Douglas tapped the newspaper article.
"Remember the cryptography we discussed before? The finest codes don't make themselves unreadable. They make people completely unaware they exist."
He raised his head and looked at Dobby.
"Look, this article has seven paragraphs in total, right?"
Dobby had not yet had time to digest what he had heard, or to get excited that his boss had shared such secret information with him.
He immediately nodded.
"Yes, sir. Dobby counted."
"Seven, a number with great magical significance. Given how little information can be conveyed, what else do you think could be connected to seven?"
Dobby said excitedly, "July, the current month."
Douglas wrote July on the parchment.
"Next is the date. That requires a more subtle keyword.
The keyword we agreed on was tradition.
Now, help me count how many times the word tradition appears in this article."
Dobby's eyes instantly lit up. He immediately picked up the newspaper, his slender fingers moving rapidly across it as he muttered to himself.
A few seconds later, he looked up and said with certainty, "Sir! Exactly fifteen times, no more, no less!"
"Very good."
Douglas wrote "15" after "July."
"We have the month and the date. Now, what information do you think he wants to convey?"
Dobby's large ears flapped as he said:
"Is it an operation? Only an operation would need a date. If there's a date, then there needs to be a target?"
Douglas nodded.
"The target is usually the hardest thing to convey. So we agreed to use an acronym, hidden in the last sentence of each paragraph. It's very brief, so it depends on how well we understand each other."
Douglas copied the last sentence of each of the newspaper's seven paragraphs onto the parchment in order.
Ancient wizarding families must zealously protect