Free I Can't Begin to Tell You by Elizabeth Buchan Page B

Box.’ He pushed the paper across to Felix. ‘We have fine minds working on them. Some of the ditties can be read by a maiden aunt without a blush. Most of them can’t. Sad but true. It’s easier to remember a filthy poem.’
    Felixread aloud.
Do you wish for a silver fish
    To leap through the stream?
    Do you wish for the light
    To shine on yours and mine?
    Do you wish for the peace of my kiss?
    He grinned. ‘Can’t I have a dirty ditty?’
    ‘They’re all in use. But I’ll get the FANYs on to it. They’re ace.’ Major Martin glanced at the ditty. ‘Sorry, not one of our finest. But it was composed in the small hours. Could you memorize it?’
    Felix was warming to Major Martin. ‘I may be cold, hungry, in the dark and surrounded by the flower of the Gestapo closing in, but I promise to remember The Firm’s second-best poem. But I have to say, it’s not even a second best …’
    ‘I apologize, I really do, but the enemy won’t know it. Bonus?’
    Felix dragged on the cigarette. The major watched him.
    ‘Does it help to know that we will keep your test coding exercises? If you make a muddle and we can’t decode the message – we call those the indecipherables – we will crawl all over your test coding exercises. They reveal your weaknesses, your lapses of speech, so to speak. We will use them to help us work out what has gone wrong.’
    ‘Even if they’ve captured me and are making me send messages?’
    A small silence.
    Major Martin was wise enough not to comment. ‘I’m here to persuade you that you possess the skill and competence to send these messages. In return, you must allow me to understand how you work.’ He pushed another piece of paper in Felix’s direction. ‘Being Danish you might know about ice hockey.’
    ‘A little.’
    ‘I want you to tackle the exercise I am about to set you as if you were assembling an ice hockey team.’
    ‘MajorMartin, this gets better and better.’
    Major Martin smiled. Again, there was a suggestion of deep anxiety behind the easy manner. He worries about us, Felix thought. Major Martin is responsible for sending us lot out into the darkness armed with not much more than doggerel, and he knows it.
    ‘You have twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘Choose your words from the poem and encode: “Send explosives, guns, chocolate
stop
”.’
    It was hard work and Felix found himself sweating. Some idiot had suggested to him that there was poetry in encryption, in the silent stalking down of words, in transforming them, but for the life of him he couldn’t see it.
    Major Martin assessed the result. ‘I detect a case of coding paralysis,’ he commented. ‘A word of advice. Always go back to the beginning.’
    The session was proving to be a humiliating one.
    ‘Stubborn is the word,’ said Major Martin.
    ‘Stubborn it is …’ The words issued through Felix’s gritted teeth.
    Major Martin eventually wrapped it up. ‘Good. But you have forgotten something vital.’
    ‘The security checks.’
    ‘Correct,’ said Major Martin. ‘If I, or one of my formidable team, read this message we would assume you and the set
had
been captured.’
    ‘What about the decoding?’ asked Felix.
    ‘Decoding will be for another session. Coding and encoding are different animals. It’s rare to be good at both. Odd that, isn’t it? But I’m going to make you practise until you beg for mercy. A few tips: free your language, vary your transposition keys.
Don’t
fall into set patterns. Code as if you are … er … making love.’
    Felix was shaken awake by Jacob shouting in his ear. ‘Go, go. Police in the street.’
    For precisely that reason, Felix had not undressed. It tookonly seconds to snatch up his boots, jacket and peaked hat and let himself out of the back of Jacob’s cottage.
    He wheeled the bicycle into the street, jammed on the cap and set off in the direction of the town centre, keeping the pace deliberately leisurely. At Sankt Nicolai Kirke he pushed the