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+harry had insisted we place the hole where it wouldnt be seen later i was pretty sure now that he
+planned to claim the table for his office so he suggested we remove the makers nameplate and drill
+there it was just as well he did the demolition charge was linked to a web of mechanical detonators
+and almost any other direction would have disturbed atleast one of them the machinery was old and
+the sappers werent happy working with it but mechanical mechanisms can be easier to work with than
+electronics as you can see how everything is connected a judicious dose of superglue fixed most of
+the mechanisms in place just leaving us with the problem of what to do with a heap of old and
+unstable explosives normally we would have placed one or two of our own detonators and packed out
+the place with sandbags and breeze blocks to contain the explosion and i think even harry might have
+been convinced that that is what we should do in this case but unfortunately the explosives were not
+the only thing we could see inside the safe sitting under them was a slim black book we couldnt see
+any details but having got this far it seemed crazy to destroy it anything this well protected must
+have been important at sometime and we needed to know what this might all have been about after a
+quick callback to headquarters harry got approval to continue trying to crack the safe he knew me
+too well to ask me to leave but the documents team retreated to a safe distance down the corridor
+with most of the guards leaving a small team to watch over us as we worked one of them had joined
+the sas from the sappers and was an experienced bomb disposal expert so he worked with us watching
+the explosives for any changes monitoring vibration and temperature and generally keeping us calm it
+takes a special temperament to do that work full time and we were glad of the company and the
+expertise after seventeen hours we were getting tired and as eighteen approached i began to wonder
+if we would manage to save the papers but eventually the final cog turned and the last tumbler fell
+into place we had managed to glue the broken cog back together and with a mild protest the top
+turned raising a platform up through the central pillar to present us with the book we had seen by
+the light of the endoscope it was bagged and secured and harry took it with him the special forces
+secured the entrances to the shadow archive and i left to get some sleep we met the next day to go
+through the papers harry had started on the decrypt doing all the usual checks frequency analysis
+index of coincidence and soon the distributions were relatively flat so it was clearly not a simple
+caden us or substitution cipher and we started trying some of the ideas we had found in blacks
+codebook it took us longer than we had expected but after a few days we had the entire set
+deciphered and had begun the analysis harry had slightly different interests from me i was
+fascinated by the insights into an older world while harry was focussed on why these documents might
+have any contemporary significance both turned out to be important history matters and as marx said
+it tends to repeat itself personally i would be the wasnt the first person to say it and he wont be
+the last but for us the point was that as we read more we began to see the parallels between blacks
+world and our own and it was not comfortable reading when we got to the back of the book all became
+clear the book was actually a civil service report on the shadow archive closing it down and giving
+reasons why black had been too successful and his activities had badly destabilised the balkans the
+report traced a direct line from the bulgarian crisis to later tragedies given his early enthusiasm
+for his new methods of shadow diplomacy i honestly believe he never meant to cost so many lives but
+it seemed clear from the report that blacks interference in foreign domestic politics had had dire
+consequences it looked all too familiar and if our enemies wanted to discredit us when we complained
+about their interference in domestic politics then these papers would be the ideal kom prom at
+material it looked like we werent just victims of these tactics we had invented some of the methods
+ourselves back in the nineteenth century harry put out a request for analysts to work on recent
+signals traffic to see if there was anything to suggest who was responsible for sending me on the
+hunt for the kom prom at files there wasnt much and certainly nothing to link it to foreign
+government action it was quite possible that this was the work of one of the criminal networks that
+had grownup after the fall of the soviets market manipulation is a lucrative business and attacks on
+government credibility area very effective way to move whole markets the documents stolen from the
+archive were still out there somewhere and it was possible that they contained enough to embarrass
+us but that seemed unlikely whoever wrote the closure report had been thorough and it didnt seem
+likely they had left anything important on the shelves but time would tell harry set a watch in case
+anything surfaced and asked me to keep an eye on the black markets too as i suspected the shadow
+archive table appeared a little later in his headquarters fully restored and i assumed completely
+disarmed i returned to the library to finish the job i had started but when they offered me a new
+contract i refused i had a better offer the table was in an office next to harrys with my name on
+the door
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projects / cipher-tools.git / blobdiff