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+the engineers harry brought with him wanted to take saws and torches to the table safe but neither
+of us were keen i could see that it would be worth alot to collectors and probably belonged in a
+museum harry said he agreed but i had a feeling he wanted it installed back in headquarters there
+was something proprietor i al in the way he looked at it it took the two of us eighteen hours to
+crack it but with a squadron of special forces from hereford guarding us there was no risk that my
+attackers would return i asked harry how he got authorisation to bring them in after all we still
+werent sure that there were any national security implications but he just laughed and pointed out
+that we were currently somewhere under new scotland yard and it hadnt taken much to convince the
+home secretary that we needed a proper security team to guard the shadow archive another team of
+analysts had camped on one side of the command centre and were combing through blacks codebook and
+the few papers that our antagonists had left behind from time to time one of the troopers would
+arrive with another box of documents retrieved from aside room or a more distant part of the archive
+labyrinth most could be decrypted quickly using the standard tools black had used a range of ciphers
+including substitution and transposition and almost none of it was harder than avi genere it was
+slow since the papers had to be handled with care and the scanner they had brought with them wasnt
+really designed for this sort of work a couple of times they called harry over to show him something
+and he read it nodded then came back to work on the safe as we worked we talked about what i had
+learned concerning the shadow archive and blacks secret work for the government harry didnt give
+much away but i had a feeling he had heard some of this story before and after the second time he
+was called away he seemed particularly thoughtful i asked him what was bothering him but he was
+enjoying being cryptic he said something about the balkan problem then muttered steve turners poem
+history lesson history repeats itself has to no one listens i couldnt get anything more out of him
+except some comment about working backwards through the papers so i turned my attention back to the
+safe the mechanism was bigger and heavier than we were used to and had been exquisitely made the
+components slid almost noiselessly over one another and the loud clicks i had heard when moving the
+table seemed to be the result of a broken cog tooth catching on the barrels that made it even harder
+to open what little noise the lock tumblers made was heavily disguised and we had to resort to
+drilling a small access hole to pass an endoscope into the interior it was as well we had taken the
+effort sitting in the middle of a pile of notebooks and papers was a small pile of what looked like
+explosives the safe was rigged to blow if we made a mistake
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projects / cipher-tools.git / blobdiff