FIRE had been in use for nearly twenty years by now, and had already begun to be phased out. Even if our adversaries had known we had broken the cipher, they still wouldn’t have been using it because by that time they had already developed a new cipher know as SUNSHINE 111. Under these circumstances, they would never have used FLAME because it was too similar to FIRE. Once FIRE had been cracked, FLAME would have been compromised. Consequently, there was no real need to decipher it. So now you must be wondering why they asked your father to tackle this cipher. Well, to use Director Wang’s words: they felt some loyalty to him; they wanted to give him something to do. You know what state of mind he was in – if things didn’t change his problems would have become ever more intense, and eventually there’d have been no turning back. Director Wang told me that he was greatly worried about your father’s condition; he would just get worse and worse if things carried on the way they were going. In order to prevent this, he arranged for your father to decipher FLAME. His purpose was clear: he wanted to immerse your father once more in the world of cryptography, to make him fight ciphers instead of that most devilish illness: senility. In other words, the organization decided to use ciphers to take care of him – to nip in the bud, as it were, the possibility of his illness becoming worse, to let him live out the last years of his life free of mental decrepitude. What man decides is not necessarily the same as heaven. Who could have guessed that his joy in being called back to work would be too hard on his heart; that being given this new cipher to solve would snatch his life away? From the day he re-entered that red-walled compound until he deciphered FLAME, your father needed only a little more than a hundred days. No doubt his quickness in cracking FLAME was due in large part to the experience gained in battling FIRE. It demonstrated once more your father’s sublime ability in decrypting ciphers.