The Voynich Cypher (3 page)

The clamor of the guards exiting the Chamber reverberated down the passage where the prowler had dropped to the floor from the duct at the far end. Engaging the night-vision goggles again, the intruder easily found the harness dangling from the well’s opening and, with a practiced motion, donned and secured it. The climb back to the top of the narrow shaft took several minutes of fiercely-determined exertion. At the end of the ascent the noise of pursuers fumbling through the hall below inspired a burst of stamina – the final twenty feet were conquered in a few seconds, just as the guards reached the bottom of the shaft, screaming in frustration. Shots echoed from the void, and bullets nicked the interior of the well’s rim, but it was too late.

The nearly-invisible figure ran three hundred yards through the brush until arriving at a clearing – an ancient cemetery, possibly for the Abbey’s service staff, or a long-departed farming family. The intruder glanced back at the Abbey, now glowing with illumination, every window streaming light into the gloom. The frantic roar of car engines starting shattered the still night over the foggy moor.

Perfect
. The din would cover the sound of the getaway vehicle – a blacked-out obsidian Moto-Guzzi Stelvio NTX motorcycle hidden, for a fast escape, behind one of the battered headstones.

A gloved finger stabbed the starter button and the big motor cranked to rumbling life. The rider checked the backpack, ensuring it was tightly closed and safely strapped in place. It wouldn’t do to have the canister lost on a trail somewhere in the English wilds.

No, the contents were far too precious to take foolish chances with. If the legends were true, the cylinder held the key to the most important secret ever known – a secret capable of changing the course of history.

Slamming the motorcycle into gear, the black-garbed rider sprayed gravel with the rear wheel and roared off into the night.

Present Day, The Road to Lucca, Italy

Dr. Steven Archer Cross was having a very bad day.

His cell phone, wedged in its dashboard holder, signaled an incoming call just as he narrowly missed ramming his 2009 Porsche Cabriolet into a Renault sedan that had come to a skidding halt in front of him, blocked by a stalled VW Wesfalia covered with faded bumper stickers. The cars behind him slammed on their brakes and then stood on their horns in frustrated anger, as though somehow he’d conspired with the Renault and broken-down van immediately ahead. Steven had the Porsche’s convertible top down, and he could feel angry eyes boring into the back of his head as he waited for an opportunity to pull around the immobile camper.

Eventually, one of the vehicles behind him took pity and waved him forward. He signaled and pulled past the log-jammed clump of vehicles to join the rubberneckers in witnessing another unlucky driver’s misfortune. A tall man with curly brown hair and a faded Grateful Dead T-shirt stood by the side of the road, agitatedly talking on his cell phone. The look on his face telegraphed this wasn’t the first time the Volkswagen had betrayed him.

Steven stepped on the gas as he drove away from the congestion, checking the digital dashboard clock as he accelerated through the gears. He caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror, the wind buffeting his shaggy, light brown hair; the beginnings of hairline wrinkles on his tanned face framed his hazel eyes. Not so bad for forty-five, he reasoned, especially considering the mileage.

The road ahead of him opened up and soon he was tearing along at eighty, traffic having thinned to nothing. The vehicular crisis circumvented, he turned his attention to the phone and the missed call.

He reached for the keypad and hit the send button. His office manager Gwen answered.

“Hullo,” she said in British-accented English, her Yorkshire heritage obvious even from the single word.

“Hey, sorry I couldn’t pick up. I was a little busy.”

“How busy can you be on a day like today?” Gwen asked.

“You’d be surprised at how much I have going on,” Steven protested. “What’s up?”

“A strange call came in a few minutes ago. The gentlemen said he needed to speak to you immediately,” Gwen said.

“Okay…did you get a name?”

“Winston Twain. Mean anything?” Gwen asked.

Steven mentally file-referenced Twain. It was familiar, almost on the periphery of ‘very important’, but after racking his brain for a few moments the sensation of familiarity flitted away. Which didn’t necessarily mean anything – he’d been scattered since…

No point dwelling on the unpleasant.

“Not really. What did he want?” Steven asked.

“Just said it was a matter of significant importance.”

“Significant? Fine. What’s his number?”

“He didn’t leave one. Said he’d call back. He sounded like another Yank. I think the call might have been international,” Gwen opined.

Steven considered Gwen’s words – most calls of actual ‘significant importance’ tended to leave call-back numbers. Especially ones from the States, assuming her instinct was correct. Which it usually was. Gwen had been his office manager and handler since the inception of his software business three and a half years ago. She had an uncanny knack of being able to read people and was rarely wrong.

An uncomfortable silence hovered over the line.

“You’re still going to jump today?” Gwen asked.

“Yes,” Steven said.

“Jump out of a perfectly good plane, right?”

“Right.”

“Dropping at thirty-six feet per second, at a speed of–”

“Stop it. I have to go,” Steven protested.

“Cheers, then, and remember: what goes up…” Gwen disconnected.

As he fought the morning traffic towards Lucca, a city roughly half an hour north-west of Florence, Steven suddenly remembered what the name Winston Twain meant.

“I’ll be damned,” Steven muttered to himself.

Winston Twain.

Arguably the most respected cryptologist in the world.

Thirty Months Ago, 20 Miles South of Florence, Italy

The rustic Tuscan country house seemed to glow in the bright noon sunshine; its mustard-tinged paint blended with the field of green and brown grass surrounding it, creating the illusion it was floating in a rusted verdant sea.

Two figures stood in a quiet embrace on the circular driveway’s stones. A light breeze carried the scent of hay from a nearby barn, intermingled with the smell of garlic drifting from neighboring kitchens. Neither of the pair noticed. They kissed like newlyweds, which was hardly the case – it had been three years since they’d exchanged vows but to any onlooker it would appear that these were teenagers enraptured by the powerful glow of first love.

The woman’s auburn hair stirred as she pulled away from the man and, rolling an elastic hair tie down her wrist, she drew her mane into a ponytail. He held her at arm’s length, as though memorizing every detail of her face, and then hugged her close once more. They kissed again for a fleeting eternity.

The moment passed and the woman glanced at her watch. “Oh, Steven, I’m late as usual. Okay, this is goodbye for real this time. I have to go,” Antonia exclaimed.

“Why are you abandoning me?” Steven asked in a theatrical fashion.

“
Cara
, it’s only a weekend. And you could have come, but you changed your mind at the last minute. You and your hobby, too busy to keep a girl satisfied, so she has to find diversion elsewhere…” Antonia complained. Her English was fluent, yet the unmistakable Italian accent colored the cadence in a musical way.

“I wish I could go, but I made the arrangements for this meeting weeks ago, and I can’t cancel. It’s taken me a year to get the old bastard interested in selling, and he could change his mind at any time. You know I want to go with you,” Steven declared.

“
Si, si,
I know. Oh well, then, it will be just me and my uncle…and perhaps the pool boy,” Antonia said.

Steven knew better. Antonia’s uncle, Dante, had a palatial home half an hour south of Venice, as well as ten-bedroom ‘cottages’ in Chianti, Naples, and on the shores of Lake Lugano. There would inevitably be dozens of relatives arriving for his seventy-fifth birthday celebration, and likely everything from visiting heads of state to a reunion of the surviving Beatles to commemorate another year on the planet for the patriarch. It wouldn’t surprise Steven if, upon Antonia’s return, she reported that the Pope had dropped by unexpectedly to wish Dante continued good health.

“Do try to have a good time, would you? I know how boring old Dante can be,” Steven quipped, fully aware that the weekend would comprise non-stop revelry. “Maybe I’ll take the train up and surprise you. I’m hopeful this meeting won’t be a multi-day negotiation, but you know Italy…”

“Yeah, yeah. At least I have the internet. I’ll tweet and let you know how the party is going,” Antonia promised.

“I wouldn’t mind giving you a good tweeting before you go,” Steven fired back.

“There’s nothing I’d like more, but I have to leave. Really, my little sparrow.” She pulled him next to the car. “
Ciao, amor
. I’ll see you in a few days.”

Antonia kissed Steven’s lips one final time, then opened the door of the silver Audi TT. He couldn’t help but appreciate how magnificent her tanned, lithely-muscled legs looked as she climbed behind the wheel, her fashionably-cut skirt riding up to the top of her thigh. The engine burbled to life, and she shut the door and waved at him through the smoked window as she popped the transmission into gear.

Steven watched the little car pull down the drive and onto the small strip of pavement that passed for a road in their rural area. Antonia tore off as though the devil was on her heels – a sedate pace for her, he knew. He could hear the engine revving into the distance for a full minute before tranquility descended again.

You’re a lucky man, Steven
.

It was true. Three years ago he and Antonia had ducked out of the rat race and committed to prioritizing their time together over everything else. They’d roamed Italy for months before settling in Greve, where they could be in Florence within twenty minutes (if Antonia was driving) and yet were still well away from the hubbub of the city.

Not renowned for resting on his laurels, once they’d established their new home in the Tuscan countryside, Steven had become increasingly engaged in his burgeoning hobby of cryptography – pursuing it with single-minded focus until Antonia suggested channeling his energy differently. At her goading he’d started a boutique software company, which had quickly blossomed into a five person organization that managed the efforts of nine remote programmers in Russia, the Ukraine and India. Ironically, neither of them needed the income – Antonia’s travel magazine sale had made her a small fortune, and Steven had accumulated enough in the market to never have to work again.

But that wasn’t his nature. Steven had already retired once, after selling his original company while in his late thirties, only to discover that his personality required more stimulation than endless napping. After a brief but deadly dalliance with the U.S. stock market and a whirlwind education on the lethal factions that congregated wherever big money circulated, he’d switched his interest to the internet – at a time when social media was coming into its own.

That had ultimately resulted in his current venture, which was precariously close to a real job. The company was supposed to run itself, but he was still inexorably sucked into the day-to-day operations far more than he liked.

And he still had his hobby. The challenges involved in cryptography had grown from being light entertainment to borderline obsession. He’d spent countless hours working on medieval and Renaissance cyphers, and had gone so far as to write several programs for tracking character repetition and analyzing coded messages. Many of his weekends had involved trips to ferret-out original parchments, hundreds of years old, written in the cyphers that were fairly common from the twelfth through eighteenth century. Steven didn’t get to spend as much time as he would have liked on it these days, what with the company seemingly going through one operational emergency or another, but he still took at least two days a week to work on his ‘projects’, as Antonia called them.

Which was why he was going to miss the party of the century, or at least, of this year, near Venice.

He’d been courting an octogenarian antique and rare parchment dealer from Bologna; his intention was to buy the man’s private collection of parchments, some of which were the stuff of rumor – scrolls from Morocco, thirteenth through fifteenth century England, Italy, France, and even some older works from Greece. These were museum pieces, rare and unseen, and would make perfect additions to Steven’s growing collection. They’d been in the old man’s possession for eons, many of them passed down from his father, who had also been in the business as well as being a counselor on rare documents to such entities as the Romanoffs at the turn of the 20th Century. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Steven, although he knew that the truly valuable works would have long ago been committed to heavyweight private collectors from Russia and China. Still, this man’s table scraps were probably as intriguing as the most highly-touted finds in the Italian trade, and Steven was anxious to seal a deal.

Steven checked his watch, a platinum Lange & Sohne perpetual calendar Antonia had gotten him as a forty-second birthday gift. He walked back into the house; his meeting wasn’t until five o’clock that evening but he was impatient to view the old man’s trove.

After a few minutes wandering aimlessly through the empty rooms, he resolved to go into Florence for a few hours to work out at his favorite Dojo. Steven’s fascination with martial arts was still as strong as ever, and even though he was an adept in most of the disciplines, he loved the ritual of performing his workout. He patted his stomach – after eating Italian food for the last three years, he needed every opportunity for exercise he could get.