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Enigma

Enigma

Titel: Enigma Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Robert Harris
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better than to speak. He can just hear her moving around the room, collecting her scattered clothes. Then the door closes quietly. The stairs creak. A minute later he hears the click of her bicycle being wheeled away from beneath his window.
    And now his own nightmare begins.
    First, there is guilt, that most corrosive of emotions, more torturing even than jealousy (although jealousy is added to the brew a few days later, when he happens to see her walking through Bletchley with a man he doesn't recognise: the man could be anyone, of course—cousin, friend, colleague—but naturally his imagination can't accept that). Why did he respond so dramatically to so small a provocation; The cheque could, after all, have been a reward for anything. He didn 't have to tell her the truth. Now that she's gone, a hundred plausible explanations for the money come to mind. What had he done to provoke such terror in her? What awful memory had he reawakened?
    He groans and draws the blankets over his head.
    The next morning he takes the cheque to the bank and exchanges it for twenty large, crisp, white five-pound notes. Then he searches out the dreary little jewellery shop on Bletchley Road and asks for a ring, any ring as long as it is worth a hundred pounds, at which the jeweller—a ferret of a man with pebble-thick glasses, who clearly can't believe his luck -produces a diamond worth less than half that amount, and Jericho buys it.
    He will make it up to her. He will apologise. It will all be right.
    But luck is not with Jericho. He has become the victim of his own success. A Shark decrypt discloses that a U-boat tanker—the U-459, under Korvettenkapitan van Williamowitz-Mollendorf, with 700 tons of fuel on board—is to rendezvous with, and refuel, the Italian submarine Kalvi, 300 miles east of St Paul's Rock, in the middle of the Atlantic. And some fool at the Admiralty, forgetting that no action, however tempting, must ever be taken that will endanger the Enigma secret, orders a squadron of destroyers to intercept. The attack is made. It fails. The U-459 escapes. And Donitz, that crafty fox in his Paris lair, is immediately suspicious. In the third week of January, Hut 8 decrypts a series of signals ordering the U-boat fleet to tighten its cipher security. Shark traffic dwindles. There is barely enough material to make a menu for the bombes. At Bletchley, all leave is cancelled. Eight-hour shifts drag on to twelve hours, to sixteen hours. . . The daily battle to break the codes is almost as great a nightmare as it was in the depths of the Shark blackout, and Skynner's lash is felt on everybody s back.
    Jericho's world has gone from perpetual sunshine to bleak midwinter in the space of a week. His messages to Claire, of entreaty and remorse, vanish, unanswered, into a void. He can't get out of the Hut to see her. He can't work. He can't sleep. And there's no one he can talk to. To Logie, lost and vague behind his smokescreen of tobacco? To Baxter, who would regard a dalliance with a woman like Claire Romilly as a betrayal of the world proletariat? To Atwood—Atwood!—whose sexual adventures have hitherto been confined to taking the prettier male undergraduates on golfing weekends to Brancaster, where they quickly discover that all the locks have been removed from the bathroom doors? Puck would have been a possibility, but Jericho could guess at his advice—'Take out someone else, my dear Thomas, and fuck her'—and how could he admit the truth: that he didn 't want to 'fuck' anyone else, that he had never 'fucked' anyone else?
    On the final day of January, collecting a copy of The Times from Brinklows the newsagent in Victoria Road, he spots her, at a distance, with the other man, and he shrinks into a doorway to avoid being seen. Apart from that, he never meets her: the Park has become too big, there are too many changes of shift. Eventually, he's reduced to lying in wait in the lane opposite her cottage, like a Peeping Tom. But she seems to have stopped coming home.
    And then he almost walks right into her.
    It is 8 February, a Monday, at four o'clock. He's walking wearily back to the hut from the canteen; she is part of a flood of workers streaming towards the gate at the end of the afternoon shift. He has rehearsed for his moment so many times, but in the end all he manages is a whine of complaint: 'Why don't you answer my letters?'
    'Hello, Tom.'
    She tries to walk on, but he won't let her get away this time. He has a

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