‘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.
CHAPTER 26
1194, Kirklees Priory, Yorkshire
They found the graveyard towards the rear of the priory, a sombre space occupied by only a half dozen stones and a dozen wooden crosses on which hungry beetle-black crows perched, studying the frosted white ground for signs of a meal.
A recent grave marked only by a long hump of turned soil and a simple wooden cross indicated the most recently deceased person to be buried in this place was not considered worthy of a piece of inscribed masonry.
In the pale grey light they hunkered down beside each grave in turn and noted the names. Eventually, to Liam’s relief, they found Haskette’s grave beside a small oak sapling that had pushed hopefully upwards for sunlight and rustled gently in the bitter cold breeze. The grave was marked by a three-foot-high block of pale granite, the name and year of death chiselled roughly, clearly not by a trained artisan but presumably by one of the Cistercian monks.
‘Recommendation: we should inscribe no more than the symbol for an “L” to indicate you have located the stone,’ said Bob. Liam nodded. He was right — best to carve no more than was absolutely necessary. ‘Uh … did anyone think to bring a chisel?’
‘Negative.’
He cursed then looked around. There had to be something they could improvise with. But he could see nothing out here but withered grass and nettles, frost-stiff and frozen-hard soil peppered with discarded flakes of worked stone and flint.