The Last Secret of the Ark

by James Becker

  ‘And,’ he added with a chuckle, ‘once I’d left you lying here on the pavement screaming in agony with a crowd around you, I would just walk down the road to the library and ask one of the staff members there if they could get the copies for me. It’s easier for me if you do it, but it’s really up to you. Either delay your lunch for no more than a quarter of an hour or face the consequences of fucking me about.’ His voice hardened on the last three words.

  Anderson swallowed a couple of times and then nodded.

  ‘I’ll get you the copies,’ he said, his voice croaking with stress. ‘Will you wait here?’

  ‘So you can arrange for a carload of gendarmes to take me away somewhere quiet for a bit of heavy-handed Q&A? I don’t think so. We’ll go to the library together, just in case you have a sudden change of heart.’

  It actually took a little longer than ten minutes before Gellerman walked out of the Bibliothèque Serpente with half a dozen copies of each of the missing pages tucked into a large envelope.

  George Anderson remained in the building. For some reason, he seemed to have lost his appetite.

  * * *

  The three Israelis assembled in Gellerman’s hotel room to look at what he’d obtained.

  ‘This shouldn’t be difficult,’ he said, pointing at the journal page. ‘It’s almost certainly written in Occitan, so it’s just a matter of translating it. It’ll take a while, but we can do it.’ He gestured towards the encrypted text. ‘That will be more difficult. None of us have much experience with ciphers, so I’ll email a copy to Jerusalem to see if they can help.’

  He turned to Dayan.

  ‘You know the people we’re probably up against, so scan whatever the cameras recorded and see if you can spot any unwelcome faces.’

  ‘I’m already on it,’ Dayan said, plugging the external hard disk into one of the USB ports on his laptop and opening File Explorer.

  Aaron Chason was a locksmith and engineer, and had no particular abilities in either translating an almost dead language or decoding an encrypted text, so Gellerman sent him down to the hotel bar to buy soft drinks and sandwiches so they could eat and drink while they worked.

  By the time he got back with their scratch lunch, Gellerman had already sent the email and Dayan had eliminated the images from one camera altogether because the angle was wrong. It didn’t show the street outside the shop, only the area beside the door: ideal for the shop’s owner but useless for him. He grabbed a sandwich and a can of cola and opened up the second database.

  ‘This is more like it,’ he said to the room in general. ‘The angle’s fine and I can see the front door of the library.’

  It took Gellerman most of the rest of the afternoon to complete the translation of the Occitan text, and even then he wasn’t sure about a couple of words. But before he’d finished, Dayan froze one particular image on the screen of his laptop and showed it to him.

  It wasn’t crystal clear, the camera’s principal focus being a short distance away so that the faces of anyone close to the lens would be easily identifiable. The figure Dayan had spotted was crossing the road and was perhaps twenty feet away, but it was clear enough, at least to Gellerman. And in truth, it was more or less what he’d been expecting ever since he’d heard about the Italian professor visiting the Bibliothèque Serpente.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he muttered. ‘That’s Luca Rossi. You know what that means.’

  ‘Yes,’ Dayan replied. ‘It means the bloody Inquisition has stuck its nose in where it’s definitely not wanted. We’ll have to move quickly.’

  Chapter 22

  Auch, Gascony, France

  They tried every combination they could think of using the first line of the Pater Noster prayer as the encryption key phrase in a double substitution cipher, and it took them most of the day to get nowhere. No matter how they used the phrase, offset or not, forwards or backwards, all they did was, as Angela had earlier described it, turn one piece of gibberish into another piece of gibberish. None of the results produced anything recognisable, apart from the occasional two- or three-letter combination that formed an Occitan word, but they were clearly accidental. Jumble up any group of letters in any language often enough and inevitably some random words will form.

  ‘This is like the infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters eventually producing the complete works of Shakespeare,’ Bronson muttered, putting down the sheet of paper he’d been working on and rubbing his eyes.

  ‘I thought it was a bit too complicated for somebody in the medieval period to come up with, using a double ciphertext system,’ Angela replied, ‘but I didn’t have any better ideas. And, for that matter, I still don’t.’

  Bronson climbed off the bed, plumped the pillows into a more supportive shape and lay down again. He’d been there for most of the day, apart from an hour when they’d left the hotel to walk to Place de la Libération for a lunch of filled baguettes and coffee.

  ‘I think I’ll just do a bit of research,’ he said, ‘and see if there’s some other medieval encryption technique that I haven’t heard of.’

  ‘Do you want to use the computer?’

  ‘No,’ Bronson replied. ‘Just my mobile.’

  He woke up his smartphone, opened the browser and began searching the Internet.

  ‘Now that’s an idea,’ he muttered a few minutes later, having visited over a dozen different websites.

  ‘What?’ Angela sounded fed up.

  ‘I’ve found a site that discusses ancient methods of encryption – not just medieval, but going way back. According to this, the commonest method of encryption was Atbash, which is what we’ve been trying to do all bloody day, but there were more devious methods as well.

  ‘One was a variant of what’s now called steganography, writing a message in plaintext but hiding it completely from view. Today this is done by, for example, reducing the image of a document to the size of a single pixel and then inserting that pixel into a photograph, so that it’s just one pixel amongst millions of others and virtually impossible to find unless you know its exact location. But the basic technique is old, and the site gives some examples.

  ‘In the early days of writing, they used wax tablets, flat pieces of wood with a border around the edge that formed a perimeter, and the interior filled with wax. Somebody would write a message on the wax, and when the recipient had read it, he’d run the flat of a knife blade over the wax to erase the message and then write his reply. To send a secret message, they’d remove the wax and write a message on the wood itself, then replace the wax and write an innocuous message on that. When the tablet was delivered, the wax would be removed and the secret message revealed. It would have been a bit cumbersome and time-consuming, but it would have worked.’

  ‘No wax tablets here, as far as I know,’ Angela pointed out.

  ‘I know. It was just an example. Another method, if the message was important but not urgent, was to shave a slave’s head, tattoo the message on his scalp, wait for his hair to grow back and then send him off to whoever needed the information. There his head would be shaved again to reveal the message.’

  ‘Again, no handy slaves about the place and—’ Angela began, but Bronson silenced her with a gesture.

  ‘Give me a chance here. The site also mentions another method that wasn’t really encryption at all because it just used the plaintext but jumbled up so it couldn’t be read. That could be what we’re looking at here, and the clue is those two sentences that have been underlined.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Have you ever heard of a scytale?’

  Her blank expression provided the answer.

  ‘Okay. According to this site, the word comes from the Greek skutálē or skútalon, meaning a cylinder or baton, and that’s the key. It was used by the ancient Greeks, in particular by the Spartans, as a way of sending an urgent message in battle that couldn’t be mistaken or misunderstood.’

  ‘Okay, you’ve grabbed my attenti
on. How did it work?’

  ‘The man wanting to send a message would take his wooden baton and wind a very thin strip of parchment or cloth tightly around it so that it formed a continuous cylinder. He would write his message on that: one letter on each section of the parchment and in a straight line down the baton, then the second line under that, and so on. Once he’d finished, he would unwind the parchment, one side of which would be covered in letters in an apparently random order. The parchment would be taken to the recipient, who would have his own baton, exactly the same size as the one carried by the person sending the message. He would wind the parchment around it and read the message. And because it was plaintext, it would be obvious if the letters weren’t lining up correctly, so the parchment could be adjusted until they did.’

  ‘Right,’ Angela said, ‘I can see exactly how that would work, and if the messenger was intercepted, the message couldn’t be read without the right diameter baton. That’s why those two underlined sentences in this piece of text are important. The sentences themselves are irrelevant; it’s the underlines that matter. They show the diameter of the baton needed to decrypt this. That is what you’re saying, isn’t it?’

  Bronson nodded. ‘Got it in one,’ he agreed. ‘The only weakness of the scytale system was that anybody intercepting the message would see what it was, and it could be cracked by trying rods of different sizes, by trial and error. But what I think the person who created this has done is write out the message using a scytale, and then copy the sequence of letters into a single block of text to disguise how he’d done it. We’ve been fiddling about with Atbash ciphers because he’d managed to steer us in completely the wrong direction.

  ‘But we have these two lines,’ Angela said, ‘and by the magic of mathematics, and thanks to an ancient Greek named Archimedes, who calculated the value of pi, we can work out the circumference of the baton used in this case.’

  She opened her handbag, took out a fabric tape measure and placed one end on the first horizontal line in the text. She read out the distance to the second line and Bronson jotted down the number.

  ‘We don’t have to be too accurate about this,’ he said, ‘because there are loads of fudge factors. The photocopy may be slightly distorted compared to the original, the man who drew the lines may not have had his pen completely vertical, and we don’t know how wide the original strip of parchment was, which would affect it as well. So this is going to be a guesstimate.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Angela said. Using the calculator function on her smartphone, she multiplied the measurement by the numerical value of pi to work out the circumference of the original baton. ‘Okay, because this is going to be approximate, I used the rough value of pi of 3.142. The diameter by measurement was just over one and a half inches, so we’re working on a circumference of about four and three quarter inches.’

  Bronson nodded, scribbled down some rough calculations and then looked over at her.

  ‘We’re obviously talking about handwriting, and I’ve assumed that there’ll be roughly five to seven letters per inch. That means, with the diameter of the baton you’ve worked out, the second letter on the unwound scytale would be between twenty-four and thirty-three characters after the first. Roughly. About. More or less. Approximately. Give or take.’

  ‘I get the picture. Let’s split it. I’ll do twenty-four to twenty-eight, and you do twenty-nine to thirty-three. Take the first half-dozen letters with those spacings and jot them down. We’ll see if they form what looks like a possible word and take it from there.’

  It didn’t take long.

  ‘Anything?’ Angela asked.

  Bronson shook his head. ‘Nothing that makes immediate sense to me. Shall I read them out to you?’

  ‘Good idea.’

  He read out the first three sets of letters that he’d transcribed. Angela stopped him.

  ‘Read me that third one again,’ she said. ‘And spell it out.’

  ‘SANTDE,’ he repeated. ‘S A N T D E. It could be a word, I suppose.’

  ‘You suppose correctly. This is at a spacing of thirty-one characters, right? Let me make a prediction. Go through the text again and see if the next character with that spacing is the letter U.’

  Bronson ran the tip of his pencil along the line of text, counting as he went, and then stopped.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It is. So is SANTDEU a word in Occitan?’

  ‘Oddly enough,’ Angela replied, ‘it isn’t. It’s actually two words – SANT DEU – which in Occitan means “Holy God”. I was expecting something like this, some reference to God at the start of the text, because that was really common in medieval documents.’

  She looked across the room at him. ‘Well, don’t just lie there like a beached whale. Start transcribing. And I’ll make you a deal. While you do the transcription, I’ll go down to the bar and get us a couple of cups of coffee. When I get back, I’ll do the translation, and when I’ve finished it, you can take me out somewhere halfway decent and buy me dinner.’

  Chapter 23

  South of Carcassonne, France

  Marco Ferrara steered his MiTo off the A61 Autoroute des Deux Mers and into the Aire de Repos du Belvédère d’Auriac south of Carcassonne, which offered a good view of the Cité de Carcassonne, the old medieval fortress that lay at the heart of the city.

  He had been on the road all day, and although the Alfa Romeo was comfortable enough, he really thought he needed to stretch his legs a bit and breathe something other than air-conditioned air. Plus, he needed to make a phone call.

  In fact, he needed to make two calls.

  He locked the car and walked briskly around the perimeter of the rest area, located on the northern side of the autoroute, relishing being able to move freely once again. He was about eighty kilometres east of Toulouse, a little under an hour’s drive, and he still had to negotiate the busy périphérique that ringed the city to get to the west side, and then drive another sixty kilometres on normal roads. Overall, despite the optimistic estimate provided by the satnav, which invariably assumed that every traffic light would be green, that there would be no traffic and that the car would be able to travel at whatever the legal maximum speed was on any journey, he reckoned he would be lucky to reach Auch in less than two and a half hours.

  That was the reason he needed to make one of the phone calls.

  The other reason was that he’d been wondering all day about the change of plan he had been told to implement in the text message he’d received that morning. Something had obviously happened, and he needed to find out what, in case it was a development that could directly affect him.

  He took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket on which he had written three mobile telephone numbers: another of Cardinal Caravaggio’s rules that he had broken. The first number was Caravaggio’s, the second was Francesco’s and the third was Luca Rossi’s. He dialled the first one and it was answered almost immediately.

  ‘Yes? Are you there yet?’

  ‘No. The journey is taking longer than I expected. I’m still on the road and I should reach the address in about two and a half hours.’

  Although mobile phone calls were fairly secure, neither man would mention the other’s name or anything in the conversation that could identify who they were, where they were or what they were doing. That was another of Julius Caravaggio’s rules, but it was one that Ferrara agreed with. Because they were both using burner phones, the chance of any law enforcement agency being able to triangulate their locations was infinitesimally small. Before triangulation could be authorised, the mobile had to be identified as suspect for some believable and convincing reason, and that was difficult to do with a burner.

  ‘I understand. What did you want? Why did you call?’

  ‘I got your message this morning. Is there a problem?’

  Caravaggio paused for a couple of seconds before he replied.

  ‘There might be,’ he said. ‘Information obtained by a source has suggested you m
ay meet some competition in addition to David.’

  ‘Competition from where?’ Ferrara asked, wondering both who it could be and how the cardinal would convey the information. ‘Or from whom?’

  ‘From the place at the end of the alphabet where the people live who want things to be the same now as they once were.’

  That made perfect sense to Ferrara. The place at the end of the alphabet in that context could only be Zion, a slang term for Jerusalem, and the other reference was obviously to the Zeru or Zerubbabel group, which had been a thorn in the side of the Catholic Church for years. They were based in Jerusalem.

  ‘Understood. How did you find out?’

  ‘We have eyes everywhere. Three of them flew to where you are, and then headed north on the trail we discussed previously. We believe they now have the same information as you.’

  Caravaggio obviously meant that the Zeru people had travelled to Toulouse, then north to Paris, and obtained copies of the Hautpoul papers from the Bibliothèque Serpente. Members of the Catholic Church and some non-clergy sympathetic to its aims were sometimes asked to keep a lookout for certain events or individuals, and Ferrara assumed that somebody who worked in the Sorbonne library had been asked to pass on details if somebody appeared there asking for access to those documents. A phone camera photograph passed up the chain to the offices of the Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei would have been enough to identify the Zeru member or members involved.

  That was not good news. Zeru was utterly fanatical in pursuing its destructive objective, and its ultimate aim would, in the eyes of many senior officials in the Church, potentially spell the end of both Christianity and Islam. What the group wanted to achieve was quite literally an Armageddon agenda. Whatever happened, they had to be stopped.