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the right direction.”
    She was a mirage of gold and turquoise, a perfect hourglass in shimmering silk. Her smile was aloof and enigmatic. Ian had seen that feline look before, lit by flaring torches, on the wall of a pharaoh’s tomb.
    But Pamela was the sort of woman who bored him silly. The kind who might as well be a pet, something fed and cosseted and groomed. Played with when she demanded it. Never an equal. Never anything but
owned
.
    â€œMrs. Randolph.” Leathers harrumphed and struggled to his feet.
    â€œPamela,” Ian murmured.
    Michael merely saluted with his drink. She had the ability to strike him dumb.
    She fixed her glowing gaze on Ian. “I’ve got something for you, Commander. A telegram. Passion by post, direct from the PM’s
private
wireless. A penny says it’s Ann!”
    A faint line furrowed Ian’s brow. He set down his Scotch and held out his hand. “Give,” he said quietly.
    â€œYou might offer a girl a drink.”
    â€œHudders, the girl wants a drink.”
    Michael rose hurriedly to his feet. “We’ve got whiskey here, but I’m sure you’d prefer—”
    â€œChampagne,” she murmured. On Pamela’s lips, the word was a bauble. Something to toss in the air and catch in the teeth. Michael was mesmerized. He held out his arm. She took it.
    â€œPamela,” Ian said wearily. “The telegram?”
    She drew it from her bodice like a harem girl of old. Still warm from her skin when she handed it to him. He noticed Leathers
almost
try to touch it.
    â€œIf you’ll excuse me,” he said.
    And left the Minister for War Transport in possession of the Laphroaig.
    â€”
    T HE 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
    T he 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