The Sword of Moses

by Dominic Selwood

  “You think you’re SS, Otto? An elite political soldier?” Uri spat out the challenge. “You’re a joke.”

  Otto shook his head. “Have it your way, Danny.” He took a step closer, bringing the end of the nozzle up towards Uri’s eye.

  With no warning, Uri became aware of footsteps on the hard concrete floor. They were approaching quickly behind Otto.

  “Alright, that’s enough.” The voice came from the shadows, but Uri knew it from the evening at The Bunker.

  It was the Skipper.

  Uri was suddenly aware of the huge man striding across the room. His face was calm, but it was clear from the tone of his voice he was not happy with the scene he had walked in on.

  “Untie him.” He glared at Otto. “Now.”

  Otto stared at Uri for a few seconds, before slowly shutting off the acetylene screw on the handle and letting the flame die. He kept his eye contact with Uri all the while, defiantly.

  Uri was under no illusions. It was not over as far as Otto was concerned.

  Otto put the hose down, and moved behind Uri, untying the belts and cutting the ropes with a butterfly knife he pulled from his pocket.

  Uri stayed where he was by the column, gently stretching his hands and legs, allowing the blood to start circulating again.

  As the Skipper drew level with Otto, he tossed Uri a set of car keys. “Get lost, Danny,” he ordered. “Keep your phone on. Wait for orders.”

  Uri resisted the urge to look back at Otto. This was a job. He had priorities. He would not let it get personal.

  He nodded at the Skipper, and headed for the door.

  Once outside, he inhaled the night air deeply, trying to calm the storm of endorphins his system was pumping out in elation at having made it out alive.

  It was not the first time someone had tried to kill him. And it would not be the last.

  But it had certainly been the closest.

  As he headed for the car, he realized he should be thanking Otto. That degree of jealousy could only mean Otto felt Uri was a threat to his position in the organization.

  Uri smiled.

  He was obviously making an impact within the group’s inner circle of power. It meant he was getting closer to the centre.

  To Malchus.

  ——————— ◆ ———————

  95

  Chinatown

  Soho

  London WC1

  The United Kingdom

  Ava woke early.

  The waiter had been as good as his word.

  After supper, he had led her and Ferguson through a series of poorly lit back alleys in the heart of Chinatown, before finally arriving at the rear of a shop. It was long past closing time, and the tatty metal shutters had been pulled down so Ava could not tell what it sold.

  A middle-aged woman had answered the security door, ushering them wordlessly into a room in which four men were smoking and playing mah-jong with small bone tiles. The woman had pulled aside a black silk curtain to reveal a concealed door and staircase leading up to a hallway, bedroom, and bathroom.

  The waiter accompanied them into the bedroom. A threadbare golden dragon strode across a faded watery red silk cloth pinned to the wall, and a stubby grey plastic Buddha water fountain bubbled on top of a pile of video recorder boxes. There were two mattresses with blankets on the floor, a metal table with an old laptop on it, and two chairs. Otherwise the room was bare.

  The waiter had given Ferguson a set of keys. “Nobody will bother you,” he had reassured them.

  And he had been right.

  She and Ferguson had collapsed onto the mattresses almost immediately, and fallen asleep exhausted.

  Awake now, she looked at her watch. It was 5:30 a.m. Ferguson was still sleeping on the mattress on the other side of the room.

  She had slept fitfully, woken repeatedly by a recurring dream of DeVere’s lifeless eyes.

  As she had lain awake in the dark, her mind kept wandering back to Malchus’s enigmatic letter.

  The text clearly divided into three sections. There was the phrase ‘JC 69’ in red at the top. Then the three green lines of message. Finally, the ending in Latin: ‘Brother, I will endure forever’.

  She had been going over and over the possibilities of what it could all mean.

  The ‘JC 69’ was almost certainly separate from the message itself. The fact that it was in a different colour from the rest of the text had to be significant.

  Was it personalizing the message for Drewitt, she wondered? His codename? A greeting of some sort? But she quickly ruled the idea out. Malchus had specifically addressed the envelope to Drewitt, so there was no need to repeat his name again in the first line of the message.

  The only plausible explanation she could think of for the different colour was that it was a line of plaintext, or en clair, as her former colleagues at GCHQ called it. That meant it was not enciphered text, but an important piece of information in plain English giving instructions, like how to set the wheels on the decoding machine, or which cipher key to use.

  If it was an en clair instruction, then it was vital. It was the key to the whole message—a puzzle within a puzzle that would unlock the rest.

  As Ava lay on the mattress staring at the ceiling, she tried to think it through.

  ‘JC’ could be almost anything. And the ‘69’ was equally enigmatic—it could refer to a year, an age, a distance, a grid reference, the astrological symbol for Cancer, or almost anything else.

  Cycling through the possibilities in her head, trying to narrow them down, she found it was instead having the opposite effect—generating an endless variety of additional avenues.

  As she wrestled with the baffling phrase, the early morning light began to seep through the blinds.

  Unable to sleep, she pushed aside the blanket and got up.

  Padding quietly through to the bathroom, she found two travel toothbrush kits from an international hotel chain, and an old blue rubber shower hose attachment. Pushing its cups over the taps, she climbed into the bathtub and sprayed herself with the water. It was not exactly hot and relaxing—but the sudden chill did the job of fully waking her up.

  By the time she was dressed and had made a cup of tea from the kettle in the corridor, she felt clear and ready to start properly.

  She sat down at the small silver laptop, and opened up the letter from Malchus and the EVA printout from Socrates.

  She started with the enigmatic first section—‘JC 69’.

  Although the most famous ‘JC’ was Jesus Christ, it seemed a long shot. Jesus had lived from around 4 BC to AD 30—so the ‘69’ could not be a reference to his age or any calendar year during his lifetime.

  As she considered the options, she heard Ferguson stirring behind her. “Hard at it?” he asked, running a hand through his hair and climbing off the mattress. “Have you made any progress?”

  She shook her head. “I’m wondering if ‘JC 69’ is a line of en clair, pointing Drewitt to a particular key. The most obvious ‘JC’ is Jesus Christ, but that seems pretty unlikely, given Malchus’s interests.”

  Ferguson headed through into the bathroom, and in no time she could hear the sound of the shower.

  Turning back to ‘JC 69’ and Jesus, it also seemed unlikely to be any kind of date associated with his followers, as the modern Christian calendar of BC and AD was unknown in Jesus’ day. The Roman military who occupied his country with an iron fist based their calendar on the regnal year of the current Caesar, none of whom ever survived as long as sixty-nine years. The Jewish calendar of Jesus’ day was no use either, as it was not remotely standardized.

  The more she considered it, the more a solution based around Jesus seemed fundamentally implausible. Malchus was definitely not a Christian, and it was far-fetched that he would use anything to do with the life of Jesus as a key for his message.

  “I was wondering, what about The Jewish Chronicle?” Ferguson suggested, re-entering the room, dressed and ready.
“It’s widely available, and Malchus clearly has an interest in certain aspects of Jewish history.”

  “Let’s give it a go,” Ava nodded. “It has acres of text that change every day. It would be a perfect key.”

  Flicking on the laptop, she navigated to The Jewish Chronicle’s home page. “Look,” she pointed to the screen. “It’s been published every Friday for around a hundred and seventy years. That means the sixty-ninth edition came out sometime in the early 1840s.”

  Ferguson sat down beside her, peering intently at the screen. “So there is a ‘69’ edition they could have used?” The excitement was mounting in his voice.

  Ava hunted around the website until she found the section with the past editions.

  “Damn!” she muttered under her breath, leaning back in her chair, pointing to the relevant part of the screen. “Access to old editions is not freely available. You have to buy it.”

  “And Malchus and Drewitt would not want to leave payment trails,” Ferguson concluded flatly.

  He looked at the EVA printout intensely, tapping on the table. “What about Julius Caesar?” he suggested. “He was alive in 69 BC wasn’t he?”

  Ava could feel a smile breaking out on her face.

  That was much more like it.

  “Now he’s someone Malchus may well have chosen,” she agreed, opening up a fresh browser window. “A brutal and ruthless dictator—probably something of a role model for him.”

  Ava navigated to an image of Caesar to help her think. It was the only known bust of him dating from his lifetime, and she had been struck by it ever since she had seen the original in Turin.

  He seemed strangely ordinary-looking for the most successful military conqueror of his time—as well as writer, dictator, philanderer, pagan priest, and finally god. She suspected she would not have looked twice if he had passed her in the street. Unlike Malchus—with his hairless head and soulless dead green eyes.

  She scrolled through Caesar’s list of writings, hoping one would catch her eye—something that might appeal to Malchus.

  But despite Caesar’s fame as an author, she was surprised to find that the list of his writings was unexpectedly short—mainly accounts of his wars.

  Just as she was about to rule him out, she felt a flutter of excitement as she saw the last entry on the page. She rested the cursor on a single line. “It says that Caesar’s aunt Julia died in 69 BC, and he gave a famous speech at her funeral.”

  Was that it?

  Typing quickly, she searched for the actual text of the speech.

  Maybe all she would have to do was write out the first twenty-six letters of the text, omitting repeats, until she had all the letters of the alphabet in the order they appeared in the text. To make allowances for the shorter Latin alphabet, she would use the same letters for I and J and also for U, V, and W, but that would not be a problem. Then she would map the first to A, the second to B, the third to C, and so on. The result would be a perfect new alphabet based uniquely on the text of Caesar’s speech.

  It was basic cryptography. Virtually uncrackable without the key.

  But clicking open the Latin text of Caesar’s oration at Julia’s funeral, she felt an instant jolt of disappointment. “It’s only a couple of lines long. No more than sixty words.” She scrolled a little further. “And look, this text wasn’t even written by Caesar. It was reported by a Roman historian born over a hundred years after Caesar’s death.

  She sat back with a sigh.

  Another dead end.

  She took another mouthful of the hot tea, and walked over to the window. Opening two slats of the blinds with her fingers, she peered out.

  The view from the back of the building looked out over the varied rooftops of Chinatown. It was indistinguishable from anywhere else in central London—just a jumble of air-conditioning units, extractor fans, and chimneys.

  She could not see the street, so had no idea if anyone was there who might have followed them the night before.

  If anyone was waiting, she would find out soon enough.

  She sat back down at the table—for now, her only priority was to get to the bottom of Malchus’s letter.

  She wondered if perhaps she was approaching it wrong.

  She retraced her steps. Malchus’s original message in the Voynich alphabet had been a cipher—the substitution of one letter of the English alphabet for a corresponding one in the Voynich alphabet.

  Looking at the text Socrates had produced from the European Voynich Alphabet, she was willing to bet the jumbled English was also a cipher. It would be the most obvious choice.

  Ciphers were more sophisticated and flexible than codes, as they did not require long books of precise pre-agreed code phrases with different meanings. Ciphers were much more flexible. Any message could be simply enciphered and sent, so long as the reader knew which key was being used.

  She stared down at the page.

  So which cipher was Malchus using?

  She was sure the answer lay in the en clair line at the beginning. It would hold the answer to which key he had chosen.

  She gazed at it for the hundredth time.

  Ferguson was staring at the floor. “Caesar was a great general though, wasn’t he, with armies all over the Mediterranean?” He looked up at her. “So how did he send messages to his troops?”

  “Let’s have a look,” Ava nodded, sitting down and pulling up a browser page before typing in a query.

  As the answers filled the screen, she could feel her pulse start racing.

  “My God!” she gasped.

  “What is it?” Ferguson asked, craning to see the list of search results that had appeared.

  “That’s it!” she turned to him excitedly, and then pointed back at the screen. “Look. The Caesar Cipher. It says he sent hundreds of confidential military messages to his troops all over France, Spain, and North Africa. Apparently he ensured their security by using the Caesar Cipher, a form of encryption he invented, which was named after him along with the month of July, the Julian calendar, and Caesarian births.

  “Well how does it work?” Ferguson urged her, leaning forward in his chair intently.

  “It shifts the letters of the alphabet a fixed number of places,” Ava explained, reading off the screen. “A one-shift Caesar Cipher turns ‘ABC’ into ‘BCD’. A two-shift Caesar Cipher turns ‘ABC’ into ‘CDE’, and so on.”

  “Simple but effective,” Ferguson nodded. “The cipher text will be completely meaningless to anyone who doesn’t know how it was created.”

  Ava was typing excitedly. They were onto something. She was sure of it.

  This had to be the answer! It would appeal to Malchus on every level.

  She opened a new spreadsheet on the laptop and wrote out the alphabet sequentially five times in bold capitals along the top row—one character per cell. When it was done, she locked them in as her reference line.

  Underneath it, she typed in the alphabet again, then shifted it sixty-nine places to the right.

  “What’s the first line of the EVA printout?” she asked Ferguson, getting ready to enter it into the spreadsheet.

  “V Z R U G,” Ferguson read off, as she typed it in.

  She looked at the result, first using the original as the base, then the shifted text.

  To her disappointment, both results were nonsense.

  She repeated the exercise, but this time shifting the text sixty-nine places to the left.

  Still nonsense.

  Next she tried shifting the alphabet six places, then a further nine, working both left and right.

  The results were still gibberish.

  Ava could feel the frustration building. “This has to be right,” she muttered, staring at the two rows of alphabet on her screen. She thought with a smile that she needed whatever computer Cordingly had been envisaging when he suggested governments had machines that could crack any enciphered text.

  But she did not have one, so was going to have to do it the old-fa
shioned way—by trial and error.

  She hunched over the computer and tried to think of other permutations—six times nine was fifty-four. She tried a shift of fifty-four from the beginning of the alphabet. Then from the other end.

  The results were all still meaningless.

  “What other letter shift could it be?” she asked Ferguson, looking up in frustration. “It has to be a Caesar Cipher. But what are they using as a key? And why ‘JC 69’?”

  Ferguson stood up and walked over the window. “Well, we’re definitely making progress. I’m just grateful it’s not still in Voynich.”

  Ava froze.

  “What?” he asked. “What did I say?”

  She could feel a flush of excitement as the significance of his throwaway remark sank in.

  Could it be?

  She sprang up, and reached for the pile of books Cordingly had lent her.

  Was it really that simple?

  “Why would they use another text,” she asked breathlessly, “when they already had Voynich, open right in front of them!” She could feel her excitement mounting. “It makes perfect sense.”

  Dropping the large facsimile book onto the table, she turned to the first page and found the sixth line, then the ninth letter along. Bringing up the EVA alphabet, she read it off.

  It was a ‘Y’. The twenty-fifth letter of the alphabet.

  She cleared the spreadsheet of all her work so far, leaving only the reference alphabet in bold across the top. Under it, she wrote out another alphabet, this time with a twenty-four-shift, so the ‘A’ of the second row lined up with the ‘Y’ in the original alphabet.

  Reading them off and writing them down, she looked at the result, feeling a wave of disappointment.

  It was another senseless jumble of letters.

  Frustrated, she turned to the sixth page, and ran her finger down to the first letter of the ninth line.

  It translated as a ‘D’.

  Quickly deleting the previous alphabet, she wrote out another one—this time with a three-shift, mapping the ‘A’ in her reference line to the ‘D’ in her code line.