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