A smile spread across her face as she went to the blackboard and explained the pattern she had discovered.
“Miss Mikaela helped,” she added and pointed to the message that had emerged using the pattern she had discovered.
Brodie studied the board, that dark gaze narrowed in concentration.
“It seems to mean that something important is to happen,” Lily pointed out the obvious.
He continued to study the message.
“But we were only able to figure out part of it. Then there are the numbers ye see, and more letters. They must mean somethin’.”
He read the numbers aloud. “An address, or possibly something else.”
“One and then an eight,” I repeated, then, “Could the one and eight actually be the number eighteen?”
Eighteen. What did that mean?
“The eighteenth?” Was that it? If so, then the next two numbers, one and two?”
“Something is supposed to happen on the eighteenth of December?”
Brodie looked at me. “Verra possible.”
And today was the fourteenth of December.
“That could mean that something is planned for four days from now.”
“Ye did well,” he told Lily. “It would seem that ye have found something verra important.” And then with a look over at me.
“The rest of it is for us to determine.”
The question was:Whatwas to happen andwhere? And what did the rest of those letters mean?
“I do not trust the telephone service,” Brodie announced. “A call often passes through too many hands. Ye never know who might be listenin’.”
Such as those who might find the information we’d uncovered and pass it to someone else? But what did it mean?
While I thought of the usual conversations I had on the telephone— responding to an invitation, a call to the cab service, or recent conversations with my sister or Lily about various things, I realized quite clearly his meaning.
It did seem that new inventions, marvelous as they were, also brought new and perhaps dangerous possibilities.
He had placed a call to Alex Sinclair and asked for him to meet us at the office on the Strand. He mentioned only that it was important, nothing more.
It was very near an hour later when Alex arrived, quite soaked through from the weather, his cheeks and ears reddened from the cold.
“Have you learned something?” he managed to ask from between teeth that chattered.
I handed him a cup of hot coffee with a bit more something else to warm him.
“Oh, this is quite wonderful, Miss Forsythe,” he said after taking a sip. He glanced past me to the blackboard.
“Oh, I say, what have you there?” His gaze scanned the original message. “This looks very much the same as the message our people intercepted in Luxembourg.”
“The same,” Brodie replied.
“And the rest of this?” Alex asked.
“The decoded message,” I explained. “Or at least part of it. Something is in place to happen on December eighteenth.”
