Chapter 4 #2
“Do you?” He glanced down at his notebook, then back at me.
“Three months ago, we had a clerk in Hut F who kept irregular hours. Turned out he was meeting someone in the village. Passing information he thought was harmless. Small things. Schedules, personnel movements.” Finch's voice hardened.
“Twelve men died because of those small things.”
The words landed like stones. Twelve men. Because someone thought their irregularities didn't matter.
“I'm not passing information to anyone,” I said quietly.
“I believe you.” The admission surprised me.
“Your work is excellent. Your dedication is obvious.
But I've learned not to trust belief over verification.” He snapped his notebook shut.
“I'll be auditing your recent decryptions.
Comparing them with your sign-out times.
If everything aligns, we won't speak of this again.”
“And if it doesn't?”
“Then we'll have a different conversation.” His pale eyes held mine, and I saw exhaustion there beneath the sternness.
The bone-deep weariness of a man who'd spent too long looking for enemies in every shadow.
“I don't enjoy this, Mr Pembroke. But I've seen what happens when vigilance lapses. The cost is always measured in lives.”
He turned and walked out, and the room exhaled.
I stood there for a long moment, feeling the adrenaline drain away and leave me hollow. My hands were still shaking. Behind me, someone muttered something sympathetic, but I couldn't process it.
Ruth appeared at my elbow. “Are you alright?”
“He thinks I'm hiding something.”
“He thinks everyone's hiding something. It's his job.” She gripped my shoulder briefly. “But he's not wrong about the danger. We forget sometimes, buried in the work, that everything we do here has consequences beyond these walls.”
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
“Your work is impeccable,” she added, softer. “The audit will show that. And then he'll move on to someone else to torment.”
“That's not as comforting as you think it is.”
“No.” Her mouth twisted in something like a smile. “I suppose it isn't.”
I grabbed my coat and scarf and walked out into the cold, needing air, needing space, needing to be somewhere my face didn't have to perform anything for anyone.
But Finch's words followed me into the snow. Twelve men. Because someone thought their irregularities didn't matter.
He wasn't just being difficult. He was trying to prevent another disaster, another failure, another stack of telegrams sent to families who'd never see their sons again.
It didn't make the interrogation less awful. Didn't stop the shame of being singled out, the frustration of my face betraying me by going blank instead of innocent.
But it made Finch something other than a monster.
Just a man. Doing an impossible job. Trying to keep people alive in a world determined to kill them.
I understood that, even if I hated being on the receiving end of it.
I stood outside Hut X trying to remember how to breathe. The sky had gone dark, proper night falling with the weight of winter, and snow drifted in lazy spirals past the shaded lamps.
I couldn't go back to my billet. Couldn't sit alone in that cold room with nothing but my thoughts and the Black Book and the endless loop of Finch's suspicion playing behind my eyes. I needed people. Noise. Something to drown out the silence in my head.
The Rose and Crown was a fifteen-minute walk from the estate, a small village pub that served watered-down ale and tolerated the strange civilians who appeared at odd hours speaking in codes and looking like they hadn't slept in weeks. It wasn't much, but it was somewhere other than here.
I started walking.
The pub was half-full when I pushed through the door, a welcome blast of warmth and noise after the frozen silence outside.
A fire crackled in the hearth. Voices murmured in the comfortable cadence of people who weren't carrying state secrets.
The smell of pipe smoke and old wood wrapped around me like a blanket.
I ordered a half-pint of whatever they had and found a corner table, settling with my back to the wall. The beer was terrible, flat and lukewarm, but I drank it anyway because holding something gave my hands purpose.
I'd been in the pub for twenty minutes, watching the room without really seeing it, when a familiar figure appeared in the doorway.
Sergeant Hale.
He stood there for a moment, scanning the room with that automatic assessment he carried everywhere, and when his eyes found me in my corner, something shifted in his expression. Not surprise, exactly. More like irritation.
He crossed to the bar, ordered something, and then walked toward my table without asking permission.
“This seat taken?”
“Would it matter if it was?”
“Probably not.” He sat down across from me, setting his pint on the scarred wood. “Didn't expect to find you here. Thought you'd be hunched over your desk pushing papers around.”
“Didn't expect to be here.” I took a sip of my terrible beer. “And they're not papers. They're intercepts. Each one represents lives.”
“I know what they represent.” His voice had an edge to it. “I've seen what happens on the other end of your intercepts.”
The words landed like a slap. I set down my glass, fingers tightening around the base.
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning you sit in your warm hut with your pencils and your patterns, and somewhere out there, men are bleeding in the snow because of the decisions that come out of this place.” He took a long drink, eyes never leaving mine.
“You ever think about that? When you're cracking your clever little codes?”
Heat flooded my chest. The unfairness of it, the sheer bloody arrogance.
“Every single day.” My voice came out sharper than I intended. “Every intercept I decode, I know exactly what it means. Convoy routes that will be attacked. Troop positions that will be bombed. I translate death into coordinates, Sergeant. Don't presume to lecture me about consequences.”
“Then why do you look so surprised when I mention it?”
“Because I didn't expect someone who kills people for a living to concern himself with moral complexity.”
The words hung between us, ugly and barbed. Hale's jaw tightened, a muscle jumping beneath the stubble.
“You think I enjoy it?” His voice dropped, low and dangerous. “You think I wake up every morning grateful for another chance to put a bullet through someone's skull?”
“I think you're very good at it. And I think men who are good at violence rarely question whether they should be.”
“And men who are good at puzzles rarely see the blood on their hands.” He leaned forward, close enough that I could smell the beer on his breath, the wool of his uniform.
“You want to know the difference between us, Pembroke?
When I kill someone, I have to watch them fall.
I have to see their face. You kill people from a distance, through numbers and patterns, and you never have to look at what you've done.”
“That's not fair.”
“War isn't fair. I thought a genius like you would have figured that out by now.”
We stared at each other across the scarred wood, the fire crackling somewhere behind me, the low murmur of other conversations fading into background noise. My heart was pounding, anger and something else I couldn't name churning in my stomach.
“Finch thinks I'm a security risk,” I heard myself say, the words spilling out before I could stop them. “Asked if my loyalties were divided. As if three years of successful decryptions meant nothing.”
I don't know why I told him. Maybe because fighting was exhausting and I needed to say it to someone, even someone who clearly despised everything I represented.
Hale's expression shifted, the anger giving way to something more guarded. “Finch said that to you?”
“This afternoon. Apparently my irregular shift patterns are cause for concern.” I laughed, hollow and bitter. “I work irregular hours because the Germans don't encrypt their messages on a schedule. But apparently that makes me suspicious.”
He was quiet for a long moment, turning his pint glass in his hands. His fingers were rough, calloused, the hands of someone who'd worked hard long before the war had given him a rifle.
“Finch is a bastard,” he said finally.
“So everyone keeps telling me. Doesn't make it easier to have him looking at me like I'm already guilty of something.”
“No. It wouldn't.” He took another drink, and when he spoke again, some of the hardness had left his voice. “Men like Finch see threats because that's all they know how to see. Doesn't mean the threats are real. Just means they're scared, and fear makes people stupid.”
“That's surprisingly philosophical for a man who just accused me of having blood on my hands.”
“You do have blood on your hands. So do I. So does everyone in this bloody war.” He set down his glass and met my eyes. “The difference is whether you let the guilt eat you alive or whether you keep doing the job anyway because someone has to.”
“And which are you? The eaten or the functioning?”
“Depends on the day.” Something flickered in his expression, there and gone. “Some nights I lie awake counting faces. Other nights I tell myself it matters, what we do. That the people we save outweigh the people we don't.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I have to. Otherwise what's the point?”
I looked at him properly then, this soldier who'd been assigned to guard me like I was something precious and fragile. In the firelight, the hard edges of his face had softened slightly, and I could see the exhaustion underneath, the same bone-deep tiredness I saw in my own mirror every morning.
We weren't so different, perhaps. Both of us killing from a distance, in our own ways. Both of us carrying the weight of decisions we hadn't asked to make.
“I'm sorry,” I said quietly. “What I said earlier. About violence and questioning. That was unfair.”