The 9 Madalyn Morgan (best romantic novels in english .TXT) 📖

were engineers. Both nodded. She turned to the other man, and froze. Henry Green was from Lowarth. He had been the childhood sweetheart of her sister Bess as well as a friend of their family. Friend, or not, his face showed no sign of having known her. Ena smiled, as she had done to the other men, but didn’t acknowledge him.

The X-board had been taken out of its box; the case it was delivered in stood open on the floor. ‘If I could have some tools?’ Ena said, pointing to a toolbox at the end of the bench. The engineer nearest the toolbox passed it along to her.

Trying to forget the four men watching, Ena looked at her work. She wondered which would be the easiest, quickest, part of the X-board to sabotage – wiring, or the dials? Wires would be easier, but the damage more difficult to locate. Dials not so easy, but any damage would be easier to see. She decided she would have to look at both.

‘Does anyone have a magnifying glass?’ The first engineer’s hand shot up to the breast pocket in of his overalls and produced a finely-engineered magnifier.

She looked over her shoulder at Commander Dalton. ‘I’ll need to sit down.’

Henry Green fetched a chair from a desk by the window and placed it behind her. ‘Thank you,’ she said, pulling the chair up to the bench and sitting. It wasn’t hot in the room but Ena was sweating and her hands felt sticky. She rubbed her palms down the front of her coat before unbuttoning it and letting it fall open.

Aware that every move she made was being noted, Ena took the diagram that she’d worked from at Silcott’s out of the lid of the box and scrutinised it. She looked from the board to the diagram and back several times. There was a writing pad and a pen on the bench. Ena took it and made notes. The commander and the two engineers leant forward to watch what she was doing, making her feel even more nervous.

She looked over her shoulder at the commander. ‘Could I have a little space, sir?’ she asked, anxiously. Dalton mumbled a grudging agreement and ushered the three men to a small table by the window.

Analysing her work, cross-checking the diagram with the hard-wired wheels on the board, Ena made copious notes. Each of the wheel’s twenty-six grooves – one for each letter of the alphabet – were equal distances apart and the letter ‘D’ had Ena’s initials beneath it. She lifted the magnifying glass and looked closely. Her initials were not there.

She had no idea how long she had been examining the wheels, but her head ached from concentrating and her eyes felt as if they had sand in them. She looked away from the board and blinked rapidly. Commander Dalton and Co. had smoked so many cigarettes the air around them was a blue fug. Ena coughed. It was smoke, drifting across the room, that had made her eyes dry.

By the time she had finished checking her calculations it was overcast outside. She looked up to see a young Wren pulling the blackout blinds. Ena took advantage of the lack of light and sat back in her chair. When she had pulled down every blind, the Wren crossed to the door and switched on the lights. Ena closed her eyes as the harsh glare from a row of overhead bulbs flooded the room. Her neck was stiff and her back sore. She rolled her shoulders. She needed a break.

‘Well?’ Commander Dalton called, ‘has the work been sabotaged?’

Ena opened her eyes, hardly daring to tell him what she had suspected all along. There was a shuffling of feet and a clearing of throats as the other men stubbed out their cigarettes and made their way to the workbench. When they were gathered, Ena said, ‘Yes, sir. The work has been sabotaged. The wires of seven buttons on the top of the dials have been disconnected from their original positioning and reconnected to different letters. Pointing to each in turn, Ena said, ‘They are, N. E. S. R. I. T. A. to E. T. A. I. N. O and S. The second group are the most commonly used letters in the English alphabet. The first group, I would guess, are the most used letters in the German alphabet.’

Ena offered the commander her notes. His face reddened and his eyes flashed with anger. He made no attempt to take them, but snapped, ‘Proceed!’

‘I don’t know what the board is used for,’ Ena said, though she knew it had to be used in some way to receive translated communications, ‘so I shall speak hypothetically.’ She took a deep breath. ‘If this were a telegraph or teletype machine, where information is input by a typewriter, what is received through this box now would be incorrect. And,’ Ena scribbled on her notepad, ‘if you were to multiply each corrupted letter by the rest of the letters in the alphabet…’ She stopped scribbling, ‘there would be millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of words that wouldn’t make sense. They’d be gibberish.’ Ena took a sharp breath and looked from the commander to Henry. ‘Therefore it is my belief that the wires in these wheels have been deliberately muddled.’

An outburst of concerned exclamations followed. Dalton put his hand up. When there was quiet, he looked at the older of the two engineers. ‘Can the wiring in the selector wheels be un-muddled?’

‘Theoretically yes, sir. But by the time we’ve found out which wires have been scrambled and unscrambled them, the information would be useless, because it would be out of date.’

‘How the hell could someone have done this much damage in such a short time?’ Dalton hollered.

Ena gripped her chair’s arms. She would have offered up a prayer but there wasn’t time. ‘They couldn’t, sir,’ she said, her