”
The dispatch rider put the receiver down with a clatter and
pushed open the door.
“All yours, pal.”
The motorcyclist didn’t move away at first. Jericho stood in the
kiosk, pretending to fish in his pockets for change, and watched
him through the glass. The man adjusted his leggings, put on his
helmet, fiddled with the chin strap…
Jericho waited until he had moved away before dialling zero.