by Manda Scott
Thanks to his uncle, the Brigadier – or possibly no thanks at all to the Brigadier – this is Laurence Vaughan-Thomas’s contribution to the war effort.
The eight weeks of training at the cipher school in Bedford passed far too fast. He came away thinking he’d learned more than he knew there was to know. In the few months since, he has been discovering how much he still has to learn.
In the life cycle of a ciphered message, an agent in the field has a brief timespan in the day that has been allocated to him and he must send his missive within his scheduled slot.
If the conditions are good, his Morse will reach the south coast, where immensely secret listening stations will be tuned to his wavelength and a listener with (hopefully) good Morse code skills will be ready to take down his ciphered message.
The result is sent by teleprinter to the Baker Street offices where the cipher clerks – FANYs to a woman: all around twenty, all with good breeding, good looks and exceptionally sharp minds – will decipher it using the same agent’s poem.
This is the theory.
In practice, there are any number of ways in which the system falls down and Laurence is the one who must put it on its feet again. He is not, thank heaven, a cipher clerk, but he is the one who takes their output and makes sense of those messages that have no obvious meaning. He sorts out the misprints, the moments when, say, the listener briefly lost focus and heard an A (dit dah) in place of an N (dah dit) or the sender slurred a dah into a dit and the receiver heard a K instead of a P, an M instead of an S, or any of the thousand other mistakes of mutilated Morse.
None of this would matter in straight text. If someone writes A VERY MERRY CHRISTMNS TO YOU ALL, it isn’t hard to correct the mistake, however improbable merriment might be in the current climate.
But when the text is HKIQN PRRUF WINDO FRLLK NMWSA and so on for a minimum of two hundred characters, and there are ten such missives arriving throughout the day, from Norway, France, Holland and occasionally, in brief, urgent stutters from Germany, it is harder. When the sender of this gibberish has to be identified, their poem code located, their bluff and true checks codes verified, and the double transposition performed in reverse to turn it back into plain text before their next scheduled slot … then it is very much harder.
But not impossible. One letter wrongly transposed doesn’t ruin an entire message; it just makes some of the finer detail less transparent.
What makes it impossible is when the listeners at the secret, unmentioned stations along the coast lose the signal and half a message is gone. Or when the coder has lost or forgotten or misremembered his poem or, more charitably, has been coding in a cave or a barn or an attic in the midst of a Dutch or Norwegian or French winter (Sutherland, are you there? Are you still alive?) on his second day without food because nobody can safely deliver supplies, is without gloves, without heating, without any means of boiling a kettle, and the Gestapo direction finders are closing in with every group of letters sent. Then, understandably, the double transposition cipher may well be less than perfect and the FANYs, who man the stations and prepare the telegrams for the heads of station to read and respond to, can make no sense of it.
Which is when they bring their slips of paper to Flight Lieutenant Laurence Vaughan-Thomas, RAF, DFC (pending), who has friends out there, men he trained with who, however much he may hate their arrogance – and he does – however much he may envy their contact with the enemy – and he does – do not deserve the kind of deaths that await them if they are caught.
Their names are etched into the parenchyma of his liver: those he trained with and those he has met since. He will not give up on them while there is breath in his body. He has been known to work around the clock without pause to break a ruined code, and perhaps six times out of ten, he succeeds.
But not today. Here, now, at something after six o’clock in the evening on the day after Boxing Day, in the war’s third year, he is stuck. He has tried flipping As for Ns, Ks for Ps, all the other common errors. The coder’s key is not the National Anthem, so the easy fixes, like spelling ‘reign’ as ‘rein’ or even ‘rain’, and ‘knavish’ with an ‘e’ do not work.
He has had this problem before. Sarpedon, whoever he might be, is not, evidently, a native English speaker; more of a hybrid, or from one of the colonies: Scotland, maybe. Or Wales. This is a joke. He made it to himself around lunchtime and has waited ever since for someone with a suitable national brogue to drop by so he can speak it aloud.
Nobody has come, which is probably as well because he’s looked at the files and found that Sarpedon is, in fact, a major, and his combat history thus far suggests that he is not a careless coder, quite the reverse. He and three others of similar calibre have been sent on a coup de main operation against a hydroelectric dam in the eastern Jura: a quick in and out with a big bang in the middle and the Reich’s war machine will be encouragingly short of power afterwards.
The incoming commando is to be helped by three British agents from the Firm, plus one Paul Mignon, known as Caesar, a French agent who has managed to gain employment as an inspector of trains, and who can therefore travel with impunity and issue valid travel passes to his friends.
The dam should have blown last night. It is likely that the mangled message – has it been jammed? Laurence has never seen a jammed message before – confirms destruction and requests a Lysander to take them out. It should have within it the name and coordinates of a suitable pick-up site, together with major local landmarks, although it could as easily be calling in an air raid, or asking for more supplies, or giving information about new defences that made their target harder to hit.
Laurence has not been specifically briefed on any of this, but he has pieced together the detail from the jumbled ciphers he has had to mend. If he were an Abwehr spy … best not to think about that. The threat of an enemy agent inside the Firm is real and terrifying but frankly, if the high-ups were to clamp down on security to the extent that all the operations were actually secret, the whole outfit would grind to a halt in a matter of minutes. Thus everyone pretends not to know anything, until they are required to know something, at which point they know everything (within reason).
This Christmas, few people know what’s going on because few people are around. As far as he can tell, barring a handful of guards, Laurence is on his own in the Signals Unit. Technically, he shares his shift with the FANYs who man the incoming and outgoing lines, but they are in a dungeon across the road. To get a message to them for sending, he will have to go up to road level, out and down. He’s been avoiding this for an hour, hoping for a breakthrough. Defeat is bad enough. Having to brave the cold outside does not make it sweeter.
He reaches for his pipe and finds it has gone out. He pulls on his coat and heads into the lightless night.
The sirens are silent. Laurence was never a night fighter, but it’s not hard to imagine the bombers waddling along like herds of pregnant sows, concealed from the ack-acks below, but for those above, picked out in perfect silhouette against the silver upsides of the clouds.
Up at street level, his breath crystallizes around his head. He hurries across the road, leans on the swing door, nods to the guard corporal’s salute – ‘Evening, Brian.’ ‘Evening, sir. Bit chilly out there.’ ‘Certainly is, Brian.’ – and heads down the stairs.
He lights up as he goes and draws in the first rush of heat against the chill of the coding room. Eight girls work each shift. None of them look up as he enters. They are dressed in their outdoor coats with fingerless gloves on, hats and scarves. Their breath colours the air. A single-bar electric fire hung up on one wall struggles against impossible odds. It is colder in here than it was outside. But not colder than the seas off France.
He writes his chit: RESEND PREVIOUS MESSAGE STOP REPEAT RESEND PREVIOUS MSG/ENDS
It takes him roughly twice as long to encipher the message as it does to write out the plain text. Six months ago, it took him an hour and three sheets of shorth
and pad. Now, he can do it in his head. He throws the result in the tray. Failure tastes like this.
He stands back against the wall and waits to see it go, an unnecessary superstition that has evolved over the past two months, as if by willpower he can get the message securely through to the other side and draw a clear cipher back by return.
One of the girls in the front row stubs out her cigarette and comes back to empty the tray: she’s tall, brunette, extraordinarily good looking, but then they all are. The high-ups don’t like ill-favoured girls. Patrick Sutherland called them the Intelligent Gentlewomen, which just about covers it.
The Firm has access, it seems, to a ready supply of girls like his cousin Theodora, who have been waiting for something like this to let them off the leash.
He doesn’t pay much attention to the one who collects his chit, and a couple of minutes later he pays even less attention to the equally tall ice-blonde who walks across the room towards him.
‘Hello, Larry.’
‘Theo? Cousin Theodora? Good God, I heard you’d joined the FANY, but I never … Wait … Does Uncle Jer—?’
He sucks back the name before it hits the air. There are mines here, wherever he puts his feet. He snaps his mouth shut and refuses to look around to see who might be listening.
Laurence’s memory of his cousin is of a prissy youth, rather taken with her own good looks.
She looks tired. She also looks immensely competent, but then that applies to all the women in his family: the true brains are all, as his father once said, on the distaff side.
She smiles, thinly. ‘My shift finishes in an hour. Would you like a drink?’
‘Where?’ He’s thinking White’s, but she’s a woman so that’s impossible, obviously. Maybe The Strand, or—
‘The Queen’s Head?’
His cousin knows the name of the local public house. Wonders never cease. ‘One hour. I’ll see you there.’ He nods in the direction of the stunning brunette who is typing his cipher into the teleprinter. ‘See that gets out cleanly to Sarpedon. And pray that what comes back is intelligible.’
He doesn’t have much experience of drinking beyond the club and he has certainly never been in the Queen’s Head. It’s warmer than his office; this much is in its favour. It’s relatively quiet and the air smells more of tobacco than sweat.
‘You really shouldn’t have gone for the gin. I don’t know what it is, but if you tried to strip walls with it, they’d dissolve in puddles at your feet.’
Theodora stands over the table he has found in the corner booth. In this light, it is apparent that she inherited all the family’s most attractive features. She smiles and becomes Chris, but with a leaner face, and long, iced-moon hair piled up on top in a way that adds to her height. Her out-of-work make-up is wildly iridescent. You could target a bomb strike from three thousand feet on the hot, bright red of her lips.
She says, ‘I should have warned you. I’m most terribly sorry. About everything. Abandon the gin; truly, it’s vile. The beer is passable. Shall I get you one?’
‘If you like.’
Life is full of new surprises. She brings it back, foaming, bitterly cold. It slides down in a welcome fashion. Theodora drinks it with him, a half to his pint.
With a grimace, he says, ‘It’s an acquired taste.’
‘One could acquire it, though.’
‘Looks as if you have. Uncle Charles won’t be pleased.’
‘On the scale of my father’s displeasure, I suspect my drinking beer will rank relatively low.’ She rearranges her face and she is no longer the gamine version of Chris, but Charles, the business head in the family, older, more clipped, prone to unheralded bursts of anger that leave the company silent, staring at their plates. He can calculate profit and loss in a heartbeat, and carries his skill as a chip on his shoulder.
In his voice, stentorian and aggrieved at once, she says, ‘Are you seriously trying to tell me that you’re planning to serve in the company of the other ranks?’
Laurence laughs, loosely. If he closes his eyes he’s back in Cambridge, the Christmas before the war, Aunt Lydia at one end of the table, Aunt Dorothea at the other and Charles in between them, pontificating.
And Theodora, the irritating prodigy, declaiming some obscure lines of Troilus to Cressida or the other way about, thinking it will impress—
He opens his eyes. ‘How was the Christmas-fest? Wiltshire, this year, wasn’t it?’
‘I expect it was. I didn’t go.’
‘In case you drove your father to kill his last surviving brother?’ It’s as close as he can get to asking the question he bit off in the coding room. Neither of them can mention the Brigadier in here, or what he does. If she knows, which she might not.
She relaxes her face and shakes herself briskly, like a hound stepping out of a river. As herself, she says, ‘He doesn’t know that part, only that I’m here.’
So he was right: the Brigadier recruited Theo, too. ‘When did you start?’
‘October. And yes, I should have told you, but I was finding my feet and I didn’t want to be in your shadow. Actually, that’s not quite true. I wanted to make it in the cipher room on my own, without anyone thinking I’d had a leg up from you.’
‘How is it?’
‘Good at times. Deadly at others. The night shifts are grim. And then something comes in when you just know that …’ Her gaze travels from the bar to the door via the three other couples making desultory conversation. They don’t look like walls, but they all have ears and word is coming back, slowly, of what happens to those caught by the Sicherheitsdienst, or worse, the Geheime Staatspolizei. The rule for agents going into the field is: if you have any kind of choice, be caught by the Abwehr, the army intelligence. They at least understand the rules of war.
Finishing her thought, Theodora says, ‘When it matters.’
‘Like tonight. That last chit.’
‘You didn’t break it, did you – the message from this morning?’ She winces at the change in his face. ‘I’m sorry. They think you’re some kind of boy wonder, that nothing is beyond you.’
‘They?’
‘The cipher clerks. My friends.’
‘Just for a moment, I thought you meant our illustrious superiors.’
‘The day I know what they think …’ She laughs, relaxed, and tilts her beer in salute to the absent officers. She is so very like Chris. Perhaps all the cousins are pressed from the same mould; he just hasn’t spent time with any of the others since he finished school.
He looks past her. There’s a piano in the corner; an ally. ‘Can you still play?’
One plucked brow soars. She looks like her mother now, or his. They were bred differently, but are very alike. ‘Here?’
‘Why not? It’s Christmas. More or less.’
And so she does, but not the Christmas fare of the Family-Fest, nor the piano concertos and sonatas of an expensively tutored girl who has worked hard on her fingering. Tonight, she plays fast American band music, and within a dozen bars the desultory denizens of the Queen’s Head are desultory no longer, but have found the mood to swing.
Laurence Vaughan-Thomas orders another beer, and then a Scotch, and this time they do not serve him barely disguised turpentine, but the real thing – Talisker, decades in the ageing, and he finds that he is not immune to warmth, and that he can laugh, and smile, and sing and, wonder of wonders, dance.
Happiness is not impossible. Duller than it was, perhaps, but this is war; it could be so much worse.
Sarpedon is scheduled to resend his newly encrypted message at 08.45 the following morning and Laurence is in the cipher room early, drinking coffee, staring at the teleprinter.
Theo stands beside him, delicately green beneath her powder. Her working lipstick is several shades less brilliant than the one she wears at night. He prefers it.
At 08.33, the teleprinter snaps and chatters and spits out a string: sender’s ID, wavelength, signal strength and sked times, follo
wed by the cipher index and the first few groups of code.
Theo says, ‘They’re sending early. Different wavelength, different cipher. If the last one was jammed to order, this one might get through.’
Laurence is already writing. The line numbers are there, and then the word numbers. Sarpedon uses an unpublished poem of W. H. Auden’s that Laurence can recite in his sleep, more or less.
Line three, words two and five: ORDER, MANIFOLD; line six, word three: GRATEFULLY; line seven, words one and four … Some people pick their shortest words. Sarpedon, whoever he is, picks the longest, presumably on the grounds that it’s more secure. It’s also harder to code and to decode. Laurence hasn’t brought squared paper. The stunning brunette FANY hands him some. He is growing used to the fine, chiselled edges of her features.
Swiftly, he lays the words out, numbering them in alphabetic order, then creates the grid. Beside him, the FANY is doing the same. He thinks her name is Jane, or Jean, or Janet. It begins with a J, anyway.
Theodora says, ‘The signal’s good.’
At four out of five, the signal is excellent. It will be for the Gestapo as well, and their French bloodhounds. They’ll be onto him by now. Hurry up. Hurry up. Forget the two hundred characters. Just send the bloody thing.
The plain text emerges, letter by letter:
Neptune Hippy. Sarpedon’s true check is a spelling mistake every ninth letter, so HIPPY becomes HAPPY and the dam is out of action. Nicely done – this is what the SOE was first created for, the quick in and out of a coup de main. Show the bastards we’re not done yet. An L becomes an S and he is requesting a pick-up at … Q to Z and DQ becomes DZ, so the location is dropping zone Mike on the twenty-eighth, which is cutting it fine, with a BBC message on Radio Londres to confirm that says …
He has no idea what it says; the teleprinter has stopped. Come on, Sarpedon. Keep going. This is perfect, clear as day.