Patton lowered her gun and placed it, with Nemo’s, on the floor, well out of his reach. She pulled the book out from under her seat. The rear panel of the dust jacket was badly water damaged, but, as she had recalled, the inside of the cover wasn’t affected at all. Patton carefully peeled back the dust jacket to discover, taped on its back side, a thin plastic bag containing a single sheet of yellowed paper with one of its corners chipped off. Printed at the top were what looked like two lightning bolts and the word “H-Sonderkommando.” Below that were two German words written in pencil and then a series of typed five letter words that weren’t words, as far as Patton could tell. Not even German ones.

“You think this might be what they’re looking for?” she said, holding up the dust jacket so Nemo could see the paper.

“Holy shit,” said Nemo. “Is that . . .”

“If I’m guessing right,” said Patton, “this is a message from the Nazi SS encoded with an Enigma machine.”

“The SS? Like storm troopers and . . .”

“And concentration camps and Heinrich Himmler.”

“Apparently it’s a message worth killing for, even all these years later,” said Nemo.

“Yeah,” said Patton. “So what are you waiting for? Let’s get the hell out of here before Fritz and Franz track us down.”

“They’re not going to track us down—at least not here. Can you break this code?”

“If you give me a computer and Internet access,” said Patton.

“Absolutely not,” said Nemo. “We need to stay off the grid.”

“What about a computer at a library or something?” said Patton.

“What would you use it for, exactly?”

“There’s a site that uses statistical techniques and the hill-climbing search algorithm to find the key for an Enigma message,” said Patton.

“Just one site?” said Nemo.

“Just one.”

“Then you can be absolutely sure that whoever hired me is watching that site. We use it to break the code and we hand them our only bargaining chip.”

“That’s inconvenient,” said Patton.

“Isn’t there another way? A way to break it without the Internet?”

“There is,” said Patton, “but you’d need an Enigma machine, something called a Bombe, and an old friend of mine who happens to be an expert in the field. Lucky for us they’re all in the same place.”

“Where’s that?” said Nemo.

“Bletchley Park, about fifty miles north of London. Not exactly convenient.”

“The first thing I do whenever I finish a job is leave the country,” said Nemo, “so it suits me. You have a passport?”

“Yeah,” said Patton. “But given that Bletchley is the obvious place to go to break an Enigma message, don’t you think they’ll know that’s where we’re headed?”