We reached the Gare du Nord in good time. The place had the air of a military depot: there was a column of deep blue French Army trucks parked in the taxi rank, surprisingly clean, their grey canvases flapping in the wind. The platforms were piled with bags and bolsters, steel crates and what appeared to be parts of disa.s.sembled field guns. Trains hustled and thudded, pistons spinning, chimneys spewing steam and s.m.u.ts. They reminded me uncomfortably of the war machines of my dreams. Brevell led the way through it all, threading a path like a dog on the scent. I found myself boarding a blue-andgold Pullman train. It was a peculiar feeling, stepping into the plush, clean, carpeted carriages, with their ornate wood carvings and gilding, amidst the military chaos outside.
It was half an hour before the train left, during which time a uniformed steward appeared and provided us with drinks. The sergeant tried to get himself a cup of tea, but was rewarded with an unlikely looking greenish liquid which he sniffed once and quietly poured away through the window. When I saw this I opted for lemonade.
The train was moving, albeit slowly, when the steward returned. Or, rather, a different steward, with blue eyes, a head of light-brown curls, and an ill-fitting uniform.
It was the Doctor.
I stared at him for a moment, saw his tiny, flickering glance towards Brevell.
Of course. The sergeant didn"t know who he was, and I mustn"t do anything that would make him suspicious.
The Doctor made a slight gesture of the hand, towards the pa.s.sageway outside our compartment. I guessed that there should be a delay, so drank my lemonade first, and watched the suburbs of Paris drift past. The train was going so slowly it seemed likely to be nightfall before we made the port.
I got up and told Brevell I needed the lavatory. He merely nodded. The Doctor wasn"t in the pa.s.sageway: I found him standing in the narrow, noisy gap between carriages.
"We have to go to Dresden," he said.
Not that again! "Doctor," I said in a stage whisper, over the creaking and clattering of the train. "I can get you to England perhaps if you need to go back there. But don"t ask me to "
"I"m not asking you: I"m telling you. I have to get to Dresden before they do, and I need your expertise."
"They?" But I knew who he meant.
"Greene and Elgar."
"How do you know?"
"I asked at the hotel."
"But how do you know they"ve gone to Dresden?"
"Where else? Elgar"s set the trap, now he"s gone to spring it. I don"t know whether Greene will go with him, but it seems too much of a coincidence that he"s vanished as well. I hope he"ll be there we need an ally."
"Doctor, your use of the word "we" tells me you"re making some a.s.sumptions here. I don"t see how you can get to Dresden, and as I"ve told you, there is no possibility that I can help you, let alone come with you." I was trying to keep my words reasonable, but I was shaking with excitement and confusion. I wanted to go, yearned for it, even though I knew it was impossible and stupid.
"Bernard can get us across the border," said the Doctor. "We"ll have to lie to him, but that"s a small sin, and I"ll do it if you like."
"Bernard!"
"Yes. He"s a collaborator at least, he ran a business that served German officers and their wives. He"s shipping some of his friends to Switzerland tomorrow not that it will do them any good in the long run, of course. We could join them, for a small fee."
I looked around the tiny, swaying s.p.a.ce between the carriages, through the window to the pa.s.sageway. The doors to the compartments, compressed by perspective, were all closed. I imagined normal people behind those doors, businessmen, perhaps, or officers on leave, going home to their businesses or their wives, burdened with normal worries that didn"t include accompanying a half-mad traitor into enemy territory and paying a n.a.z.i collaborator for the privilege.
"No," I said. "I can"t possibly have anything to do with that. In any case, it"s no good going to Switzerland "
"One of them is German. Going on to Dresden."
"And that means they"ll let us through the border?"
"This is smuggling, Alan. We"re not crossing at the border posts." He grabbed my shoulders. "Come on, it will work!"
I realised then that I"d fallen in with an a.s.sumption the Doctor had set up in our conversation, that is, that I was willing to go but was doubtful about the practicality of the arrangements.
"No," I said again. I s.n.a.t.c.hed myself away from his hands, turned and pushed open the heavy door that led back to the compartment. I half hoped the Doctor would say something, enter some further plea in his defence, but there was only the sound of the door banging shut behind me.
I turned, saw a steward, only a steward, hurrying away from me along the pa.s.sageway in the next carriage, past the compressed perspective of the compartment doors.
Brevell expressed no curiosity as to my prolonged absence: he was reading a book on motorcar maintenance. He glanced up at me. "Got anything to read, sir?"
"Actually, I haven"t," I confessed. "I"ve never been much of one for novels, and practical matters I prefer to learn by practising them."
Brevell nodded. "So do I. But it"s going to be a long journey. I need something to do, and I don"t like novels either."
"When will we reach Cherbourg?"
"It"s Le Havre now, sir. There"s been a change of plan the railway track has been damaged by a military transport train. Got derailed. And we"ll not get there until five."
We were in fact stopping as he spoke, still within the built-up area of Paris.
"You married, sir?"
I glanced at him, puzzled as to the reason for such a personal question. For the first time I noticed his face: round and clerical, with a neat head of blond hair. He looked as if he should be in a suit, behind a counter at a bank or a high-cla.s.s shop. I guessed that within a couple of years he would be.
"I"ve been married five years," he told me, evidently taking my silence as a "no". "Day after war broke out, we married, Joan and I." He paused. "Two kids, both boys. I was worried about them, and the missus, all the way through this war. I still worry, with the buzz bombs and that. But it makes you realise. Having kids that"s what it"s all for. Why we"re fighting. For their future, so they can have it better than us."
"And will that make them any different from us?"
"Different!" He shook his head. "Why should they be any different, Mr Turing? I"d want them to be just the same as me. Only better off. No war and that."
"So you want carbon copies?" I regretted the remark as soon as I"d made it, and I saw the stiffening of Brevell"s face that indicated he had not understood my humour and had become offended.
When he spoke, there was an edge of harshness in his voice. "Get married, Mr Turing. That"s what I suggest. A man don"t get married, he gets cynical. Forgets what life is really all about. It"s like that song "birds do it, bees do it". Making carbon copies is life, Mr Turing. That " he waved out of the carriage window, and I saw that a train was grinding past on the next track loaded with canvas-sheathed field guns "that"s death. There isn"t anything else, just life and death. You think there is, when you"re young " I was fairly sure he was younger than I was "but it isn"t so. Joan taught me that. That"s why she made me marry her before I went away to war. And she was right."
I felt like a.s.sa.s.sinating him, there and then, for the blandness of his sentiments. There was a whole world he didn"t understand, was content never to understand, and was content for his children never to understand. A world of mathematics and magic and science and beauty. I wanted to tell him about it, but he was reading his book again, and besides, I felt I"d offended him enough already.
The train began to move, albeit slowly, and I was offered a view of flat fields under leaden clouds, lines of poplars, rivers laden with dull brown mud. After a while, I began to realise I"d done Brevell an injustice. He was, after all, reading a book on motor maintenance. There was no difference between that and mathematics. Both operated from a set of axioms; both had rules that needed to be followed; and both were capable of practical application to the real world. Perhaps, in the scheme of things, motor maintenance was actually more useful.
For a whimsical moment I wondered what Brevell would have said about the difference between mathematics and motor maintenance, and imagined him saying, "Both the same, sir, if you ask me, except that one has more mess." I wondered which that would be, as the train, gathering speed, rattled on.
After a moment or two I realised I was wool-gathering. I shouldn"t be doing that. Not when I had a choice. Not when I had the kind of choice that men such as Brevell were seldom if ever offered, and wouldn"t have recognised if it had been offered to them.
And what a choice! Here in the carriage was the safe fascination of mechanical things, the solid reality of a future in which children grow up just like their parents. Outside in the pa.s.sageway was the unsafe fascination of love, the liquid reality of a future where people did stupid things because the rules changed all the time and you had to feel your way through life. A reality that I could barely comprehend and that terrified me above any feeling of excitement.
I knew which I needed to choose.
I knew which I would would choose. choose.
I excused myself again, blaming it on too much wine the previous night, and escaped into the pa.s.sageway. I found the Doctor in the next carriage, with a tray in his hand bearing two full champagne gla.s.ses.
He caught my eye and smiled. "Would you like some more lemonade, sir?"
"I"ll go," I said.
"I know." He was still smiling. "Perhaps, then, we should have the champagne."
He handed me a gla.s.s, and I held it, perfect, crystal, full of tiny bubbles. I laughed like a child, and so did he.
I know for certain now that it was the best moment of my life. I have known nothing better, before or since, than standing on that swaying train with the Doctor, with the grey French fields pa.s.sing outside, and the murder of war ahead.
Book Two
The Heart of the Matter
Chapter Ten.
Since Turing is now dead, I am forced at this point to impose on you a break in the narrative, and a change of narrator. It"s something I would never do to a reader of one of my novels. In a work of fiction, such a change of direction is irritating. If an author can"t say everything from the point of view of one "I", then he had better stick to the third person (but perhaps I"m being too much the jaded professional here I"ve had my own huge difficulties with "I" novels, and I"m perhaps the last person to tell other authors what to do).
I did consider continuing without a break, by adopting Turing"s style and point of view, but that would be neither fair nor honest, and perhaps impossible. I don"t know Turing"s side of the story, and (even after reading his narrative) I don"t understand the way he sees the world it"s alien to everything I know.
My first impression when I met him in that cold Nissen hut in Bletchley was of a serious, effete, untidy man with a single valuable talent. He had the mind of a child a weak child, timid and unyielding and like a child he was given to tantrums when he didn"t get his own way. His unnatural s.e.xual orientation, and his imposition of that att.i.tude on the as.e.xual being of the Doctor, were typical of his att.i.tude to life. He may not have been very much more sinful than any of us, but he had no guilt for his sins, and that made him less than a whole man.
I can"t say I"m surprised that his death was a suicide he smeared cyanide around an apple, and took a bite. At the inquest they hinted that he might have been "of unsound mind" as a result of his deviant s.e.xual behaviour there had been a trial, a public shaming, following a sordid affair with a street boy in 1952. However, I think the reasons for his death lay deeper than s.e.x. The way he chose to die the knowing apple, poisoned from Eden has that heightened Christian symbolism often chosen at desperate moments by those who call themselves atheists. Maybe he did, in extremis in extremis, begin to feel a human guilt for the way he had lived his life. I am given further hope for Turing by those last words of the transcript, in which he describes his decision to go with the Doctor in terms of a choice, love rather than the mechanism. Perhaps the poisoned apple was his second attempt at making that choice. If so, I hope it was more successful than the first.
It was about six months after his death that I received the tape: a metal disc about two feet in diameter, spooled with dull, brown, plastic ribbon. I had no means of playing it, and if I had the recorded sound would have been meaningless, if I understand Turing"s remarks about encryption correctly. However, the tape was accompanied by the above transcript. There was also a letter signed by an Intelligence operative, informing me that Turing had wanted me to have the tape, and that the transcription had been thoroughly vetted and found to contain no secret information.
It"s self-evident that the second claim isn"t true, and I don"t know how the tape and transcript got out of the offices of the Intelligence services. I was suspicious, even a little nervous, as I read the transcript, and I seriously considered sending the tape back. Then I saw the signature on the letter: "Doctor John X Smith". I chuckled then, recognising the touch of a familiar hand. The Doctor"s insouciance, his way of using apparent coincidence, parallels that of our Maker Himself a similarity which I think is neither deliberate nor accidental, but inevitable. As I looked at the scrawled signature it was as if the Doctor were standing by me again, with that earnest, encouraging smile on his face, telling me there was a meaning to this.
Or perhaps he wasn"t there, wasn"t anything to do with it. Perhaps the security services were just being stupid they had been stupid enough during the war, and afterwards.
Whatever the Doctor"s role in the matter, the security risks are real enough. They are certain to prevent publication of this doc.u.ment for decades. I"ve chosen to allow the release of the papers in the year 2000, forty-six years hence, when the security risk will be minimal, and when, more importantly, all the princ.i.p.al characters in the action will (I hope) be dead. I have chosen to finish this story, since Turing has started it and since (perhaps) the Doctor wishes me to continue, but I don"t want anyone to read it not while I"m still around to answer for it.
Before I can continue, I need to point out some fundamental errors of fact in Turing"s narrative. He doesn"t appear to have understood perhaps he never understood the reasons why I became involved with "the strangers", the makers of the Dresden Code. He appears to have a.s.sumed that I came to the case by accident. If he had questioned this a.s.sumption (as he would no doubt have questioned a mathematical one), he would have found that my involvement began long before his probably before the Doctor"s.
In 1942 I was working in Sierra Leone, based in the capital, Freetown. My job was to run agents that is, to provide them with money, cover stories and communications, and to get information back to London. It was easy work, requiring some imagination and initiative, though there was a great deal of dull and repet.i.tive decoding to be done. What seemed best of all to me when I was first offered the post was that it would allow me to live away from the dull grey world of wartime England and yet still serve my country. Sierra Leone was not as significant a posting as I would have liked there was little action there compared with Cairo or Johannesburg but it was a country I knew well, having travelled there in the thirties. And it was not a backwater: with the Mediterranean closed to shipping, all convoys had to go to Egypt and North Africa via the Atlantic and the West Coast, and Freetown was the main port of call. In addition, Sierra Leone had a long border with French Guinea, which was under Vichy French and therefore German control. It was always possible that an invasion might be mounted, and for this reason I ran a large number of agents in the remoter areas of the country. It was occasionally necessary for me to travel out of the capital to visit them.
These missions were a relief from the boredom that quickly descended upon me in the stifling capital city on more than one occasion I"m convinced they saved my sanity. The discomforts and dangers of travel have never troubled me as much as the itchy depression that invades me when I stay in one place for too long. I would drive my hard-sprung car through fifty miles of heat and humidity to spend the night in villages that were no more than clearings in the jungle with a few ramshackle huts. I would sleep in a tent under double layers of netting and yet was still bitten by insects. I would meet agents in brick-built missions, shanty huts, on bare roads far from anywhere.
On such an expedition in June of 1942, I arrived at a village called Markebo to find it deserted. The place had a Mary Celeste Mary Celeste air, the single street of wooden huts silent, not even a dog stirring. Unnerved, I stopped the car short and got out. My head boy, Jackson a slope-shouldered Mende of greying hair and a certain lazy wisdom was travelling with me, and he noticed it first. "The air smells wrong, boss." air, the single street of wooden huts silent, not even a dog stirring. Unnerved, I stopped the car short and got out. My head boy, Jackson a slope-shouldered Mende of greying hair and a certain lazy wisdom was travelling with me, and he noticed it first. "The air smells wrong, boss."
He was right. The air of these villages would usually smell of cooking fires and animal s.h.i.t, but this was more like London in the rush hour before the war, when there was a great deal of motor traffic. It was a heavy, oily atmosphere, with a metallic, electrical odour. I looked around for vehicles, but saw none except my own Morris, incongruous as ever in the African bush. I remember wondering if there had been an invasion. This was a time of particular danger, not long after De Gaulle"s a.s.sault on Dakar. The village was only eight miles from the frontier. But I could see no vehicle tracks except our own.
I advanced along the road between the huts. It was the rainy season: the mud sucked at my boots, making progress slow and noisy. Nothing moved in response. I saw a hut with the door hanging open, and had a look inside. There were dirty wooden bowls on a low table, and a stool had toppled. The Mary Celeste Mary Celeste came to mind again: I began to feel not afraid but unsettled. Perhaps there had been a raid by cattle thieves my friend Brodie, the police commissioner in Freetown, had mentioned that they were in this area. He"d suggested I go out armed, but I don"t like carrying weapons. came to mind again: I began to feel not afraid but unsettled. Perhaps there had been a raid by cattle thieves my friend Brodie, the police commissioner in Freetown, had mentioned that they were in this area. He"d suggested I go out armed, but I don"t like carrying weapons.
I turned back and walked up the muddy road, ready to return to the relative safety of the vehicle and move on to the next village where I was due to meet my contact. I had my hand on the hot dry metal of the car and Jackson had already got in when a voice began to sing behind me. I couldn"t tell if it was a man or a woman: it was of a pitch that could have been either. The tone was as rich and warm as a contralto in an opera house. There were no words. I listened for perhaps a minute, then called out. The voice stopped, then replied in a warbling recitative which was no language that I recognised. Jackson jumped up in his seat and shouted a warning to me in English. At the same time I had the feeling of presence behind me.
I turned and saw a white man emerging from the shadows of the hut that I had just examined. He was dressed as an African chieftain, in the local dyed cloths, but there was a wrongness in the way he wore them. It wasn"t just his white skin: his body was wrong. He carried himself in a light, awkward fashion, like a bird that has alighted on the ground to search for food but might at any moment take off again. And indeed he must have landed from the thin air, because I had looked inside that hut and I can swear there was no more than a single room, and that it had been empty.
Whilst I puzzled as to how he had got there, he sang to me. I looked at Jackson, who shrugged. I advanced along the street towards the stranger.
"Where are the Africans?" I asked.
Again, he stopped singing. Two more white men emerged from the hut, dressed in old loose clothes of the sort that ordinary African villagers might wear. Despite their white skins, they didn"t look European: the way they carried themselves was wrong. One was bare-chested, and I noticed heavy collarbones protruding from his flesh. It was as if he were malnourished, though his ribs didn"t show.
All three sang, to each other, to me, to Jackson, who had followed me down the street. They accompanied the singing with mannered, yet awkward, gestures. It was like an opera, and would have been funny, except for the signs of fear and abandonment around the village.
"Where are the Africans?" I asked again. "The people who live here where?"
Jackson translated my question into a couple of the local languages. The strangers turned and looked at him but showed no sign of understanding. I examined the shirtless man"s back, and saw that his shoulder blades protruded. I half expected to see the amputated stumps of wings. I experienced a moment of confusion, almost delirium. Was I asleep? Hallucinating? What I was seeing, hearing, even what I was smelling, made no sense at all. It was not, could not, be connected with the real world of agents, telegrams and war.
I could see that Jackson was getting jittery his hand was on the long knife at his belt. "Get back to the car," I called to him. "I"ll deal with this." Though I had no idea what to do.
I studied the faces of the strangers. They looked like bewildered children, on the cusp between simple confusion and tears. Could they be French spies, an advance guard for the invasion? The idea was ridiculous. Why dress as Africans? Why weren"t they armed? But if they were mad, it was a strange madness. It occurred to me that it might be the holy kind. Back then, I hadn"t seen any miracles, and I had the eager notion that I might be witnessing one: a direct intervention of the Divine in my life. It made no sense to think that way, but miracles are always nonsense.
I heard my voice saying the most absurd thing possible, which was, "I am English come with me."
Jackson looked on with an alert curiosity. But he was loyal, and said nothing. We accommodated two of the three strangers uncomfortably in the back of the car with the boy: the "chieftain" rode with me in the front, his leg jammed up against the gear stick. He muttered a few s.n.a.t.c.hes of song as we drove along, but although I tried phrases in every European language I could remember (which was quite a few), he made no response.
The next village, D"nalyel, was bigger. There was a redbrick Catholic mission with a school. Here I found a crowd of noisy Africans, some almost naked. From their confused jabbering, half translated by Jackson, I worked out that these were the people who had fled from Markebo. But they showed no fear of the newcomers, which suggested that they had another reason for leaving.
I couldn"t make myself understood in English, so I got the boy to translate. "Ask them why they left the village."
There was a great deal more chattering then, and fearful looks, and waving of hands. One of the villagers grabbed my arm and shook me, as if trying to alert me to a danger I couldn"t see. No one showed much interest in the strangers, who sat in the car and watched the proceedings in silence, with expressionless faces.
"Demons," said the boy at last. "The sky turned black, and there were demons."
I didn"t believe that then, and I don"t believe it now. I"m not sure what manifestation accompanied the strangers" appearance, but I doubt it was supernatural, in the sense that they believed, nor in the way that I half hoped for at the time.