Authors: Robert Harris
“What?”
“The Prime Minister has just been on the telephone with his
congratulations!”
Logie’s voice seemed a long way away. Jericho bent forward to
hear better what Churchill had said and then the concrete floor
melted beneath his feet and he was pitching forward into
darkness.
“Is,”said Jericho.
“What, old thing?”
“Just now, you said Shark was a monster and then you said it was
a monster.” He pointed the fork at Logie. “I know why you’ve come.
You’ve lost it, haven’t you?”
Logie grunted and stared into the fire and Jericho felt as
though someone had laid a stone on his heart. He sat back in his
chair, shaking his head, then gave a snort of laughter.
“Thank you, Tom,” said Logie, quietly. “I’m glad you find it
funny.”
“And all the time I thought you’d come here to give me the push.
That’s funny. That’s pretty funny, isn’t it, old thing?”
♦
“What day is it today?” asked Logie. “Friday.”
“Right, right.” Logie extinguished his pipe with his thumb and
stuffed it into his pocket. He sighed. “Let me see. That means it
must have happened on Monday. No, Tuesday. Sorry. We haven’t had a
lot of sleep lately.”
He passed a hand through his thinning hair and Jericho noticed
for the first time that he’d turned quite grey. So it’s not just
me, he thought, it’s all of us, we’re all falling to pieces. No
fresh air. No sleep. Not enough fresh food. Six-day weeks and
twelve-hour days…
“We were still just about ahead of the game when you left,” said
Logie. “You know the drill. Of course you do. You wrote the bloody
book. We’d wait for Hut 10 to break the main naval weather cipher,
then, by lunch time, with a bit of luck we’d have enough cribs to
tackle the day’s short weather codes. That would give us three of
the four rotor settings and then we’d get stuck into Shark. The
time-lag varied. Sometimes we’d break it in one day, sometimes
three or four. Anyway, the stuff was gold-dust and we were
Whitehall’s blue-eyed boys.”
“Until Tuesday.”
“Until Tuesday.” Logie glanced at the door and dropped his
voice. “It’s an absolute tragedy, Tom. We’d cut losses in the North
Atlantic by 75 per cent. That’s about three hundred thousand tons
of shipping a month. The intelligence was amazing. We knew where
the U-boats were almost as precisely as the Germans did. Of course,
looking back, it was too good to last. The Nazis aren’t fools. I
always said: “Success in this game breeds failure, and the bigger
the success, the bigger the failure’s likely to be.” You’ll
remember me saying it. The other side gets suspicious, you see. I
said—”
“What happened on Tuesday, Guy?”
“Right-ho. Sorry. Tuesday. It was about eight in the evening. We
got a call from one of the intercept stations. Flowerdown, I think,
but Scarborough heard it too. I was in the canteen. Puck came and
fetched me out. They’d started picking up something in the early
afternoon. A single word, broadcast on the hour, every hour. It was
coming out of Sainte-Assise on both main U-boat radio nets.”
“This word was enciphered in Shark, I take it?”
“No, that’s just it. That’s what they were so excited about. It
wasn’t in cipher. It wasn’t even in Morse. It was a human voice. A
man. Repeating this one word: Akelei”
“Akelei,” murmured Jericho. “Akelei…That’s a flower, isn’t
it?”
“Ha!” Logie clapped his hands. “You are a bloody marvel, Tom.
See how much we miss you? We had to go and ask one of the German
swots on Z-watch what it meant. Akelei: a five-petalled flower of
the buttercup family, from the Latin Aquilegia. We vulgarians call
it columbine.”
“Akelei?” repeated Jericho. “This is a prearranged signal of
some sort, presumably?”
“It is.”
“And it means?”
“It means trouble, is what it means, old love. We found out just
how much trouble at midnight yesterday.” Logie leaned forwards. The
humour had left his voice. His face was lined and grave. “Akelei
means: “Change the Short Weather Code Book.” They’ve gone over to a
new one and we haven’t a bloody clue what to do about it. They’ve
closed off our way into Shark, Tom. They’ve blacked us out
again.”
♦
It didn’t take Jericho long to pack. He’d bought nothing since
he arrived in Cambridge except a daily newspaper, so he took out
exactly what he’d carried in three weeks earlier: a pair of
suitcases filled with clothes, a few books, a fountain pen, a slide
rule and pencils, a portable chess set and a pair of walking boots.
He laid his cases on the bed and moved slowly about the room
collecting his possessions while Logie watched him from the
doorway.
Running round and round in his head, unbidden from some hidden
depth in his subconscious, was a nursery rhyme: “For want of a
nail, the horse was lost; for want of a horse, the rider was lost;
for want of a rider, the battle was lost; for want of a battle, the
kingdom was lost; and all for the want of a horseshoe nail…”
He folded a shirt and laid it on top of his books.
For want of a Short Weather Code Book they might lose the Battle
of the Atlantic. So many men, so much material, threatened by so
small a thing as a change in weather codes. It was absurd.
“You can always tell a boarding-school boy,” said Logie, “they
travel light. All those endless train journeys, I suppose.”
“I prefer it.”
He stuffed a pair of socks down the side of the case. He was
going back. They wanted him back. He couldn’t decide whether he was
elated or terrified.
“You don’t have much stuff in Bletchley, either, do you?”
Jericho swung round to look at him. “How do you know that?”
“Ah.” Logie winced with embarrassment. “I’m afraid we had to
pack up your room, and, ah, give it to someone else. Pressure of
space and all that.”
“You didn’t think I’d be coming back?”
“Well, let’s say we didn’t know we’d need you back so soon.
Anyway, there’s fresh digs for you in town, so at least it’ll be
more convenient. No more long cycle rides late at night.”
“I rather like long cycle rides late at night. They clear the
mind.” Jericho closed the lids on the suitcases and snapped the
locks.
“I say, you are up to this, old love? Nobody wants to force you
into anything.”
“I’m a damn sight fitter than you are, by the look of you.”
“Only I’d hate you to feel pressured…”
“Oh do shut up, Guy.”
“Right-ho. I suppose we haven’t left you with much choice, have
we? Can I help you with those?”
“If I’m well enough to go back to Bletchley, I’m well enough to
manage a couple of suitcases.”
He carried them to the door and turned off the light. In the
sitting room he extinguished the gas fire and took a last look
around. The overstuffed sofa. The scratched chairs. The bare
mantelpiece. This was his life, he thought, a succession of cheaply
furnished rooms provided by English institutions: school, college,
government. He wondered what the next room would be like. Logie
opened the doors and Jericho turned off the desk light.
The staircase was in darkness. The bulb had long since died.
Logie got them down the stone steps by striking a series of
matches. At the bottom, they could just make out the shape of
Leveret, standing guard, his silhouette framed against the black
mass of the chapel. He turned round. His hand went to his
pocket.
“All right, Mr Leveret,” said Logie. “It’s only me. Mr Jericho’s
coming with us.”
Leveret had a blackout torch, a cheap thing swathed in tissue
paper. By its pale beam, and by the faint residue of light still
left in the sky, they made their way through the college. As they
walked alongside the Hall they could hear the clatter of cutlery
and the sound of the diners’ voices, and Jericho felt a pang of
regret. They passed the Porter’s Lodge and stepped through the
man-sized gate cut in the big oak door. A crack of light appeared
in one of the lodge’s windows as someone inside pulled back the
curtain a fraction. With Leveret in front of him and Logie behind,
Jericho had a curious sensation of being under arrest.
The deputy director’s Rover was pulled up on the cobbled
pavement. Leveret carefully unlocked it and ushered them into the
back seat. The interior was cold and smelled of old leather and
cigarette ash. As Leveret was stowing the suitcases in the boot
Logie said suddenly: “Who’s Claire, by the way?”
“Claire?” Jericho heard his voice in the darkness, guilty and
defensive.
“When you came up the staircase I thought I heard you shouting
“Claire”. Claire?” Logie gave a low whistle. “I say, she’s not the
arctic blonde in Hut 3, is she? I bet she is. You lucky
bugger…”
Leveret started the engine. It stuttered and backfired. He let
out the brake and the big car rocked over the cobbles on to King’s
Parade. The long street was deserted in both directions. A wisp of
mist shone in the shaded headlamps. Logie was still chuckling to
himself as they swung left.
“I bet she jolly well is. You lucky, lucky bugger…”
♦
Kite stayed at his post by the window, watching the red
tail-lights until they vanished past the corner of Gonville and
Caius. He, let the curtain drop.
Well, well…
This would give them something to talk about the next morning.
Listen to this, Dottie. Mr Jericho was taken away at dead of
night—oh, all right then, eight o’clock—by two men, one a tall
fellow and the other very obviously a plain clothes copper.
Escorted from the premises and not a word to anyone. The tall chap
and the copper had arrived about five o’clock while the young
master was still out walking and the big one—the detective,
presumably—had asked Kite all sorts of questions: “Has he seen
anyone since he’s been here? Has he written to anyone? Has anyone
written to him? What’s he been doing?” Then they’d taken his keys
and searched Jericho’s room before Jericho got back.
It was murky. Very murky.
A spy, a genius, a broken heart—and now what? A criminal of some
sort? Quite possibly. A malingerer? A runaway? A deserter! Yes,
that was it: a deserter!
Kite went back to his seat by the stove and opened his evening
paper.
NAZI SUB TORPEDOES PASSENGER LINER, he read. WOMEN AND CHILDREN
LOST.
Kite shook his head at the wickedness of the world. It was
disgusting, a young man of that age, not wearing uniform, hiding
away in the middle of England while mothers and kiddies were being
killed.
CRYPTOGRAM
CRYPTOGRAM: message written in cipher or in some
other secret form which requires a key gy for its meaning to be
discovered.A Lexicon of Cryptography (“Most Secret”, Bletchley
Park, 1943)
THE NIGHT WAS impenetrable, the cold irresistible. Huddled in
his overcoat inside the icy Rover, Tom Jericho could barely see the
flickering of his breath or the mist it formed on the window beside
him. He reached across and rubbed a porthole in the condensation,
smearing his fingers with cold, wet grime. Occasionally their
headlamps flashed on whitewashed cottages and darkened inns, and
once they passed a convoy of lorries heading in the opposite
direction. But mostly they seemed to travel in a void. There were
no street lights or signposts to guide them, no lit windows; not
even a match glimmered in the blackness. They might have been the
last three people alive.
Logie had started to snore within fifteen minutes of leaving
King’s, his head dropping further forwards onto his chest each time
the Rover hit a bump, a motion which caused him to mumble and nod,
as if in profound agreement with himself. Once, when they turned a
corner sharply, his long body toppled sideways and Jericho had to
fend him off gently with his forearm.
In the front seat Leveret hadn’t uttered a word, except to say,
when Jericho asked him to turn it on, that the heater was broken.
He was driving with exaggerated care, his face hunched inches from
the windscreen, his right foot alternating cautiously between the
brake pedal and the accelerator. At times they seemed to be
travelling scarcely faster than walking-pace, so that although in
daylight the journey to Bletchley might take little more than an
hour and a half, Jericho calculated that tonight they would be
lucky to reach their destination before midnight.
“I should get some sleep if I were you, old thing,” Logie had
said, making a pillow of his overcoat. “Long night ahead.”
But Jericho couldn’t sleep. He stuffed his hands deep into his
pockets and stared uselessly into the night.
Bletchley, he thought with disgust. Even the sensation of the
name in the mouth was unpleasant, stranded somewhere between
blanching and retching. Of all the towns in England, why did they
have to choose Bletchley? Four years ago he’d never even heard of
the place. And he might have lived the rest of his life in happy
ignorance had it not been for that glass of sherry in Atwood’s
rooms in the spring of 1939.
How odd it was, how absurd to trace one’s destiny and to find
that it revolved around a couple of fluid ounces of pale
manzanilla.
It was immediately after that first approach that Atwood had
arranged for him to meet some “friends” in London. Thereafter,
every Friday morning for four months, Jericho would catch an early
train and make his way to a dusty office block near St James’s tube
station. Here, in a shabby room furnished by a blackboard and a
clerk’s desk, he was initiated into the secrets of cryptography.
And it was just as Turing had predicted: he loved it.
He loved the history, all of it, from the ancient runic systems
and the Irish codes of the Book of Ballymote with their exotic
names (“Serpent through the heather”, “Vexation of a poet’s
heart”), through the codes of Pope Sylvester II and Hildegard von
Bingen, through the invention of Alberti’s cipher disk—the first
poly-alphabetic cipher—and Cardinal Richelieu’s grilles, all the
way down to the machine-generated mysteries of the German Enigma,
which were gloomily held to be unbreakable.