Enigma

AE NW CU IK FX BR
    An Ostubaf Dorfmann. Ostubaffoi Obersturmbann-fiihrer. A Gestapo rank.; TO OBERSTURMBANNFUHRER DORFMANN RHSA ON ORDERS OFFICE COMMANDER IN CHIEF NAMES OF POLISH OFFICERS IDENTIFIED TO DATE IN KATYN FOREST AS FOLLOWS
    He didn't bother to write them down. He knew what he was looking for and he found it after an hour, buried in a babble of other names. It wasn't sent to the Gestapo on the 2nd, but on the 3rd:
    PUKOWSKI, T.

6

    A few minutes after 5 a.m., Tom Jericho surfaced, molelike, from his subterranean hole, and stood in the passage of the mansion, listening. The Enigma had been returned to its shelf, the safe locked, the door to the Black Museum locked as well. The cryptograms and the settings were in his pocket. He had left no trace. He could hear footsteps and male voices coming towards him and he drew back against the wall, but whoever they were they didn't come his way. The wooden staircase creaked as they passed on, out of sight, up to the offices in the bedrooms.
    He moved cautiously, keeping close to the wall. If Wigram had gone looking for him in the hut at midnight and failed to find him, what would he have done? He would have gone to Albion Street. And seeing Jericho hadn't turned up there, he might by now have roused a considerable search party. And Jericho didn't want to be found, not yet. There were too many questions he had to ask, and only one man had the answers.
    He passed the foot of the staircase and opened the double doors that led to the lobby.
    You became her lover, didn't you, Puck? The next after me in the great revolving door of Claire Romilly's men. And somehow—how?—you knew that something terrible was going on in that ghastly forest. Wasn't that why you sought her out? Because she had access to information you couldn't get to? And she must have agreed to help, must have started copying out anything that looked of interest. ('She'd really been much more attentive of late . . .') And then there came the nightmare day when you realised—who? your father? your brother?—was buried in that hideous place. And then, the next day, all she could bring you was cryptograms, because the British—the British: your trusty Allies, your loyal protectors, to whom the Poles had entrusted the secret of Enigma—the British had decided that in the higher interest they simply didn't want to know any more.
    Puck, Puck, what have you done?
    What have you done with her?
    There was a sentry in the Gothic entry hall, a couple of cryptanalysts talking quietly on a bench, a WAAF with a stack of box files struggling to find the doorhandle with her elbow. Jericho opened it for her and she smiled her thanks and made a rolling motion with her eyes, as if to say: What a place to find ourselves at five o'clock on a spring morning, and Jericho smiled and nodded back, a fellow sufferer: Yes, indeed, what a place.
    The WAAF went one way and he went the other, towards the morning star and the main gate. The sky was black, the telephone box almost invisible in the shadows of the arboretum. It was empty. He walked straight past it and pushed his way into the vegetation. Sir Herbert Leon, the last Victorian master of the Park, had been a dedicated arborist, planting his realm with three hundred different species of tree. Forty years of re-seeding, followed by four years without pruning, had turned the arboretum into a labyrinth of secret chambers, and here Jericho squatted on the dry earth and waited for Hester Wallace.
    By five fifteen it was clear to him she wasn't coming, which suggested she had been detained. In which case, they were almost certainly looking for him.
    He had to get out of the Park, and he couldn't risk the main gate.
    At five twenty, when his eyes were thoroughly used to the dark, he began to move northwards through the arboretum, back towards the house, his bundle of secrets heavy in his pocket. He could still feel the effects of the Benzedrine—a lightness in his muscles, an acuteness in his mind, especially to danger—and he offered a prayer of thanks to Logie for making him take it, because otherwise by now he'd be half-dead.
    Puck, Puck, what have you done?
    What have you done with her?
    He came out cautiously from between two sycamores and stepped on to the lawn at the side of the mansion. Ahead of him was the long, low outline of the old Hut 4, with the mass of the big house behind it. He skirted it and went around the back, past some rubbish bins and into the courtyard.