Excerpt from Too Bad to Die by Francine Mathews, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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THE TELEGRAM was not from Ann O'Neill, of course. Ian's latest flirt could hardly gain access to Churchill's private commo network.

It was from Alan Turing, an eccentric and solitary man who lived out his days in Hut 8 at a place called Bletchley Park, working for something known affectionately as the Golf, Cheese, and Chess Society—the Government Code and Cypher School. Turing was an odd fish in most people's estimation, but Ian had learned long ago to ignore most people.

He strolled out onto the Mena House terrace. The Great Pyramid's hulking silhouette blotted out a few stars. A November chill was rising from the desert; he was completely alone for the first time in days. He tore open the telegram.

The Fencer's in town. He's brought a girlfriend with him.

Ian's fingers tightened, briefly, on the paper. Then he reached into his jacket for his gold cigarette lighter and burned Turing's words to ash.





CHAPTER 2

The Prof, as Alan Turing's friends called him, was an indisputable mathematics genius, with degrees from Cambridge and Princeton and a mind that shook up the world like a kaleidoscope, rearranging it in unexpected and intricately beautiful ways. He saw the war as waged not by Fascists or heroes, tanks or bombers, but by bits of information reeled out into the ether in a code so complex and constantly mutating it was virtually impossible to break: the German Enigma encryption.

Ian didn't understand Turing's mathematical world in the slightest. Codes, and breaking them, were games he'd played with Hudders in their public school days. But the Enigma problem was urgent—the German naval cyphers, in particular, were the most complex encrypted communications known to man, and they told submarines where to sink Allied shipping in the Atlantic. Thousands of tons of cargo Britain desperately needed were torpedoed daily. Countless lives were lost. Breaking the codes was critical to survival—not just for the men drowning in the frigid Atlantic seas, but for all of Europe going under.

Turing had set up a series of "bombes," as he called them, at Bletchley. These were electromechanical machines that mimicked the rotor and plugboard settings of an actual Enigma encoder, sifting through millions of variations in those settings for the one correct combination that could translate gobbledygook into plain German text. Ian had no idea how the bombes worked. Turing had tried to explain it to his layman's mind in terms he would understand. But the Prof spoke in stuttering, truncated words that seemed to reel off his own rotors. Snatches of code, opaque in meaning.

"Expect the world to make sense. Certain co-co-co-herence. Isn't the key. Not to codes. Not to life. Co-co-herence hides meaning. Seas hide a shark. Ha! Contradic-ic-ic-tion's what matters. Fin on the sea's surface. Tells you the shark's there. Contradiction gives up the gh-gh-ghost."

From a single contradiction, Ian translated, you can deduce everything.

The Enigma's contradiction was that no letter could ever be encyphered as itself. If the bombe's trial settings produced that result for an intercepted German message, the combination was instantly discarded. Which meant one less set of variables in the cipher universe. And so on, and so on, for days and hours, disproving every incorrect combination of settings until only the right one remained. The combination that broke the code.

Ian had met Turing two years ago, in the old loft of the converted stable that was Bletchley Park's Hut 8, where the Enigma naval ciphers were parsed by Turing and his team. The mathematician never met another person's eyes and avoided physical contact; he winched lunch baskets up into the loft with a block and tackle and sent requests back down on slips of paper with his dirty plates.

Excerpted from Too Bad to Die by Francine Mathews. Copyright © 2015 by Francine Mathews. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.