“What were the minds like?” Auger asked, curiosity overcoming outrage, despite herself.
“Distant, huge and unchanging, like a range of mountains.” Skellsgard smiled self-consciously, then shook her own head, as if trying to break a mental spell. “It never happened again. I got over it. We all have a job to do here. Talking of which, how do you like the set-up? This is effectively the nerve centre of E2 operations, the point from which we communicate with all the field agents.”
Barton looked up from a folding table set with food and coffee. “Show her the Enigma.”
“Her mission profile says she doesn’t need to know about that,” Skellsgard replied.
“Show her anyway.”
Skellsgard shrugged and led Auger to a skeletal shelf unit containing about a dozen of the black typewriters. “You recognise these things?”
“Not really—they look like typewriters, but I’m sure they’re something more sophisticated than that.”
“They’re Enigma machines,” Skellsgard said. “Commercial enciphering equipment.”
“Made locally?”
“Yes. The military use them, but anyone can buy an off the-shelf model for their own purposes. We use them to send secure messages to our field agents.”
“Like Susan?”
“Exactly like Susan. Before she left here, we gave her one of these machines and instructions for converting a commercial wireless to intercept signals on our chosen frequency. Once she’d set up home, she used local tools and parts to modify the wireless. From our end, we encipher signals using an Enigma machine with the appropriate rotor settings for the given day of the month. Susan had a list of the settings so that she could set up her own Enigma accordingly. The enciphered messages came through the wireless in standard Morse code, but would have been completely unintelligible to anyone without an Enigma to decipher them back into plain text.”
“Wait,” Auger said, raising a hand. “I remember a little about these machines now. Didn’t they play a role in the Second World War? Something involving submarine warfare?”
“Yes,” Skellsgard said. “Enigma was cracked, eventually. It required several cunning breakthroughs in cryptanalysis methods and electromechanical computing. In fact, the task of cracking Enigma pretty much kick-started the entire computer revolution in the first place. But none of that happened here. There was no Second World War on E2.”
“I figured as much from the map Caliskan sent me, but I didn’t know what to make of it.”
“Make of it what you like. Fact is, the E2 timeline diverges significantly from our history. On E2, the war fizzled out in nineteen forty. There was a brief front in the Ardennes, and then it was all over. The German advance stalled. A coup took out the leadership—Stauffenberg and Rommel were part of that—and within two years the Nazi party had collapsed from within. People still talk about a Great War here, because there was never a second to rival it. No Second World War, no massive endeavour to crack Enigma. Computing here is still stuck at the same level as in the nineteen thirties, which—to all intents and purposes—is pretty much the same as the eighteen thirties. And that’s both good and bad. On the downside, it means we can’t go out and steal computing equipment or any kind of sophisticated electronic hardware. There are no transistors, no integrated circuits or microprocessors. But we can be sure that no one on E2 is capable of deciphering our Enigma traffic.”
“So you were using this thing to talk to Susan?”
“Yes,” Skellsgard said. “But it was a strictly a one-way conversation. It’s one thing to build a radio receiver. It’s much more complicated to build a transmitter with the necessary range, and even more difficult to run it without drawing attention. Given time, she could have done it—we’d given her the instructions—but she was more interested in pursuing her own little investigation.”
“The one that got her killed.”
“I knew Susan. She wouldn’t have allowed herself to get into something unless she felt the risks were worth it.”
“Meaning she was on to something? But according to Aveling…” Auger looked across to Barton, who had just raised his head, presumably on hearing Aveling’s name. She lowered her voice. “But according to Aveling, the only reason Caliskan wants those papers back is in case the locals get their hands on them.”
“Don’t underestimate the danger of that,” Skellsgard said. “It would only take one nudge in the right direction for them to realise they’re inside an ALS. The illusion is good, but it isn’t flawless.”
“Still, you don’t think that’s the only reason, do you? It seems as if everyone here had a good opinion of Susan. If she said she was on to something—”
“Then maybe she was. But we won’t know what it was until we get those papers back. And then hope that there’s enough of a clue in them.”
“There’s still one thing I don’t get,” Auger said, keeping her voice low. “Why me? If you know the territory as well, couldn’t you have posed as this long-lost sister instead of dragging me halfway across the galaxy instead?”
“There’s a catch,” Skellsgard said.
“Another one? But of course there is. You know, I’m thinking I should start a collection.”
“For some reason, Susan wanted you to be the sister. We know this from the last postcard she sent us.”
Auger frowned. Up to this point, she had never had anything more than a distant professional relationship with Susan White. Academic rivalry aside, she neither liked nor disliked the woman, but she didn’t really know her at all. “I don’t get it,” she said.
“We didn’t get it either.”
“Couldn’t one of you have just pretended to be the sister? A name’s just a name, after all.”
“There’s more to it than that. She might have primed Blanchard with a physical description of you. She knew you by sight, didn’t she?”
“Yes,” Auger admitted, remembering the times they had bumped into each other at conferences. “And we weren’t so different in appearance, now that I think about it.”
“We can’t take the risk of sending in someone who doesn’t fit Blanchard’s expectations. If he gets suspicious—thinks he’s being set up—then we may never see those papers again. That’s why we need you.”
“Then what Caliskan said was a lie. I was only ever the one candidate on his list.”
“Guess he needed to appeal to your vanity,” Skellsgard said.
“Guess it worked, too.”
TWELVE
Floyd continued his tour of the building in rue des Peupliers, knocking on doors and sometimes getting an answer. He worked methodically and patiently, turning on the charm when it was required. By the end of his enquiries, it was clear that at least two other tenants had seen the girl in the building, hanging around on the stairs. They couldn’t be specific about dates, but the sightings had all occurred within the last three or four weeks: consistent with there being a link to the White case. Once observed, the girl was not usually seen again by the same witness. Another tenant might have seen an odd child in the street outside, but he was insistent that this child had been a boy rather than a girl. Floyd and Custine had seen a strange girl leaving the Blanchard building the evening before, and Floyd had noticed what he thought was a different girl watching White’s window from outside earlier that day. Floyd still hadn’t spoken to the witness on the second floor, the one who had mentioned a child to Custine the night before.