“Where have you been? It’s like you’re miles away. Hello…”
“I’m sorry. I’m probably still tired, as well as a little surprised by…well…by this.”
“Are you complaining?”
“No. Quite the opposite. I mean, it’s—”
“If you find my company too distracting, we can always go back to being platonic colleagues,” she offered.
“I’m not sure that would work,” Steven countered.
“It had better not.”
Steven didn’t know what else to say. There was a whole world he wanted to talk about, but at the same time, where did one start? He decided to punt it.
“Tell me more about you, Natalie. All the stuff you’ve been holding back. I’m curious.”
“I’d say you know me pretty well, by now,” she said, then took a sip of wine.
“Let’s see. First off, I don’t hop into the sack with every amateur cryptographer who plies me with cyphers. Let’s start with that. In fact, I can safely say you’re my first amateur cryptographer. In Italy. So far.”
Steven took that in, nodding. “I’m not in the habit of showering with every sexy damsel in distress who soaps up next to me,” Steven said.
“That’s reassuring. I’d hate to think I was just one in an endless line of naked bathing partners you lure to safe houses with lascivious intentions to have your way with.”
“Seriously, though. It’s been years since I had a…a relationship. Of that kind,” Steven admitted.
That put an effective end to the banter, although unintentionally. Steven felt awkward with the situation and was still fumbling his way through. Natalie seemed fine with that.
She took his arm as they meandered down the small winding footpaths that were the only connecting mechanism Venice had, beyond the canals. They made their way to Saint Mark’s Square — easily the most famous landmark in Venice. Once there, they watched several wizened old women feeding the pigeons on the massive plaza as dusk cast its final shadows over the long row of gondolas on the waterfront.
Natalie pulled Steven by the hand. “Let’s take a gondola ride. I’ve never done it, and who knows when I’ll be back in Venice again?” she pleaded.
Steven couldn’t think of a good reason not to, and soon they were meandering up the nearest canal. Natalie seemed delighted with the experience and leaned into Steven and kissed him as they cut through the dark water beneath the Bridge of Sighs. She looked deep into his eyes when they finally disengaged.
“It’ll all turn out okay, Steven. You’ll see. Everything.” Then she returned to kissing him.
They disembarked and made their way back to the car as night fell upon the city. Something important had changed between them, and Steven resolved to just let it unfold, without questioning it or forcing anything. He hadn’t signed up to be chased all over Italy, nor had he volunteered for a whirlwind romance, much less to be a hair away from solving one of history’s most enduring riddles. Attempting to steer things seemed like a waste of time. He’d simply float along and see where the tide took him. Hopefully, alive.
Once they were back at the house, Natalie had most of her clothes off by the time they made it down the hall, and Steven’s focus on completing the remainder of the decryption process was sidelined in favor of more pressing matters. The tablet would still be there in an hour, he figured, so he enthusiastically followed her to the bedroom, kicking the door shut behind him.
Steven sat at the dining room table, having retrieved the tablet from the garage, and was finishing his inputting. In the end, the encryption code was ingenious, and indecipherable absent the key. Some of the letters looked like they were formed by not just two contiguous glyphs, but in a number of cases by a glyph, a meaningless glyph, and then the second relevant glyph in the pairing. And to further complicate matters, if the whole relevant string was preceded with a certain character, it changed it from a letter, to nothing. It would be painstaking to go passage by passage, but there was no other way. Minutes turned into hours as he went character by character, until he finally had the Scroll decrypted — roughly a third of a page of letters which would presumably make sense when broken up appropriately into Latin words. Steven’s Latin was passable, but hardly fluent, and he couldn’t easily discern any meaning from the letter block.
Which was where his program came in handy. The first stage would be having it create the most likely words from the string, and then break those into likely sentences. He knew from past experience that could result in a host of false starts because the software wasn’t intuitive enough to know, if presented with five different possible words from the same six letters, which would have meaning in the context of the document, given the prior and following words. That was where Steven would earn his keep, and he knew that the paragraph could take hours to sort through all of the possible permutations.
The easiest way was to start with just the first letters and filter them into all possible words, assuming that they were in sequence and not randomly arranged. That, he could do with his program, but the likely accuracy decreased the longer the character string became. The earlier messages had been single sentences, making them far simpler and, even so, they’d taken an hour of processing time to group. This could take far longer. He absently wished he was a better coder, but there was no point in recriminations.
Stretching his arms over his head, he resigned himself to practicing patience. He clicked the begin button after configuring for Latin, as well as French, Italian and Spanish — just in case — and watched as the familiar ‘in-process’ window popped up and the light signaling the hard disk was being hit flickered on and off.
Natalie softly approached from the bedroom wearing one of his T-shirt and shorts ensembles; she stood behind him, her hands on his shoulders.
“What do you think?” she asked softly.
He reached back and put his hand over one of hers.
“It’ll take a while. No way of knowing how long. There are a lot of variables to compare, and I’m having it try to create meaningful sentences, not just random words. Words wouldn’t take that long. And I’m doing it in several languages. It’s probably Latin, but I don’t want to assume anything,” Steven explained. “What do we do once we know it?”
“I don’t really have a plan, Steven. But it seems to me that the only leverage we have is whatever the Scroll is hiding. If we don’t have that, we’re worm food.” She thought about it. “I just can’t imagine any medieval secret worth killing over. And knowing whatever it is won’t bring my father back, so I’m not sure how it’s going to help, beyond that we have it.”
“Don’t you think there’s even more of a chance that the Order and Frank will want to kill us if they think we know it?” Steven asked.
“You mean more than they’re already trying to kill us? How can they kill us more than once, even if they want to?”
Score one for Natalie.
“With any luck, soon we’re going to know whatever it is, so it’ll be time to formulate some kind of strategy. Maybe the best solution will be to disappear and start life over somewhere new,” Steven mused.
“I’m not sure they’ll ever give up hunting for us. This is priority number one for the Order. I doubt they’ll drop it because it’s been a few months since we surfaced,” she said.
“That’s a crummy way to live. Always looking over your shoulder. Trust me, I know,” Steven admitted.