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+it was dark and dusty in the shadow archive but atleast i had found it the shelves marched off into
+the gloom and most of them were empty though there was the occasional box of papers marked sa which
+had clearly been forgotten in the move they would be interesting to read later but nothing in them
+looked important enough to have excited my co conspirator whoever that might be it would have been
+easy to get discouraged but i needed to recover the lidar so i carried on searching for the chimney
+i eventually found it at the back of the stacks but there was no sign of the lidar or of any
+disturbance to suggest it had fallen that far so i guessed it might have got caught on a ledge
+higher up fortunately the chimney was fairly wide but not so wide that i couldnt bridge it and all
+those hours on the climbing wall paid off as i climbed up looking for the lost machine as i
+suspected it had caught on one of the ledges designed to catch rain so i made ready to lower it back
+down but as i moved loose bricks to steady myself part of the inner wall collapsed and to my
+amazement i found myself staring into a control room it was very jules verne and wouldnt have looked
+out of place on the bridge of the nautilus it must have been cutting edge technology once all brass
+and polished instruments there was a map on the wall covered in small bulbs that i assumed would
+have lit up to signify activity and a bank of fine nineteenth century telegraph machines in polished
+walnut unless i was mistaken i had found douglas blacks command centre under a large circular oak
+table in the centre of the room there was a filing system with drawers containing maps of every
+nation and the table could be turned like a restaurant lazy susan the walls were lined with
+brassbound ledgers and folders marked with what looked like mission code names in amongst them was
+the most amazing find blacks codebook it contained a number of keys and best of all a list of
+ciphers and when and how they should be used it would be worth a fortune on the bibliophile black
+market but i didnt feel like selling it harry might be interested if only for historical reasons but
+if not then this would find a home in my own private collection i took a seat by the telegraph and
+put my feet up opening the codebook at random to read as with the three emperors operation it maybe
+necessary to enhance operational security during the operation itself in that case we moved from
+purely letter substitution cryptograms to transposition ciphers and at the urging of baron playfair
+other more complicated ciphers like the vi genere and playfair ciphers and variants upon them i was
+completely immersed in what i was reading and then it hit me
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projects / cipher-tools.git / blobdiff