Newton’s Fire (24 page)

‘Sure,’ laughed Rachel. ‘Because I’m a knock-out in borrowed clothes after a night on the bus.’ But she adopted a more serious look. ‘Would it be better if I waited outside?’

‘God, no. I need you in there. And it’ll be fine, truly. I just want you aware, so that you won’t overreact if he says or does something odd.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Consider me aware. But how did he cope with your documentary? It can’t have been easy for him, having a TV crew around.’

‘It wasn’t like that. He just checked our scripts and helped track down some interesting alchemical experiments for Pelham. This was before the bulk of Newton’s papers were digitized, so he was invaluable. He knows them backwards – he can recite vast sections of Newton’s
Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended.
But for god’s sake don’t mention that to him, or there’s every chance he will.’

‘Must be a riot at dinner parties.’ Her jaw trembled as she fought a yawn. ‘Why’s he so interested in Newton?’

‘I think he sees him as a role model. Because of the Asperger’s.’

Rachel squinted at him. ‘Newton had Asperger’s?’

‘We think maybe. Diagnosis is impossible after three hundred years, but he certainly showed some signs. He pretty much taught himself mathematics from first principles, for one thing. Then he took it far beyond anything anyone had ever done before. You don’t do that without a seriously unusual mind.’

‘So all great mathematicians have Asperger’s by definition, do they?’

‘Of course not. But Asperger’s is a syndrome. You diagnose it by looking for certain attributes and behaviours. One of those can be an extraordinary facility with numbers. Newton had that. So that box gets a tick.’

‘And what’s the next box?’

‘Asperger’s sufferers often have extraordinary visualisation skills. Remember that movie
Rain Man
? How the character played by Dustin Hoffman told at a glance how many toothpicks or whatever got spilled on the floor? According to a Cambridge roommate, Newton could do something similar. He kept a thousand guineas worth of coins in a huge bowl by his window just to see if anyone was stealing from him.’

‘Wow,’ teased Rachel. ‘So he could be a suspicious room-mate. Lock the bastard up.’

‘Okay,’ said Luke. ‘Asperger’s shows itself very early. Infants with it have difficulty bonding with their parents. Newton’s father died before he was born and his mother remarried when he was three years old. But the thing is, even though her new husband had plenty of room in his home, she didn’t take Isaac with her when she moved in.’

‘Maybe her new man didn’t like children.’

‘Then why marry her?’

‘Ever heard of love?’

Luke shook his head. ‘They hadn’t even met when he proposed. He’d just heard good reports.’

Rachel looked startled. ‘You’re kidding me.’

‘They were both recently widowed,’ said Luke. ‘It made good sense. But it certainly wasn’t a marriage of necessity. So why not take Isaac?’

‘What did she do with him?’

‘Left him with her parents. They had a lovely farmhouse in Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, home of the famous apple tree. But he didn’t get on with them either. He had a very strained relationship with his grandmother – and his grandfather actually cut him out of his will. As for the servants and farmhands, they popped corks when he finally left home:
Fit for nothing but the ’Versity
, as one of them put it. He didn’t have many childhood friends, partly because he picked a lot of quarrels and held a pretty good grudge. Same thing at Cambridge. Later on, one of his disciples decided to track down Newton’s contemporaries there, ask them what the great man had been like as an undergraduate. None of them could even remember having met him. It was only in his thirties that he started making any real friends; but then people typically learn to manage their Asperger’s better as they get older, like Jay’s doing. And Newton never became comfortable with intimacy. In fact, he probably died a virgin. Anyway, I’m not saying Newton had Asperger’s; I’m just explaining why Jay looks up to him.’

They’d reached Jay’s street. Luke pointed across the road to a front door painted racing green. ‘That’s him,’ he said. ‘Let’s go wake the bugger up.’

Croke was catching a few minutes shut-eye in the museum office when Morgenstern knocked and came in. ‘Are we through?’ Croke asked him.

Morgenstern shook his head. ‘Still another hour. But I just had a call about your two fugitives. Thought you’d want to know.’

Croke stood up. ‘They’ve found them?’

‘Not exactly.’ He gave a little grimace. ‘We had people watching the coach station. But apparently there are stops on the way out of town too.’

‘For fuck’s sake. Didn’t they think of that?’

‘There wasn’t enough manpower to cover everything. But they did ask the drivers to report any couples they picked up.’

‘And?’

‘The first driver out picked up a woman at one stop, a man at the next. He didn’t make the connection. But apparently they left Victoria coach station together. And their descriptions match Luke and the girl.’

Croke touched a finger to his temple. He wanted to yell at someone, but he couldn’t see how it would help. ‘Where are they now?’

Morgenstern shrugged. ‘They left on foot. They could have gone anywhere. We’ll try to track them through our CCTV network, but that’s a bitch, believe me. We’re more likely to find them when they break cover again, which they’re bound to do, sooner or later. We’ve put taps on their families and friends, and we’re monitoring the major media groups in case they go that route. And we’ll keep a close eye on Twitter and the Internet too.’

‘Okay. Good. Let me know if they surface. Or when we get through to the chamber.’

‘Will do.’ He nodded and withdrew.

Croke rested his head back against the wall, closed his eyes. Morgenstern should be able to stop Luke and Rachel damaging this operation before he left for Israel. But they could certainly still cause future grief, particularly for Walters and his men. And if those three went down, they’d likely take him with them. At some stage, he’d have to make sure that couldn’t happen. But for the moment they were still too useful.

He called Walters now, briefed him on the Victoria coach station sighting. ‘The NCT are out looking for them,’ he told him. ‘But I’d much rather deal with them in-house if we can.’

‘Too right,’ agreed Walters. ‘We’re on our way.’

After the big build-up from Luke, Rachel was a little disappointed by Jay Cowan. She’d expected him to stand out in some way, yet he could scarcely have been more ordinary: slight, neat and generally unobtrusive. He had an oblique way about him, too, never facing either of them directly, or looking them full in the eye. He also held himself unnaturally still, as if someone had once told him to stop fidgeting, and he’d taken the words too much to heart. And while his green shirt and black drainpipe trousers and brown brogues were each perfectly fine in themselves, they looked awful in combination. Not ordinary, then, so much as trying his very best to appear ordinary, and falling strangely short.

‘Luke,’ he said, opening his front door. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘We didn’t wake you, did we?’

‘I was working.’

‘Working?’ asked Rachel, giving him her warmest smile. ‘At this time of day?’

He didn’t look at her so much as over her left shoulder. ‘Yes,’ he said. He turned back to Luke. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked again.

‘We need help, mate.’

‘With what?’

‘Can we come in? If I don’t get a coffee soon, I’m going to keel.’

Jay stood there a moment longer, then nodded and let them in. A short corridor led to a dingy stairwell with worn brown carpeting. They went up to the first floor. Boxes stacked against the wall were covered by a white sheet. ‘What’s all this?’ asked Luke.

‘A project.’ He led them inside his flat and into a large, book-lined room that should have overlooked the street, except that the thick crimson curtains were drawn across the windows, leaving it lit by a table lamp and an array of six computer screens stacked in two rows of three, each of which showed a hand from a different online poker tournament.

‘That’s your work?’ asked Rachel. ‘Poker?’

‘This is the best time,’ he said. ‘People who’ve been playing all night are tired by now. They make more mistakes when they’re tired.’ He began cashing out of the games one by one, switching off the screens.

‘And you can make a living from it?’

‘You wouldn’t believe how bad some of them are. They bet in situations where there’s no possible benefit to betting. Then they do it again.’

‘Maybe they’re trying to prove themselves,’ suggested Luke.

‘Or maybe they just want to go to bed,’ said Rachel.

Jay looked directly at her for the first time. ‘Then why wouldn’t they just go to bed?’

With the screens gone black, the room suddenly felt a little spooky. ‘Yes,’ said Rachel. ‘Good point.’

‘How about that coffee?’ said Luke, setting down Olivia’s laptop. ‘We’ve had one hell of a night.’

‘Of course,’ he said. He led them through to an impeccably neat kitchen, turned on the kettle. ‘What do you need my help with?’

Luke fished his cipher text from Pelham’s pocket. It was badly smudged and crumpled, so Jay found him a fresh pad of paper on which to write it out clean. ‘Rachel and I found this last night,’ said Luke. ‘We think it’s a cipher, perhaps devised by Newton.’

‘A Newton cipher?’ Jay’s eyes opened a little wider. ‘Where did you find it?’

‘I can’t tell you, I’m afraid. I gave someone my word.’

‘You want my help and you won’t tell me?’

‘I’m sorry, Jay. If I gave you my word on something, you wouldn’t want me to break it, would you?’

Jay considered this for a moment, like a boy with a scraped knee wondering whether or not to start bawling. ‘It won’t help me solve the cipher.’

‘You can do it anyway. I’ve been telling Rachel how brilliant you are.’

For a moment, Rachel feared the flattery was too blatant, but Jay only nodded, so she decided to back Luke up. ‘It’s quite true,’ she said. ‘He’s been bragging shamelessly about you.’

Jay’s throat reddened slightly and he squinted at the architrave above the kitchen door. ‘I can’t promise anything.’

‘Of course not,’ said Luke, pouring boiling water into three mugs. ‘Just give it your best shot.’

He nodded and set the pad square in front of him on the countertop.

BE 22108 BF

BE 10460 BF

BH 01256

BC 10484

KD 11201

‘Five rows of five numbers,’ said Jay. He turned to Luke. ‘You’ve already checked for a grid, I assume.’

‘For a what?’

Jay sighed. ‘There are twenty-six letters in the Latin alphabet. If you treat I and J or Y and Z as one letter, you can fit the entire alphabet into a five-by-five grid. Code-makers have been using that for centuries. It would have been old hat to someone like Newton.’ He pointed to the top row of numbers: 2 2 1 0 8. ‘If that’s what this is, then these numbers might indicate how many times each letter is used in the cipher text. This first 2, for example, would imply that the letter A appears twice.’ He wrote two capital As at the top of a fresh sheet of paper. ‘This second 2 would indicate two Bs.’

‘I’m with you,’ said Rachel. ‘One C. No Ds. Eight Es.’

‘How do you know the grid reads left to right?’ asked Luke, a little piqued. ‘Maybe it goes from top to bottom.’

‘E is
by far
the most common letter in the alphabet,’ said Jay. ‘Eight Es therefore makes sense. Under
your
system, we’d have just one E, but eight Us. Are you really arguing that eight Us are more likely than eight Es?’

‘I guess not.’

‘Plus
my
way also gives us six Os, which I’d say makes rather more sense than
your
six Ws. Maybe you’d disagree? Maybe you’d prefer your six Qs to my six Is. At least it would give you something to do with all those Us. ’ He glanced at Rachel, almost with a smirk, as though showing off for her. ‘And I get four Rs and eight Ss, not to mention three Ns and two As, Ms and Ts, all of which make sense. That’s why, incidentally, I can be confident that this is a YZ cipher rather an IJ one. Any other questions, or may I get on with it?’ He didn’t bother waiting for Luke to answer, but instead wrote out all the letters in sequence:

A A B B C E E E E E E E E

F H H H H I I I I I I

L M M N N N N N O O O O O O

P R R R R S S S S S S S S T T T T

U V W W Y/Z

‘What about the pairs of letters before and after the numbers?’ asked Rachel. ‘What are they for?’

‘The numbers stood for letters,’ said Jay. ‘So perhaps the letters stand for numbers.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘A equals one. B equals two. E equals five. Add all the letter pairs up and what do you get?’

Luke shook his head. ‘What?’

‘My god, Luke! How long have you had this? Sixty. Now count up the numbers.’

‘Sixty?’ hazarded Rachel.

‘Exactly. Well done. Sixty.
Now
do you see?’

‘No,’ said Luke.

Jay took a fresh sheet of paper, set it next to the list of letters. He wrote two dashes on the left of the page, followed by a space and another five dashes, as in in a game of hangman. ‘There’s your first B and E,’ he said. He wrote two dashes and then six more on the right-hand side of the page. ‘And that’s your first B and F.’ He repeated it immediately beneath, then followed it with a third line of two dashes followed by eight, a fourth line of two and three dashes, with eleven and four dashes on the bottom line. ‘Now all we have to do is fit these sixty letters onto these sixty blank spaces until we’ve got a phrase that makes sense. Which would be easier if I knew where’d you found this thing, or what its context was.’ But he said this more to make the point than in reproach, for he was clearly enjoying the challenge now and didn’t want it made easier.