“That depends on whether we get a good stop,” said Ruthie, not turning to look at him. “And whether it’s the first stop or the second or . . .”

Just then the clicking abruptly ceased and the drums stopped rotating. Ruthie extricated herself from Patton’s arm and picked up a pencil and Patton’s notebook from the table in front of the machine.

“OK, we have our first stop,” said Ruthie, copying down the positions of the drums in the notebook.

“Is that it?” said Nemo. “Have you cracked it?”

“Patience isn’t his strong suit,” said Patton.

But Nemo knew otherwise of course. His career required endless patience. After he had disappeared from the Gerrards’ house he had spent years preparing for his first real hit. He had hidden in the wilderness of Pennsylvania, emerging every year or so to steal a birth certificate and apply for a driver’s license or a passport. He had created a half-dozen identities and allowed the world to believe that the teenager who disappeared just before the grisly death of Mr. Gerrard had died long ago. In the end he had been overly patient and overly cautious—after all, no one had been looking for him.

When he did begin work, patience was the key to his success. He heard stories of others in the business who rushed their jobs and paid the price. Nemo took his time, happy to spend weeks holed up in a grubby room or even living on the streets as he watched and waited and planned. Even a little job like Jasper Fleming had required patience.

But there were times for patience and times to get moving. When you had broken into a museum in the middle of the night, and a security guard was on the prowl, and someone, most likely another trained killer, was stalking you—that was not a time for patience. But Phoenix didn’t seem to understand that.

Ruthie set the machine going again, then stepped across the room to a device not much larger than Enigma itself. The black metal box had a row of twenty-six keys across the front and a corresponding row of letters just above the keys. An angled section held four drums that looked exactly like the ones on the Bombe.

“This is the checking machine,” said Ruthie. “We use it to see if that stop was good.” She fiddled with the drums for a minute, referring to the letters she had written down in Patton’s notebook. “I’ll type, and you write down the letters that light up,” she said, handing the notebook to Patton. Ruthie began to type the cipher text into the machine. With each key she depressed, a letter lit up on the front of the checking machine. After she had keyed in twenty or so letters she took the notebook from Patton and glanced over the transcription.

“Gobbledygook,” she proclaimed. “We’ll just have to wait for the next stop.”