by James Becker
By that time, the only piece of information that was not publicly available was the name of the dead Englishman, simply because the Italian police were making arrangements to inform his family in the UK before the news broke.
28
France
When Bronson and Angela reached the vicinity of Orleans Angela managed to tune into British Radio 4. After a few minutes, the programme ended and then a man with a very deep BBC voice began reading the news. Bronson turned up the volume – both he and Angela were desperate to hear whether or not news of the events in Iraq had broken internationally. If they had, they both guessed the massacre would be headline news.
It soon became clear that nothing had been released about it by the Iraqi authorities, but just before the end of the broadcast they both registered the importance of one other breaking news story: the body of an Englishman, believed to be an archaeologist, had been found murdered that morning in a hotel in Milan.
When the broadcast ended, Angela reached up and switched off the radio. Her hand covering her mouth in horror, she turned to Bronson.
‘That was Stephen,’ she said quietly, ‘wasn’t it?’
Bronson sighed heavily. ‘I’d like to say that it wasn’t, that it was just a bizarre coincidence, but I don’t think it was. I’m sorry,’ he said, and squeezed Angela’s shoulder.
Angela was staring straight ahead through the windscreen, taking in deep breaths to steady herself.
‘They got to him so quickly. I mean, how did they manage that?’ Her voice was quiet with shock.
‘Realistically, he wouldn’t be that difficult to find. If they had access to the airline schedules of Kuwait City our three names would have popped up as probably travelling together, because we bought tickets at exactly the same time.’
‘But they were in Iraq! They couldn’t have got to Milan any quicker than we did. It doesn’t make sense.’
Bronson shook his head.
‘Unfortunately, crime is a business these days – an international business, in fact – and it’s quite common for one criminal organization to contact another one in a different country to arrange a particular job. In fact, and especially with assassinations, this is a really good technique – from their point of view – because it provides a complete separation between the person who actually orders the killing and the victim. The murder is committed by someone who has never met the victim and has no possible links with him, and that type of crime is virtually impossible to solve.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Angela said. ‘So you think someone in Iraq just picked up a telephone, rang a contact in Italy and told him to find us and kill us?’
‘That’s about the size of it, yes. Obviously you can’t just open up a telephone directory, look under “M” and expect to find the Mafia listed, but there’s a lot of international cooperation between criminal organizations in those areas where they’re not directly competing with each other. In fact,’ Bronson added, ‘what probably saved us was the time it took the men in Iraq to establish their bona fides.’
‘Sorry, you’ve lost me.’
‘Even in the criminal world, committing murder is still pretty serious, and it would take a lot more than one phone call to convince some Mafia capo to send out a group of his soldiers to track down and kill three people. There would have been checks and double checks and then they’d have to agree the fee and the payment method. All that would have taken time. My guess is that our aircraft had probably already landed in Milan several hours before the Italians were ready to move, and they were playing catch-up all the way.’
Angela shivered. ‘So if we’d taken a later flight somewhere, or the men in Iraq had moved quicker, the Italian killers might have been waiting for us at the airport?’
‘Yes. That was why I was so keen to get out of Kuwait as quickly as possible.’
For a few minutes, they were both silent, the gravity of the situation weighing heavily on them. Then Bronson glanced across at his former wife who was still staring straight ahead through the windscreen at the unwinding road in front of them.
‘I’m starting to have second thoughts,’ he said.
‘What about?’
‘What we do next. I think it’s time for Plan B.’
29
Baghdad, Iraq
Khaled took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. He had been studying both the photographs of the inscription found in the underground temple and the written copy he had made of the text. He felt as if he had been looking at the enigmatic characters for the entire day, though in fact he’d only been sitting there for about three hours. But the text – such as it was – still made absolutely no sense to him. It was clearly encrypted, because no combination of letters in the text formed a recognizable Latin word, and he was reasonably certain that it was Latin.
He tried character shifting, a refinement of basic Atbash, which meant starting the first letter of the reversed alphabet at some random point, which gave a further twenty-six possible ciphertexts to try, none of which had worked. He’d then again tried character shifting but using the ciphertext alphabet written forwards rather than backwards. That produced another twenty-six possible combinations, and once more none of them had worked.
All he’d so far managed to establish was that something rather more complex than Atbash had been used to encrypt the message. And, realistically, about the only two possibilities were that a code word of some sort had been included within the ciphertext, or perhaps the cipher itself was entirely reliant upon a number of code words instead of a reversed alphabet.
Both techniques were known to have been used as early as the mediaeval period, and because of one single piece of information – the date of an event that took place in Western Europe – which had been included within the text on the parchment in his possession, Khaled knew that the inscription could not possibly have been written prior to the early part of the fourteenth century. So a cipher that utilized code words was entirely feasible.
The problem, obviously, was working out which word, or combination of words, had been used.
Khaled was by no means an expert cryptographer. Because of his job he had become familiar with the basic techniques, and rather than trying to peer into the mind of a mediaeval scribe to guess what names or words he might have chosen almost half a millennium earlier, he decided to approach the problem from a different direction, by using frequency analysis.
In English the six commonest letters in order are E T A I O N, the list including four of the five vowels. So if a piece of English-language text, encrypted using a simple letter-substitution code, is analysed, whatever letter occurs most frequently in that piece of text is most likely to represent the letter ‘E’, and the second commonest the letter ‘T’, and so on.
Latin was obviously going to be different, but Khaled had very quickly located an analysis that had been performed on a number of pieces of mixed-genre Latin texts amounting to nearly 300,000 words. The results, posted on the Internet, were in fact not that dissimilar to English, the commonest letters being I E A U T S, these six letters together amounting to over 55 per cent of the text, and the first three accounting for almost 32 per cent of the total. Obviously different types of text would have produced different results, but he felt this information was a good guide.
He took a fresh sheet of paper, printed a photograph of the entire inscription and worked his way methodically through the first half-dozen lines, crossing out each letter on the photograph as he noted it down on the paper, and putting an additional line beside each letter as a simple counting mechanism each time it reoccurred. That produced a kind of table of popularity for the letters used on the inscription, which he cross-referred to the list on the Internet and pencilled in substitutes accordingly.
That, infuriatingly, didn’t make any better sense, and for a couple of minutes after he had completed the letter substitution Khaled just stared blankly at the paper in front of him.
And then it was as
if a light began to dawn, and he suddenly realized that as well as encrypting the original text, the man who carved the inscription had added one other simple layer of complication. A complication that in fact Khaled should have guessed a lot earlier, purely because it was an inscription.
Once he saw how the original text – and he now knew that it definitely was Latin – had been encrypted, deciphering it was simply a matter of time, and within a little over half an hour Khaled was looking at the original plaintext. Or at least, he was looking at the original plaintext of roughly half the inscription.
But the lower half of the encrypted text stubbornly refused to yield to anything he tried, even frequency analysis, and he guessed that some entirely different encryption method must have been used. This was interesting in its own right, and attracted his professional attention, but on a personal note it was just extremely frustrating. There had to be, he assumed, some clue or indication in the section he had managed to crack that would indicate how to decipher the rest of it.
And then he saw something that he hadn’t noticed before. There was a piece of the inscription that he had ignored because he’d assumed it was simply decoration, placed there by the sculptor in an attempt to make a rather uninteresting-looking inscription slightly more attractive. And he’d been wrong.
Between the section of the inscription that he had managed to decrypt and translate and the part that had so far resisted his efforts was an incised line made up of a series of small square crosses, all apparently identical. But now he could see how important the line was because it separated the two parts of the text. It was another indication – if any was needed – to show that a different decryption technique would be required to display the plaintext of the characters that had been chiselled into the rock to form the lower part of the inscription.
As a final check, he then effectively reverse-engineered the part of the cipher he’d successfully cracked and confirmed that it was Atbash, but with the addition of two proper names, one at the beginning of the reversed alphabet and the other at the end, giving multiple options for the encryption. And the names the author had chosen, with hindsight, were entirely predictable, given what he already knew – or at least guessed – about the origin of the inscription and the men who had ordered it to be carved.
He spent another hour trying every combination of names and variants he could think of, attempting to crack the lower section of the encrypted text, but got absolutely nowhere. And there appeared to be no clue within the plaintext he had written out to suggest what word or words might have been used to form the cipher. It looked very much as if the second section needed something else to allow it to be decrypted, and that did make sense of a phrase that appeared towards the end of the plaintext.
But he wondered if he even needed to decrypt the remainder of the text, because the information contained within the inscription seemed enough in its own right, within certain limitations. Although the statement he had decoded was clear enough, it was also in one sense frustratingly obscure.
Khaled checked his decryption a couple of times and looked at the few possibilities for alternative meanings, and then for a minute or so he just sat and stared at his best guess of the translation of the original Latin script, the only bit of the inscription that actually mattered to him. It was far from specific, but interpreting what it meant – or more accurately the location to which it referred – wouldn’t be that difficult.
He smiled to himself. With any luck, his quest would be over within a matter of days.
But there was no time to waste, because of the woman who had got away. She had escaped from the camp and then vanished from Milan before she could be silenced. She was probably somewhere in France at that very moment, running for her life. But what concerned Khaled more than anything was not the fact of her continued existence, but the unpleasant knowledge that – according to the dead archaeologist in Milan – she, like all the other members of the team, had taken copious photographs of the inscription.
And, sooner or later, she would go to ground somewhere and when she did Khaled had no doubt that she too would manage to decrypt the enciphered text and make exactly the same connection that he had. And if she had the slightest inkling of the importance of the object the inscription referred to as the ‘hoard’, then almost certainly she and her former husband would join the race.
Time really was of the essence, and Khaled knew he would need to move as quickly as he could once he’d worked out the meaning of the clue he’d uncovered. And he would also need some help. Or, to be completely accurate, some muscle. He opened his briefcase, took out his personal mobile phone and dialled Farooq’s number.
‘I need you and six of your men,’ he said without preamble when his call was answered. ‘And make sure you have your passports, because we will almost certainly need to fly somewhere at short notice, probably somewhere in Europe.’
‘You mean you don’t know where?’ Farooq asked. He sounded surprised.
‘Not yet,’ Khaled replied. ‘I’ve deciphered the inscription, but I still need to work out exactly what the text means.’
‘What about weapons?’
‘Hopefully we won’t need them, but if we do we’ll have to find them at our destination. Anyway, warn your men and hold yourself ready.’
Khaled ended the call, opened up a web browser and began searching for a location that matched the description he’d managed to decipher.
30
France
‘And Plan B is what, exactly?’ Angela asked.
‘Basically,’ Bronson replied, ‘it’s not so much a plan, more like an anti-plan. Instead of doing what they might expect, we do the opposite, and stay unpredictable. I’ve no doubt that Stephen was forced to tell his killers that we planned to drive to England, and if we do that there’s a good chance there’ll be a man with a long rifle waiting for us somewhere near the Channel port or outside your apartment building.’
Angela stared at his profile for a few moments before she spoke.
‘You’re serious? You really think they won’t give up until they’ve killed me?’
Her voice was calm and level, but there was no mistaking the fear that lay behind her simple questions.
‘They massacred a whole camp of people and then had Stephen murdered,’ Bronson said in reply. ‘Italy’s a long way from Iraq, but they had no trouble reaching out and killing him in Milan within just a few hours. So, yes, I’m serious. Mind you,’ he added, ‘we’ve been here before, facing the same kind of threat.’
‘I know,’ Angela said, ‘but when it happened before, at least we had a good idea what the motive was. This time, it just doesn’t make sense. How can the knowledge contained in an inscription carved over half a millennium earlier be so important – or so dangerous – that everybody who sees it ends up dead?’
‘The only way to find out is for you to decipher it,’ Bronson said simply. ‘Do you think your photographs are good enough to let you transcribe the letters and work out what the plaintext says?’
Angela nodded.
‘That wasn’t why I took the pictures,’ she said. ‘At the time, the inscription was just a curiosity, and the photographs were intended to show the entire layout of the underground temple, but they’re certainly clear enough to let me transcribe every character.’
‘I think we should go to ground, lose ourselves completely for a while. Once you’ve worked out the meaning of the inscription, we can decide what to do next.’
‘That won’t get them off our backs, though.’
Bronson nodded. ‘I know. The trouble is that at the moment we have no idea why they want us dead, so what we need more than anything else is information. And pretty much the only source is that inscription. Once we know what it says, we’ll have a better idea why it’s worth killing for and hopefully what we should do about it.’
‘So we just drop off the radar?’
‘Exactly. For the time being, I think that’s our safest course of ac
tion. And the first thing we need to do is get rid of this car. If they traced Stephen to his hotel room, there’s no doubt at all that they’ll know about this vehicle.’
A few minutes later they reached the Auxerre-Sud junction of the Autoroute du Soleil, and Bronson steered the car down the off ramp. Auxerre wasn’t a huge town, but it was big enough to have a number of vehicle hire agencies and, luckily, one of them was the same company that they had approached in Milan. He handed over the vehicle, explaining to the counter clerk that they had changed their plans and were now going to take a train to Paris and then fly to London from there. That, he hoped, would help muddy the waters if their anonymous pursuers managed to track them to that agency.
About a quarter of an hour later they sat down at an outside table at a pavement café, their bags tucked against the wall behind them, and ordered the menu of the day, plus a coffee for Bronson because he was going to be driving, and a large gin and tonic for Angela because she looked like she needed it.
‘So we’ve got rid of the car,’ Angela said, taking a long swallow. ‘What next?’
‘We max out our credit cards, draw as much cash as we can. With the resources these people seem to have, I’ve no doubt they’ll be able to pinpoint our location if we pay hotel bills with cards, so we need the cash if we’re going to stay out of sight. Out of electronic sight, I mean. Then we find ourselves another car, hopefully from a small agency.’
