Page 133 of The Words Beneath the Noise

“I want you to do your jobs. Just as I'll do mine.” Finch moved back to his desk, pulled out a folder. “There's one more thing. An intercept that came in overnight. Different cipher variant, possibly containing final targeting details or attack timing.”

He held out a single page. I took it automatically, eyes scanning the encoded text. Letter patterns. Frequency distribution. The familiar puzzle of enemy communications, except this time the puzzle might be the only thing standing between us and annihilation.

“If we can decode it,” Finch continued, “we might be able to anticipate the strike window. Prepare more effectively. Save lives.”

“Or we decode it too late and die knowing exactly what killed us,” Ruth said.

“Also possible.” Finch met her eyes without flinching. “But I'd rather die fighting than die waiting. Wouldn't you?”

Hut X wasdifferent when we returned.

The usual sounds were there, typewriters and murmured conversations and the scratch of pencils on paper, but underneath ran a current of tension that made everything sharper. People worked with the kind of manic focus that came from knowing time was running out. No one joked. No one complained about the cold or the food or the endless hours. They just worked, heads bent over intercepts, trying to wring meaning from encrypted chaos.

Peter's desk sat empty. Someone had cleared it already, removed his personal effects, erased all evidence of his presence. As if he'd never been there at all. As if two years of sitting three desks away from me, sharing complaints about the tea, asking questions about operational outcomes, could be wiped away with a quick tidying.

I settled at my own desk and spread out the new intercept. Stared at it until the letters blurred and reformed into patterns my conscious mind couldn't quite grasp.

Modified cipher. I could see that immediately. The frequency distribution was wrong for standard Enigma, wrong for the Lorenz variants I'd spent three years decoding. Somethingnew. Something designed specifically for communications they couldn't afford to have compromised.

Which meant this message was important. Important enough to warrant special encryption. Important enough to be worth the extra effort.

Important enough, possibly, to contain the details that would save us or confirm our doom.

I started working.

Ruth took the desk beside me, pulling up her own intercepts, cross-referencing with anything that might provide context. Noor appeared periodically with updates from the wireless room, fragments of traffic that might or might not be related. The other cryptanalysts worked around us, each lost in their own section of the puzzle, all of us trying to find the thread that would unravel the enemy's plans before those plans unravelled us.

Hours passed. I lost track of how many.

My hand developed a tremor from gripping the pencil too tightly. My leg bounced so hard the desk vibrated, papers shifting with each jolt. Every sound from outside made me flinch, sirens that weren't there, explosions that existed only in my imagination.

Ruth brought me bread at some point. Stood over me until I ate three bites, then returned to her own work without a word. The bread sat heavy in my stomach, threatening rebellion.

Fourteen hundred hours. Something clicked.

The cipher variant was modified Lorenz, but the key generation had been rotated in a pattern I recognised. Fibonacci sequence. The Germans sometimes used mathematical progressions for high-security communications, assuming Allied codebreakers wouldn't think to check such elegant structures.

They'd assumed wrong.

I started applying the logic, watching letters transform into fragments of German that almost made sense. Koordinaten. Coordinates. Zeitfenster. Time window. Bestätigung erforderlich. Confirmation required.

Fifteen hundred hours. More clarity.

Could read whole phrases now. Targeting coordinates that matched the estate's location. Timing windows that narrowed down when the attack would come. Expected results expressed in cold military terminology that reduced human lives to acceptable losses.

My hands were shaking badly now. Had to press them flat against the desk to steady them enough to write.

“Ruth.” My voice came out hoarse. “I'm getting something.”

She was beside me in seconds, reading over my shoulder. Her breath caught as she processed what I'd decoded.

“Two-wave attack,” I said. “First wave marks targets with pathfinder aircraft. Second wave follows to bomb what the pathfinders identify. If we can confuse the pathfinders, make them think they've hit the wrong location...”

“We might survive.”

“We might.”

“How long until the first wave?”