Read Enigma for Free Online Page A

and we were
Whitehall’s blue-eyed boys.”
    “Until Tuesday.”
    “Until Tuesday.” Logie glanced at the door and dropped his
voice. “It’s an absolute tragedy, Tom. We’d cut losses in the North
Atlantic by 75 per cent. That’s about three hundred thousand tons
of shipping a month. The intelligence was amazing. We knew where
the U-boats were almost as precisely as the Germans did. Of course,
looking back, it was too good to last. The Nazis aren’t fools. I
always said: “Success in this game breeds failure, and the bigger
the success, the bigger the failure’s likely to be.” You’ll
remember me saying it. The other side gets suspicious, you see. I
said—”
    “What happened on Tuesday, Guy?”
    “Right-ho. Sorry. Tuesday. It was about eight in the evening. We
got a call from one of the intercept stations. Flowerdown, I think,
but Scarborough heard it too. I was in the canteen. Puck came and
fetched me out. They’d started picking up something in the early
afternoon. A single word, broadcast on the hour, every hour. It was
coming out of Sainte-Assise on both main U-boat radio nets.”
    “This word was enciphered in Shark, I take it?”
    “No, that’s just it. That’s what they were so excited about. It
wasn’t in cipher. It wasn’t even in Morse. It was a human voice. A
man. Repeating this one word: Akelei”
    “Akelei,” murmured Jericho. “Akelei…That’s a flower, isn’t
it?”
    “Ha!” Logie clapped his hands. “You are a bloody marvel, Tom.
See how much we miss you? We had to go and ask one of the German
swots on Z-watch what it meant. Akelei: a five-petalled flower of
the buttercup family, from the Latin Aquilegia. We vulgarians call
it columbine.”
    “Akelei?” repeated Jericho. “This is a prearranged signal of
some sort, presumably?”
    “It is.”
    “And it means?”
    “It means trouble, is what it means, old love. We found out just
how much trouble at midnight yesterday.” Logie leaned forwards. The
humour had left his voice. His face was lined and grave. “Akelei
means: “Change the Short Weather Code Book.” They’ve gone over to a
new one and we haven’t a bloody clue what to do about it. They’ve
closed off our way into Shark, Tom. They’ve blacked us out
again.”
    ♦
    It didn’t take Jericho long to pack. He’d bought nothing since
he arrived in Cambridge except a daily newspaper, so he took out
exactly what he’d carried in three weeks earlier: a pair of
suitcases filled with clothes, a few books, a fountain pen, a slide
rule and pencils, a portable chess set and a pair of walking boots.
He laid his cases on the bed and moved slowly about the room
collecting his possessions while Logie watched him from the
doorway.
    Running round and round in his head, unbidden from some hidden
depth in his subconscious, was a nursery rhyme: “For want of a
nail, the horse was lost; for want of a horse, the rider was lost;
for want of a rider, the battle was lost; for want of a battle, the
kingdom was lost; and all for the want of a horseshoe nail…”
    He folded a shirt and laid it on top of his books.
    For want of a Short Weather Code Book they might lose the Battle
of the Atlantic. So many men, so much material, threatened by so
small a thing as a change in weather codes. It was absurd.
    “You can always tell a boarding-school boy,” said Logie, “they
travel light. All those endless train journeys, I suppose.”
    “I prefer it.”
    He stuffed a pair of socks down the side of the case. He was
going back. They wanted him back. He couldn’t decide whether he was
elated or terrified.
    “You don’t have much stuff in Bletchley, either, do you?”
    Jericho swung round to look at him. “How do you know that?”
    “Ah.” Logie winced with embarrassment. “I’m afraid we had to
pack up your room, and, ah, give it to someone else. Pressure of
space and all that.”
    “You didn’t think I’d be coming back?”
    “Well, let’s say we didn’t know we’d need