‘Who dares wins,’ he whispered.
That’s the spirit.
He’d noted which archway they’d come out of. The fifth one along. He waited until the others had turned out of the backstreet and east to head into Brooklyn before he tossed the paper cup of bland coffee he’d been holding on to into a litter bin and took a first tentative step across the pedestrian walkway towards the dirty little backstreet.
‘Here we go,’ he whispered.
Maddy heard the shutter door rattle as someone lightly tapped on it from outside. One of them must have forgotten something. She got up from the office chair and crossed the floor. Rubbing her eyes tiredly, she punched the green button and let the shutter clatter up to knee height before ducking down.
‘What did you forg-?’
She looked up and saw a tall, tanned and well-groomed man in a very expensive-looking suit. He removed a pair of designer shades and smiled. ‘Uh … hi,’ he said with an English accent and a small self-conscious wave.
‘Excuse me?’ she said. ‘Can I help you?’
He smiled. ‘You and I, we, uh … met some years ago.’
Maddy frowned. Confused for a moment. ‘I don’t think so.’ Then she realized there was something about his face that looked vaguely familiar.
He shrugged. ‘I think I looked quite a bit different then. Long scruffy dreadlocks, pretty bad zits … and, if I recall correctly, I had a beard — if you can call it that. I don’t think you caught me at my best.’ He smiled, a handsome expression on his lean sculpted face. ‘But you,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘quite incredible! You don’t seem to have changed one bit.’
Her eyes widened with surprise. She suddenly recognized him. ‘Oh my God!’ she whispered. ‘You’re … you’re that young — ’
‘Adam Lewis,’ he said, squatting down to face her on the level. He offered his hand.
‘How did you …’ Her jaw flapped uselessly.
‘How did I find you?’
She nodded.
He reached for the inside pocket of the well-tailored pinstriped jacket and pulled out a leather wallet. ‘I’ve kept this safe in here, you know, all these years. And every now and then, I pull it out and look at it, just to remind myself that I wasn’t going mad. That I didn’t imagine that night.’ He pulled out a frayed and faded corner of paper and held it in the palm of his hand. ‘It’s a little bit of litter you left by mistake in my room.’
She could just make out the name of the club they’d been to last night. ‘I dropped that?’
He nodded.
He looked up at the clear blue sky and sighed. ‘I do believe, back in 1994, you promised to come back and tell me what the message was all about. So … how did you get on with finding out the truth? Finding out what Pandora means?’
‘Oh boy.’ She looked up and down the street. ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’
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.’