the Source (2008)

by Cordy, Michael

  Underwood looked down at his notes. 'You're working on this with a client, Scarlett Oil. They're a pretty small company.'

  'All our clients, here and overseas, are small-to-medium players with limited in-house geological expertise. That's why they use a consultancy.'

  'And the odds on finding this ancient oil?'

  Ross smiled. 'A lot better than average.' Even with the most advanced technology the average strike rate for finding conventional oil deposits was still only 10 per cent. He pulled a palmtop computer from his jacket, opened it and placed it on the table. A geological map of the world appeared on its screen, highlighting the various rock patterns that indicated potential reserves of trapped oil. It always made Ross a little sad because it demonstrated not only man's knowledge of the Earth's surface and what lay beneath but also a world stripped bare of its mysteries. 'My team have developed a software program that amalgamates the seismic, gravity-meter, magnetometer and geological data with satellite imagery and state-of-the-art global-positioning satellite technology to identify the world's most deposit-rich areas. By focusing on ancient rock sites, particularly high-yield cap and reservoir rock combinations, we can increase the odds of finding trapped oil.' Ross paused for effect. 'Our current modelled success rate is approaching twenty per cent. Twice the current level.'

  Underwood nodded. 'But you've no actual data yet? Only modelled data?'

  'That's why I went to Uzbekistan. To test the models.' He retrieved a folder from his laptop case and put it on the table. 'We need more time but the initial findings are good. Scarlett Oil's excited.'

  'Oh, yes, the mighty Scarlett Oil.' Underwood turned to the finance man. 'How much has this cost so far?' He had asked it as if he already knew the answer. Summers turned his laptop round so Underwood could see the screen. 'Wow! Xplore put a lot of time and money into this one. As much as Scarlett Oil.'

  Ross clenched his jaw, determined to keep calm. 'George, it's an investment project, based on sound data, which is in the process of being proved in the field. We'll own the search-and-extraction technology, allowing us to offer smaller companies - our client base - the chance to steal a march on their bigger competitors. Including Alascon, unless it embraces this new opportunity.'

  Underwood leant over to Kovacs and exchanged whispers with him. Then Kovacs gathered his papers. 'Please don't misunderstand us, Dr Kelly,' he said. 'You have a great reputation within the industry and we want you on our team. But the only reason Alascon bought this small consultancy was because of its excellent contacts and business links with the Far East and the old Soviet republics. And because it was cheap.' He glanced at the finance man's spreadsheet. 'Frankly, given how Xplore spent money, I can see why. Dr Kelly, Alascon Oil doesn't care about speculative ventures with other, smaller, American oil companies. We have little to learn from them.' He pointed at Underwood. 'I'm putting George in charge of oil exploration. You and your team will report to him. I understand you've worked for him in the past.' He turned to Underwood. 'It's your call, George.'

  'We want you to focus on developing your contacts in strategically important areas of the world, Ross,' Underwood said, 'in conventional oil. This ancient-oil research has to stop.'

  'What about our relationship with Scarlett Oil?'

  'What about them? They're small fry.'

  Ross gritted his teeth. 'But this will make money. A lot of money. Soon.' He had invested two years of his working life on the project and believed passionately in it. He picked up the folder from the table. 'Let me show you. All the new figures are in here. It's a no-brainer.'

  Underwood gave a dismissive wave. 'I know it's your pet project, Ross, but Alascon has no interest in ancient oil, just the good old-fashioned kind.'

  'But that's going to run out soon enough.' He slammed the folder on to the table. 'At least look at the latest figures.'

  Underwood flashed Kovacs a look that said, 'I told you he could be difficult,' then turned back to Ross. 'I've always admired your talent,' he said. 'You're a brilliant geologist and have a real gift for finding oil. Your one weakness is that you enjoy the adventure of exploration a little too much. To you the mystery is as sweet as the discovery, perhaps sweeter. Alascon isn't about making great discoveries but reducing risk. It doesn't care about excitement, adventure or mysteries, only results. And if you want to stay with this company, earning your very generous salary, you'd better accept that. I want you to direct your team to look for conventional deposits with immediate effect.'

  Ross said nothing. Two years' hard work dismissed just as it was about to yield dividends.

  Underwood frowned. 'Do you understand, Ross?'

  At that moment Ross saw his future career with Alascon in George Underwood's red face and jabbing finger. He was tired and had had enough. He stood to his full height, a head taller than Underwood, and looked down at his former, and would-be future, boss. He held his eyes until Underwood lost his nerve and glanced away. Ross reached for the folder on the desk and tore it into halves, then quarters and finally eighths.

  'Do you understand?' asked Underwood again, his voice shaking.

  'Take it easy, George,' warned Kovacs. 'Alascon needs guys like Dr Kelly. I'm sure he understands well enough.'

  'You understand, Ross?' persisted Underwood.

  'Perfectly.' Ross kept the torn file in his right hand and retrieved his phone from his pocket with the left. He speed-dialled and Gail answered on the second ring. 'It's me,' he said, into the phone. 'I promised you'd be the first to know.' Staring at Underwood, he dropped the torn file on the man's head. 'I'm resigning,' he said.

  'Wait!' said Kovacs, leaping to his feet. 'That isn't necessary.'

  Loosening his tie, Ross put the phone and palmtop back into his jacket, then picked up his laptop and walked to the door. As he opened it, he turned back. 'It is necessary,' he said. 'For me.' Then he closed the door and walked away.

  Chapter 3.

  A few miles from the Xplore offices, the guest of honour was leaving the McNally Auditorium on the Lincoln Campus of Fordham University, the Jesuit university of New York. The priest had stayed as long as he had needed to at the conference and was satisfied that he had discharged his duties. Now he was impatient to get away. After thanking his hosts and dismissing his entourage he walked so fast to his official limousine that his limp was barely noticeable.

  In the back seat, concealed behind tinted glass, he checked his watch. He had plenty of time before his return flight to Rome tonight. 'Yale University,' he told the driver. 'The Beinecke.'

  As the car drove north towards Henry Hudson Parkway, he turned his mind to what had occupied him since he had arrived in America a few days before. He opened his attache case and began to study the photocopy of a 450-year-old trial document that his office had discovered in the Inquisition files of the Vatican's secretum secretorum, the archive of the Church's most sensitive secrets. As he read the hand-written Latin, one of five languages he spoke fluently, his mind whirled with the threats and opportunities it presented.

  If what he had heard was true.

  An hour and a half later, the limousine pulled up outside Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, one of the largest buildings in the world devoted entirely to rare books. A white oblong structure covered with translucent marble 'windows', which resembled the indentations on a golf ball, it contrasted sharply with Yale's more traditional buildings. The priest, however, ignored the unusual architecture as he climbed the steps.

  They were expecting him at the front desk and a senior researcher escorted him to the main hall.

  'It's not very busy,' said the priest.

  'No.' A flush of excitement suffused the researcher's face. 'But it will be this evening. We're expecting quite a turnout for the open seminars. One of the talks promises to be dynamite.' He pointed to a Plexiglas box, displayed prominently on a plinth in the centre of the hall. It was empty. 'All this week the book's been displayed here, but we've arranged for you to study it
in one of the reading rooms for half an hour. If you need more access, digital copies of the pages can be studied on the Internet, on one of the terminals over there.' The man led him to a small, subtly lit room and handed him a pair of white gloves. 'You may only touch it when you're wearing these.'

  The priest approached the reading table. 'Thank you.'

  The researcher cleared his throat. 'The Voynich is one of my specialist areas. What can I tell you about it?'

  'Nothing.' As the priest put on the white gloves, he doubted there was anything the man could tell him that he didn't know already. 'I just need some time alone - to see it in the flesh, as it were.'

  'Right.' The man hovered, then moved to the door. 'I'll leave you to it, then. Call me if you want anything.'

  But the priest was no longer listening. He was staring, transfixed, at the book. The yellowing document looked unremarkable. Only when his gloved hands slowly turned the pages did its mystery become apparent. They were filled with unrecognizable text, and decorated with crude colour illustrations of bizarre plants that resembled known flora but were actually like nothing on Earth. Other pictures included naked women with unnaturally rounded bellies floating in green liquid.

  The illustrations were no more sophisticated than a child's, but that didn't detract from their power. The Beinecke Library's catalogue entry lay beside the book: 'Almost every page contains botanical and scientific drawings, many full-page, of a provincial but lively character, in ink washes and various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue and red. Based on the subject matter of the drawings, the contents of the manuscript fall into six sections.'

  'Botany' contained drawings of 113 unidentified plant species, accompanied by text. The astronomical, or astrological, section had twenty-five astral diagrams. 'Biology' included drawings of small-scale female nudes, most with bulging abdomens and exaggerated hips, immersed or emerging from fluid, interconnecting tubes or capsules. The pages dealing with pharmaceuticals contained drawings of more than a hundred herbs, while the remaining two sections were composed of continuous text and an illustrated folding page.

  The world had been fascinated by it since 1912, when the book dealer Wilfrid Voynich had come across the 134-page volume at the Villa Mondragone, a Jesuit college in Frascati, Italy. A letter dated 1666 had been tucked inside it; the rector of the University of Prague had asked a well-known scholar to attempt to decipher the text. According to the letter, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II of Bohemia had bought it for six hundred gold ducats.

  A faded signature on the first page of the manuscript read 'Jacobus de Tepenec'. Records showed that Jacobus Horcicky had been born into a poor family and raised by Jesuits to become a wealthy chemist at Rudolf 's court. In 1608 he had been granted the noble name 'de Tepenec' for having saved the emperor's life. His role in the manuscript's history, however, was less clear. Some believed that Rudolf had given it to him to decipher, others that when the emperor abdicated in 1611, and died a year later, the manuscript had come into Horcicky's possession 'by default'. Whatever had happened, the manuscript had found its way somehow to the Jesuit college where Voynich rediscovered it. Many claimed it had come originally from Italy, where it had been stolen from one of the Jesuit libraries and sold to Emperor Rudolf, and that agents of the Catholic Church had eventually reclaimed it, then allowed it to fall into obscurity once more.

  The manuscript's illustrations were bizarre but it was the text that had most intrigued Voynich and the countless others who had tried in vain to decipher it. The symbols were teasingly familiar, often resembling roman letters, Arabic numerals and Latin abbreviations. Elaborate gallows-shaped characters decorated many beginnings of lines, while an enigmatic swirl, like '9', could be found at the end of many words.

  When Voynich had brought the manuscript to the United States he had invited cryptographers to examine it, but to no avail. In 1961 H. P. Krause, a New York antiquarian book dealer, had bought it, and in 1969 he donated it to Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In the 1960s and 1970s the National Security Agency had put their best cryptanalysts to work on it, but even they failed.

  In the last ten years, researchers employing a battery of statistical methods, including entropy and spectral analysis, discovered that Voynichese - as the language of the text became known - displayed statistical properties consistent with natural languages, which suggested that it was unlikely to be the random writings of a madman or fraud. They also discovered that the text read from left to right and employed between twenty-three and thirty individual symbols, of which the entire manuscript contained around 234,000, which amounted to about 40,000 words, with a vocabulary of perhaps 8,200. Most words were six characters long and showed less variation than those of English, Latin and other Indo-European languages. But still no one was any closer to knowing what the manuscript said, who had written it, or why.

  Until now. Apparently.

  There was a discreet knock at the door. His half-hour was up. He lingered a moment longer, mesmerized, sensing that the book was about to change his life for ever, and that God was guiding him. He removed the gloves, and allowed his bare fingers to brush the manuscript.

  When the door opened and the researcher entered, the priest thanked him, stole one last look at the Voynich, then went back to the lobby.

  He paused by a poster announcing that evening's open seminar: 'Solving the Riddle'. Billed as the highlight of Voynich Week, there would be three presentations. A British mathematician from Cambridge University and a computer specialist from MIT were to present the latest techniques for decoding the text. But it was the third that interested the priest: 'The Voynich Manuscript: A Doomed Quest for Eldorado?'

  He clutched his attache case tighter and thought of the photocopied document within it. The original recorded the trial and testimony of a Jesuit priest burnt at the stake for heresy. It also recorded the existence of a book that should have been burnt with him: The Devil's Book.

  He confirmed the time of the last presentation, satisfied he could still make his flight, then checked the name of the academic giving it: Dr Lauren Kelly.

  Chapter 4.

  Sitting on the New Haven line train from Grand Central to Darien, Ross Kelly was preoccupied with thoughts of his career. Geology had not been a popular or easy choice for a schoolboy growing up in the Bible Belt. His mother had believed the Earth was created a few thousand years ago and that the Great Flood was the major geologically related event in human history. Creationism might have morphed into Intelligent Design, but things hadn't changed much - and not only in the Bible Belt: the new pope had recently rejected Darwinian evolution in favour of God's guiding hand in all aspects of creation.

  But Ross had always fought for his passions. Ever since he was a boy, growing up on his father's farm in the shadow of the Ozark mountains, he had seen geology as a romantic, magical science that charted Earth's history over an unimaginably deep chasm of time. He could still remember the hairs standing up on the back of his neck when he'd first read that Mount Everest was made of rock that had once formed the floor of the oceans. How could anyone not marvel at the sheer pressure and time involved in pushing the Himalayas from the bottom of the sea to the top of the world?

  A scholarship to study geology at Princeton, a PhD from MIT and his first years with the earth-sciences division of the mighty Alascon had fuelled his wonder. It was quickly apparent, though, that the oil industry cared more about making profit than exploring the world's treasures. When Xplore, then a lean, progressive search consultancy, had headhunted him, their desire for fresh ideas had rekindled his passion.

  But his career there was over now: the visionaries who had recruited him had gone, swept away by men like Underwood and Kovacs, who had more in common with accountants than with explorers. And he had no illusions that other companies in the industry would be any different in embracing anything new.

  On the short taxi drive home from the station, Ross contemplated his future. He tried n
ot to think about whether he had made the right decision, or what his wife would say. As the driver pulled into the kerb he saw his ancient Mercedes convertible parked next to Lauren's economical Prius. He had acquired the so-called classic car after he'd joined Xplore. Back then it had seemed to symbolize his success. Now, like his career, its lustre had faded and it looked what it was - an old car covered with bird shit. A third car, small and boxy, was parked alongside. Ross groaned: he was in no mood for visitors. His work took him all over the world, but when he came home he wanted to be alone with his wife. He enjoyed nothing better than a bottle of Pinot Noir, pizza, making love and squabbling over the TV remote - he'd never understand why someone as smart as Lauren preferred reality makeover shows to classic comedies, a good movie or anything by David Attenborough on the Discovery channel. He paid the man, got out and crunched across the gravel to the white clapperboard house he had mortgaged himself to the hilt to buy.

  The front door opened and Lauren appeared. In the early-afternoon light, her honey-blonde bob gleamed, her soft green eyes sparkled and her skin glowed. Just seeing her made him feel better. The door opened wider, to reveal another striking woman. While his wife was conventionally beautiful, her assistant at Yale was the opposite. Elizabeth 'Zeb' Quinn resembled a strange blend of punk and geek. Her long, curly hair was dyed henna-red and she wore thick glasses, second-hand jeans, a shapeless hemp jacket and a T-shirt proclaiming: Gaia's Your Mother! So Stop Killing Her!

  Lauren rushed to kiss him. 'Ross, you're back - God, I'm so happy to see you.'