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…12th 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 13th and early 14th 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.”
TWENTY-ONE
“King, this is Irish, over.”
In the front seat of the rented Ford Galaxy minivan, King keyed his throat mic. “This is King. Send it.”