Morning Briefing

The British had three translators, and Fatima was the only one they did not pay directly.

This was not unusual. This was, in fact, the arrangement that had been negotiated with her father, who had been told that his daughter would be performing clerical work of a sensitive nature and compensated in the form of protection for the family's shop on Sharia el-Falaki, which had been twice searched by military police that summer for reasons that were never specified.

Fatima understood the arrangement precisely. She had no illusions about it.

She was good at this. She had studied at the American University for two years before the money ran out, and her English was better than either of the two other translators — both men, both university-educated in England, both apparently incapable of recognizing idiomatic usage when it appeared in intercepted field reports. She had corrected the same error four times this week without credit.

The document placed in front of her on Tuesday morning was routine: a communication from a German field officer to his supply depot, requesting fuel and ammunition, the kind of thing that required translation quickly and accurately and generated no further interest.

Except that embedded in the body of the message, in a section that read as standard supply logistics and would have read that way to anyone who was not listening for a particular pattern, was a codename she recognized.

Not from intelligence work. From home.

From the nickname her mother had given her brother when he was six years old and had refused to answer to his given name.

Her hand did not shake. She was twenty-three years old and she had learned, in twenty-three years, not to let her hands shake at important moments.

She translated the document. She handed it in. She returned to her desk.

Then she began, very carefully, to plan.