The Doomsday Code

CHAPTER 16

2001, New York

Adam straightened up inside, his eyes slowly adjusting from the bright September morning outside to the dimly lit interior.

‘My God …’ he whispered and turned to her. ‘This is your … your base, is it?’

She nodded. ‘’Fraid so.’

He took several hesitant steps across the floor towards the bank of computer monitors, the perspex cylinder and the rack of machinery standing beside it. ‘And this? What is …?’

‘That’s our time displacement unit,’ she replied, drawing up beside him. ‘We have to talk, Mr Lewis.’

He shook his head. ‘Adam will do. Clients call me “Mr Lewis”.’

‘Fair enough. We have to talk about Pandora, Adam.’

‘You know what it means now?’

She shook her head. ‘No … Look, my colleagues don’t know about it yet. I plan to tell them, but not yet, not until I know what it means.’ She looked at him. ‘Maybe you can help me. I need to know everything you know about the Voynich. How you managed to decode it when no one else can. And how you’ve ended up here.’

He nodded. ‘Yes … yes, of course.’

‘Let’s go sit.’ She gestured to one of the threadbare armchairs. ‘I’ll make some coffee.’

A couple of minutes later she sat down opposite him with two mugs of coffee and a packet of Oreos.

‘So?’

‘Where do I begin?’ Adam took off his suit jacket, laid it carefully over one arm of the chair and loosened his tie. ‘Not long after you visited me I became a news story for a day. A national newspaper ran an article on me, and a story about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript became the next day’s fish-’n’-chips paper.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘But the damage was done. Everyone at university knew who I was. A loony. A deluded little sad case who made up the story just to get some attention.’

‘Why? You managed to decode it successfully. So you didn’t explain how you did it? Show them you weren’t a nutcase.’

‘I couldn’t explain the technique to anyone. I couldn’t demonstrate the deciphering method.’

‘Why not?’

Adam sipped his coffee. ‘Because …’ He sighed. ‘It sounds crazy.’ He shook his head. ‘Maybe because it is.’

‘Just tell me why you couldn’t explain how you managed to decode it?’

‘Because I believe it used a cipher aimed specifically at me.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘It was encrypted in a way that only one person in the world could unlock.’ His eyes widened. Looking more like the paranoid student he’d once been than the successful and groomed executive he was now. ‘Someone in 1194 — ’ he laughed edgily — ‘knows me. Knowsme very well.’

He sighed. ‘OK, here goes,’ he said, sitting forward on the chair. ‘I was really interested in palaeolinguistics — the study of dead languages — and I took a gap year before my degree to go to South America with some others. We were following the trail of a pre-Aztec tribe called the Windtalkers. Theory was they had a form of writing long before the Aztecs arrived. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I managed to locate a cave wall, high up on a cliff overlooking the rainforests. A wall covered in this dead language, their glyphs. It’s unique, Maddy. Completely unique. No one has ever discovered that cave, or written a paper on the Windtalkers and their language.’

‘Why not?’

‘I guess because no other palaeolinguist has discovered the cave since.’

‘And why didn’t you make yourself famous then? Go public with your find?’

He shrugged. ‘Various reasons. I wanted to understand it first. I wanted to keep it to myself. It’s also a unique character set. Perfect for encryption.’ He grinned coyly. ‘I use some of it in the work that I do now, creating software security ciphers. And that’s why I’m one of the most sought-after IT security consultants in New York. The ciphers I write are unbreakable.’ He waved that comment away, embarrassed at how conceited it sounded. ‘Anyway, I’m telling you that because, well, because I spotted two very specific glyphs from the cave wall … in the Voynich Manuscript.’

Maddy nearly dropped an Oreo in her coffee.

‘They’re very important glyphs. They were used by the Windtalkers to separate ideas. Sentences, if you like. Much like we use a capital letter and a full stop. One glyph always appeared at the beginning of a sentence or an expression and the other at the end.’

‘So, what? You’re telling me the Voynich was written by, like, Aztecs?’

‘No. It’s not. The glyphs are only used once.’ He raised a finger. ‘On just one occasion. The Voynich Manuscript is hundreds of pages crammed full of random characters, some of them Roman Latin, some Egyptian, some Greek, some mathematical — and then there’s this one passage of those same random characters, which begins with a Windtalker glyph and ends with one.’

‘My God!’

He nodded. ‘Yes, like it was flagged up. Like someone was saying, Focus on this passage alone.’ He stirred uneasily. ‘Like they were saying, Focus on this passage … Adam Lewis.’

A nervous grin skittered across Maddy’s lips then slipped away. ‘That is so-o-o creepy.’

He nodded. ‘Anyway, I won’t bore you with the technical details of breaking open a cipher, but if you can isolate a chunk of meaningful language from random gibberish — a technique often deployed to throw cryptanalysts off the scent — then it’s just a matter of time before you can break it down. Those Windtalker markers were the reason I’m the only person who’s ever managed to extract something meaningful from the Voynich.’

He set his mug on the table. ‘And that’s the reason why I couldn’t explain myself publicly. That’s why I was dismissed as an attention-seeking nut. I couldn’t say some medieval bloke knew I was going to take a field trip to the Amazon and discover the key to breaking the code! I just had to take all the criticism, all the mickey-taking on the nose. It’s a period in my life I’ve tried to put behind me.’ He smiled. ‘Then of course this bloody film comes out.’ He sighed. ‘Luckily they changed the character’s surname.’

‘And who’d want to be portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, eh?’

They both laughed politely at that.

Maddy weighed him up silently. She realized he already knew too much. That at some point they were going to have to undo history and see to it that Adam Lewis never found his way here. Until then, though, he appeared to be a reluctant part of this mystery, linked to Pandora somehow. Perhaps even the key to it all. Just like his pre-Aztec glyphs.

‘Cookie?’