Authors: Robert Harris
And he loved the secret vocabulary of cryptanalysis, with its
homophones and polyphones, its digraphs and bigraphs and nulls. He
studied frequency analysis. He was taught the intricacies of
superencipherment, of placode and enicode. At the beginning of
August 1939 he was formally offered a post at the Government Code
and Cipher School at a salary of three hundred pounds a year and
was told to go back to Cambridge and await developments. On 1
September he woke to hear on the wireless that the Germans had
invaded Poland. On 3 September, the day Britain declared war, a
telegram arrived at the Porter’s Lodge ordering him to report the
following morning to a place called Bletchley Park.
He left King’s as instructed, as soon as it was light, wedged
into the passenger seat of Atwood’s antiquated sports car.
Bletchley turned out to be a small Victorian railway town about
fifty miles west of Cambridge. Atwood, who liked to cut a dash,
insisted on driving with the roof off, and as they rattled down the
narrow streets Jericho had an impression of smoke and soot, of
little, ugly terraced houses and the tall, black chimneys of brick
kilns. They passed under a railway bridge, along a lane, and were
waved through a pair of high gates by armed sentries. To their
right, a lawn sloped down to a lake fringed by large trees. To
their left was a mansion—a long, low, late-Victorian monstrosity of
red brick and sand-coloured stone that reminded Jericho of the
veterans’ hospital his father had died in. He looked around, half
expecting to see wimpled nurses wheeling broken men in Bath
chairs.
“Isn’t it perfectly hideous?” squeaked Atwood with delight.
“Built by a Jew. A stockbroker. A friend of Lloyd George.” His
voice rose with each statement, suggesting an ascending scale of
social horror. He parked abruptly at a crazy angle, with a spurt of
gravel, narrowly missing a sapper unrolling a large drum of
electrical cable.
Inside, in a panelled drawing room overlooking the lake, sixteen
men stood around drinking coffee. Jericho was surprised at how many
he recognised. They glanced at one another, embarrassed and amused.
So, their faces said, they got you too. Atwood moved serenely among
them, shaking hands and making sharp remarks they all felt obliged
to smile at.
“It’s not fighting the Germans I object to. It’s going to war on
behalf of these beastly Poles.” He turned to a handsome,
intense-looking young man with a broad, high forehead and thick
hair. “And what’s your name?”
“Pukowski,” said the young man, in perfect English. “I’m a
beastly Pole.”
Turing caught Jericho’s eye and winked.
In the afternoon the cryptanalysts were split into teams. Turing
was assigned to work with Pukowski, redesigning the “bombe”, the
giant decryptor which the great Marian Rejewski of the Polish
Cipher Bureau had built in 1938 to attack Enigma. Jericho was sent
to the stable block behind the mansion to analyse encrypted German
radio traffic.
How odd they were, those first nine months of the war, how
unreal, how—it seemed absurd to say it now—peaceful. They cycled in
each day from their digs in various country pubs and guesthouses
around the town. They lunched and dined together in the mansion. In
the evenings they played chess and strolled through the grounds
before cycling home to bed. There was even a Victorian maze of yew
hedges to get lost in. Every ten days or so, someone new would join
the party—a classicist, a mathematician, a museum curator, a dealer
in rare books—each recruited because he was a friend of someone
already resident in Bletchley.
A dry and smoky autumn of gold’s and browns, the rooks whirling
in the sky like cinders, gave way to a winter off a Christmas card.
The lake froze. The elms drooped under the weight of snow. A robin
pecked at breadcrumbs outside the stable window.
Jericho’s work was pleasantly academic. Three or four times a
day, a motorcycle dispatch-rider would clatter into the courtyard
at the back of the big house bearing a pouch of intercepted German
cryptograms. Jericho sorted them by frequency and call sign and
marked them up on charts in coloured crayons—red for the Luftwaffe,
green for the German Army—until gradually, from the unintelligible
babble, shapes emerged. Stations in a radio net allowed to talk
freely to one another made, when plotted on the stable wall, a
crisscross pattern within a circle. Nets in which the only line of
communication was two-way, between a headquarters and its
out-stations, resembled stars. Circle-nets and star-nets. Kreis und
Stern.
This idyll lasted eight months, until the German offensive in
May 1940. Up to then, there had been scarcely enough material for
the cryptanalysts to make a serious attack on Enigma. But as the
Wehrmacht swept through Holland, Belgium, France, the babble of
wireless traffic became a roar. From three or four motorcycle
pouches of material, the volume increased to thirty or forty; to a
hundred; to two hundred.
It was late one morning about a week after this had started that
Jericho felt a touch on his elbow and turned to find Turing,
smiling.
“There’s someone I want you to meet, Tom.”
“I’m rather busy at present, Alan, to be honest.”
“Her name’s Agnes. I really think you ought to see her.”
Jericho almost argued. A year later he would have argued, but at
that time he was still too much in awe of Turing not to do as he
was told. He tugged his jacket off the back of his chair and walked
out, shrugging it on, into the May sunshine.
By this time the Park had already started to be transformed.
Most of the trees at the side of the lake had been chopped down to
make way for a series of large wooden huts. The maze had been
uprooted and replaced by a low brick building, outside which a
small crowd of cryptanalysts had gathered. There was a sound coming
from within it, of a sort Jericho had never heard before, a humming
and a clattering, something between a loom and a printing press. He
followed Turing through the door. Inside, the noise was deafening,
reverberating off the whitewashed walls and the corrugated iron
ceiling. A brigadier, an air commodore, two men in overalls and a
frightened-looking Wren with her fingers in her ears were standing
round the edge of the room staring at a large machine full of
revolving drums. A blue flash of electricity arced across the top.
There was a fizz and a crackle, a smell of hot oil and overheated
metal.
“It’s the redesigned Polish bombe,” said Turing. “I thought I’d
call her Agnes.” He rested his long, pale fingers tenderly on the
metal frame. There was a bang and he snatched them away again. “I
do hope she works all right.”
Oh yes, thought Jericho, rubbing another window into the
condensation, oh yes, she worked all right.
The moon slid from beneath a cloud, briefly lighting the Great
North Road. He closed his eyes.
She worked all right, and after that the world was
different.
♦
Despite his earlier wakefulness Jericho must have fallen asleep,
for when he next opened his eyes Logie was sitting up and the Rover
was passing through a small town. It was still dark and at first he
couldn’t get his bearings. But then they passed a row of shops, and
when the headlights flickered briefly on the billboard of the
County Cinema (NOW SHOWING: “THE NAVY COMES THROUGH”, “SOMEWHERE
I’LL FIND YOU”), he muttered to himself, and heard the weariness
already creeping back into his voice: “Bletchley.”
“Too bloody right,” said Logie.
Down Victoria Road, past the council offices, past a school…The
road curved and suddenly, in the distance, above the pavements, a
myriad of fireflies were swarming towards them. Jericho passed his
hands across his face and found that his fingers were numb. He felt
mildly sick.
“What time is it?”
“Midnight,” said Logie. “Shift change.”
The specks of light were blackout torches.
Jericho guessed the Park’s workforce must now be about five or
six thousand, toiling round the clock in eight-hour shifts—midnight
till eight, eight till four, four till midnight. That meant maybe
four thousand people were now on the move, half coming off shift,
half going on, and by the time the Rover had turned into the road
leading to the main gate it was barely possible to advance a yard
without hitting someone. Leveret was alternately leaning out of the
window, shouting and hammering on the horn. Crowds of people had
spilled out into the road, most on foot, some on bicycles. A convoy
of buses was struggling to get past. Jericho thought: the odds are
two to one that Claire’s among them. He had a sudden desire to
shrink down in his seat, to cover his head, to get away.
Logie was looking at him curiously. “Are you sure you’re up to
this, old thing?”
“I’m fine. It’s just—it’s hard to think it started with sixteen
of us.”
“Wonderful, isn’t it? And it’ll be twice the size next year.”
The pride in Logie’s voice abruptly gave way to alarm. “For God’s
sake, Leveret, look out man, you nearly ran that lady over!”
In the headlights a blonde head spun angrily and Jericho felt a
rush of nausea. But it wasn’t her. It was a woman he didn’t
recognise, a woman in an army uniform, a slash of scarlet lipstick
like a wound across her face. She looked as if she was tarted up
and on her way to meet a man. She shook her fist and mouthed
“Bugger off” at them.
“Well,” said Logie, primly, “I thought she was a lady.”
When they reached the guard post they had to dig out their
identity cards. Leveret collected them and passed them on through
the window to an RAF corporal. The sentry hitched his rifle and
studied the cards by torchlight, then ducked down and directed the
beam in turn on to each of their faces. The brilliance struck
Jericho like a blow. Behind them he could hear a second sentry
rummaging through the boot.
He flinched from the light and turned to Logie. “When did all
this start?” He could remember a time when they weren’t even asked
for passes.
“Not sure now you mention it.” Logie shrugged. “They seem to
have tightened up in the last week or two.”
Their cards were returned. The barrier rose. The sentry waved
them through. Beside the road was a freshly painted sign. They had
been given a new name some time around Christmas and Jericho could
just about read the white lettering in the darkness: “Government
Communication Headquarters”.
The metal barrier came down after them with a crash.
§
Even in the blackout you could sense the size of the place. The
mansion was still the same, and so were the huts, but these were
now just a fraction of the overall site. Stretching away beyond
them was a great factory of intelligence: low, brick-built offices
and bombproof bunkers of concrete and steel, A-Blocks and B-Blocks
and C-Blocks, tunnels and shelters and guard posts and
garages…There was a big military camp just beyond the wire. The
barrels of anti-aircraft batteries poked through camouflaged
netting in the nearby woods. And more buildings were under
construction. There had never been a day when Jericho hadn’t heard
the racket of mechanical diggers and cement mixers, the ringing of
pickaxes and the splintering of falling trees. Once, just before he
left, he had paced out the distance from the new assembly hall to
the far perimeter fence and had reckoned it at half a mile. What
was it all for? He had no idea. Sometimes he thought they must be
monitoring every radio transmission on the planet.
Leveret drove the Rover slowly past the darkened mansion, past
the tennis court and the generators, and drew up a short distance
from the huts.
Jericho clambered stiffly from the back seat. His legs had gone
to sleep and the sensation of the blood returning made his knees
buckle. He leaned against the side of the car. His right shoulder
was rigid with cold. A duck splashed somewhere on the lake and its
cry made him think of Cambridge—of his warm bed and his
crosswords—and he had to shake his head to clear the memory.
Logie was explaining to him that he had a choice: Leveret could
take him over to his new digs and he could have a decent night’s
kip, or he could come in straight away and take a look at things
immediately.
“Why don’t we start now?” said Jericho. His re-entry into the
hut would be an ordeal. He’d prefer to get it over with.
“That’s the spirit, old love. Leveret will look after your
cases, won’t you, Leveret? And take them to Mr Jericho’s room?”
“Yes, sir.” Leveret looked at Jericho for a moment, then stuck
out his hand. “Good luck, sir.”
Jericho took it. The solemnity surprised him. Anyone would think
he was about to make a parachute jump into hostile territory. He
tried to think of something to say. “Thank you very much for
driving us.”
Logie was fiddling with Leveret’s blackout torch. “What the
hell’s wrong with this thing?” He knocked it against his palm.
“Bloody thing. Oh, sod it. Come on.”
He strode away on his long legs and after a moment’s hesitation
Jericho wrapped his scarf tight around his neck and followed. In
the darkness they had to feel their way along the blastproof wall
surrounding Hut 8. Logie banged into what sounded like a bicycle
and Jericho heard him swear. He dropped the torch. The impact made
it come on. A trickle of light revealed the entrance to the hut.
There was a smell of lime and damp here—lime and damp and creosote:
the odours of Jericho’s war. Logie rattled the handle, the door
opened and they stepped into the dim glow.
Because he had changed so much in the month he had been away,
somehow—illogically—he had expected that the hut would have changed
as well. Instead, the instant he crossed the threshold, the
familiarity of it almost overwhelmed him. It was like a recurrent
dream in which the horror lay in knowing precisely what would
happen next—the certainty that it always had been, and always would
be, exactly like this.