A Burial at Sea

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

So absorbing had life on board been that Lenox had half forgotten the reason he was there at all. But it had been nearly a week now. They would make landfall in Egypt after only five or six more days, four if the wind was exceptionally kind.

So that afternoon he went to his cabin and removed the papers Edmund had handed him at the Plymouth docks from their leather satchel. After coming down from the crow’s nest he had had a good lunch, of roasted chicken, peas, and potatoes, washed down with a half bottle of claret, and then he had slept for an hour or so, physically exhausted. Now he felt refreshed, his mind sharp. He was prepared to read his orders.

There were three sheets of paper, each a mess of jumbled numbers and letters, none of them ever forming a word, much less a sentence. They had been written in cipher by a cryptographer working for the British government.

Thankfully Lenox knew the key to the cipher. For his sake it was a simple one: the first thirteen letters of the alphabet corresponded to the second thirteen, so that the letter A in fact denoted the letter N, the letter B in fact denoted the letter O, and so on. Meanwhile the cardinal numbers one through thirteen corresponded to the first thirteen letters of the alphabet, so that a one denoted an A and a thirteen denoted an M. Numbers more than thirteen were used as line breaks or spaces. The first enciphered word of his brother’s letter—4-5-1-E—therefore translated in plain English into the word Dear.

Edmund had told Lenox of this system and made him recite it back several times, until the older brother was satisfied that the younger brother would remember. Now Lenox made a key for himself and set about translating the first of the three documents, his brother’s letter. This took half an hour or so of lip-biting effort. In its translated version the letter read:

Dear Charles,

Two documents are enclosed with this letter. We have enciphered both, believing that it would draw attention to have enciphered only one. The first, marked

Alpha

in the upper right-hand corner, details your official responsibilities in Suez, and the second, marked

Omega

in the upper right-hand corner, your covert ones. It is a matter of the highest importance that you should destroy both this letter and the document marked

Omega

as soon as you have committed the simple details of

Omega

to your memory.

Alpha

you may keep, and not bother hiding—should the French find it and decipher it they would discover only your official itinerary, and it might command their attention for long enough to keep their eyes off of you.

Please accept the pistol they offer you at the consulate; you should carry it as a precaution. Return home safely, please, and know me to be,

Your affectionate and grateful brother,

Edmund

For all his life Lenox had kept files full of the letters he received, dating back to school days and the Lord Chesterfield missives his father sent to Harrow. Now, though, he dutifully shredded Edmund’s letter into pieces, did the same with his scrawled translation, and dropped the resultant confetti through his porthole and into the ocean. Now he had only the two letters from the prime minister’s office and his quickly drawn-up key on his desk.

There would be time to look over his official activities, and at any rate the resident consulate would no doubt shepherd him through his duties. It was more urgent to memorize the details of his clandestine mission.

Translation of the Omega document was more difficult than translation of the letter, because there were more proper names and it was therefore more difficult to guess words after the first few letters. An hour of labor earned him a terse set of directions.

Mr. Lenox:

- Your meeting will take place on May fifteenth at ten minutes before midnight, three days after you are scheduled to arrive. If the

Lucy

has not reached Port Said by the afternoon of the fifteenth, the meeting will be delayed exactly twenty-four hours.

- Near your hotel is a club for the use of European gentlemen, known in English as Scheherazade’s. Arrive there early, preferably by an hour or so, and order a (nonalcoholic) drink. In the fourth room on the left is a small door. Behind it is a staircase leading to the establishment’s kitchen. Your meeting will take place in the kitchen. A diagram of exits from the kitchen and the Scheherazade are on the back of this sheet. Commit them to memory.

- Your contact, whom you may call Monsieur Sournois, will be at the rear of the kitchen, which at this hour will be empty. He is over six foot, dark-haired, and missing the smallest finger of his left hand. He will say the following phrase to you in English:

“The kitchen is always closed when one is hungriest.”

To this you will respond:

“There’s never a meal to be had in Port Said after ten.”

He will then answer all of the questions your brother has instructed you to ask. He will not ask about payment; it has been arranged.

- When your meeting is concluded, take the exit marked B in the diagram on the reverse of this page. The corridor outside of it will lead to the street. Return to your hotel. Write the answers Sournois gave you in cipher,

without copying down names, dates, or figures

. These you must commit to your memory. Should you be followed, fall in with other people and make your voice and presence conspicuous.

- When you reach Port Said, the consular staff will greet your ship. In all matters other than your meeting accept their guidance.

- Should anything go amiss, you must for your own safety immediately make your way to the consulate, and then with all possible haste to your ship.

- Destroy this document once you have memorized its contents.

As he read this Lenox’s nerves began to tense. It had seemed simple in the warmth of his London library: go to Egypt and perform a variety of official functions, and while off duty receive information from a French spy. Now it seemed like a mission fraught with danger.

Mingled with this new anxiety, however, was excitement. He was eager to arrive at their destination: Port Said, a city that lay at the north of the canal, near the top of the continent, just as the city of Suez lay at the canal’s southern point. He wondered what it would be like, and a series of images flashed through his mind: the nomadic Bedouins of the desert, almond-eyed women whose mouths were covered with veils, dancing in dimly lit dens, curved swords, camels, tin lanterns carved with Moslem symbols. All the stuff of boyhood books about the great Arabic world.

It was impossible to know whether any of that still existed. Of course the canal had changed Africa drastically, permitting goods from the center of the continent to reach its northern edge, around Port Said, and then to be absorbed into the great trade currents of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. There would be Europeans crawling all over the city—a concern, now that he came to think of it, though thankfully he and Sournois both had legitimate business to conduct, from all Edmund had said.

Now the implications of this document, the one in his hands, returned with full force to Lenox’s mind: conflict between the world’s two greatest nations, its two greatest navies, its two greatest armies. A war across the channel. It was within his power to help England, either by avoiding the war or by giving her a head start if the war was inevitable. A daunting thought.

He read through the letter twice more, and then looked out at the waning light and thought for a while.

“McEwan, would you fetch me a cup of tea?” he called out to the hallway at last.

“Yes, sir,” McEwan’s voice rang back.

“And while you’re at it I’ll take some toast.”

“And cakes, sir?”

“And cakes, why not.”

Lenox hid the document marked Alpha and then shredded his translation of Omega, the original, enciphered document, and his key, and again dumped the confetti out through his porthole. His tea arrived just as the last scraps of torn white paper sank beneath the water. He took a sip and contemplated what they had said, and what the next week of his life might be like.