Prime (21 page)

THIRTY-THREE

General Keasling was waiting for them at the safe-house. He stood with
his arms folded across his chest, saying nothing as the thoroughly dispirited
Delta operators filed into the room and collapsed wearily onto the floor.

Ten had gone out. Only seven had come back.

They had reached the van after a harrowing
hour-long cross-country trek. On three different occasions, they had
encountered
buru—
the
crocodilian species was evidently a nocturnal predator—waiting in ambush along
their chosen route, but in each case, Shin spotted them in time to avoid a
repeat of the earlier battle. The frankensteins had dogged their steps
relentlessly for the first half-hour, but after that, the noise of pursuit had
dwindled. When they finally reached the rented van, they climbed inside with
barely a word exchanged among
themselves
. Zelda had
handed her radio over to King, who promptly informed Deep Blue that they had
reached the extraction point. He hadn’t added that the mission was a complete
failure; that was self-evident.

They picked up Casey Bellows on the return
trip. Despite the fact that his role in the night’s disastrous events had been
peripheral, he shared their sense of defeat. Now, back in the relative safety
of the Mandalay op center, there seemed little left to do but lick their
wounds.

Keasling continued to survey the team with a
stern look, then turned on his heel and scooted a large blue Igloo cooler into
the center of the room. He threw back the lid to reveal several brown glass
bottles sloshing about in a bath of ice cubes.

As if by unanimous accord, the members of the
team stared at the offering like it was a crate full of spent nuclear fuel
rods.

Tremblay finally edged forward and picked up
one of the bottles.
“Samuel Adams Boston Lager.
General, I could…” He stopped in mid-quip, as if recognizing that this most
definitely wasn’t the time or the place, and instead he commenced distributing
the beers. When he had completed that task, he raised his bottle.
“To missing friends.”

Everyone raised their drinks to the toast,
but when they finally began to imbibe, it was perfunctory. King just stared at
the bottle and shook his head. He raised his eyes to Keasling. “Sir, I’d like a
word with you and Deep Blue…in private, please.”

Keasling regarded him thoughtfully, as if
divining King’s intent. “Want to call it quits, son?”

“I blew it, sir. Three men are dead, and
nothing to show for it.”

“The fact that you made it out of there is a
testament to your abilities.” He gestured around the room. “That goes for all
of you. So you got your asses handed to you; shit happens. The important thing
is that you took the fight to the enemy, and he’s the one that ran. You were
ordered to run him down, and that’s what you’ve got to do.”

King remained unconvinced. “So, we’re just
going to watch and see where he lands next, and then go charging into another
little shop of horrors? Do we just keep doing that until we finally run out of
bodies to throw at him?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

Parker spoke up unexpectedly. “Jack, it’s not
just about beating him or getting payback. He’s got Sasha. As long as she’s
alive, we have to keep trying.”

King looked like he was about to throw up his
hands, but instead he just rubbed the bridge of his nose as if trying to massage
away a headache. “Kevin told me something back there; he talked about a
paycheck. He’s just the hired muscle. We need to know
who’s
writing that check and why they need Sasha. Maybe if we can figure that out, we
can get ahead of him. That’s the only way we’re going to win this.”

There was a loud pop as Zelda smacked a hand
against her thigh. She shrugged out of her backpack and rooted in it until she
produced a laptop computer. “I completely forgot about this. I grabbed it from
the room where we ran into Rainer. She was working on it when we walked in.”

Parker reached out for it, and after a nod
from King, Zelda surrendered it. Parker opened the computer and hit the power
button, but a moment later he let out a frustrated sigh. “Password protected.”

“If anyone can figure it out,” King said,
“it’s you, Danno.”

Parker however wasn’t quite as enthusiastic.
“Sasha Therion is a mathematical genius and a professional cryptographer. I
think her password is going to be a little more complicated than the name of her
pet goldfish.”

“Is there another way to get around it?”

Parker stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Well,
Lew taught me a few tricks… He’s the guy you really want working on this.”

“Done,” declared Keasling. “It just so
happens
that Staff Sergeant Aleman has been assigned to the
headquarters element of our new team. You should be able to link up with him
using the equipment here.”

“Crack that nut, Danno.” King’s expression
was no longer that of a defeated commander ready to tender his resignation or
fall on his sword. Whether it was Keasling’s exhortation or Zelda’s revelation,
he had a little of his fighting spirit back. “Figure out what that bastard
wants, and where he’s going to go next, and just maybe, we’ll be able to get
her back.”

THIRTY-FOUR

The password turned out to be child’s play, relatively speaking anyway.
Sasha’s user settings were protected by factory-standard security software,
which was not in
itself
unsophisticated. There was no
way around the password lock without reformatting the hard drive and
overwriting the disk’s contents, and the password options were virtually
unlimited, but it had one weakness that Lewis Aleman was able to exploit, and
in short order, he opened Sasha’s computer like it was Pandora’s Box. That
weakness was that there was no limit to the number of attempts that could be
made to enter the correct password.

Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have mattered. Even
with unlimited guesses, it might take a lifetime to physically enter all the
possible combinations. A skilled hacker might be able to accomplish the same
task in a matter of days instead of decades, but it would nevertheless be a
daunting task even for the fastest commercially available computers.

Deep Blue had given Aleman access to
something even better: the National Security Agency’s XT3 Red Storm
supercomputer.

The most time-consuming part of the process
involved creating a virtual clone of Sasha’s computer inside the NSA’s system,
a procedure that was limited by the download speed of the satellite Internet
connection at the safe-house. The cloned version eliminated the laborious chore
of manually entering all possible password permutations, or waiting for the
laptop’s comparatively ponderous Intel Core processor to run the security
subroutine.

It took all of three minutes.

Trying to make sense of the contents of the
computer took slightly longer; about half an hour altogether.

“It really is about trying to decode the
Voynich manuscript,” Parker announced after scanning the most recently created
document files.

King, exhausted and sporting a veritably
mummy’s wrap of bandages over cuts and abrasions too numerous to count, didn’t
look particularly impressed. “Alright, Danno, you’ve been talking about this
manuscript for a couple days now. What is it?”

Parker took a breath and affected his best
professorial manner. “In 1912, a rare book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich came
across a very unique book in a church in Italy. It was an antique, hand written
on parchment and illustrated with full color paintings. That was pretty common
for books from the
Middle
Ages, before the invention
of the printing press, but what made this book really special was the fact that
it was written in cipher text.”

“Symbols instead of
letters?
Like the page we
supposedly found in Ramadi?”

“Right.
At a glance, you might think it’s just
another language or a different alphabet, but the symbols in the manuscript
have never appeared anywhere else. Even so, there are ways to break a
cipher,
and usually the longer the message, the easier it is
to crack. All you have to do is figure out which characters appear most
frequently, and then compare them to the letters of the alphabet that are most
often used, and you’re on your way to breaking the cipher.”

“Just like Wheel of Fortune; you start with
RNLST and E. But what if it’s not written in English?”

Parker shook his head. “That’s not as
important as it might seem. But in the case of the Voynich manuscript,
professional and amateur code breakers from all over Europe have been trying to
crack it for nearly a hundred years. The fact that no one has succeeded has led
many to believe that it’s a fake—a randomly generated message, created by a
medieval con man.”

King frowned. “Okay, for argument’s sake,
let’s say that it’s real. What difference does it make? What are we talking
here: lost books of the Bible? Templar treasure maps, or something else? What
makes this thing so damned important? What makes it worth killing for?”

Parker took a deep breath. “Remember how I
said the manuscript was illustrated? It’s full of detailed drawings, mostly of
plants, but other things too, like star charts and animals. The popular theory
is that it was a book of herbal or alchemical lore. That would explain why it
was coded in the first place; it’s a book of secret recipes, and who ever wrote
it didn’t want those recipes falling into the wrong hands.”

King nodded slowly.
“Secret
recipes.
Like the formula for some kind of nerve agent?”

“Or worse.”
Parker turned the computer around so that King
could see the file he had been looking at. The screen displayed a picture of a
badly damaged wooden box with several levers sticking out from the sides. “This
was found in a crypt in China. It has markings that are identical to the cipher
used in the manuscript. The crypt where they found this thing was hot with a
strain of plague bacteria. In fact, the place where they found it might have
been ground zero for the Black Death back in the fourteenth century.”

“Okay, now you have my attention.” King
pointed at the image. “What is it?”

“It’s a musical instrument, similar to an
organ. The code isn’t cipher text. It’s musical notation. That’s why no one has
been able to crack it. The letters don’t correspond to any alphabet; they’re
musical notes.”

King just stared at him.

“Sasha figured it all out…well, almost. She
couldn’t verify any of her historic suppositions because they wouldn’t let her
have outside Internet access, but it all checks out.”

Parker tapped the screen again. “This is what
started it all. Some kind of primitive pipe organ, found in the crypt of a
Chinese general who led the Mongol armies that destroyed Baghdad in 1258; it
was a war trophy taken from the House of Wisdom.”

“That was almost a hundred years before the
Black Death,” King pointed out. “How could they be connected?”

“Maybe they’re not, but somebody obviously
thinks they are. That’s why they want Sasha to decode the manuscript.”

King still didn’t appear convinced. “Back up.
You said
it’s
musical notation. What did you mean by
that?”

“Think of it as another layer of code. Each
symbol corresponds to a specific musical note—we even use letters to symbolize
those, A to G—so music is a form of language. The Voynich notation is obviously
more complex, but that could be the difference between octaves or
semitones—sharps and flats. I don’t understand it all, but Sasha did. She was
in the process of trying to create a virtual copy of the organ when you showed
up tonight.”

“Would that have worked?”

“The original was badly damaged. There wasn’t
enough of it left to even begin guessing how the symbols and notes
corresponded. But Sasha was researching someone named Nasir al-Tusi, a Persian
scientist and an advisor to the Mongol ruler. Al-Tusi was the Leonardo Da Vinci
of the Islamic world. No, scratch that… He was more like Leonardo and Galileo and
Isaac Newton all rolled into one. Based on what Sasha turned up, he’s a good
candidate for having been involved in the creation of the manuscript. He was
also present at the destruction of Baghdad, and he even managed to save some of
the documents from the House of Wisdom. Sasha wanted access to al-Tusi’s
writings, to see if the plans for the organ were there somewhere, but she never
got a chance.”

King considered this for a moment. “Those
documents he saved; where did they go?”

“A place called Maragheh. It was an
astronomical observatory, and after the destruction of Baghdad, the last
bastion of science and learning in the Islamic world.”

“I don’t suppose it’s still around today?”

“Yes and no. It’s currently undergoing
restoration.” Parker clicked a few keys and the picture on the display changed
to show an enormous white geodesic dome. “Everything in Sasha’s notes indicates
that she expected to find a copy of the plans for the organ in the archives of
the Maragheh Observatory. There are thousands of documents there, but hardly
any of them have been preserved digitally.”

“So, the only way to get the specs for the
organ is to physically visit this observatory.” It was more a statement than a
question, but King’s next inquiry wasn’t rhetorical. “The organ is the only way
to decode the manuscript?”

Parker nodded.

King’s lips curled into a smile that was both
grim and satisfied. “Rainer will have to go to Maragheh. And we’ll be waiting
for him.”

“Jack, there’s a problem. Maragheh…”

“Yeah?”

“It’s in Iran.”

King blinked at him. “Oh. I guess that is a
problem.”