Decoding

The first thing Peggy Carter noticed when she walked into the office with the lunch orders, was that everyone seemed to be clustered around one desk. The desk of one agent Vega, who had been out on a mission when she went to collect lunch, to be exact. Naturally, this peaked her curiosity.

Setting the bag with lunch on a desk she passed by, she made her way to where everyone else was standing. "What's going on here?" she inquired. Most agents ignored her, but not Daniel Sousa. He made his way to stand beside her, leaning on his crutch, before answering her.

"Agent Vega came back from his mission just after you left. He intercepted a letter and is currently trying to decode it, without much luck," Daniel explained to her.

"Huh," Peggy answered, before making her way from the edge of the circle towards the desk, where indeed, agent Vega was seated, with a paper with morse code on it in front of him and a pen in hand. Jack Thompson, chief of the New York SSR department, stood beside him, arms crossed and his signature smirk present on his face.

"Carter, there you are, man the phones, will you?" Jack ordered. Peggy only rolled her eyes and decided to ignore him. Instead, she looked at the letter and what agent Vega had managed to decode already. It didn't take her long at all to notice that he had the letter upside down or that he'd mixed up some letters while decoding it. She sighed inwardly at this. Men, you can't trust them to do anything right.

"The letter is upside down," she stated. She then turned it, so it was the right way up for her, grabbed an empty piece of paper and took the pen from agent Vega's hand. Promptly, she began to write, eyes not once leaving the lines of morse code. "There are also some mistakes in agent Vega's decoding, mixed up letters and such," she told him matter of factly, still writing.

Peggy ignored the degrading comments of her colleagues and their disbelieving questions of "Who does she think she is, Vega's been decoding that for twenty minutes, how's she doing it that fast?". She ignored agent Vega's sputtering of "I was busy with that!" and even ignored agent Yauch's "You can't just ignore the chief's orders, Carter, go man the phones!". It was only when Jack told her "Thanks for pointing that out, Margharet, but Vega was doing a fine job decoding that, you can go hand out lunch and cover the phones now," that she looked up from her writing.

"With all due respect, Jack, I think I'm doing a better job at decoding this letter that agent Vega's been doing. You see, I've already made my way through two layers of coding, while agent Vega took twice as long to decode only half of the first layer. Besides, I've got more experience in decoding, seeing as I've done it thousands of times before, before I was drafted by the SSR. Also, I'm pretty fluent in Russian, a skill I picked up on while serving in Eastern Europe, which I don't believe agent Vega possesses," Peggy argued, looking Jack dead in the eye.

"Why on earth do you need to speak Russian to decode this letter," Jack asked incredulous.

"Because, these words are actually Russian numbers, Jack. I need to translate them, before I can continue decoding," Peggy deadpanned. Taking his astounded "Oh" as a sign their conversation as closed, Peggy turned her gaze back towards her paper, where she continued to jot down numbers in her neat handwriting.

Peggy could feel the stares of her colleagues burning holes in her back while she worked, but she shrugged them off. Whoever wrote this letter hadn't used difficult codes. However, they had used a lot of different codes over each other, making it a lot of work anyway.

It took her some time, but after about half an hour and about three pieces of paper she had completely decoded the entire letter. Now she had a short message scribbled down in front of her in understandable English.

As soon as she put down her pen, Jack briskly walked up to where she was still standing at agent Vega's desk. The other agents had gone back to their own desks after some time, grabbing their lunch from the bag and working further on whatever they were working on before agent Vega came back, though they kept lancing at Peggy every now and then. Jack grabbed the sheet of paper with the readable message, before Peggy herself could read it through.

"You must have made a mistake, Marge. This letter still doesn't make any sense," Jack called out after reading it through. At this, every other agent looked up. Some even walked over to watch this going down from up front.

"What does it say then, Jack?" Daniel asked from behind his desk, chair turned to have a proper look.

"Dear Miss Union Jack,

The boys and I were on the road to the North when we came across a group of Vladimirs. We overheard them saying they are going to throw nuts at the Tiny Pear on Cap's birthday. We played a game with them, but there are most certainly more Vladimirs. Thought you'd like to know this.

We should meet up to catch up sometime soon. The boys say hi,

D.D." Agent Fischer read out loud over Jack's shoulder. Most guys looked utterly confused at this message, though there were also some snickers from the ones who were under the impression that Peggy messed up while decoding, like Jack did. These were only fueled when Peggy groaned.

"That is a message from the Howling Commandos. The Russians are planning to bomb New York City on the Fourth of July," Peggy informed her colleagues. This caused the snickers to stop, but the curious looks only grew more bewildered. Peggy rolled her eyes, but gave them further explanation anyway. "This message is written with with the Howling Commandos code names. They came up with them during and after the war, so that if they send a message and the enemy intercepts it, they still wouldn't have a clue what it says after they've decoded it all. Agent Vega didn't intercept this letter, he was supposed to get it. Well, not him, per se, it could have been agent Blackwell just as well, it was just supposed to get to one of you, so you would bring it here," Peggy alluded.

"Who is that Miss Union Jack the letter is addressed to, by the way, or is that some code to explain the severity of the message. Wait, how do you know those code names anyway?" agent Ryan asked from where he was standing just behind Peggy.

"That would be me. As for how I know the code, I was there while they came up with it. I even helped them, God knows what kind of code names they would have if it weren't for me," Peggy answered him sharply. There was, however, a tiny smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, put there by fond memories of nights at the bar where they would come up with this silly code.

"Pfff, yeah sure, as if," agent Ford muttered quietly. He wasn't quiet enough it seemed, however, when Jack piped up.

"Actually, I can confirm that Carter is Miss Union Jack. She only got that name after our mission in Russia," Jack said. Peggy quirked an eyebrow at this. Apparently she'd gained some of his respect after that mission, though he hardly showed it. Peggy wasn't the only one surprised by this reaction, if the incredulous looks of the other agents were anything to go by.

"Thank you, Jack. Well, what are you guys waiting for? We've got a bombing to stop and there are only nine days left until the Fourth of July," Peggy told her colleagues. She herself walked toward her desk and picked up her phone.

"And what are you going to do?" Daniel asked her, while the rest started moving.

"I'm going to call a certain Howling Commando to remind him that phones still exist," Peggy stated, before she put the horn to her ear and started dialling a number.