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Enigma

Enigma

Titel: Enigma Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Robert Harris
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Miss Wallace made a pencil move more quickly. The worst part had been at the end: keeping her nerve and not fleeing when she'd finished, but checking the figures, returning the file to the Foetus, and observing the normal social code with Donald
    'We really must have a drink one of these evenings.'
    'Yes really we must.'
    'I'll be in touch, then.'
    'Absolutely. So shall I.'
    Neither, of course, having the slightest intention of ever doing so.
    Come on, Tom Jericho.
    Midnight passed. The first of the buses lumbered by—invisible, almost, except for its exhaust fumes, which made a puff of pink cloud in its red rear lights.
    And then, just as she was beginning to give up hope, a blur of white. A hand tapped softly on the glass. She dropped the telephone and shone her torch on to the face of a lunatic pressed close to the pane. Dark wild eyes and a convict mask of shadowed beard. 'There's really no need to scare me half to death,' she muttered, but that was in the privacy of the phone booth. As she came out, all she said was: I've left your numbers on the telephone.'
    She held the door open for him. His hand rested on hers. A brief moment of pressure signalled his thanks—too brief for her to tell whose fingers were the coldest.
    'Meet me here at five.'
    Exhilaration gave a fresh energy to her tired legs as she pedalled up the hill away from Bletchley.
    He needed to see her at five. How else could one interpret that, except as meaning he had found a way? A victory! A victory against the Mermagens and the Cordingleys!
    The gradient steepened. She rose to tread the pedals. The bicycle waved from side to side like a metronome. The light danced on the road.
    Afterwards, she was to reproach herself severely for this premature jubilation, but the truth was she would probably never have seen them anyway. They had positioned themselves quite carefully, drawn up parallel with the track and hidden by the hawthorn hedge—a professional job—so that when she came round the corner and began to bounce over the potholes towards the cottage she passed them in the shadows without a glance.
    She was six feet from the door when the headlights came on—slitted blackout headlights,, but dazzling enough to splash her shadow against the whitewashed wall. She heard the engine cough and turned, shielding her eyes, to see the big car coming at her—calm, unhurried, implacable, nodding over the bumpy ground.

5

    Jericho told himself to take his time. There's no hurry. You've given yourself five hours. Use them.
    He locked himself into the cellar room, leaving the key half turned in the keyhole, so that anyone trying to insert their key from the other side would find it blocked. He knew he'd have to open up eventually—otherwise, what was he? Just a rat in a trap. But at least he would now have thirty seconds' warning, and to give himself a cover story, he reopened the Naval Section safe and spread the handful of maps and code books across the narrow table. To these he added the stolen cryptograms and key settings, and his watch, which he placed before him with its lid open. Like preparing for an examination, he thought. 'Candidates must write on one side of the paper only; this margin to be left blank for the use of the examiner.'
    Then he lifted down the Enigma and removed the cover.
    He listened. Nothing. A dripping pipe somewhere, that was all. The walls bulged with the pressure of the cold earth; he could smell the soil, taste the spores of damp lime plaster. He breathed on his fingers and flexed them.
    He would work backwards, he decided, deciphering the last cryptogram first, on the theory that whatever had caused Claire's disappearance was contained somewhere in those final messages.
    He ran his fingers down the columns of notation to find the Vulture settings for 4 March—panic day in the Bletchley Registry.
    III V IV GAH CX AZ DV KT HU LW GP EY MR FQ
    The Roman numerals told him which three out of the machine's five rotors were to be used that day, and what order they were to be placed in. GAH gave him the rotor starting positions. The next ten letter pairs represented the cross-pluggings he needed to make on the plugboard at the back of the Enigma. Six letters were left unconnected which, by some mysterious and glorious fold in the laws of statistics, actually increased the number of potential different cross-pluggings from almost 8 million million (25 x 23x21x 19 x 17 x 15 x 13 x 11 x 9 x 7 x 5 x 3) to more than 150 million

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