Enigma
Page 24
‘How are they arranged?’ asked Jericho.
‘Chronologically.’ He closed the door.
Not locked, noted Jericho, continuing his inventory. And the entrance not really visible, except to the four operators nearest to it. He could feel his heart beginning to thump.
‘Major Heaviside, sir!’
They turned to find Kay standing, beckoning to them, one of her headphones pressed to her ear.
‘My mystery piano player, sir. He’s just started doing his scales again, sir, if you’re interested.’
Heaviside took the headset first. He listened with a judicious expression, his eyes focused on the middle distance, like an eminent doctor with a stethoscope being asked to give a second opinion. He shook his head and shrugged and passed the headphones to Hester.
‘Ours not to reason why, old chap,’ he said to Jericho.
When it was Jericho’s turn, he removed his scarf and placed it carefully on the floor next to the cable form that connected the wireless set to the aerials and the power supply. Putting on the headphones was rather like putting his head under water. There was a strange rush of sounds. A howl that reminded him of the wind in the aerial farm. A gunfire crackle of static. Two or three different and very faint Morse transmissions braided together. And suddenly, and most bizarrely, a German diva singing an operatic aria he vaguely recognised as being from the second act of Tannhäuser.
‘I can’t hear anything.’
‘Must have drifted off frequency,’ said Heaviside.
Kay turned the dial minutely anticlockwise, the sound wowed up and down an octave, the diva evaporated, more gunfire, and then, like stepping into an open space, a rapid, staccato dah-dah-dah-dah-dah of Morse, pulsing clearly and urgently, more than a thousand miles distant, somewhere in German-occupied Ukraine.
*
They were halfway to the Teleprinter Hut when Jericho raised his hand to his throat and said, ‘My scarf.’
They stopped in the rain.
‘I’ll get one of the girls to bring it over.’
‘No, no, I’ll fetch it, I’ll catch you up.’
Hester took her cue. ‘And how many machines did you say you have?’ She began to walk on.
Heaviside hesitated between the two of them, then hurried after Hester. Jericho could have kissed her. He never heard the major’s answer. It was whipped away by the wind.
You are calm, he told himself, you are confident, you are doing nothing wrong.
He went back into the hut. The woman sergeant had her fat back to him, leaning over one of the interceptors. She never saw him. He walked swiftly down the central aisle, looking straight ahead, and let himself into the storeroom. He closed the door behind him and turned on the light.
How long did he have? Not long.
He tugged at the first drawer of the first filing cabinet. Locked. Damn it. He tried it again. Wait. No, it wasn’t locked. The cabinet was fitted with one of these irritating anti-tilt mechanisms, which prevented two drawers being opened at once. He looked down and saw that the bottom drawer was protruding slightly. He closed it gently with his foot and to his relief the top drawer slid open.
Brown cardboard folders. Bundles of smudged carbons, held together by metal paperclips. Log sheets and W/T red forms. Day, Month and Year in the top right-hand corner. Meaningless jumbles of handwritten letters. This folder for 15 January 1943.
He stepped back and counted quickly. Fifteen four-drawer cabinets. Sixty drawers. Two months. Roughly a drawer a day. Could that be right?
He strode over to the sixth cabinet and opened the third drawer down.
February the 6th.
Bingo.
He held the image of Hester Wallace’s neat notation steady in his mind. 6.2./1215. 9.2/1427. 20.2/1807. 2.3./1639, 1901 …
It would have helped if his fingers hadn’t swollen to the size of sausages, if they weren’t shaking and slippery with sweat, if he could somehow catch his breath.
Someone must come in. Someone must hear him, surely, opening and closing the metal drawers like organ stops, pulling out two, three, four cryptograms and the log sheets, too (Hester had said they’d be useful), stuffing them into his inside coat pocket, five, six – dropped it, damn – seven cryptograms. He almost gave up at that – ‘Quit while you’re ahead, old love’ – but he needed the final four, the four Claire had hidden in her room.
He opened the top drawer of the thirteenth filing cabinet, and there they were, towards the back, virtually in sequence, thank you, God.
A footstep outside the storeroom. He grabbed the logs and red forms and had just about got them into his pocket and the drawer shut when the door opened to silhouette the trim figure of Kay the intercept girl.
‘I thought I saw you come in,’ she said, ‘only you left your scarf, see?’ She held it up and closed the door behind her, then slowly advanced down the narrow room towards him. Jericho stood paralysed with an idiot grin on his face.
‘I don’t mean to bother you, sir, but it is important, isn’t it?’ Her dark eyes were wide. He dimly registered again that she was very pretty, even in her Army uniform. The tunic was belted tight at her waist. Something about her reminded him of Claire.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I know I shouldn’t ask, sir – we’re never meant to ask, are we? – but, well, is it? Only no one ever tells us, see? Rubbish, that’s all it is to us, just rubbish, rubbish, all day long. And all night, too. You try to go to sleep and you can still hear it – beep-beep-bloody-beep. Drives you barmy after a bit. I joined up, see, volunteered, but it’s not what I expected, this place. Can’t even tell my mum and dad.’ She had come up very close to him. ‘You are making sense of it? It is important? I won’t tell,’ she added, solemnly, ‘honest.’
‘Yes,’ said Jericho. ‘We are making sense of it, and it is important. I promise you.’
She nodded to herself, smiled, looped his scarf around his neck and tied it, then walked slowly out of the storeroom, leaving the door open. He gave it twenty seconds, then followed her. Nobody stopped him as he went out through the hut and into the rain.
4
Heaviside didn’t want them to leave. Jericho tried feebly to protest – the light was bad, he said, they had a long journey ahead, they had to beat the blackout – but Heaviside was horrified. He insisted, insisted they at least take a look at the direction finders and the high-speed Morse receivers. He was so enthusiastic, he looked as though he might burst into tears if they said no. And so they trailed meekly after him across the slick wet concrete, first to a row of wooden huts dressed up to look like a stable block and then to another fake cottage.
The chorus of the aerial farm sang weirdly in the background, Heaviside became increasingly excited describing abstruse technicalities of wavelength and frequency, Hester pretended heroically to be interested and carefully avoided meeting Jericho’s eye, and all the time Jericho walked around unhearing, in a cocoon of anxiety, nerved for the distant sounds of discovery and alarm. Never had he been more desperate to get away from anywhere. From time to time his hand stole into his inside coat pocket, and once he left it there, reassured to feel the roughness of the intercepts safely between his fingers, until he realised he was doing a passable impersonation of Napoleon, whereupon he promptly snatched it out again.
As for Heaviside, such was his pride in Beaumanor’s work, he clearly would have kept them there for another week if he could. But when, an interminable half-hour later, he suggested a visit to the motor pool and the auxiliary generators, it was Hester, so cool until then, who finally snapped and said, rather too firmly in retrospect, that no, thank you, but really they did have to get going.
‘Honestly? It’s a heck of a long way to have come for just a couple of hours.’ Heaviside looked mystified. ‘The commander will be disappointed to miss you.’
‘Alas,’ said Jericho. ‘Some other time.’
‘Up to you, old boy,’ said Heaviside huffily. ‘Don’t want to press ourselves on y
ou.’ And Jericho cursed himself for hurting his feelings.
He walked them round to their car, halting on the way to point out an antique ship’s figurehead of an admiral, perched on top of an ornamental horse trough. Some wit had draped a pair of Army knickers over the admiral’s sword and they hung limply in the raw damp. ‘Cornwallis,’ said Heaviside. ‘Found him in the grounds. Our lucky charm.’
When they said goodbye he shook hands with them each in turn, Hester first, then Jericho, and saluted as they got into the Austin. He turned as if to go, then froze, and suddenly ducked down to the window.
‘What was it you said you did again, Mr Jericho?’
‘Actually, I didn’t.’ Jericho smiled and turned the engine on. ‘Cryptanalytic work.’
‘Which section?’
‘Can’t say, I’m afraid.’
He jammed the gear stick into reverse and executed a clumsy three-point turn. As they pulled away he could see Heaviside in the rear-view mirror, standing in the rain, his hand protecting his eyes, watching them. The curve of the drive took them off to the left and the image vanished.
‘Pound to a penny,’ muttered Jericho, ‘he’s on his way to the nearest telephone.’
‘You got them?’
He nodded. ‘Let’s wait till we get clear of here.’
Out through the gates, along the lane, past the village, towards the forest. The rain was blowing across the dark slope of woodland in ghostly white columns, like the banners of a phantom army. A large and lonely bird was flying through the cloudburst, very high and far away. The windscreen wipers scudded back and forth. The trees closed in around them.
‘You were very good,’ said Jericho.
‘Until the end. By the end it was unendurable, not knowing if you’d managed it.’
He started to tell her about the storeroom, but then he noticed a track coming up, leading off from the side of the road into the privacy of the wood.
The perfect spot.
They bounced along the rough trail for about a hundred yards, plunging into puddles that turned out to be potholes a foot deep. Water fountained out on either side of them, tearing against the underside of the chassis. It spouted through a hole at Hester’s feet and drenched her shoes. When at last the headlights showed a patch of bog too wide to negotiate, Jericho turned off the engine.
There was no sound except for the pattering of the rain on the thin metal roof. Overhanging branches blotted out the sky. It was almost too dark to read. He turned on the interior light.
‘VVVADU QSA?K,’ said Jericho, reading off the whispers on the first log sheet. ‘Which, if I remember my days in traffic analysis, roughly translates as: This is station call sign ADU requesting reading of my signal strength, over.’ He ran his finger down the carbon copy. Q-code was an international language, the Esperanto of wireless operators; he knew it off by heart. ‘And then we get VVVCPQ BT QSA4 QSA?K. This is station call-sign CPQ, break, your signal strength is fine, what is my signal strength? Over.’
‘CPQ,’ said Hester, nodding. ‘I recognise that call sign. That has something to do with Army High Command in Berlin.’
‘Good. One mystery solved, then.’ He returned his attention to the log sheet. ‘VVVADU QSA3 QTC1 K: Smolensk to Berlin, your signal strength is reasonable, I have one message for you, over. QRV, says Berlin: I am ready. QXH K: broadcast your traffic, over. Smolensk then says QXA109: my message consists of 109 cipher groups.’
Hester fluttered the first cryptogram triumphantly. ‘Here it is. One hundred and nine exactly.’
‘OK. Fine. So that goes through – straight away, presumably, because Berlin replies: VVVCPQ R QRU HHVA. Message received and understood, I have nothing for you, Heil Hitler and good night. All very smooth and methodical. Right out of the manual.’
‘That girl in the Intercept Hut said he was precise.’
‘What we don’t have, unfortunately, is Berlin’s replies.’ He riffled through the log sheets. ‘Easy contact on the 9th as well, and again on the 20th. Ah,’ he said, ‘now on the 2nd of March it looks to have been more tricky.’ The form was indeed a mass of terse dialogue. He held it up to the light. Smolensk to Berlin: QZE, QRJ, QRO. (Your frequency is too high, your signals are too weak, increase your power.) And Berlin snapping back: QWP, QRX10 (observe regulations, wait ten minutes) and finally an exasperated QRX (shut up). ‘Now this is interesting. No wonder they suddenly start to sound like strangers.’ Jericho squinted at the carbon copy. ‘The call sign in Berlin has changed.’
‘Changed? Absurd. Changed to what?’
‘TGD.’
‘What? Let me see that.’ She snatched the form out of his hand. ‘That’s not possible. No, no. TGD simply isn’t a Wehrmacht call sign.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Because I know it. There’s a whole Enigma key named after TGD. It’s never been broken. It’s famous.’ She had started to wind a lock of hair nervously around her right index finger. ‘Notorious might be a better word.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s the call sign of Gestapo headquarters in Berlin.’ ‘Gestapo?’ Jericho fumbled through the remaining log sheets. ‘But all the messages from March the 2nd onwards,’ he said, ‘that’s eight out of the eleven, all the long ones, including the four in Claire’s room – they’re all addressed to that sign.’ He gave the forms to her so she could check for herself and sat back in his seat.
A gust of wind stirred the branches above them, sending a shower of rainwater rattling like a volley across the windscreen.
‘Let’s try and construct a thesis,’ said Jericho after a minute or two, as much to hear a human voice as anything. The random pattering of the downpour and the crepuscular gloom of the forest were beginning to affect his nerves. Hester had pulled her feet up from the sodden floor and was huddled up very small on the front seat, staring out at the forest, hugging her legs, occasionally massaging her toes through her damp stockings.
‘March the 4th is the key day,’ he went on. (Where was I on 4 March? In another world: reading Sherlock Holmes in front of a Cambridge gas fire, avoiding Mr Kite and learning to walk again.) ‘Up to that day, everything is proceeding normally. A signals unit hibernating in the Ukraine, dormant all winter, has come to life in the warmer weather. First, a few signals to Army HQ in Berlin, and then a burst of longer traffic to the Gestapo –’
‘That’s not normal,’ said Hester scathingly. ‘An Army unit transmitting reports in a Russian-front Enigma key to the headquarters of the secret police? Normal? I’d call that unprecedented.’
‘Quite.’ He didn’t mind being interrupted. He was glad of a sign she was listening. ‘In fact, it’s so unprecedented, someone at Bletchley wakes up to what’s happening and starts to panic. All previous signals are removed from the Registry. And just before midnight on that same day your Mr Mermagen telephones Beaumanor and tells them to stop interception. Ever happen before?’
‘Never.’ She paused, then moved her shoulder slightly in concession. ‘Well, all right, maybe, when traffic’s very heavy, a low-priority target might be neglected for a day or so. But you saw the size of Beaumanor. And that’s not as big as the RAF’s station at Chicksands. And there must be a dozen smaller places, maybe more. We’re always being told by people like you that the whole point of the exercise is to monitor everything.’
He nodded. This was true. It had been their philosophy from the beginning: be inclusive, miss nothing. It isn’t the big boys who give you the cribs – they’re too good. It’s the little fellows – the long-forgotten incompetents stuck in out-of-the-way places, who always begin their messages ‘situation normal, nothing to report’ and then use the same nulls in the same places, or who habitually encipher their own call-signs, or who set the rotors every morning with their girlfriend’s initials …
Jericho said: ‘So he wouldn’t have told them to stop on his own authority?’
‘Miles? God, no.’
‘Who gives him his orders?’
‘In what sense?’
‘Well, Heaviside said Miles called Beaumanor just before midnight on the 4th in a panic. I was wondering: what if Miles had been told earlier in the day that this unit was no longer to be intercepted, but forgot to pass on the message.’
‘Eminently possible. Likely, in fact, knowing Miles. Yes, yes of course.’ Hester turned round to face him. ‘I see what you’re driving at. In the time between Miles being told to pull the plug and the order reaching Beaumanor, four more messages had been intercepted.’
‘Exactly. Which came into Hut 6 late on the night of the 4th. But by then the order had already been issued that they weren’t to be decoded.’
‘So they just got caught up in the bureaucracy and were passed along the line.’
‘Until they ended up in the German Book Room.’
‘In front of Claire.’
‘Undecrypted.’
Jericho nodded slowly. Undecrypted. That was the crucial point. That explained why the signals in Claire’s bedroom had showed no signs of damage. There had never been any strips of Type-X decode gummed to their backs. They had never been broken.
He peered into the wood but he didn’t see trees, he saw the German Book Room on the morning after the night of 4 March, when the cryptograms would have arrived to be filed and indexed.
Would Miss Monk herself have rung the Hut 6 duty officer, or would she have delegated the task to one of her girls? ‘We’ve got four orphan intercepts here, without the solutions. What, pray, are we supposed to do with them?’ And the reply would have been – what? Oh, Christ! File them? Forget them? Dump them in the bin marked CONFIDENTIAL WASTE?
Only none of those things had happened.
Claire had stolen them instead.
‘In theory?’ Weitzman had said. ‘On an average day? A girl like Claire would probably see more operational detail about the German armed forces than Adolf Hitler. Absurd, isn’t it?’
Ah, but they weren’t supposed to read it, Walter, that was the point. Well-bred young ladies wouldn’t dream of reading someone else’s mail, unless they were told to do so for King and country. They certainly wouldn’t read it for themselves. That was the reason why Bletchley employed them.