‘Latin changed over time,’ Stephen Taverner explained, ‘like all languages. The classical Latin alphabet had only twenty-three letters, and all but two of those were derived from the earlier Etruscan alphabet, but during the Middle Ages the letters “j”, “u” and “w” were added, and that gave us the same twenty-six letters that are used today in English and form the basis of most other European languages. We have no idea if this inscription contains the full character set, because not one of those letters is carved into the rock, so if it is written in Latin, we have no idea of the approximate date. If there had been a “w”, for example, that would have told us it had to be late mediaeval.’
‘So what do you think the encryption is?’ Bronson said.
‘Perhaps Atbash — it’s a really early form of cipher, allegedly used by Julius Caesar. Basically, you just write out the letters of the alphabet in a horizontal line, then write out the reversed alphabet directly below it, so that “z” is under “a” and “y” is under “b”, and so on. In order to encrypt your message, all you do is write down the plaintext and then substitute the letters from the reversed alphabet. The obvious problem is that you always end up with nonsense, so it’s immediately apparent to anyone seeing it that the message must be encrypted. The other problem is that if you apply frequency analysis to the message — there are certain letters that occur much more frequently than others in every language — you can probably work out some of the plaintext letters fairly quickly.’
‘But if everybody knows that Atbash just uses the reversed alphabet, then presumably anybody could translate the message about two minutes after they’d realized that it was enciphered. Or am I missing something?’ Bronson sounded puzzled.
‘You are,’ Stephen said, ‘but not a lot. That’s basic Atbash, but there were refinements, most of which involved picking a different letter of the alphabet underneath which you would start the reversed alphabet, so that instead of “z” going under “a”, for example, it might appear under “m” or “p”. And of course, the second alphabet need not necessarily be reversed, or perhaps the person encrypting the message could reverse only half the alphabet. The result would still be gibberish, the ciphertext, I mean, but fiddling about with the cipher like that would create a huge range of different possibilities for the decoding.’
‘Right, I understand all that,’ Bronson said, ‘but you haven’t answered the other obvious question.’
Neither Stephen nor Angela responded, so he ploughed on.
‘If you’re assuming that the people who wrote that inscription were Marsh Arabs or a similar group that lived way out in the bundu at the southern end of Iraq about half a millennium ago, why did they use Latin? Presumably they would have spoken Arabic or some local language. So why did they use Latin for this inscription? Was it a kind of lingua franca in those days? Or at least a written lingua franca?’
‘Now that,’ Angela said slowly, ‘is a very good question. Their lingua franca, most probably, would actually have been Arabic, and I wouldn’t have expected very many people in that part of the world to be able to either read or speak Latin during the time period that we’re talking about. So I have no idea why whoever carved the inscription chose that language.’
‘You’re right,’ Stephen said. ‘It really doesn’t make any sense.’
Bronson switched his gaze from Angela to the man in the back seat and then to Angela again.
‘Well, it does make sense in one context,’ he said.
‘What context?’ Angela asked.
‘The message contained in the inscription has got to be important. Or, to be absolutely accurate, it must have been important when it was written, although it might be completely meaningless now, of course. If it wasn’t important, there would have been no point in encrypting it, obviously.’
‘Yes, obviously.’ Angela sounded rather testy. ‘I thought we’d already established that. What’s your point?’
‘The point, as I see it, is that you have a mysterious inscription not only written in Latin — or at least that’s what you think — but in encrypted Latin and hidden away under the desert in Iraq. From what you’ve told me, it’s quite likely that almost nobody who used that temple, not even the priest, would have been able to read it. So it seems to be fairly obvious that the inscription wasn’t meant to be understood by the people who worshipped in the temple. Perhaps it was intended to be read by somebody else entirely.’
4
‘Is this what you expected, Khaled?’ Farooq asked.
He and the man in the white suit were standing side by side in the underground chamber, the powerful arc lights switched on and casting a pitiless white light that illuminated every corner of the space. Faintly, in the background, they could hear the throb of the petrol generator that was supplying the power.
Khaled stared at the carved inscription, nodding slowly. ‘We will need to decipher this, but I have no doubt at all it will provide the information we need to track down the relic.’
‘But you can’t know that for certain,’ Farooq pointed out reasonably, ‘until you have decoded the inscription.’
In Farooq’s case, appearances were more than slightly deceptive. He looked and dressed like the leader of a gang of terrorists, which to all intents and purposes he was, but he was also a highly educated man, possessing two separate degrees from a Middle Eastern university. And he was, just like Osama bin Laden — the man who had first inspired him to take up arms in the service of radical Islam — the product of a wealthy and respected Saudi Arabian family. Khaled, who also had two degrees — and a doctorate — was by no stretch of the imagination a man of violence, though he was more than capable of ordering it when necessary. As such he treated Farooq as an equal.
‘This is my business, Farooq, and I have been waiting for something like this to be discovered somewhere in this area for the last two decades. I know that we can’t read the inscription — yet — but the fact that the inscription exists at all, and in such close proximity to that face’ — he pointed at the carving above the altar at the other end of the room — ‘tells me that I’m right.’
He reached into his pocket and took out a compact but high-resolution camera. He aimed it at the carved inscription and snapped about a dozen photographs, checking each image in the camera’s viewing screen after he had taken it.
Then he and Farooq climbed up the aluminium ladder back to the surface. Khaled strode over to the jeep in which he’d arrived, opened the rear door and sat down on the seat. Positioned right in the middle of the rear bench seat was a leather computer case, which he unzipped. He took out a slim laptop computer, opened it and pressed the power button. While he was waiting for the operating system to load, he slid open the memory card slot on the camera and pulled out the data card. He slid the card into the card reader on the laptop and examined the photographs that he had taken. He was only interested in the clarity of the images, and checked each one carefully to make sure that every piece, every single letter, of the inscription was clearly visible.
He copied the images on to the laptop’s hard disk, but didn’t delete them from the camera’s data card, and then made a further backup copy on to a separate memory stick that he put in one of the pockets of his jacket. That gave him three separate and identical copies of the images, so even if some catastrophe resulted in both the computer and the camera being lost or destroyed, he would still have one copy left.