“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?”
The silence was thunderous. “All right, then. Look at the pages. Look at them!”
Like chastened schoolboys, the class complied.
“You, St. Florian, you’re a man of hard experience in the world. Tell me what you see.”
“Ah…” said Basil. He was completely out of irony. “Well, ah, a messy scrawl of typical eighteenth- century handwriting, capitalized nouns, that sort of thing. A splotch of something, perhaps wine, perhaps something more dubious.”
“Yes?”
“Well, I suppose, all these little religious symbols.”
“Look at them carefully.”
Basil alone did not need to unlimber reading spectacles. He saw what they were quickly enough.
“They appear to be crosses,” he said.
“Just crosses?”
“Well, each of them is mounted on a little hill. Like Calvary, one supposes.”
“Not like Calvary. There were three on Calvary. This is only one. Singular.”
“Yes, well, now that I look harder, I see the hill isn’t exactly a hill. It’s segmented into round, irregular shapes, very precisely drawn in the finest line his nib would permit. I would say it’s a pile of stones.”
“At last we are getting somewhere.”
“I think I’ve solved your little game, Professor,” said General Cavendish. “That pile of stones, that would be some kind of road marker, eh? Yes, and a cross has been inserted into it. Road marker, that is, marking the path, is that what it is? It would be a representation of the title of the pamphlet, The Path to Jesus. It is an expression of the central meaning of his argument.”
“Not what it means. Didn’t you hear me? Are you deaf?”
The general was taken aback by the ferocity with which Professor Turing spoke.
“I am not interested in what it means. If it means something, that meaning is different from the thing itself. I am interested in what it is. Is, not means.”
“I believe,” said the admiral, “a roadside marker is called a cairn. So that is exactly what it is, Professor. Is that what you—”
“Please take it the last step. There’s only one more. Look at it and tell me what it is.”
“Cairn… cross,” said Basil. “It can only be called a cairncross. But that means nothing unless…”
“Unless what?” commanded Turing.
“A name,” said Sir Colin.
Hello, hello, said Basil to himself. He saw where the path to Jesus led.
“The Soviet spymaster was telling the Cambridge librarian the name of the agent at Bletchley Park so that he could tell the agent’s new handler. The device of communication was a 154-year-old doodle. The book-code indicators were false, part of the disguise.”
“So there is a man at Bletchley named Cairncross?” asked Sir Colin.
“John Cairncross, yes,” said Professor Turing. “Hut 6. Scotsman. Don’t know the chap myself, but I’ve heard his name mentioned — supposed to be first-class.”
“John Cairncross,” said Sir Colin.
“He’s your Red spy. Gentlemen, if you need to feed information to Stalin on Operation Citadel, you have to do it through Comrade Cairncross. When it comes from him, Stalin and the Red generals will believe it. They will fortify the Kursk salient. The Germans will be smashed. The retreat from the East will begin. The end will begin. What was it again? ‘Home alive in ’45,’ not ‘Dead in heaven in ’47.’”
“Bravo,” said Sir Colin.
“Don’t bravo me, Sir Colin. I just work at sums, like Bob Cratchit. Save your bravos for that human fragment of the Kipling imagination sitting over there.”
“I say,” said Basil, “instead of a bravo, could I have a nice whisky?”
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Otto Penzler for commissioning this short-form experiment for me and badgering me until I finished. Barrett Tillman was indispensable on German aviation, Lenne Miller on general editing and proofreading, and Gary Goldberg on cyber transmissions. Naturally all failures of taste, plot, and nerve devolve solely to me.
About the Author
Stephen Hunter graduated from Northwestern University in 1968. He was a journalist for the Baltimore Sun from 1971 to 1996, then he moved to the Washington Post, where he stayed until his retirement in 2008. In 1998, Hunter won the ASNE Distinguished Writing Award in the criticism category. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for his authoritative film criticism in the Washington Post. Hunter is the author of the popular Bob Lee Swagger series, and in 2007 his novel Point of Impact was made into the successful Hollywood blockbuster Shooter, staring Mark Wahlberg. Hunter lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with his wife.