The Voynich Cypher (15 page)

The screen indicated that the software had begun the comparisons as it studied for pattern recognition and tried countless possible substitution cyphers in myriad languages. It was a processing-intensive program that Steven had written in his clumsy, amateurish manner, which could only be sped up by distributing the various computing tasks across the three most powerful systems they had. Steven might have been a visionary in some respects, but a coder he wasn’t, and the program was one that would take a week of full time operation for a single CPU.

Sophie gazed at the screen in dismay and made a silent resolution to herself. She would approach him whenever he got back, casually, and see if he was interested in having her optimize the program at an equitable hourly rate. It might take up all her nights for the next few weeks, but she was willing to make the sacrifice. She had to generate money somehow. It had affected her sleep for the past month, as she plotted the course of her savings versus her expenses – it was grim picture that would see her underwater within a few more weeks.

She tore open a bag of barbecue-flavored potato chips and popped a fistful into her mouth, washing them down with a swig of cola. Sophie knew she was a little heavy. Okay, more than a little heavy. She was easily eighty pounds overweight, which was getting dangerous for her. Her doctor had cautioned her to cut back on calories and start exercising, the only real fix for her pre-diabetic condition, which was teetering on the brink of going full-blown. But food was her comfort and solace, and it was her constant companion now, just as it was her father, lover and confidante. She didn’t need a pet. She had chocolate.

The primitive little icons Steven had filched from some off-the-shelf shareware annoyed her, just as everything seemed to lately. She knew it was nerves, coupled with a creeping awareness that ignoring the reality of her financial situation wasn’t going anywhere good. It was getting to the point where she’d have to start maxing out all her credit cards – that was a downward spiral that always ended badly. She understood the effect of compounding and recognized it worked against her.

Sophie had considered asking for a big raise, but in the current financial climate, that wouldn’t fly. Steven was already paying her at the top of her pay scale and had been overly generous in subsidizing her health insurance to include her mom. That amounted to thousands of dollars per year he was shelling out due to sympathy over her situation, which she appreciated. But in the end, if her problem wasn’t solved, it would ruin her. It was an unfortunate situation all around. She had to do something, and do it quick, or she’d wind up drowning in a financial ocean that had the capacity to devastate both Sophie and her ailing mother.

She hated the choices she was going to have to make, but in the end it was family first. When all was said and done, it was about survival. And Sophie had someone depending upon her.

Stabbing at the monitor button, she shut down the screen in preparation to leave for the night. Glancing at the chips, she shrugged to herself and poured the remainder into her mouth before balling up the bag and tossing it into the trash.
Waste not, want not.
Sophie grabbed her small purse and moved to the front entrance, fishing her keys out so she could lock up. It was going to be another lonely night on the couch with Mom, watching pirated movies. Not quite the life she’d aspired to, but it was out of her hands.

Colonel Gabriel Synthe lit his twenty-fourth cigarette of the day from the glowing ember of his twenty-third and blew a cloud of rancid smoke at the ceiling of his home office. He coughed a rasping exclamation, but didn’t hesitate from drawing another deep puff into his lungs to quell the spasm. He figured that he was probably on borrowed time, so what was the point of quitting now?

He contemplated the phone conversation he’d had a few minutes earlier and considered not making the call he knew by rights he really should. He just didn’t see much point, and naturally was resistant to reporting to the insufferable fool he’d been saddled with. Still, it would probably wind up harming more than helping if he sidestepped it, so he reluctantly dialed the number and listened as it rang.

“Any progress?” Diego Luca asked, by way of opening.

“Of a kind, I suppose. I just got word that Twain’s daughter has been located.”

“That’s wonderful news!”

“Maybe not. She’s hooked up with a third party, who we’re trying to get more information about. And there’s a further complication. Someone tried to follow them, and it didn’t go well,” Synthe rasped, noisily exhaling another cloud of smoke.

“Start at the beginning. Where is she?”

“Florence. Italy.”

“What the hell is she doing there?” Luca demanded.

“That’s a great question. For now, it’s an unknown. But we’re working on it.”

“
Working on it
. I see. And who is the mystery third party?” Luca asked.

“He’s a local entrepreneur, a Dr. Steven Cross. But the first checks into his identity are odd.”

“In what way?”

“He didn’t exist until five years ago. Before that, there’s no data on him. It’s like he came out of nowhere,” Synthe reported, stubbing out the cigarette in an old terracotta flowerpot he used as an ashtray.

“Italian records are notoriously unreliable. Probably a quarter of all the people in Italy don’t have history. It’s not like the U.S. or the rest of the European Union. Things in Italy are more, you know, old-fashioned.”

“Great. Well, here’s what we know. He owns a small software company. He’s got money. Lots of it. His wife, Antonia, died in a car accident a few years ago, and he inherited a bundle. He’s forty-five, healthy – there are no medical records to speak of – and he has no debt. Leases a flat, and that’s it. Nothing else,” Synthe said disgustedly. He felt the cigarette pack on his desk and shook his head – he was down to the last cigarette.

“Hmm. A question mark,” Luca said. “All right. What’s this about someone following her? And what did you mean by it not going well?”

“Someone, presumably after the same thing we are, entered a construction site after they did, but didn’t get a chance to leave. When we picked up the girl’s trail yesterday, I dispatched a small team to see what they could find. We were able to trace her from a bank account she must think is anonymous, which it would be, under ordinary circumstances but we have reach in a lot of unusual areas. Suffice to say, money always leaves a trail. Always.”

“Why not just scoop her up?” Luca asked.

“Because we don’t know whether she’s got the item. Nor do we know what her game is. All we know is she’s vacationing in Italy and has a friend. That’s not a lot to go on. If we move on her at the wrong time, we’re done. We lose the chance she could lead us to the…to our objective.”

“I understand. But what happened to the follower?”

“Either she, or her friend, knocked the man unconscious. We don’t think he, or any of his associates, know where she is.” Synthe chose his next words very carefully. “This morning, there was a police report that someone had broken into Steven Cross’s home. A burglary, they say.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t us. But that tells me that whoever is doing the surveillance might have known about her friend earlier than yesterday. It’s troubling – we seem to be playing catch-up to a group that’s one step ahead of us. We need to change that,” Synthe concluded, his information exhausted.

Luca could hear Synthe lighting a cigarette. Filthy habit for a degenerate atheist. It figured.

“Is there anything else?” Luca asked.

“We’re doing research on Cross, and we’ll be following the followers now that we know they’re on the board. But at present there are many unknowns. That’s not good. As you know.”

Synthe spent another few minutes discussing logistics before terminating the call. Luca was a conniver, he decided, and the man was growing emboldened by his mandate to work with him – the tone of their interactions was increasingly becoming one of Synthe playing the role of subordinate to Luca’s insufferable position as his superior.

The only really interesting news was that Cross and the girl appeared to be on the run, and Synthe knew where they were using as their home base. That single bit of information could well wind up being a critical piece – and at present it was the only real break they’d gotten.

He leaned back in his executive chair and stared at the paint flaking off his ceiling from the constant stream of toxins being blown there, day after day. It, like his soul, was rotting away, largely due to his own actions. He smirked humorlessly to himself as he considered the metaphor.

Nothing, he knew, lasted forever.

Natalie had been unfazed by Steven’s account of how he’d knocked the man who’d been following them unconscious. She had studied the air pistol and stun gun with only mild curiosity. As someone who had been on the receiving end of attempted assaults before, Steven found the response unusual. She should have been shaken by such a close brush with violence, and yet she’d continued to exude that unabashed tranquility – a quiet confidence that betrayed no anxiety. She was either extremely tough, or a sociopath, he reasoned. Even he, who had been in the military for several years and had been in numerous deadly situations, was shaken by the implications of surveillance and a near miss on a kidnapping attempt. Natalie looked like she’d just woken up from a night’s restful sleep, refreshed and ready to go to the gym. He’d never seen anything like it.

Frederick kept scanning the mirrors, and several times made abrupt turns into small streets then doubled-back, checking for any followers. He was clearly very good at what he did, causing Steven to wonder again exactly what his full job description was.

“We’ll get out a few miles from the villa and get a taxi. We don’t want the car anywhere near the villa anymore. Frederick will get new wheels for us by tomorrow morning. Won’t you, Frederick?” Natalie smiled at the driver, and their eyes locked in the rearview mirror. He nodded.

“So, you think those were Morbius Frank’s men?” Steven pressed.

“Yes, or the Order. In the end it’s probably the same. Whoever it was, we have to expect the worst. If you don’t have any pressing reason to stick around Florence, we should make tracks out of the area tomorrow. I’d say tonight, but that isn’t practical until we have a different a car. Now that they know I’m here, with you, it isn’t safe in Florence for either of us.” She paused.

Steven didn’t say anything. Natalie took a closer look at the stun gun.

“This is Iranian. Not one you usually see. First one I’ve ever come across up close,” Natalie observed.

“You know the different types of stun guns that well?”

“Let’s just say that at one point in my life it was of interest to me.” If Natalie was trying to create additional mystery surrounding her, it was working. “It’s different than civilian models. These are for the military and secret police.”

“Forgive my ignorance, but what’s the difference?”

“Civilian devices are designed to incapacitate. They give a zap and then stop unless the button’s pressed again. These are built to not only incapacitate, but to continue delivering a series of charges to keep the target down for a long time.” She waved it around casually. “Or to torture.”

“Torture.”

“In some countries, the police torture in order to get suspected perpetrators to cooperate – they find it far more useful than civilized techniques. Devices like these are built for that application.”

“Seems like you know an awful lot about them. What did you say you did for a living, Natalie?” Steven asked, only half joking.

“I didn’t.” She leaned forward to Frederick. “Drop us at that little restaurant we passed yesterday that I said looked cute, okay? We’ll cab to the house from there.”

Frederick nodded, never stopping his perusal of the mirrors on an automatic circuit – rear, right, left; rear, right, left. Steven was getting dizzy following it. Then again, if he’d been treating this more seriously he would have spotted the surveillance at his apartment. He was usually good that way, and it annoyed him that he’d dropped his guard and gotten lackadaisical. There had been a time not so long ago when he was so finely-tuned he would have had internal alarms going off the second someone had scrutinized him; just as when Natalie had begun her shadowing.

He resolved to get back into the old habits.

Being rusty could cost him his life, if Natalie was right.

And it looked at this point like she was.

At four-forty a.m., the computers stopped processing and went silent, their decryption job finally completed. Sophie’s whirred for a few additional minutes as it committed the results to a new folder, then closed down the program, automatically putting itself into sleep mode.

The parchment was decrypted, awaiting human eyes to interpret the data.

Steven woke to the sound of a rooster crowing nearby and for a few seconds was disoriented. Then the whole adventure came rushing back to him. He was in a rented villa, being hunted by shady miscreants intent on torturing him, while in the company of a modern Mata Hari with a mysterious past and beautiful eyes.

His phone indicated it was seven in the morning. He sighed, and then focused on meditating: a practice that was second nature to him. Steven felt the immediacy of his surroundings fade away, and soon he was in a void, absent any thought or mental images. After twenty minutes he felt a stirring and returned to conscious awareness, slowly coming back into the world, his nerves alive and again processing sensation.

Swinging his legs off the bed, he debated going for a morning run, but decided that it probably wasn’t the day for it. They had a lot to do, not the least of which was getting away from Florence as soon as possible. Steven peered through a gap in the curtains at the driveway and saw a silver Audi sedan parked in front of the house. Frederick had been busy last night.