Enigma by Robert Harris Read Free Book Online

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.
    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