The Sword of Moses (61 page)

Ferguson looked blank.

“Computers can’t read real Voynich any more than we can. So people studying Voynich over the years must’ve turned it into alphabets that can be understood and read by humans and computers. That’s the only way they can work on it.”

“So there’s a modern key?”

“Yes,” Ava could feel the excitement rising, “It’s not a translation into intelligible words. It won’t tell you what the Voynich manuscript means. But it will let you swap the Voynich text in and out of an alphabet we can actually read. That’s how computers can count and analyze its letter and word distribution patterns.”

With a mounting feeling of exhilaration, she pulled out her phone and searched the internet for Voynich alphabet transliterations.

It only took a few moments before she found one. “I knew it!” She handed the phone to Ferguson. “It’s called FSG, and was drawn up by military code-crackers in the 1940s.” She took the phone back and searched again. “And here’s another, called CURRIER, from the 1970s.”

Excited, she kept searching.

Within a few more minutes, she had found five different alphabets—all used at different times by code-breakers to turn Voynich’s tortuous glyphs into ordinary readable letters.

“Now what?” Ferguson asked. “It’s going to take forever to apply those to the text in Malchus’s letter.”

Ava finished her pint and stood up. “We don’t have the time or expertise to do this.” She put the empty glasses back on the bar. “We need Socrates.”

“Isn’t he dead?” Ferguson collected the pile of books and tucked them under his arm. “I thought an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head two-and-a-half thousand years ago.”

“That was Aeschylus,” Ava pulled open the front door and headed out onto the noisy street. “And no—he’s very much alive.”

She made a quick phone call, before turning back to Ferguson. “We need a cab to the British Museum.”

Ferguson looked up and down the street. “You’d best give me your phone first. When they realize we’ve gone AWOL, they’ll use the phones’ GPS to pinpoint us.”

She pulled it out of her jacket with resignation and handed it to him, watching as he slipped it along with his own into the envelope he had removed from Cordingly’s office. He walked across to a bright red cast iron pillar box sunk into the pavement nearby, and pushed the envelope through the narrow slit at the top.

He headed back over to Ava. “There’s a mail collection in fifteen minutes. It’ll buy us a bit of time—but not much.”

——————— ◆ ———————

British Museum

Bloomsbury

London WC1

England

The United Kingdom

The taxi dropped Ava and Ferguson in Montagu Street, at the rear of the great museum.

Hurrying through an unassuming back door, Ava knew exactly where she was going. She had been a member of the museum’s staff since 2004, starting in London, then on secondment to Jordan, and finally Baghdad. She came back regularly, and could have navigated her way down its endless corridors in the dark.

A lot had changed since the grand but unfashionable old Montagu House had become the first British Museum in 1759. Successive building projects had created a world-class facility built around eight million artefacts and Europe’s largest covered square.

It had been her home from home for years—from long before she had become a member of staff. Throughout her life, she had spent innumerable hours in its long galleries—at times surrounded by hordes of other visitors, at others with just the sound of her own footsteps as company. She knew many of the collections intimately: Africa, Egypt, Greece and Rome, the Middle East—everything from the exuberantly painted Egyptian mummies’ sarcophagi to the grand austerity of Greece’s great Pergamon altar.

She also knew exactly where she would put the Ark and the Menorah, if she ever got hold of them.

They would be the museum’s star exhibits.

Housing the treasures in London would not please everyone. Yet at least the huge city had the experts to look after them, along with the vast number of scholars and visitors to study and enjoy them.

They arrived at a sign marked ‘Department of the Middle East’. The security guard greeted her like an old friend, opening the door and waving them through.

Ava arrived in front of the first office door, and knocked. A slim middle-aged Indian woman rose to great her. The identity tag round her neck read ‘Patricia Davies’.

“Baghdad too hot for you?” the woman beamed.

Ava smiled back at the longest-serving member of the department. “We’re recovering some amazing exhibits. And we’re not lending them to you or anyone else,” she replied. “So if you want to see the real glories of Mesopotamia, you’ll have to come and visit.”

“I’m sure,” Patricia nodded. “Although we could do with you back here now, given all the footage of the Middle East on television. The department’s never been so popular.” She paused. “Anyway, I’ve booked Socrates for you. He’s all yours. Just let me know when you’re done.”

“We’ll be quick,” Ava thanked her. “I owe you.”

“You usually do,” Patricia replied, sitting back down behind her desk.

“By the way,” she called after Ava. “There was a man here asking after you earlier. He wanted to know if you still worked here. He wouldn’t say who he was.”

Ava felt her blood run cold.

She stared at Ferguson.

His grim expression said it all.

“English?” Ava asked.

She nodded. “Not memorable looking. Cut glass accent. Expensive shoes.”

Not Malchus then. But it described most of her former MI6 colleagues perfectly.

The net was tightening.

Ferguson headed for the door. “We need to be quick. They’ll have the place under surveillance already.”

Ava nodded, and led Ferguson through a long series of sterile corridors to a back staircase signed ‘Department of Conservation and Scientific Research’.

Reaching the bottom of the stairwell, she opened the double doors and could immediately feel the drop in temperature and smell the clean recycled air.

As they hurried down the corridor, they passed a series of large windows revealing a row of laboratories packed with cabinets of drawers and shelves piled high with boxes.

Towards the end, they came to a set of thick slightly tinted glass doors.

Ava punched a code into the wall-mounted keypad, and the doors slid apart with a quiet hiss, revealing a sleek lab fitted with wall-to-wall clinical white surfaces and a number of workstations. It was low-lit by controlled lighting, and there were blinds pulled over two small windows close to the ceiling.

“Welcome to Socrates,” she announced proudly to Ferguson, “the museum’s mainframe for everything from x-radiography to electron microscopy and radio carbon dating.”

Stepping over to the middle terminal, she dropped down into the yellow padded swivel chair in front of it and clicked the keyboard, bringing the screen to life. “But in addition, he’s no slouch with languages.”

“Here,” she handed Drewitt’s letter to Ferguson. “Put it face down on that scanner.” She pointed towards an A2-size glass panel set into the worktop against the right wall.

Ferguson placed the paper carefully onto the glass and covered it with the black rubber mat lying rolled beside it.

Ava was meanwhile on the internet, finding the character sets of the five Voynich transcription alphabets she had identified earlier.

She uploaded them one by one into Socrates.

Sitting back and hitting ENTER, the scanner started to hum. A moment later, the computer’s black screen dissolved, to be replaced with a pale grey grid of squares, nineteen across by five down. One by one, they filled with blue images of the strange characters spelling out Malchus’s message.

“This programme is the gateway to the electronic inscriptions catalogue,” she explained. “We take detailed photographs of every inscribed object, whether it’s stone, pottery, coin, wax, textile, bone, or anything else. We scan the images in, and create a permanent electronic record which we can share with other museums.”

“So Socrates is all-knowing,” Ferguson nodded.

“As well as that,” Ava continued, “for damaged, faded, or partial inscriptions, Socrates can match them off against the existing database or user-defined data sets.”

“Do you get a lot of inscriptions the curators can’t read?” Ferguson sounded surprised. “If the experts here can’t make something out,” he waved his arms to indicate the people in the building, “then who can?”

Ava continued staring at the screen, examining the letters closely. “You’d be surprised. There are a vast number of variants of each ancient alphabet depending on period and region. Just think how much handwriting has changed in the last two hundred years. The same is true of ancient writing and inscriptions. Being able to match fragments of letters through Socrates is invaluable.”

“Here, it’s ready.” She clicked the mouse. “Watch this.”

The large grid shrank and moved up to the top of the screen, while five identical smaller grey grids appeared in a band across the bottom. They were empty, with a label above each one:

BENNET CURRIER EVA FROGGUY FSG

The white departmental telephone beside Ava rang.

It was Patricia. “Ava, that man, he’s here again, and there’s another one with him, too.” She sounded anxious.

Ava took a deep breath, then replied quickly. “It’s okay. Just tell them you haven’t seen us.”

“I did.” Ava could hear the tension in Patricia’s voice. “But I don’t think they believed me. Ava, who are these people? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

Ava was thinking fast. “I’ll be gone in a few minutes. Just deny everything.” She put the phone down and turned to Ferguson. “They’re here. They must’ve seen us come in.”

She turned back to the terminal and struck another key. “Here goes. We need to pray this works.”

The letters in the larger grid began to flash one by one, and identical copies of each letter dropped quickly down into the same respective position in each of the five smaller grids below, morphing on their descent into recognizable letters and numbers from the modern Roman alphabet.

In a few seconds it was done, and all five of the smaller grids across the bottom flashed simultaneously to indicate the task was complete.

Socrates had transliterated the Voynich characters in Drewitt’s letter into readable text.

But as Ava looked at the five grids, she felt a flood of disappointment crashing over her.

There was nothing even remotely resembling an intelligible text. The writing in each box was gibberish—just garbled letters and numbers.

“It didn’t work.” The frustration in Ferguson’s voice was evident. “We need to go.”

Ava peered hard at the five grids. She was sure she had not made a mistake.

She did not believe for a moment that Malchus had actually cracked Voynich. He had to be using it as an alphabet. And she doubted he had the expertise to create his own transliteration. He must be using one of the standard ones.

Ferguson moved quickly to the glass door and opened it, peering out into the corridor. “If these guys are who I think they are, they can walk through walls. We could have company any minute. We’ll be sitting ducks in here.”

“Give me two seconds.” Ava tried to block out all thoughts. The answer had to be there, hiding in the five baffling grids.

She rubbed her eyes and looked at each one carefully in turn, willing herself to see a pattern.

Ferguson pulled out his Sig Sauer and flipped the safety off. “You need to hurry,” he urged her. “This could get noisy quickly.”

“Just a minute.” She stared at the screen intently. The answer was there somewhere. She was sure of it.

“We’re overstaying our welcome.” Ferguson’s voice was sounding increasingly tense.

She continued to stare at the screen, unable to hold back a growing anxiety that she had somehow got it wrong.

Then in the blink of an eye, she saw it.

There!

“It’s that one,” she stabbed the screen excitedly, pointing to the EVA alphabet.

“What?” Ferguson was still at the door.

“Look.” She blew the third grid up to full screen size.

“I don’t get it.” Ferguson was frowning at the screen, shaking his head.

“The other four are completely random jumbles of letters and numbers,” Ava replied with mounting excitement. “But in this one,” she tapped it, “each word sequence and number sequence is whole.” She counted the characters quickly. “Leaving aside the ‘FRATER PERDURABO’, there are eight whole words and two complete numbers. If we were using the wrong alphabet key, then the letters, numbers, punctuation and other symbols would all be randomly jumbled up within the same words—like in the other four. But this has whole uncorrupted words and numbers. The only two exceptions, ‘40A’ and ‘R1’, could be house numbers, postcodes, or something similar.”

Ava flicked onto the internet and quickly searched for the EVA alphabet. She was well aware precious time was passing, but if the museum was under surveillance, this was going to be her only chance. They would not be coming back.

Ferguson moved swiftly into the room and picked up the letter from the scanner, stuffing it into his pocket. He returned to the door, and raised the handgun in readiness.

Ava was reading out loud to Ferguson from the screen in front of her:

“EVA is the European Voynich Alphabet, the most widely used of all the Voynich transcription alphabets. It strives to use Roman letters that resemble their allocated Voynich characters. When used in computer fonts, numbers are based on the handwritten page numbers added onto the manuscript by Dr John Dee.”

She swivelled the chair to face Ferguson, her eyes gleaming. “This is it. It’s the only one that makes sense. And the Dr Dee reference would be right up Malchus’s street. It’s exactly what he would choose. All we have to do now is work out what it means”

She heard the footsteps running down the corridor a second before Ferguson’s voice. “Ava—move!” He punched the button by the door and it slid shut with another hiss. “Two of them.” He was rushing towards her. “And they’re not wearing lab coats.”

She hit print, and waited the agonizing few seconds as a hard copy of all five grids appeared in the printer under the workstation. Grabbing them, she flicked the power button, crashing the terminal immediately.

“This way,” Ferguson urged, standing on the desk and ripping aside one of the blinds, yanking open the small high window behind it.

Ava climbed up onto the desk and hooked her fingers over the wooden frame. Hoisting herself through the small open window, she landed hard in the narrow concrete light well.

Seconds later, Ferguson arrived beside her, pulling the window shut behind him. As she scrambled to her feet, she caught a glimpse of the doors of the lab sliding open and a pair of feet entering.

Her heart hammering hard, she did not stop to see any more, but sprinted down the light well to the short flight of concrete stairs at the far end.

She had only one thought—to put as much distance between them and their pursuers as fast as possible.

Ferguson was beside her, running hard. “They’ll be watching everything. We can’t use public transport, hotels, or any of the regular safe houses. We need to completely disappear.”

Arriving at the stairs up to the main esplanade level, they climbed them two at a time.

“Do you like Chinese food?” he asked breathlessly as they headed across the courtyard, losing themselves in the heaving throng of anonymous tourists sweeping out of the museum’s main gates and into Great Russell Street.