by John Meaney
Perhaps Clive knew what he was talking about. He had worked first on breaking the Enigma codes: hence, perhaps, his habit of humming out intercepts in Morse while he worked on them, even though the teletype codes were a 5-bit encoding and transmitted as such.
Then there was Harry, with his narrow Errol Flynn moustache and over-use of Brylcreem – he kept a tube in his desk drawer – always the self-styled charmer of the group. Having spent time in the Foreign Office before returning to teach modern languages at Durham, he considered himself wise in matters of strategy in a way that annoyed the others. But he was bright, and had taught Clive to correct his mangled pronunciation of German words in quite a creative way: he encouraged Clive, as a pitch-perfect musician, to sing the syllables.
Fred and Olivia were similar opposites: a large Cantabrigian and a thin Oxonian, mathematicians who viewed languages as logic systems – they sometimes argued in dry-sounding classical Greek – and both incessant pipe-smokers. (Olivia would sometimes stare at Gavriela in ways that made her uncomfortable for several weeks; then she accepted it and nothing happened.)
Silvester was the elder statesman of the group: a professional intelligence officer who had carried out similar work in the Great War (and was responsible for recruiting Clive and Harry), he could occasionally be persuaded to reminisce about the cracking of German naval codes and the difficulties then of persuading the military to act on signals intelligence.
‘Can’t blame them, really,’ he said. ‘Partly because they had no idea what Room 40 was, and partly because we had the same problem as SIS with human intelligence: had we revealed our sources to show our credibility, we would have compromised those sources. Revealing an agent’s name or which cipher one has cracked are equally damaging.’
Room 40 in the Admiralty had been one of the roots of the fledgling GCHQ, with at least as much codebreaking success then – a quarter of a century ago – as now.
The remaining four codebreakers were Brian – handsome, one-armed, who had been staying in the same Oxford digs as Gavriela when they met – plus Harriet, June, and Sophie, all with cut-glass accents, impeccable manners and ferocious focus once they had a problem in their grip. The three women belonged to the social class Rosie had described on Gavriela’s first day; and they were nice enough.
They broke codes by hand – or rather by brain – not with mechanical calculating machines; and they took pride in their work. Once, Olivia fell asleep at her desk, faced with an intractable cipher she had worked on for nearly a week. No one said anything, and even Clive dropped his incessant humming to near inaudibility. When she finally woke up, Olivia yawned, took her pencil in hand and wrote out the intercept contents in clear, from beginning to end.
Several days later, Clive was working on a batch of intercepts from some newly established outstation when his Morse-code humming made Gavriela’s stomach clench, interrupting her work.
‘Mm, mm-hmm, mm-mm-mm-hmm, mm-mm …’
The solidity of the room seemed to twist apart around her.
That night in her digs, after the long walk through the village in night-time gloom, she sat atop her bed, eyes open but with nothing to see: the lights were off and the blackout curtains kept any stray moonlight from entering. She thought of the classical Greeks and their Italian renaissance counterparts (natural imaginings for someone working alongside Fred and Olivia), and a discussion she had once had with Florian Horst in her days at the ETH.
‘Memory palaces,’ she aloud in the dark, remembering how she had argued that the psychological technique was a waste of vivid imagination that could be put to better creative use than memorizing a list of words you could just as well write down.
Then she lay back to sleep.
In the morning, because of the blackout curtains, it was still pitch black. She sat up, barely conscious, saying: ‘Thank you, Roger.’
As she pulled open the curtains, the tag-end of her dream and her waking words were like frozen CO2: solidity evaporating straight to invisible gas, lost from sight.
I can’t tell the others what I think.
Talk of darkness twisting in odd geometric ways – a darkness visible only to her, her brother, and a Soviet agent called Dmitri Shtemenko who was haunted by it – would surely result in her removal to a quiet ward somewhere. The nine-note auditory analogue, the nine notes hummed yesterday by Clive, might easily be her hallucination, nothing real.
I need to break that code.
Because Clive had been humming while he worked at his desk on the enciphered enemy message.
Which means I need to steal the intercept.
And that was treason, wasn’t it? But she checked that she had blank notepaper and a sharp pencil, before she went down to breakfast.
Gavriela plodded through her day, finally breaking off to go the ladies room at the shift’s end. There, Rosie was powdering her face, her headscarf draped across her shoulders.
‘Hi, Gabby,’ she said. ‘Are you coming along on the bus tonight?’
‘I’m not, er, feeling all that good.’ Gavriela put a hand on her stomach. ‘You know. Anyway, I’m all right walking home later, when the cramp goes.’
‘You want me to stay?’
‘Oh, no. Thank you.’
‘Well, you take care. I’ll let people know not to hang around waiting for you.’
Gavriela slipped back into Hut 27 just as Harry was locking up.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Um … Can I carry on working for a while? I don’t really feel like going home just yet.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘A bit under the weather, if you know what I mean.’
‘Are you—? Oh. Right. I’ll, er, see you in the morning. Toodle-oo.’
She gave a smile that probably looked as ill as she felt – though not from the woman’s trouble she was hinting at. For ten minutes, by the light of the overhead bulb above her desk, she stared at her own intercept decrypt-in-progress, scarcely seeing the letters, never mind thinking about the code.
The hut was very quiet with only her inside. The thing was, no one kept regular hours, and any one of the team could return at any minute. She waited, until she no longer could.
Clive had not been in all day. Fred claimed he was going to be with some Admiralty types for the rest of the week, along with Brian; Gavriela thought he did not really know. In the meantime, everyone had their own intercepts to work on; no one would be attempting to complete Clive’s unfinished tasks.
The truth was, the content that Clive had deciphered so far in this batch had been of little interest, its triviality a contrast to some of the other intercepts, including several direct from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute regarding the atomic bomb programme.
Was this a remotely sensible thing to be doing?
Remember the music.
Those nine discordant notes that Clive had hummed.
You know it’s the darkness.
She went to Clive’s desk, pulled open the drawer, and extracted the intercept. It seemed to have been several messages in one, after a single 12-character prefix: at least, there was one section that remained enciphered while the rest was now in plain text. The prefix, when broken, assigned the ten-wheel settings (two for each bit of each character) on the sending machine. No British officer had ever seen a German Tunny device, yet the mathematical analysis was certain. A peculiarity of this encryption was that ‘adding’ the key to the plaintext (actually performing a bit-wise transformation) produced the enciphered signal, yet performing the same operation again reproduced the original message en clair.
But not in this case, it seemed. The explanation was probably a misread portion of the signal.
What if it’s been enciphered twice?
More precisely, what if part of the signal was so sensitive it could not even be read by the security-cleared teletype operator? So what if someone had encoded once according to their own scheme – starting with the prefix that sounded like the darkness, the horrible rhythm of EAVI a
s hummed by Clive – and given that message to the operator, as part of a longer signal, for further enciphering and transmission?
The still-enciphered portion read:
EAVI5 N1BF 961Y0 1N2B6 WRRQY 5N172 B5QUB UN1BU N40BF RBLGB F07B5 N19U2 QTBN9 B27QV QYTQ7 DYQ2H BRN2B 519BQ 5Y17B 271VV 19BRF 1UU19
Gavriela concentrated, stringing the random characters like party streamers among the decorations of her childhood bedroom, in the image constructed in her mind: as vivid, almost, as being there once more. She was feeling odd by the time she had finished; but whenever she closed her eyes, she could see the message in full once more: exactly as on the intercept sheet when she checked in reality. Finally, she slipped the sheet back inside the pile, the pile inside the drawer, and closed up the desk.
A message from the darkness lay enciphered in in her mind.
Back in her own chair, she sat for some time with her eyes closed, walking around the imagined room again and again, until she was sure she could reconstruct it at will. Then she opened her eyes, and got ready to leave.
As she was walking past the courtyard, she looked back and saw Silvester heading for Hut 27. Perhaps he would be carrying out an audit – he was that conscientious – but what she had stolen was only inside her head.
I must be insane.
Yet she knew she was right.
At home, she wrote out the message as memorized, without the first four characters she believed to be an identifying prefix.
5N1B5F961Y01N2B6WRRQ95N172B5QUBUN1BUN40BFRB LGBF07B5N19U2QTBN9B27QVQYTQ7DYQ2HBRN2B519BQ 5Y17B271VV19BRF1UU19
The simplest form of cipher is a monoalphabetic substitution – replacing each letter of the clear message with a different letter. But if this were, say, an Enigma message contained inside a Tunny signal, then the cipher would be far less trivial, most likely polyalphabetic: after each character was encoded, the machine would shift to a new letter-replacement scheme. That type of cipher was nearly impossible to break without a crib: a section of message whose plaintext was known or could be guessed. But this message was a cipher-within-a-cipher, and with luck the enemy had relied on the sophistication of the outer algorithm for the main protection, while the inner cipher was simply to prevent a casual glimpse from German signallers.
She looked for a character that might be a word delimiter. Alphabetically, the first likely candidate was B, occurring at reasonable intervals in the message, giving a three-character initial word. So what might a message begin with?
Der. Die. Das. Wer.
They were likely candidates. Setting the first word to der was unpromising, so she tried again:
DIE DF96EY0EI2 6WRRQ9DIE72 DQU UIE UI40 FR LG F07 DIE9U2QT I9 27QVQYTQ7DYQ2H RI2 DE9 QDYE7 27EVVE9 RFEUUE9
It was about the darkness. Her skin crawled as Dunkelheit floated and billowed like a spectre in her mind’s eye. And if the fifth word were Sie, she now had nine entries – her lucky number – in her decrypt table; so this was progress.
0→H 1→E 2→T 5→D 9→N F→U N→I U→S Y→L
The next stage was fast, since d-something-s gave das, then she had sich and um. Two more words popped out: Dienstag and muessen.
DIE DUNKELHEIT 6WMMANDIE7T DAS SIE SICHUM LG UH7 DIENSTAG IN T7AVALGA7DLATH MIT DEN ADLE7 T7EVVEN MUESSEN
Now Adler – meaning eagle – was inevitable, along with Trafalgarplatz and treffen.
THE DARKNESS COMMMANDS THAT YOU MEET THE EAGLE AT?? O’CLOCK THURSDAY IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE
She stared at it for a long time. Most of the intercepts were weeks old, but this had been sent last Friday.
I’m scared.
Because the pictures in her mind no longer featured code but two dangerous figures in shadow, meeting in secret while unknowable darkness watched from wherever it manifested; and if she had learned anything in Bletchley Park it was that a handful of people could change the world.
The rendezvous must not happen.
ELEVEN
MOLSIN, 2603 AD
Roger opened his eyes, still tangled in Leeja’s nakedness, warm and satisfied and drowsy. So much tension was gone that his muscles felt too soft to allow him to stand. He had no desire to shift, save for the bladder-pressure that forced the matter.
‘Sorry, Hei— Leeja.’
‘Mm?’
‘I’ve got to get up.’
He had been going to call her Heithrún, which made no sense: the name belonged to no one he knew. Pulling on his trousers, he looked around for the bathroom facilities, saw nothing obvious, and called up his tu-ring menu with its quickglass commands.
‘You want the bathroom?’ said Leeja. ‘Look.’
She pointed and the wall puckered and opened back. Smiling, Roger went inside, and waited for her to command it shut. When he came back out, his skin was tingling and smelling of pine – he had used full cleansing facilities – but some of his warmth was gone.
‘My tu-ring can’t ping external services,’ he said.
‘That’s the privacy shield.’ Leeja smiled as she pulled back the covers. ‘We don’t want to shock the neighbours, do we?’
Her entire body was an invitation, soft and glorious.
‘Yeah, but … Sorry. My … friend’s in the med-hall and I was waiting for news.’
Leeja blinked, then pulled the cover up around herself.
‘If you need me to drop the shield, then— There you are.’
The message cache glowed scarlet: a single message, priority-one urgent.
Alisha?
But the sender ID was Jed Goran, and the message playing out in Roger’s smartlenses, accompanied by collimated audio, said nothing about the fate of one traumatized refugee among so many.
‘We’re holding off in mu-space,’ Jed said. ‘Me and the seven ships that have turned up, none of which have offloaded their refugees. Investigations are ongoing, so I’ve been told. At twenty-seven hundred your local, I’ll perform a realspace insertion. Meaning, I’ll be available to take your call, my friend.’
Not promising to come back to Molsin and take him away.
‘Shit.’
‘What is it, lover?’
There were no addenda to the message, no smart-query facilities to allow follow-up questions with best-heuristic generated answers. Two-and-a-bit standard hours before he could talk to Jed again.
‘I’ve got stuff … happening.’
What ongoing investigations could Jed have meant? If the ships were waiting in mu-space, then who was doing the investigating? On Fulgor, a dispersed army of roving in-Skein netAgents would have been ideal; but Molsin was clearly a different world.
‘Privacy is important here, isn’t it?’ he added.
‘I’ll share everything about my life with you,’ said Leeja. ‘Any detail at all you want to ask about, I’ll tell you.’
There was a wondering note in her voice, as if surprised by her own offer. Older than he was, with years of additional experience, still she seemed lost in something new, just as he was.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
It was a unilateral response – implying no obligation on his part to divulge his innermost thoughts, for example about Alisha – but Leeja smiled, accepting his answer.
He kissed her bare shoulder.
‘I … I get lost in you,’ he said. ‘You know?’
‘My world has been simplifying,’ said Leeja, ‘since I met you.’
This was not helping him do what he needed to do.
‘I’m going to have to go back to the med-hall,’ he said. ‘To check on my friend. All right?’
‘Girlfriend?’
‘Girl and friend, who might have become my girlfriend. But it didn’t happen, and now everything has changed.’
Leeja smiled, though she was not the only change he had been thinking of.
‘You’ll come right back to me, then?’
Roger pulled back the cover, leaned over and kissed one cherry nipple, then the other.
‘Of course I will.’
Her stomach was smooth-
skinned, so kissable; and so he did. Then his lips were murmuring and kissing and travelling lower. Her inner thighs were ultimately soft; and her core was sensitive and wonderful.
Some time later, entangled and spent, they smiled and kissed each other.
‘You’re really going now?’ said Leeja.
‘Only if you’ll wait for me to return.’
‘Do you have any doubts?’
‘Not about that.’
He dressed, then blew her a kiss as she commanded an opening in the wall. She made it a double affair, with inner and outer doors. He stepped into the airlock-like passage, blew her another kiss, then waited for the inner door to flow back into place and the outer to melt.
Then he was out in a main corridor and the wall was sealing up. Complex patterns whirled inside the quickglass: art-forms he did not know how to read, not yet.
A new world.
Despite all previous trauma, he was smiling as he queried his tu-ring for directions to the med-hall and Alisha Spalding.
Roger and Dr Keele sat in a small consulting-room. One wall was either a one-way transparent window or a full-function holo displaying a private ward. Beyond, Alisha was sitting up in a green quickglass chair next to her bed, while a male physician talked to her.
‘Your eyes are different.’ Dr Keele placed a fingertip on her own cheekbone. ‘It changes your appearance rather a lot.’
‘I’ll take the lenses out, if you like.’
‘Not at all. I wouldn’t dream of violating your privacy by suggesting it.’
‘Oh.’ Roger glanced out at Alisha. ‘But we’re spying on her, aren’t we?’
Dr Keele smiled and nodded. ‘Very good.’
As if he had passed a test.
‘Because medical ethics change behavioural standards,’ he said. ‘For her own good, sort of thing.’
‘Something like that.’ Her voice was neutral. ‘And I think that’s enough.’
The wall blanked to opacity.
That was a test.
