Chapter 4
FOUR
PATTERNS AND PEOPLE
ART
Numbers became a language more fluent than English somewhere around hour six of my shift.
Letters arranged themselves into patterns that sang in frequencies only my brain could hear, a symphony of meaning hidden beneath apparent chaos.
My pencil moved across the paper in quick, precise strokes, annotating, cross-referencing, feeling the shape of the code like running fingers over Braille.
This intercept was Wehrmacht, probably Lorenz, the encryption complex enough that it required every scrap of focus I possessed.
Which was fine. Perfect, actually. Because when I was this deep in the work, the rest of the world fell away.
The guilt. The exhaustion. The persistent ache of loneliness that had made a home between my ribs.
All of it dissolved into the clean logic of cryptanalysis, where problems had solutions and patterns revealed themselves if you were patient enough to look.
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 next letter, 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.
“Cracked. Ruth caught an error in my preliminary analysis.”
“Ruth catches errors in everyone's analysis. It's her gift and our curse.” Noor leaned back in her chair, studying me with eyes that saw more than I was comfortable with.
Before I could respond, the door opened and Captain Finch walked in.
The room went quiet in that rippling way that suggested everyone had suddenly found something urgent to look at on their desks. Finch's gaze swept the space with methodical attention, cataloguing, assessing, and when those pale eyes landed on me, my stomach dropped.
He crossed to my desk rather than summoning me to his office. A small mercy, perhaps. Or a calculated choice to make this public, to remind everyone that no one was above scrutiny.
“Mr Pembroke.” He pulled a notebook from his pocket, flipped it open. “Your sign-out logs show irregular times over the past week. Monday you left at seventeen twenty. Wednesday at eighteen forty. Yesterday at seventeen fifty-three.”
I set down my pencil carefully, buying a moment to steady my voice. “Yes, sir.”
“Can you explain the inconsistency?”
My brain, which could crack German military encryption in under four hours, suddenly couldn't string together a coherent sentence. “I... the work varies. Sometimes an intercept takes longer. Sometimes there are delays in...”
“Regulations state that unless given explicit authorisation, staff maintain consistent shift times.” His tone was clipped, but I noticed something I hadn't before.
The way his jaw worked slightly between sentences.
The faint tremor in his hand as he held the notebook.
This wasn't enjoyment. This was a man doing something he found necessary but not pleasant.
My chest tightened anyway. Words fled. The overhead lights seemed too bright, the room too small, and I could feel my face going blank the way it always did when stress overwhelmed my ability to perform normalcy.
Flat affect, the doctors had called it once.
But to people like Finch, it looked like evasion. Like guilt.
“The nature of cryptanalysis doesn't conform to exact schedules,” I said, and my voice came out clipped, robotic. Wrong. “Some ciphers resolve quickly. Others require extended analysis.”
“You're saying you have no control over when you leave?”
“I'm saying the work dictates the schedule, not the other way around.”
Finch studied me for a long moment. Something shifted in his expression, so subtle I might have imagined it.
“I'm not trying to make your life difficult, Mr Pembroke. But inconsistencies create vulnerabilities. Patterns that deviate from the norm draw attention. Attention, in a place like this, can be dangerous.”
It wasn't quite an apology. But it wasn't pure accusation either.
“I understand, sir.”