Enigma

did all this start?' He could remember a time when they weren't even asked for passes.
    'Not sure now you mention it.' Logie shrugged. 'They seem to have tightened up in the last week or two.'
    Their cards were returned. The barrier rose. The sentry waved them through. Beside the road was a freshly painted sign. They had been given a new name some time around Christmas and Jericho could just about read the white lettering in the darkness: 'Government Communication Headquarters'.
    The metal barrier came down after them with a crash.

2

    Even in the blackout you could sense the size of the place. The mansion was still the same, and so were the huts, but these were now just a fraction of the overall site. Stretching away beyond them was a great factory of intelligence: low, brick-built offices and bombproof bunkers of concrete and steel, A-Blocks and B-Blocks and C-Blocks, tunnels and shelters and guard posts and garages . . . There was a big military camp just beyond the wire. The barrels of anti-aircraft batteries poked through camouflaged netting in the nearby woods. And more buildings were under construction. There had never been a day when Jericho hadn't heard the racket of mechanical diggers and cement mixers, the ringing of pickaxes and the splintering of falling trees. Once, just before he left, he had paced out the distance from the new assembly hall to the far perimeter fence and had reckoned it at half a mile. What was it all for? He had no idea. Sometimes he thought they must be monitoring every radio transmission on the planet.
    Leveret drove the Rover slowly past the darkened mansion, past the tennis court and the generators, and drew up a short distance from the huts.
    Jericho clambered stiffly from the back seat. His legs had gone to sleep and the sensation of the blood returning made his knees buckle. He leaned against the side of the car. His right shoulder was rigid with cold. A duck splashed somewhere on the lake and its cry made him think of Cambridge—of his warm bed and his crosswords—and he had to shake his head to clear the memory.
    Logie was explaining to him that he had a choice: Leveret could take him over to his new digs and he could have a decent night's kip, or he could come in straight away and take a look at things immediately.
    'Why don't we start now?' said Jericho. His re-entry into the hut would be an ordeal. He'd prefer to get it over with.
    'That's the spirit, old love. Leveret will look after your cases, won't you, Leveret? And take them to Mr Jericho's room?'
    'Yes, sir.' Leveret looked at Jericho for a moment, then stuck out his hand. 'Good luck, sir.'
    Jericho took it. The solemnity surprised him. Anyone would think he was about to make a parachute jump into hostile territory. He tried to think of something to say. 'Thank you very much for driving us.'
    Logie was fiddling with Leveret's blackout torch. 'What the hell's wrong with this thing?' He knocked it against his palm. 'Bloody thing. Oh, sod it. Come on.'
    He strode away on his long legs and after a moment's hesitation Jericho wrapped his scarf tight around his neck and followed. In the darkness they had to feel their way along the blastproof wall surrounding Hut 8. Logie banged into what sounded like a bicycle and Jericho heard him swear. He dropped the torch. The impact made it come on. A trickle of light revealed the entrance to the hut. There was a smell of lime and damp here—lime and damp and creosote: the odours of Jericho's war. Logie rattled the handle, the door opened and they stepped into the dim glow.
    Because he had changed so much in the month he had been away, somehow—illogically—he had expected that the hut would have changed as well. Instead, the instant he crossed the threshold, the familiarity of it almost overwhelmed him. It was like a recurrent dream in which the horror lay in knowing precisely what would happen next—the certainty that it always had been, and always would be, exactly like this.
    A narrow, ill-lit corridor, perhaps twenty yards long, stretched in front of him, with a dozen doors leading off it. The wooden partitions were flimsy and the noise of a hundred people working at full stretch leaked from room to room—the clump and thud of boots and shoes on the bare boards, the hum of conversation, the occasional shout, the scrape of chair legs, the ringing of telephones, the clack clack clack of the Type-X machines in the Decoding Room.
    The only tiny difference was that the