The Voynich Cypher (17 page)

Whatever it took, he wanted to avoid the dreams.

Dreams of Sabrina, glaring accusingly at him with only half a face.

Sia Amieri’s oversized frame filled the doorway of the private detective’s offices in Florence. Seated in front of the mouse-like investigator, Dr. Morbius Frank was all polished relaxation in his hand-tailored lightweight navy blue suit, worn, as was his custom, with no tie, the shirt opened one button, with a red cravat hugging his neck. The investigator, Paolo, was explaining the steps he’d taken, while Frank nodded periodically in approval.

“Besides that, I also have two of my staff making inquiries with Cross’s employees, as instructed, to see what sort of accommodation can be reached for helping us with anything of potential interest,” Paolo explained.

“I’m not price sensitive…within reason,” Frank underscored.

“Yes, and I’ve shared that. Perhaps it would help if we knew precisely what we were looking for?” Paolo suggested, for the second time during the meeting.

“That’s the problem, isn’t it? I’m not completely sure. Anything related to cryptography, or ancient parchments. Failing that, information on where Cross can be found.”

“I think you’ll agree that I’ve been quite thorough. I’ll pass everything along to your associate, just as you wish.” He shot a nervous glance past Frank to where Amieri stood impassively by the far wall, in tan slacks and a dark brown leather jacket. “I would hope we have something within a day or two, at most. We’re doing everything we can. Now we just need to wait for the fly to come to the spider,” Paolo assured him.

“Time is, alas, our most precious commodity at the moment. Please stay in touch, and get me whatever you find, no matter how seemingly inconsequential,” Frank ordered, then pushed himself to his feet, ignoring Paolo’s outstretched hand. The tense moment passed, and Paolo exhaled a sigh of relief when the pair had vacated his office. The money was stupendous, but both men exuded pure menace. He’d bent the law before, which is why Frank had contacted him, but even so, these two were in a completely different league than his customary jilted wives or corporate espionage clients. They stank of death, which Paolo recognized as clearly as he understood the value of their cash. In troubled times like the present, he couldn’t be as selective about his customers as in times of prosperity – and Frank was paying top dollar.

Which in the end, was what mattered.

Paolo lifted the telephone handset from its cradle and dialed a familiar number.

Natalie peered over Steven’s shoulder at the screen.

“What does it mean?” she asked.

“It’s the first step. The program established a character substitution pattern, so now we have a cypher. The problem is that we need to organize the letters into something coherent. That will take a little while, but I seem to remember that this was written in Latin, so that will shorten the time required for me to figure it out. It was a long time ago, but I still remember the basics of this document. Give me some space and some quiet and I can nail it,” Steven advised.

“You have the floor. I’ll go pack. We need to make tracks sooner than later.”

Natalie left him to his devices. He entered the string into the program that would perform the painstaking process of trial and error to structure the seemingly gibberish letters into a lucid order. Soon, he had the Latin organized coherently, and it was just a matter of translating it so it made sense.

He studied the familiar words. “
Occultumest
…”

When Natalie returned from her bedroom with her bags in hand, Steven was finished with the translation and was surfing the web to make sense out of the cryptic message. He looked up and was momentarily taken aback by a Natalie with long brown hair. She looked like a different person, which he supposed was the whole point of the wig. He quickly regained his composure and fixed a look of concentration on his face.

“Well? How’s it going?” the new, improved Natalie asked.

“I translated it. But it’s not like a street address. Remember, this was written almost six hundred years ago.”

“What does it say?”

Natalie approached him, and he held up the sheet of notepaper where he’d scribbled his findings.

“Translated, it reads: ‘Six paces from Alexis in the middle basilica stands a crucifix. Illumination into the sacred text is near the savior’s head on the cross’.” Steven scratched his ear. “I think that’s pretty clear, no?”

“That’s it? It might as well say: ‘Follow the doves to the wall of silence’. How do we figure out what it means?” Natalie asked.

“This is the second hard part. Just decrypting it would have been a multi-week or month process if I hadn’t written this software program, and organizing the random letters into coherent script is no small feat. It helps that I remembered this was in Latin, otherwise we would have needed to increase the complexity for the program, to make it compare the letter series to all the idioms being used at the time the parchment was written; that would have taken some serious time. We’re actually well ahead of where we could reasonably expect to be,” Steven explained. He could see she was disappointed, but he’d just accomplished the near-impossible, so he felt a little defensive.

Natalie seemed to sense he was on edge and said nothing. She went to the coffee pot and prepared more while he stared at the seemingly meaningless clue. He entered some of the key words, hoping for a hit, but didn’t get anything. He didn’t even know where to begin.

“This part is going to take a while. I need to run different word combinations into the search engines in the hopes something comes up. It’s trial and error, with no guarantees. And Natalie? This was written in the mid to late 1400s. It’s quite possible that whatever it’s referring to was destroyed over the years, or forgotten. I wouldn’t get my hopes up. That, and we don’t even know what country it’s referring to, much less city. Latin was used everywhere by the Church. Whatever the message is directing us to could be anywhere in the known world of the time,” Steven warned. “Be that as it may, I have a program that will do these comparisons at high speed. It’s on the disk I loaded onto this computer. I’ll have it churn through the data over the next hour. Maybe we’ll get a hit.”

“It seems like a long shot,” Natalie said dejectedly.

“Everything in cryptography is a long shot. There’s no such thing as instant results, at least not that I’ve found. Sorry. It is what it is.”

Steven tapped in a few commands, and a crude screen popped up. Peering at his notes, he entered all of the words from the message into the fields, and then hit ‘Enter’. The computer began working, and he returned his attention to Natalie.

“We need to stick around the villa until this is done; it’s going to access online search engines and record the results. Want to get some air?” Steven invited.

“Sure. It’s not like I have anything else to do.”

They walked slowly along the driveway, enjoying the sun’s warmth on their skin. Natalie broached the obvious subject.

“What’s your preference for new places to hide?” she asked, only half serious.

“Let’s see if we can get a fix on where the parchment is directing us,” Steven answered humorlessly.

They meandered across the road and turned towards town, the gravel on the shoulder crunching beneath their feet.

“I’m sorry you’re involved in this, Steven. I know how odd it has to feel being pursued when you haven’t done anything wrong,” Natalie said – the closest that she’d come to apologizing.

Steven hesitated, glancing at her profile.

“The wig isn’t bad, but I like your real hair better.”

The corners of her mouth twitched, and her nose crinkled.

“Why, thank you. Are you always such a smooth talker with the ladies?”

“It’s been a while…and believe it or not, I know exactly what it’s like to be on the run from powerful enemies,” Steven offered.

“I don’t think you do. Not like this. These people will torture and kill you. That’s their mission – to find the Scroll, get everything you know, and then terminate you.”

He paused, considered his response, and then forged on with it.

“In another life, I had everyone from organized crime syndicates to intelligence services trying to kill me. I’ve taken bullets. Trust me. I know what it’s like,” Steven stressed.

She stopped. Steven turned to face her. A moment seemed to pass between them.

“I couldn’t find out much about you when I was checking. I suspected there might be a reason for that when you took down our tail without breaking a sweat. Care to share?”

He chose his words carefully. “A while ago, I pissed off the wrong groups, trying to fight odds I should have walked away from. I disrupted a very lucrative scheme, and it wound up collapsing at considerable cost to these groups, so they tried to take me out. These were very dangerous adversaries. Not some jealous husband or impatient loan shark. I’m talking world-class bad guys. And I’m still here. They aren’t. Or at least, most of them aren’t.”

She appraised him as he spoke.

“Perhaps I misjudged your temperament. Sounds like it isn’t a good idea to underestimate you, Dr. Cross.”

Steven didn’t have any glib responses. They resumed their stroll.

“I’m thinking we need to stay in Italy. We don’t want to trigger any alarms with your passport. Agreed?” Natalie asked, returning to her original topic.

“That’s fine. Maybe a bigger city where we’ll blend in easily. Bologna, or Milan, or even Rome…”

“I’ve heard good things about Bologna. If you’re okay with that, barring something materializing with your software program, I’m for going there. We can drive,” Natalie said.

He rolled his head, relaxing the taut muscles in his neck, then looked over at her. “Beyond running, do you have a plan?”

“Sure. You figure everything out, we learn the secret of the Scroll, and then…”

“…and then?” Steven asked.

Natalie stopped walking.

Steven softened his voice. “Natalie, there’s a big hole in all this, even if I’m successful in decrypting the Scroll. That hole is that you don’t have a plan, beyond reacting. Let’s assume we figure this out. Then what? Or being more realistic, let’s assume we don’t. That we never learn what the Scroll says. What do we do? When will you, or I, ever be safe?” Steven stressed.

Natalie didn’t speak. Her eyes glistened momentarily.

Steven pressed on. “I’ve been through this kind of thing before.” He kicked a piece of gravel into the adjacent field. “This is a massive dislocation that will change everything. There’s no scenario I can see where we return to the way things were. Our lives are permanently altered, as of now, with no going back to normal, whatever that was. Just accept that, and we’ll both be better off.”

“I hadn’t thought about it like that…”

“Look. If you’re correct, and the Order is real and coming for both of us, they won’t stop. If it’s a group that’s been protecting the Scroll for over five hundred years, can you imagine any circumstance where they give up? And how about Frank? Regardless of whether you give him his two million back, you told me yourself the man’s filthy rich and obsessed. In what scenario does he just walk away?”

Steven turned and began moving back to the house. Natalie increased her pace, quickly catching up to him.

“I…I’m sorry, Steven. I didn’t involve you on purpose. It’s the letter to my father that got you sucked in…”

“Natalie. I’m a big boy. I understand that. I’m not looking for who to blame. I’m worried about how to survive, not just today, but ten years from now. Assuming you’re right, it’s going to take every bit of luck and skill we have to make it through this. Fortunately, I’ve got enough money to last a lifetime, but I need to move it around so it stays off the radar. But I realize I’m going to have to walk away and never look back.” Steven rubbed his face and sighed. “I’ve done this before. It’s tough. The sooner you realize what you have to do, the better. One mistake and you’re screwed. You can never slip up. Ever.”

Natalie digested his words as she trudged along beside him. Her tough exterior had cracked, just a little, and Steven saw a hint of vulnerability where before there had only been strength. He knew what she was going through. She’d been so busy pursuing the secret of the Scroll, hell bent on somehow avenging her father, that she hadn’t considered the larger picture. Either that, or she had, and decided to push off acknowledging reality until she was more prepared to deal with it. But Steven had once before been forced to throw everything in his life into a bag and run, and once you’d been through it, you never slept the same, and a part of you was always mentally prepared to do it again. In some ways he was the worst possible target to pursue because he’d been there and remembered all the lessons.

“This sucks,” Natalie muttered.

“You can say that again.”

Overhead, a few birds hung languorously in the air, wheeling around the field before the farmer came on duty with his ancient shotgun. The sun kissed the vines of the neighboring parcel: a picture of rustic serenity. Other than the fact Natalie and he were being hunted like rats, it was a beautiful day.

Steven checked his watch. The program might have finished. Time to get back to work.

Frederick was carrying Natalie’s two bags out to the car when they approached the house; he nodded at them in greeting. Steven again wondered what the man’s story was.

“What’s with Frederick? What’s his deal?” he asked Natalie as they entered the house.

“Frederick was with my father for almost twenty-five years. I sort of inherited him when my father died. He was at the house when I arrived to claim the remains and said he wanted to help me.”

“Not very chatty, is he?”

“Not really.”

“But I’ll bet he’s a hoot on karaoke night…”

Natalie laughed. “Frederick just isn’t loquacious. He never has been. But he’s fiercely loyal and would do anything for me. He’s completely fearless. Ex-Green Beret. Went to work for my father in the mid-Eighties straight out of the service and never had another job. He’d follow me anywhere,” Natalie said.