Free Enigma by Robert Harris

it.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know.” Jericho shrugged. “Just to handle it. To get a
feel of it. I’ve been out of the game for a month.”
    “You think we may have missed something, perhaps?”
    “Not at all. But Logie has asked me.”
    “Ah yes. The celebrated Jericho “inspiration” and “intuition”.”
Puck couldn’t conceal his irritation. “And so from science and
logic we descend to superstition and “feelings”.”
    “For heaven’s sake, Puck!” Jericho was starting to become
annoyed himself. “Just humour me, if that’s how you prefer to look
at it.”
    Puck glared at him for a moment, and then, as quickly as they
had arisen, the clouds seemed to pass. “Of course.” He held up his
hands in a gesture of surrender. “You must see it all. Forgive me.
I’m tired. We’re all tired.”
    Five minutes later, when Jericho walked into the Big Room
carrying the folder of Shark cryptograms, he found his old seat had
been vacated. Someone had also laid out in his place a new pile of
jotting paper and three freshly sharpened pencils. He looked
around, but nobody seemed to be paying him any attention.
    He laid the intercepts out on the table. He loosened his scarf.
He felt the radiator—as ever, it was lukewarm. He blew some warmth
on to his hands and sat down.
    He was back.
    §
    Whenever anyone asked Jericho why he was a mathematician—some
friend of his mother, perhaps, or an inquisitive colleague with no
interest in science—he would shake his head and smile and claim he
had no idea. If they persisted, he might, with some diffidence,
direct them to the definition offered by G.H. Hardy in his famous
Apology: “a mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of
patterns”. If that didn’t satisfy them, he would try to explain by
quoting the most basic illustration he could think of: pi—3.14—the
ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Calculate pi to
a thousand decimal places, he would say, or a million or more, and
you will discover no pattern to its unending sequence of digits. It
appears random, chaotic, ugly. Yet Leibnitz and Gregory can take
the same number and tease from it a pattern of crystalline
elegance:
    ♦
    Pi⁄4=1-1⁄3+1⁄5-1⁄7+1⁄9—
    ♦
    —and so on to infinity. Such a pattern had no practical
usefulness, it was merely beautiful—as sublime, to Jericho, as a
line in a fugue by Bach—and if his questioner still couldn’t see
what he was driving at, then, sadly, he would give up on them as a
waste of time.
    On the same principle, Jericho thought the Enigma machine was
beautiful—a masterpiece of human ingenuity that created both chaos
and a tiny ribbon of meaning. In the early days at Bletchley he
used to fantasise that some day, when the war was over, he would
track down its German inventor, Herr Arthur Scherbius, and buy him
a glass of beer. But then he’d heard that Scherbius had died in
1929, killed—of all ludicrously illogical things—by a runaway
horse, and hadn’t lived to see the success of his patent.
    If he had, he would have been a rich man. By the end of 1942
Bletchley estimated that the German had manufactured at least a
hundred thousand Enigmas. Every Army headquarters had one, every
Luftwaffe base, every warship, every submarine, every port, every
big railway station, every SS brigade and Gestapo HQ.
    Never before had a nation entrusted so much of its secret
communications to a single device.
    In the mansion at Bletchley the cryptanalysts had a roomful of
captured Enigmas and Jericho had played with them for hours. They
were small (little more than a foot square by six inches deep),
portable (they weighed just twenty-six pounds) and simple to
operate. You set up your machine, typed in your message, and the
ciphertext was spelled out, letter by letter, on a panel of small
electric bulbs. Whoever received the enciphered message merely had
to set up his machine in exactly the same way, type in the
cryptogram, and there, spelled out