“Just one question,” said Giles, reading through the files. “Have you verified these decodes? Did your friend get them all correct?”
“First thing I did once I figured out the encryption method,” she replied. “I had to try a few algorithms, but there are only so many that will do this kind of thing, and eventually I found it. All the messages checked out.”
“What are the words and names, that stuff that isn’t time or date? Code words for locations, perhaps?”
“Possibly, but why encode something twice? Either you trust your encryption or you don’t.”
“Silly Tommy maps,” Giles murmured, lost in thought.
Bridge had no idea what that meant. “Excuse me?”
“Old SOE trick. Back in World War Two, saboteurs often needed maps, in order to know their targets. But if they were captured, the Germans would figure out our intel level, which could raise an alarm. So some SOE maps were only accurate as far as they needed to be; target locale, exfil path, that sort of thing. Everything else was slightly incorrect, enough that any captors would see it and assume our intel was poor.”
She nodded, getting the slang. “And they’d say ‘Silly Tommy, you know nothing.’ When in fact we knew everything.”
“Exactly,” Giles smiled. “Encrypting twice isn’t always redundant.”
Bridge pulled up the master list of decoded messages. “Say we assume the other stuff is another code, then. But for what? They’re real words, not encrypted garbage, so it must be a straight cipher of some kind. And look at the variety of them: Holland, Euterpe, Cavendish, Gladstone, Temperance, Bunyan…do you think by any chance our mole is a classicist?”
Giles hummed. “Holland could simply mean the Netherlands. It’s right next to France. And Cavendish — that could be connected to Terry Cavendish, in the Air Force. But the rest of it just sounds like a list of famous people. You’ve got Bunyan, and Gladstone. Is Disraeli in there, too?”
She scanned down the list. “No. Poor old Benny, never gets any respect. Even his statue’s a poor job compared to Gladstone’s…” she trailed off, her eyes widening. “Oh, bloody hell. Statues.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“They’re statues, here in London. Holland, in Holland Park. Cavendish, in the Square. Gladstone, down the far end of the Strand. Hang on,” she said, walking round to Giles’ computer and tapping in search terms. After half a minute, she clenched her first in triumph. “There you go. Euterpe is a muse, she’s in St George’s Gardens. Temperance sits on top of a fountain at Blackfriars. Get it? They’re the rendezvous locations.” She turned the laptop round so Giles could see.
“I should coco,” he nodded, staring at his screen. “Now, show me the newsgroups where these were posted.”
Still leaning over Giles’ shoulder, Bridge navigated to Usenet. To her surprise, someone had posted another ASCII message sometime in the early hours of the morning. “Well, well, well.” She smiled. “Do you have a copy of yesterday’s Times?”
Five minutes later, Bridge returned to Giles’ office with her HP laptop, and brought up the new ASCII post on her own screen. Giles had found yesterday’s Times under a small pile of document folders on his desk. “Good thing I hadn’t chucked it in the recycling yet,” he said. “But I should warn you, I only made it halfway through yesterday’s puzzle before I was distracted.” He turned to the crossword section, showing her the half-completed grid.
She checked the clue reference at the end of the post. “Ten across, four down.”
“We’re in luck, I did those already. Answers are penultimate, and glockenspiel. Is that really enough for you to decode the message?”
“One way to find out,” said Bridge as she pasted the ASCII art into a script window she’d set up the previous night, using Ten’s methods. First, the script stripped all the whitespace and linefeeds from the text, leaving a solid block of three thousand characters. Next it asked her for the key. She typed ‘PenultimateGlockenspiel’ in response, and the decoding algorithm began to do its thing. Fifteen seconds later it had finished, and she read it aloud. “Possible compromise - have returned - standby for next details.” She looked up at Giles, who was deep in thought. “They mean Ten. Shit, they think he was one of us. Please, we have to look into this. Has anyone come forward? Any witnesses, anything on CCTV to show who might have killed him?”
Giles leaned back in his chair, removed his glasses, and cleaned them with his handkerchief. “Not to my knowledge, but I don’t believe the pathologist has conducted their examination, yet. Once they do, I’m sure they’ll have a better idea of what happened.”
“Well, is there at least some way I can be kept in the loop?”
“Seems to me you’ve done a pretty good job of getting inside so far, without my help.”
Bridge sighed. “Surely you can understand why I was hesitant to come to you before I knew what I had.”
“Deniability? You appear to have forgotten who we work for. I’d deny the sky is blue if necessary. Now, what are we going to tell Five about all of this?”
She hesitated. “I hadn’t given that any thought.”
“No, that much is clear.”
Bridge resisted the urge to argue, even though she knew he was right, and after a moment’s pause Giles reached a decision. “Here’s how we play it. You called me as soon as you read the dead man’s email, and I ordered you to proceed, following his instructions to locate the drive. We didn’t inform Five, or the police at the house, for fear of leaks before we knew if there was anything solid. You then brought it to me this morning, and I’m going to hand it over to Andrea Thomson in about…” he checked his watch, “…forty-five minutes.”
“What do we do in the meantime? Do you want me
