The Voynich Cypher

by Russell Blake

  “Nice to meet everyone,” Natalie said.

  “Natalie, let’s step into my office; this way, please…” Steven moved ahead of her to a room at the far end of the cavernous work area.

  Natalie strode behind him, still holding her soft leather satchel.

  Gwen looked to Natalie. “May I take that for you?”

  “Thank you, I’m fine,” Natalie said and then followed Steven into this office, closing the door behind them.

  Natalie took a seat in front of Steven’s desk. For a moment there was only silence, as he reclined in his chair and sipped his coffee. Steven and Natalie regarded each other. Natalie’s gaze was impassive, inscrutable.

  Steven put the cup to the side and folded his arms while leaning forward in his seat. “All right, Ms. Twain. You have my attention. Why is my life in danger, and how can I help you?”

  Natalie lifted her satchel and placed it on Steven’s desk.

  “Call me Natalie. Please.” She paused, appraising him, and then continued. “I – I’m not sure where to start, so I’ll just begin with my father’s death. I believe that he was murdered by a man named Morbius Frank. Dr. Morbius Frank. Does the name mean anything to you?” Natalie said.

  Steven searched his mental rolodex, but nothing flipped in terms of recognition. “No. Should it?”

  “He is, aside from being behind my father’s murder, a businessman. A businessman, adventurer, self-described archeologist and philanthropist, and a billionaire. A trust fund baby to an oil magnate dynasty – one of the largest in the United Kingdom.”

  Steven nodded. “I don’t recognize the name, but I get the point. He’s rich and powerful…and you think he killed–”

  “Two weeks ago, Frank funded an operation for my father to obtain a religious artifact which Frank had learned was intrinsic to the Voynich Manuscript. I know you recognize that.”

  Steven leaned back and his demeanor changed. “Of course. It’s only the holy grail of cryptology. But the Voynich’s been at Yale for decades. What relic could possibly be connected with it? I know everything about it, and there’s nothing but the manuscript and mountains of speculation as to how to crack the code – something nobody has ever done.”

  “It’s something that my father said could help decipher the Voynich. He believed it was the key, in fact, to a mystery that dates back six hundred years.”

  Steven studied Natalie quietly, but inside, his heart had just shifted gears into overdrive; his normal sinus rhythm shot from sixty to a hundred in just a few brief moments. “Go on, Natalie.”

  “The artifact is known as the Holy Scroll of the Abbey of St. Peter at Abbotsbury in Dorset, England. Have you heard of the place?”

  Steven nodded. “Heard of it? I visited the Abbey on a tour ten years ago. But there was no sacred relic there that I can remember. Are you saying this artifact is in the Abbey? I’m still not following the logic.”

  “It was there, deep in the hidden catacombs beneath the grounds. But no more,” Natalie said. “The Holy Scroll was liberated two weeks ago.”

  Steven shook his head. “Ah. So it was stolen. And your father had something to do with this?”

  “Liberated,” Natalie corrected.

  “Liberated. Sure, okay. And this ‘Holy Scroll’ was ‘liberated’…by your father? I would have imagined that he wasn’t a particularly, er, nimble man, given his years…”

  “He didn’t do it himself, but I know that he and Dr. Frank arranged it. But what’s important is that my father retained possession of the Scroll on the understanding that Frank would be able to share the information it contained once it was decrypted.”

  “And you believe your father was murdered because Frank wanted the Scroll for himself. Did Frank steal it after killing your dad?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  Steven considered this, the hair on the nape of his neck prickling. “Then where is this holy artifact, and how do you know so much about all this?”

  “I have it,” Natalie said, answering part of the question. She glanced at her bag.

  Steven studied Natalie, and then his eyes slowly moved to the satchel. Natalie had his full and complete attention.

  “Did Professor Twain…your father…have time to analyze this Holy Scroll?” Steven asked quietly.

  “No, but…” Natalie hesitated for a moment.

  “No, but what?” Steven persisted.

  Natalie opened the satchel, removed a piece of paper and handed it to Steven. Steven took it and opened it.

  The paper was the letter that Steven had sent to Winston Twain a year before, articulating his theory on the origin of the Voynich Manuscript.

  Steven perused the document and a chill ran down his spine.

  The letter was partially smeared with blood.

  The blood of the late Professor Winston Twain.

  Steven studied the letter in silence, and then squinted as he tried to make out a handwritten note that the Professor had scribbled on the left hand side of the letter. He read it aloud: “Theory wrong, but close. Call Cross, have a chat.”

  Steven looked up at Natalie. “Then he hadn’t ignored my letter after all.”

  “No,” Natalie said. “He didn’t. I found the letter under his head. When he died…” Natalie paused, and swallowed hard. “When he died, his head collapsed on the desk, and your letter was under it. The coroner said he died of a massive aortic aneurism, and that he probably broke his nose when it hit the desk. That’s why–”

  “Yes, I understand,” Steven said and looked at the bloodstained letter again. “But now I’m really puzzled. You keep saying your father was murdered by Frank, and yet you just described a congenital defect as the cause of death. Those don’t add up. Either he was killed, or he died of natural causes. Which is it?”

  “I believe that he was being tortured when the aneurism ruptured. The coroner also found some unexplained abrasions on his hands, but ultimately said they were inconclusive. I don’t think they were. I believe Frank lost patience and came for the Scroll,” Natalie insisted.

  Steven sighed. “You realize that’s completely impossible to prove, right? I mean, you could also theorize that the devil was having a drink with him when his aorta burst. It doesn’t make it so. I’m not trying to be difficult…”

  “I can appreciate your skepticism. But it doesn’t change my opinion.” She gestured to the letter in Steven’s hands. “I wanted you to see this first because you need to know that my father respected your skills,” she said.

  “I’ll take that as a high compliment. But none of this really sheds any light on whether your father was able to study the Scroll and make heads or tails of it,” Steven said matter-of-factly.

  “I’m sure he didn’t. My father and I were close, and he hadn’t called to tell me of any significant discovery. If he found something new about any of his projects, he would call me immediately. He was like a child. Always excited, always wanting to share with me first.”

  Steven offered a sympathetic smile. “I can understand that.”

  She gave an almost imperceptible nod of thanks.

  “How did you come by the Scroll?” Steven asked.

  “He gave it to me before he died,” Natalie said. “He insisted that I safeguard it as soon as he had it in his possession.” She stared at the Picasso lithograph on the wall behind Steven’s head. “It’s almost as if he knew someone would be coming after him sooner or later.”

  Steven frowned.

  “What?” Natalie asked, noticing the change in his expression.

  “If your father and Frank had an agreement to share the Scroll, why would he kill him? Assuming your torture theory is right.”

  “Because my father, for all of his failings, was in the end a religious man. He was torn – his academic side wanted to decrypt it, but he didn’t want to do anything overtly sacrilegious or damaging to those who shared his faith. I know it caused him a great deal of anxiety. Once he’d seen the Scroll I think his conscience got
the better of him, and he told Frank that the information contained in the Scroll was best left undiscovered,” Natalie said. “My father told me that he was going to sell his entire retirement portfolio of stocks and bonds, as well as his summer home in Aspen, and give Frank back his money so there could never be contentions that Frank had any claim on the Scroll.”

  Steven let out an exasperated sigh. “Let’s say I completely buy all this and agree that this Frank is a monster. The obvious question is, how can I help you? What do I have to do with any of this, other than having written a letter even I forgot about? And how do I even know that the Scroll, which I’ve never heard of until you mentioned it, has anything to do with the Voynich?”

  Natalie silently extracted a battered container from her bag, easing off the lid as she regarded Cross from across the desk.

  “My father did describe how the Scroll was connected to the Voynich,” Natalie said at last.

  Steven nodded indulgently. “Okay, I’ll bite. We’ve come this far. What did he say was the link?”

  Natalie carefully took out a sheaf of parchments from the canister that were clearly hundreds of years old. He’d seen enough medieval documents in his time to recognize the signs of antiquity, as well as the distinctive scent of centuries past.

  “My father told me that the Holy Scroll was one of the missing chapters of the Voynich Manuscript, Dr. Cross,” Natalie said slowly. “Quire 18, to be precise.”

  The room seemed to spin for a few moments as Steven took in the details of the dog-eared parchments in Natalie’s hands. His eyes roamed over the ancient canister, then returned to the quire. This was impossible. It was akin to someone walking in off the street and unfurling a lost Rembrandt. The missing section of the Voynich had disappeared early in its life, along with another chapter, quire 16, and even though there were vague rumors of forbidden knowledge that periodically surfaced when one studied the history of the document, nobody had ever seen the lost pages. Through the ages, speculation as to their contents was sparse and often contradictory. They were phantoms, nothing more.

  “Quire 18…are you…are you sure this is what your father told you?”

  “Yes,” Natalie said. “He put its date at around 1450.”

  Steven couldn’t believe his ears.

  In front of him was the lynchpin – the key – to solving one of the greatest mysteries the world had ever known.

  CHAPTER 10

  “May I see it, Natalie?” Steven asked, his voice catching on her name.

  Natalie handed him the pages across the desk. His hands were steady, thankfully not betraying the surge of adrenaline, as he took them from her.

  Steven carefully unfurled the document and spread the sheets on his desktop, which was empty except for a telephone, his computer and a coffee cup full of pencils and pens.

  The vellum was in remarkable condition, showing inevitable minor degradation after weathering the ages, but beyond that, in extraordinary shape. He glanced again at the canister. It had done its job admirably, protecting the treasured Scroll from the elements so that, even now, the document was pristine.

  The distinctive pseudo-alphabet used in the Voynich was unmistakable – the glyphs were unique. The first pages were filled with the unusual, and yet to Steven, familiar, illustrations that were in keeping with the medicinal character of quire 19. Steven knew most of the quires from memory, having devoted hundreds of hours to study them. The Scroll was definitely consistent with what he would have expected quire 18 to look like, although there was something odd about the drawings; something niggling, but off. He studied them closely, but couldn’t put his finger on what he was sensing. The harder he scrutinized them, the further away the elusive sensation got.

  “What do you think?” Natalie walked around the desk and stood by Steven’s side as he pored over each page. He was jarred back into the present by her proximity, and he could detect a subtle aroma of cinnamon emanating from her skin, along with a hint of fragrance, a light floral perfume. Steven realized his focus had slipped even as he simultaneously had a burst of insight: Natalie smelled extremely good.

  He shook off the thought. “Based on a cursory look, I’d agree it’s the Voynich. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that, based on the drawings and the calligraphy, not to mention the age. Your father would have recognized it as such instantly. But I’m not seeing anything that’s jumping out at me as earth-shattering, beyond the fact that these pages exist at all,” Steven explained.

  “Take your time. There has to be something here,” Natalie pressed.

  Steven shook his head. “Why? Why are you so convinced these pages hold some sort of solution to the Voynich, when they appear to be almost exactly like the other two hundred forty pages on display at Yale?” Steven reached over and moved his computer mouse. The large flat screen monitor blinked to life. He typed in a password and selected a folder labeled: ‘Crypto’ and then drilled down until he got to one marked: ‘VMan’. He opened a web browser, and within a few moments the screen was filled with high-resolution images of the pages of the Voynich Manuscript. He quickly went to quire 17 and scrolled through the photos, which looked similar to the pages on his table.

  Ignoring Steven’s question, Natalie said, “Quire 17 doesn’t have any nudes in it, and neither does 19. Maybe there’s some significance to the two nude women in 18?”

  “Then perhaps there’s some significance wherever they appear in the manuscript. If there is, it’s defied researchers, including me, since the Voynich surfaced. I think that’s a dead-end in terms of something unique to this quire.” Steven stopped and turned to Natalie, their faces only inches apart as they both hunched over the desk. “Why don’t you answer my original question, Natalie? Why are you convinced there’s something special in these pages?”

  She held his gaze, then moved a few feet from him – the proximity was too intimate for her to dodge Steven’s reasonable query.

  “My father was killed for them, and Frank considered the Scroll to be priceless,” she stated flatly.

  He shook his head. “You think. You’re of the opinion he was killed for them. But you don’t know.”

  “I know,” Natalie insisted.

  Steven decided to let that go. There was nothing to be gained by pointing out the difference between a strongly-held conviction and a provable fact. He knew the tone she had adopted, and logic was the wrong approach if he wanted answers.

  “Okay. I believe you’re convinced your father was killed for these pages.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Dr. Cross,” Natalie admonished him, pain and anger now evident in her eyes.

  “I…look, I’m sorry. We’re getting off on the wrong foot here. What I meant was I believe you. But you came to me because you obviously want my help in figuring out what the significance of these pages is – I didn’t come to you. But if you trust me enough to show me this stolen quire,” he held up a hand to silence her protest at the word ‘stolen’, “you’re going to have to trust me enough to tell me everything you know. Otherwise, I’m fumbling in the dark, and that won’t do either of us any good.” Steven stopped, waiting to see what effect an appeal to reason would have on Natalie.

  She hesitated, then looked away. “This was important enough to have armed guards protecting it for hundreds of years in a secret section of the Abbey,” she revealed.

  “How do you know that?” Steven demanded.

  “I’m not inventing it. My father and Frank discovered a lot about these pages. Enough to pay millions of dollars to get their hands on them,” Natalie concluded.

  “Millions? Are you kidding me? They couldn’t give the Voynich away forty years ago. That’s why it was donated to Yale. It had no value, other than as an historical curiosity…”

  “That may be, but I can assure you that my father was not a foolish or impulsive man, and his partner in this, Morbius Frank, is as ruthless and cunning as they come. They both believed that they were getting the bargain of a lifetime by payin
g seven figures for information that enabled them to get their hands on the Scroll. Whatever the Voynich may or may not be worth, it’s clear that there’s something in these pages that’s far bigger than you can imagine.”

  “It sounds like you know a lot more about this than what you are letting on, Ms. Tw…Natalie.”

  “Here’s what I know. This canister contains a secret so important that even more than five centuries after the Scroll was written it was still being guarded twenty-four hours a day by an elite order of the Catholic Church. Year after year, through wars, famines, plagues, changes in governments and ideologies, the secret was kept, and generations of protectors lived and died,” Natalie explained.

  “That sounds far-fetched–”

  She held up a hand. “You’ve listened to me so far; hear me out. It’s also pretty far-fetched that an American woman would show up on your Italian doorstep with missing pages of one of your fascinations, isn’t it? I know how unbelievable this must sound, but everything I’m telling you is the truth.”

  “Who were these ‘protectors’, Natalie? And how do you know what you claim you know?” Steven asked.

  “Just let me finish. They call themselves the Order of the Holy Relic, and they don’t exist in any church records. My father learned of them from Frank, who’d spent decades cultivating contacts and following up on threads and rumors. Eventually, he found a chink in their armor and was able to confirm that the Order was still active. From what my father explained, it had to do with money. Frank met with my father multiple times and revealed to him that, whatever the Scroll was, it was connected to the Voynich, which is where his knowledge came into play. That’s how the uneasy partnership began, with my father vetting all the information Frank had unearthed.”