Page 37 of The Words Beneath the Noise

“See that you do.” Finch leaned forward, palms flat on the desk. “Sergeant Hale's mission depends on this information, Pembroke. Every hour you spend puzzling over letter groups is an hour he doesn't have to prepare.”

I felt my jaw tighten. “I'm aware of the stakes, sir.”

“Are you?” His pale eyes held mine, and I forced myself not to look away, not to let him see how much the scrutiny costme. “Because I've noticed you and Sergeant Hale have become rather... familiar. I trust that familiarity won't affect your work.”

The words landed like stones in still water. I kept my face neutral through sheer force of will.

“My work has never been affected by anything, sir. You can check my record.”

“I have checked your record. It's why you're here.” He straightened, the moment of pressure passing as quickly as it had come. “Get me that location, Pembroke. The sooner the better.”

I took the intercept back to Hut X.

The hut was quieter now, the day shift having thinned out. I cleared a corner of my desk and spread out the encrypted text, forcing myself to focus on the patterns rather than the purpose.

Polyalphabetic with a running key. Not impossible, but not trivial either. The challenge was identifying the key text. Without it, I'd be guessing at letter shifts for every position in the message, a process that could take hours or days depending on luck and intuition.

I started with what I knew. German military format meant the message likely began with a location indicator or unit designation. If I could guess the plaintext of the first few characters, I could work backwards to identify which key letters had been used, and from there begin to reconstruct the source text.

The first letter group was KQXVR. If this was a location, it might begin with coordinates or a place name. French geography, given the intercept origin. I tried common openings: NORD, SUD, EST, OUEST. Applied them against the cipher text and looked for patterns in the resulting key letters.

NORD gave me key letters that spelled nonsense. SUD was worse. But when I tried a direct place name, when I assumed themessage opened with the name of a town or region, something clicked.

SAINT.

If the plaintext began with SAINT, the key letters were... I scribbled the calculation. F-R-A-N. The beginning of a word. FRANCE? No, too obvious. FRANCAIS? Possible. Or perhaps a name. FRANCOIS. FRANCOISE.

It was slow work. Each letter required a separate calculation, cross-referencing the cipher character against the key character to find the plaintext. My pencil moved steadily across scratch paper, building the message one character at a time, and with each letter the picture became clearer.

SAINT-LAURENT-DU-VAR.

A town. Southern France, near Nice, along the route between the Italian border and the French interior.

The rest of the message filled in around it. A crossroads two kilometres north of the town centre. A checkpoint location. The place where the convoy would slow, where the target would be most vulnerable, where a single well-placed shot could change the course of the war.

I sat back and stared at the decoded text.

Forty-seven minutes. That's how long it had taken, in the end. Not simple work, but not impossible either. The kind of challenge that engaged my mind just enough to feel like accomplishment, just enough to almost let me forget what the accomplishment meant.

Saint-Laurent-du-Var. A checkpoint. A convoy. A man who would die there if everything went according to plan.

My hands started to shake as I wrote my findings. Location, checkpoint configuration, approach routes, sight lines. Everything Tom would need to complete the mission and come home alive. I wrote it in the precise, clinical language thatmilitary intelligence required, stripping away everything human until only the data remained.

Then I sealed it in an envelope, marked it for Finch's immediate attention, and sat back in my chair feeling hollowed out.

This was what I did. This was the work.

I delivered the envelope to Finch's office personally. Watched him open it, scan the contents, nod once with grim satisfaction.

“Saint-Laurent-du-Var,” he read aloud. “Good work, Pembroke. Sergeant Hale will be briefed soon.”

Good work. As if I'd done something praiseworthy instead of signing someone's death warrant. Two death warrants, potentially, if anything went wrong.

“The cipher was more sophisticated than expected,” I said, not sure why I was explaining.

“I don't care about his pretensions. I care about the location.” Finch set the paper down and fixed me with that pale, assessing stare. “You look unsettled, Pembroke. I hope you're not having second thoughts about your contribution to this operation.”

“No, sir.”