Birth of a Spy

by Duncan Swindells

  ‘Got another one for you,’ Hunter said peering over his shoulder.

  ‘Fine,’ the South African replied circling a flat on the Madingley Road, ‘just not in the middle of the night, please.’

  ‘Seen Amy?’

  ‘Upstairs. I think she’s had your father on the phone again?’

  ‘You going somewhere?’

  Joth closed the paper. He was starting to resent being stuck in the middle of Scott and Amy’s tempestuous relationship. There was a one bed-flat which he’d discounted as too small, but now was looking more and more appealing. The idea of shutting out the world and in particular Scott Hunter, was looking extremely attractive indeed. He would do this one last translation for him. It would draw a neat line under their time as flatmates together and then he would move on and out.

  ‘Where is it then?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The text!’

  ‘I don’t have it, yet. Couple of days tops.’

  With a little luck Joth might have a flat lined up by then.

  ✽✽✽

  As soon as he saw Amy, Hunter knew she was upset.

  ‘So, how did you get on?’ she asked pointedly.

  ‘Good. Very good actually,’ he said setting up the MacBook on his desk.

  ‘Did you get the job then? In London?’

  Hunter put the machine on to charge and in an effort to appear casual began searching through his bookcase.

  ‘Too early to say,’ he offered over his shoulder.

  ‘What about Alec?’

  ‘I spoke to him. I said I would.’

  Amy stood in front of him now, blocking his way to the desk and his laptop. ‘I know Scott, because I spoke to him as well. He told me he offered you a job and you turned him down. You turned him down! What the hell were you thinking?’

  ‘You called him?’

  ‘To see if you got the job, yes.’

  Hunter couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  ‘He told me about London too, Scott. There was no interview, was there? You lied to me.’

  She’d gone behind his back and spoken to Alec, and then Alec had, feeling unable to keep his mouth shut, dropped him in it and from a considerable height. Hunter didn’t want to think about any motivation Alec might have had for such an act.

  ‘I love you Scott, but I can’t cope with this. How am I supposed to know if I can trust you? I’ve had your dad on the phone asking how you are and when you’re ever going to call him back and I’m getting pretty sick of trying to reassure him you’re okay. I think he’s even more worried about you than I am.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’ Another lie. ‘Why don’t we go out tomorrow night, have a meal. It’ll give us a chance to sit and talk.’

  ‘All right,’ Amy said unsurely, then picked up her handbag and left.

  ✽✽✽

  In spite of their row it wasn’t long before Hunter was poring over Philip Rutherland’s Enigma. He quickly found the Lorenz schematics in the appendices at the back. The scale of the machine’s workings was bewildering. He’d been impressed with Enigma, but never daunted by it, and now he was wondering if Lorenz might not just be beyond him. He sat as the evening sun streamed in through his window and thought about Amy and then Lorenz and then Amy again. He’d gone too far this time, he knew that, but if he could just get the new settings right and onto the computer before she returned then maybe he would call it a day. He’d take her to the best restaurant he could afford, wine and dine her and win her back. Perhaps he’d even phone his father, if that was what it would take.

  By the time he’d finished writing the new code it was late and he was tired. Hunter was about to set the programme running when Alec came to mind. His so called friend who it appeared had gone behind his back and told Amy what he was up to. He half considered not sharing the algorithm, but then there had been more then enough lies and broken promises for one day. He went into the MacBook’s applications folder and found the file, dragged it over to the dropbox icon where it disappeared. Then he created a new file called Blonde Twins and copied in the algorithm and all its supporting files. Alec also used a Mac so he would have no problems in opening and running them. All that remained was the simple task of inviting him to share the file’s contents. Dropbox created an email for him, he clicked “Approve” and off it went.

  Time to see if his suspicions were correct. He input the 51 characters and hit the return key. The familiar pattern of figures appeared and immediately started tumbling down the screen. Hunter felt sure this would break it, so why was there still that nagging doubt? Less so than before admittedly, but still that bothersome voice whispering that he’d missed something. All was not quite right. However, he wasn’t going to work it out now and in any case he could hear Amy creaking up the stairs. He quickly undressed and jumped in to bed.

  The following morning Hunter lay in bed and watched Amy dress for work. She’d come back from the shower, a towel wrapped around her chest, another piled high on the top of her head in some mysterious knot that only women understood. She let the other towel slip to the floor. Hunter couldn’t help but admire her slender figure as she put on her underwear. Then a simple white long sleeved top under her charcoal grey suit. She bent forward before the full-length mirror, shaking the towel from her head, letting her long hair fall loose before drying it and nimbly twisting and tying it behind her head. Hunter was pleased to see she wore the necklace he had given her. Then, rather pointedly he thought, she picked up the towels and dropped them into the laundry basket.

  ‘Are we going out tonight?’ he asked as cheerily as he could.

  ‘I don’t know, are we?’

  ‘Yes. We need to talk.’

  ‘I agree.’ Amy said, clearly still not in the mood to make life easy for him.

  ‘Leave it with me, I’ll book us a table somewhere nice. Italian?’

  ‘Fine,’ she replied frostily. ‘See you later then.’ She was at the window, smoothing out some paperwork he should probably have dealt with. ‘Your laptop’s doing something odd,’ she added.

  Hunter leapt out of bed, kissed her goodbye, pulled on an old Joy Division t-shirt that he found lying on the floor and sat by his MacBook. It appeared that the algorithm had done its work. He moved the icon over the decode tab. One click and the screen changed instantly to reveal the plain text.

  There would be no need for Joth’s linguistic skills today. You didn’t need to be a language student to recognise a list of names when you saw one, even if some of them did appear to be Russian or Polish. There were six in total;

  J K Borkowski

  P Utkin

  D J Metzger

  H Schmid

  J A Seidel

  F Ritthaler

  Hunter stared long and hard at the screen. He didn’t know how to feel. Confused? Certainly. A little disappointed? Possibly. A name with no reference points was just that and nothing more. A name. It was no wonder the programme had struggled to decode it, the algorithm was far better suited to words and phrases. Proper nouns were infinitely harder to accommodate because they had little inherent pattern. These people could have been anyone. Heroes, traitors, politicians or footballers. Hunter couldn’t even tell if they were male or female, dead or alive. Perhaps it would help if he printed the list out and looked at it in a hard state. No, it was still just a list of names. Were any of them similar in anyway? Not particularly. He ran them through the google search engine. Apart from Julie Ann Seidel who, according to her Facebook page, was a seventeen-year-old girl living in Sacramento and whose relationship status was ‘“uncertain”, there was no sign of any of them on the internet. Hunter assumed the Californian teenager just happened to share the same surname and initials. Now that was odd wasn’t it? These days it was almost impossible not to leave some footprint of your life on the world wide web whether it be intentionally or not. That suggested these people might have predated the internet, although with all the various web sites devoted to tracking down lon
g-lost relatives and plotting family trees, that too seemed improbable. After much thought, Hunter conceded the only thing he understood with any degree of certainty, was just how little he understood.

  He packed up his things, put the laptop in his bag along with the code and the hard copy of the list. Professor Sinclair would know what to make of it, that had always been the way their relationship had worked. Hunter would do the number crunching and Sinclair would make sense of the results. Quite suddenly he needed to get out of the house. On and off he’d been staring at a computer screen for hours. A break from it all would do him good. He’d buy a paper and sit by his favourite cherry tree in Fellows’ Gardens, then grab the professor sometime around lunch when he ought to be free.

  On his way out he ran into Joth pouring over his laptop at the kitchen table. Seeing Hunter, the South African quickly shut the computer down.

  ‘What happened with the code?’

  ‘Good question. Just a load of names. Listen, sorry it’s been a bit mad around here with me and Amy. We’re sorting it out, okay?’

  ‘Cheers man.’ Joth brushed his sandy blond hair back, ‘Might catch you later?’

  Hunter stopped at the arcade of shops at the end of their street. He tried to support it in all its faded splendour. There was a faceless supermarket around the corner which was really hammering small businesses and now the local community didn’t even have a proper post office. He ducked in to get his copy of The Times and some stamps, then a short walk to the bus stop and into Cambridge. Once he’d got his ticket he’d give Wiseman a call and thank him for the tip off.

  The top of the bus was quieter at this time of day. The school run had finished and so Hunter had it almost entirely to himself. He briefly toyed with starting the crossword before instead electing to quickly skim the day’s news. Hunter took out his iPhone and scrolled through the contact list. Wiseman.

  ‘Hullo, who is this?’

  ‘Mr Wiseman, it’s Scott Hunter here.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Hunter and how may I help you today?’ Hunter was getting used to Wiseman’s misanthropic telephone manner.

  ‘I just wanted to thank you for seeing me yesterday and for your help.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware I’d been any.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I had a long think about what you said and… well, I’ve had a bit of a break through actually.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Thanks to you I realised it wasn’t an Enigma code at all.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It must have been sent on a Lorenz machine.’

  ‘Good Heavens, are you quite sure?’

  ‘Positive. I’ve already broken it.’

  ‘How unusual. And was it anything of interest?’

  ‘I’m not sure I’d call it interesting exactly. Unusual maybe?’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘It’s just a list. A list of foreign names.’

  Hunter heard something change and then silence.

  ‘Mr Wiseman, are you there?’

  ‘Names, you say?’

  ‘German mostly but one or two which could be Polish or Russian I suppose. Hang on I’ve got it here,’ Hunter found the print out in his bag, ‘Borkowski, Utkin, Metzger, Schmid... Mr Wiseman? Mr Wiseman?’ The phone was dead. Hunter checked. There was a full signal but Mr George Wiseman was no longer on the other end of the line. Perhaps he’d been moving between areas when they had been cut off? But even as Hunter was thinking it, he knew that George Wiseman had just put the phone down on him. He flicked back to recent calls and rang the number again. Wiseman answered immediately.

  ‘Where are you?’ There was a degree of urgency to his voice which Hunter had never heard before.

  ‘On a bus going into town, Mr Wise...’

  ‘Where’s the code?’ The old man cut him short before he’d had time to finish.

  ‘Right here, I was ...’

  ‘Don’t go into town. Get off the bus. Do not go home.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Listen to me, it is imperative you do not go home, do you understand me? You will have to find somewhere else. Somewhere safe. And do not ring me again,’ and then the phone went dead for a second time. Hunter stared at it in disbelief.

  Last number dialled. Redial. He brushed the icon with his thumb. A slight wait whilst the connection was made and then the engaged tone. He tried again and again and got the same result. What the hell was going on? Wiseman had either immediately phoned someone else or deliberately left his phone off the hook. Either way it seemed the old goat was losing his marbles. But on the other hand, he had seemed genuinely concerned. Imperative he’d said. Now Hunter began to worry. He could see a bus stop fast approaching. Perhaps he should do something just in case the old man hadn’t gone completely off his rocker. He pressed the yellow stop button. An ugly electronic bell rang out and the bus began to slow.

  Hunter weighed up his options. He tried Wiseman’s phone for a fourth time but the result was no different. He knew this bus route pretty well. He’d gone three stops, but if he crossed the road he might have to wait a good half hour for the next service. It would be quicker if he just started back home on foot.

  Do not go home, do you understand me?

  Wiseman might be concerned but he knew nothing about Hunter or his home. In fact, the more Hunter considered it, the surer he was that Wiseman had no idea where he lived. Surely these were the overreactions of an aged and possibly slightly confused old man. Hunter thought of his papa and how there were times even when he was lucid he could confuse the simplest things. Not to mention, it was entirely possible that Wiseman had already started drinking.

  Once he’d negotiated the roundabout and started along Danforth Road he was able to see the front of his house. And once he could see the front of his house Hunter knew something was wrong. First there were the bins. They had been moved and were partially blocking the short flagstone path. Then, he realised the front door was slightly ajar. It didn’t appear to have been forced but he couldn’t think of any reason for it to have been left open. He was sure he had felt it close firmly behind him. Hunter’s heart was racing. Nervously he stood in the house’s dilapidated old porch, gently pushing at the door. Something was preventing it from opening. Using both hands Hunter pushed a little harder. The door gave, but still not enough to allow him entry. He took a step back, held himself for a moment and then, with one quick step, thrust his shoulder firmly against the old front door. There was a sickening sound as it shuddered briefly before revealing Joth’s prone body, bent and lifeless and lying at a peculiarly Dutch angle, his knee unnaturally twisted and broken, a neatly cauterized hole in the centre of his forehead where the brass 9 millimetre bullet had entered.

  Hunter’s head buzzed and thrummed. Colour left him, his perceptions diminishing to featureless shades of grey. Noises from the road vanished, his spine prickling hot whilst his body simultaneously cold and numb. Hunter realised there was every chance he was about to faint. He grabbed at the staircase’s newel post, steadying himself, forcing oxygen into his lungs. His head was swimming with images; the night Joth had helped Amy home after a college party, the intense sporting rivalry, always played out at their local pub and in front of a gigantic screen, his heartfelt sadness when Mandela had passed.

  And then, nothing. A sudden and quite inexorable nothingness. No sight, no sound, no hot, no cold, no feeling. Nothing at all. And just as quickly, as though from a great distance, noises came rushing back at him. Colours flooded his world. He still felt a little unsteady but he was pretty sure he would not now faint. He looked at Joth’s lifeless body. Jesus Christ.

  Hunter’s mind was still racing. Was it possible that whoever had done this was still in the house? Surely they had heard him come in? He reached into his back pocket, withdrew his iPhone and switched it to silent. What on earth would he do if he encountered someone wielding a gun, carry on into the house or turn tail and run, run as fast as he was able?

  Hunter stepped over his friend’s pr
one body and into the house’s cramped hallway. From here he could see a little way into the kitchen. That appeared to be much as he had left it, so he began to slowly climb the stairs. He checked over his shoulder, making sure he’d not imagined the scene in the hallway. From this angle he could clearly see a pool of fresh blood forming behind Joth’s head, tainting his beautiful blonde hair. Stepping over a loose board Hunter reached the kink in the stairs and was able to see the landing for the first time. Both bedroom doors had been left flung open, but no sounds came from within. He edged up the final few stairs, all the while ready to turn tail and run for his life.

  Joth’s bedroom was at the back of the house, overlooking their sadly neglected postage stamp of a garden. Hunter squinted between the door and its jam. It appeared empty, so he tentatively edged inside. T-shirts, underwear, text books all littered the floor. Joth’s papers covered every available surface as if incautiously thrown from some central point and allowed to settle like furiously conceived confetti. However, Hunter was regrettably forced to concede, none of this was necessarily the work of an armed intruder. His now dead friend’s room was often in such a state of disarray it was impossible to say whether it had been disturbed or not. Then he saw it, lying next to his unmade bed, Joth’s beloved copy of Faust, its cover crumpled and torn. Someone had definitely been here. Joth would never have discarded this particular book so carelessly. Next Hunter moved to the bathroom which he could see was empty. That just left his bedroom at the front of the house.

  He edged along the back of their bedroom door. If he could get a little closer he’d be able to use Amy’s six foot cheval mirror to see the opposite side of the room. Light was streaming in through the window at the front of the house and Hunter could just make out his desk. Again, papers everywhere, books lying open and hastily discarded. Some had fallen, landing unnaturally, their pages bending and folding. He could see the far side of the room now. His bookcase had been all but completely emptied onto the floor, his bedside cabinet turned upside down. Crucially the room was empty, and for the first time Hunter felt he could breathe a little easier. Clearly whoever had been there had been looking for something he possessed and following his conversation with George Wiseman it was obvious it had to be the list. But why? Why would anyone be interested in a list of foreign names?