Birth of a Spy

by Duncan Swindells

  ‘That’s all. I stuck my head out to see if he was still around. He wasn’t. That’s it.’

  ‘No. There’s more. Who did you see?’

  ‘No one. It was raining I think. There weren’t even any cars on the road, just the one opposite and a black Beemer parked a few doors up.’

  ‘Beemer?’

  ‘BMW. Black. Looked brand new. Tinted windows, the whole thing.’

  ‘There. Thank you, Scott. Now you have told me everything.’

  The old man seemed oddly preoccupied, rubbing his thumb over his finger as if searching for something that had never been there. Hunter took this as his cue to leave. ‘Thank you for the drink and your time Mr Wiseman, I think I’d better be going.’

  ‘Of course, of course. Thank you for coming to see me. It’s been years since anyone’s expressed an interest in my writing,’ he said cheerfully.

  They were at the door now and Hunter turned to shake the old man’s hand. Even though he didn’t consider the meeting a success, and had found the irascible old boy somewhat temperamental and difficult to handle he couldn’t deny having warmed to him.

  ‘Thanks again. I’m sorry I hope I didn’t upset you earlier.’

  ‘No no, not at all. You must excuse me. Don’t forget, young man, that when I was a little younger than yourself I actually saw the men responsible for breaking Enigma with my own eyes, I may even have met some of them. I didn’t know it at the time, and they would never have spoken of their work, people didn’t, but these men, Dilly Knox, Alan Turing, Bill Tutte, the men behind the breaking of Enigma, they were responsible for shortening the war by many years. They were geniuses, intellectual giants. Now, of course, they are all dead and thanks to the Official Secrets Act, many of them have gone to their graves without anyone having the faintest idea of the huge debt we owe them. That is why, Mr Hunter, if occasionally I lose my patience, you will have to forgive a sick and somewhat sentimental old man.’ And with that George Wiseman firmly but politely shut the door.

  4

  Sir John had never behaved like this, never shown such a personal interest in someone before. But then these were exceptional circumstances and he could never have predicted that events would have unfolded quite as they had. He opened his Telegraph and idly scanned the inside pages. Much of the joy of the daily paper had been taken for him years ago. Now there was no need to read a single sensationalist sentence. Anything of any real importance from any publication around the world was first translated, then retyped and left in a folder on his desk each and every morning. He flicked through to the back pages and the sport. Even this gentle pastime had been tarnished for him in recent years with the introduction of the short game. Work was all that was left. Work and his fine collection of tailored suits. Today he had chosen a fitted two button silver-grey number with a dark purple silk lining. A little unusual certainly, but one of his favourites. Yes, now that he was unable to smoke almost anywhere, was forced to watch cricket matches that finished by lunchtime and have all the world’s news, threat or no threat, condensed into one pithy sentence, often not even that, most of life’s simple pleasures seemed to have been denied him. He’d even lost his inclination to work his way through the typing pool on four. So, work it was. He brushed a dusty blob of London from his lapel and looked over the top of his Telegraph into the next compartment. This lad was doing well. Dangerously well.

  Hunter spent the train journey back to Cambridge painstakingly dissecting his encounter with the author George Wiseman. He thought about the flat and the old man’s incredible collection of photographs. He remembered their conversations about Enigma, Wiseman’s extraordinary revelations regarding the Commonwealth and wondered what had made him suggest he give up on the code. He hoped he’d not upset the old boy, after all it was true, there had been a whole generation to whom Enigma was more than just a puzzle to be solved, more than a sophisticated parlour game. To these people it really had been a matter of life and death.

  Knox. Turing. Tutte.

  As the scenery flashed by, transporting him from Hertfordshire, through Essex and finally to Cambridgeshire, deep down, in his gut, something stirred. Hunter began to feel profoundly uncomfortable. There was something he had overlooked, like a voice off, lost in the wind Hunter’s doubts nipped and worried him. Plagued him. A voice which, in the past he might have tried to shut out with tablets and pills, but which now he was desperate to hear and to comprehend. It called to him, through the sleepless nights and the lingering effects of Wiseman’s whisky, always there, yet never present, woolly and indistinct and no matter how much Hunter struggled to organize his thoughts, it would not be heard and so the idea continued to elude him. In an effort to quieten his mind Hunter opened his freshly signed copy of Setting Europe Ablaze, idly flicking through its pages without particularly taking anything in. He found with pride the one spelling mistake he had underlined that morning and then turned to the photographs at its centre. It was difficult to imagine the handsome young man sat with his father was the same elderly gentleman with whom he had, somewhat reluctantly, just been drinking whisky.

  What had the old fool been talking about? Just before Hunter left Wiseman had suddenly become quite animated and talkative. Perhaps it had been the whisky? Hunter was certain he had little in the way of human contact day to day and that had contributed to his awkwardly aggressive conversational manner. Maybe he had been about to hit his stride when Hunter had decided to leave. He’d given him that great long speech about the code breakers at Bletchley Park and implied, rather bluntly, that Hunter should be a little more respectful. Hunter was prepared to concede that he might have had a point. He knew his history. He knew the debt they were due. Turing had committed suicide, unable to come to terms with his sexuality and had only recently been recognised for his remarkable contributions to the war effort. Similarly, thanks to their unerring devotion to the official secrets act, Hunter knew many others had only been properly recognised either in extreme old age or posthumously. Bill Tutte was one such tragic case. He had gone to his grave having received no official thanks for the ground-breaking work he had undertaken at Station X. Hunter flicked through a few more pages of Wiseman’s book. What could they have been talking about, he wondered, for Bill Tutte’s name to crop up? Tutte hadn’t been involved in the breaking of Enigma, although he had worked at Bletchley Park. Why would the old man have thrown his name in? Surely not a simple mistake? Wiseman knew his history far too well, had been there, possibly even met the man. Maybe the whisky then? Or was the old boy trying deliberately to mislead him, send him down some strange blind alley? Perhaps another test, like the names of the Poles? If so Hunter wanted to go back and put him straight right away. He fought off the last effects of the alcohol. What possible reason could he have had to try and put Bill Tutte’s name into his thoughts? And then, like a giant ball of tangled string unravelling, Hunter’s mind began to see things more clearly, to hear and understand the voice which had plagued him since leaving South Kensington. He began furiously turning the pages of Wiseman’s book back to the glossy collection of black and white photographs at its heart. Bill Tutte had never worked on Enigma. That was the point. That was what Wiseman had been trying to tell him. Bill Tutte had worked on a completely different machine. Lorenz. The machine in the photograph. The coding machine that the twenty-something-year-old George Wiseman had so proudly sat behind with his father. It wasn’t an Enigma machine at all. True it wasn’t the best photograph that had ever been taken but Hunter couldn’t believe he’d missed it. It was a Lorenz machine. Lorenz had been used by the German High Command as an add on to a teleprinter. Lorenz was the machine that Bill Tutte had single-handedly reconstructed without ever having clapped eyes on one. Hunter had not listened carefully enough to the old man, not looked closely enough at the photograph. The machine on the table didn’t have Enigma’s distinctive keyboard, nor it’s wooden carrying box. It was in its appearance an altogether less elegant device, bigger and not designed to be po
rtable for use in the field, being much more at home in an office. Hitler’s personal means of communication, his “secret writer”, all messages for the eyes of the few, and ten thousand dedicated men and women in a collection of rickety huts in the grounds of an eclectic manor house situated by a moderate sized lake in the Buckinghamshire countryside. Hunter had leapt to a totally false conclusion. But a conclusion based on what? He’d spent the last eighteen months breaking Enigma and so there had been no reason to believe that the code pushed through his letter box had been anything other than just that, another Enigma code, another weather report salvaged from the records of The IWP. The inscription on the photograph in Wiseman’s book had said Bletchley Park which had made him think of Enigma and so that was what he had seen, an Enigma machine. The code he’d been sent wasn’t an Enigma code, it was from a Lorenz machine and what the boffins at Bletchley had called Fish. He’d been trying to crack the wrong damn code. Traffic sent by the two machines could never have been confused, they were completely different, but that wasn’t what Hunter had expected to see and consequently he had seen only what he had wanted to see. Had Wiseman been trying to tell him, trying to steer him in the right direction with his dropping of Bill Tutte’s name? Hunter’s mind was working at a thousand miles an hour. Now it wasn’t about the machine, it was about the technique of encryption. Enigma used a substitution cypher, altering one letter for another, whilst the Lorenz machine had used an additive cypher based on the Vernam code, where one letter was added to another to produce a third. If whoever had written the code had used an additive cypher the results would, to all intense and purposes, look identical to an Enigma code. Hunter prayed he could simply tweak the algorithm to take that into account and the hill climber would take care of the rest.

  He found the sheet with its burst of seemingly random characters. If this was a Lorenz code it was quite possibly the first one Hunter had ever seen. Lorenz had only been declassified in 2002 and perhaps due to the overwhelming attention garnered by Enigma, or possibly because of its apparent functionality and ugliness had never made the impression on the public its older, sleeker cousin had. Consequently, not only was this potentially an incredibly rare piece of code, but because Lorenz was the exclusive instrument of the German High Command, Hunter realised, its content could well be extremely important too. It wasn’t unheard of for the small team in hut 3 to break messages from the Fuhrer himself.

  The biggest single problem Hunter faced was the complete lack of a depth. Wiseman had called it a dead duck, and perhaps he had been right. During the war there had always been some context in which to place the communications; where they were sent to and from, when they were sent, and the ever present possibility that, due to a lazy operator, vital wheel settings had not been changed. Hunter had thought he had nothing, no clues to go on, but then the code must have been transmitted after 1940 when Hitler had contacted the Lorenz Electrical Company in Berlin and commissioned the machine. Additionally, the message probably originated from the Italian Peninsula, the Western Front or Russia and the Eastern Front. It wasn’t a lot to go on, and the timeframe was still significantly larger than he would have preferred, but it was more than he had had up until this point. Suddenly Hunter’s dreams of Nazi gold, masterpieces secreted in subterranean passages, and missing U-boats, sunk but never found, flooded his mind. And if he was excited by the possibilities, Hunter could only imagine how the Professor would feel. Should he phone him immediately to let him know? He would wait. He would wait until he had seen Joth, until he was holding the Fuhrer’s personally written message in his hand and then he would go and see Professor Sinclair and present it to him.

  Hunter would have to seriously re-gig his program. Amy would be aggravatingly patient and supportive whilst simultaneously quietly seething and furious. Enigma had worked with initially three and then, after the 2nd February 1942 and the German Navy’s introduction of the M4, four wheels, producing a daunting 150 million, million starting positions. But Lorenz, an infinitely more complex machine with twelve wheels and 501 pins generated an eyewatering 1.6 quadrillion starting positions. Hunter reassessed his position. Amy would, quite justifiably, not simply be furious. This time, she might just kill him.

  ✽✽✽

  Alec Bell was starting to enjoy the trappings of his success. There were the now regular dinner invitations, the international travel, often in first class and more money than he could ever have anticipated, however optimistically. He wasn’t wealthy, far from it, but it was a comfortable income for someone of his age, as in addition to his lecturer’s salary, revenue was beginning to trickle in from a variety of other sources. The university seemed only too happy to have their latest darling paraded before the press and Alec was certainly not adverse to the publicity, if anything, he thrived on it. They’d arranged a string of interviews with increasingly low brow publications. He’d been encouraged to talk less and less about his ground-breaking mathematical theories and more of his tastes, hobbies and increasingly lavish lifestyle. Ironically this had meant that he had been able to indulge in one of his favourite passions. He’d been one of a very few students to own a car at university, taking huge pleasure in offering lifts to friends in his little Fiat Punto. But now he had the money and the credit rating he’d so long desired, Alec had done the unthinkable. Despite his friends many warnings that he would kill himself at the first busy junction, he’d bought a Starfire blue TVR S3. It was an old car now, never famed for its reliability and initially the insurance payments had been crippling but none of that mattered, not to Alec. He loved the sculptured lines coupled with the raw naked aggression of the V6, and the noise was quite something else. His friends hadn’t been the only ones anxious about Alec’s safety. Much to Amy’s entertainment, at an end of term quad party, a soothsayer who had always claimed to be nothing of the kind, had taken his hand in hers and told Alec he was afraid of death. Alec had tried to laugh it off. Of course he was afraid of death. Wasn’t everybody? No, she had said. It is not the moment of death which terrifies you. Not the instant of your demise. That they had been able to agreed was nothing more than entropy, a gradual yet inevitable decline and a concept Alec understood only too well. No it was not this which haunted him, it was the running out of time. The thought that there was still more to do. The idea that he might have left great works unfinished. The woman had summed it all up rather cruelly Alec thought.

  I think you’re scared the world will forget you once you’re gone.

  And so, upon reflection, Alec had sworn that, although he thought the sentiment mawkish and clawing, he would live each hour as if it were his last, he would cram every day with excitement and adventure. The S3 growled beneath him like a hunted animal.

  He was parking up having taken Jolanta out for a spin in the Cambridge countryside in the morning followed by lunch in a sleepy little village near Huntingdon. The purpose had been twofold. Whilst he’d been trying to impress the twenty-year-old undergraduate and get her into bed, Alec had also wanted to give the TVR a good run out on Cambridgeshire’s tightly bending country lanes. He was confident Jolanta was coming round but now he had papers that needed working on for a particularly important series of lectures. An agent would be present and there had been talk of television. Alec was fast becoming one of the new breed of media driven intellectuals, always willing to be interviewed and ready with a quotable soundbite. The S3 suited him nicely. It always attracted onlookers and so he wasn’t surprised to feel that someone was staring at him now. He took his case from the passenger seat next to him and swung his legs out. His only surprise, to find it was Professor Frederick Sinclair admiring his car.

  ‘So, this is how you get around, Alec?’

  ‘Beautiful isn’t she?’

  Sinclair eyed the car.

  ‘I’m not convinced she is a thing of beauty, nor for that matter that she is a she. I would say this however, it, whatever it may be, is extremely noisy. Are you walking?’

  They set off towards the c
ollege debating the most recent scandal to befall its Dean.

  ‘I expect your name will be at the top of many people’s lists,’ Alec said.

  ‘Well, that is most flattering to hear, but we both know that these appointments are never straight forward. It may well drag on for some time. In my experience they rarely, if ever, go to the most deserving or well qualified candidate.’

  Once inside the two men turned to go their separate ways.

  ‘Bye the bye, have you seen Scott recently?’ Sinclair asked.

  ‘Just the other day as a matter of fact.’

  ‘And how is he?’

  ‘You know I’m looking for an assistant? I thought he’d come to ask for a job.’

  ‘But he hadn’t?’

  ‘No. Too tied up busting codes for you.’

  ‘Well Alec, that is his choice.’

  ‘Sure. I’m just a bit concerned it seems to be taking up all of his time.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘He needs to get out there, look for some work.’

  ‘Naturally. I shouldn’t imagine he’ll have to wait very long before he’s approached by someone. You didn’t.’

  ‘Question is, will Amy be prepared to wait?’

  'Ah yes,’ Sinclair said, ‘I do see.’

  ‘He’s off to London to talk to some crusty old fart about codes.’

  ‘Crusty old fart?’ Sinclair asked, annunciating each word scrupulously.

  ‘No offence. I think he told Amy he’s got a job interview, but actually he’s off seeing this author guy.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Amy’s going to be so pissed off when she finds out.’

  ‘Indeed. Well, it has been charming catching up with you Mr Bell, we shall keep an eye on Scott.’

  ✽✽✽

  Hunter raced back to the house. Joth was sitting at the kitchen table nursing a cold cup of tea and trawling the property section of the local paper.