Prime (24 page)

THIRTY-NINE

King heard a voice, a low whisper. It was the Iranian man, the hostage
they had saved from a triad bullet, cowering on the floor, mumbling
incoherently… No, not mumbling…talking into a cellular phone.

“Bishop!”

Bishop darted forward and smacked the phone
from the man’s hand, sending it flying across the room to shatter against a
wall. He brandished the barrel of his carbine, thrusting it toward the man’s
face. “Who did you call?” he barked, and then he repeated the question in
Farsi.

The fearful hostage muttered something in the
same tongue and then continued pleading.

“What did he say, Bish?” asked Queen.

“He called the police. They’re probably on
their way.”

“Damn.” King continued forward until he was
standing in front of Sasha. His gaze fell on the unrolled parchment.
“It that it?
Is that what you were looking for?”

She nodded.

King let his carbine hang from its sling and
took out his digital camera. He snapped several photographs of the document
before rolling it up and stuffing it into a pocket. “We need to get out of
here, now.” He keyed his mic. “Rook, Knight, sitrep.”

Both men succinctly reported that everything
was clear outside the dome.

“Deep
Blue
, this is
King. It looks like we’re going to
be needing
that
extraction soon.”

The electronic voice responded immediately as
if anticipating the request.
“Understood.
The bird
left the ground five minutes ago. ETA to the rendezvous point is twenty mikes.”

“Roger, out.”
He turned to the Sasha again. “Where’s
Rainer?”

She gave him a blank stare, as if unaware
that he was addressing her, but then she snapped out of it. “He didn’t come. He
thought the Iranians would be suspicious of a Westerner.”

King felt only a flicker of disappointment.
Taking down Rainer would have been the icing on the cake, but rescuing Sasha
and recovering the information to decode the Voynich manuscript was nothing to
sneeze at. He gestured to the bodies on the floor. “Who are they?”

“Triad foot soldiers,” muttered Queen.

Sasha nodded.
“Posing as a
Chinese cultural delegation.”

That made sense. Iran and China had a cozy
relationship, with the latter buying most of the former’s oil exports, keeping
the regime flush with cash in spite of the sanctions imposed by Western
nations. King hoped Queen’s assessment was correct and that they hadn’t just
killed actual Chinese diplomats; one international incident was more than
enough.

“Queen, stay with her. Bishop, check these
guys for a set of keys. We’re gonna borrow their ride.”

Bishop jerked a thumb at the Iranian hostage.
“What about him?”

King regarded the frightened man. “Let’s hope
that when the police get here, he remembers to tell them that we’re the good
guys.”

They hastened out of the library chamber and
back to the dome’s entrance. Knight and Rook were waiting for them at the SUV—a
Toyota Hilux Surf—and without any discussion, they piled inside. Bishop settled
into the driver’s seat and started the engine, while King, in the front
passenger seat, busied himself with establishing a satellite data-link. The
others crowded into the rear, with Knight and Rook taking the door seats.

By the time they reached the edge of the open
area surrounding the ruins, King had started uploading of the images of the
al-Tusi document to Parker. Now, if they didn’t make it out, the secret to
decoding the Voynich manuscript would survive. Nevertheless, he was cautiously
optimistic about their prospects. It would take a while for the police to
arrive, and hopefully by then, they’d be long gone, en route to the remote
pick-up location several miles west of Maragheh.

His good feeling lasted about a minute, the
length of time it took for Bishop to navigate through the maze of exterior
ruins and around old foundations to the paved road south of the dome. There, in
the small parking lot, waited another vehicle identical
to
their own
. Several men with Asian features stood vigilantly around its
exterior, and as Bishop
drove
past them without
slowing, they all began moving, shouting and gesturing animatedly at the
departing SUV.

King felt a knot of dread in his stomach.
“Miss Therion, how many men were in that cultural delegation?”

Sasha seemed blissfully unaware.
“About a dozen.
Why?”

King sighed and shook his head. “One of these
days, everything is actually going to go according to plan; I truly believe
that. Bishop…
drive
like hell.”

FORTY

Incirlik Air Base, Turkey

Parker felt a wave of relief at the news of Sasha’s rescue, but that
did little to dull the sting of having been cut out of the operation. He
couldn’t begin to imagine the hell she’d gone through, and the fact that he
wasn’t there to comfort her only compounded his bitterness.

The computer chirped an alert, signaling that
a download was in progress. He waited until the transfer was complete and then
opened the file. There it was; Nasir al-Tusi’s instructions on how to build the
device that would decode the Voynich manuscript.

He scrolled over the text, cutting and
pasting it into a translation matrix, and in a matter of only a few seconds, he
was able to read the Persian scholar’s words in English. He skimmed the
introductory paragraphs and focused on the specifications for the
urghan
. Sasha had already constructed a
virtual replica of the exterior body—the wooden sounding chamber that would
amplify the musical tones—and the bellows system that supplied air to the
pipes. All that was missing was the pipes themselves. Al-Tusi had fashioned
them out of wood, and provided extensive information about the size, thickness,
and shape of the pipes. The units of measurement were unfamiliar to Parker, but
as he read on, he saw that even that detail was unimportant. The last section
of the roll contained information on how to verify that the
urghan
was tuned correctly; each character
of Voynich script corresponded to a specific note on the Persian harmonic
scale.

Almost trembling with excitement, he began
inputting the values into Sasha’s program for the virtual
urghan
. With each addition, the program transferred the information
into the deciphering subroutine, seeking out every instance where the Voynich
character occurred, and replacing it with an alphanumeric character based on
the musical scale, but Parker did not check it until the last value had been
entered.

He had hoped that the manuscript’s secrets
would simply pour off the pages, but the book did not give up its treasure so
readily. The output was an incomprehensible jumble of letters and numbers. He
tried different variations on the musical scale, but each time the result was
the same.

That wasn’t a surprise really; all he had
done was employ a common substitution cipher, and that approach had been tried
innumerable times. There was an added layer to the Voynich code.

He returned to the al-Tusi document and read
it again. Aside from the appearance of the unique script, there was nothing to
explicitly link the
urghan
to the
manuscript. The explanatory paragraphs focused mostly on the mathematical
properties of music. Then he noticed the final paragraph.

“When once you have fashioned the organ, the
music of the book may be understood with the indivisible numbers, each one in
turn and one for each number, in the language of civilized men but according to
the fashion of the infidel.”

Parker gaped at the words on the screen. The
‘book’ could only be the Voynich manuscript, but what did the rest mean? The
numbers part seemed straightforward enough; assign each musical note—as
represented by the Voynich script—a number and then employ an alphabetic
substitution.

Language of civilized men
?
To al-Tusi, the
civilized world was the world of Islam, and the common language of Islam, even
in Persia, was Arabic. That made sense, and offered one possible explanation
for why the manuscript had resisted all previous decoding efforts. But something
about that explanation nagged at him.

Of
course!

Arabic, like many Middle Eastern languages,
was written from right to left. The Voynich manuscript however was clearly
written in the manner of the Western world, from left to right. That was what
al-Tusi meant by “in the fashion of the infidel.” The original text had been
composed in Arabic, but then written backward, in the Western style, to confuse
the uninitiated reader.

But the difference in language and
composition style did not sufficiently explain the mystery. Read forward or
backward, the text output from the manuscript remained without any sort of
recognizable pattern.

He read the clue again.
Indivisible numbers
.
The only
whole numbers that could not be divided were the primes.
Each
one in turn.
Could that be it?

A standard substitution cipher assigned a
value for each letter of the alphabet: A=1, B=2 and so forth. With a cipher
wheel, you could change the starting point: A=4, B=5 and on until you started
the numbers over so that X=1, Y=2 and Z=3, but even this substitution could be
easily defeated by looking at the frequency of certain oft-used letters. There
were other ways to tweak the system, such as by using a keyword variation, but
frequency analysis remained the Achilles heel of any substitution cipher.
However, one way to render the cipher nearly unbreakable was to change the
substitution pattern with every letter, rotating the cipher wheel a prescribed
number of places with each letter. That way, letters and numbers would not
correspond with any regularity.

Had al-Tusi done that, using prime numbers to
adjust the cipher pattern with each new letter?

Parker plugged the new parameters into the
decipherment subroutine and let it run. He tried to keep his expectations in
check, and braced himself for yet another disappointment. When the screen
finally displayed the results, he was stunned to discover that he was able to
do something that nobody had done in over seven hundred years.

He was reading the Voynich manuscript.

FORTY-ONE

Maragheh, Iran

Bishop stomped the accelerator but had to brake just as quickly, when a
sharp hairpin turn loomed ahead.

“You do realize,” he said in a low voice that
was not altogether unlike the sound of rocks grinding together, “that just
because I was
born
in Iran, it
doesn’t mean I know my way around.”

Before King could respond, Deep Blue’s voice
came over the net. “Bishop, I’m tracking you on GPS. I’ll guide you to the
rendezvous point.”

“Well that’s handy,” Rook said.

“The road continues straight for about a
quarter-mile, then there’s another sharp turn to the left.”

The play of light on the embankment behind
them betrayed the fact that the second SUV was moving; they weren’t going to be
able to just slip away. Bishop floored the gas pedal again, racing down the
straight stretch, but before he got to the turn, a pair of headlights dawned in
the rearview mirror.

King glanced back.
“Knight,
see if you can’t shoot out their radiator.”

Knight answered with a nod, and depressed the
button to roll his window down as he twisted around in his seat. But as he
started to lean out, something smacked into the rear window, shattering it.
There were several more loud noises, the hammer-strike sound of bullets
striking the rear of their stolen SUV. Knight pulled back without firing, and
everyone ducked low, but Rook immediately popped back up, and aimed through the
opening where the window had been. The sound-suppressed weapon made hardly any
sound; the only indication that he was firing was the sudden storm of hot brass
shell-casings that started pelting the other passengers.

The headlights started swerving back and
forth as the other driver tried to evade the incoming fire, but then Bishop
reached the turn, and for a moment, the pursuing vehicle was again lost from
view.

King listened in as Deep Blue advised Bishop
about the road ahead. There was another short straight stretch, followed by a
hard right, but beyond that the road was straight for almost half-a-mile. King
saw city lights ahead on the right; in less than a minute, they would be
driving through an Iranian suburb.

“Let’s take ‘em on,” suggested Rook. “We’ve
got the firepower.”

Queen chimed in as well. “I agree.”

King felt like saying.
Great.
When this is a democracy, I’ll be sure to count your votes
. But
instead, he just shook his head. “Negative. We can’t risk getting pinned down
here. Shoot back if you can, but we’re not stopping.”

The headlights reappeared behind them, just
as they came alongside the residential area. If the police were not already on
their way, they would be as soon as the people in those shops and houses heard
the sound of shots from the triad soldiers’ guns…or as soon as they started
catching stray bullets.

“Bishop!
Hard right now!”
The electronic voice of Deep Blue crackled strangely, as if the software used
to mask his identity wasn’t sure how to interpret his urgency.

There was a broad paved boulevard running
almost parallel to the narrow access road on which they now drove, but neither
Bishop nor King saw any sign of the turn Deep Blue was telling them to take.

“Turn,” Deep Blue repeated, even more
stridently.
“Right turn.”

With unexpected suddenness, the road ended
and merged onto the main thoroughfare…going the wrong way.

Bishop realized his mistake a moment too
late. He stomped on the brake and hauled the wheel hard to the right, but it
was an impossible angle, and the stolen SUV had too much momentum. The brakes
locked, and there was a tortured scream of metal and rubber as the Toyota went
into a spin.

The next few seconds were a blur of movement,
but when King’s disorientation passed, he became aware of honking horns and the
headlights of traffic on the main road swerving around the now stationary SUV.
He also saw a pair of headlights coming from a different direction, and he realized
they were the lights of the pursuing Hilux Surf, still on the access road, but
about to reach the intersection. The vehicle carrying the team had spun around
too many times to count, but had come to rest facing back the way they’d come.

“Bishop!
Go!”

The big man, thankfully, didn’t ask him to
specify a direction, but cranked the wheel hard to the left and stomped on the
accelerator.

Nothing happened.

The spin out had caused the engine to stall.

Bishop frantically threw the shift selector
into neutral and jiggled the keys until the whining noise of the starter sounded,
but the engine refused to turn over. He tried again, once more with no success.

“It’s flooded!” Rook shouted from the back
seat.

King didn’t think it was possible to flood a
modern fuel-injected engine, but Bishop didn’t challenge the diagnosis.
Instead, he pressed the accelerator to the floor and held it there as he tried
the starter once more.

The engine roared to life with a plume of
blue smoke, and the smell of burning petroleum wafted into the interior through
the shattered rear window, momentarily overpowering the pervasive sulfur odor
of gunpowder. Bishop threw the SUV into gear and they lurched into motion,
joining the flow of traffic heading west, at almost the same instant that the
vehicle carrying the Chinese thugs reached the intersection.

Their pursuers had to slow to make the turn,
but the spin-out and stall had cost Chess Team several seconds of their lead.
The pursuing headlights continued to get closer until Bishop was able to build up
a head of steam.

King couldn’t see the speedometer, but it
felt like Bishop was doing close to seventy miles an hour. He swept around the
other vehicles on the road like they were standing still, weaving in and out,
and sometimes creating his own lane with a blaring horn. Unfortunately, the
pursuing vehicle didn’t have to contend with the same obstacles, because Bishop
was clearing a trail for them, and so despite his best efforts, the gap
continued to close.
Two hundred meters…a hundred…fifty.

The triad thugs hadn’t fired at them again,
and King thought he knew why; they wanted Sasha back—alive and preferably
unharmed. But if the pursuing vehicle got much closer, the gunmen inside would
be able to shoot out their tires and bring the chase to an abrupt end.

“Rook.
If they get any closer, use those cannons of
yours to take them out.”

Rook grinned as he drew his Desert Eagle
pistols, and then leaned over the back of his seat and took aim. Before he
could fire though, the SUV swerved left, out of his field of view, and made a
move to overtake them.

Without prompting, Knight aimed his XM8 out
the window and tried to hit the Surf’s front tires. He squeezed off a few
shots, but the moving target eluded him, and his rounds just sparked off the
vehicle’s chassis or burrowed harmlessly into the pavement.

Now the Surf was beside them, only a few
yards away and nearly even with them. Knight gave up trying to hit the tires
and instead aimed at the windshield, which he could now see was already
fractured with a spider web pattern from earlier impacts.

Something was happening on the far side of
the vehicle, but because his attention was fixed on the picture in his gun
sight, Knight didn’t see what the others did: a figure had crawled out of the
rear driver’s side window and was clambering onto the roof of the SUV. Queen
saw it and so did Rook. The latter leaned over his fellow passengers and tried
to aim his Desert Eagle up at the man on the roof, but before he could fire,
two things happened almost simultaneously: Knight fired a burst from his
carbine that shattered the front passenger window and filled the interior of
the chasing vehicle with lead, and the figure on the roof coiled like a spring
and then jumped.

The pursuing SUV abruptly veered right,
evidently out of control, and ground against the side of the team’s vehicle.
Just as quickly, it rebounded and careened to the left, going off the pavement
to smash into the exterior of a building. The members of Chess Team barely
noticed the demise of their pursuers however; their attention was consumed by
the crunch of something heavy landing on the roof of their vehicle.

“We’ve got a stowaway!” Rook shouted.

Bishop reacted immediately by tapping the
brakes. Everyone inside was hurled forward by the sudden deceleration, and King
expected to see their unwanted passenger thrown from his perch like a stone
from a catapult, but that didn’t happen. Instead, something crashed down on the
windshield right in front of Bishop, but somehow, impossibly, it refused to be
dislodged.

King stared at the outline of their attacker,
splayed out on the other side of the glass, arms and legs stretched out, feet
digging into the narrow seam between the hood and the windshield, and he understood
how the man, seemingly in defiance of the laws of physics, had managed to hang
on.

Man
was perhaps the wrong word.

The thing clinging to the front of the SUV
was human in the literal sense, but one look told King that this was no
ordinary foot soldier of the Chinese mob. The head and unkempt hair were that
of a Burmese youth, perhaps in his mid-twenties, but the arms and legs were
grotesquely muscled, straining at the fabric of the man’s clothes. The torso
was malformed, as if he had been taken apart and reassembled by someone who had
only the vaguest grasp of human anatomy.

This was one of the monstrosities they had
fought in Myanmar—a
frankenstein—
but unlike those,
this one seemed to be a new-and-improved model.

The thing dropped its head low and peered
into the interior of the SUV, swiveling its gaze back and forth, searching for
something.

It was looking for Sasha.

It found her.

The thing released one of its clutching
hands, drew back, and punched through the windshield. The blow would have
broken a normal person’s hand, but this creature was in no way normal. The fist
smashed out the upper corner of the glass, folding it over like a dog-eared
page in a book. Just as quickly, it grasped the exposed metal of the Surf’s
roof in both hands and then braced its feet against the hood as if getting
ready to lift something.

That something was the SUV’s roof. With a
torturous shriek, the metal skin of the Toyota began peeling back like the lid
of a sardine can.

King brought his XM8 up and let lead fly. The
already compromised windshield fractured into a web of cracks, and beyond it,
the bullets tore into the monstrosity’s chest. Blood, erupting from the exit
wounds and blown back by the wind, sprayed across the windshield, but the thing
barely flinched from the wounds. Driven by rage and augmented by a stew of
chemical enhancements, it shrugged off the lethal wounds like they were
mosquito bites, and commenced giving the Surf a ragged sunroof.

Rook stabbed one of his Desert Eagles in the
direction of the thing’s exposed head, but even as he pulled the trigger,
unleashing a thunderclap of noise in the semi-enclosed space, the creature
moved. It ducked out of the way, and then with a gymnast’s agility, vaulted
from the hood, up and over the opening to land behind the gap, impacting the
roof with such force that the vehicle bounced on its suspension.

For a moment, King thought the
frankenstein
had been thrown clear, but a moment later the
shredding of the car resumed. He twisted around, trying to get a shot at the
thing, but it stayed out of view, using the curl of torn metal like a shield.
King knew the 5.56-millimeter ammunition from the XM8 would pass through the
thin sheet like it was tissue paper, but so far the high-velocity rounds hadn’t
done much to slow the monster down.

“Rook, blast that fucker!”

Rook didn’t wait for a clear shot. He aimed
the Desert Eagle at a spot roughly in the center of the roof and fired into the
headliner. The entire chassis rang like a bell as the .50 caliber round punched
an enormous hole in the roof. Rook adjusted his aim to a point twelve inches
behind the hole and fired again. He didn’t need to hit a vital organ; a bullet
from the Desert Eagle could rip off limbs.

The tearing stopped.

Suddenly Knight’s window was filled with the
creature’s head and shoulders. Blood streamed from dozens of wounds, but the
thing was relentless. It had swung down from the roof and was now reaching into
the Surf, stretching its fingers out to snare Sasha’s arm.

Knight was pinned against his seat by the
monster’s bulk. Rook threw both arms around Sasha, trying to pull her back, but
the prodigiously strong creature effortlessly dragged him along. Queen was the
only thing between the
frankenstein
and its prey; she
threw an uppercut that snapped the thing’s head back. The monster gave a low
growl and shook its head, shrugging the punch off as effortlessly as the
bullets, but in that brief instant, Queen did something that no one expected.
She reached under the shredded fabric of the monster’s shirt, closed her
fingers around the tubes that curled like external veins between its head and
chest, and pulled. The tubes came free like clumps of hair, with scraps of
bloody flesh clinging to the ends.