What else is there to say? We took our innocent consciences and ruined them. In this frame of mind, everything began to become complicated and confused. It all became a mess. I truly regret not having made a recording of what he had said while he was asleep. If I could have known what was going to happen, why would I have made all that fuss about not wanting to take credit? But that was then and this is now; what I did was out of a deep sense of the importance of the endeavour, out of respect and love for your father. Does that mean to suggest that I had no desire to be honoured? It was because I loved and respected him that I couldn’t steal his glory. My heart just wouldn’t let me do it. How could anyone know that things would turn out the way they did, that everything would become so terribly unbearable! But all of this – everything – none of it was created by us: the responsibility for that lies with those senior comrades who were too much concerned with appearances. At times, I can’t help but feel that for your father ciphers weren’t all that frightening. The things that scared him most were those things outside the world of cryptography, those things of the so-called real world. That was why life beyond those red walls was so difficult for him. He was unable to live the life of a normal man: such a life was a torture to him. Ciphers, on the other hand … I never once saw anything in them that caused him discomfort or concern. As you know, your father eventually returned behind those red walls, returned to the world of cryptography. This final time he was in charge of decrypting a new cipher called DESERT 2, also known as FLAME. It was the reserve cipher for FIRE.