by James Becker
‘We’ll have to use a card for that,’ Angela pointed out, ‘unless the rules have changed.’
‘I know, but there’s nothing we can do about it. But it will take them time to find out what we did after we handed back the first car, and even if they get the details of our new vehicle, France is a really big country and finding us won’t be easy. We’ll make sure of that. And then we disappear. Just take a look at the map and pick somewhere at random. Find a hotel and get started deciphering the inscription as soon as we can.’
‘Okay. A hotel would be helpful because I’m going to need the Internet. My Latin isn’t too bad, but I’ll need some pointers about deciphering the text. I’m not an expert in cryptography.’
They left Auxerre in a small and anonymous three-year-old Citroën a little over two hours later, having raided the ATMs and drawn out a couple of thousand euros between them. Their natural inclination was to head towards Paris and the Channel ports, but that was probably what anybody trying to follow them would assume they’d do, so instead Bronson steered the dark blue C3 south-east, following a road that more or less paralleled the autoroute, and taking turnings as and when he felt like it.
‘Do you know where we’re going?’ Angela asked.
Bronson shook his head.
‘No, and that’s the point. If I don’t know where we’re going, nor will anybody else. What I want to do is put about thirty miles between us and Auxerre, because that will create a huge search area for someone trying to find us.’
Around three-quarters of an hour later, he steered the Citroën into the car park of a hotel lying just off the Route de Paris on the outskirts of Avallon and not too far from the local airport. The parking was behind the building, which meant that the car would be out of sight of the road, and a large sign beside the main entrance extolled the virtues and facilities of the premises. These included the obvious essentials like en suite bathrooms and central heating, but also advertised coffee-making facilities in each room and, in quite large letters, free Wi-Fi.
The proprietors only spoke basic English, but Bronson’s French was more than up to the task, and they chose a double room on the first floor overlooking the road.
‘Are you sure about the double?’ Bronson had asked, somewhat surprised at Angela’s insistence. Their relationship was still somewhat fragile and sharing a room was unusual rather than normal.
‘Just book it before I change my mind,’ Angela had replied. ‘It’s going to attract a lot less attention. And after what we’ve been through in the last day or so, I don’t think I want to be on my own.’
In the hotel room, Angela immediately opened up her computer and navigated to the folder containing the photographs of the inscription.
Bronson sat beside her as she studied the pictures she’d taken.
‘It really isn’t what I expected,’ Bronson said, staring at the image on the screen. It was many times larger than the small image he’d previously looked at on her camera, and he could see the inscription clearly for the first time. ‘I’d envisaged a neat carving, maybe inside a shield or escutcheon, something like that. But that just looks so crude.’
The image showed a flat area of rock, brilliantly illuminated by the flash from the camera and on which every detail stood out clearly. There was a roughly carved border around the outside of the text, and the incised letters were carved in a simple and basic fashion with no attempt at ornamentation of any sort. It looked as if the carving had been done in a hurry by somebody whose only aim had been to ensure that the individual letters were perfectly readable.
‘That’s one of the things that struck us about it as well,’ Angela said. ‘We came to the conclusion, maybe wrongly, that the inscription was a copy of something else. Maybe a piece of text written on a parchment or something of that sort, and the inscription was just intended to be a permanent record.’
‘In other words, it’s not the inscription that’s important, it’s the message. It’s the information, rather than the form in which that information is conveyed.’
Angela nodded. ‘Exactly. Now, I think the easiest way to tackle this is for you to take a pencil and paper and copy down the inscription as I read it out, letter by letter. Once we’ve done that, I can try to work out how the encryption was done.’
Bronson opened his own computer bag and took out what he needed, then sat at the other end of the small desk in the room and wrote down each letter as Angela read it out from the image on the screen. It wasn’t a large piece of text, and it didn’t take long for Angela to finish. There were a few instances where extra clarity was needed, and on these she looked at different pictures of the inscription until she was satisfied that she had correctly read every single letter.
‘And I suppose that,’ Bronson said, putting down the pencil he’d been using, ‘was the easy bit.’
‘Correct.’
An hour or so later, Angela had followed the same logical process as Khaled had done hours before and had in front of her a new version of the inscription, produced not by any form of Atbash but simply by frequency analysis.
She was staring at it, her head in her hands.
‘I must be missing something,’ she said. ‘This looks almost right, but it just doesn’t make sense.’ She pointed at one section of the text. ‘It still looks like gobble-degook, but less obscure, somehow.’
Bronson walked over to the side of the room and made a couple of cups of coffee, then returned to the desk and put one of the cups in front of her.
‘It’ll come to you,’ he said confidently. ‘I know you. You’ll keep going backwards and forwards over this until you finally crack it.’
Angela suddenly stiffened.
‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,’ she murmured, grabbing another piece of paper.
31
Iraq
The biggest problem Khaled had encountered in his search for a possible location was the sheer number of places that could be described in a way that matched the crucial words in the deciphered inscription, that could be below a ‘lost temple’. There were far more destroyed temples, buildings lost to the world through neglect, natural catastrophe and, inevitably, war, than there were places of worship still standing.
There were obvious filters that he could apply – it had to have been in existence at least as early as the thirteenth century, for example – but that still left dozens of possibilities. The other problem he faced was that although he knew that many Christian churches – and in his opinion these could be generically described as ‘temples’ – had crypts lying underneath the building, this fact was rarely a matter of public record. The number of places he found that were described as having such a structure was vanishingly small, and he was quite certain that subterranean chambers existed below many buildings that he had initially dismissed.
Khaled pushed back his chair, stood up and paced back and forth across the carpet in front of his desk. It was a habit he had acquired years earlier, as the worn track in the carpet mutely testified, but it did seem to help him think more clearly. And after only a couple of minutes, a thought popped into his mind, an idea that might focus his search significantly. But first, he needed to check his translation of the inscription again.
He sat down in front of the computer and pulled up the transcription he had prepared. He scanned down to the appropriate section, and then nodded. It was something of a jump, but it seemed to him to make sense. It all hinged on the interpretation of a single word, a word chosen by a man over five hundred years earlier.
He looked again at the decrypted Latin, and then navigated to an online Latin dictionary and entered the word hypogeum into the search field. He’d done it before, and the result was exactly what he had expected. It wasn’t even an unusual word, and had been in use during the entire period when Latin had been the predominant European language – but just to make absolutely certain he brought up three other different Latin dictionaries, one after the other, and checked the results in those
as well.
They all agreed. The translation was simple: the word meant a crypt or a vault, or some other kind of underground chamber, and that was what had prompted his re-examination of the text. The question really was whether or not the mediaeval author of the inscription had thought the same way that he was now doing.
Because there was another word, a word much more commonly used than hypogeum, and which indicated almost exactly the same kind of thing, but with one subtle difference. In Latin, the word crupta – the root of the English word ‘crypt’ – also meant an underground chamber, but one that was additionally used for rites, for religious services of one sort or another. If Khaled was right in his interpretation, the mediaeval author was specifically stating that the ‘hall’ was not used by the temple above it for any kind of religious function, and – making another leap of deduction that might well not be justified by the evidence – might not even be in any way a part of that temple. The writer could simply have been referring to two entirely separate buildings: a temple, or to be exact a place where a temple had once stood, and some kind of hall cut into the ground some distance underneath it.
And if that were the case, then there was one very obvious location that sprang into his mind.
There was also, he supposed, trying to rationalize and justify his deduction, a piece of what might be described as negative evidence as well. By simply using the word templum, meaning the temple, rather than one of the other fifty or so words in Latin that could be employed to refer to a place of worship, and by not specifying where that temple might be located, the author could have been alluding to the best-known such structure of his time. Khaled had spent some years in Britain and, to take a modern example, if most citizens there heard a reference to ‘the abbey’, he guessed that most of them would immediately assume that the speaker was referring to Westminster Abbey because that was the most famous such structure in the United Kingdom.
And although the mediaeval world was geographically diverse and well separated, culturally and religiously it was a very small place and he was reasonably confident that most people in Europe and the Middle East in those days would know exactly which temple the author of the inscription would have meant.
Khaled turned back to his browser, thought for a few seconds, then entered an entirely different search string and scanned the list of pages that had been generated. At the top of the third screen was a hit that he thought seemed promising, and this time the page of information that was shown after he’d clicked the link was precisely what he was hoping to see. He now knew – or at least he hoped he knew – what the author of the inscription must have been referring to.
He read it all twice, then picked up his mobile phone and called Farooq.
They needed to move quickly, but the good news was that they didn’t have quite as far to go as he had expected.
32
France
‘What?’ Bronson asked.
‘I think that could be it,’ Angela said, quickly jotting down a series of letters. She turned back to her laptop, accessed a website and typed rapidly. Then she nodded in apparent satisfaction.
‘What?’ Bronson asked again.
Angela pointed to one of the words in the latest version of the inscription that they had produced.
‘See this word here?’ she asked, and Bronson nodded. ‘Frequency analysis suggests that the word is “siruf”, and that’s not a word in Latin that I know. In fact, it’s not a word that any of the online Latin dictionaries recognize. But if you reverse the letters it turns into “furis”.’
‘I’m none the wiser,’ Bronson said.
‘No, but you are better informed, my dear. “Furis” might not be a Latin word that you’ve ever encountered, but I know what it means. It’s the Latin for “thief”. And look at this’ – she pointed at another sequence of letters – ‘that is “sirotpecretni”, which again is not a Latin word, and it doesn’t even look like Latin. But write it backwards and you get “interceptoris”. “Interceptor” is now an English word with an entirely different meaning. But originally it was a Latin word, and it meant a usurper. I think the person who prepared this inscription used Atbash with a code word or words added to the alphabet to make decryption more difficult and then as a final refinement he reversed the ciphertext in its entirety, writing every word backwards. In fact,’ she added, ‘I probably should have guessed that that was a possibility, just because we’re talking about an inscription.’
‘Why?’
‘Because most people are right-handed, and if you’re carving something on a piece of stone you’ll naturally hold the chisel in your left hand and the hammer in your right. If you do that, your left hand obscures what you’ve just carved if you work from left to right, but not if you work from right to left. This is why we believe that some languages, like Hebrew, run from right to left because most of the early examples were inscriptions of various sorts. The language got established by being carved in that way, and nobody ever bothered changing it to run in the opposite direction.’
Their coffee grew cold as they reversed the inscription, transcribing it letter by letter, Angela reading out each one in reverse sequence while Bronson wrote out the text.
‘There don’t seem to be any breaks between these words,’ he said. ‘Or if there are, you’re not telling me where one word ends and another one starts.’
‘That’s because as far as I can see there are no breaks in the inscription and I’ve seen nothing like an interpunct anywhere in the text, which is more or less what I expected.’
This time it was Bronson’s turn to look puzzled.
‘An interpunct was a small dot or occasionally a tiny triangle that was used in ancient and classical Latin script to separate words,’ Angela explained. ‘But it fell out of use round about AD 200, and after that Latin was written in what was known as scripta continua – basically, continuous script without any spaces – for about the next half a millennium. After that, the custom of inserting spaces between words was used.’
‘But if you think this inscription is mediaeval, wouldn’t you expect to find spaces?’
‘If this were a regular inscription or piece of Latin text written on parchment, then I would absolutely agree with you. But this inscription looks to me as if it was a copy of a piece of earlier text and, more importantly, we know it was encrypted. If the scribe or mason who produced it had included spaces to separate the words, that would have made deciphering it easier, which would have defeated the object of the exercise.’
Deciphering the Latin was the first step. Once they’d completed that, or at least the first part of the text, because the section written below a faint but a distinct line that ran across the middle of the inscription defied all her efforts, Angela spent another fifteen minutes or so using an online Latin–English dictionary to translate the text. Then she sat back in her seat, read through what she’d written, and glanced at Bronson.
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘And what does it say, obviously?’ Bronson asked.
‘Oh. Well, not as much as I was hoping, frankly, and certainly not what I was expecting. And that lower part of the inscription still appears to be complete gobble-degook, so I guess that will need some other code words or something, maybe even a different decryption method, before we can read what it says. The section I have translated seems to be a condemnation of some unnamed man. It refers to him as “the thief” and “the usurper” – the two words, oddly enough, that I first recognized in the text when we realized how it had been encrypted – but his identity is never confirmed. It’s almost as if the author would have expected anybody reading it to know precisely who he was talking about. A bit like Christianity today, I suppose, where a church could be referred to as the “house of the lord”, and nobody would be in any doubt which particular lord was meant.’
‘That would be a reference in a positive sense,’ Bronson pointed out, ‘but from what you’ve said this is definitel
y a negative reference, maybe something to do with the forces of evil, with the Devil, perhaps. After all, in most religions if you accept the existence of God, logically you must also accept the existence of God’s counterpart, the Devil. Without the threat of going to Hell, how could the priests persuade their flock to do what the Church wanted them to do? Could that be it?’
Angela shook her head.
‘That’s a good suggestion,’ she replied, ‘but it doesn’t really work with this text. This doesn’t read like a threat of eternal damnation or anything of that sort, it’s more a sort of lament, really. It’s as if it refers to a member of the Church – or of a particular religion, in this case – who has taken something and used it for his own purposes, though it doesn’t say what was taken or how it was used. But there is a reference right here’ – she pointed to a sentence towards the end of the translated inscription – ‘to an object, or rather objects, of some sort that the writer refers to as the “hoard” or “cluster”.
‘The problem is that almost every Latin word has a number of different but related meanings, and although it’s generally considered to be a precise language, there are obviously different ways of interpreting any piece of text, and especially one that’s at least half a millennium old. There may well have been different meanings ascribed to particular words at the time when it was written, meanings that may never have been recognized by scholars and researchers. We know, for example, that this word – acervus – had multiple meanings. It usually referred to a large quantity of something, hence the translation as a “cluster” or a “hoard”, but it could also mean a funeral pile or even a treasure of some sort.’
‘That sounds more interesting,’ Bronson said. ‘The idea of treasure always raises my interest level. So the short version is that the text might be referring to a cluster of something, or even a hidden treasure, but you have no idea what, although it is whatever this usurper stole.’
