Enigma

missed you.'
    'It's my fault, Leonard,' said Logie. 'Bad briefing. Should have put him in the picture better. Sorry. Bit of a rush first thing.'
    'Why don't you just get back to the Hut, Guy? In fact, why don't you all go back, and then Tom and I can have a little chat.'
    'Bloody fool,' said Baxter to Jericho.
    Atwood took his arm. 'Come on, Alec.'
    'Well, he is. Bloody fool.'
    They left.
    The moment the door closed Skynner said: 'I never wanted you back.'
    'Logie didn't mention that.' Jericho folded his arms to stop his hands shaking. 'He said I was needed here.'
    'I never wanted you back, not because I think you're a fool—Alec's wrong about that. You're not a fool. But you're a wreck. You're ruined. You've cracked once before under pressure and you'll do it again, as your little performance just now showed. You've outlived your usefulness to us.'
    Skynner was leaning his large bottom casually against the edge of the table. He was speaking in a friendly tone and if you had seen him from a distance you would have thought he was exchanging pleasantries with an old acquaintance.
    'Then why am I here? I never asked to come back.'
    'Logie thinks highly of you. He's the acting head of the Hut and I listen to him. And, I'll be honest, after Turing, you probably have—or, rather, had—the best reputation of any cryptanalyst on the Park. You're a little bit of history, Tom. A little bit of a legend. Bringing you back, letting you attend this morning, was a way of showing our masters how seriously we take this, ah, temporary crisis. It was a risk. But obviously I was wrong. You've lost it.'
    Jericho was not a violent man. He had never hit another person, not even as a boy, and he knew it was a mercy he had avoided military service: given a rifle he would have been a menace to no one except his own side. But there was a heavy brass ashtray on the table -the sawn-off end of a six-inch shell-case, brimful of cigarette stubs—and Jericho was seriously tempted to ram it into Skynner's smug face. Skynner seemed to sense this. At any rate, he pulled his bottom off the table and began to pace the floor. This must be one of the benefits of being a madman, thought Jericho, people can never take you entirely for granted.
    'It was so much simpler in the old days, wasn't it?' said Skynner. 'A country house. A handful of eccentrics. Nobody expecting very much. You potter along. And then suddenly you're sitting on the greatest secret of the war.'
    'And then people like you arrive.'
    'That's right, people like myself are needed, to make sure this remarkable weapon is used properly.'
    'Oh is that what you do, Leonard? You make sure the weapon is used properly. I've often wondered.'
    Skynner stopped smiling. He was a big man, nearly a foot taller than Jericho. He came up very close, and Jericho could smell the stale cigarette smoke and the sweat on his clothes.
    'You've no conception of this place any more. No idea of the problems. The Americans, for instance. In front of whom you've just humiliated me. Us. We're negotiating a deal with the Americans that—' He stopped himself. 'Never mind. Let's just say that when you—when you indulge yourself as you just did, you can't even conceive of the seriousness of what's at stake.' Skynner had a briefcase with a royal crest stamped on it and 'G VI R' in faded gold lettering. He slipped his papers into it and locked it with a key attached to his belt by a long chain.
    'I'm going to arrange for you to be taken off cryptanalytical work and put somewhere you can't do any damage. In fact, I'm going to have you transferred out of Bletchley altogether.' He pocketed the key and patted it. 'You can't return to civilian life, of course, not until the war's over, not knowing what you know.
    Still, I hear the Admiralty's on the lookout for an extra brain to work in statistics. Dull stuff, but cushy enough for a man of your . . . delicacy. Who knows? Perhaps you'll meet a nice girl. Someone more—how shall we say?—more suitable for you than the person I gather you were seeing.'
    Jericho did try to hit him then, but not with the ashtray, only with his fist, which in retrospect was a mistake. Skynner stepped to one side with surprising grace and the blow missed and then his right hand shot out and grabbed Jericho's forearm. Skynner dug his fingers very hard into the soft muscle.
    'You are an ill man, Tom. And I am stronger than you, in every way.' He increased the pressure for a second or two, then