by Alex Scarrow
Liam nodded. ‘Well then, while it appears the sky hasn’t yet fallen on our heads again, and while we’re waiting for this machinery to recharge, perhaps Miss Vikram would like to go for a breakfast in one of those charming Scottish restaurants.’
‘Scottish restaurants?’
‘One of them McDougal places?’
‘McDonalds?’
‘Aye, that’s the fella. The ones with the big fancy yellow M.’
She pulled a face. ‘Breakfast sounds good … but maybe somewhere else?’
CHAPTER 9
May 1994, UEA campus, Norwich
Opening the portal in the university’s swimming pool after closing time had seemed a good idea to Maddy back in the archway. They’d arrive wet, but there’d be changing facilities, and hopefully a blow-dryer or towel or something. But now, floundering beneath the water in total darkness, not knowing which way was up and which way was down, she realized it ranked pretty high on her own Not To Be Tried Again list.
Suddenly Maddy felt Becks’s hand grasping her, followed by a hearty yank and her face breaking the surface. She coughed, retched and spluttered as Becks swam to the side of the pool, pulling her after.
‘Recommendation: this was not a good idea.’
‘No, really?’ she gasped.
Becks nodded firmly, not yet a master of irony. ‘Yes, you could have drowned.’
Maddy eased herself out of the cold water and flopped exhausted on to the side. She looked around. The university’s sports centre was closed now, the swimming pool dark, lit only by the dim amber glow of street lights outside, strips of orange light leaking through the drawn and turned-down blinds along the racing-lane side of the pool.
‘All right, well … so we’re here now. We’ve got four hours. So let’s get dry and changed. And then we’ll go find this Adam Lewis.’
Adam’s nerves were getting the better of him. He needed to get a grip.
‘Get a grip,’ he uttered to the face in his mirror. A lean face of freckles and acne, framed by the pitifully feeble sprouting of an auburn beard. Auburn — not ginger. Auburn. That’s what he kept telling everyone. And the tatty twists and turns of greasy hair tied back in a ponytail, they were flippin’ well auburn too.
His eyes looked back at him through round-framed ‘Lennon’ specs.
‘You look terrible,’ he told himself.
Well, why not? he argued back. I’ve got every right to look terrible.
Why not indeed. He was scared. Really scared. He’d not stepped out of his room now for what? … Four, five days? Missed half a dozen study periods and lectures and his flatmates were beginning to mutter about him in the hallway outside his door. They’d already thought he was a bit of an oddball before … well, before … this.
Outside it was dark. Eleven. He could hear the thud of music coming from the floor below. He recognized it: Chili Peppers. His flatmates were playing Mario on the SNES; there was a lot of noise, the clack-fissss of cans of beer being popped open, and laughing, lots of laughing … most probably about him.
Not so big a deal to him now. A week ago stuff like that got him down a bit, being a loner, being perceived as the resident freak. But he brushed off the quips and sniggering at his expense the way every hardened geek does it, by acting as if far greater matters were on his mind, matters these beer-swilling oiks wouldn’t even begin to understand.
One day I’ll be flying business class … and, you idiots, you’ll be serving fries somewhere.
That’s the sort of thing he usually said aloud. The lads laughed and shook their heads at his lame and faltering comeback. But he quietly smiled because he knew it was undoubtedly going to be true. And that, he figured, was how he and every other geek coped with being the frozen-out loner — the certainty that there’d come a day of mega payback for all the jibes and the sniggering.
But right now he really did have far, far greater matters on his mind.
Why me? How do they know my name? Oh God … who are ‘they’?
All of a sudden the throbbing music and the drunken guffawing stopped. He realized the front doorbell to their digs had just gone. He licked dry, cracked lips and realized he was holding his ragged breath to hear better who was down there at the door; to hear who’d come knocking at so late an hour.
He could hear Lance’s Glaswegian accent … and who else? Another murmuring voice. Quiet, polite, businesslike. Female.
Lance was trying it on, some witty banter, loosened up by the beer. His easy Celtic charm usually worked flawlessly on the ‘freshers’, first-year girls looking for an older, wiser university boyfriend. But, from the murmuring tone of this female visitor, she seemed wholly uninterested.
He heard Lance’s attitude suddenly change. Clearly facing a rejection for the first time in his life. He sounded like a petulant child. ‘Well, if you really want to see the freak … he’s up the stairs. Second on the right.’
Adam heard footsteps on the uncarpeted hallway and up the wooden stairs.
His heart was pounding in his chest, his stomach suddenly churning like a spin dryer.
‘Oh G-God … it’s …’
Them.
His mind spun between two options: to go for the window, clamber out, drop down outside and run for his life. Or to stay put and meet them. See what they wanted from him.
Oh God, oh God, oh God …
Maddy stood outside the door. She turned to look at Becks before gently rapping on it with her knuckles. ‘Adam Lewis?’
There was no answer. But she heard something stirring inside, the clunk and scrape of footsteps.
‘Adam?’ she called softly. ‘Can we talk to you?’
A long pause. Downstairs she could hear the murmur of male voices, no doubt talking about her and Becks. Actually, probably just Becks. She was well aware the support unit tended to attract the gaze of excitable testosterone-fuelled young men. Finally she heard a shuffling sound from just beyond the door.
‘Who … who are y-you?’ a voice came through the keyhole.
‘My name’s Maddy.’
‘Are … y-you … h-here to g-get me?’ The voice sounded pitiful, thin with fear.
‘No. I’m not here to get you. I just want to talk to you.’
‘I … did … what I was told. I d-did exactly … w-what it told me to d-do …’
Maddy had no idea what he was talking about. But she decided the only way she was going to get him to open the door was to mention something very specific.
‘Adam … I’m here about a particular word.’
Silence.
‘I’m here to talk about Pandora.’
She heard the dull click of the lock turning and the door cracked open an inch. A pale face dotted with spots and the glint of spectacles appeared in the space between the door and frame. ‘Are y-you … are you … the one?’
Go on, Maddy, play along with him. She offered him a reassuring smile. ‘Sure, I’m the one.’
‘The … the one who w-will explain? B-because I n-need to know … I … I …’
‘I’ll do my very best, Adam … if you’ll just let us in.’
The crack widened another half-inch as the glinting of spectacles shifted to study Becks. ‘And who’s she?’
‘She’s a friend. She’s no harm. Just a friend.’
‘D-does she know? A … about … P-Pandora?’
‘Yes.’
Adam studied them both for another few seconds before finally his face pulled back into the darkness and with a creak of worn hinges the door swung slowly open, inviting them in.
CHAPTER 10
1994, Norwich
It was too dark to see anything, but the room she stepped into smelled musty. A room, she guessed, that was probably littered with dirty clothes and underwear lying in crumpled piles. ‘Can we have a light on in here?’ she asked.
‘Y-yes … sure.’ A moment later a bedside lamp snicked on.
The room was as small and as messy as she’d expected. But the walls
… the walls caught her breath. She’d done a couple of terms of college before dropping out and getting a programming job. She’d had a room like this once and covered its walls with posters of sci-fi movies she loved like Aliens, Predator, Serenity, computer games, bands and stuff.
But this — this was plain weird.
All four walls seemed to be covered with sheets of paper filled by the handwritten scrawl of strange-looking hieroglyphics.
‘So you’re pretty keen on — what? Egyptian stuff, then?’ she said, breaking the silence.
‘Uh … oh … yeah. No, it’s not hieroglyphics. I’m into cryptanalysis.’ He turned back to her. ‘You — you said you’re theone, right? That’s w-who you are? The one who explains it?’
Now they were through the door, she decided it was going to be best to come clean and confess she really didn’t know much, if anything. ‘Adam, we’re here because of a message you posted on the Net.’
‘Net?’
Maddy shook her head. Of course, back in 1994 they called it the Web. A different language for the technology they took for granted in 2010. ‘You posted on the university’s public forum that you’d decoded a complete sentence of the …’ She forgot the name of the thing.
‘The Voynich Manuscript,’ said Becks, helping her out.
He nodded his head vigorously. ‘Yes … yes. I did! That’s what, that’s exactly what I was instructed to do. I–I did exactly what I was told. I did what — ’
‘Told? Told? By who?’
Adam looked from Maddy to Becks, then back again, completely bewildered. ‘By you? … I was kind of thinking you’re involved?’
‘Not me.’ Maddy shook her head. ‘I never heard of the Voynich Manuscript until last night.’
Adam still appeared completely on edge and wary of them both. ‘Never heard of it?’
‘Nope.’
He licked dry lips. ‘So you can’t be the one. You can’t tell me why my name’s in the — ’
Maddy raised her hands to calm him down. ‘I know about Pandora, Adam. I know that much.’
He regarded her suspiciously.
‘You’re involved … us too, in whatever this means. I’m just trying to make some sense of it. I need to know what it means too. Please,’ she said softly, ‘please … why don’t you tell me about this Voynich document?’
His eyes flickered uncertainly from her to Becks.
‘Please?’ She spread her hands in a disarming way. ‘Then maybe the three of us can figure this out together? Huh?’
‘Yeah, sure.’ He seemed relieved at the suggestion, relieved to have somebody else to share what he knew.
As an afterthought he nodded towards a stool and a beanbag. ‘Want to sit down?’
Maddy smiled. ‘Thanks.’ She unzipped her anorak and laid it on the bed and gestured to Becks to settle down on the beanbag. She was going to look less intimidating that way than standing over them both like a guard dog.
‘So?’ Maddy looked at Adam expectantly.
He sat down on the end of his bed. ‘It’s the ultimate challenge for code-breakers,’ he started. ‘It’s a several-hundred-pages-long document that’s been carbon-dated back to the twelfth century and the entire volume is written in a completely unknown language. I mean the whole thing … is a bunch of characters and glyphs that have never been used in any other written form.’
Adam’s ragged nerves seemed to be settling a little. ‘People have been trying to decipher this thing since the seventeenth century when it was first discovered. It’s been floating around from one archived library to another. Spent a hundred years or so in the papal library in Rome until the Jesuit order desperately needed some cash and flogged off a whole section of their library in 1912. It was a job-lot bought by a trader in old manuscripts called Wilfrid Voynich. He found it buried among crates of old papal paperwork. He had it for a while, and tried selling it on to various collectors. He realized there was something very special about it. He never did manage to sell it, though.’
‘What happened to it?’
‘He died in 1930, left it to his wife. She died in 1960 and left it to a friend who sold it to another dealer, a bloke called Hans Kraus. Like Voynich, he took it around a bunch of collectors hoping to make some money, but no one took it. Eventually Kraus donated it to Yale University in 1969.’ He opened a bottle of flat, weak Pepsi and took a gulp. ‘And that’s when it became public domain. And ever since then code-breakers, linguistic hackers have all been having a go at it.’ He offered the Pepsi to Maddy. She nodded and took a polite sip.
‘It really is the most incredible coded document in history,’ he continued. ‘No one — I mean no one — has managed to extract even a single meaningful sentence from it, not even a single word.’
‘Until you did.’
He nodded. ‘Until I managed to decipher that, uhh … that bit, yeah.’
‘Information,’ said Becks. ‘Adam Lewis is exhibiting behavioural stress indicators. He is concealing truth from you, Maddy.’
Adam looked at her, suspiciously. ‘Are you two some sort of secret-service types?’
Maddy laughed. ‘God, no!’ She cocked an eyebrow. ‘Becks here is pretty paranoid. She’s good at spotting things like this. So … is she right? Is there something you’re not telling me, Adam?’
‘I …’ He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a fisherman’s float. ‘OK … all right, I–I deciphered a little more than the sentences I made public.’
‘How much more?’
He looked up uncertainly at Maddy. ‘How do I know I can trust you?’
Maddy shook her head. ‘I can’t help you make sense of this unless you tell us what you’ve got, Adam.’ She looked at him, then around the room. Clearly the poor young man had been holed up in here for too many days. Presumably too frightened to step outside. ‘You want someone to share this with, don’t you?’
His head nodded vigorously. ‘I … yes. Actually, I’m totally freaked. This is seriously hardcore. I … yes. Jesus, tell me you can make sense of this stuff, tell me!’
‘We’ll do our best, Adam. Just let me know what you decoded.’
He licked his lips again, took a deep breath and steadied his nerves. ‘All right, then … OK, this is how it goes.’ He took another slurp from the two-litre bottle of Pepsi.
‘You must make public the last part of this message, Adam Lewis, and I promise you someone will come and explain everything. When she comes, it is important you tell her this: “Seek Cabot at Kirklees in 1194”. Do not reveal any more of this message to anyone else. The last part now follows. Pandora is the word. The word leads to truth. Fellow traveller, time to come and find it.’
‘That’s all of it?’
He nodded.
Maddy turned to Becks. ‘What do you think?’
‘At this time I can offer no data.’
Adam stood up. ‘I really have to go pee. You’re gonna stick around, right?’
Maddy nodded and watched him tiptoe across the messy floor and open the door to an equally grubby bathroom. She waited until she heard the door lock click before turning to Becks. ‘My God, Becks — this Voynich Manuscript, it’s a drop-point document! It has to be! It’s got to be another team, do you think?’
Becks’s eyes fluttered — processing going on inside. ‘This is possible. It is also possible this is a document that will be used at a later date by your team.’
Maddy shook her head. ‘No, there’s no way I’d use it now. Because it’s … look, now I know it’s been decoded by some teen hacker, I certainly wouldn’t allow Liam to use it to talk through time to us. Not now we know it’s compromised, that it’s been hacked. And I’ll tell Liam when we get back, of course. So, look, whatever happens in the future, we know we can’t use it. Therefore it has to be someone else.’
Becks nodded. ‘A logical argument.’
‘What we’ve got to do is get back home to 2001. Then I’ll send a warning message into the future, to 2056. I’ll send a
warning that the Voynich Manuscript isn’t safe for any other teams to be using.’
Becks nodded approval.
There was the sound of a flushing toilet, and a moment later the lock clacked and Adam emerged. Maddy hastily picked up her anorak from his bed. ‘Adam,’ she said, ‘we have to leave. We’ve got a … got a train to catch.’
His jaw dropped open. ‘But — but … you said …’
‘We can’t stay, I’m really sorry.’
‘But I need someone else. I need someone to explain what this means!’
Maddy shook her head. ‘Sorry.’ She pointed at the door and Becks reached to open it.
‘Please don’t go! I–I’m completely freaked here! Who wrote that message? Why was it me that deciphered it? Why me?’ Adam grabbed at her arm, holding it tight.
‘I don’t know, Adam. But, look, we have to go. When I know what this all means, I’ll come back, OK? I’ll come back and tell you! I promise!’
‘Please! Don’t go!’ His grasp was tightening. Hurting her.
Becks noticed and with one swift movement she grabbed one of his fingers and twisted it savagely back. He screamed with pain and released his grip.
‘Ahhh! Jesus! It’s broken!’
Maddy winced. ‘I’m really sorry, Adam … We’ll be back, I promise.’ She stumbled out of the open door and into the hall, down the noisy wooden steps and past the young man who’d answered the door. ‘Everything OK, girls?’ he asked as they swept through the hallway towards the front door.
‘Fine,’ said Maddy hastily.
He reached out an arm in front of Becks, blocking her way. ‘Sure you don’t wanna stay and share a few beers with me and the lads?’ Lance offered her his most charming smile, the one that never let him down. ‘We could part-eee, sweetheart.’
Her cold grey eyes locked on him — calmly assessing what level of force would be appropriate to remove the obstruction from her path — but Maddy stepped in and casually pushed his arm out of her way. ‘I really wouldn’t recommend doing that — she’s, uh … she can get quite tetchy.’
