"Trevor, Elleston as Hall, Adam - Quiller 17 - Quiller Meridian 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hall Adam)

Favourite sport, football, no hobbies, slight knowledge of English, Russian Orthodox.

It was just gone 3:15 when I dropped the file onto the floor and switched the lamp off and heard a spring twang as I lay down and started memorizing the cover, giving it another ten minutes. The voices had stopped, and through the small high window the snow drifted in silhouette, black against the haze of the city lights, and the last thing I saw was the steady green glow of the LED on the scrambler over there, and the last thought I had was about the other reason that might have delayed Zymyanin's getting into contact with us again: he could have set up the kill himself at the rendezvous in Bucharest and could be busy setting up another one, for me.



3 ROSSIYA


'I broke K -- 15,' she said, and tilted the frying pan to get the butter over the eggs.

'Oh, Jesus,' I said, 'and you were trying to impress me by walking like a duck.'

'Thought I'd kind of steal up on you.'

K -- 15 was a hands -- on but much -- used Soviet code that the people in Codes and Cyphers at the Bureau had been trying to break for three years. I knew it had been done but I'd thought it was in London.

'Another egg?' Jane asked.

'If you can spare one.'

'No problem,' she said. 'Blackmarket.'

I didn't know when I was going to eat again. There'd been two signals from Control earlier this morning but Zymyanin still hadn't made contact. It was just gone eight, and the clothing shop wouldn't open until nine. 'Even if then,' Jane had said. 'We might have to bash at the back door.'

'You worked on it at the embassy here?' I asked her. On K -- 15.

'Yes. I'd be an infant prodigy in maths, if I were an infant. When I was six I used to finish Dad's crossword puzzles for him when he was at the office, made him furious. And they were in The Times.'

At the scrubbed pinewood table she said, 'Ketchup? I also created Mystere.' she watched me for my reaction.

'Did you, now.'

Mystere was also a hands -- on code, non -- computerized, and C and C had brought in a man from the Foreign Office to try breaking it. He hadn't managed it so far but when he did we'd destroy it, because if he could break it so could the Soviets, or someone else.

'I got it from my typewriter,' Jane said.' Or that started me off. I use a Canon AP810 -- III, and I was changing the ribbon when I noticed the characters on the old one. It's a wide ribbon and they're not in a single -- line row, it prints three characters vertically, shifts -- wait a minute --' she reached for her pad and got a pencil --' it prints three characters vertically downwards, then shifts one space to the right and prints upwards again, three --' she glanced up at me --' am I being an infant prodigy all over you?'

'I've worked on codes,' I said. 'I'm interested.'

'All right. Three down, then shift, three up, shift, three down again, like this. And if you read it like that, it makes sense, but we always read in a single line from left to right, and that looked like gibberish, and it suddenly struck me -- 1 was looking at a code.' she put the pencil down and bit on some toast and munched it. 'But if we, say, typed the words, oh, I dunno, "if you like", the "y" comes at the bottom of the first vertical and the "o" comes at the bottom of the next one, and there aren't too many ordinary words beginning with "yo" except for "you" -- and you start getting the drift. So at the top and bottom of every vertical I inserted a blind character to break the rhythm, and that was much nicer.' she sat back and looked at me. 'Had enough?'

'No.'

. ' Glutton for punishment. So I 'm reading three horizontal lines of code and I'm not picking up clues from the verticals because of the blinds. At that stage it would have taken a bright teenager maybe half an hour to break, so I threw in a reverse -- direction read -- out and put it on the standard grid and went for three -- character alphabetical substitutes and froze it. Mystere!' she shook her pony -- tail. 'God, don't tell the man in London.' Her eyes were suddenly deep, their colour darkening. 'Or anyone.'

'I'm offended,' I said.

'Sorry.' she drew a breath, let it out. 'I want that one to run for ever.'