Maybe there was something here after all.
There were more machines on Stensness’ desk, and more still in the storeroom on the far side.
Herbert looked through all of them, and again came up blank. One small piece, presumably a spare part, looked as though it could have been familiar, but he could not place it, and eventually he conceded that his imagination was playing tricks.
It would have been helpful if the machines had been labeled, he thought; but why should they have been, when the only people using them would know perfectly well what they were for?
He went back to Stensness’ desk, a little deflated.
Apparatus apart, there was nothing there which he would not have expected: two adjoining piles of books, about the same height, all with scientific titles; a long wooden ruler half-hidden under a manila folder; and an old metal mug from which an assortment of pens bristled.
Herbert opened the books one by one and flicked through them, hoping to find something pressed between the pages.
When he found nothing, he held each book horizontally by the spine and shook hard; perhaps he had missed something first time round.
Ten books; ten blanks.
He put the books back in their piles, picked up the metal mug, tipped the pens out, and looked inside the mug, to see if Stensness had hidden anything there, perhaps taped to the sides or the bottom.
Nothing.
Nothing on the base, either, when Herbert turned it over. He scooped up the pens and began to stuff them angrily back into the mug; and he stopped.
One of the pens was much heavier than the others.
He took the lid off and pressed the nib against the back of his hand. It left a mark of blue ink. So it worked. That in itself proved nothing, he knew; and with a swirling of exhilaration, Herbert knew what he was going to find.
He unscrewed the nib from the main barrel of the pen.
There was a small ink sac within the nib itself; but it was what was in the barrel itself that excited him. He shook it gently, and into his palm popped a small metal cylinder, no more than a couple of inches in length.
He turned this cylinder vertical, and almost yelled for joy. The ends, as he had expected, were not solid metal, but glass: small lenses.
“What is it?” Hannah said, as attuned to emotions as a shaman.
Herbert looked at the desk, at the books, and the ruler, and then again toward the storeroom, where most of the apparatus was stored. The answers came tumbling through his mind with the speed and mechanical accuracy of handcrafted cogs.
He pulled the ruler from underneath the manila folder, and saw that it had a small hole drilled through the middle, perhaps half an inch in diameter.
In four quick strides he was back in the storeroom, hunting for the piece of metal he had thought familiar.
There it was, a tiny knurled cylinder; half as long as the one in the pen, but twice as wide, and instantly recognizable the moment he knew what he was looking for.
Herbert went back to Stensness’ desk, where it took him scant seconds to arrange everything in the correct place.
The books he kept in their piles but moved nine inches apart.
The ruler he placed across the top of the stacks, so that it served as a bridge.
Then, adjusting things slightly, he took the uppermost book from each pile and placed it on top of the ruler, one on each side, to hold it in place.
The knurled cylinder from the storeroom fitted exactly into the hole in the ruler.
“Herbert, what the hell you do?” Hannah asked again.
“Microdots,” he said. “Stensness was making microdots here.”
“Microdots? What is that?”
“Ways of hiding lots of information in a very small space.”
He took her hand and placed it on the left-hand pile of books. “Go up until you get to the ruler,” he said. “Then feel along the top of the ruler. When you get to a metal cylinder, that’s halfway. There’s another pile of books on the other side.”
She ran her hand up, right, and down, as he had instructed.
“The metal cylinder is a microdot camera,” Herbert said. “The top opens to allow the film to be inserted. Then, working downward, there’s a spiral spring, a disc to hold the film in place, the film itself, a container for all the lens stuff, and a cap which doubles as a shutter; we’re talking long exposures here, up to several minutes sometimes. The ruler holds the camera at precisely the right height above the table; there’s no adjustable focus on these things, they’re far too small for mechanisms like that. He puts the documents on the table, between the books, directly below the camera, makes sure the whole thing is well lit, and takes the photographs. And with this”—Herbert passed Hannah the second cylinder, the one he had found in the fountain pen—“he can view the microdots to make sure they came out OK.”
“But where are the microdots themselves?” she asked.
“Oh, they’re the size of a full stop, you can conceal them in any document you like …” And already he was pulling the Times article from his pocket.
Herbert turned on Stensness’ anglepoise lamp and held the paper beneath it, tilting it this way and that to find the gleam where the microdot film caught the light.
There was none, at least not that he could see, but the method was not foolproof; some types of film were matted, making them harder to discern under illumination.
He put the Coronation map down on the desk and studied it again.
He was looking for a full stop, perhaps more than one, but there were hundreds on the page. It would take hours to study them all.
The place names which Stensness had circled, he thought. Perhaps that was it.
Crude, sure; but if Stensness had been in a hurry, he might have taken the chance.
Herbert looked at the circled place names, and the first he saw was Regent Street. The word Street had been abbreviated to St.
St., with a full stop.
He put the viewer to his eye and zoomed in on that stop.
Nothing; just a tiny circle of finest Times ink.
And now he saw the pattern; every place name Stensness had circled had at least one dot somewhere in it. St. James’ St., St. James’ Park, St. James’ Palace, Victoria Embt., Trafalgar Sq., Piccadilly Cir., Marlboro. Ho., Northd. Av., Parlt. St., Hyde Park Crnr., Oxford St., and Regent St.
He scanned them all, one after the other, and each time nothing, nothing, nothing.
Damn Stensness, Herbert thought. Damn him and his ridiculous schoolboy obsession with tradecraft, damn him for playing at these games which had killed him. Damn Stensness, most of all, for dangling the prize just out of Herbert’s reach, beckoning him so far and no further, as though Herbert were Tantalus in the underworld, destined forever to be given that most cruel of commodities: unfulfilled hope.
Herbert cursed loudly. Hannah put her hand on his shoulder.
“What is it?” she asked.
He told her, as calmly as he could, what he had—or, more precisely, had not—found; and she laughed.
“I’m glad you think it’s funny,” he said.
“Herbert, don’t be like that. What did I tell you yesterday?”
“You told me lots of things.”
“No; well, yes, but I mean, what did I tell you about way you think?”
“You said I think only with my eyes, like all sighted people.”
“And now, you do that, exactly.”
“How?”
“Because you see something—here, circles—and for you they are answer, because your eye go to them. But they are not answer. So he give you wrong direction. What you do now, is you turn your eye off. What your eye say, you think opposite. No; don’t look at the paper again”—how was she always ahead of him?—“that is point I make. Shut your eye. Think.”
Herbert could have done without the lecture, but he knew Hannah was right.
Stensness had hidden something in that article, he was sure. And he had drawn circles
around various places, knowing they would be taken as indicators, whereas in fact they were nothing of the sort.
If the microdots were not where the circles were, therefore, they were where the circles were not.
Only now did Herbert turn back to the map, knowing what he was looking for: a place name which had a dot, but no circle round it.
Herbert found it more or less instantly, checked to see that there were no others, and then put the viewer to his eye and homed in, this time on London’s most famous Gothic edifice: the Houses of Parliament—or, as written here, Ho. of Parlt.
And they were there, two little microdots, clear as day through the tiny lenses.
They made their way back to Hannah’s flat, Herbert checking behind them every so often but seeing no one. The air was clearer below knee level, strangely, and once or twice he squatted down to peer through this unexpected corridor of clarity; but Hannah hurried him along, for she was cold and wanted to get home, so he could not fully assuage his paranoia.
He did not know how long they could count on remaining alone in the laboratory, and he did not want to have to explain himself to any wandering biophysicists.
Besides, the contents of the microdots were sufficiently baffling to require further study, perhaps hours’ worth—time he wanted away from de Vere Green, or Papworth, or Kazantsev, or anyone else who might have found out where he lived.
The moment they were inside Hannah’s flat, Herbert put the radio on; his constant companion for so long, it seemed, maybe even some kind of security blanket, an unfailing voice through the quiet in his life.
All bus and train services bar three had been withdrawn, it said.
The AA were now appealing to people to leave their cars at home, as conditions were the worst they had ever known. Tell me about it, Herbert thought, having just seen how abandoned vehicles were littering the streets as though London were a metallic battlefield. They’d had several near misses and two actual hits: Herbert barked his shin on a Sunbeam Talbot, Hannah smacked her hand on a wing mirror.
The emergency services were becoming more stretched by the hour; police rushing to crime scenes hidden by the fog, ambulances trying to save those whom the pollutants were killing, fire engines struggling to quench blazes inadvertently started by people desperate to keep warm.
The newsreader reeled off a litany of burglaries, assaults, and robberies: a cinema manager robbed of the day’s takings on the Edgware Road; a post office safe blown open in Isleworth; thieves had smashed the window of a jeweler’s in Brixton and made off with the display; and in Great Windmill Street, the offices of boxing promoter Jack Solomon were lighter to the tune of twelve boxes of cigars, a case of whiskey, a camera, two fight films, and £50 in cash.
Herbert listened to all this as he sat at Hannah’s kitchen table. Then he phoned Tyce again.
No word on de Vere Green as yet, Tyce said. He had spoken to Scott, who had pledged to contact Sillitoe immediately. There was nothing now they could do but wait.
Herbert told Tyce what he had found in the lab, and gave him Hannah’s number; he would be here until further notice.
When the call had finished, Herbert looked through the viewer at the microdots.
The first one, after the o of Ho, appeared at first glance to be one of those inkblot tests that psychiatrists gave patients to assess their state of mind. It was in black-and-white, and it was a circle, divided roughly into an inner and an outer ring.
The outer ring was more or less uniformly dark, all the way round.
In the inner ring, which was lighter, four horizontally striped lines radiated out from the center in an X-shape.
The lines were not quite at right angles to each other, so the X appeared to have been squashed slightly from either side; it was taller than it was wide.
There were therefore four lighter areas, almost diamond-shaped, in the spaces between the limbs of the X.
At the center was a small circle, brilliantly white.
It could have been anything, Herbert thought; absolutely anything.
The other microdot, after the t of Parlt, was another piece of code; much longer than the scrap written in the corner of the map, and therefore many times as baffling.
MGX Q-KGHDXI DHMMXJZ TK ITAA-JHLMTBZHWWR LGHJHLMXJTKMTL BA H GXWTLHW KMJNLMNJX. MGX ITHY-BZI KMJNLMNJX KXJOXK MPB ANZLMT-BZK. ATJKM, TM TZITLHMXK MGHM MGX DHMMXJZ JXDXHMK HEBOX HZI EXWBP MGX LXZMJHW Q-KGHDX, KTCZHWTZC MGX LBZMTZNHMTBZ BA MGX GXWTQ. KXLBZI, TM HJTKXK AJBY H JXCNWHJ KXJTXK, HWBZC MGX YBWXLNWHJ HQTK, BA MGX KNCHJ DGBKDGHMX CJBNDK MGHM ABJY MGX YBWXLNWX’K EHLVEBZX. MGX KRYYXMJTLHW DHMMXJZK BA MGX GBJTSBZMHW KYXHJK BZ MGX HJYK HZI WXCK BA MGX “Q” IXYBZKMJHMX MGHM MGX GXWTQ YHVXK H MPTKM HM JXCNWHJ TZMXJOHWK. MGX ABN-JMG WHRXJ-WTZX BZ XHLG WTYE TK YTKKTZC; MGTK YHR GTZM HM H IBNEWX GXWTQ, PTMG MGX YTKKTZC WHRXJ-WTZX JXDJXKXZMTZC MGX DBTZM HM PGTLG MGX MPB KMJHZIK LJBKK XHLG BMGXJ.
Herbert felt a begrudging admiration for Stensness; whatever his secret was, he was not giving it up easily.
Codes and ciphers had been part of Five training, at least to a level somewhere between elementary and intermediate. Although Herbert had taken the course several years before, and was therefore bound to have forgotten much, his crossword habit had surely kept his brain in some kind of requisite shape.
Hannah came back into the living room with a pot of coffee and two cups. She crooked the top joint of her finger over their rims so she knew when to stop pouring.
Herbert told her that this would take some time; several hours, perhaps.
She said that was fine, she was happy reading.
He watched her run her hands along the spines of the books on her shelves, up and down, up and down, feeling for their titles.
She found the one she was looking for, took it from the shelf, sat down, opened it, and began to read, eyes fluttering as her fingers danced across the pages.
Herbert found it hard to reconcile the knowledge that she was reading with the visual evidence that she did not once look at the book in front of her; but in the context of everything that had happened these past few days, it was just about the most reassuringly normal thing he could remember.
He smiled at Hannah, took a few quick breaths to make himself alert, and turned back to the microdot.
Peering through the viewer hour after hour would give him the mother of all headaches, so the first thing he had to do was transcribe the text onto a piece of paper. As he wrote, he could also keep a tally of the frequency with which each letter appeared, without which he would have no hope of solving Stensness’ code.
He was already making several assumptions, but he figured that they were sensible and therefore likely to be true.
The text was clearly laid out as it had been originally written; word lengths, spaces, and punctuations were all unchanged. This suggested that Stensness had used a monoalphabetic cipher; substituting each letter with another, all the way from A to Z, according to a system Herbert had yet to work out.
Usual practice in such ciphers was that each letter had a unique proxy; that was, the cipher did not use any given letter to replace more than one letter in the original.
It sounded simple, and in essence it was, but the permutations were horrific. Herbert had forgotten what the actual figures were, concerning the number of ways in which twenty-six letters could be rearranged, but he remembered there being something in the region of twenty or thirty zeros tacked onto the end.
However, codes tended to use systems, and mono-alphabetic ciphers were usually based on a starting key: a word or phrase which filled the first few places of the cipher alphabet (minus duplicate letters and spaces, naturally), followed by the continuation of the original alphabet from the last letter in the key through to Z, and then by whichever letters had not yet been used, still in original alphabetical order.
This way, the decoder needed only to know the key to decipher the message.
Herbert, of course, had no key, so he had to try it another way: frequency analysis.
In n
ormal English, some letters appeared much more often than others. Herbert knew what these were; every cruciverbalist did.
By finding out which letters appeared most frequently in the coded text, he could match them to their originals.
So he drew a grid down one side of the paper, with a little box for each letter from A to Z, and as he transcribed Stensness’ code, letter by letter, he put a stroke next to each relevant box in the grid: four vertical strokes and one diagonal for the fifth, just as they had been taught in schoolboy mathematics.
It was not especially difficult work, but it was slow and painstaking.
He was especially concerned not to make mistakes at this stage, as an error now could skew his results and send him chasing up blind alleys all day.
Thus it took him almost an hour, including two full check-throughs at the end, before he had finished.
Only three letters had appeared more than fifty times: M and X, both with sixty-seven, and H, on fifty-one. Herbert decided to focus his attention here first.
It was fairly safe to assume that the three commonest letters in the cipher text probably represented the three commonest letters in the language proper—e, t, and a respectively—but in such a small sample, perhaps not in the same order.
In other words; he was sure that M, X, and H between them signified e, t, and a, but he could not be certain which was which.
He had more counting to do.
E and a were vowels, and as such tended to be found next to pretty much most other letters, both before and after them.
But t was a consonant, and was therefore pickier about the company it kept. For instance, one rarely saw t next to b, d, g, j, k, m, q, or v.
And so it proved here.
In the cipher text, H and X were sociable to a fault, spreading themselves throughout sentences with the ease of an ambassador at a cocktail party.
M, on the other hand, was something of a recluse, lurking around only a few letters and avoiding many others outright.
Herbert had his first breakthrough.
M represented the letter t. He wrote as such next to its box with the sixty-seven strokes.
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