Prime (5 page)

“What does it say?”

“I don’t know,” Sasha replied, looking
genuinely bothered by the admission.

The CIA man broke in impatiently. “It’s
evident from the accompanying message that the enemy
does
know what it says, and that it’s critical to the development
of a biological weapon.”

Sigler had been in the Unit long enough that
such a declaration no longer surprised him. The stakes were always high.
America’s enemies were bent on acquiring bio-weapons or loose nukes. It was the
Unit’s job—
his
job—to nip those
deadly aspirations in the bud.

“The
intel
you
collected,” Klein continued, “doesn’t tell us what exactly, but it does tell us
where: an old Republican Guard depot about thirty klicks northeast of Samarra.”

Sigler reviewed his mental map of the region,
but the area didn’t ring any bells. Samarra lay between Baghdad and Tikrit,
along the eastern leg of the Sunni Triangle, where nearly all of the insurgent
activity had been focused lately. East of the triangle, there was a whole lot
of nothing, all the way to the Iranian border.

“We had no idea this place even existed; it
doesn’t show up on any of our satellite imagery, going back all the way to the
First Gulf War, so we have to assume that it was decommissioned sometime
following the end of the war with Iran. We should have a UAV over the site
within the hour, but we’re thinking most of
it’s
underground. Saddam probably buried it to hide it from UN weapons inspectors.
That’s probably why we didn’t find it sooner.” Klein shifted forward in his
chair.

Here
it comes
, thought Sigler.

“The window of opportunity on this one is
narrow. Once they figure out their couriers got nabbed, if they haven’t
already, they’ll pick up and move. We need to hit this place ASAP.”
Another pause.

“Tonight.”

Sigler didn’t question the assessment. Klein
wasn’t asking for his opinion or advice; the CIA man was telling him to get
ready. “I’ll tell the boys.”

“Slow down. There’s more.” He glanced at
Sasha. “You’re going to have a ride-along.”

This time, Sigler wasn’t able to hide his
dismay. “You’re shitting me, right?” He glanced over at Rainer, but the Boss
was stone-faced. “You mean you’ll bring her in once we secure the site?”

Klein shook his head. “Miss Therion needs to
be there with you.”

For the first time since her introduction,
Sasha seemed to be aware of the discomfort her presence was creating. “The
Iraqis know how to crack this code,” she said, tapping the computer screen
emphatically. “And we don’t. We don’t even know where to begin. I have to be
there. I have to be the first one inside.”

Rainer cleared his throat. “The decision is
made, Jack.”

“With all due respect, sir, I would like to
say for the record that this is a piss-poor idea.” Sigler hoped that his use of
the military honorific—something that was almost never done in the Unit—would
convey that this wasn’t just run-of-the-mill bitching and moaning.

Rainer’s reply was succinct. “Deal with it.”

Sigler glanced at Klein, who now seemed to be
making a studied effort to avoid meeting his gaze, and then at Sasha. “I don’t
suppose you’ve been trained for field work. Can you shoot?”

Before she could answer, Klein spoke up.
“Don’t worry about that, Jack. I’ll take care of her. You guys just need to get
us through the front door.”

A dozen different retorts flew through
Sigler’s mind, but this time he checked himself. He stood up. “I’m going to
need that imagery from the drone as soon as you can get it to me. The more I
know about the site…” He let the thought trail off; there was nothing to be
gained by stating the obvious. He motioned for Parker to follow, but to his
surprise, his friend waved him off.

“Actually Jack, I’d like to have a word with
Miss Therion.”

For a moment, Sigler wasn’t sure he’d heard
correctly, but before he could inquire, Pettit snapped: “Parker!”

Usually, a stern look from Cipher element’s
top NCO would be enough to put any member of the team in their place—even
Sigler, who, as the platoon leader, outranked him. Pettit rarely had to
chastise with words, but when he did, everyone sought cover.

Parker, however, didn’t even blink. He
pointed at the computer screen and kept his gaze on Sasha. “I know what that
is. So, either you can talk to me, one-on-one, and tell me what’s really going
on here, or I can walk out that door and tell the rest of the team that we’re
about to go put it on the line over an undecipherable medieval manuscript
that’s probably a hoax.”

Sigler gaped at him. So did nearly everyone
else. Klein swore softly under his breath.

Sasha shook her head. “It’s not a hoax. That
much, I’m sure of. And this could be the closest anyone has come to cracking
the code in over four hundred years.”

“What the fuck?” growled Pettit, turning to
Rainer in
disbelief.
“Medieval
manuscript?
Is this shit for real?”

Rainer didn’t respond to his sergeant major.
Instead, he stood abruptly and motioned toward the door. “Gentleman, let’s give
Danno and Miss Therion a chance to get acquainted.”

THREE

Rainer’s abrupt declaration caught even Parker by surprise, and he
didn’t hide his elation very well; he grinned so hard, his jaws started to
hurt. As the others filed out of the TOC, Sasha just stared at him in what he
guessed was complete disbelief.

Yeah,
that’s right
, he thought,
nodding his head ever so slightly.
The
black man was the smartest guy in the room. Bet you didn’t see that coming,
princess.

“So,” she
said,
when
they were alone. “You know about the manuscript?”

He shrugged, but his irrepressible grin
foiled his attempt to appear nonchalant.
“Maybe.
Or maybe
I was just trying to find an excuse to be alone with you.”

She blinked, uncomprehendingly. “Why would
you do that?”

That dulled Parker’s smile just a little.
This girl wasn’t pretending to be aloof as a way of fending off unwanted
advances; this was who she really was. “I’ve dabbled a little in number theory
and mathematical codes. I like to do brain teasers. Lateral thinking puzzles,
cryptograms…stuff like that. I must have come across an article about it
somewhere and it stuck in my head.

“Probably when I was at Yale,” he added with
a wink.

That seemed to penetrate her shield of
inscrutability. “You went to Yale?”

His only answer was an airy wave. He hadn’t
attended Yale as a student, but he had grown up in New Haven, where his father
still worked at the University as a janitor. He’d spent a lot of time on the
campus while growing up, and he had, for a short while, dared to dream of
attending the Ivy League institution. It was a dream that could not withstand
the harsh realities of socio-economics and race politics.

His
higher education—still
a work in progress—had come through distance learning programs, but Sasha
didn’t need to know that.

“The article called it ‘the most mysterious
manuscript in the world.’ An entire book written in a language that no one has
ever seen before, and which no one is able to translate. Not even the NSA.
That’s pretty crazy shi…ah, stuff.”

Sasha nodded. “It’s one of the greatest
puzzles in cryptology.”

It
was officially designated MS 408 of Yale
University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, but it was more
commonly
known
as the Voynich manuscript, so named for
the early 20
^th
century antique book dealer who brought it into
public awareness.

The book’s vellum pages, over two hundred and
forty altogether, were decorated with elaborate full-color illustrations,
mostly of plants, rendered with extraordinary detail—almost like a biology
textbook—which had led many to believe that it was a book of herbal remedies
from the Middle Ages. The pages also depicted star charts, along with more
symbolic pictures—several of the paintings featured crudely drawn, almost
cartoonish images of naked pregnant women, cavorting about in green pools,
dancing along the edge of spiral star clusters, or emerging from plant root
systems that looked suspiciously like the veins and arteries of a human body.
What made the Voynich manuscript remarkable though was its text. The entire
book had been written using a completely unknown alphabet system that had
confounded all attempts at decipherment.

Theories about its origin were diverse. Some
believed it to be the work of an herbalist or apothecary, who had developed the
unique code to protect his recipes from competitors. Others believed it to be a
hoax—created by a confidence artist during the reign of Queen Elizabeth or
perhaps even by Voynich himself in the early 1900s—and opined that the reason
the book’s code couldn’t be cracked was that the text had been generated
randomly, to make it seem that the book contained some great mystery. Hoax or
not, since its appearance in 1912, more than a few people had wasted years of
their lives in a vain attempt to solve its riddle.

The mystery of the Voynich manuscript was
exactly the sort of puzzle that captivated Parker. He had read numerous
articles about the book, staying current on the latest research and theories
about its origin, so he had immediately recognized the text excerpt on Sasha’s
computer screen. On a personal level, he was intrigued by the admittedly
bizarre notion that Iraqi insurgents might be on the verge of cracking the
Voynich code. The fact that this beautiful, if somewhat socially awkward
cryptanalyst not only shared his interest but was obsessed with finding the
solution, made it even more appealing.

But it sure as hell wasn’t a good reason for
Cipher element to risk their lives.

He shook his head. “The Voynich manuscript is
almost certainly a hoax. The best theory I’ve heard is that it was produced by
an English charlatan who claimed, among other things, to be able to turn lead
into gold. The reason no one can read it is that there’s nothing there to read;
it’s just a jumble of random symbols that don’t mean anything.”

“You are talking about the Edward Kelley
hypothesis?” Sasha shook her head. “That has been categorically disproven.”

“Categorically disproven?
I wasn’t aware of that.”

“At my request, the agency secretly tested
pieces of the manuscript. Carbon-14 dating confirms that the parchment dates to
between the 13
^th
and 15
^th
centuries, at least two hundred
years before Kelley lived.”

“So it’s old. That proves nothing.
Different crook, same scam.”

She pursed her lips. “You could be right. But
the documents your team recovered indicate that al-Awda is in the process of
decoding it. They believe it will help them create a new bio-weapon.”

Despite his desire to impress her, Parker
couldn’t hide his incredulity.
“Really?
A medieval
cookbook is going to tell them that?”

“You must be unfamiliar with the science of
ethnopharmacology.” Sasha’s tone was flat, matter of fact, but the statement
was a disparaging slap in the face to Parker. “It’s the study of traditional
medicines used by different ethnic groups, to discover new drugs and medicines.
Traditional knowledge is the basis of modern pharmacology; there’s every reason
to believe that the Voynich manuscript might contain important new insights
into healing medicines. However, if the information you recovered is accurate,
the book might also contain important historical information about the plague.”

That got Parker’s attention.

If the Voynich manuscript did date back to
the 1400s, then it wasn’t too much of stretch to believe that it might contain
knowledge about the Black Death, which had ravaged Europe less than a century earlier.
The plague bacteria had already been used as a bio-weapon; it was widely
believed that the first outbreak of the disease in Europe had occurred after an
invading Mongol army catapulted infected bodies into the besieged city of
Caffa. Seven hundred years later, the organism that had caused the plague—
Yersinia pestis
—remained a pathogen with
deadly potential for exploitation as a germ warfare agent.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter whether the
Voynich manuscript really contained information about the plague, or even if it
could be decoded at all. Somebody was trying to cook up a nasty new weapon, and
it was his job—his team’s job—to identify them and put them in the ground.

“That’s good enough for me,” he said, rising
to his feet.

Sasha’s face creased in confusion.
“You…believe me?
Just like that?”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe.” His grin
was back, but this time it was a cold smile of anticipation. “I’ve got a job to
do. It’s going to be a busy night.”