So it would go. That is the way of the wickedness called war. It eats us all. In the end, it and it alone is the victor, no matter what the lie called history says. The god of war, Mars the Magnificent and Tragic, always wins.
And then he was there.
He was out of grass. He had come to the hardpacked earth of the runway. He allowed himself to look up. The little plane was less than fifty meters away, tilted skyward on its absurdly high landinggear struts. He had but to jump to the cockpit, turn it on, let the rpm’s mount, then take off the brakes, and it would pull itself forward and up, due north, straight on till morning.
Fifty meters, he thought. All that’s between myself and Blighty.
He gathered himself for the crouched run to it. He checked: Pistol still with me, camera in my pocket, all nice and tidy. He had one last thing to do. He reached into his breast pocket and shoved his fingers down, probing, touching, searching. Then he had it. He pulled the L-pill out, fifty ccs of pure strychnine under a candy shell, and slid it into his mouth, back behind his teeth, far in the crevice between lip and jawbone. One crunch and he got to Neverland instantly.
“There,” whispered Boch. “It’s him, there, do you see, crouching just off the runway.” They knelt in the darkness of the hangar closest to the Storch.
Macht saw him. The Englishman seemed to be gathering himself. The poor bastard is probably exhausted. He’s been on the run in occupied territory over four days, bluffed or brazened his way out of a dozen near misses. Macht could see a dark doublebreasted suit that even from this distance looked disheveled.
“Let him get to the plane,” said Macht. “He will be consumed by it, and under that frenzy we approach, keeping the tail and fuselage between ourselves and him.”
“Yes, I see.”
“You stand off and hold him with the Luger. I will jump him and get this”—he reached into his pocket and retrieved a pipe—“into his mouth, to keep him from swallowing his suicide capsule. Then I will handcuff him and we’ll be done.”
They watched as the man broke from the edge of the grass, running like an athlete, with surprising power to his strides, bent double as if to evade tacklers, and in a very little time got himself to the door of the Storch’s cockpit, pulled it open, and hoisted himself into the seat.
“Now,” said Macht, and the two of them emerged from their hiding place and walked swiftly to the airplane.
His Luger out, Boch circled to the left to face the cockpit squarely from the left side while Macht slid along the right side of the tail boom, reached the landing struts, and slipped under them.
“Halt!” yelled Boch, and at precisely that moment Macht rose, grabbed the astonished Englishman by the lapels of his suit, and yanked him free of the plane. They crashed together, Macht pivoting cleverly so that his quarry bounced off his hip and went into space. He landed hard, far harder than Macht, who simply rode him down, got a knee on his chest, bent, and stuffed his pipe in the man’s throat. The agent coughed and heaved, searching for leverage, but Macht had wrestled many a criminal into captivity and knew exactly how to apply leverage.
“Spit it out!” he cried in English. “Damn you, spit it out!” He rolled the man as he shook him, then slapped him with a hard palm between the shoulder blades, and in a second the pill was ejected like a piece of half-chewed, throat-obstructing meat, riding a propulsive if involuntary spurt of breath, and arched to earth, where Macht quickly put a heavy shoe on it, crushing it.
“Hands up, Englishman, goddamn you,” he yelled as Boch neared, pointing the Luger directly into the face of the captive to make the argument more persuasively.
There was no fight left in him, or so it seemed. He put up his hands.
“Search him, Macht,” said Boch.
Macht swooped back onto the man, ran his hands around his waist, under his armpits, down his legs.
“Only this,” he said, holding aloft a small camera. “This’ll tell us some things.”
“I think you’ll be disappointed, old man,” said the Englishman. “I am thinking of spiritual enlightenment, and my photographs merely propose a path.”
“Shut up,” bellowed Boch.
“Now,” said Macht, “we’ll—”
“Not so fast,” said Boch.
The pistol covered both of them.
It happened so fast. He knew it would happen fast, but not this fast. Halt! came the cry, utterly stunning him with its loudness and closeness, and then this demon rose from nowhere, pulled him—the strength was enormous—from the plane, and slammed him to the ground. In seconds the L-pill had been beaten from him. Whoever this chap was, he knew a thing or two.
Now Basil stood next to him. Breathing hard, quite fluttery from exhaustion, and trying not to face the enormity of what had just happened, he tried to make sense, even as one thing, his capture, turned into another—some weird German command drama.
The SS officer had the Luger on both of them.
“Boch, what do you think you are doing?” said the German in the trench coat.
“Taking care of a certain problem,” said the SS man. “Do you think I care to have an Abwehr bastard file a report that will end my career and get me shipped to Russia? Did you think I could permit that?”
“My friends,” said Basil in German, “can’t we sit down over a nice bottle of schnapps and talk it out? I’m sure you two can settle your differences amicably.”
The SS officer struck him across the jaw with his Luger, driving him to the ground. He felt blood run down his face as the cheek began to puff grotesquely.
“Shut your mouth, you bastard,” the officer said. Then he turned back to the police officer in the trench coat.
“You see how perfectly you have set it up for me, Macht? No witnesses, total privacy, your own master plan to capture this spy. Now I kill the two of you. But the story is, he shot you, I shot him. I’m the hero. Moreover, whatever treasure of intelligence that little camera holds, it comes to me. I will weep pious tears at your funeral, which I’m sure will be held under the highest honors, and I will express my profound regrets to your unit as it ships out to Russia.”
“You lunatic,” said Macht. “You disgrace.”
“Sieg Heil,” said the SS officer as he fired. He missed.
This was because his left ventricle was interrupted mid-beat by a .380 bullet fired a split second earlier by Basil’s .380 Browning in the Abwehr agent’s right hand. Thus Boch jerked and his shot plunged off into the darkness.
The SS officer seemed to melt. His knees hit first—not that it mattered, because he was already quite dead, and he toppled to the left, smashing his nose, teeth, and pince-nez.
“Excellent shot, old man,” said Basil. “I didn’t even feel you remove my pistol.”
“I knew he would be up to something. He was too cooperative. Now, sir, tell me what I should do with you. Should I arrest you and earn the Iron Cross, or should I give you back your pistol and camera and watch you fly away?”
“Even as a philosophic exercise, I doubt I could argue the first proposition with much force,” said Basil.
“Give me an argument, then. You saved my life, or rather your pistol did, and you saved the lives of the men in my unit. But I need a justification. I’m German, you know, with that heavy, irony-free, ploddingly logical mind.”
“All right, then. I did not come here to kill Germans. I have killed no Germans. Actually the only one who has killed Germans, may I point out, sir, is you. Germans will die, more and more, and Englishmen and Russians and even the odd Frog or two. Possibly an American. That can’t be stopped. But I am told that the message on the film, which is completely without military value, by the way, has a possibility of ending the war by as much as two years sooner than expected. I don’t know about you, sir, but I am sick to death of war.”
“Fair enough. I am, too. Here, take this, and your camera, and get out of here. There’s the plane.”
“Ah, one question, if I may?”
?
??Yes?”
“How do you turn it on?”
“You don’t fly, do you?”
“Not really, no. At least, not technically. I mean I’ve watched it, I’ve flown in them, I know from the cinema that one pulls the stick up to climb, down to descend, right and left, with pedals—”
“God, you are something, I must say.”
And so the German told him where the ignition was, where the brakes were, what groundspeed he had to achieve to go airborne, and where the compass was for his due north heading.
“Don’t go over 150 meters. Don’t go over 150 kilometers per hour. Don’t try anything fancy. When you get to England, find a nice soft meadow, put her down, and just before you touch down, switch off the magnetos and let the plane land itself.”
“I will.”
“And remember one thing, Englishman. You were good—you were the best I ever went after. But in the end I caught you.”
The War Room
“Gentlemen,” said Sir Colin Gubbins, “I do hope you’ll forgive Captain St. Florian his appearance. He is just back from abroad, and he parked his airplane in a tree.”
“Sir, I am assured the tree will survive,” said Basil. “I cannot have that on my conscience, along with so many other items.”
Basil’s right arm was encased in plaster of Paris; it had been broken by his fall from the tree. His torso, under his shirt, was encased in strong elastic tape, several miles of it, in fact, to help his four broken ribs mend. The swelling on his face, from the blow delivered by the late SS Hauptsturmführer Boch, had gone down somewhat, but it was still yellowish, corpulent, and quite repulsive, as was the blue-purple wreath that surrounded his bloodshot eye. He needed a cane to walk, and of all his nicks, it was the abraded knee that turned out to hurt the most, other than the headache, constant and throbbing, from the concussion. In the manly British officer way, however, he still managed to wear his uniform, even if his jacket was thrown about his shoulders over his shirt and tie.
“It looks like you had a jolly trip,” said the admiral.
“It had its ups and downs, sir,” said Basil.
“I think we know why we are here,” said General Cavendish, ever irony-free, “and I would like to see us get on with it.”
It was the same as it always was: the darkish War Room under the Treasury, the prime minister’s lair. That great man’s cigar odor filled the air, and too bad if you couldn’t abide it. A few posters, a few maps, a few cheery exhortations to duty, and that was it. There were still four men across from Basil, a general, an admiral, Gubbins, and the man of tweed, Professor Turing.
“Professor,” said Sir Colin, “as you’re just in from the country and new to the information, I think it best for you to acquire the particulars of Captain St. Florian’s adventures from his report. But you know his results. He succeeded, though he got quite a thrashing in the process. I understand it was a close-run thing. Now you have had the results of his mission on hand at Bletchley for over a week, and it is time to see whether or not St. Florian’s blood, sweat, and tears were worth it.”
“Of course,” said Turing. He opened his briefcase, took out the seven Minox photos of the pages from The Path to Jesus, reached in again, and pulled out around three hundred pages of paper, whose leaves he flipped to show the barons of war. Every page was filled with either numerical computation, handwriting on charts, or lengthy analysis in typescript.
“We have not been lazy,” he said. “Gentleman, we have tested everything. Using our decryptions from the Soviet diplomatic code as our index, we have reduced the words and letters to numerical values and run them through every electronic bombe we have. We have given them to our best intuitive code breakers—it seems to be a gift, a certain kind of mind that can solve these problems quickly, without much apparent effort. We have analyzed them up, down, sideways, and backwards. We have tested the message against every classical code known to man. We have compared it over and over, word by word, with the printed words of the Reverend MacBurney. We have measured it to the thousandth of an inch, even tried to project it as a geometric problem. Two PhDs from Oxford even tried to find a pattern in the seemingly random arrangement of the odd crosslike formations doodled across all the pages. Their conclusion was that the seemingly random pattern was actually random.”
He went silent.
“Yes?” said Sir Colin.
“There is no secret code within it,” the professor finally said. “As any possible key to a book code, it solves nothing. It unlocks nothing. There is no secret code at all within it.”
The moment was ghastly.
Finally Basil spoke.
“Sir, it’s not what I went through to obtain those pages that matters. I’ve had worse drubbings in football matches. But a brave and decent man has put himself at great risk to get them to you. His identity would surprise you, but it seems there are some of them left on the other side. Thus I find it devastating to write the whole thing off and resign him to his fate for nothing. It weighs heavily.”
“I understand,” said Professor Turing. “But you must understand as well. Book codes work with books, don’t they? Because the book is a closed, locked universe—that is the point, after all. What makes the book code work, as simple a device as it is, is, after all, that it’s a book. It’s mass-produced on Linotype machines, carefully knitted up in a bindery, festooned with some amusing imagery for a cover, and whether you read it in Manchester or Paris or Berlin or Kathmandu, the same words will be found on the same places on the same page, and thus everything makes sense. This, however, is not a book but a manuscript, in a human hand. Who knows how age, drinking, debauchery, tricks of memory, lack of stamina, advanced syphilis or gonorrhea may have corrupted the author’s effort? It will almost certainly get messier and messier as it goes along, and it may in the end not resemble the original at all. Our whole assumption was that it would be a close enough replica to what MacBurney had produced twenty years earlier for us to locate the right letters and unlock the code. Everything about it is facsimile, after all, even to those frequent religious doodles on the pages. If it were a good facsimile, the growth or shrinkage would be consistent and we could alter our calculations by measurable quantities and unlock it. But it was not to be. Look at the pages, please, Captain. You will see that even among themselves, they vary greatly. Sometimes the letters are large, sometimes small. Sometimes a page contains twelve hundred letters, sometimes six hundred, sometimes twentythree hundred. In certain of them, it seems clear that he was drunk, pen in hand, and the lines are all atumble, and he is just barely in control. His damnable lack of consistency dooms any effort to use this as a key to a code contained in the original. I told you it was a long shot.”
Again a long and ghastly silence.
“Well, then, Professor,” said Gubbins, “that being the case, I think we’ve taken you from your work at Bletchley long enough. And we have been absent from our duties as well. Captain St. Florian needs rest and rehabilitation. Basil, I think all present will enthusiastically endorse you for decoration, if it matters, for an astonishing and insanely courageous effort. Perhaps a nice promotion, Basil. Would you like to be a major? Think of the trouble you could cause. But please don’t be bitter. To win a war you throw out a million seeds and hope that some of them produce, in the end, fruit. I’ll alert the staff to call—”
“Excuse me,” said Professor Turing. “What exactly is going on here?”
“Ah, Professor, there seems to be no reason for us to continue.”
“I daresay you chaps have got to learn to listen,” he said.
Basil was slightly shocked by the sudden tartness in his voice.
“I am not like Captain St. Florian, a witty ironist, and I am not like you three high mandarins with your protocols and all that elaborate and counterfeit bowing and scraping. I am a scientist. I speak in exact truth. What I say is true and nothing else is.”
“I’m rather afraid I don’t grasp your meaning, sir,” said Gu
bbins stiffly. It was clear that neither he nor the other two mandarins enjoyed being addressed so dismissively by a forty-year-old professor in baggy tweeds and wire-frame glasses.
“I said listen. Listen!” repeated the professor, rather rudely, but with such intensity it became instantly clear that he regarded them as intellectual inferiors and was highly frustrated by their rash conclusion.
“Sir,” said General Cavendish, rather icily, “if you have more to add, please add it. As General Sir Colin has said, we have other duties—”
“Secret code!” interrupted the professor.
All were stupefied.
“Don’t you see? It’s rather brilliant!” He laughed, amused by the code maker’s wit. “Look here,” he said. “I shall try to explain. What is the most impenetrable code of all to unlock? You cannot do it with machines that work a thousand times faster than men’s brains.”
Nobody could possibly answer.
“It is the code that pretends to be a code but isn’t at all.”
More consternation, impatience, yet fear of being mocked.
“Put another way,” said the professor, “the code is the absence of code.”
No one was going to deal with that one.
“Whoever dreamed this up, our Cambridge librarian or an NKVD spymaster, he was a smart fellow. Only two people on earth could know the meaning of this communication, though I’m glad to say they’ve been joined by a third one. Me. It came to me while running. Great for clearing the mind, I must say.”
“You have the advantage, Professor,” said Sir Colin. “Please, continue.”
“A code is a disguise. Suppose something is disguised as itself?”