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.
∨ Enigma ∧
TWO
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
Jennifer LaBrecque, Leslie Kelly