bout de papier, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1995) — Fall 1995 // Automne 1995, p. 36
The seaplane banked sharply, set down on the lake and taxied to the wharf in front of Liebnitz’s summer cabin. The door on the starboard side opened and Chief MacBannoch, face buried in a file-folder, stepped out into the twilight onto what he thought was the dock. Unfortunately, that was on the other side of the seaplane. Liebnitz and the pilot watched in some amazement as the Chief walked, still reading, along the broad back of a smoothly swimming moose, until finally tripping over its antlers and performing a creditable triple pike into the lake.
Ten minutes later, a somewhat confused moose was lost in the sunset and the Chief was sitting in Liebnitz’s cabin, a blanket around his dripping shoulders and a double scotch in his hand. “Tt’s another of Jimmy the Turk’s damned reports,” he growled.
“The mission was simple. The local branch of the pan-Pacific environmental group Midoriiro no Heiwa called us in because they were convinced that a certain European power, which has just resumed nuclear testing, had placed a double agent in their ranks to sabotage the protest the group plans to make. Given the Rainbow Warrior precedent, we felt we had to take steps, and Jimmy was sent in. He soon telephoned to say that he had narrowed the suspects down to six. This is the list he sent in later.”
MacBannoch passed a somewhat soggy piece of paper to Liebnitz, who read out the contents: “All the members of the group here have changed their last names to the names of living things, as a political symbol. And each person’s first name plus last name add up to ten letters. Clues to the suspects names follow, with the last names listed in alphabetical order: (a) Gädel or Weill, miner’s watch-bird; (b) Darwin or Ives, Wilde’s “uneatable”’; (c) Priestly or Haydn, Mary’s pet; (d) Feynman or Strauss, Minerva’s mascot; (e) Pauli or Mozart, Bunyan’s bovine; (f) Newton or Stern, Blake’s flame; and (g) Bettelheim or Walter, Melville’s cetacean.”
“Well that’s easy enough,” said Liebnitz. ““The first part of each clue pairs a famous scientist and a famous musician with the same first name. The second part gives the animal name. But why are there seven clues, when he said there were only six suspects? Ah, I see — he threw in a ringer. One of them is the name of a real historical person, one with a diplomatic connection. Trust Jimmy. But how are we expected to choose among this lot?”
“That comes in his second report,” said MacBannoch. “On this one, I have no idea what’s going on.” So saying, he handed Liebnitz another sheet, with the following notations:
KEYWORD ONE: CANAPE FAIR (chimp for example: two words) minus HAIG FAN (Kabul type) plus EFO (enemy) plus TYE (still).
KEYWORD TWO: CHEST SAUNA (prickly plants) plus RED DEFEAT (unified) plus DIETING (set aflame) plus RAGES (cogs) plus ANAGI (once more) plus GAME (big).
“That’s a bit more complicated,” admitted the ace logician, “but I recognize the type. It’s a Fluegelmann-Playfair cypher, and it works like this. First, you take each of the separate words or phrases in the two keyword strings (four in the first and six in the second) and treat them as separate anagrams, with the definitions that follow them as clues. CHEST SAUNA with a reference to prickly plants, for example, can only be ACANTHUSES.”
“Secondly,” Liebnitz went on, “you convert the solved anagrams into numbers by the old A=1, B=2, C=3 method. This would make ACANTHUSES 1-3-1-14-20-8-21-19-5-19 or 131142082119519. (If the anagram turns out to be two words, you treat it as one when you convert it to a number.) Then you follow the directions (plus or minus) in each case to come up with a new number. You then convert this number, using the same A=1, B=2, C=3 system, into the keyword you are looking for — two keywords in this case.”
“Now comes the Playfair part, a very old cypher method. You take the keyword (or the two keywords in this case) and write the letters out in a line, dropping any repeats of letters you have already written down. If the keywords were MARCH HERRINGS, for example, you would write down:
MARCHEINGS (You would leave out the H and the Rs in HERRINGS because you had already written them down from MARCH.) Then you write down the other letters of the alphabet, the ones you haven’t used in the keywords, in reverse alphabetical order after the keyword letters:
MARCHEINGSZYXWVUTQPOLKJFDB Finally, you write down the full alphabet underneath this line: MARCHEINGSZYXWVUTQPOLKJFDB ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
And that gives you the cypher. If you get an encrypted message, you just find each letter in the upper line of the message and read the real letter off the line underneath. PRVORN, for example, would become SCOTCH using this keyword — although probably something completely different with Jimmy’s keywords.”
“This is a joke, right?” said MacBannoch querulously. “It would be easier to write the report on the head of a pinnipad.”
Liebnitz looked a little embarrassed. “Actually, Chief, you may have a point there. Fluegelmann worked out this variation after he had been notified that he was being downsized out of the Service, then burned all the other options. No-one else but Jimmy ever uses it. He loves it, of course. Can J assume that he sent a third report, this one in cypher?” MacBannoch silently handed him over a slip of paper inscribed: AHQOL LGVYC LLCQO VAPKL TVQOW PXCOX PZCPL CWYCL LCQPW PMQPX VAJHY YPHWO PYHPO.
Liebnitz worked awhile in silence, looking up only once to say, with a chuckle, “Jimmy’s such a card. The keywords are in Latin — the name of a famous scientific treatise.’ He soon had Jimmy’s answer, which he turned over to MacBannoch. The Chief looked at it, sneezed and climbed wearily down the hill and back onto the seaplane. In the evening across the lake, a lonely moose bellowed.
Can you duplicate Liebnitz’s feat by (a) giving the names of the 7 names on the first list; (b) indicating which one is the diplomatic ringer; (c) providing the two key-words; (d) giving the deciphered text of the final report; and (e) identifying the double agent?
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1995) — Fall 1995 // Automne 1995, p. 36. Read the rest of this issue →
