by James Becker
Both drivers set their Range Rover cruise controls to hold them at exactly seventy-three miles an hour, because they couldn’t afford to get stopped by the police for something as mundane as speeding. One reason was that they were in a hurry. The clock was ticking and they didn’t want to be delayed.
The second reason was just as practical. After they’d cleared the customs and immigration facilities at the airport, one of the flight deck crew had returned to the Cessna, ostensibly to check on how much fuel they would need to buy for the return journey. When he’d rejoined his passengers outside the ECA building, he handed over half a dozen small but quite heavy black plastic cases that he’d recovered from a hidden compartment in the aircraft’s cabin and then concealed in his bulky flight case.
The contents of these were now tucked away in the jacket pockets of the men sitting in the two Range Rovers, but would result in their immediate arrest if any British police officer knew what they were carrying. Of course, the organization that employed them would be able to secure their release without too much difficulty, but the operation would require negotiation with the British authorities—something that their masters in Italy would most especially want to avoid—and take a considerable amount of time.
And time was the one thing they all knew they were short of.
14
Dartmouth, Devon
The restaurant was small, only accommodating about a dozen tables, and four of those were positioned by the long windows that overlooked the river Dart. They managed to secure the last of these, at the far end of the room, and for a few minutes after the waiter had led them to the table, they both sat in a companionable silence looking out at the water.
Through the open windows, they could hear the melodic tinkling of halyards on metal masts, and on the opposite side of the river Mallory could see a large number of sailing yachts of various sizes moored in lines, with the lights of cottages and streets on the opposite side of the river just beginning to be switched on. It was a scene that was quintessentially English, but with just a hint of a Mediterranean playground about it.
“It is beautiful,” Robin said, somewhat wistfully. “I never get tired of sitting and looking out at the river. It’s never the same from one day to the next. There’s always something going on, something to watch.”
“I presume you’re a regular here?” Mallory asked.
Robin nodded. “I probably come here at least twice a month, usually as my treat to myself for getting through another week without going bankrupt. Sometimes I bring Betty along as well, just to keep her sweet. It’s not desperately expensive, the food is pretty good, and we all have to eat somewhere.”
“Look,” Mallory began, “I know we agreed you’d cover my expenses and my time, but let me pay for this meal. I’ve had quite an entertaining day so far, and I’d be quite happy to pick up the bill.”
Robin scowled at him. “I noticed you only said that after I told you this wasn’t an expensive restaurant.” Then she smiled, her face lighting up. “No, a deal is a deal. Dinner is on me.”
Mallory shrugged, then looked out the window again and pointed across the river, to the opposite bank. “I’ve never been here before. Is that another bit of Dartmouth over there on the other side?”
Robin shook her head. “No, that’s Kingswear. It’s actually separate, and there’s a ferry you can use to get across there. And you’ll notice that most of the yachts are on trots on that side of the river, the east. That’s because the main navigable channel of the Dart is closer to the west bank in this area.”
“‘Trots’?” Mallory asked.
“Moorings. There’s so much nautical stuff about in Dartmouth that even a confirmed landlubber who’s never so much as sat in a rowing boat—someone rather like me, in fact—still absorbs some of the local expressions, possibly by some form of osmosis. Don’t forget that this town’s main claim to fame, apart from Agatha Christie’s house, which is some way upriver, is the Royal Navy College, HMS Britannia, a kind of concrete battleship. If you came in on the main road, you must have seen it. A massive building on the left-hand side as you start driving down the hill into the town, and pretty impressive, not to mention being stuffed full of extremely fit young men.”
“Could that possibly have had anything to do with you setting up shop here in the town?” Mallory asked innocently.
“Oddly enough, no. I prefer my men to be a bit more mature, and to have slightly wider interests than the ability to discuss the tactics employed at the Battle of Matapan or Trafalgar. Most of the young officers in training that I’ve met here have been fairly single-mindedly set on making it to the admiralty, and the idea of becoming Mrs. Commander Blogs, just a kind of decorative attachment worn on the left sleeve of a naval officer’s uniform, has never appealed to me. I want to do more with my life than play second fiddle to any man, or any woman, for that matter.”
Mallory looked at her for a long moment.
“You’re not—” he began.
“If you were going to say ‘gay,’ the answer is no. I enjoy the company of women, but only as long as they’ve got their clothes on.”
“And men?”
“That depends on the man, obviously. I notice, by the way,” Robin added with a smile, “that we haven’t even ordered yet, and already the level of conversation has descended to navel level and below, and that’s navel with an e, nothing to do with the boys up the road wearing dark blue.”
“I could say that you started it, banging on about the college,” Mallory said. “But you’re right. Let’s order something, and then try and decide what we should do about that piece of parchment.”
A waiter stepped over to the table, pad and pen poised, and a couple of minutes later he scurried off back toward the kitchen.
Over a couple of steaks—served with salad for Robin and french fries for Mallory—and a bottle of half-decent red, they began exploring possible ways that they could decipher the remainder of the encrypted Latin text.
“I wonder if we need to start looking at numerology,” Mallory said. “The shift in the Atbash cipher took place every nine words—except for those two runs of eighteen words, but of course eighteen is nine multiplied by two—so I think it’s a reasonable assumption that the number nine is important for whoever encrypted this. And of course we also have other numbers, the value of each shift in the cipher. In fact, each shift could generate two numbers, because a left shift of ten, say, is the same as a right shift of sixteen in an alphabet of twenty-six letters. Was the Latin alphabet twenty-six letters, by the way?”
Robin shook her head. “That question isn’t easy to answer because it depends upon what period you’re talking about. The archaic Latin alphabet, which was in use after the seventh century BC, contained twenty-six letters, but five of those letters came from the ancient Greek alphabet, and the order was slightly different as well. For example, the letter Z came between F and H. Then the classical Latin alphabet appeared in the first century BC, but that only contained twenty-three letters, missing today’s J, U, and W, so Julius Caesar’s name would actually have been spelt IVLIVS.”
She paused and took a sip of wine. “But by the Middle Ages, the present Latin alphabet had been pretty much established, including the letter W, which of course isn’t a double U at all but actually a double V. That’s one reason why I think the parchment dates from that period in history, because you’ve been using the full twenty-six letters in your decryption, and it’s been working. And the other two indicators of date are the interpunct and what was known as scriptio continua. Or, to be exact, the absence of both of them.”
“I presume you’re going to tell me what the hell you’re talking about. I spend my life working with computers, and Latin is pretty much all Greek to me, if you see what I mean.”
Robin smiled at him.
“That’s the point,” she said. “We’re different but comp
lementary. I know all about the old stuff and you know something about the new stuff.”
Mallory raised an eyebrow at that remark and the emphasis she’d used, but Robin bashed on without a pause.
“Right, an interpunct was a punctuation mark used to indicate where one word ended and the next word began. It was usually a dot, but sometimes a small triangular shape, and most often it was vertically centered on the line of text, not at the bottom of the letters, which is where a comma or a full stop is placed today. It’s still used in some languages like Catalan to indicate where there are two syllables separated by a dot and where the sense would alter considerably if it was omitted. One common example is cella. Without the dot, which is known in Catalan as a punt volat or ‘flown dot,’ the word means an ‘eyebrow.’ Put the dot between the two letter L’s and it means ‘cell,’ and is pronounced differently.
“Anyway, the interpunct was used in Latin for a while, but was gradually replaced by scriptio continua, continuous script, where there were no breaks at all between the words. That sounds as if it was probably a retrograde step, but you have to appreciate that at this time written text was handled in a different way than it is today. Speakers would read the text a number of times in order to memorize it, and so the script, which was usually written on a scroll, was used more like a prompt sheet or an aide-mémoire that the speaker would glance at occasionally just to refresh his memory.”
“I didn’t see any dots on the parchment,” Mallory pointed out, “and most of the words were definitely separated by spaces. Small spaces, I grant you, but they were there.”
“Exactly. By about one thousand AD it was the norm for words to be separated by spaces, just as they are today, and certainly this was well established by the medieval period. So, as I said before, that’s why I’m fairly certain that the text on the parchment dates from no earlier than the Middle Ages. Anyway, you said something about numbers?”
“Oh yes,” Mallory replied, placing his knife and fork on his now-empty plate and leaning back in his seat. “Whoever encrypted that text is clearly leaving us clues of some sort. Otherwise there’d be no point in changing the shifts in the Atbash cipher the way he has. He could simply have encrypted the whole thing using a single setting. So the number nine is important, and possibly the numbers employed in each shift as well. Or, I suppose, perhaps it’s not the numbers but the letters. I mean the letter that corresponds to the first letter of the alphabet in the shifted cipher.”
Robin finished her main course a few moments later.
“But you do think you can work it out?” she asked.
“I’ll do my best. There are lots of options, but there are definitely enough clues, as far as I can tell, so it’s really a matter of trying a number of different code words that are based somehow upon either the numbers or the letters, because we’ve tried all the possible Atbash shifts. Unless there really was a different kind of encryption method being used, then the obvious solution has to be that the author carried on using the Atbash cipher but with something more subtle than the reversed alphabet or a position shift. That more or less has to mean another code word, and working out what it is could take a while.”
He paused for a moment, thinking over what he’d just said, then nodded.
“What?” Robin asked.
“There are really only two possible scenarios here,” Mallory replied. “Either the author of the manuscript wanted the text to be readable only to somebody who possessed a special code word, or he didn’t. In other words, did the manuscript have to be decoded using an entirely separate secret code word that would only be known to another member of whatever group or society was involved, or was it internally consistent? Is the clue to the second code word somehow incorporated within the text itself?”
“Well, which?”
“I don’t know, obviously, but my guess is that it is internally consistent. If a separate code word was needed to decipher the text, why was the first part encrypted just using different shifted Atbash ciphers? Why not encrypt the whole thing using that secret code word? No, I think the clue must be hidden somewhere in the text itself.”
They left the restaurant about a quarter of an hour later, both of them having resisted the calorie-laden delights of the dessert menu and settled instead just for coffee. True to her word, Robin paid the bill for both of them without flinching noticeably when she saw the total, and they walked slowly through the darkening streets back toward her apartment.
“It’s getting late,” Mallory said, glancing at his watch. “I really ought to go and find a hotel somewhere. Deciphering this is going to take longer than I had expected.”
“You don’t have to worry. I’ve got a couple of friends who run a little B and B just down the street from the shop. It’s cheap and cheerful, very clean, they do a decent breakfast, and they do have at least one vacancy tonight—I called them this morning, just in case you had to stay over. I’ll ring them when we get back to the apartment.”
Robin led the way down the alley that led to the back of her shop, and then started up the stairs.
She was only on the third step when a black-clad figure materialized from the shadows beside Mallory and grabbed him firmly by the right arm.
“You are Robin Jessop?” he asked in heavily accented English.
15
Dartmouth, Devon
Mallory hesitated for the barest fraction of a second. Who the man was he had not the slightest idea, but the stranger exuded an almost palpable air of menace. And because he had approached Mallory, he was clearly not acquainted with Robin herself and hadn’t realized that name could be used by a woman, so what he wasn’t going to do was place her in the firing line.
“Yes, I’m Robin Jessop,” Mallory said, before Robin could reply. “Who are you, and what do you want?”
The man in black didn’t reply, just nodded almost imperceptibly and with a casual grace that belied his size, he reached into his jacket pocket with his other hand and pulled out a small automatic pistol, which he pointed at Mallory.
“You have something we want,” he said, and gestured for Mallory to climb up the staircase in front of him.
Mallory was no coward, but he was unarmed and facing not only one man carrying a pistol but two armed men, he realized a moment later, as he took a couple of steps toward the staircase. Another man, with the same heavy build as the first stranger and dressed in a similar kind of dark suit, had just stepped into view, and he, too, was holding a pistol.
And then Mallory discovered that the odds were stacked even higher against them. The second man half turned away and raised his left arm. As he did so, the headlights on a large SUV—it looked to Mallory like a Range Rover or maybe a Toyota Land Cruiser—parked a few dozen yards up the street flashed once briefly in acknowledgment. He and Robin were facing a group of at least three men, and he knew that two of them—and quite probably all three of them—were armed.
Robin looked down at him, a shocked expression on her face, and opened her mouth as if to speak, but Mallory shook his head decisively and she turned away and continued climbing up the staircase to her apartment.
Mallory was thinking furiously, running different scenarios through his mind, but the problem with all of them was the fact that he was only one man, and facing two other men both of whom were bigger than him, plus another one in the SUV. Even if the two he could see hadn’t been carrying pistols, he knew perfectly well that if it came to a straight fight he would probably lose.
He glanced back, wondering if by some chance he could swivel on the spiral staircase and kick out to knock out the man behind him, but it was immediately apparent that this wouldn’t work because the stranger was keeping well back, and certainly out of kicking distance. He was still aiming the gun directly at Mallory’s back, and would be able to fire it at the first sign of any resistance. Something told Mallory these were not the kind of people to mak
e idle threats: the mere fact that they’d both produced firearms suggested they would be quite prepared to use them.
Whatever plan he managed to come up with—assuming he thought of anything, of course—Mallory knew it would have to wait until they were in the apartment, where the small and cramped rooms might just possibly provide him with an opportunity to disarm at least one of the strangers. Beyond that strategy, which was vague in the extreme, he really had no idea what he could do.
“Open the door,” the first man demanded when the three of them reached the metal landing outside Robin’s apartment. The other man was following them and was already halfway up the spiral staircase.
Robin glanced at Mallory, but both of them knew they had absolutely no option but to obey. She slid the key into the lock, turned it, and pushed the door open.
“Now wait.”
The man gestured with his pistol, forcing Robin and Mallory to stand to one side while the second man walked into the apartment, his weapon held out in front of him. It wasn’t a big flat, and in less than two minutes the man returned to the door, where he exchanged a couple of sentences in high-speed Italian with his companion.
“You get inside now.”
Again Robin and Mallory had no option but to obey, and in a few seconds all four of them were standing around the desk in Robin’s tiny office.
“Who are you and what do you want?” Mallory demanded again, and this time the man replied.
“You have relic, codex or perhaps scroll, that is property of my employer,” he said, staring at Mallory, his English not fluent but understandable and heavily accented.
Mallory had never been a believer in coincidence, and he was already quite certain that he knew exactly which item in Robin’s stock of ancient volumes the man was after. From what he’d seen when they walked through the shop downstairs, everything she had for sale was a book of some sort, not a codex or scroll. The man’s next words confirmed it.
