Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 77, No. 4. Whole No. 451, March 25, 1981

The Spy and the Walrus Cipher by Edward D. Hoch

Mr. Hoch reminds us that “the Rand stories started out being about codes and ciphers,” and he is always pleased when he “can return to that original concept of a secret message.” We are also pleased. As for Rand, the Double-C man, he must be pleased too. When Hastings, his former superior, calls, Rand can’t help wondering if he’ll ever be free of his past, when he was director of Concealed Communications for British Intelligence. But thank St. Edgar, Rand does go back to work — grumbling a bit perhaps, but deep down, pleased...

“We have a defector,” Hastings said over the telephone. “A really top-level fellow, straight from Moscow.”

“Good for you!” Rand congratulated him. “I’m retired, remember?”

“And I know I promised not to bother you with our troubles, Rand, but we’re in a bit of a bind. We have this fellow at the estate up in Scotland along with a crack team of debriefers, and the trouble is he won’t talk.”

“Won’t talk? Then what did he defect for?”

“He says he’ll talk to you, Rand. Nobody else.”

“Who is it?”

Hastings hesitated. “Your home telephone isn’t secure. I don’t want to mention any names.”

Rand held the receiver away from him, tempted to hang up and be done with it. Still, if the defector was asking for him—

“All right,” he decided. “I suppose I can come see him. Where do you want me?”

“I can’t go up myself. We’re busy with this Middle East thing. But if you’ll be at Heathrow at ten in the morning I’ll have someone meet you with instructions and plane tickets. We’ll want you to fly up there, of course. It’s too dangerous bringing him down to London.”

“Very well,” Rand agreed. He hung up the phone wondering if he would ever be free of his past, free of Hastings and those others who’d been part of his life when he was director of Concealed Communications for British Intelligence.

He went into the kitchen and told his wife, “Leila, I have to go away for a few days. Up to Scotland.”

She didn’t look up from the mixing bowl. It was her semester break from the course she taught at Reading University, and Rand knew she’d been hoping they could go off somewhere for a few days. “For Hastings?” she asked simply.

“Yes.”

“It’s always for Hastings, isn’t it? How much of our lives does that man want?”

“They have a defector. He won’t speak to anyone but me.”

“It must be nice to feel so wanted.”

“Leila—”

“Never mind. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll try to be back by Wednesday. We’ll still have the weekend.”

“Yes. The weekend.”

Spring came late to that portion of Scotland, and though the trees were beginning to leaf out there was still a memory of winter’s dampness clinging to the air. Rand had visited the estate, as it was called, only once before — when he’d been a junior cipher clerk in British Intelligence. Now, driving up to the front door with a laconic chauffeur who’d met him at Glasgow Airport, he was struck at once by the changes which had gone into modernizing the place. They might pass unnoticed to the casual observer, but to Rand’s practiced eye the steel window grilles, the unobtrusive television cameras, and the electronic door locks shouted a need to keep people out — or in, as the case may be.

The present interior of the rambling country house was even more startling. An entire wing that had once housed a cozy library and study had been gutted to make room for a modern computer and communications center. Sir Roscoe Hammond, the tall white-haired intelligence officer who’d greeted him at the door, seemed to take particular pride in it.

“We have equipment here that’s the equal of anything in Whitehall or your old department, Rand. Instant communication with any British embassy in the world, plus the latest in decoding equipment. This is my responsibility at those times when we don’t have guests staying here.”

“When will I meet your guests?”

“The debriefing team will be at lunch. They’ve delayed it especially for you.” They walked past a row of electric typewriters where tailored young women worked without looking up. “What do you think of it all, eh? Changed quite a bit since your last visit, I’ll wager.”

“It certainly has,” Rand agreed, wondering how this proper diplomat knew of his last visit. Perhaps on one of those computer reels behind their dustproof windows was stored the history of everyone who crossed these portals.

“This way, then,” Hammond said. “You must be hungry.”

Rand was pleased to see that the massive formal dining room, at least, had been left intact. The long table could seat a dozen with ease, but at the moment there were only six places set, clustered at one end. A striking young woman with coal-black hair turned and smiled as they entered.

“Ah, Roscoe, so you’ve brought our visitor! This must be the celebrated Mr. Rand.”

Rand returned her smile. “You have me at a disadvantage.”

Hammond took charge of the introductions. “Rand, this is Polly Carver, our language expert. As it turned out, we haven’t needed her skills. The person in question speaks quite acceptable English.”

She shook Rand’s hand. “A pleasure to meet you.”

“I hope I’m not all that celebrated,” he remarked, unable to tear his gaze from her emerald-green eyes. “It can be fatal in this line of work.”

“Ah, but you’re retired, and retired spies are like retired chief inspectors of Scotland Yard. They settle down to write their memoirs and appear on television talk shows.”

“I haven’t done that yet, though I will admit to doing a bit of writing. I may even turn to fiction, if that’s a way around the Official Secrets Act.”

She directed him to a chair next to her own, while Hammond went in search of the others. “You seem awfully young to be retired. When they said the famous Rand was coming up to see our prize I anticipated a kindly gray-haired gentleman with a walking stick.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” he murmured.

“It’s hardly a disappointment! In fact, you’re the one bright spot of an otherwise dreary week. I expect—”

She was interrupted by the return of Roscoe Hammond. He had a short stocky man in tow, whom he introduced as, “Toby Fly, our expert on covert operations.”

Toby Fly walked with a peculiar rolling motion that hinted at some old leg injury that hadn’t entirely healed. He was a jolly man with a little mustache and an obvious eye for the youthful Miss Carver. “Pleased to meet you, Rand. Ah, I see you’ve been introduced to our Polly. Hands off her, now! I saw her first.”

“I’m a happily married man,” Rand told him with obvious sincerity.

Fly gave him a wink, then settled down to business. “You’re Hastings’ man in Concealed Communications, aren’t you?”

“Was. I’ve been retired nearly five years now.”

“That long? No wonder our paths never crossed.”

“You’d be wise to stay out of his path,” Polly Carver warned. “He likes to pinch.”

“Not men, I don’t!” Toby Fly chuckled. “You’re safe, Rand.”

Another man entered, somewhat younger than Hammond and Fly. He wore glasses and a studious look, but his broad shoulders and wide chest hinted that a muscle man might lurk beneath the casual white sweater and slacks. “Mark Temple — Professor Mark Temple — our Russian expert.”

“Hello, Rand. I believe we met once at a symposium up at Cambridge, just after you retired. Good to see you again.”

Rand remembered the man then. He’d seemed brilliant but slightly pompous in spite of his youth, and Rand hadn’t realized then that he was part of the intelligence community. “Yes, I remember your theories on Soviet expansion in the Middle East. You proved to be quite a prophet.”

“It’s my specialty,” Temple replied, accepting the praise. Then he told Hammond, “We might as well start. Olimski won’t be joining us for lunch.”

The name stirred Rand’s memory. “I thought Olimski defected years ago. He can’t be your mysterious guest.”

“No, no,” Hammond assured him. “Olimski is the fifth member of our debriefing team. We find it wise to have a previous defector present to put the subject at his ease. You see, I’m permanently assigned in charge of operations here. We use the estate as a worldwide communications center and as a jumping-off place for certain covert operations. The debriefing area is in the other wing, quite separate. We don’t have that many defectors these days, but it’s still a good place to bring them. Gets them away from the press until we have a chance to talk.”

A light lunch was served and they ate for a bit before Rand asked, “Just who is the defector?”

Hammond exchanged glances with the others. Then he replied, “Anton Lifnov.”

“Our biggest prize in years,” Toby Fly said. “You know him, don’t you, Rand?”

“I met him once in Moscow,” Rand admitted. “But it was quite casual. I can’t imagine why he’d ask for me to be here.” Lifnov was a middle-aged cog in the Russian intelligence machinery — a bureaucrat of no special importance who would now achieve his moment of glory as a defector to the west. Rand met the man briefly following some trouble in Moscow a few years back.

“He came here a week ago,” Roscoe Hammond continued. “Flew in by way of Dublin, accompanied by one of our people who arranged the defection. Claimed he had valuable information which he would sell us in return for money and a new identity in the west.”

“He came alone?”

“Yes. His wife died recently. Apparently he decided to make a new start. I went by the book and assembled a debriefing team: Temple, our Russian expert — Toby Fly, covert operations — Olimski, a previous defector — and Miss Carver, our language expert. Anton Lifnov arrived and met with us all — and would say nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“He refuses to discuss his former position or anything about his life in Moscow,” Polly Carver confirmed. “All he talks about is our weather.”

“But he said he had information.”

Mark Temple took up the conversation. “So he did. But whatever it is, he won’t tell us. We tried to reason with him but he would say nothing. Finally we asked him if there was anyone at all he would speak to.”

“He thought about it for a full day,” Toby Fly said. “Then he came up with your name, Rand. We knew you used to be one of Hastings’ people, so we phoned him.”

Rand finished the last of his lunch and sipped a cup of cool coffee. “Interesting. Well, I suppose as long as I’m here I really should see him as soon as possible.”

Hammond played nervously with his napkin ring. “Before you do, I think it would be wise if you spoke with Olimski. I’d hoped he would join us, but he’s been keeping pretty much to himself. Polly, could you take Mr. Rand up to Olimski’s room, please?”

“Certainly.” She patted her mouth with a napkin and pushed back her chair. “Let’s go up now.”

They left the three men still at the table and Rand followed her up the broad front staircase to the second floor. The sound of typewriters from the remodeled wing barely penetrated here, and by the time they reached the upstairs hall the thick carpeting deadened all sound. “The atmosphere around here is quite relaxed,” Rand observed.

“We’re all like children on holiday,” she admitted. “It’s such a treat after being cooped up in a London office.”

Rand noticed a locked door which seemed to lead to the far wing of the house. “Is that where Lifnov is?”

“Yes. You’ll see him soon. It’s kept locked for his own protection. He’s not a prisoner.” She paused before another door and knocked.

A voice from inside responded with a single word. “Enter.”

Rand knew Olimski from newspaper photographs at the time of his defection. He was a mountain of a man, with a smooth bald head and piercing dark eyes. He rose from his chair now and bowed slightly, a motion which seemed incongruous in someone so large. “Excuse me for not joining you at lunch, Polly,” he said in heavily accented English. “I was doing some writing.”

“This is Mr. Rand, the man Anton wished to see.”

“Ah!” He didn’t smile and Rand was unable to read his thoughts. “So you will succeed where all of us failed?”

“I’ll talk to him,” Rand said. “That’s about all I can promise. What do you think the problem is?”

Olimski shrugged his massive shoulders. “When I first came here I had my doubts too. Did I do the right thing? Could I ever go back to my countrymen? One gets over them. One learns to start a new life.”

“Is there anything I should know before I see him?”

“Only that you must go slowly with him. Remember, the Russian nature is a devious one at best. Do not judge him by your English standards.”

Rand thought he could understand why Olimski did not mingle with the others. “You don’t much care for the British, do you?”

Another shrug. “I will not speak ill while I am a guest in your country. Certainly if your people were all as charming as Miss Carver here there would be no problem.”

“Would you like to be with me when I speak to Lifnov?”

Polly Carver interrupted. “Anton especially requested that he meet with you in private, Mr. Rand.”

“Very well.” He held out a hand to the Russian. “Nice meeting you, Olimski. I’m sure we’ll have a chance to talk after I’ve heard what Lifnov has to say.”

At the door Polly Carver paused. “Will you be joining us for the evening meal?” she asked Olimski.

He hesitated, then said, “Yes, certainly. I will be down very soon.”

She closed the door behind them and led Rand down the hall. “A difficult man. I try to make allowances, but I find him hard to work with.”

“Did you know him before this week?”

“I was a member of the team that debriefed him following his defection three years ago.”

“Were any of the others on the team?”

“Well, Sir Roscoe was in charge of the estate, as he is now. But the others on the team were different. I only met Toby Fly this week. Mark Temple and I have known each other for about a year.”

There was something in her tone that caused him to respond, “Socially?”

“Why do you ask?”

“He’s a handsome young man, and you’re certainly attractive.”

“Thank you, kind sir.” She unlocked the door to the other wing, and it was obvious she didn’t plan a direct answer to his question about Temple. He supposed it was none of his business, after all, and her silence on the matter was really answer enough.

He followed her through another door into a small well-decorated suite. The colors were cheerful and one whole wall was filled with books in English and Russian. The small man who waited there for him was such a contrast to Olimski’s imposing bulk that Rand had to restrain himself from commenting on it. It was still the Anton Lifnov he remembered, but the man seemed to have shriveled since their last meeting.

“Ah, Rand!” he exclaimed. “It is so good to see you again, so good of you to come!”

Polly glanced at the tray of food on the coffee table. “You haven’t touched your lunch, Anton.”

“I was not hungry. Perhaps now that Rand is here I will drink a little of the wine.”

“I’ll leave you two alone,” she said. “Just push the buzzer when you’re finished.”

“You’re looking good,” Rand lied when they were alone.

Anton Lifnov smiled. “It was a difficult decision to come over to your side. Our meeting in Moscow was brief, but I think it was that as much as anything which finally decided me. You were not the villain I had imagined. You were only a man much like myself. I decided I could spend the rest of my life among such men.”

“And you can,” Rand assured him. “We’re all here to help you.”

The Russian paused and took a deep breath. “There is one problem. A very serious problem. That is why I told them I must see you.”

“I’ll help in any way I can.”

“You see, I came over to your side with a certain piece of information. It was to be my passport to a happier tomorrow. The information concerned a double agent now in the employ of British Intelligence.” Anton Lifnov smiled sadly and took the glass stopper from the decanter of wine on his luncheon tray. “A bit of white wine?”

“I’ll pass for the moment,” Rand said.

Lifnov filled his own glass and continued. “You must realize that day-to-day activities in my section were much like your own. We were a shadow of British Intelligence, trying to duplicate your thinking and your procedures. Wherever possible our equipment was the same as yours, even to the latest-model IBM typewriters like the ones downstairs.”

“I’m surprised they gave you a tour.”

“Briefly, on the night I arrived. No one was working there. I told Hammond the same thing. It reminded me of my office in Moscow.”

“Did you speak English there?”

“As much as possible. A knowledge of the language was essential in our cryptographic section, of course.”

“Of course.”

“So I was familiar with western ways, and when at last we met in Moscow that brief time, I began to think the west would not be so bad. My wife had died of cancer, I was at loose ends. Ideology meant little to me. I came west, bearing the name of a double agent as my security to a new life.”

“And?”

He lifted the wine glass. “They brought me here for debriefing, and I found that one of these five people was the very person I had planned to betray.”

“What?” Rand almost came out of his chair.

“You see why I could talk to none of them? I do not know their relationships. I do not know their loyalties. If I revealed the information to any one of them I could wind up dead before morning. That is why I had to have someone from outside, someone I thought I could trust. Yours was the only name I knew.” He took a drink of the wine.

“If what you’re telling me is true, we must—”

Rand froze, leaving the sentence unfinished, as Anton Lifnov suddenly dropped the wine glass and clawed at his throat.

“Lifnov! What is it?”

The Russian toppled out of his chair, and as Rand bent to help he caught the unmistakable odor of bitter almonds. There’d been cyanide in the wine, and Anton Lifnov had died with his secret.

The others came quickly in response to Rand’s summons. Of the five, Sir Roscoe Hammond seemed the most disturbed by the body on the floor. “My God, this will ruin me. Whoever poisoned him, it was my responsibility!”

Toby Fly took a quite different approach. “You’re telling me he was killed by one of us five?”

“That seems to be the case,” Rand agreed. “He told me one of you is a double agent. He had no contact with anyone else in the building, did he?”

“None,” Sir Roscoe confirmed. “He arrived at night. I showed him around a bit, introduced him to these four, and took him to this suite where he’s remained for the past week.”

“Who brought him his meals?”

“Sometimes we would all eat with him up here. Lately we’ve taken turns bringing him the food because he seemed to prefer eating alone.”

“Who brought it to him today?”

“I did,” Mark Temple answered.

Rand looked at the untouched food. “Perhaps that’s why he was afraid to eat it.”

“But he drank the wine,” Temple pointed out. “He wasn’t afraid of that.”

“Apparently he never considered poison,” Rand agreed. “Even the odor of bitter almonds didn’t warn him.”

Olimski grunted and came forward. “You are overlooking the most obvious possibility, Mr. Rand — that my comrade became depressed after fleeing his homeland and took his own life.”

“After telling me what he did? It hardly seems likely. Tell me something: who else had access to the luncheon tray, and especially to the decanter of wine?”

“I helped prepare the food,” Toby admitted. “I like puttering around in the kitchen.”

“And I poured the wine from a fresh bottle,” Polly Carver said. “Sir Roscoe was right there too.”

Hammond agreed. “Any of us but Olimski could have poisoned the decanter.”

Temple cleared his throat. “I’m afraid our Russian friend isn’t exempt from suspicion. I stopped by his room to see if he was joining us for lunch, and I had Lifnov’s tray along. I even set it down and chatted for a few moments. I went to the window when I heard your car arriving, Rand. He could have poisoned the wine while my back was turned.”

“What do you say to that?” Rand asked the Russian.

“It is not worthy of a reply.”

“So all five of you had the opportunity. Now what about the means? The cyanide?”

Roscoe Hammond sighed. “More of my responsibility, I fear. I told you this estate was occasionally used to mount covert operations. Naturally we have necessary supplies on hand — weapons, shortwave radios, secret inks, and suicide capsules.”

“Cyanide.”

“Exactly. Any of us could have stolen one and emptied the liquid into that decanter.”

“But none of us as well as you, Sir Roscoe,” Olimski observed.

Rand held up his hand. “Let’s calm down. We’ll get nowhere accusing each other. Toby, you’re in charge of covert operations. You must have known where the poison was kept here.”

“No, no, my friend. It was all Sir Roscoe’s responsibility at this end.”

Hammond took a deep breath. “They’ve been here a week, Rand. Any of them could have stumbled onto the poison, or brought some along for just such an emergency. We didn’t search them, after all.”

“What about the dead man?” Rand asked, staring down at his contorted body. “Did you search him?”

“No need. He came without luggage. We even gave him fresh clothing at this end.”

“And yet,” Rand remembered, “he said he came bearing the name of the double agent. Did he mean that literally, that he carried the name on his person?”

“Only one way to find out,” Toby Fly said. “Let’s strip him and examine the body.”

Sir Roscoe Hammond cleared his throat. “I think the young lady might be excused before we get on with this.”

Polly Carver bristled. “He’s a dead man, for God’s sake! I have as much right to stay as any of you.”

“Let’s get to it,” Rand said.

They found what they sought taped to the inside of his thigh with a wide plastic strip that almost exactly matched the color of his skin. Rand pulled it off with needless gentleness and held it up. “A tiny photograph,” he decided. “Someone bring me a magnifying glass.”

He peered at the photo print through the glass and saw three lines of typed letters, twenty letters to the line. “What do you make of it?” he asked Sir Roscoe, passing him the photograph and the glass.

“It’s a cipher!”

“Seems to be,” Rand agreed. The message read:

“The first word seems to be walrus,” Polly pointed out.

“Walrus?”

“Walrus,” Rand confirmed. “Walrus ork wait o fee hmf, if you want to separate it that way.”

“Walrus or Kwait,” Toby suggested. “Short for Kuwait, on the Persian Gulf?”

Rand took back the message. It had been years since he’d tackled an enemy cipher, but he’d spent most of his life cracking them. “I’ll need a blackboard,” he decided, “pads, pencils, chalk. And lots of black coffee.”

“You’re really going to try breaking it?” Hammond asked.

“Someone has to.”

Rand worked far into the evening while the others made arrangements for the disposition of the corpse. By midnight he’d tried the most likely substitutions without success. Toby Fly came up to watch him work. “Any luck, old man?”

“Not yet.” Rand tapped a list of letter frequencies he’d made. “There are twenty letters of the alphabet represented. E is the most frequent, occurring eight times, as you might expect in ordinary English. A is next, showing up seven times. Then N, O, R, and T with five each.”

“What does it mean?” Toby asked.

“Damned if I know.”

“I think I’ll go to bed.”

An hour later Temple and Polly came by. “Any luck?” Polly asked.

“All of it bad.”

Temple frowned at the blackboard where Rand had printed the message in large chalk letters. “Think it could be in Russian?”

“You know better than to ask that question. As a Russian expert you can see there are no characters from the Russian alphabet here.”

“True enough. But they could be English equivalents.”

“I doubt it. Before he died Lifnov told me they used English in the Moscow office as much as possible, trying to duplicate London conditions. From the sharpness of the letters in the photo I’d guess it was typed on a standard IBM typewriter, with an English language keyboard.”

“What about the walrus at the start?” Polly asked.

“It could be a key word signaling the exact cipher being used, in which case the actual message would start with the letters following.”

“Maybe it’s not a cipher at all,” she suggested. “Maybe it’s a book code.”

“What book?”

“Through the Looking-Glass. You remember ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter,’ don’t you?”

Rand took a deep breath and put down his chalk. Almost in unison the three of them attacked the shelves of books at the end of the room. After a few minutes’ search Temple shouted, “Here it is!”

“No good English library would be complete without Lewis Carroll,” Rand agreed, flipping the pages until the familiar Tenniel illustration of the two creatures caught his eye. “Here it is.”

It was a long poem, and they spent the next hour trying to make some connection between the letters on the blackboard and the words on the page.

Finally, admitting defeat, Temple and Polly left him alone.

He turned out the lights and started toward the room Hammond had assigned him. Then, to help him sleep better, he went downstairs and asked Sir Roscoe if he might have a weapon to keep in his room. The slender white-haired man eyed him distastefully. “Do you really think that’s necessary, Rand?”

“There’s a killer in this house.”

Hammond gave him a loaded Beretta automatic from his desk drawer.

In the morning the cryptic message was still on the blackboard. Sixty letters, arranged in three lines of twenty each. He broke them down into five-letter groups, the way coded messages were usually transmitted:

The second group in the middle line almost spelled typed, and this got him searching for possible anagrams.

“Still working at it?” Polly asked when she brought him breakfast at nine o’clock.

“I’m an early riser.” He stared at the orange juice and toast, wondering what good a Beretta under his pillow was when he ate the food they brought him without question.

“Olimski says he’s leaving today,” she told him.

“Can’t Hammond stop him?”

“He’s too concerned about London. They’ve heard what happened and they want to send a team up here.”

“They sent a team already,” Rand pointed out. “That’s what caused the trouble.”

“Perhaps Olimski is right about the possibility of suicide. Perhaps the whole thing is a Russian plot to have us suspecting one another.”

“That’s a bit bizarre even for them.”

“What about my book-code idea?”

“We tried that last night and got nowhere. Book codes use numbers, not letters.”

“Couldn’t these letters stand for their numerical place in the alphabet? WALRUS would be 23-1-12-18-21-19.”

Rand tried it, returning again to the Carroll poem. “The twenty-third word in the poem is and, hardly a good beginning for a message. The twenty-third letter is e.” He counted out the rest of them. “E-T-I-N-E-T. Nothing likely there.”

“You said WALRUS could be just a preliminary word. Start the message with the next part.”

“ORK gives us 15-18-11. The corresponding words in the poem are his, to, and his again. The letters are N-N-H.”

“Well, it was a good idea.”

“Let’s go down and see Olimski,” he suggested.

He locked the door of the suite behind them and followed Polly to the Russian’s room. But Olimski had already departed. The closet was empty and his bag was gone. They met Toby Fly on the stairs. “If you’re looking for that crazy Russian he’s in with Hammond, typing a letter to the Prime Minister!”

“What?”

“Says this whole matter was handled all wrong, that Lifnov was driven into a state of depression and killed himself.”

Toby was right. They found Olimski seated behind the big electric typewriter in Hammond’s office, carefully pecking out a message while Sir Roscoe stood by helplessly. “I am sorry,” Olimski told Rand and Polly, “but the truth must be told.”

Rand walked behind him and watched the words he was typing. “It wasn’t suicide, Olimski. It was murder. One of you is a double agent.”

Mark Temple appeared in the doorway, apparently summoned by Toby who brought up the rear. “What is this, Olimski? We’ve got enough trouble here without your going off and writing crazy letters!”

They were all talking at once then, but Rand wasn’t listening. He was staring down at the typewriter, watching the Russian’s fingers and the words as they appeared on the paper. Was it possible—?

“Rand, where are you going?” Hammond called after him, but he was already out of the office and vaulting up the stairs.

He unlocked the door and hurried over to the blackboard where the message was printed.

And then he knew.

“I should have poisoned you too,” a voice said from the doorway. “But a gun will be just as quick.”

Rand turned to face Toby Fly.

“Can we take that as a confession, Toby?”

The gun in Toby’s hand steadied and aimed, and Rand waited no longer. He fired the Beretta through the pocket of his jacket, hoping his unaimed shot would find its mark.

Toby’s weapon went off almost simultaneously, but his bullet went far to the right. His leg went out from under him and he fell to the floor, bleeding from the thigh. Rand hurried over and kicked the gun out of his reach.

Then the others were in the room, and everyone was talking. “You shot him in the leg?” Temple complained. “Why didn’t you finish the swine off?”

“I wasn’t really aiming,” Rand admitted quietly. He handed the weapon back to Sir Roscoe.

“The cipher identified Fly?” Olimski asked.

“Oh, yes, except that it wasn’t a cipher.”

Polly Carver frowned. “If it wasn’t a cipher, what was it?”

“A typewriter ribbon.”

While they summoned an ambulance and special guards for Toby Fly, Rand explained. “Lifnov made a point of telling me their Moscow office used the latest IBM typewriters, the same as we have here. Watching Olimski type that letter just now I realized that these machines used a high-yield film ribbon. It runs through the machine only once, but at each width of the ribbon it types three characters, in this order.” He jotted some numbers on the blackboard to illustrate:

“The letters strike the film ribbon from bottom to top, and from right to left. The ribbon doesn’t advance when you strike the space bar, so the words run in together. What Lifnov did was to take a small piece of this used ribbon and make a reduced photographic print from it. The black film ribbon, with its clear spaces where the letters had struck, made a perfect film negative.”

“But if it was from a typewritten message, why were there no periods or small letters? It was all capitals.”

“There were no periods because we have only a portion of the complete sentence. And I imagine it was typed in all caps because it was meant to be enciphered and sent as a cable or teletype message. Capital letters are common enough in such circumstances.” He pointed to the blackboard. “Reading bottom to top, right to left, as the message was typed — and putting in the likely word breaks — we read: ONFIRM WE HAVE AGENT FLY ON STATION AND WEEKLY REPORTS TO US ARE ALREADY W. The first word is obviously confirm, with the c missing. The last word, beginning with a w, could be working or some such word. Of course this bit of used typewriter ribbon from Moscow was no sort of proof against Fly, but in the world of double agents even the accusation would have ruined his usefulness. When Lifnov met him and then refused to talk, Toby had to kill him. Obviously he hoped Lifnov would drink the wine before he saw me, but as luck would have it he lived long enough to tell me about the double agent.”

“You did fine work, Rand, forcing Fly into the open like that.” Sir Roscoe shook his hand. “When Hastings hears about this he’ll want you back in the department.”

“There’s no chance of that,” Rand assured him. “I’m going back to my retirement.”

Polly Carver walked downstairs with him. “Then the letters forming walrus at the top of the message were only a coincidence.”

“That’s all. They could just as easily have spelled out cat or dog or nothing at all. Unfortunately they caused me to read the message in horizontal lines, rather than consider the possibility of vertical rows. I should have suspected a transposition of some sort rather than a true cipher when I realized that e was the most frequent letter in the message just as it is in clear English.”

Polly glanced at the clock in the downstairs hall. “You’ve only been here twenty-four hours. Do you always work this fast?”

He remembered Leila waiting at home. “I had an extra incentive this time,” he said.