After a few hours Basil went for his reconnaissance. He saw them almost immediately, chalkfaced men wearing either the tight faces of hunters or the slack faces of time-servers. Of the two, he chose the latter, since a loafer was less apt to pay attention and wouldn’t notice things and further- more would go off duty exactly when his shift was over.
The man stood, shifting weight from one foot to the other, blowing into his hands to keep them warm, occasionally rubbing the small of his back, where strain accumulated when he who does not stand or move much suddenly has to stand and move.
It was time to hunt the hunters.
“It’s the trust issue again,” said General Cavendish, in a tone suggesting he was addressing the scullery mice. “In his rat-infested brain, the fellow still believes the war might be a trap, meant to destroy Russia and Communism. He thinks that we may be feeding him information on Operation Citadel, about this attack on the Kursk salient, as a way of manipulating him into overcommitting to defending against that attack. He wastes men, equipment, and treasure building up the Kursk bulge on our say-so, then, come July, Hitler’s panzer troops make a feint in that direction but drive en masse into some area of the line that has been weakened because all the troops have been moved down to the Kursk bulge. Hitler breaks through, envelops, takes, and razes Moscow, then pivots, heavy with triumph, to deal with the moribund Kursk salient. Why, he needn’t even attack. He can do to those men what was done to Paulus’s Sixth Army at Stalingrad, simply shell and starve them into submission. At that point the war in the East is over and Communism is destroyed.”
“I see what where you’re going with this, gentlemen,” said Basil. “We must convince Stalin that we are telling the truth. We must verify the authenticity of Operation Citadel, so that he believes in it and acts accordingly. If he doesn’t, Operation Citadel will succeed, those 300,000 men will die, and the war will continue for another year or two. The soldiers now say ‘Home alive in ’45,’ but the bloody reality will be ‘Dead in heaven in ’47.’ Yet more millions will die. We cannot allow that to happen.”
“Do you see it yet, Basil?” asked Sir Colin. “It would be so helpful if you saw it for yourself, if you realized what has to be done, that no matter how long the shot, we have to play it. Because yours is the part that depends on faith. Only faith will get you through the ordeal that lies ahead.”
“Yes, I do see it,” said Basil. “The only way of verifying the Operation Citadel intercepts is to have them discovered and transmitted quite innocent of any other influence by Stalin’s most secret and trusted spy. That fellow has to come across them and get them to Moscow. And the route by which he encounters them must be unimpeachable, as it will be vigorously counterchecked by the NKVD. That is why the traitorous librarian at Cambridge cannot be arrested, and that is why no tricky subterfuge of cracking into the Cambridge rare books vault can be employed. The sanctity of the Cambridge copy of The Path to Jesus must be protected at all costs.”
“Exactly, Basil. Very good.”
“You have to get these intercepts to this spy. However — here’s the rub — you have no idea who or where he is.”
“We know where he is,” said the admiral. “The trouble is, it’s not a small place. It’s a good-sized village, in fact, or an industrial complex.”
“This Bletchley, whose name I was not supposed to hear — is that it?”
“Professor, perhaps you could explain it to Captain St. Florian.”
“Of course. Captain, as I spilled the beans before, I’ll now spill some more. We have Jerry solved to a remarkable degree, via higher mathematical concepts as guidelines for the construction of electronic ‘thinking machines,’ if you will…”
“Turing engines, they’re called,” said Sir Colin. “Basil, you are honored by hearing this from the prime mover himself. It’s like a chat with God.”
“Please continue, your Supreme Beingness,” said Basil.
Embarrassed, the professor seemed to lose his place, then came back to it. “… thinking machines that are able to function at high speed, test possibilities, and locate patterns which cut down on the possible combinations. I’ll spare you details, but it’s quite remarkable. However, one result of this breakthrough is that our location — Bletchley Park, about fifty kilometers out of London, an old Victorian estate in perfectly abominable taste — has grown from a small team operation into a huge bureaucracy. It now employs over eight hundred people, gathered from all over the empire for their specific skills in extremely arcane subject matters.
“As a consequence, we have many streams of communication, many units, many subunits, many sub-subunits, many huts, temporary quarters, recreational facilities, kitchens, bathrooms, a complex social life complete with gossip, romance, scandal, treachery, and remorse, our own slang, our own customs. Of course the inhabitants are all very smart, and when they’re not working they get bored and to amuse themselves conspire, plot, criticize, repeat, twist, engineer coups and countercoups, all of which further muddies the water and makes any sort of objective ‘truth’ impossible to verify. One of the people in this monstrous human beehive, we know for sure from the Finland code, reports to Joseph Stalin. We have no idea who it is — it could be an Oxbridge genius, a lance corporal with Enfield standing guard, a lady mathematician from Australia, a telegraph operator, a translator from the old country, an American liaison, a Polish consultant, and on and on. I suppose it could even be me. All, of course, were vetted beforehand by our intelligence service, but he or she slipped by.
“So now it is important that we find him. It is in fact mandatory that we find him. A big security shakeout is no answer at all. Time-consuming, clumsy, prone to error, gossip, and resentment, as well as colossally interruptive and destructive to our actual task, but worst of all a clear indicator to the NKVD that we know they’ve placed a bug in our rug. If that is the conclusion they reach, then Stalin will not trust us, will not fortify Kursk, et cetera, et cetera.”
“So breaking the book code is the key.”
“It is. I will leave it to historians to ponder the irony that in the most successful and sophisticated cryptoanalytic operation in history, a simple book code stands between us and a desperately important goal. We are too busy for irony.”
Basil responded, “The problem then refines itself more acutely: it is that you have no practical access to the book upon which the code that contains the name for this chap’s new handler is based.”
“That is it, in a nutshell,” said Professor Turing.
“A sticky wicket, I must say. But where on earth do I fit in? I don’t see that there’s any room for a boy of my most peculiar expertise. Am I supposed to — well, I cannot even conjure an end to that sentence. You have me…”
He paused.
“I think he’s got it,” said the admiral.
“Of course I have,” said Basil. “There has to be another book.”
It had to happen sooner or later, and it happened sooner. The first man caught up in the Abwehr observe-and-apprehend operation was Maurice Chevalier.
The French star was in transit between mistresses on the Left Bank, and who could possibly blame Unterscharführer Ganz for blowing the whistle on him? He was tall and gloriously handsome, he was exquisitely dressed, and he radiated such warmth, grace, confidence, and glamour that to see him was to love him. The sergeant was merely acting on the guidance given the squad by Macht: if you want him to be your best friend, that’s probably the spy. The sergeant had no idea who Chevalier was; he thought he was doing his duty.