They were all talking at once then, but Rand wasn’t listening. He was staring down at the typewriter, watching the Russian’s fingers and the words as they appeared on the paper. Was it possible—?
“Rand, where are you going?” Hammond called after him, but he was already out of the office and vaulting up the stairs.
He unlocked the door and hurried over to the blackboard where the message was printed.
And then he knew.
“I should have poisoned you too,” a voice said from the doorway. “But a gun will be just as quick.”
Rand turned to face Toby Fly.
“Can we take that as a confession, Toby?”
The gun in Toby’s hand steadied and aimed, and Rand waited no longer. He fired the Beretta through the pocket of his jacket, hoping his unaimed shot would find its mark.
Toby’s weapon went off almost simultaneously, but his bullet went far to the right. His leg went out from under him and he fell to the floor, bleeding from the thigh. Rand hurried over and kicked the gun out of his reach.
Then the others were in the room, and everyone was talking. “You shot him in the leg?” Temple complained. “Why didn’t you finish the swine off?”
“I wasn’t really aiming,” Rand admitted quietly. He handed the weapon back to Sir Roscoe.
“The cipher identified Fly?” Olimski asked.
“Oh, yes, except that it wasn’t a cipher.”
Polly Carver frowned. “If it wasn’t a cipher, what was it?”
“A typewriter ribbon.”
While they summoned an ambulance and special guards for Toby Fly, Rand explained. “Lifnov made a point of telling me their Moscow office used the latest IBM typewriters, the same as we have here. Watching Olimski type that letter just now I realized that these machines used a high-yield film ribbon. It runs through the machine only once, but at each width of the ribbon it types three characters, in this order.” He jotted some numbers on the blackboard to illustrate:
“The letters strike the film ribbon from bottom to top, and from right to left. The ribbon doesn’t advance when you strike the space bar, so the words run in together. What Lifnov did was to take a small piece of this used ribbon and make a reduced photographic print from it. The black film ribbon, with its clear spaces where the letters had struck, made a perfect film negative.”
“But if it was from a typewritten message, why were there no periods or small letters? It was all capitals.”
“There were no periods because we have only a portion of the complete sentence. And I imagine it was typed in all caps because it was meant to be enciphered and sent as a cable or teletype message. Capital letters are common enough in such circumstances.” He pointed to the blackboard. “Reading bottom to top, right to left, as the message was typed — and putting in the likely word breaks — we read: ONFIRM WE HAVE AGENT FLY ON STATION AND WEEKLY REPORTS TO US ARE ALREADY W. The first word is obviously confirm, with the c missing. The last word, beginning with a w, could be working or some such word. Of course this bit of used typewriter ribbon from Moscow was no sort of proof against Fly, but in the world of double agents even the accusation would have ruined his usefulness. When Lifnov met him and then refused to talk, Toby had to kill him. Obviously he hoped Lifnov would drink the wine before he saw me, but as luck would have it he lived long enough to tell me about the double agent.”
“You did fine work, Rand, forcing Fly into the open like that.” Sir Roscoe shook his hand. “When Hastings hears about this he’ll want you back in the department.”
“There’s no chance of that,” Rand assured him. “I’m going back to my retirement.”
Polly Carver walked downstairs with him. “Then the letters forming walrus at the top of the message were only a coincidence.”
“That’s all. They could just as easily have spelled out cat or dog or nothing at all. Unfortunately they caused me to read the message in horizontal lines, rather than consider the possibility of vertical rows. I should have suspected a transposition of some sort rather than a true cipher when I realized that e was the most frequent letter in the message just as it is in clear English.”
Polly glanced at the clock in the downstairs hall. “You’ve only been here twenty-four hours. Do you always work this fast?”
He remembered Leila waiting at home. “I had an extra incentive this time,” he said.