Enigma

by Robert Harris

  A dry and smoky autumn of golds and browns, the rooks whirling in the sky like cinders, gave way to a winter off a Christmas card. The lake froze. The elms drooped under the weight of snow. A robin pecked at breadcrumbs outside the stable window.

  Jericho’s work was pleasantly academic. Three or four times a day, a motorcycle dispatch-rider would clatter into the courtyard at the back of the big house bearing a pouch of intercepted German cryptograms. Jericho sorted them by frequency and call sign and marked them up on charts in coloured crayons – red for the Luftwaffe, green for the German Army – until gradually, from the unintelligible babble, shapes emerged. Stations in a radio net allowed to talk freely to one another made, when plotted on the stable wall, a crisscross pattern within a circle. Nets in which the only line of communication was two-way, between a headquarters and its out-stations, resembled stars. Circle-nets and star-nets. Kreis und Stern.

  This idyll lasted eight months, until the German offensive in May 1940. Up to then, there had been scarcely enough material for the cryptanalysts to make a serious attack on Enigma. But as the Wehrmacht swept through Holland, Belgium, France, the babble of wireless traffic became a roar. From three or four motorcycle pouches of material, the volume increased to thirty or forty; to a hundred; to two hundred.

  It was late one morning about a week after this had started that Jericho felt a touch on his elbow and turned to find Turing, smiling.

  ‘There’s someone I want you to meet, Tom.’

  ‘I’m rather busy at present, Alan, to be honest.’

  ‘Her name’s Agnes. I really think you ought to see her.’

  Jericho almost argued. A year later he would have argued, but at that time he was still too much in awe of Turing not to do as he was told. He tugged his jacket off the back of his chair and walked out, shrugging it on, into the May sunshine.

  By this time the Park had already started to be transformed. Most of the trees at the side of the lake had been chopped down to make way for a series of large wooden huts. The maze had been uprooted and replaced by a low brick building, outside which a small crowd of cryptanalysts had gathered. There was a sound coming from within it, of a sort Jericho had never heard before, a humming and a clattering, something between a loom and a printing press. He followed Turing through the door. Inside, the noise was deafening, reverberating off the whitewashed walls and the corrugated iron ceiling. A brigadier, an air commodore, two men in overalls and a frightened-looking Wren with her fingers in her ears were standing round the edge of the room staring at a large machine full of revolving drums. A blue flash of electricity arced across the top. There was a fizz and a crackle, a smell of hot oil and overheated metal.

  ‘It’s the redesigned Polish bombe,’ said Turing. ‘I thought I’d call her Agnes.’ He rested his long, pale fingers tenderly on the metal frame. There was a bang and he snatched them away again. ‘I do hope she works all right …’

  Oh yes, thought Jericho, rubbing another window into the condensation, oh yes, she worked all right.

  The moon slid from beneath a cloud, briefly lighting the Great North Road. He closed his eyes.

  She worked all right, and after that the world was different.

  Despite his earlier wakefulness Jericho must have fallen asleep, for when he next opened his eyes Logie was sitting up and the Rover was passing through a small town. It was still dark and at first he couldn’t get his bearings. But then they passed a row of shops, and when the headlights flickered briefly on the billboard of the County Cinema (NOW SHOWING: ‘THE NAVY COMES THROUGH’, ‘SOMEWHERE I’LL FIND YOU’), he muttered to himself, and heard the weariness already creeping back into his voice: ‘Bletchley.’

  ‘Too bloody right,’ said Logie.

  Down Victoria Road, past the council offices, past a school … The road curved and suddenly, in the distance, above the pavements, a myriad of fireflies were swarming towards them. Jericho passed his hands across his face and found that his fingers were numb. He felt mildly sick.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Midnight,’ said Logie. ‘Shift change.’

  The specks of light were blackout torches.

  Jericho guessed the Park’s workforce must now be about five or six thousand, toiling round the clock in eight-hour shifts – midnight till eight, eight till four, four till midnight. That meant maybe four thousand people were now on the move, half coming off shift, half going on, and by the time the Rover had turned into the road leading to the main gate it was barely possible to advance a yard without hitting someone. Leveret was alternately leaning out of the window, shouting and hammering on the horn. Crowds of people had spilled out into the road, most on foot, some on bicycles. A convoy of buses was struggling to get past. Jericho thought: the odds are two to one that Claire’s among them. He had a sudden desire to shrink down in his seat, to cover his head, to get away.

  Logie was looking at him curiously. ‘Are you sure you’re up to this, old thing?’

  ‘I’m fine. It’s just – it’s hard to think it started with sixteen of us.’

  ‘Wonderful, isn’t it? And it’ll be twice the size next year.’ The pride in Logie’s voice abruptly gave way to alarm. ‘For God’s sake, Leveret, look out man, you nearly ran that lady over!’

  In the headlights a blonde head spun angrily and Jericho felt a rush of nausea. But it wasn’t her. It was a woman he didn’t recognise, a woman in an army uniform, a slash of scarlet lipstick like a wound across her face. She looked as if she was tarted up and on her way to meet a man. She shook her fist and mouthed ‘Bugger off’ at them.

  ‘Well,’ said Logie, primly, ‘I thought she was a lady.’

  When they reached the guard post they had to dig out their identity cards. Leveret collected them and passed them on through the window to an RAF corporal. The sentry hitched his rifle and studied the cards by torchlight, then ducked down and directed the beam in turn on to each of their faces. The brilliance struck Jericho like a blow. Behind them he could hear a second sentry rummaging through the boot.

  He flinched from the light and turned to Logie. ‘When did all this start?’ He could remember a time when they weren’t even asked for passes.

  ‘Not sure now you mention it.’ Logie shrugged. ‘They seem to have tightened up in the last week or two.’

  Their cards were returned. The barrier rose. The sentry waved them through. Beside the road was a freshly painted sign. They had been given a new name some time around Christmas and Jericho could just about read the white lettering in the darkness: ‘Government Communication Headquarters’.

  The metal barrier came down after them with a crash.

  2

  Even in the blackout you could sense the size of the place. The mansion was still the same, and so were the huts, but these were now just a fraction of the overall site. Stretching away beyond them was a great factory of intelligence: low, brick-built offices and bombproof bunkers of concrete and steel, A-Blocks and B-Blocks and C-Blocks, tunnels and shelters and guard posts and garages … There was a big military camp just beyond the wire. The barrels of anti-aircraft batteries poked through camouflaged netting in the nearby woods. And more buildings were under construction. There had never been a day when Jericho hadn’t heard the racket of mechanical diggers and cement mixers, the ringing of pickaxes and the splintering of falling trees. Once, just before he left, he had paced out the distance from the new assembly hall to the far perimeter fence and had reckoned it at half a mile. What was it all for? He had no idea. Sometimes he thought they must be monitoring every radio transmission on the planet.

  Leveret drove the Rover slowly past the darkened mansion, past the tennis court and the generators, and drew up a short distance from the huts.

  Jericho clambered stiffly from the back seat. His legs had gone to sleep and the sensation of the blood returning made his knees buckle. He leaned against the side of the car. His right shoulder was rigid with cold. A duck splashed somewhere on the lake and its cry ma
de him think of Cambridge – of his warm bed and his crosswords – and he had to shake his head to clear the memory.

  Logie was explaining to him that he had a choice: Leveret could take him over to his new digs and he could have a decent night’s kip, or he could come in straight away and take a look at things immediately.

  ‘Why don’t we start now?’ said Jericho. His re-entry into the hut would be an ordeal. He’d prefer to get it over with.

  ‘That’s the spirit, old love. Leveret will look after your cases, won’t you, Leveret? And take them to Mr Jericho’s room?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Leveret looked at Jericho for a moment, then stuck out his hand. ‘Good luck, sir.’

  Jericho took it. The solemnity surprised him. Anyone would think he was about to make a parachute jump into hostile territory. He tried to think of something to say. ‘Thank you very much for driving us.’

  Logie was fiddling with Leveret’s blackout torch. ‘What the hell’s wrong with this thing?’ He knocked it against his palm. ‘Bloody thing. Oh, sod it. Come on.’

  He strode away on his long legs and after a moment’s hesitation Jericho wrapped his scarf tight around his neck and followed. In the darkness they had to feel their way along the blastproof wall surrounding Hut 8. Logie banged into what sounded like a bicycle and Jericho heard him swear. He dropped the torch. The impact made it come on. A trickle of light revealed the entrance to the hut. There was a smell of lime and damp here – lime and damp and creosote: the odours of Jericho’s war. Logie rattled the handle, the door opened and they stepped into the dim glow.

  Because he had changed so much in the month he had been away, somehow – illogically – he had expected that the hut would have changed as well. Instead, the instant he crossed the threshold, the familiarity of it almost overwhelmed him. It was like a recurrent dream in which the horror lay in knowing precisely what would happen next – the certainty that it always had been, and always would be, exactly like this.

  A narrow, ill-lit corridor, perhaps twenty yards long, stretched in front of him, with a dozen doors leading off it. The wooden partitions were flimsy and the noise of a hundred people working at full stretch leaked from room to room – the clump and thud of boots and shoes on the bare boards, the hum of conversation, the occasional shout, the scrape of chair legs, the ringing of telephones, the clack clack clack of the Type-X machines in the Decoding Room.

  The only tiny difference was that the walk-in cupboard on the right, immediately next to the entrance, now had a nameplate on it: ‘Lt. Kramer US Navy Liaison Officer’.

  Familiar faces loomed towards him. Kingcome and Proudfoot were whispering together outside the Catalogue Room and drew back to let him pass. He nodded to them. They nodded in return but didn’t speak. Atwood hurried out of the Crib Room, saw Jericho, gawped, then put his head down. He muttered, ‘Hello, Tom,’ then almost ran towards Research.

  Clearly, nobody had ever expected to see him again. He was an embarrassment. A dead man. A ghost.

  Logie was oblivious, both to the general astonishment and to Jericho’s discomfort. ‘Hello, everybody.’ He waved to Atwood. ‘Hello, Frank. Look who’s back! The prodigal returns! Give them a smile, Tom, old thing, it’s not a ruddy funeral. Not yet, anyway.’ He stopped outside his office and fiddled with his key for half a minute, then discovered the door was unlocked. ‘Come in, come in.’

  The room was scarcely bigger than a broom store. It had been Turing’s cubbyhole until just before the break into Shark, when Turing had been sent to America. Now Logie had it – his tiny perquisite of rank – and he looked absurdly huge as he bent over his desk, like an adult poking around in a child’s den. There was a fireproof safe in one corner, leaking intercepts, and a rubbish bin labelled CONFIDENTIAL WASTE. There was a telephone with a red handset. Paper was everywhere – on the floor, on the table, on the top of the radiator where it had baked crisp and yellow, in wire baskets and in box files, in tall stacks and in piles that had subsided into fans.

  ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger.’ Logie had a message slip in his hands and was frowning at it. He took his pipe out of his pocket and chewed on the stem. He seemed to have forgotten Jericho’s presence until Jericho coughed to remind him.

  ‘What? Oh. Sorry, old love.’ He traced the words of the message with his pipe. ‘The Admiralty’s a bit exercised, apparently. Conference in A-Block at eight o’clock with Navy brass up from Whitehall. Want to know the score. Skynner’s in a spin and demands to see me forthwith. Bugger, bugger.’

  ‘Does Skynner know I’m back?’ Skynner was the head of Bletchley’s Naval Section. He’d never cared for Jericho, probably because Jericho had never concealed his opinion of him: that he was a bombast and a bully whose chief war aim was to greet the peace as Sir Leonard Skynner, OBE, with a seat on the Security Executive and a lease on an Oxford mastership. Jericho had a vague memory of actually telling Skynner some of this, or all of it, or possibly more, shortly before he was sent back to Cambridge to recover his senses.

  ‘Of course he knows you’re back, old thing. I had to clear it with him first.’

  ‘And he doesn’t mind?’

  ‘Mind? No. ‘The man’s desperate. He’d do anything to get back into Shark.’ Logie added quickly: ‘Sorry, I don’t mean … that’s not to say that bringing you back is an act of desperation. Only, well, you know …’ He sat down heavily and looked again at the message. He rattled his pipe against his worn yellow teeth. ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger …’

  Looking at him then it occurred to Jericho that he knew almost nothing about Logie. They had worked together for two years, would regard themselves as friends, yet they’d never had a proper conversation. He didn’t know if Logie was married, or if he had a girl.

  ‘I’d better go and see him, I suppose. Excuse me, old love.’

  Logie squeezed past his desk and shouted down the corridor: ‘Puck!’ Jericho could hear the cry being taken up somewhere in the recesses of the hut by another voice. ‘Puck!’ And then another: ‘Puck! Puck!’

  Logie ducked his head back into the office. ‘One analyst per shift co-ordinates the Shark attack. Puck this shift, Baxter next, then Pettifer.’ His head disappeared again. ‘Ah-ha, here he comes. Come on, old thing. Look alive. I’ve a surprise for you. See who’s in here.’

  ‘So there you are, my dear Guy,’ came a familiar voice from the corridor. ‘Nobody knew where to find you.’

  Adam Pukowski slid his lithe frame past Logie, saw Jericho and stopped dead. He was genuinely shocked. Jericho could almost see his mind struggling to regain control of his features, forcing his famous smile back on to his face. At last he managed it. He even threw his arms round Jericho and hugged him. ‘Tom, it’s … I had begun to think you were never returning. It’s marvellous.’

  ‘It’s good to see you again, Puck.’ Jericho patted him politely on the back.

  Puck was their mascot, their touch of glamour, their link with the adventure of war. He had arrived in the first week to brief them on the Polish bombe, then flown back to Poland. When Poland fell he had fled to France, and when France collapsed he had escaped across the Pyrenees. Romantic stories clustered around him: that he had hidden from the Germans in a goatherd’s cottage, that he had smuggled himself aboard a Portuguese steamer and ordered the captain to sail to England at pistol-point. When he had popped up again in Bletchley in the winter of 1940 it was Pinker, the Shakespearian, who had shortened his name to Puck (‘that merry wanderer of the night’). His mother was British, which explained his almost perfect English, distinctive only because he pronounced it so carefully.

  ‘You have come to give us assistance?’

  ‘So it seems.’ He shyly disengaged himself from Puck’s embrace. ‘For what it’s worth.’

  ‘Splendid, splendid.’ Logie regarded them fondly for a moment, then began rummaging among the litter on his desk. ‘Now where is that thing? It was here this morning …’

  Puck nodded at Logie’s back and whispered: ‘Do you
see, Tom? As organised as ever.’

  ‘Now, now, Puck, I heard that. Let me see. Is this it? No. Yes. Yes!’

  He turned and handed Jericho a typewritten document, officially stamped and headed ‘By Order of the War Office’. It was a billeting notice, served on a Mrs Ethel Armstrong, entitling Jericho to lodgings in the Commercial Guesthouse, Albion Street, Bletchley.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what it’s like, old thing. Best I could do.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s fine.’ Jericho folded the chit and stuffed it into his pocket. Actually, he was quite sure it wasn’t fine – the last decent rooms in Bletchley had disappeared three years ago, and people now had to travel in from as far away as Bedford, twenty miles distant – but what was the point in complaining? On past experience he wouldn’t be using the room much anyway, except to sleep in.

  ‘Now don’t you go exhausting yourself, my boy,’ said Logie. ‘We don’t expect you to work a full shift. Nothing like that. You just come and go as you please. What we want from you is what you gave us last time. Insight. Inspiration. Spotting that something we’ve all missed. Isn’t that so, Puck?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ His handsome face was more haggard than Jericho had ever seen it, more tired even than Logie’s. ‘God knows, Tom, we are certainly up against it.’

  ‘I take it then we’re no further forward?’ said Logie. ‘No good news I can give our lord and master?’

  Puck shook his head.

  ‘Not even a glimmer?’

  ‘Not even that.’

  ‘No. Well, why should there be? Damn bloody admirals.’ Logie screwed up the message slip, aimed it at his rubbish bin and missed. ‘I’d show you round myself, Tom, but the Skynner waits for no man, as you’ll recall. All right with you, Puck? Give him the grand tour?’

  ‘Of course, Guy. As you wish.’

  Logie ushered them out into the passage and tried to lock the door, then gave up on it. As he turned he opened his mouth and Jericho nerved himself for one of Logie’s excruciating housemaster’s pep talks – something about innocent lives depending on them, and the need for them to do their best, and the race being not to the swift nor the battle to the strong (he had actually said this once) – but instead his mouth just widened into a yawn.