Dr. Ben Carter is a 21st-century cryptographic genius, a man who builds and breaks the uncrackable codes that protect the world’s most sensitive data. His life is a digital dance of algorithms and quantum computing. When a hostile state-sponsored cyber-attack causes his secure server farm to catastrophically overload, Ben is killed in the ensuing explosion. He awakens with a splitting headache in a drab, chilly Nissen hut, no longer a celebrated doctor of computer science, but Alwyn Finch, a shy, unassuming junior mathematician recruited to a top-secret British signals intelligence site in 1941: Bletchley Park. Plunged into a world of tweed, cigarette smoke, and primitive mechanical computers, Alwyn is confronted with the monstrous challenge of breaking the German Enigma code. Armed with a future ghost’s understanding of computational theory and statistical analysis, he must navigate the desperate, brilliant, and frustratingly slow progress of the codebreakers, including the eccentric and troubled genius, Alan Turing. Alwyn’s every “intuitive” leap, every suggested shortcut, is a dangerous anachronism that could expose him as a spy or a madman. He is in a race against time to guide the Allied war effort’s greatest minds toward a solution they are years away from finding, all while wrestling with the impossible secret of the ghost in their machine.
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