Prime (23 page)

THIRTY-SEVEN

Incirlik Air Base, Turkey

The passage of time did not cool Daniel Parker’s ire. Instead, the
longer he sat, alone with his thoughts, chewing the gristle of his bitterness,
the more convinced he became that his old friend had forsaken him. Why exactly,
he could not say. Maybe King was enamored with his new teammates…
maybe just having me around reminds him how
badly he bungled the last mission
…

Yes, that had to be it.

Maybe
he’s trying to cover his ass, put the blame for the screw-up in Myanmar onto
me, somehow.

Damn
him
.

He didn’t buy for a second King’s story about
needing him to decode the Voynich manuscript. King didn’t really believe there
was anything worthwhile in the mysterious old book; its only value to him was
the fact that Kevin Rainer seemed to care about it.

That thought gave Parker pause. Maybe King
wasn’t a believer, but Sasha definitely thought the book was important, and
that was reason enough to take it seriously.

After the team exited the plane 30,000 feet
above northwestern Iran, the stealth transport had headed for Incirlik Air
Force Base in Turkey. The plane was refueled and refitted for the eventual
extraction of the team. Parker found an unused office near the airstrip, and as
he listened in on the team’s radio transmissions, he went to work on the riddle
of the Voynich manuscript.

He reviewed Sasha’s notes more thoroughly,
and he discovered that his initial perusal had only scratched the surface.
Sasha Therion had been thinking about the Voynich problem for a long time, and she
had recorded her musings in a personal journal. Parker scrolled through the
entries, going back to the day that she had been contacted by Scott Klein and
told of Cipher element’s discovery in Ramadi:

There
is a new lead on the Voynich manuscript. A page has been found among documents
captured from an insurgent cell in Iraq, and preliminary findings indicate a
connection between the
manuscript
and plague research.
While it is a tenuous connection, it supports my hypothesis that VM contains
information that might offer insight into the origin of life.

Parker couldn’t recall Sasha mentioning any
such hypothesis. He did a search of the journal, and found an entry from nearly
two years earlier.

I am
so weary of them all. Just when I think I have figured out the secret of what
makes them tick, they do something completely unexpected. The human variable
confounds me. I don’t even want to leave home anymore.

I am
going to take that government job. Now that I think about it, I don’t even know
why I hesitated. It’s perfect.
The Voynich manuscript.
It’s always fascinated me, but I never would have imagined that I could
actually get paid to solve it.

He was surprised to learn that her CIA
contract had been primarily for the purpose of cracking the Voynich code. He
had always assumed that it was just one of many projects she consulted on.
Based on that new information, he realized that deciphering the Voynich
manuscript had become Sasha’s entire reason for living. He skimmed through the
subsequent entries until he found something more substantial.

The
pictures must be the key to understanding VM. It cannot simply be, as many
think, a book of herbal lore. The paintings show plants that do not exist, or
rather, plants that we have never seen before. Those plants must have existed
when the book was written; how else can the level of precision and detail be
explained?

I am
convinced that Bacon is the author of the book, though perhaps he did not work
alone. I’m also convinced that the VM contains a record of his experiments.
What kind of experiments? Did he conduct some kind of primitive genetic
manipulations? That would account for the mysterious plants. Perhaps he created
them in his laboratory.

“Bacon” had to be Roger Bacon, a 13
^th
century Franciscan friar who was often credited as the father of scientific
investigations. His published writings included detailed reports of his
experiments with lenses, acoustics, botany and even a primitive form of
gunpowder. One popular theory held that Bacon was the author of the Voynich
manuscript, and indeed many of the illustrations in the manuscript were similar
to known examples of his work.

Yet,
I have to believe there is more to it than that. Methods of cross-pollinating
and plant grafting were widely known in his day. He would not have felt the
need to hide his research using such a complex cipher if that was all it was.
No, I believe he must have uncovered something even more profound, something
that could have made him liable for a charge of heresy.

What
could that possibly be? I can think of only one thing. If the plants shown in
the VM are not the result of genetic manipulation, and they do not exist in the
natural world, I see only one logical conclusion: they were created. Bacon
discovered the alchemists’ secret, the Elixir, the Philosopher’s Stone. Nothing
short of the discovery of the secret of creating life from inorganic matter
could account for his compulsion to conceal the knowledge in a code that seems,
quite literally, unbreakable.

The Elixir of Life?
Parker had missed that reference during his
earlier reading. It was difficult to believe that the ever-pragmatic
cryptanalyst’s quest to decode the Voynich manuscript was anything but an
academic exercise; this idea seemed so fanciful, and yet, he could not disagree
with her simple logic. The complexity of the Voynich code demanded that its
contents be of exceptional value.

Subsequent entries in Sasha’s journal
variously restated that hypothesis, but evidently her insights had not been
sufficient to crack the code. He skipped forward to the most recent entry—made
less than an hour before the disastrous raid and failed rescue attempt in
Myanmar. Parker read it again, this time from this new perspective.

I
cannot allow myself to think about what has happened. It is beyond my
comprehension. The human variable confounds me yet again. If only I could find
the solution that would allow me to subtract that unknown and balance the
equation.

The
answer lies in the VM. I am sure of it. If I can decipher the VM, maybe I can
work backward and find a solution for the human variable.

I
think I understand the connection between the urghan and the manuscript. Guo
Kan led the Mongol armies that sacked Baghdad. He also traveled with Nasir
al-Tusi. Now it all makes sense. It was not Bacon that wrote the VM, but
al-Tusi, an Islamic scholar. I should have made that connection sooner. After
all, ‘elixir’ is an Arabic word; it translates as ‘the effective recipe.’
Effective could be understood in the causative sense; not just a healing
substance, but something that can bring life out of lifelessness.

Al-Tusi
must have discovered the secret of the elixir and created the code to keep it
safe. Perhaps, in his writings, I will find the key to deciphering the book.
Perhaps he even kept a copy of the plans for the urghan with the documents he
rescued from Baghdad and took back to Persia. It might be there at Maragheh.

I
still do not understand the connection between the plague and the book, but I
am no longer willing to dismiss it as a coincidence. Guo Kan had the urghan;
did he use it to decode the book? Perhaps he tried to make the elixir, but
accidently unleashed something else—
an
elixir of
anti-life? Or maybe it was no accident.

When
I have deciphered the book, I will know for sure.

Parker realized that he had been holding his
breath.

Sasha’s long effort to understand the Voynich
manuscript was nothing less than a quest to divine the secret of life. It had
become her sole purpose for living.

In a rush of understanding, Daniel Parker realized
that his own purpose was to help her succeed.

“Damn you, Jack,” he muttered under his
breath. “You’d better bring her back in one piece.”

As if in response to his utterance, a voice
blared from the radio: “King, there’s a vehicle approaching. You’re about to
have company.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

Maragheh, Iran

Sasha felt as though her head was about to implode.

The variables had multiplied beyond her
ability to enumerate them. They were coalescing in her consciousness, becoming
a veritable black hole of chaos and uncertainty that consumed her thoughts. Her
sleep had been erratic; there were huge gaps of time in her memory; dark
periods where she must have slept deeply, but she felt exhausted and physically
ill. Her techniques for tuning out the world—working through prime numbers,
performing complex mathematical operations in her head—seemed beyond her
ability now. She barely understood where she was; even the simplest of sensory
inputs were scrambled in a fog of confusion.

She sat in the back of a large vehicle, an
SUV of some kind. There were five other men there. Four of them had been on the
plane; Chinese men, whose tailored suits did not quite conceal their true
identity as thugs working for the triad. They had told her their names, but
that information had already vanished beyond the event horizon. The fifth man
had been picked up shortly after their arrival. He was different; he cowered
fearfully in his seat, nursing superficial wounds that oozed blood. Sasha
sensed that he was not there of his own volition.

A prisoner.
Like me
.

The realization slipped away, engulfed by the
blackness of chaos.

Some time later—perhaps just a few minutes,
perhaps days or weeks—she became aware of someone tugging at her arm. The SUV
had stopped, and all of its passengers, save for her, had already disembarked.
She allowed herself to be coaxed from her seat, but as soon as she was standing
on the rough ground outside, she felt her legs go weak. She tried to lean
against a fender, but the man holding her arm did not permit this; he drew her
toward the front end of the vehicle.

She gradually came to understand that it was
nighttime. The headlights of the SUV were illuminating a rather plain looking
metal door set into a much larger white structure. The man—the prisoner—was propelled
forward, and one of their captors barked a rough order. The prisoner fumbled
with a ring of keys, and after a few moments, he succeeded in unlocking the
door, after which they all filed in. Sasha and her minder brought up the rear.

Flashlights came out, but their beams
revealed little about the interior of the white structure. Sasha wasn’t paying
any attention. This new experience only compounded her sense of dislocation;
the dark tumor of uncertainty throbbed in her head, consuming even her desire
to know what was happening.

The group descended a flight of carved stone
steps, and they halted at last in a room that might have been the office at a
construction site. One of the men barked something, and then repeated himself,
but Sasha paid no heed until she felt someone shaking her arm violently.
Through a monumental effort of will, she fixed her gaze on the man who had been
speaking.

“Tell him what you want.” The man spoke in a
harsh, clipped manner, possibly a result of his relative unfamiliarity with
English but more probably because he was a man of violence, used to getting his
way with bellicose displays of aggression.

“What, I—?”
Sasha shook her head. What was he talking
about?

“We bring you here to Maragheh, like you ask.
You say you need writings.” He gestured forcefully at the prisoner. “Tell him
which papers you need.”

Maragheh
.
That was important, and she struggled to
remember why. “Al-Tusi,” she murmured. “In Nasir al-Tusi’s writings, is there
anything that describes how to construct an
urghan
?”

The prisoner, a middle-aged man with a full
head of gray hair and a bushy beard, looked at her blankly for a moment, and he
seemed on the verge of answering in the negative, but a menacing growl from one
of the other Chinese men gave him pause.

“An
urghan
,
you say?” He bent over a table and began flipping through a ring binder.

This simple act of compliance was a lifeline
to Sasha in the midst of the whirlpool.
Maragheh.
Al-Tusi.
The
urghan.

These were not variables. They were the
constants that anchored her to the world; they were known quantities and values
that, while not yet completely understood, were fixed properties.

The manuscript
.

Yes.

The Voynich manuscript was the ultimate
constant. The knowledge locked within its mysterious cipher text would not
change once she decoded it. It would be the same tomorrow as it was when
al-Tusi had first written it down. But she would change.

The book was the irreducible prime factor
that would enable her finally to balance the equation of her life…of the very nature
of human existence. She believed this to be true with every fiber of her being.

I
need to be here
…
right now
…
in this moment
.

She willed herself back from the swelling
tide of chaos and straightened, at long last taking in her surroundings. She
knew that she was in the ruins of the Maragheh Observatory, which now rested
inside a protective geodesic bubble that preserved its ancient stones and the scrolls
and codices from the ravages of the elements. The man—the prisoner—was an
Iranian, and probably one of the archaeologists or caretakers of the facility.
Her Chinese captors had rightly deduced that they would not be able to simply
walk into Maragheh and find what they needed lying out on a table. Sasha
wondered if she would even recognize the document when it was finally procured.

“This must be it,” the prisoner announced,
tapping a page.
“A treatise on the mathematical nature of
harmonies.
Al-Tusi’s authorship is suspected, but not proven. It appears
nowhere else, and it is not mentioned in any other writings of the time.”

“Get it,” ordered the leader.

The man moved into the maze of shelves,
followed closely by one of the Chinese men, and then he returned a moment later
with a copper tube. The lead captor snatched it from his hands and handed it to
Sasha.

“You must wear gloves,” admonished the
Iranian, but before he could explain why, a savage blow to the gut put him on
his knees, hunched over and moaning in pain.

Sasha witnessed the violence with detachment;
her attention had already become focused on opening the case and teasing out
the roll of parchment inside. The outermost curl, which had received the most
exposure to the environment, felt stiff and cracked a little at the edges when
she began to unfurl it, but above that, the vellum had, for the most part,
remained supple. She carefully unrolled the document and spread it out on a
tabletop.

It was immediately evident that she would not
be able to read it; the careful and elegant script looked to her untrained eye
like Arabic, but the accompanying illustrations filled her with hope. This was,
unquestionably, a set of instructions for building the device that had been
recovered from Guo’s crypt. One illustration even showed the levers, marked
with Voynich characters, and each one was connected by a line to the pipes of
varying length contained in the body of the
urghan
.
Though she could not grasp the specific musical tones that the pipes were
intended to produce, Sasha could already see the mathematical progression that
al-Tusi had employed. Given enough time, she might be able to work it out in
her head, but she felt certain that, if afforded access to a computer and
supplied with translation tools, she could build a virtual replica of the
device, and with
it,
at long last, she could decode
the Voynich manuscript.

“This is it,” she breathed.

The lead captor did not appear to appreciate
the gravity of her discovery, but he understood well enough that they had
accomplished their objective. He dipped a hand into the folds of his jacket and
produced a pistol, which he promptly trained on the other captive.

The Iranian’s eyes grew wide, and he threw
his hands up in a supplicating gesture. “No. Please. I did what you asked.”

The Chinese man glanced at Sasha again. “You
need him for anything else?”

Sasha blinked, not fully comprehending the
question. The man might be able to help her translate the document, but there
were other ways to accomplish that. What she really needed was a computer; her
computer. “I don’t think so.”

That was answer enough for the Chinese man.
He adjusted the barrel of the pistol so it was trained between the captive’s
eyes…

And then he abruptly pitched backward onto
the ground. Before any of his cohorts could react, they too went down, pistols
and flashlights clattering to the floor, the latter describing wild and random
arcs of illumination before coming to rest.

Sasha stood motionless, unable to fathom what
had just happened. She picked up the flashlight she had been using to inspect
the document and swept it around the library. Her beam found a large figure,
dressed in desert camouflage and heavily laden with military gear, emerging
from behind one of the shelves. His face was partially obscured by a night
vision device, and at the touch of her flashlight beam, he raised a hand to
shade his eyes. Sasha saw that he held a gun in the other hand; wisps of smoke
were issuing from its long barrel.

“Miss Therion!” The voice, a man’s voice,
came from another direction, and she turned to see two more similarly dressed
figures moving toward her from a different part of the room. “It’s Jack Sigler.
Are you all right?”

Sigler
?

She remembered him.
One of
the Delta commandos who had accompanied her in Iraq, and had tried to rescue
her in Myanmar.

Her head started to pound with the effort of
processing what had just happened.
More variables.
More chaos.

But this time, she was able to resist the
pull of the vortex. She now had the key to unlocking the manuscript, and with
it, the secret of the Elixir.

The solution was within her grasp. Soon, she
would have the means to balance the equation, and at last, wipe away all the
uncertainty.