“We’re hunting nukes, Deke, how much fucking worse can it-?”
“Captain Ledger is being hunted by Red Knights.”
There was a stunned silence on the phone, and then Aunt Sallie whispered, “Oh my God!”
Chapter Forty-Four
The Warehouse
Baltimore, Maryland
June 15, 2:26 a.m. EST
“Wait,” said Bug, “what?”
“Those pages,” said Circe. “I recognize them. They’re from an ancient codex called the Voynich manuscript. I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t think so,” said Bug dubiously. “Rasouli seemed to think this was the Book of Shadows.”
Circe shook her head. “You’re wrong, Bug. That’s the Voynich manuscript.”
“What is the Voynich manuscript?” asked Rudy. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s an old ciphertext,” Circe said as she accessed a browser and went to one of the university research sites she subscribed to. In a few seconds a screen came up with THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT MYSTERY in bold letters. She went through the directory and pulled up several scans of individual pages. The pages were crammed with writing in a language none of them knew.
Bug whistled.
“Well I’ll be damned,” murmured Rudy.
Circe pulled up more pages, and some of these had pictures. Plants, naked women, celestial diagrams. The drawings were primitive, but they were orderly-even if the sense of order was elusive. Then she found one that matched a page from Rasouli’s files.
“See? I was right,” Circe said triumphantly. In a few minutes she matched seven of the nine pages, but then she frowned as she ran through every single page of the manuscript. “Wait… did I miss them?”
“No,” said Bug. “The last two pages from Rasouli’s file aren’t in the Voynich thingee.”
“Slow down,” begged Rudy. “What is this?”
Circe took a breath. “The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious book that dates back to the fifteenth century. Radio carbon dating put it somewhere between 1404 to 1438 C.E., and from the materials used it’s believed that it was created in northern Italy, which was a very important and wealthy part of Europe at the time.”
“Who wrote this book?” asked Rudy.
“That’s just it,” said Circe, “no one knows who wrote it or why. It’s named after Wilfrid Voynich, a rare-book dealer from New York who discovered the book in 1912 during a buying trip to Villa Mondragone, near Rome. It was in a trunkful of rare texts. Voynich spent the rest of his life trying to decipher the language, but he never did. In fact no one ever has.”
“Maybe it’s a fake language,” suggested Rudy.
“Doubtful,” said Bug, peering at it. “It’s too orderly.”
“Can we suppose for a moment that the two remaining pages from Rasouli’s file are from the other book, the Book of Shadows? ” suggested Rudy. “If so, they’re clearly written in the same language. Maybe it’s a secret language, reserved for use by members of a society.”
“Sure,” Circe agreed. “That’s the consensus of scholars of the book, but it is an incredibly complex language. In all there are one hundred and seventy thousand distinct glyphs, or written elements. About thirty of these glyphs are used repeatedly throughout the manuscript.”
“An alphabet?” said Bug.
“Probably, but no one has cracked it.”
“Where is the book now?” asked Rudy. “And can we get it?”
“It’s at Yale, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, but there’s no reason to get it. There are hundreds of Web sites devoted to the manuscript. Every page of it, including the covers, is available online.”
Bug reached up to tap one of the pages on the screen. “Wait, isn’t that a signature? I can almost read it. Jacob something something.”
“Jacobus de Tepenecz,” said Circe. “He wasn’t the author, though. More likely he owned it for a while. De Tepenecz was a seventeenth-century physician and an expert in medical plants. In 1608 he was summoned to Prague to treat Emperor Rudolf II who was suffering from severe depression and melancholia. Because of his success with the emperor, de Tepenecz was appointed Imperial Chief Distiller. Scholars believe that he was given the Voynich manuscript as either payment or as a gift by Rudolf, who was a collector of occult books and manuscripts of arcane sciences. The ownership of the book has a lot of gaps in it. We do know that when Voynich purchased it he found a letter tucked between its pages that had been written in 1665 by Dr. Johannes Marcus Marci of Bohemia, and in that letter Dr. Marci claimed that the book was written by Roger Bacon.”
“Who was-?” prompted Rudy.
“He was a Franciscan friar, philosopher, and alchemist in the thirteenth century. His nickname was ‘Doctor Mirabilis’-‘wonderful teacher.’ But… Bacon was likely born around 122 °C.E. He died in 1294, more than a century before the book was written.”
“Unless he really could do miracles,” said Bug, but they ignored him.
“What’s in the manuscript?” asked Rudy. “I see plants and diagrams…”
“That’s just it,” answered Circe, “on the surface the book appears to be a codex of herbology. But here’s the kicker, while some of the plants in the book are recognizable, there are some plants that are either so badly drawn that they’re unrecognizable, or they are plants that are currently unknown to science. Aside from the herbal drawings, there are others, including a number of cosmological diagrams, some of them with suns, moons, and stars, suggestive of astronomy or astrology. There are the twelve zodiacal symbols, and each of these has thirty female figures arranged in two or more concentric bands. Most of the females are at least partly naked, and each holds what appears to be a labeled star or is shown with the star attached by what could be a tether or cord of some kind to either arm.” She took a breath. “And there are sections that show small naked women bathing in pools or tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes, some of them clearly shaped like body organs. Some of the women wear crowns. Some pages look like complex formulae, but for what is anyone’s guess. In short, we don’t know what the book is about or why it was written.”
Rudy said, “You called it a ciphertext rather than a codetext. What’s the difference? I thought a cipher was another name for code.”
Circe shook her head. “A cipher is the result of encryption performed on plaintext using an algorithm. It’s mathematical. A code is simply a method used to transform a message into an obscured form. Like letter transposition or word-swapping. You decipher a code with a codebook that has the letters, words, or phrases that match the coded message. A cipher is much more complex, and it’s often the word people should be using when describing something that has been encrypted.”
“I knew that,” Bug said quietly.
“I didn’t,” said Rudy, “and I have no idea what you just said. What I want to know is what the Voynich manuscript is and how it relates to seven nuclear bombs.”
Circe blew out her cheeks. “Scholars have spent the last century trying to decipher the manuscript. How that relates, or how it helps… is anyone’s guess.”
Rudy stood and bent closer to the screens showing the two mystery pages. He looked back and forth between them, and then studied the Voynich pages. He grunted.
“What?” asked Circe.
“Well… I’m no handwriting expert,” he said slowly, “but I don’t think these other pages were written by the same person.”
Chapter Forty-Five
On the Run
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 10:59 a.m.
Mr. Church said run, so I ran.
When Church is so rattled by something that he freaks at me on the phone, then my own scare-o-meter starts burying the needle. I ran like a son of a bitch and put a lot of gone between me and the death house.
Three blocks away I cut down an alley behind an abandoned house. Once I was sure that the place was completely deserted, I broke in. Ghost was too weak to do much running, so I left him in the kitchen and quickly cleared the whole house. Six empty rooms, lots of junk, some bugs, a dead rat, and nothing else.