Enigma

by Robert Harris

  ‘Come on, old love,’ shouted Logie above the din. ‘There’s nothing more we can do here.’ He pulled at his sleeve again.

  Reluctantly, Jericho turned and followed him out of the hut.

  He felt no sense of elation. Maybe tomorrow evening or maybe on Thursday, the bombes would give them the Enigma settings for the day now ending. Then the real work would begin – the laborious business of trying to reconstruct the new Short Weather Code Book – taking the meteorological data from the convoy, matching it to the weather signals already received from the surrounding U-boats, making some guesses, testing them, constructing a fresh set of cribs … It never ended, this battle against Enigma. It was a chess tournament of a thousand rounds against a player of prodigious defensive strength, and each day the pieces went back to their original positions and the game began afresh.

  Logie, too, seemed rather flat as they walked along the asphalt path towards Hut 8.

  ‘I’ve sent the others home to their digs for some kip,’ he was saying, ‘which is where I’m going. And where you ought to go, too, if you’re not too high to sleep.’

  ‘I’ll just clear up here for a bit, if that’s all right. Take the code book back to the safe.’

  ‘Do that. Thanks.’

  ‘And then I suppose I’d better face Wigram.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Wigram.’

  They went into the hut. In his office, Logie tossed Jericho the keys to the Black Museum. ‘And your prize,’ he said, holding up a half-bottle of scotch. ‘Don’t let’s forget that.’

  Jericho smiled. ‘I thought you said Skynner was offering a full bottle.’

  ‘Ah, well, yes, I did, but you know Skynner.’

  ‘Give it to the others.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so bloody pious.’ From the same drawer Logie produced a couple of enamel mugs. He blew away some dust and wiped their insides with his forefinger. ‘What shall we drink to? You don’t mind if I join you?’

  ‘The end of Shark? The future?’

  Logie splashed a large measure of whisky into each mug. ‘How about,’ he said, shrewdly, offering one to Jericho, ‘how about your future?’

  They clinked mugs.

  ‘My future.’

  They sat in their overcoats, in silence, drinking.

  ‘I’m defeated,’ said Logie at last, using the desk to pull himself to his feet. ‘I couldn’t tell you the year, old love, never mind the day.’ He had three pipes in a rack and he blew noisily through each of them, making a harsh, cracking sound, then slipped them into his pocket. ‘Now don’t forget your scotch.’

  ‘I don’t want the bloody scotch.’

  ‘Take it. Please. For my sake.’

  In the corridor, he shook Jericho’s hand, and Jericho feared Logie was going to say something embarrassing. But whatever it was he had in mind, he thought better of it. Instead, he merely gave a rueful salute and lurched along the passage, banging the door behind him.

  *

  The Big Room, in anticipation of the midnight shift, was almost empty. A little desultory work was being done on Dolphin and Porpoise at the far end. Two young women in overalls were on their knees around Jericho’s desk, gathering every scrap of waste paper into a couple of sacks, ready for incineration. Only Cave was still there, bent over his charts. He looked up as Jericho came in.

  ‘Well? How’s it going for you?’

  ‘Too early to tell,’ said Jericho. He found the code book and slipped it into his pocket. ‘And you?’

  ‘Three hit so far. A Norwegian freighter and a Dutch cargo ship. They just went straight to the bottom. The third’s on fire and going round and round in circles. Half the crew lost, the other half trying to save her.’

  ‘What is she?’

  ‘American Liberty ship. The James Oglethorpe. Seven thousand tons, carrying steel and cotton.’

  ‘American,’ repeated Jericho. He thought of Kramer.

  ‘My brother died, one of the first …’

  ‘It’s a slaughter,’ said Cave, ‘an absolute bloody slaughter. And shall I tell you the worst of it? It’s not going to finish tonight. It’s going to go on and on like this for days. They’re going to be chased and harried and torpedoed right the way across the bloody North Atlantic. Can you imagine what that feels like? Watching the ship next to you blow up? Not being allowed to stop and search for survivors? Waiting for your turn?’ He touched his scar, then seemed to realise what he was doing and let his hand fall. There was a terrible resignation in the gesture. ‘And now, apparently, they’re picking up U-boat signals swarming all around SC-122.’

  His telephone began to ring and he swung away to answer it. While his back was turned, Jericho quietly placed the half-empty half-bottle of scotch on his desk, then made his way out into the night.

  His mind, on a fuel of Benzedrine and scotch, seemed to be wheeling away on a course of its own, churning like the bombes in Hut 11, making bizarre and random connections – Claire and Hester and Skynner, and Wigram with his shoulder holster, and the tyre tracks in the frost outside the cottage, and the blazing Liberty ship going round and round over the bodies of half her crew.

  He stopped by the lake to breathe some fresh air and thought of all the other occasions when he had stood here in the darkness, gazing at the faint silhouette of the mansion against the stars. He half-closed his eyes and saw it as it might have been before the war. A midsummer evening. The sounds of an orchestra and a bubble of voices drifting across the lawn. A line of Chinese lanterns, pink and mauve and lemon, stirring in the arboretum. Chandeliers in the ballroom. White crystal fracturing on the smooth surface of the lake.

  The vision was so strong that he found he was sweating in his overcoat against the imagined heat, and as he climbed the slope towards the big house he fancied he saw a line of silver Rolls-Royces, their chauffeurs leaning against the long bonnets. But as he drew closer he saw that the cars were merely buses, come to drop off the next shift, pick up the last, and that the music in the mansion was only the percussion of telephone bells and the tapping of hurrying footsteps on the stone floor.

  In the labyrinth of the house he nodded cautiously to the few people he passed – an elderly man in a dark grey suit, an Army captain, a WAAF. They appeared seedy in the dingy light and he guessed, by their expressions, he must look pretty odd himself. Benzedrine could do funny things to the pupils of your eyes, he seemed to remember, and he hadn’t shaved or changed his clothes for more than forty hours. But nobody in Bletchley was ever thrown out for simply looking strange, or the place would have been empty from the start. There was old Dilly Knox, who used to come to work in his dressing gown, and Turing who cycled in wearing a gas mask to try to cure his hay fever, and the cryptanalyst from the Japanese section who had bathed naked in the lake one lunchtime. By comparison, Jericho was as conventional as an accountant.

  He opened the door to the cellar passage. The bulb must have blown since his last visit and he found himself peering into a darkness as chill and black as a catacomb. Something gleamed very faintly at the foot of the stairs and he groped his way down the steps towards it. It was the keyhole to the Black Museum, traced in luminous paint: a trick they had learned in the Blitz.

  Inside the room the light switch worked. He unlocked the safe and replaced the code book and for a moment he was seized by the crazy notion of hiding the stolen cryptograms inside it as well. Folded into an envelope they might pass unnoticed for months. But when, after tonight, was he likely to pass this way again? And one day they would be discovered. And then all it would take would be a telephone call to Beaumanor and everything would be unravelled – his involvement, Hester’s …

  No, no.

  He closed the steel door.

  But still he couldn’t quite bring himself to leave. So much of his life was here. He touched the safe and then the rough, dry walls. He drew his finger through the dust on the table. He contemplated the row of Enigmas on the metal shelf. They were all encased in light wood, mostly in their origina
l German boxes, and even in repose they seemed to exude a compelling, almost menacing power. These were far more than mere machines, he thought. These were the synapses of the enemy’s brain – mysterious, complex, animate.

  He stared at them for a couple of minutes, then began to turn away.

  He stopped himself.

  ‘Tom Jericho,’ he whispered. ‘You bloody fool.’

  The first two Enigmas he lifted down and inspected turned out to be badly damaged and unusable. The third had a luggage label attached to its handle by a bit of string: ‘Sidi Bou Zid 14/2/43’. An Afrika Korps Enigma, captured by the Eighth Army during their attack on Rommel last month. He laid it carefully on the table and unfastened the metal clasps. The lid opened easily.

  This one was in perfect condition: a beauty. The letters on the keys were unworn, the black metal casing unscratched, the glass bulbs clear and gleaming. The three rotors – stopped, he saw, at ZDE – glinted silver beneath the naked light. He stroked it tenderly. It must only just have left its makers. ‘Chiffreirmaschine Gesellschaft,’ read their label. ‘Heimsoeth und Rinke, Berlin-Wilmersdorf, Uhlandstrasse 138.’

  He pushed a key. It was stiffer than on a normal typewriter. When he had depressed it far enough, the machine emitted a clunk and the right-hand rotor moved on a notch. At the same time, one of the bulbs lit up.

  Hallelujah!

  The battery was charged. The Enigma was live.

  He checked the mechanism. He stooped and typed C. The letter J lit up. He typed L and got a U. A, I, R and E yielded, successively, X, P, Q and Q again.

  He lifted the Enigma’s inner lid and detached the spindle, set the rotors back at ZDE and locked them into place. He typed the cryptogram JUXPQQ and C-L-A-I-R-E was spelled out letter by letter on the bulbs in little bursts of light.

  He fumbled through his pockets for his watch. Two minutes to twelve.

  He folded the lid back into place and hoisted the Enigma up on its shelf. He made sure to lock the door behind him.

  To the people whom he ran past in the mansion’s corridors, who was he? Nothing. Nobody. Just another peculiar cryptanalyst in a flap.

  Hester Wallace, as agreed, was in the telephone box at midnight, the receiver in her hand, feeling more foolish than afraid as she pretended to make a call. Beyond the glass, two currents of pale sparks were flowing quietly in the dark, as one shift streamed in from the main gate and the other ebbed towards it. In her pocket was a sheet of Bletchley’s wood-flecked, brownish notepaper on which were jotted six entries.

  Cordingley had swallowed her story whole – indeed, he had been, if anything, a little too eager to help. Unable at first to locate the relevant file, he had called in aid a pimply, jug-eared youth with wispy yellow hair. Could this child, she had wondered, this foetus-face, really be a cryptanalyst? But Donald had whispered yes, he was one of the best: now the professions and the universities had all been picked over, they were turning to boys straight out of school. Unformed. Unquestioning. The new elite.

  The file had been procured, a space cleared in a corner, and never had Miss Wallace made a pencil move more quickly. The worst part had been at the end: keeping her nerve and not fleeing when she’d finished, but checking the figures, returning the file to the Foetus, and observing the normal social code with Donald –

  ‘We really must have a drink one of these evenings.’

  ‘Yes really we must.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch, then.’

  ‘Absolutely. So shall I.’

  – neither, of course, having the slightest intention of ever doing so.

  Come on, Tom Jericho.

  Midnight passed. The first of the buses lumbered by – invisible, almost, except for its exhaust fumes, which made a puff of pink cloud in its red rear lights.

  And then, just as she was beginning to give up hope, a blur of white. A hand tapped softly on the glass. She dropped the telephone and shone her torch on to the face of a lunatic pressed close to the pane. Dark wild eyes and a convict mask of shadowed beard. ‘There’s really no need to scare me half to death,’ she muttered, but that was in the privacy of the phone booth. As she came out, all she said was: ‘I’ve left your numbers on the telephone.’

  She held the door open for him. His hand rested on hers. A brief moment of pressure signalled his thanks – too brief for her to tell whose fingers were the coldest.

  ‘Meet me here at five.’

  Exhilaration gave a fresh energy to her tired legs as she pedalled up the hill away from Bletchley.

  He needed to see her at five. How else could one interpret that, except as meaning he had found a way? A victory! A victory against the Mermagens and the Cordingleys!

  The gradient steepened. She rose to tread the pedals. The bicycle waved from side to side like a metronome. The light danced on the road.

  Afterwards, she was to reproach herself severely for this premature jubilation, but the truth was she would probably never have seen them anyway. They had positioned themselves quite carefully, drawn up parallel with the track and hidden by the hawthorn hedge – a professional job – so that when she came round the corner and began to bounce over the potholes towards the cottage she passed them in the shadows without a glance.

  She was six feet from the door when the headlights came on – slitted blackout headlights, but dazzling enough to splash her shadow against the whitewashed wall. She heard the engine cough and turned, shielding her eyes, to see the big car coming at her – calm, unhurried, implacable, nodding over the bumpy ground.

  5

  Jericho told himself to take his time. There’s no hurry. You’ve given yourself five hours. Use them.

  He locked himself into the cellar room, leaving the key half turned in the keyhole, so that anyone trying to insert their key from the other side would find it blocked. He knew he’d have to open up eventually – otherwise, what was he? Just a rat in a trap. But at least he would now have thirty seconds’ warning, and to give himself a cover story, he reopened the Naval Section safe and spread the handful of maps and code books across the narrow table. To these he added the stolen cryptograms and key settings, and his watch, which he placed before him with its lid open. Like preparing for an examination, he thought. ‘Candidates must write on one side of the paper only; this margin to be left blank for the use of the examiner.’

  Then he lifted down the Enigma and removed the cover.

  He listened. Nothing. A dripping pipe somewhere, that was all. The walls bulged with the pressure of the cold earth; he could smell the soil, taste the spores of damp lime plaster. He breathed on his fingers and flexed them.

  He would work backwards, he decided, deciphering the last cryptogram first, on the theory that whatever had caused Claire’s disappearance was contained somewhere in those final messages.

  He ran his fingers down the columns of notation to find the Vulture settings for 4 March – panic day in the Bletchley Registry.

  III V IV GAH CX AZ DV KT HU LW GP EY MR FQ

  The Roman numerals told him which three out of the machine’s five rotors were to be used that day, and what order they were to be placed in. GAH gave him the rotor starting positions. The next ten letter pairs represented the cross-pluggings he needed to make on the plugboard at the back of the Enigma. Six letters were left unconnected which, by some mysterious and glorious fold in the laws of statistics, actually increased the number of potential different cross-pluggings from almost 8 million million (25 × 23 × 21 × 19 × 17 × 15 × 13 × 11 × 9 × 7 × 5 × 3) to more than 150 million million.

  He did the plugging first. Short lengths of corded, chocolate-coloured flex, tipped at either end by brass plugs sheathed in bakelite that sank with satisfying precision into the lettered sockets: C to X, A to Z …

  Next he lifted the Enigma’s inner lid, unlocked the spindle, and slid off the three rotors that were already loaded. From a separate compartment he withdrew the two spares.

  Each rotor was the size and thickness of an ice-hocke
y puck, but heavier: a code wheel with twenty-six terminals – pin-shaped and spring-loaded on one side, flat and circular on the other – with the letters of the alphabet engraved around the edge. As the rotors turned against one another, so the shape of the electrical circuit they completed varied. The right-hand rotor always moved on a letter each time a key was struck. Once every twenty-six letters, a notch in its alphabet ring caused the middle rotor also to move on a place. And when, eventually, the middle rotor reached its turnover position, the third rotor would move. Two rotors moving together was known at Bletchley as a crab; three was a lobster.

  He sorted the rotors into the order of the day – III, V and IV – and slipped them on to the spindle. He twirled III and set it at the letter G, V at A and IV at H, and closed the lid.

  The machine was now primed just as its twin had been in Smolensk on the evening of 4 March.

  He touched the keys.

  He was ready.

  The Enigma worked on a simple principle. If, when the machine was set in a particular way, pressing key A completed a circuit that illuminated bulb X, then it followed – because electric current is reciprocal – that, in the same position, pressing key X would illuminate bulb A. Decoding was designed to be as easy as encoding.

  Jericho realised quite quickly that something was going wrong. He would type a letter of the cryptogram with his left index finger and with his right hand make a note of the character illuminated on the display panel. T gave him H, R gave him Y, X gave him C … This was no German he recognised. Still, he went on in the increasingly desperate hope it would start to come right. Only after forty-seven letters did he give up.

  HYCYKWPIOROKDZENAJEWICZJPTAKJHRUTBPYSJMOTYLPCIE

  He ran his hands through his hair.

  Sometimes an Enigma operator would insert meaningless padding around proper words to disguise the sense of his message, but never this much, surely? There were no proper words that he could discern hidden anywhere in this gibberish.

  He groaned, leaned back in his chair and stared at the flaking plaster ceiling.