The Doomsday Code

CHAPTER 25

2001, New York

Liam nodded with approval at the thermal underwear.

‘I got them from a sportswear shop,’ said Sal. ‘That should keep you warm under your other stuff.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, stuffing them into the plastic bag.

‘I took the labels off again,’ she added. ‘But all the same … you should keep the thermals hidden. It’s modern material.’

‘Right.’

Maddy joined them around the long kitchen table. ‘So, I’m sending you guys back to a couple of minutes in time after we brought you back, to avoid a tachyon clash.’ She shared a look with Liam. ‘Not making that mistake again,’ she uttered out of the side of her mouth.

‘OK.’ She turned to Adam. ‘Adam … you want to tell Liam and these two about your idea?’ She flicked a finger at Bob and Becks standing like two sentinels at the end of the table … in their underwear.

Adam nodded. ‘There’s a way, we figured, that you can stay in touch — ’

‘But Maddy said we can’t use the Voynich,’ said Liam.

‘No, not using that. There’s a graveyard at Kirklees that dates back to the beginnings of the priory. I’ve actually been there myself and picked through it all. Loads of broken masonry slabs lost underneath brambles and nettles and what have you. If you look, you’ll find them there. Anyway, I took a number of photographs of several of them. One, in particular, was part of a simple gravestone for a man called Robert Haskette, with 1192 as the year he died. So he’ll be dead now, of course.’ He frowned. ‘Well, when I say now I mean … you know, the point at which you — ’

Liam tutted and waved. ‘Don’t worry, I get tripped up by the now-then sort of thing too.’

Adam continued. ‘He’ll be dead and his gravestone there already and freshly carved … hopefully. You just need to look for it.’

Becks raised a finger. ‘Question.’

‘Yes?’ Adam’s eyes flickered up her athletic body. Then he found himself looking over her shoulder shamefaced, cheeks colouring. ‘Uh … what is it, err … Becks?’

‘You do not intend for us to communicate openly? This will present a contamination risk.’

‘No, no, of course not. This would need to be encoded. Ideally a code that looks inconspicuous and not out of place on a piece of masonry. Almost like decoration.’

‘Do you have such a code?’ asked Becks.

‘Indeed. Yes — well, it’s not mine, but it can be adapted slightly. You got any paper?’

Sal quickly skittered over to the computer desk and returned with a pad of paper and a pen.

‘Thanks. OK, this is the Masonic cipher. They call it the pigpen cipher.’ He sketched some criss-cross patterns of lines and dots on the paper and then filled them in with letters of the alphabet.

‘Now what you do is, for each letter in your message you use the part of the pattern that the letter is within. I’ll give you an example.’

He scribbled a coded message. Liam craned his neck forward to get a closer look. It meant nothing to him, and, as Adam had said, it did just look like a rather uninteresting pattern.

‘Now, see … if we take, for example, the letter X. Do you see where it sits in the cipher? Which part of this pattern is it sitting in? The part of the large diagonal cross with dots in — the left-hand quadrant — see?’ The others nodded. ‘Now look at that coded message: the first character matches that bit of the pigpen grid, the part that contains the letter X. So the first letter of the encoded message is X. Anyone figure out what the second letter would be?’

Sal answered first. ‘It’s an M?’

‘Yup. You got it. Go on — see if you can do the rest.’

Sal grabbed a pen off the desk and with a grin quickly and easily extracted the encoded message.

‘There you go,’ said Adam. ‘Easy as easy peas.’

Liam held a finger up. ‘But, err … this is a Freemason code, isn’t it? Won’t that mean any Freemason who stumbles across our gravestone will be able to translate our message as well?’

‘Yup, which is why we need to adapt it slightly. If I jumble the order of the letters now, like this …’ Adam drew the pattern again, but this time filled in the letters in a random order.

‘Now, provided you keep your messages very short so that no frequency analysis techniques can be used, then it’s almost impossible to break unless you throw some serious computer power at it.’

‘Frequency analysis techniques?’

Adam was about to explain that to Liam, but Maddy cut in. ‘Perhaps later.’ She picked up the sheet of paper and held it up for Bob and Becks to study closely. ‘You guys can remember this layout?’

‘Affirmative,’ said Bob, leaning forward. ‘I now have a stored digital image.’

‘Affirmative,’ echoed Becks.

‘Good. So … that’s how you’re going to talk to us.’ She tucked the paper into the hip pocket of her jeans for safekeeping. ‘And you’ll need to let us know when and where to open a portal. We’ll do the usual thing and plan a day-later one, week-later, a fortnight-later and of course one just before the six-month critical mission window.’

‘What’s critical about six months?’ asked Adam.

‘Bob’s and Becks’s heads blow up.’

‘Whuh? Did you just say …?’

‘It’s a safety measure, to ensure the computer tech doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.’ Maddy wrinkled her nose. ‘More sort of a fizzle than a bang, really. The circuits fry.’

‘Oh, right.’

She resumed her briefing. ‘So those are the window times, Liam, but … since we don’t really have a clear mission plan, I’m guessing this is all going to boil down to you telling us where and when you want to be picked up. Are you OK with that?’

Liam nodded. ‘Aye. And you’ve got these photographs, you say?’

Adam nodded. ‘Yes. Not on me.’ He turned to Maddy. ‘Back at my apartment. On my hard drive. I’ll need to go get it.’

She pursed her lips. ‘Sal or me will have to go with you to get it, then.’

‘What if the gravestone isn’t there?’ said Sal.

‘It should be,’ said Adam.

Maddy puffed her cheeks. ‘Hmmmm, well, look — if it isn’t, for whatever reason, then you come back on the first of the scheduled windows, I guess. Just play it safe. Don’t go wandering off to see King John until you know you can talk to us.’

‘Recommendation: first mission task should be to locate the gravestone and send a test message,’ said Bob.

‘That’s quite right,’ replied Maddy. ‘Very sensible, Bob.’

She looked around at everyone. ‘So … I think that’s it.’ She smiled. ‘This is a hunt for something we have no idea what it is, or where it is — other than some nasty guy with a hood stole it and ran off into the woods. So it’s the usual half-baked, no-idea-what-we’re-doing thing again. Business as usual, I guess.’

She dismissed them all with a self-conscious shall we? As Liam turned to follow Bob and Becks across the archway and up the ladder she reached out for Liam and squeezed his shoulder.

‘Liam?’

‘Yuh?’

She glanced at the plume of silver hair at his temple and the first faint hint of an age line around his eyes.

‘Liam, I’m glad I told you — and Sal — the truth. It was eating me up sitting on it.’

He hunched his shoulders. ‘A load shared is a load halved. That’s what me Auntie Doe used to say.’

‘You stay safe … again, OK?’

He grinned. ‘With Punch and Judy, I’ll be fine, so.’

He turned to go, but she held on. ‘Liam, this is an important one, you know? I’ve got a real feeling this — I dunno … that this is going to open doors. We find out about Pandora and we’re going to find out more about who we’re working for,’ she said quietly.

‘It’s a certain Mr Waldstein, isn’t it?’

She shrugged. ‘So Foster once told us. I do wonder.’

‘Now there’s an idea.’

‘What?’

‘Foster. Maybe you should ask the ol’ fella about Pandora while we’re gone.’

‘I was sort of thinking of doing that,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I guess now I’ve told you guys, telling him won’t hurt, right?’

He cocked his head. ‘I trust him.’

She smiled at Liam, realizing that in his cheeky cock-eyed grin she could see the ghost of Foster’s gaunt face. ‘Yeah, me too.’

The archway echoed with the splash of water as Bob dropped into the displacement tube.