The Voynich Cypher (12 page)

As the day wore on, Steven took Natalie up on her offer of lunch and was pleasantly surprised at the spread she set out. Organic green salad, gnocchi pesto, dry salami, rigatoni in a four cheese sauce, all accompanied by a passable bottle of chianti.

They ate on the small, brick-built outdoor breakfast patio off of the kitchen, which had a sturdy rustic pine picnic table and two benches. Natalie and Frederick sat across from him, making strained small talk about where they could go from Italy to ensure her continued survival. Steven had probed for some more information on her background, but the attempt had been met with a polite but firm rebuff.

Steven wondered what the exact nature of Natalie and Frederick’s relationship was – she seemed far more relaxed with him than Steven would have expected her to be with a driver, and he seemed to know everything she did about their current adventure, even though he limited his commentary to a few terse words. As with much that had occurred over the last half a day, Steven figured he’d discover more in time and contented himself with savoring the gourmet meal while thinking through his examination of the Scroll.

“Are you making any progress?” Natalie asked after he thanked her for lunch, clearly having resisted the urge to raise the subject throughout the meal.

“Perhaps. The glyphs look the same as the rest of the Voynich, but they’re arranged in a different format, almost like short descriptive paragraphs. That would be consistent with several other quires, but there’s just something that strikes me as unusual about this set. I haven’t yet been able to put my finger on it, but I’m working on it,” Steven summarized.

“If you have a breakthrough, I’m all ears, Steven. I’m thinking I’ll take a nap while you’re working – Frederick can get you anything you need,” she said, yawning ever so slightly into her cupped hand.

“I’ll try to have the whole thing wrapped up by the time you wake up,” Steven said easily as he reentered the dining room.

After spending several hours poring over every nuance of the parchment pages, the truth was that Steven was no closer to deciphering the Scroll than when he’d first laid eyes on it. That wasn’t unexpected, although a part of him felt disappointed. It would have been wonderful if it had inspired a Eureka moment. But in his experience, that wasn’t how things worked. He was very good and had honed his skills over the years, but there were no secrets to decryption only he knew – much of the time it was simple trial and error. One painstakingly looked for patterns and tried known examples of encryption techniques that dated from the same period, hoping that it would yield a solution, or at least a direction to follow. But the Voynich had always been inscrutable, impervious to all efforts to decode it. Even after the best in the field had done their best, there had been no breakthrough. Plenty of theories, but no solutions.

He wearily rubbed his hands over his face and stood back from the dining room table as he stared at the collected pages. There was so much data to incorporate, and no obvious place to start. This was an almost impossible task, and he wondered absently why the Order had spent so much energy guarding what on the surface appeared to be just more Voynich cypher. It made no sense. He began pacing in frustration, his gaze wandering absently over the Scroll as his mind raced. There was something there, but so elusive…

Wait a second. The crest on the final page of the Scroll, under the elaborately drawn roots of a mythical plant. That looked vaguely familiar.

Steven racked his brain to recall why he’d felt a stirring, or where he’d seen the crest before. It was a tiny depiction of a labyrinth, which seemed out of place in this seemingly medicinal chapter. He concentrated on it, searching his memory banks for the recollection, but couldn’t place it. He continued pacing.
That crest.
What was the significance
? For that matter, what was the significance of any of the illustrations, depicting everything from elaborate, nonsensical plumbing diagrams replete with bathing nude women, to cosmological diagrams of unfamiliar or fantastical galaxies or constellations, to plants that appeared to be hybrids of the real and the invented?

Whenever he spent long hours studying the Voynich, he always felt like he was being sucked down a dark rabbit hole into an upside-down world where nothing made sense. Today’s efforts were no different.

And yet that symbol. He’d seen it before.

Steven moved to the computer and, from online scans of the complete document, spent an hour looking at every illustration in the Voynich. The labyrinth didn’t appear anywhere, so he hadn’t seen it before in the Voynich. Frustrated, he switched strategies and loaded a search engine, then proceeded to pore through countless results for medieval astrological and astronomical symbols. There were tens of thousands, and he quickly acknowledged the futility of trying to find the needle in the haystack. But he knew he’d seen it elsewhere during his travels. Could those have been coded clues that would decode the Voynich? Anything was possible, and Steven realized he wouldn’t have thought twice about the symbol if he hadn’t seen it in quire 18.

Think, dammit. It’s an emblem – almost like a coat of arms with the circular labyrinth depicted as the central element.

It was right on the periphery of Steven’s awareness. But the harder he focused, the more fleeting it became.

This isn’t working.

Steven knew he’d need to stop trying to force it and wait until the gears meshed and the answer came to him. But knowing and doing were two distinctly different things. Increasingly frustrated, he decided to go for a short walk to clear his head. After alerting Frederick, he made his way down the long drive, taking in the vineyards and olive trees surrounding the property.

The summer sun felt good on his face; by its angle, he realized that it was going to be evening in just a few hours. That raised the question of what he was going to do. If Natalie was right, his best option was to stay at the villa until further notice, but there was a part of Steven that wasn’t comfortable allowing an ephemeral threat drive him underground. His life for years had been spent in a sort of hiding, always looking over his shoulder, and he’d only recently become comfortable that he had nothing more to worry about. Then this slammed into him. It wasn’t fair.

Steven was jolted out of his daydream by the deep boom of a nearby gunshot. He swung around and found himself facing an old man, seventy yards off, holding a turn-of-the-century shotgun. He was shooting at the crows, trying to drive them off his property. Steven waved at him. He waved back. There were few things like the Italian countryside, where just a few minutes outside of a major town you could find farmers discharging guns with nobody batting an eyelid.

What a weird country. He continued strolling, amid a reverie of his old place in Greve, haunted by Antonia’s restive ghost and his own disturbed dreams, and realized there was a part of him that still missed living in rural tranquility. Just as quickly as that image flitted through his consciousness, the familiar sequence of recollections began their bittersweet parade – those last moments, kissing and holding Antonia, watching her race off in the Audi, thinking it was just another routine day when, in reality, the final minutes of her life were ticking away. If it hadn’t been for the ancient book peddler, he would have also been crushed by the huge–

The book collector. His box.

Steven stumbled, then turned and ran like a madman back to the villa. He burst through the front door to find Natalie standing in the kitchen, her nap over, making herself a cup of tea.

“I know where I’ve seen the Voynich crest before,” he announced, only mildly winded from the sprint back.

“That’s amazing!” She peered at him. “What Voynich crest?”

Steven realized that he hadn’t shared with her any of his postprandial speculations. He beckoned to her, and she joined him at the table where the Scroll was laid out.

“You see this small drawing on the last page? The one that looks like a highly-stylized circular labyrinth in a shield-shaped exterior?” he asked excitedly, tapping the parchment delicately with his index finger.

“Yes. I see it, although to me it looks a lot like the rest of the drawings. What’s the big deal about it?” Natalie asked.

“I’ve seen it before.”

“You already said that. But why is that such exciting news?”

“Because of where I’ve seen it,” he responded.

“Where have you seen it?”

“On another parchment, also written in a cypher, but one that’s been decrypted,” he announced.

“And…” Natalie gestured with her hand: like, whenever you’re ready to tell me the meat of it, proceed.

“Decrypted by me.” Steven could see she still didn’t get it. “I have the parchment.”

“You’re saying that this little emblem, or whatever it is, is similar to some parchment you worked on?” Natalie summarized, surprised at the direction events had suddenly moved in.

“No, I’m saying that it is the exact same crest as on a medieval parchment that I own – I bought it along with four others from an antique book dealer several years ago. One of the oldest families in the business in Italy, and perhaps all of Europe. They’ve been at it for hundreds of years, and many of the older pieces in circulation have moved through their hands at one time or another if a sale was involved. This parchment was part of the family’s private collection, which comprised mainly obscure and historically insignificant documents. The only reason it’s now noteworthy is because of the drawing. Otherwise it would just be a run-of-the-mill fifteenth century coded letter that was drafted using a fairly complex substitution cypher. The pisser is that I actually consigned it to a rare book company six months ago, with some of my others,” Steven explained, then shifted his attention to the Scroll. “If you look at the crest, you’ll see that it’s an eleven-circuit labyrinth. Not sure if that has any significance…”

“What does that mean?”

“See the path? If you count the rings, you’ll see that there are eleven levels. Older labyrinths tend to be simpler. This is similar to the one in Chartres Cathedral in France,” Steven explained.

“So it’s a maze…some sort of a puzzle?”

“No. Labyrinths have well defined paths. Mazes don’t – they’re intended to challenge the intellect with numerous dead-ends. With labyrinths, the symbolism is deeper. The only decision with a labyrinth is whether or not to enter it. Everything else is about the trip through. In a way, this could be a veiled reference to beginning a tortuous journey…”

“Do you remember what the parchment said?” Natalie asked.

“Not really. It…it simply wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy. At least not then. I just put it onto the curiosities pile and went about my business. At the time, I had a lot going on…I’d just lost my wife in a car crash, so I wasn’t really that involved in much of anything for a while…”

“I’m sorry, Steven.” Natalie said quietly.

“It was two and a half years ago… Anyway, the point is, I’ve seen the parchment and I’ll need to get hold of it as soon as possible, because it may hold the key to deciphering the Scroll, or at least could put us on the right path.” Steven looked at his watch. “Shit. I’ll need to make a call. If he’s in town, I should be able to get the dealer to scan the document and send it to my e-mail. Let me give it a try.”

Steven consulted his phone’s address book, and after a few moments, conducted a hurried call in Italian. When he hung up, he was smiling.

“Mission accomplished. Framboso, the dealer, hasn’t sold it yet. He promised to get a high resolution scan to me by the end of the day,” Steven said.

“You’re sure it’s the same crest?” Natalie asked.

“Positive. But I have another problem, and I think we need to deal with it sooner than later. My passport and cash are in one of several large safety deposit boxes at a bank in downtown Florence, where I keep my parchment collection. It’s completely secure and climate-controlled.” He stared at the crest closely, nodded, then turned to Natalie. “The bank’s open until five o’clock. I’ll need it anywhere I go in Italy, or if I have to cross a border. Come to think of it, it might not be a terrible idea to put the Scroll in one of the boxes at the same time. If you’ve got scans, there doesn’t seem to be anything on the originals that wouldn’t be on an image. Your call, but you’re welcome to use one of my boxes to store it,” Steven offered.

Natalie hesitated. Steven could tell she was torn. His invitation made sense, but she wasn’t completely willing to give up possession of the Scroll. Too high a price had already been paid for it.

Steven let the moment pass. When push came to shove, it wasn’t his problem – the Scroll wasn’t his property. Then again, it wasn’t really hers, either. She hadn’t paid millions for it.

“I’ll bring it with me and make a decision once I see the security. Not all banks are created equal,” she observed, dodging the moment of truth.

“If we’re going to make it with any time to spare, we better hit the road. Oh, and I think it would be a good idea to stop by my flat so I can get a shaving kit and clothes. Especially if I’m going to be on vacation for a while,” Steven said.

“That’s a terrible idea, Steven. They might be watching your place.”

“Natalie. You said they’d be following up on me as a routine lead, which would be one of many, I’d think. So the likelihood of someone being there, watching the flat with twenty-four hour surveillance, is slim. In fact, the longer I wait, the higher the probability they’ll get interested in it,” he insisted.

“If you’re hell bent on it I can’t stop you, but remember I told you I don’t like it. From my perspective it’s an unnecessary risk. Can’t you have someone else go over and pack a bag for you, and then they meet Frederick someplace crowded? They won’t be looking for an older man. That’s just one of many ways to solve the problem,” Natalie proposed.

“I’ll make the decision later,” Steven said, echoing her earlier comment on the Scroll.