The Children's War (75 page)

Angry and embarrassed, he scanned their faces in turn. After a moment’s hesitation he mentioned some other minor skills he had picked up along the way: maintenance, repairs, lockpicking, even cooking. It was all greeted with barely disguised contempt.

Zosia cocked her head to the side as if wondering what sort of game he was playing, but she did not question him or his choice of offerings.

Tadek, however, did. “Isn’t there anything you can do that we can use?” he asked with ill-humored impatience. Then with a practiced air of frivolity he added, “After all, we don’t have any German camp commanders who need servicing.”

There were one or two grunts of amusement. Peter stifled his initial reaction of stunned hurt and searched for a quick response. How long had Tadek waited to drop that little gem? With so little warning, all Peter could manage was to maintain a façade of composure and reply quietly, “We all do what we must.”

“A real man would have died first.”

“Indeed. But all the good men have been killed.” Peter paused significantly to let the meaning of his words sink in. Zosia had told him, in strict confidence, about a sabotage mission from which Tadek alone had returned. Years had
passed, but no one, especially Tadek, had forgotten. Smiling slightly Peter added unnecessarily, “So, how are you still alive, Tadek?”

Tadek slowly rose to his feet, enraged.

Peter stood to meet him.

“Stop this nonsense!” Zosia interjected angrily, glaring furiously first at Tadek, then at Peter. She turned to Tadek and said something to him in Polish that caused him to sit back down looking somewhat abashed. Then she turned to Peter and hissed in English, “I told you that in confidence! How dare you betray my trust!”

“I’m sorry, Zosia, I wasn’t prepared for what he said.”

“Well, since you’re so keen to betray my confidence, maybe you should know the whole story,” Zosia spat, still using English.“He did it to try and save his wife from a military brothel!”

Peter sat back down, feeling extremely foolish. His only consolation was that Tadek looked even more sheepish. Zosia continued in German, “We don’t have the resources to fight both the Germans and each other! Now, let’s get back to business like civilized people.”

Katerina nodded her agreement. “Peter, tell us if there is anything else you might be able to do. Our needs are great, and although another person is always welcome, our resources are very limited. You have to contribute if you are to stay.” She gestured around. “As you can see, we have no windows here to clean. Is there any skill, or even interest, that you can offer that we can develop?”

Peter grimaced; he had held his most important and well-developed skill in reserve. He had spent his life being trained for it, yet he hesitated to mention it to the committee, partly out of fear that if they scoffed at it, he would have nothing more to offer, partly because it brought back such strong and painful memories of his time with Allison and his very last years in the Underground. But as he saw the row of faces looking questioningly at him, some hopeful, some full of disdain, he was forced to offer up his last hope.

“I know something about decoding. You know, cryptanalysis.”

The sudden look of interest on the faces of the Council was rewarding. “But my knowledge is old, almost certainly out-of-date,” he added, quick to point out the disadvantages before anyone else did.

“But you know the basics?” Katerina pressed.

“Oh, yes, I know the basics,” he replied, thinking of some of the idiotic things he had learned. Katerina would surely have opined that his time could have been better spent with a rifle.

“Were you good at it?” Hania asked.

“I suppose. But it was a long time ago.”

“Still, you do remember things, don’t you?” Konrad insisted.

“Yes. I guess so.”

“And you could pick up on new techniques and knowledge quite quickly?”

“I don’t see why not. If someone gave me the information, I could study it certainly.”

“Good. I think we have a job for him. Don’t you agree?” The speaker was the older, balding Council member named Tomasz, whom everybody called Tomek. He was the one who had initially voted against Peter—it was funny how Peter never failed to remember what their votes had been—but had switched rather easily when pressed.

Tadek scowled at Peter and cleared his throat to get the Council’s attention. “I hate to interrupt this little festival with something so tedious as a rational thought, but before we rashly take yet another idiotic decision, I think he should prove his skills. Otherwise, we might waste a lot of time and effort on him.”

“How would we do that?” Marysia inquired.

“Let him decipher some coded documents. We have some stuff from years ago—certainly we could find something for him to look at. Something outdated—you know, at his skill level,” Tadek sneered.

“What would that prove?” Zosia asked, clearly annoyed.

“It would prove he’s not lying to us now. That he’s not just buying time to work some mischief. If we set him to learning current skills and decoding stuff, he could be here for years before we’d see a result—or the lack of one.”

Zosia began to object, but Peter interjected, “I don’t mind. I’d like to see what I can do. It’s been a long time and a lot has happened since then.”

Tadek smiled with a great deal of self-satisfaction. Zosia glared at Peter for preempting her defense of him.

He explained, “I’ve been through a lot and I really don’t know what I’m capableof anymore. Tadek’s right—you would invest a lot of time and effort in me. I’d like to know that I’m up to it.”

So it was agreed; he would pass one more test, but this time it would be the sort of test he understood, and for the first time in a long time he felt no real fear.

3

“Y
OU STILL FEAR ME,
don’t you?” the voice asked.

He did not know the correct answer, so he said nothing. He lay there, curled on the floor, his eyes closed in defense against the pain.

“I know you’re awake,” the voice chided, “and you will be punished for not answering.”

He opened his eyes to stare at the smooth polished leather of his tormentor’s boots. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to say.”

“That’s also wrong. As wrong as fearing us. And for that you will also be punished.”

“I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do,” he moaned.

“You’re not supposed to understand. You’re not supposed to think. Or feel.

Or even fear. You just obey. It’s that simple.” The uniform came into view as his tormentor stooped down to grab his arm. “You’ll like this one. Something really special, just for you.” A hand, holding a syringe, came toward him.

“No! No syringes!”

The psychiatrist looked at him in surprise. “But you just said it was okay.”

“No. No, it’s not.”

“It will help you remember,” she assured him patiently. “You’ll relax.”

He shook his head, more to clear it than to disagree.“No needles.” She surveyed him for a long moment, her patience obviously at an end, then sighing, she put the medication away. “Fine. We’ll do it your way. But let me warn you, the Council will be informed of your lack of cooperation.”

It wouldn’t be the first time, he thought.

“Nor the last,” Zosia added when he had told her about his interview with Katerina’s researcher. “Don’t worry, they’ll be gone soon enough.”

“And when they are, I will never again talk about these things with anyone,” he asserted, then he paused and added, “Except maybe you.”

Zosia pursed her lips.

Tadek, standing next to her, snorted. “Now, about this decoding test.”

“How did you two get assigned to do this?” Peter asked.

Tadek snorted again. Zosia answered, “Apparently we volunteered. Anyway, here’s what we came up with.” She handed him a single sheet of paper. The entire page was a string of numbers, nothing else. “There are three separate passages.”

“Don’t tell him that! Let him work it out,” Tadek snapped.

“Oh, it’s obvious.” He grabbed a pencil and drew a line on the page. “One of them ends about here.” He drew another line, farther down. “And the other ends around here.”

Tadek and Zosia looked at each other in amazement. Finally Tadek stammered, “That’s right. How did you know that?”

“You didn’t put this together, did you?”

They shook their heads sheepishly.“How could you tell?”

“Who did?”

Zosia and Tadek looked at each other almost guiltily. Finally Zosia answered, “We had HQ send something—they have analysts there. We tried, we looked up some old documents and their translations—but we had no idea what to do. So we explained the situation and asked them to send something.”

“Just as well, I suppose they’ll have sent something feasible as a test.” In fact, he thought as he perused the sheet, they’ve sent a child’s game. He spared a mental thank-you to his counterparts at HQ who had decided to be so gentle with him.

“But how did you know there were three separate codes?”

“Just look at it,” he said, enjoying his little triumph. “The patterns are absolutely different.”

“What patterns?”

“Look at this first set—the numbers are nearly random and evenly distributed
from zero to ninety-nine. So, each number clearly does not represent an individual letter—otherwise the numbers wouldn’t be so random. It’s some sort of homophonic cipher.”

“A what?”

“And that means, since it’s so short and I don’t have time or computing capabilities, that I almost certainly won’t be able to decipher it without more information.”

“Oh.”

“They did send along some extra information, didn’t they?”

“Yes, how’d you—”

“But this next section here—see? They’ve just strung together numbers that are clearly simply substitutions for letters. And there’s a lot of structure—see how often twelve appears? It’s probably something fairly simple like a monoalphabetic cipher.”

“And the third passage?” Tadek asked, fascinated.

“Well, it doesn’t look random, and again the numbers are limited, so I’d guess they just put in numbers for letters—but the structure looks weaker than the second passage.”

“So?”

“So, it’s probably some combination. Maybe a VigenËre cipher with a finite keyword—that would be a nice, simple test. I can calculate an index of coincidence and tell you more; it’ll just take time.”

“How much time?” Tadek pressed.

“I’ll tell you”—Peter smiled wickedly—“when I’m done. Now, do I get any background information?”

“Why should you?”

“It’s rare that there is absolutely no idea what a document is about. These are rather short passages: to be fair, I at least deserve some sort of realistic scenario of where this originated or some general idea of what it might be about. Even a bit of cleartext—especially for the first passage.”

Zosia raised her eyebrows at Tadek.

Peter added, “And besides, I’m sure they told you to give me the extra information, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” Tadek admitted sheepishly, and handed over another sheet of paper.

Peter knew then, before he had even started, that he had passed their little test. He felt an overwhelming rush of pleasure at the knowledge that it was all still there! All those years of soul-destroying work, numerous beatings, humiliation, sickness, hunger, loneliness—none of it had taken his knowledge away from him. It was all still there! It would take work to recapture the details, to catch up on new developments, to reconstruct a way of thinking, but he no longer doubted his own abilities—they had survived, just as he had. It was all still there!

After he presented the Council with his results, he was quickly put to work analyzing, or at least organizing, stacks of information that had accumulated.
Apparently, for a long time they had not had anybody who could seriously attack intercepted messages. As recently as three years ago, they had had three analysts. Two had been seconded to Warszawa—that is, to the region that had once contained the capital city of Warsaw and was now dominated by the concrete colossus of Göringstadt—to work on a major project. The third had been Marysia’s husband. He was supposed to have trained successors, but had suffered a nervous breakdown after the death of his daughter and had wanted to retire to a village with a reasonably safe set of papers. Marysia had steadfastly refused and they had eventually divorced. In deference to his years of loyal service he was provided with a safe retirement, but Marysia’s bitterness at his abandonment was still evident, and the subject of her ex-husband was tactfully avoided.

Items of seeming importance had been forwarded to headquarters, but a mountain of presumably trivial information had, in the meanwhile, accumulated. And how it had accumulated! Nobody had bothered to sort the documents, broadcasts, and electronic messages by source or date or possible subject. Peter was simply shown to a storeroom full of papers and tapes and told to do what he could with it.

Over time he managed to sort and prioritize and translate. Week after week he presented to the Council the fruits of his labors. They politely stifled their yawns at the lists of winter coats and orders for fertilizer. He begged for assistance, convinced that if the information, tedious as it was, was correlated, it might provide useful demographic and economic information. They agreed and assigned Olek and a seventeen-year-old, Barbara, as his part-time staff.

During the Christmas holidays, he began to badger the Council to provide him with his own computer. It was simply impossible to do reasonable work constantly begging time on other people’s machines. And what were they using them for anyway? He harassed the Council mercilessly, accosting members in the hall, demanding to know when they would finally provide him with adequate equipment. There could be something important among all that dross and they would never know it! Not at the rate he had to proceed!

Eventually they agreed. He appeared at a Council meeting in January with his report in hand, ready to begin his demands again, when he was preempted by Katerina. She raised her hand as he stood to speak and said, “Enough. Enough. Before you say a word, we want you to know that we have pulled every string we have with HQ. We have called in every favor. We have reminded them that they have stolen our two best analysts without replacing them; we brought up the painful subject of our Marysia’s ex-husband; we have groveled and implored and cajoled on your behalf. So not a word! You will get your damn machine.”

Peter grinned, set his week’s work on the table, and without saying a word, promptly left.

It took another month before the machine finally materialized. Peter was summoned from his storeroom office to the Council meeting room. Only

Katerina, Zosia, and Tomek were there. Zosia pointed to the small box on the table and watched with delight as he opened its cover.

“It’s so small!”

“But look at what it can do.” She almost giggled as she switched it on. “It was delivered this morning and I’ve been trying it out. It’s better than mine!”

He looked at the compact gray box and the screen that had leapt to life. “It’s beautiful!” Over the past months, he had learned much from Zosia and others about the current state of computers and software, but he had never seen anything so compact and ostensibly powerful before.

“Isn’t it great?” Zosia asked as though she had invented it herself.

“I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s no comparison with the clunky old things that I’ve seen in the ministry.”

“I’m not surprised. We got this from America. Apparently they’re sold on the open market there. Available to just about anyone. Can you imagine?”

“No,” Peter sighed. What sort of place sold such exquisite technology on the open market? “Why doesn’t the Reich just import them then?”

Tomek answered, “Oh, the Americans forbid their export; besides, they’re priced in dollars and so are, for us, phenomenally expensive.”

“And so you should be grateful,” Katerina added.

Peter pressed a few keys, studied the listed files, and shook his head in slight wonder.

“We had some stuff loaded on it for you,” Tomek explained. “Latest math programs, that sort of stuff. At least that’s what our people in the NAU claimed. Unfortunately, you’re on your own in working out what it all does, but they said it would be useful.”

“You mean this was specifically sent for me, all the way across the Atlantic?”

“Yeah, the PDA—that’s the Polish Defense Association—they organize funds and send shipments of equipment and arms periodically. No doubt your little machine here was part of a fund-raising drive: dinners, speeches, broadsides.”Tomek laughed.

Peter laughed, too. What a wonderful thing it must be to live in a free land. Fund-raising dinners! He could barely imagine what a strange world must exist on the far side of the Atlantic.