He recognized the grumble too—Phillip Camden, one of the few of his new colleagues who always greeted him with an easy smile instead of polite distrust. “How in blazes am I supposed to decode something in a whole different alphabet? And how the devil can I know which one?”

“If it’s too much for you, you can put it aside for someone else, you know.” The note in De Wilde’s voice said she knew well that by phrasing it like that, she was making it an issue of pride.

Much like his colleagues had done in Russia, this group greatly enjoyed poking fun at one another. He stepped into the room and cleared his throat. “Pardon me. I heard mention of alphabets. I could perhaps be of service?”

Not everyone was in for the day yet, but those who were all came to a sudden halt, five sets of eyes upon him.

His fingers curled into his palm. Why did he feel as though he ought to apologize? This was, after all, why Hall had hired him, wasn’t it? He pulled out a smile. “I do not mean to be forward. But I studied linguistics at university. I am fluent in nine languages and able to translate several more with the aid of a lexicon. I am likely to know any alphabets we have intercepted.”

That use of we was calculated. It would, with a bit of luck, remind them that even before he came here, he’d been an ally. Doing this same work, on the same side.

Camden stood with a grin. “And the Lord provides. Here, sit. See if you can make sense of it, Ziv.”

Ziv. He blinked at the nickname but moved toward the chair. On Camden’s desk a few papers rested, including a hastily drawn Vigenère table with the Latin alphabet filled in. It had, apparently, produced nothing but gibberish when applied to the message also sitting there.

He sat, looking first at the encrypted message. The length of the words, the frequency of certain repetitions of letters, the patterns of language. Borrowing Camden’s slide rule, he flipped over the paper with the table on it and drew his own. One with thirty-three letters instead of English’s twenty-six. Into this he put the Cyrillic alphabet and then applied to the message the new pattern it created.

It required only a few minutes to realize he’d selected the correct alphabet. Words definitely began appearing, though they weren’t the most familiar. “Not Russian—but Bulgarian, without doubt. Shall I . . . ?”

“You had better.” This from one of the other codebreakers—Adcock, who smiled at him genuinely for the first time in Zivon’s three weeks here. “If you leave it to Camden, he’ll make a mess of it.”