Prime (12 page)

FOURTEEN

4163
…

Sasha ran through the factors in her head.
She discounted three out of hand; the individual digits did not add up to any
multiple of three.
Seven?
No.
Eleven?

She ran through the division.
Forty-one minus thirty-three leaves
eight…eighty-six minus seventy-seven is nine…ninety-three… No.

Seventeen?
Nineteen?
Twenty-three?

Yes
…
Twenty-three
from forty-one leaves eighteen, for one hundred-eighty-six. Eight times
twenty-three is one-eighty-four…which leaves two…twenty-three!

4167
…

The digits added up to eighteen. Three was a
factor.
Next
.

4169
…

Sasha already knew that the number was not a
prime—she had memorized the first two thousand prime numbers—but when she was
faced with a problem for which the solution was not readily apparent, she would
work her way down the number line, testing every number to see if it was prime,
a number that was divisible by only itself and one. The activity helped sharpen
her mental subroutines and gave her brain a chance to process the problem in
the background. Once in a while, the problem might relate to her work—a
particularly tricky code that would not yield to a brute force attack—but more
often than not, the problems that confounded her the most had nothing to do
with codes or numbers or anything that could be expressed in the precise
language of mathematics. Instead, her consternation arose from the chaos of
human interactions. She would use the technique to stave off boredom, such as
when forced to sit in a doctor’s waiting room. She was always punctual, and
could never understand why medical professionals could not afford their
patients the same courtesy. Other people would read magazines or play games on
their cell phones… Sasha worked out the primes.

This situation was a lot like waiting at the
doctor’s office, except it had gone on now for…how long?
Long enough to get to over four thousand
.

She knew she should probably be afraid.
Rainer had killed Scott Klein, for no reason she could fathom, and it seemed
likely enough that he would kill her too, but that prospect did not frighten
her nearly as much as the ongoing uncertainty. More than anything else, she
hated not understanding what was going on around her.

After leaving the helicopter in Syria, he and
the other men had been polite, if a bit abrupt at times. She had not been
mistreated at all, aside from the simple fact that she was their prisoner.
Rainer had promised that he would explain everything once they arrived at their
destination, so with every stop along the way, she had asked him again.

“Not yet,” he had told her as they deplaned
in Yangon, and then they had moved through the airport to another concourse to
wait for yet another flight. “Soon, everything will make sense. Trust me.”

Rainer seemed to understand that threats of violence
were not the way to gain her compliance. He did not seem
put
out by her repeated inquiries; if anything, he regarded her almost playfully,
as if he was in possession of a secret that he was dying to share with her.

Now, as she bounced between the other two men
in the back seat of the Toyota, with Rainer in the front passenger seat along
with the Chinese man who had met them outside the airport, she sensed the
long-awaited answer would come very soon. Speculation about what it might be
was almost as frustrating as the waiting.

She was contracted to work for the US
government, and as such was privy to matters that were classified as Top
Secret, but the men who now held her captive had access to the same materials.

Did they need her to break a code?

That seemed likely enough, and yet why the
elaborate deception? Why lure her to Iraq and then subsequently spirit her off
to Myanmar, when they could have just abducted her off the streets of
Georgetown?

It was a human problem; imprecise and
unpredictable. Human variables were too chaotic.

4171
…

She was still sifting through the factors
when the Toyota crested a hill, revealing a fenced compound with four buildings
nestled in a valley between two lushly forested hills. As the Toyota drew near,
two men rushed out to open the gate ahead of their arrival. They were wearing
civilian clothes, but carried guns—maybe they were AK-47s, she really didn’t
know for sure. She thought it might be some kind of paramilitary base, but it
looked almost like a school yard; there was even a rickety looking playground
in one corner of the compound.

They got out in front of one of the buildings
and Rainer escorted her inside. This, at last, had to be their ultimate
destination, and now he would tell her the reason for his actions. But Rainer
offered no explanation. Instead, he motioned to a row of cheap, molded plastic
chairs that lined the wall near the entrance, and then disappeared down a
hallway, leaving her alone.

For a fleeting moment, she thought about
simply getting up and leaving; it wasn’t like she was handcuffed to the chair.
She could hide somewhere, bide her time and wait for an opportunity to sneak
out of the compound…stowaway in one of the cars in the parking lot perhaps.

No.
Too many unknowns, too much uncertainty.

Rainer returned a moment later, accompanied
by a tall, handsome man. Although she seldom paid attention to the latest
fashion, Sasha thought his clothes looked expensive. He smelled amazing too.

The man greeted her with a smile. “Ms.
Therion, is it?
A pleasure to meet you at last.”

Sasha didn’t know exactly how to respond. She
couldn’t read facial expressions very well; smiles were just another
unpredictable human variable. “Who are you?”

The man glanced sidelong at Rainer. “She
doesn’t know?”

The turncoat Delta operator shook his head.
“I didn’t tell her anything.”

“Well, it’s not that important.” The man
flashed his smile again. “You’re not here to see me, after all.”

“I don’t know why I’m here.”

“You are here because I have a problem. You
see, I’m used to getting what I want. It’s one of the perquisites of having
more money than God. When I am confronted with a problem that I can’t solve, I
bring in the very best people to solve it for me. That is why you are here.”

“Are you…offering me a job?”

He threw back his head and laughed. “That’s
exactly what I’m doing.”

She was dumbfounded.

“This would be easier if I just showed you.
Please come with me.” He beckoned to her, and even though she had decided that
she wasn’t going to trust him, there seemed no alternative but to go along with
him.

He guided her to a bleak-looking conference
room. The chairs were the same as those in the lobby, and the table looked like
something from a school cafeteria. He seemed to sense her train of thought. “I
hope you’ll forgive the rather austere appointments. I usually spare no expense
when it comes to decorating, but the secretive nature of our work here meant
that I had to make do with what was available. But here, this is what I want
you to see.”

He held up a small plastic rod, which she
immediately recognized as a thumb drive. As if on cue, one of Rainer’s cohorts
stepped into the room and set a laptop computer down on the table—her laptop
computer, which she had not seen since setting out on the ill-fated raid more
than twenty four hours previously. The man opened the hinged screen and tapped
the power button.

After the device booted up, her host plugged
the thumb drive into the USB port. Understanding what was expected of
her,
Sasha entered her password to unlock the computer and
then opened the directory for the portable memory stick. The folder contained
several image files.

“Try the ‘slide show’ option,” her host
suggested.

She did, and after a few seconds the screen
went black as the first image loaded. It was a photo, but of what exactly, she
couldn’t tell. Misshapen and irregular, blackened and corroded, it looked like
something recovered from a fire. The image changed, showing it from a different
angle, but the mystery of what it was remained unresolved.

Except she did recognize
something.

She moved her face closer to the screen,
peering intently at something that protruded from the object. She couldn’t
guess what its function was, but there was a symbol on it, a single character that
she instantly recognized. Before she could process the information, the image
changed again, and as if anticipating her desires, the next image was a
close-up of the symbol:

“That’s the script from the Voynich
manuscript!”

Her host smiled. “Yes, it is.”

She felt closer to an understanding of what
was going on, but there were still too many unknowns. “Did the Iraqis find
something that can decode the manuscript?”

“Oh, good heavens, no.
And if they did, they wouldn’t know what to
make of it. I’m afraid the ruse in Iraq was necessary to draw you out into the
open. You see, I knew the CIA would be very interested in any discovery
relating to the world’s most famous unsolved code…interested enough to send
their best person out to investigate, though I had no idea who that person
would be. There are many so-called ‘experts’ with pet theories about the
Voynich code, but I needed the very best.”

There was an infallible logic to the answer,
and that appealed to Sasha, but it hardly justified what had been done to her.
“You had all those people killed, just so you could get me here?”

Her host glanced nervously at Rainer, but
then his expression hardened. “Maybe I haven’t made myself clear to you, Ms.
Therion. I get what I want, no matter the cost.”

She swallowed. “I understand.”

“Good.” He put his hands on his hips and
looked around the room as if to collect his thoughts.

“So what do you want? From me, I mean.”

The man gestured again at the computer. “The
object in those photographs was discovered last year in a crypt in the Yunnan
Province of China—just a few hundred miles from here, actually. As you can see,
the artifact has markings on it that are identical to those found in the
Voynich manuscript. It’s badly damaged of course, but there are eight definite
matches, and another fourteen probable matches, to Voynich script. I’m sure
you, of all people, understand how significant that is.”

She stared at the computer screen as it
continued to cycle through the images of the strange object. “What exactly is
it?”

“That is one of the questions I am hoping
that you will be able to answer. Our best theory is that it is an antique code
machine.”

Sasha pondered that. The existence of a
machine designed to facilitate enciphering or deciphering was not beyond the
realm of possibility, but it seemed unlikely in this instance for the simple
reason that the Voynich script remained so unique. If it had been produced
using a machine, then surely other documents would have been found utilizing
the elaborate—and still impossible to decrypt—substitution alphabet.

More unknowns.

Then she realized that the function of the
device didn’t matter nearly as much as the simple fact of its existence. It was
tangible proof that the Voynich manuscript could be deciphered…it was meant to
be deciphered.

By her.

Sasha felt as if someone had wiped her mental
chalkboard clean. All the uncertainty surrounding her abduction, the actions
and motives of her captors, even her ultimate fate when all of this was
done…all of those variables had been erased.

“I need to see this machine. The real thing,
not just pictures. Can you arrange that?”

The man regarded her with a taut expression,
as if it was he that now harbored uncertainties about the situation. “Ms.
Therion, because I want you to be able to solve this problem for me, I’m going
to be straightforward with you.