Page 15 of The Words Beneath the Noise

Outside the windows, daylight had shifted from grey to greyer, but I barely noticed. Time moved differently when I was like this. Hours compressed into moments, moments stretched into eternities, and the only thing that mattered was the nextletter, the next sequence, the slow unravelling of someone else's secrets.

“You've got the preamble wrong.”

Ruth's voice cut through my concentration like a blade. I blinked, the real world rushing back too fast, and found her standing beside my desk with a sheet of paper in her hand.

“What?”

“The preamble. You're treating it as standard Lorenz protocol, but look here.” She leaned over my shoulder and pointed to a sequence I'd marked. “This call sign. It's not Wehrmacht. It's Kriegsmarine. Navy, not army. Different operator pool, different habits.”

Wehrmacht. The German armed forces as a whole, but in practice we used the term for their army, the ground troops grinding across Europe in field grey uniforms. Kriegsmarine was their navy, the U-boats and battleships and destroyer fleets that hunted Allied convoys across the Atlantic. Different branches meant different communication networks, different encryption protocols, different operator training. A Wehrmacht radio operator in France would have entirely different typing habits and abbreviation patterns than a Kriegsmarine signalman aboard a submarine in the North Sea.

And I'd been trying to crack this intercept as if it were army traffic when it was naval all along. No wonder the patterns hadn't resolved.

I stared at where she was pointing, and the pattern I'd been building in my head shifted, reformed, clicked into something new. She was right. Of course she was right. Ruth had spent three years translating intercepted German before I'd even arrived, had an ear for the rhythms and idioms that no amount of mathematical analysis could replicate.

“The substitution key would be different,” I said slowly, already reaching for a fresh sheet of paper.

“Entirely different. Which means your last two hours of work are probably useless.” She said it without malice, just statement of fact. That was one of the things I appreciated about Ruth. She didn't soften her corrections or wrap them in false comfort. She just told you the truth and expected you to be grateful for it.

“Thank you,” I said, and meant it.

She pulled up a chair and settled beside me, close enough that I could smell the faint scent of her soap, something utilitarian and vaguely floral. Ruth Adler was perhaps the only person at the estate who could occupy my space without making me want to crawl out of my skin. We'd developed a rhythm over the years, a way of working together that accommodated my need for silence and her need to think aloud.

“Let me see what you've got so far,” she said, pulling my annotated pages toward her. Her eyes moved quickly across my handwriting, absorbing information with the speed of someone who'd been reading German since childhood. “The frequency analysis is good. You've identified the repeated phrases correctly. We just need to recalibrate for naval protocols.”

We worked in tandem for the next hour, Ruth translating the German as I decoded it, our skills complementing each other like interlocking gears. This was why we'd been paired together in the early days, why our section chief had put us at adjacent desks despite my reputation for being impossible to work with. Ruth understood that my silences weren't rudeness, and I understood that her bluntness wasn't cruelty.

Somewhere in Germany, she had family she might never see again. Parents who'd urged her to leave while she still could. A younger brother who'd stayed behind because someone had to look after them. She never talked about it directly, but I'd seen her face when certain intercepts came through, the ones that mentioned deportations and camps and words we were all learning to dread.

“There,” she said finally, tapping a decoded passage. “Convoy routes in the North Atlantic. Three days old, but the methodology is sound.”

I looked at what we'd uncovered. Ship names. Coordinates. Departure times. Information that would have been sent up the chain, analysed, turned into orders that sent men to intercept or evade or die.

“Good work,” I said.

“Our work.” She gathered the pages and stood. “I'll file the report. You should take a break before your brain starts bleeding from your ears.”

“I'm fine.”

“You're always fine. That's the problem.” She looked at me with an expression I couldn't quite read. “Some of us worry about you, Art. You know that, don't you?”

I didn't know how to respond to that, so I didn't. Ruth sighed, the sound familiar and exasperated, and walked away to file our findings.

Noor appeared at some point, dropping into the chair Ruth had vacated with the theatrical exhaustion she deployed like a weapon. Her uniform was rumpled, dark curls escaping their pins, and she looked like she'd been awake for approximately a hundred years.

“I hate everyone,” she announced.

“Strong position to take.”

“Strong feelings require strong positions.” She stretched her neck, wincing. “There's a new officer in wireless operations who's convinced he knows more about frequency allocation than people who've been doing this job since before he learned to shave. I had to explain basic radio physics to him three times. Three times, Art. And he still looked at me like I was speaking Martian.”

“Did you try speaking slower?”

“I tried speaking in words of one syllable. Didn't help. Some people are determined to be stupid no matter how much you accommodate them.”

I almost smiled. Noor had that effect on me, her frustration so perfectly expressed that it became a kind of comedy. She was the only person I knew who could turn a complaint into an art form.

“How's your intercept?” she asked, nodding toward my desk.