The Dead Sea Deception (36 page)

She clicked
ROTGUT.

A box popped up, red-bordered.
PASSWORD
, it demanded.

Kennedy opened her handbag and took out her notebook. She turned to the last page, where she’d copied down the words from Sarah Opie’s paper.

Oh what can ail thee, knight at arms

Alone and palely loitering the sedge has withered

From the lake and no birds are singing
.

She typed in the number 2, then in quick succession 4334624. She hit return, and nothing happened except that the
PASSWORD
box flashed once and emptied itself again.

‘What was that?’ Tillman asked.

‘I took these words down from a sheet of paper Sarah Opie had on her when she died,’ Kennedy said. ‘She told me it was a mnemonic for her computer password. It’s from a Keats poem. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” And it actually goes: “Oh what can ail thee, knight at arms / Alone and palely loitering? / The sedge has withered from the lake / And no birds sing.”

‘She played about with the line breaks, so that she’d be left with exactly eight words on a line. Messed with the wording a bit, too.’

‘So you’re thinking an eight-digit password,’ Tillman said.

‘Yeah. And I just tried the first line – assuming that Opie was just taking the number of letters in each word.’

She tried the second and third lines, too. Nothing: the box filled up each time and refreshed when she hit return, appearing empty and with the same silent demand.

‘Initial letters,’ Tillman suggested.

Kennedy tried that without success. Then she tried both sequences – numbers of letters and initials – in reverse. The box blinked at her, inscrutably, and refused to yield. She swore softly.

‘It’s got to be something obvious,’ Tillman pointed out. ‘It’s no use as a mnemonic if she had to think about it too much.’

Kennedy chewed her lower lip, thinking furiously. Something obvious, but not initial letters or length of words.

Why three sequences of eight words, rather than just one? The blocks of eight indicated an eight-digit key, but maybe the three lines were significant, too. She took every third word and entered the letter totals.

can – knight – alone – loitering – has – the – no – singing

3-6-5-9-3-3-2-7

The computer chuntered industriously to itself for a few moments, then the screen went completely blank, before filling up again with a list of what were presumably file names:

ROTGUT RAW
1, 1–7

ROTGUT RAW
2, 8–10

ROTGUT RAW
3, 11–14a

ROTGUT RAW
4, 14b–17

ROTGUT PARTIAL
1, 1–7

ROTGUT PARTIAL
2, 8–10

ROTGUT PARTIAL
3, 11–14a

ROTGUT PARTIAL
4, 14b–17

ROTGUT FULL
1, 1–7

ROTGUT FULL
2, 8–10

ROTGUT FULL
3, 11–14a

ROTGUT FULL
4, 14b–17

Kennedy clicked on the first file:
ROTGUT RAW
1, 1–7. The screen blinked, there was another rattle of dry, chitinous sounds from the hard drive, and then she was looking at a different list.

Dalath
2 actuals

Waw
3 actuals 1 spaced

Semkath
2 actuals 2 spaced

He
exact

Resh
exact

Mim
1 actual 1 spaced

Tau
exact

She used the scroll bar on the right of the screen to see how much of this stuff there was. It went on through what looked like several hundred items.

She closed the file, opened one of the
PARTIAL
s. This file was a whole lot busier.

‘Any idea?’ Kennedy asked Tillman, nodding at the monitor.

Tillman had been reading over her shoulder. ‘Translation,’ he suggested.

‘The file label said partial,’ Kennedy offered back. ‘And all these lists of words are places where they’re not sure – where they’re listing possible alternatives. They were working their way through a document, translating as they went.’

‘The Rotgut.’

‘Must be. No, wait. The Rotgut is already a translation, isn’t it? I mean, the actual Rotgut manuscript is already in English. Nobody knows what the source document was, or what language it was in, so that wouldn’t work.’

Kennedy picked up the top sheet of paper again and ran her gaze across the surface of the hectic verbal torrent.

THENLETNOTTHYSERVANTGTOILINVAINLORDORWITHOUTREWARD THEREWARDISHALLGIVEUNTOTHEEWILLBEGREATERTHANANYHAVE KNOWNANDGREATERTHANTHOUCANSTFRAMEINWORDSTHENHELE DHIMFROMTHATPLACEINTOANOTHERPLACEFROMWHICHALLTHING SINHEAVENANDINEARTHWEREVISIBLEIHAVEGIVENTHEEARTHUNTOA DAMANDHISSEEDWHATSHALLIGIVETHEEMOSTFAITHFULANDMOSTU NCOMPLAININGISHALLMAKETHEEHATEDANDREVILEDBUTTHENISHA

Downstairs, tens of thousands of pages of random characters: upstairs, a few scant sheets of real words. No formatting, no punctuation, no spaces, but still, an actual narrative of some kind with a distinctly biblical flavour.

‘It was a code,’ Kennedy said, wonderingly. ‘And they broke it.’

She turned to stare at Tillman. He was looking at her in silence, waiting for more. And the pieces of it were all in her mind, now, but it was still hard for her to make out the final shape – like trying to figure out what a jigsaw might show by looking at the reverse face, the face that bore no image.

‘Barlow gave evidence in a court case,’ she said. ‘Years back. A ring of counterfeiters, selling fake documents that were meant to be from one of the big biblical finds – Nag Hammadi.’

‘So?’

‘He was the expert witness. They called him in to look – look hard – at the real documents and the fake ones, so he could testify
which was which and prove that someone was putting dodgy gospels on the market. It was a really big thing for him. He had newspaper cuttings framed and put up on the wall of his office.’

She looked at the screen again. At the list of maybe-Aramaic characters. Actuals. Spaces. Exacts. ‘Hundreds of scholars and historians must have looked at those things. Maybe thousands. But Barlow was coming at them from a different angle. He was trying to catch them out – looking for things that didn’t fit. And …’

That was as far as she could go. She had no idea what Barlow had found, but she felt sure that it had been the turning point. ‘There was something wrong with the Nag Hammadi texts. Something you’d only see if you went in looking to catch a fraud in the first place.’

‘But you said this was years ago,’ Tillman pointed out. He’d picked up the pack of recordable discs and was turning it over in his hands, staring at it with unnecessary intensity.

Kennedy dredged her memory. ‘Fifteen years,’ she said.

‘So if he found something then, why wait so long? What happened in-between?’

She didn’t know, but she could see the shape of the thing she didn’t know. It had a definite outline. ‘He found something. Or he suspected something. He kept bouncing off it and coming at it again from a new angle. He goes away and looks at Old Testament texts – the Dead Sea Scrolls. For five years. Then he looks at the Gnostic sects. And finally he goes to see the Rotgut in Avranches. That was when it all came together. It’s like … he had the key but he didn’t know where the lock was.’

‘I don’t think I get it,’ Tillman said.

‘Leo, think about it. The Rotgut is a medieval translation of a document that already existed elsewhere. Nobody can figure
out why this Portuguese sea captain bought it in the first place – why he’d ever think it was worth having. But Barlow goes to take a look at it and he sees …’

Tillman scowled. ‘What?’

‘Something. Something nobody else saw. I’m sure I’m right. There was a code in the Rotgut. And Barlow knew enough by that time to see it for what it was.’ She saw the hole in her own reasoning as she said it. ‘But the Rotgut is just John’s Gospel. Where do you hide a code in a copy of an existing document?’

Tillman didn’t answer. He threw the pack of discs back down on the desk, but it hit the edge of the desktop and clattered to the floor, where it rolled away. Kennedy could see that he was angry, but she was slow to realise why. She plunged on, putting it all together while she had it clear in her mind.

‘Maybe it wasn’t in the words. Or maybe it’s in the changes in the words. If you started from the King James version, or whatever version they had back then, but you messed with it and changed it around, you might end up with a code that someone could crack. Holy Christ, Leo. I’m right. I know I’m right. Barlow picked up on a coded message from centuries ago and built a team to crack the code.’

‘Amazing,’ Tillman said, flatly.

‘Yeah, it is. It
is
amazing. But they needed a computer expert to do it. Three historians and a tech-head. It makes sense now. They were looking for some really subtle patterns in the text of the Rotgut, or somewhere else on the document. Patterns that you’d need some kind of statistical algorithm to nail down. Totally insane! But here’s the question we’ve got to answer now.’ She brandished the small sheaf of papers that had been lying on the desk. ‘This information was hidden back in the Middle Ages. Why would anyone be prepared to kill for it now?’

It was at this point that she ground to a halt, seeing in Tillman’s
face that he didn’t give a damn about the question or the answer. His expression looked as hard and set as if she’d driven her whole chain of reasoning into it with carpet tacks.

‘What?’ she asked him.

‘None of this matters,’ he said, tightly. ‘None of it, Kennedy.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s not …’ He seemed to struggle to find a word that was strong enough. ‘… relevant. This isn’t even close to what I was looking for. I lost my family. I thought if Brand was killing these people, or arranging to have them killed, it was because they’d seen through him. That they’d dug up all his dirty little secrets.’

‘I think they did, Leo. They found something that he wanted to keep—’

‘This is ancient history.’ Tillman all but spat the words out. His fists were clenched now and his face flushed red.

Kennedy absorbed the violence of that pronouncement, kept her own voice carefully neutral. ‘The victims were all historians. I’d have to say that was on the cards.’

‘It’s not funny, Kennedy. Not to me.’

‘Not to me, either. But you’re wrong about one thing: it
is
relevant. It’s the key to everything, somehow, and if we stick with it, I think we’ll get all the answers we’ve been looking for.’

Tillman opened his mouth to reply but said nothing. Instead, he sniffed.

Kennedy was suddenly aware of a smell that had been riding under her conscious notice for a minute or more, masked by the stench of damp and dust.

Something was burning.

Although she was the only woman, and although it had been taught to her throughout her life that women should defer to men, Mariam was the team’s leader. This hadn’t even been something that anyone had to decide on, it was the outcome of a simple equation whose three inputs were the personalities of herself and the other two Messengers with whom she’d been partnered, Ezei and Cephas. Nobody who knew the three of them would have doubted for a second which way that calculation would come out.