The Quiller Memorandum

16: CIPHER

The dawn offensive was not spectacular, opening as it did with nothing more than a quiet stroll.

He was waiting for me when I left the Hotel Zentral. I didn't actually see him but I knew where he was. The street was residential but had a bar at the corner, some small distance from the hotel entrance. I knew he would be there. It was the only place. He would be somewhere behind the grey-white net curtains, watching for me.

To warm him up I turned along the street in the other direction so that he had to get out of the bar and start his tag at a distance. He wouldn't like that. There was nothing moving in the street at this hour but myself, and the morning was windless. He must have tracked me over this first section with his fingers crossed hard: I had only to turn my head once to spot him. I didn't turn my head. We went north towards the centre of the city where it would be more crowded.

The operation we were now engaged on was known as the switch. When an operator starts out to shadow another the outcome will be found among five main possibilities. One: the tag is never noticed, and the shadowed man leads the adverse party to his destination, unknowing. (It seldom happens. An operator who doesn't even notice a tag isn't allowed to stay in the business very long.) Two: the tag is noticed but can't be flushed, in which case the operator must simply lead him a dance and leave his original destination unexposed. Three: the tag is noticed and then flushed, and the operator can then make for his original destination unaccompanied. Four: the tag is noticed, flushed and challenged. (I did this with young Hengel. In that case my tag was not an adverse party, but it makes little difference: there's always a temptation to challenge after flushing, if only to see their face go red.) Five: the tag is noticed, flushed and followed. The switch has been made, and the tag is now tagged.

We don't often do it, because an operator is never off duty. He is always going somewhere and usually it's important that he gets there as soon as he can. On this occasion I used the switch because I had to go over to the offensive and find where the Phoenix had its nest. It might be where I had been taken for the narcoanalysis session, but I was getting bored with being taken to places and followed to places (Inga's flat). The idea was to draw the enemy's fire so that we could come to grips, and I had done that successfully, but it was no good fetching a bellyful of amytal whenever we closed together. I now had to find their base, go in under my own steam, get information on it and then get clear with the skin on.

Two untapped sources of information were mine for the taking but I wasn't going to take them. Solly Rothstein's sealed container was one. Unless I were missing something, that container held all the vital information that he'd tried to bring me when they'd shot him down. It would lead me right to the Phoenix base. I wanted to get there without trading on the death of a friend I'd helped to kill. Inga was the other untapped source. She was a defector of long standing but I would not trade on our innocent afternoon and ask her to give me all the information she had at the time of her defection. (This was how she would see things, and I must play it her way.)

The single route to their base was open to me: the tag who was behind me now must be made to lead me there. It was almost the only justification for a switch.

By nine o'clock I had managed to check him visually twice. He was a new man and less efficient than the one I'd flushed last night. Forty-five minutes later I flushed him outside Kempinski's in the Kurfurstendamm, though clumsily. (He nearly got run over crossing the zebra on the red.) We spent half an hour dodging about and then he went into a phone-kiosk to report on the situation. His orders became obvious within ten minutes: he took a taxi and I followed him in mine, all the way back to the Hotel Zentral in Mariendorf. He had lost me, hadn't a hope of picking me up again by chance, and had been ordered back to our starting-point, the only known place where I could be found.

We were both annoyed. The morning was wasted. I had borne it in mind, when launching my damp-squib offensive, that he wouldn't necessarily lead me to his own base after I did the switch. It had been hope, not expectancy, that had started me off. There had been no other way of trying to get near their base again.

But tagging is like driving: an experienced operator does it automatically, and can think about other things while he's doing it. I had thought a lot about Solly Rothstein between Mariendorf and the Kurfurstendamm and back, and it had been brain-think. Before, it had been stomach-think, emotional thinking. Guilty because of his death, I'd let myself believe that to use the information inside that container would be to trade on tragedy, to exploit Solly for my own purposes. But my purposes were his. If I could kill off Phoenix, a Nazi organisation, it would avenge the murder of his wife; and Solly had lived for that and died for it.

I phoned Captain Stettner at the Z-Bureau. He said:

"I've been trying to make contact with you. I didn't know where you'd moved."

There was no audible sign of line-tap but we didn't have to take chances so I just told him I would go to his office within the hour.

Sleet had started so I used the BMW, not even checking the mirror. They knew I was linked with the Z-polizei. already. On the way I thought about Kenneth Lindsay Jones because the question of the Grunewald See had been coming up at me again, on and off. I thought I'd answered it: Oktober had told them to drop my corpse into the Grunewald because he knew I was listening and would be convinced that they were genuine orders to kill, since that was where KLJ was dumped. That answer might be correct but now I suspected it, simply because it kept on calling for my attention. It would have to be dealt with.

The only clue might lie in KLJ's last report to Control before he died. The information in that report was already filed in my head, taken from the burned memorandum; but I had never seen the report itself. If KLJ had had any premonition of his death it would be there in the phrasing of his report, and the memorandum didn't quote reports verbatim. It carried edited information only.

I signalled Control before reaching the Z-Bureau, using a letter-card. REQUEST EARLY SIGHT OF LAST KLJ REPORT IN ORIGINAL FORM. HOTEL ZENTRAL MARIENDORF.

Captain Stettner was alone in his office and greeted me with slight embarrassment. He was a man typical of his stock, with a strong face and clear unimaginative eyes. Let him follow a saint and he would do saintly things; put him to work with a devil and he would out-foul Satan. They are born to obey, these men, born to be led, and it's luck that elects their leader. Stettner was young, perhaps thirty, and so he was working for a liberal chancellor; it was his duty to bring in the henchmen of a long-dead maniac and to hand them to justice. Had he been fifteen years older he would have graduated from the Hitler Youth in 1939 to command an SS company pledged to genocide in the glorious name of the Fuhrer.

He said to me: "You are not sleeping well, Herr Quiller."

"I haven't the time." It wasn't lack of sleep that was showing in my face, but the strain of Oktober's succession of treatments. It irked me that it showed. "You said you were trying to contact me?"

"Yes. I'm sorry you didn't feel it necessary to give me your change of address."

"I didn't know you'd need my help."

His embarrassed air increased. "I assume our relationship to be one of mutual assistance."

No answer. I studied the clearness of his skin and the freshness of his eyes and wished I were thirty, so that whatever I went through it didn't show in my face.

"I believe you knew Dr. Solomon Rothstein well?" he asked me suddenly.

"I knew him a long time ago."

"In the war?"

"Yes."

"Would you tell me what kind of work he was doing, in the war?"

I said: "In what precise way can I mutually assist you, Herr Stettner?"

"Of course you are not obliged to answer my questions, Herr Quiller -"

"That's right. You talk and I'll listen."

He considered this and I could see the brightly-polished cogs going round inside his transparent plastic skull. He worked for the Federal Government. I worked for an intelligence service of an Occupying Power, and was therefore of a technically higher status. Therefore I called the tune. When he got it set out correctly he followed procedure and said unemotionally:

"We have been trying to break a cipher and we have so far failed. I hoped you might succeed, since you once worked with Dr. Rothstein and might remember any cipher systems he used."

I knew what had happened.

"We can't trace his brother in Argentina – Isaac Rothstein. We have now opened the canister that was found in the laboratory on the Potsdamer-strasse, after checking it for explosive with magnetic sounding. It contains a glass phial and a sheet of paper covered with cipher."

It was some time since I'd had a piece of luck. I had expected a lot of trouble in persuading them to open the container and even more trouble in persuading them to show me what was inside.

I said: "I'll have a go."

He tried not to look relieved. "We are keeping the original, and will give you an exact copy. It's unnecessary to warn you that it must not be let out of your close possession."

"I thought of offering the publication rights to Der Spiegel."

He span in his chair. "But that would be unthinkable, Herr Quiller! Surely you must realise that the very highest possible secrecy has to be… maintained…" and the wind went out of him slowly while I watched him. A wan smile came to his face. "Of course… a little joke. Of course."

He took time to recover. I asked him: "Are you thinking of opening the glass phial?"

"My superiors believe it might be very dangerous to do that. Dr. Rothstein's main work was carried out in a special laboratory behind the one that was raided, and it is sealed off with decontamination air-locks. One of his staff has been interrogated and has warned us that Dr. Rothstein was researching on certain strains of bacteria highly dangerous to man. Unless the ciphered material specifies any good reason for our opening the glass phial it will probably be put into a furnace, still sealed. "He gave me a plain grey envelope. "This is your copy, Herr Quiller. May I wish you success."

On the way to Mariendorf a small grey NSU became lodged in the driving-mirror and I led it to within a kilometre of the Hotel Zentral. I wasn't going there but I went in that direction to give the impression that I was, so that the flush would be easier: anticipating my destination, though wrongly, the tag would be unprepared for a sudden change of route. I lost him in a turning off the Rixdorfstrasse and got clear, heading for the park and running the BMW into a gap between two other cars that stood empty outside the lodge.

The decipherment might take several days. If I sat like a duck at the Zentral Hotel working on it they could come for me whenever they liked, and I didn't want to see Oktober again until I was ready. He wouldn't wait long. I knew why he'd left Inga's flat, and it wasn't because he thought he could never get me to talk. He would go on trying until one of the higher executives gave the order to kill me off as useless. Since leaving the flat last night I had been under constant observation and they'd now be worried about the two flushes of today.

If they came for me at the hotel and caught me with the Rothstein document they'd haul me in and keep me held until they'd tried to break the cipher, and if they failed they would try to break me. The Hotel Zentral was a permanent red sector now.

The park was deserted. Sleet hit the windows of the car and slid down in rivulets. The engine was still warm so I turned on the heater-fan and worked up a fug.

The single sheet was copied in typed capitals. I took a letter-card and drew the skeleton-boxing. The pale afternoon light threw water-patterns from the windows across the paper, and it seemed to be melting as I studied it.

First considerations: was this code, cipher, or an unfamiliar language? Three or four of the words indicated a cipher; two of them comprised solely the letter N and there was more than one instance of a word comprising double A. This wouldn't happen with a code, and it was unlikely that even a lost language of Asia or South America would have a double vowel as a complete word. There was a thousand-to-one risk of my spending days on this task without realising I was trying to decipher the indecipherable: a purely unknown language.

Darmha valthala-mah im jhuma, for example, is pure Rabinda-Tanath and means ‘fire-cart kills very quick’. I had put this into speech for Fabian the narcoanalyst and he imagined it to be gibberish or a foreign tongue. In writing it would still look like gibberish, or like a foreign language, or like a cipher. To propose an absurd case anyone who had never heard or seen French might take the word arbre for cipher, and if he assumed A=M, R=O, B=T, E=R, he would finish up with the word motor. Obviously he wouldn't get far because he would soon find that most of the other words were turned into gibberish by applying the same assumption. (Barre would give tmoor, which is meaningless.) But he could waste hours of time trying different assumptions (A=B, C, D, etc.) before he realised he was dealing with the indecipherable: a foreign language.

But the N and the double A ruled out the chance that Solly had written this document in a little-known tongue with which his brother was familiar.

Assumption: cipher. Stettner's cryptographers agreed with this.

All ciphers are broken by applying three tools: mathematics, the laws of frequency, and trial-and-error. The most experienced cryptographer uses these three tools and plies them with patience, the prime mover.

I was not experienced. Two months at the training school and the infrequent sight of cryptograms during a mission was all I knew of the business, and normally I would shoot this document straight over to Control for their own team of specialists to break. But there might be something in Captain Stettner's idea: my knowledge of Solly Rothstein could provide a key. (In the same terms, the original report sent in by KLJ could give me clues to his death and its circumstances, where the edited and depersonalised information could not.)

The sheet on my knees carried twenty-five lines averaging ten words to the line. First checks on frequency gave the use of the letter K one hundred and thirty times. Possible E. The number of L'S was ninety-seven. Possible T. The x's numbered sixty-one. Possible A. So on.

Check a cipher word, XELK. Gave A-TE. ANTE was the only possibility. No go. Anti would have given more hope, since it was a suffix used in most sciences, biology included (antibiotic), but even then it wouldn't stand alone. I went on to double letters in terms of frequency LL, EE, SS, so on, thinking in English and German. Tried combinations: TH, HE, AN, so on. Treble-combination frequencies: THE, ING, AND, ION, ENT, so on. Back-checked and amalgamated with singles, doubles, trebles, English and German.

One interesting point was that there was no equal grouping to avoid a single letter standing alone. This is often done to avoid leaving blatant clues: a single letter standing alone is almost certain to be A or I. Two letters standing alone would be IN, ON, AN, so on. Therefore I SHALL SEND IN A REPORT would be grouped in batches of five, using one `null' at the end of the final group as a filler: ISHAL LSEND INARE PORTW. The ciphering would follow. But the groups here were unequal, with words comprising single, double and treble letters. These could be themselves ‘nulls’ peppered at random to confuse the pattern.

Five words were composed of fifteen letters or more, but this was to be expected: they were probably the Latin names of bacilli. I left them out of my present reckoning.

Trial and error. Apply singles, doubles, trebles, try the same again: reverse and read backwards, add prefix and suffix nulls, assume all singles and doubles to be nulls…

The sleet hit the windows softly.

Solly, what is it you want so urgently to tell your brother?

ELFTE-PSKLIO-JZFDX-LWO… No go, no go.

The afternoon light was fading. Steam was thick inside the windows and I turned off the heater.

Solly, what did you put in your little glass phial? For good or for evil, and for whom?

SLK. FPQC. OS. SPRIT. Sprit! German. Alcohol. Alcohol used in biological research. Check it. ASSwz. No go… a false alarm. (But there's nothing like it to spur you on, an occasional promise of success, however false.)

When it was too dark to see the words without putting a light on I got out of the car and locked it, walking for an hour through the raw half-dark of the streets to circulate the blood and take on oxygen; then I did a further four-and-a-half hours' stint without moving the BMW, and finished where I had begun, with not one single word deciphered. But the groundwork was almost over. The document was written in one of sixteen thousand two hundred and twenty ciphers, and I still had to find out which; but it couldn't be found by going through the lot (a task of approximately twenty-one months, working eight hours per day and six days per week with no vacations) and there were ways in that must be found and taken.

At ten o'clock a schnitzel and some Moselvein and the thought of home and bed. Unattractive. Home was the place where they might come for me at any minute, but if I left the Hotel Zentral it would worry Oktober. It must be shown that I was ready to hold myself available, placing my trust in the situation of his own devising. For another day – but no longer than that – he could be allowed to think that his present plan would work. After that, I would have to change it and pursue my own.

I had chosen a restaurant of cheap aspect, where the lavatory could be expected to have a certain amount of warped woodwork somewhere instead of elegant tiling throughout. If the choice was wrong it would mean finishing the evening at a bar with an Apollinaris; as it was, there was a partition of flimsy timber here at the restaurant and the document was folded thrice and slipped between the joists where it would be safe for the night. Then I went home to the Zentral.

The BMW was run into the lock-up and the key taken upstairs. A five-minute check assured me that my room had neither been searched nor rigged with booby-traps or a mike. Half a minute to reach a brain-think decision to override the stomach-think wish to telephone the Brunnen Bar, the number of which I had written on the Kleenex for Inga. Sleep, with a swarm of typed capitals plaguing my dreams.

It was noon next day when I took out the car and checked the tag in the mirror within a kilometre of the hotel. It was different again: a metalescent Taunus 12M that dogged me through two ambers before closing up and flicking its lights on and off. I chose the same park where I had worked all through the afternoon and evening of yesterday, and stopped the car near the lodge. The Taunus pulled up behind and I got out before he did, just in case, and stood waiting for him.