harry, thanks for your email, i forgot you had spent time here in the archaeologists and it was good to be reminded that it can lead somewhere. in this case i think the best we can hope for is that we will have a new bunch of recruits trained and ready to tackle more serious challenges, but i have to admit that i am getting more excited about this case, even if it is just a training exercise.
the attached memo from abc reinforces what we learned from the last one. the lighthouse conspiracy seems to be a group of influential victorians who are aiming to use their newfound technological prowess to profit from war, famine, pestilence, and any other disturbance in the force. i don’t like to jump to conclusions, but i can’t help noticing that the initials coincide with people of interest to boss. i checked faraday’s intelligence file and as you say, it was empty. it is hard to believe that a scientist of his eminence had escaped notice, so it seems more likely that the real file has either been deleted or stored somewhere more secure. perhaps you can make enquiries? b must surely be babbage. all the talk in the attached letter is about a device that sounds like a computer, and that would mean that al is ada lovelace, who died some years before this letter was written. i can’t be sure who w or n are, but my guess is that this n is the same person as fn in the previous letter. as for abc, i have a guess, but it all seems rather fantastical. al and b appear in some of the earliest boss files, and i always assumed they were on the side of the angels. could they have been double agents working for boss inside the conspiracy? given that it is their work that seems to be driving it on, it seems more likely that the reverse is true. but that means boss was riddled with domestic insurgents from the start. i don’t think this has the same urgency as your discovery of soviet agents at the heart of british intelligence, but it is still rather alarming.
as is the increasing sophistication of our protagonists’ communications. they are still only relying on substitution ciphers, but their head of security, w, is clearly smart enough to know that this is too weak for serious use, and i suspect that future letters will be protected by something more professional. i wonder if he will push them to think about using polyalphabetic ciphers, or if he will just introduce simple changes like blocking the ciphertext.
i think it might pay for me to make a trip to london to carry out some enquiries, so i may be off grid for a couple of weeks. let me know if you hear anything useful.
all the best,
jodie.