Prime (15 page)

NINETEEN

There was just enough time for King to towel off the perspiration and
get Parker to slap a butterfly suture on the cut under his right eye, before
Keasling took him aside for the conference call with the new handler.

The general handled the introductions…sort
of. “I have Jack Sigler—callsign: King—here with me.”

King didn’t know what to say, so he ventured
a vague: “Hello?”

The voice that issued from the speaker
sounded strange. It wasn’t just the normal crackles of squelch or the vagaries
of radio transmissions. The voice had been electronically distorted, making it
impossible to even begin guessing at the person’s identity. King couldn’t say
with certainty whether it was a male or female voice.
“King?”
The distant unseen person seemed to be savoring the word.
“A
rather fortuitous choice.
You can call me Deep Blue.”

“Deep Blue?”
King could just imagine what Tremblay’s
response to that declaration would be—something off-color, no doubt—and the
thought brought a smile to his face. King however, correctly recognized the
origin of the name. “Like the chess computer?”

“Exactly.
It’s my job to know everything and be one
step ahead of our enemies.”

The auto-tuned and digitally modulated voice
could have been the voice of a computer, for all King knew. It was not a very
comforting thought. The obvious implication was that this mysterious Deep Blue
was going to be playing chess on a grand scale, with King and his new unit as
the pawns. He didn’t like the idea of his fate being controlled by some
mysterious entity, much less one that might not even be human.

“Or rather I should say,” Deep Blue
continued, “to keep you one step ahead of
your
enemies.”

“I’m listening.”

“Operational Detachment Delta was created to
give the President the ability to act—or react—rapidly, without having to wade through
the mire of politics and command structures. But like everything else in
government, it has gradually become a victim of the bureaucracy it was supposed
to circumvent. Now, as you have personally witnessed, it has been compromised.
The worst part is that we have no idea where this attack came from, much less
who can be trusted. It will be General Keasling’s job to root out any bad
actors still lurking in the shadows, but last night underscores the importance
of having a quick response team—one with virtually unlimited resources—as a
surgical option for the President to use as an alternative to the military.”

“You don’t need to sell me on this, sir.” King
wasn’t sure if he was supposed to refer to his handler as ‘sir,’ but when in
doubt… “What’s the mission?”

“First, build your team. From what the General
tells me, you’ve already started recruiting.” The electronic distortion made it
impossible to tell if Deep Blue was joking.

“Why me?”

“I think you already know the answer. Right
now, you and your men are above suspicion. Additionally, the fact that you
survived last night tells me that you are someone who can beat long odds.”

“I had a lot of help.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, King. You were
thrown into an impossible situation, and you held it together.”

King wondered if the men who hadn’t made it
back would agree with that assessment.

Deep Blue quickly switched gears. “However,
our most pressing need right now is to bring those rogue operators down. Need I
add, with extreme prejudice?”

King thought about what Parker had said
earlier, during the first meeting with Keasling. “I think maybe we should be
more focused on the question of why this happened, and what it is the enemy
wants.”

“The CIA is working that angle, but gathering
intelligence will be an essential part of the mission.”

“So you don’t have a clue?” It came out with
more sarcasm than he intended, but Deep Blue let it slide.

“It would be dangerous to assume anything at
this early stage. It appears that this action was completely unconnected to current
military operations, but whoever is behind this was able to coordinate with the
insurgents that attacked you last night. We can’t dismiss the possibility that
this is a bold new terror plot.”

“The CIA contractor—Therion—was the target,” King
said. “They wanted her for something. She’s a code-breaker; maybe they want her
to hack into the Pentagon computers? Steal nuclear launch codes?”

“Now you understand why we have to act
quickly and without full knowledge of our enemy’s goal.” Deep Blue must have sensed
King’s earlier concerns, and after a pause, he continued. “You probably think
that I’m playing a game with your life, and the lives of your men. Perhaps in a
way that’s true, but it’s a game we have to win. In chess, you can never know
exactly what your opponent is thinking, but you can draw conclusions from the
moves he’s made. But you must never think that you are a pawn to be sacrificed
for victory. As soon as I know something, you will know it, and when it comes
to operational decisions, you have the final say.”

In King’s experience, assurances like that
came cheaply and were worth even less. He wished he could look the other man in
the eye, read the sincerity—or lack thereof—in that promise. “All right, let’s
talk about those resources. We know where Rainer is, but that’s about all we
know.”

“I’ve already made contact with Shin
Dae-jung—the man currently conducting reconnaissance on the target. With the
GPS coordinates he gave me, I’ve tasked a KH-12 satellite to get some real-time
satellite imagery. That should give you a better idea of what you’re looking
at.”

For a moment, King thought he misheard. The
nation’s network of ‘eyes in the sky’ was controlled by the National
Reconnaissance Office, an independent and specialized agency that kept a very
tight rein on its product—detailed satellite imagery—and was positively miserly
about the satellites themselves. Requests for pictures of a target had to go up
one chain of command and down another, a process that could take days and could
be very costly in terms of political capital. Actually changing the orbit of a
satellite, a procedure that required the craft to use up some of its very
limited and irreplaceable fuel supply, was something that almost never
happened.

Deep Blue wasn’t kidding about having
unlimited resources.

Maybe this new team was going to work out
after all.

TWENTY

The excitement Sasha had felt as she donned the level-four biohazard
safety suit in preparation to enter the sealed room where the relic was being
kept, climbed to a fever-pitch of elation as she got a chance to actually
behold the object—real, tangible evidence that the Voynich code was not a
unique occurrence. That was about all that it revealed.

She was able to touch and interact with the
object—albeit with a barrier of latex rubber between her and it, but there was
little to be gleaned from such physical contact. She laid her hands upon it,
turned it this way and that and then poked experimentally at the strange
protrusions that were marked with the distinctive letters of the Voynich
alphabet. She could tell that the pegs extended into the larger body of the
thing, and deduced that they were something like the keys on a typewriter. That
would be consistent with the idea that the device had been a type of encryption
machine, but somehow it didn’t feel right. She saw no evidence of gears and
wheels inside the thing—the kind of things that would be necessary for a
rudimentary cipher machine to work. Rather, the hollow body, broken though it
was, contained only the remains of a few hollow tubes. The tubes and the wooden
body of the thing reminded her of something, but what exactly that was, eluded
her.

What she did know for certain was that eight
of the keys contained exact matches to the Voynich script, and that was somewhere
to start. She went back to an adjacent office just outside the containment area,
shedding her environment suit. Rainer was there and began looking over her
shoulder, but he otherwise let her work undisturbed.

Her laptop contained a complete version of the
Voynich manuscript in digital form, along with a program that allowed her to
plug in values for the distinctive characters of the mysterious alphabet. She
highlighted the eight that were marked on the device. Without any context, they
offered absolutely no insight.

It can’t
be a code machine
, she
decided. If it was, other examples of the code would have shown up. So what did
that leave?

What
else has levers like that?
Buttons?
Keys
…

“A piano has keys!”

Rainer threw an inquisitive glance her way.

“It’s a musical instrument,” she said, and she
knew with absolute certainty that she was right. The wooden body was similar to
a drum or a stringed instrument, hollow with thin curved panels to amplify the
sounds. The tubes inside were like the pipes of an organ or a pan flute.

The Voynich manuscript was a book of music.
The mysterious characters that had challenged code breakers for nearly a
century were not enciphered letters, but musical notes; each symbol
corresponded to a specific tone, a sound frequency.

Sasha didn’t have a deep aesthetic
appreciation for music, but she did recognize its perfection as a mathematical
language. If the code was an expression, not of individual letters but of
sounds, then there would be a pattern to it.

There wasn’t enough of the device left to
even approximate what specific notes each lever would have created, but the
simple knowledge of the artifact’s purpose was enough to get her started.

She turned to Rainer. “Do you have a
broadband Internet connection here? I need access to the Cray at Langley.”

He shook his head. “That’s not going to
happen.”

She blinked at him in disbelief. “You want
this cracked, don’t you?”

Rainer shrugged indifferently. “I can allow
you supervised Internet access, but there’s no way in hell I’m letting you
interface with the CIA.”

For a moment, Sasha couldn’t comprehend the
reason for this, but then she remembered that she wasn’t here by choice. The
Cray would have allowed her to employ a brute force attack, trying every
permutation of the code, a grueling task that would have taken a lifetime using
conventional methods, but would require only a few hours or days at the most,
for the supercomputer. Denial of access to the agency’s resources meant that
she would have to do this the old-fashioned way.

The idea was not without some appeal to her.

The subroutines weren’t discriminatory; the
computer would treat every permutation as having equal potential, whereas a
human cryptanalyst knew how to winnow out the obvious false trails.

But there were still too many variables.

She glanced through the window at the
artifact—the instrument. If it had been a piano or a flute—something
familiar—she would know the expected range of possible sounds, but there was
nothing familiar about this device. She knew only its country of origin…

She turned to Rainer again. “This was found
in China?
Yunnan Province?”

“That’s what I was told.”

That didn’t make any sense. There was nothing
in the manuscript that even hinted at a Far Eastern origin; everything—the
artwork, the style and the distribution of the text, even the parchment on
which it was written—pointed to Europe as the place where the manuscript had
been created.

“I need to know more about where this was
found.”

Rainer stared at her thoughtfully for a
moment, and then he produced a cell phone. He dialed it and after a moment, he
spoke. “She has some questions about the find.”

He nodded in response to an unheard reply,
then set the phone on the desktop, pushing a button to activate speaker mode.

The voice of Rainer’s employer—Sasha couldn’t
recall if she’d been told his name—sounded tinny as it issued from the mobile
device. “What do you wish to know, Ms. Therion?”

“You said it was in a crypt? Whose crypt? Was
there anything else there? Has it been dated?”

“We think it was the tomb of a Chinese
prefect named Guo Kan. Several of the artifacts appear to be war trophies from
his campaigns with the Mongol Empire.”

“Mongol?”
Sasha tried to recall what she knew of the
Mongolian era. “That would have been…12
^th
century?”

“A bit later than that.
Historical records say that he died in 1277,
during the reign of Kublai Khan.”

Kublai Khan.
History had never held much interest for
her, but that was a name she knew well. Kublai Khan had ruled most of Asia
during the late 13
^th
and early 14
^th
centuries, but he was
perhaps best known for being the exotic ruler described in
The Travels of Marco Polo
.

Had the Voynich manuscript and the strange
musical instrument, which evidently held the key to unlocking its secrets,
traveled on the Silk Road from Europe to China? Had the manuscript traveled
back again?

It was another variable, and one that didn’t
square with the carbon-dating of the Voynich manuscript to the 1400s, but it
would place the device and the Voynich script nearly fifty years ahead of the
outbreak of the Black Death.

“What else did you find? Was there anything
that might explain where this artifact originated?”

There was a sound that might have been a
sigh. “Just stick to deciphering the code, Ms. Therion. I’ve already
investigated all the other angles.”

“It’s a musical instrument,” she blurted.
“Did you discover that in your investigations?”

A long silence followed. “A musical
instrument, you say? Could it be an organ of some kind?”

“Yes.
A primitive one.”

“Some of Guo’s writings refer to an
‘urghan’
—something he took as spoil from
the siege of Baghdad. It’s a Persian word and possibly the root word from which
we get the name ‘organ.’”

Baghdad
.
Iraq again.
The
search was bringing her full circle.

“I need to see everything you have on this
urghan
. If I am going to crack this
code, I need to rebuild the thing.”