by James Becker
The three men fanned out, scanning the people in the arcade and then in the adjoining streets, but saw nobody who matched even the vague and uncertain descriptions they were working with. Ten minutes later, they reassembled at the opposite end of the arcade.
“This was just a diversion,” Toscanelli said quietly in Italian, after a minute or so. “Did you notice anything about this place?”
“Something unusual, you mean?” Mario asked.
“No, not unusual at all. Just some things that should tell you why we’re looking in the wrong place.”
He glanced at his two companions, but neither of them spoke.
“Right,” Toscanelli continued, “Jessop has already proved he’s not stupid, as well as being a dangerous man. He would know that if he made a call to his shop it would be traced, so the one thing he wouldn’t do was make the call from close to where he’s staying. I don’t know if he picked this part of the city deliberately, or if he was just lucky, but four things struck me about this area. First, it’s a shopping district, which means there are no hotels anywhere near here. Second, the arcade links two streets, which greatly increases the area anyone would have to search. Third and fourth, there’s a bus route running along one street and there’s a taxi rank on this street. I think Jessop probably came here on a bus, because he wouldn’t be in any hurry, made the call, and then took a cab back to wherever he was staying, to get clear of the area as quickly as he could.”
“So you mean we’re wasting our time looking?” Dante asked.
“Here, yes, but at least we know that Jessop is still here in Exeter. And if my guess is right and he did travel here by bus, that will give us a route to search along. We’ll pick up some bus timetables and backtrack each route. Somewhere along one of them there’ll be a hotel with a parking lot that’s invisible from the road.”
“There might be several hotels like that,” Mario said.
Toscanelli nodded. “Yes, and if there are, we’ll check them all. Jessop is still here, and we’re going to find him.”
31
Exeter, Devon
Mallory plugged in his computer and switched it on. He used the dongle to establish a presence on the Virtual Private Network, and this time chose France as his apparent location.
“That should keep the bad guys busy,” he said. “The first place they’ll have to start looking for us is somewhere down to the south of Toulouse.”
He explained to Robin how the device worked, and emphasized that it meant they were completely safe from any normal level of electronic interception. Then he started investigating all things runic, which turned out to be a far bigger subject than either he or Robin had expected.
The earliest runes had been used in the second century AD, and were almost certainly derived from the ancient Old Italic alphabets that were used on the Italian peninsula and that were employed to provide written versions of a number of different languages. These alphabets themselves had in turn originated from the Euboean alphabet, which had been used in Greek colonies in the southern parts of Italy. These archaic alphabets were first written from right to left, because that was the natural way that a right-handed mason carving an inscription would work, but when the use of ink became common, the direction shifted to left to right, again because most people were right-handed, and writing in that direction did not smudge the ink.
By the time the first runic alphabets emerged, left to right was the accepted direction for most writing, though some of the very earliest examples ran in the opposite direction, possibly owing to the influence of other alphabets that were written that way, such as the Northern Etruscan. The first runic alphabet was commonly known as Elder Futhark, the latter name representing the phonemes of the names of the first six runes, and as soon as Mallory looked at it he knew that the symbol he was investigating bore no resemblance whatsoever to most of the letters.
“These runes are all quite simple shapes,” he said to Robin, who was sitting beside and slightly behind him. He pointed at the images on the screen. “None of these are anything like as complex as this symbol.”
“More to the point,” Robin replied, “not one of those runes contains any additional strokes like those on the symbol. I mean, none of them have a horizontal line at either the top or bottom of the vertical stroke, and the only one with a prominent diagonal line is the L rune, normally spoken as laguz, and which means water or a lake. The diagonal is on the correct side, but it’s at the top, not the bottom, of the vertical line. What I was wondering was whether we were looking at a kind of complex or combined rune, where several letters were displayed together, on the same vertical line, but that isn’t the case with this version of the alphabet.”
“Yes,” Mallory said, “but this Elder Futhark was only in use until about the eighth century, according to this article, so let’s take a look at the alphabets that followed it. The next in terms of timescale was the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc.”
He clicked on a link and brought up a diagram showing all the letters of the revised runic alphabet.
“This looks pretty much the same to me,” Robin said, “though there are a few more letters employed. The Elder Futhark had twenty-four runes, but the Anglo-Saxon version expanded over the years until it contained thirty-three different runes. But none of the new ones had the characteristics we’re looking for. Try the Younger Futhark.”
Mallory obediently selected another link, and they both stared intently at the screen, studying the new information.
“Several of these are more complex shapes,” Mallory said, “especially the medieval versions of the runes—you can see that they’ve added dots to some of the letters—but I still don’t see any shapes that resemble this symbol. I think we’re probably on the wrong track.”
“That’s what I thought right from the start,” Robin said, “but it was a useful exercise to do, if only because we’ve now eliminated the various runic alphabets as a possible source for the symbol. The question now is where we look next.”
Mallory shook his head. “I’ll just do a few general searches on the Web and see if I can find any references to runelike symbology. That might work, if anything like this has appeared before.”
A little over an hour later, Mallory sat back and stretched his arms out above his head, looking across at Robin, who was lying sprawled across the bed.
“Nothing?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Mallory confirmed. “Either that symbol is so unusual that nobody has ever seen it before, or perhaps we were wrong and it really is just a kind of doodle, a drawing that we can’t decipher simply because it doesn’t actually have any meaning. But to me it still looks too deliberate, too positive in the way it’s been created, for that to make sense.”
He glanced at his watch. “Look, let’s order a pot of tea or coffee or something, and see if we can think of somewhere else we can search. Not everything’s on the Internet, you know: it just seems as if it is. Maybe we should be looking in libraries, places like that.”
Robin smiled at him, picked up the phone, and placed the order with room service.
“You must be getting desperate if you’re thinking about actually reading a book,” she said. “I’d more or less got the impression that you lived your life online.”
“I have been known to read the odd book,” Mallory replied, slightly defensively, “but you’re right. I do sometimes feel a bit like that guy in The Matrix, living inside a computer program and not having much contact with reality.”
When the coffee arrived, he turned his attention back to his Web browser. “I think I covered pretty much all the possible search options relating to runic inscriptions and symbols of that type. Any ideas where we could start looking next?”
Robin thought for a few moments, then nodded.
“Maybe you could try a bit of lateral thinking,” she suggested. “Instead of trying to find some way of deciphe
ring that symbol, how about approaching the problem from the other end, as it were?”
“And by that you mean?”
“Try searching for subjects that are a bit less specific. Use terms like ‘medieval cryptology’ or ‘early cipher systems,’ that kind of thing, and see if that produces any useful information. I just think that because we don’t actually know what encryption system—that’s assuming that there was an encryption system, of course—was used to create the object, trying to decode it is probably going to be impossible. But if you just look at old cipher systems in general, that might give you a clue as to where you should be looking.”
Mallory shrugged.
“You might be right,” he said, “and it’s certainly worth a try.”
To his surprise, although the majority of the sites he looked at dealt with what might be termed conventional cryptography—principally various kinds of letter substitution codes and innovative types of steganography—he actually found the result he was looking for almost immediately.
“I’ve got it,” he said, sounding astonished.
“You have?” Robin was almost equally surprised.
“It’s an obscure medieval number code that was apparently developed by Cistercian monks in the late thirteenth century. It used a single vertical stem, just like a rune, and nine different types of line or shape that could be attached to that stem. Depending on which side of the vertical they were positioned, they had different meanings, and any combination of these shapes could be used to represent numbers from one up to nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine. It’s a simple and really clever system, and according to this Web site, it was used by the monks for a couple of hundred years after it was developed, as an alternative to both the old Roman numerals and the new Hindu-Arabic numbers, which were just starting to be introduced.”
Robin shook his head. “I’ve never heard of it. In fact, I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
“I’m not surprised. Again, if the information on this Web site is to be believed, and I’ve got no reason to doubt it, the system started as a development of a kind of ancient Greek shorthand that only really became generally known about in the nineteenth century when a carving on a stone was discovered at the Acropolis, a carving that described that shorthand. But the number notation system remained obscure right up to the twentieth century, and it was only investigated then because of a fourteenth-century astrolabe that was auctioned at Christie’s in London in 1991. The astrolabe was marked with symbols derived from this numbering system, and that prompted research into their origin and meaning.”
“So the symbol is a number? I’m not sure that helps us very much, but now you’ve got the table of meanings in front of you, you can decode it.”
Mallory nodded and pointed at the symbol. “I already have,” he said. “The horizontal line at the base of the vertical means one thousand; the diagonal pointing up and to the right decodes as three hundred, while the kind of reversed capital letter L on its side at the top of the upright means seven. So the entire number represented by the symbol is 1307, and I really don’t see how that helps us very much. My best guess is that it refers to the year the document was prepared. And I suppose it could also mean that the person or people who authored it were quite possibly Cistercian monks. Other than that, I don’t think we’re that much further forward.”
Robin nodded, appearing deep in thought. “I’m not sure you’re right about it referring to the year the document was written, because my impression was that the date was much later than that, maybe even a century or two later. But that is certainly one possible interpretation.”
Mallory pushed the computer to one side on the table and took another drink of coffee. “Any other ideas, or have we just wasted about half a day working out that the symbol is just an unusual way of writing a date?”
“I don’t know. I mean, the number pretty much has to be referring to a year—you’ve proved that—but I still don’t think it means the year the text was prepared. If the author wanted the date to be included, or if the date itself was important to the message in some way, then I would have expected him to have made a reference to it in the text itself. A kind of ‘In the year of our Lord’ statement, that sort of thing. So in my opinion, for what it’s worth, it looks to me as if that encrypted date is another clue of some sort, and perhaps what we should be looking for is something that happened in 1307, an event that might have meant something to the authors of the text. But I’ve got no idea what that might be, so maybe what we’ll need to do is carry out a kind of quick survey of all significant events that took place that year, and try and relate one of them to the encrypted text.”
Mallory shook his head, light dawning.
“We might not have to do that,” he said.
He reached into his computer case to extract the decryptions they had already done of the first part of the encrypted message. He scanned quickly over the printed plaintext that between them they had decoded and then translated from the Latin, until he found the passage that he had remembered. Mallory turned the paper around on the table so that Robin could see the text, and then pointed at a particular section of it.
“We talked about this before,” he said, “but the significance of it escaped me at the time.”
“It’s still escaping me,” Robin said. “This passage is just a kind of general statement about the importance of worshipping God and leading a life according to strict rules. I don’t see how any of this helps, so what are you talking about?”
Mallory jabbed his finger at the text again.
“Just read that passage aloud, could you?” he asked. “Only that one short section.”
“It says ‘only through the observance of strict rules can the penitent sinner expect to enter the kingdom of heaven.’ It sounds to me like a typical medieval admonition trying to persuade people to follow a particular path.”
Mallory shook his head. “Agatha Christie once wrote a novel where the crux of the plot hinged upon a character not repeating word for word what a dying man had said to her, but upon her interpretation of what he had said. I heard what you said when you read out that passage, but what you read was not exactly what we had translated and what’s written on this piece of paper. Look at it again.”
Robin glanced down at the sheet and shook her head.
“You’re wrong,” she said. “I did read out what it says.”
“No. You said ‘of strict rules,’” Mallory insisted, “but the translation actually reads ‘of strict rule.’ Singular, not plural.”
“Rule, rules. What’s the difference? And you might have written it down wrong.”
“I don’t think I did, so why don’t you take a look at the sheet with the decrypted Latin text on it and just check it?”
Robin pulled the paper toward her and looked at it. Then she nodded.
“You’re right,” she agreed. “The Latin noun is singular, not plural, but I still don’t see what difference that makes.”
“I think I do. If you remember, the number nine seemed significant when I was decoding the text, because almost every ninth word marked a shift in the Atbash cipher. So we have the year 1307, the number nine, and a reference to a ‘strict rule.’ Does any of that ring a bell with you?”
“Not really, no.”
“Well, I’ve got a pretty loud ringing in my ears at the moment, and I’m surprised it didn’t occur to me earlier. A really significant event happened in October 1307, an event that still has some repercussions even today. That’s the date encoded in that numerical notation that was almost certainly developed by the Cistercians, and that religious order is important. Plus, there was one medieval society for which the number nine was important in at least two different ways. And, finally, that same society was famed for its adherence to a particularly strict code of conduct, a ‘strict rule,’ if you like.”
Mallor
y paused and glanced across the table at Robin, who still looked baffled.
“Put all that lot together,” he continued, “and you have three indirect references to perhaps the most mysterious, notorious, and powerful of all the medieval organizations. I think this text has got something to do with the Knights Templar.”
32
Exeter, Devon
Half of the secret of success in life lies in looking the part, and this is especially true when it’s a case of gaining unauthorized access. Toscanelli knew that wearing the right clothes and carrying the correct accessories enormously reduced the chances of anyone stopping him and asking any questions.
Not that he was trying to get anywhere to which access was restricted. He was simply checking hotels, but as far as possible he wanted to be effectively invisible while he did so. Wearing his dark suit and carrying his briefcase, he looked exactly like every other businessman walking the streets of Exeter, and he simply strode into each hotel they’d identified as if he had reserved a room there, hurrying past the reception desk with a quick glance at his watch and then making his way to the parking area using the lifts or the stairs. And nobody at all had taken the slightest notice of him, as far as he could tell.
Exeter was big, but it wasn’t a huge city, and they’d only identified about a dozen hotels that had off-street parking that couldn’t be seen from the road. And, in the event, they hadn’t had to check every one of them.
When Toscanelli had stepped out of the lift on the first level of the underground parking lot at the eighth hotel, almost the first vehicle he’d seen was the black Porsche Cayman, parked in a bay near the sidewall. He’d walked over to it and checked the registration number, just to confirm it, but he’d known it was the right car the moment he saw it.
There was a grim smile on his face when he emerged from the front door of the hotel and walked a few yards down the street to where Dante and Mario were waiting in the Ford Focus.
