Unit Director Luo’s words reminded me that I really did need to speak seriously to Huang Yiyi. I needed her to understand my feelings, so that she would not get bogged down in her emotions, which after all might well affect her ability to crack RECOVERY. She seemed to know intuitively what I was thinking, because that evening when I got home after dark, I found a bag hanging from the door handle. Inside there was a wine bottle, a letter, a book, a pack of playing cards and a note. The note was only a couple of lines long: ‘Here are four ciphers. Please crack them in order. You have half an hour. As I am sure you will have guessed, this puzzle comes to you from Huang Yiyi!’ Though I was rather surprised at the whole thing, I took the bag into the house and laid the items out on the table, and then got to work on her ciphers.

I looked first at the wine bottle, and realized that it didn’t have wine inside it, but a long strip of paper about an inch wide. I took it out, and saw that it had been written on all over: there was Chinese, there was English, there was some Russian, and also some apparently random scribbles. It was completely mysterious. I thought about the paper for a bit, and then decided that it was probably a ‘Roman cipher’ and the wine bottle was actually the scytale. I wound the paper strip around the bottle, and when I got it right the random rubbish turned into a perfectly clear message:

Good wine and I are equally intoxicating, you are just as important to me as RECOVERY is!

I shook my head and laughed over the idea that any woman in this day and age could compare herself to a fine wine, and say that she was equally intoxicating!

Then I took out the envelope. This was empty, but there was a line of nonsensical Russian written on it that I cracked really quickly, to produce one line of plain text:

Russian is a really complicated and profound language, so will a Russian code be very abstruse?

After that I looked at the book, which was Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered. Inside there was a sheet of paper covered with numbers. Just as with the previous one, I immediately realized what I was dealing with, and flipping back and forth between the pages of the code book, I finally picked out all the words, arriving at the message:

Tonia does actually love Pavel as much as Pavel loves the revolution.

The cipher concealed in the pack of cards was also quick to crack. When I put the cards back in the right order by suit, the message written on their sides was easy to read:

It’s ages since you wrote to Anderov, why hasn’t he written back?