The Voynich Cypher Read online

  But that wasn’t his nature. Steven had already retired once, after selling his original company while in his late thirties, only to discover that his personality required more stimulation than endless napping. After a brief but deadly dalliance with the U.S. stock market and a whirlwind education on the lethal factions that congregated wherever big money circulated, he’d switched his interest to the internet – at a time when social media was coming into its own.

  That had ultimately resulted in his current venture, which was precariously close to a real job. The company was supposed to run itself, but he was still inexorably sucked into the day-to-day operations far more than he liked.

  And he still had his hobby. The challenges involved in cryptography had grown from being light entertainment to borderline obsession. He’d spent countless hours working on medieval and Renaissance cyphers, and had gone so far as to write several programs for tracking character repetition and analyzing coded messages. Many of his weekends had involved trips to ferret-out original parchments, hundreds of years old, written in the cyphers that were fairly common from the twelfth through eighteenth century. Steven didn’t get to spend as much time as he would have liked on it these days, what with the company seemingly going through one operational emergency or another, but he still took at least two days a week to work on his ‘projects’, as Antonia called them.

  Which was why he was going to miss the party of the century, or at least, of this year, near Venice.

  He’d been courting an octogenarian antique and rare parchment dealer from Bologna; his intention was to buy the man’s private collection of parchments, some of which were the stuff of rumor – scrolls from Morocco, thirteenth through fifteenth century England, Italy, France, and even some older works from Greece. These were museum pieces, rare and unseen, and would make perfect additions to Steven’s growing collection. They’d been in the old man’s possession for eons, many of them passed down from his father, who had also been in the business as well as being a counselor on rare documents to such entities as the Romanoffs at the turn of the 20th Century. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Steven, although he knew that the truly valuable works would have long ago been committed to heavyweight private collectors from Russia and China. Still, this man’s table scraps were probably as intriguing as the most highly-touted finds in the Italian trade, and Steven was anxious to seal a deal.

  Steven checked his watch, a platinum Lange & Sohne perpetual calendar Antonia had gotten him as a forty-second birthday gift. He walked back into the house; his meeting wasn’t until five o’clock that evening but he was impatient to view the old man’s trove.

  After a few minutes wandering aimlessly through the empty rooms, he resolved to go into Florence for a few hours to work out at his favorite Dojo. Steven’s fascination with martial arts was still as strong as ever, and even though he was an adept in most of the disciplines, he loved the ritual of performing his workout. He patted his stomach – after eating Italian food for the last three years, he needed every opportunity for exercise he could get.

  He packed a messenger bag with his Gi and a towel, then strode to the small stand-alone garage, which was crammed full of the junk he and Antonia had collected during their years together. After a few moments, Steven emerged pushing a battered Vespa motor-scooter – the ubiquitous transportation in the region – and struggled with the kick-start. On the fourth try it rattled to life and, after revving the motor a few times, Steven settled onto the cracked vinyl seat and made for Florence in a cloud of blue exhaust.

  Antonia loved the feel of the wind in her hair as she sped north on the highway that wound its way through the Italian countryside. She’d left the house just after 12:45 and, allowing for traffic and the odd unforeseen fuel and rest stop, she figured she could make it to Dante’s house by 5 p.m.. The little Audi convertible’s top was seldom up except when they went into Florence, and one of her guilty pleasures was to feel the sun warm on her face as she drove, admittedly far too fast, to one of her favorite places on the planet: Venice.

  Even now, she felt the city possessed a majesty she’d never found anywhere else. True, it could get unpleasantly crowded with tourists in the spring and summer, but so could most of the larger cities in Italy. It was a necessary evil, and one she could deal with, especially if she was just visiting. She enjoyed the quiet of the country life she and Steven had together in Greve, but there was nothing like the magic of Venice to get the juices flowing.

  Her mind wandered to the miracle that was their life together as she rolled through the hills – it really was a dream come true. She loved Steven deeply and completely, and she knew he would do anything for her – he’d more than proved that. And it was perfect that they’d turned the old farmhouse they’d bought into a rambling, Tuscan classic, lovingly renovating it while adding all the modern conveniences they both appreciated. It was large for the two of them – but they would soon need the space: only this morning she’d discovered, via the miracle of modern drugstore products, that she was pregnant.

  Antonia had been so excited she’d repeated the test – both times had registered positive. There was no doubt. She’d wanted to tell Steven, but had composed herself and resolved to sit down with him once she returned – she knew enough about men that you didn’t just announce you were going to have a family and then hit the road to a party. This was a serious step; one they’d discussed, but it had never seemed like exactly the right time…eh, well, it’s the right time now, no?

  After all they’d been through together, after she’d almost died in his arms, to create a life together – and see both of themselves in their baby's eyes – was almost too much to hope for. The circle of life was complete. They were safe, secure, healthy, prosperous, and Steven would be a perfect father…

  Antonia was lost in her thoughts as she wound her way through the slopes north of Barberino de Mugello. As she twisted down the tortuous mountain highway her fuel light blinked and then illuminated. Damn. She’d forgotten to fill up. No matter, there was a station in a few miles, she was sure. Antonia passed a tanker truck making its way cautiously down the steep incline; as she swerved around it, she nearly collided with an old pickup that was barely crawling – in the fast lane, of course. She stomped on her brakes to avoid crashing into it, but the pedal went to the floor without any resistance. She slalomed around the pickup, nearly slamming through the guardrail, and checked her speedometer – 92 MPH. Her mind racing, Antonia downshifted, and the car gradually slowed. At least she could use the transmission to brake – it was just her luck that something would go wrong on a Saturday, when most mechanics were closed for the weekend.

  Antonia pushed the thought aside. She could make arrangements once she’d found a gas station. At worst, she could have Dante send a car for her. It would be annoying and inconvenient, but sometimes that was how life was.

  She downshifted again, slowing the little car to 60 MPH, then 50, and pulled off at the exit she thought led to a fuel station. She coasted along and glanced to her right – she could make out a service station sign through the olive trees. At least that’s what it looked like – she couldn’t be sure, but she thought it must be. She studied the map on her in-console GPS, looking for the icon that signified a fuel stop. Aha! She was right. There was one an eighth of a mile away.

  Temporarily engrossed with the GPS, by the time Antonia registered the overloaded semi-rig hurtling down the frontage road at her, it was too late to do anything but scream. She instinctively pumped her non-functional brakes, and then, instantly realizing her mistake, tried to accelerate.

  She almost made it.

  Antonia only had a split second before the massive truck rammed sideways into her little roadster, crushing it like a soda can. Her final thoughts were that it was too soon, that it wasn’t fair, and that the precious life inside her would never see the light of day.

  Then everything went black.

  Steven pulled back into the driveway of his home,
his impatience and anxiety at the upcoming meeting with the rare parchment dealer blunted by the physical exertion from his martial arts workout. He checked his watch and realized he only had twenty minutes to prepare for his guest.

  He threw open the front door, tossed his bag onto the entryway hall table and hurried to the bedroom, stripping off his damp top as he went. He grabbed a button-up shirt and a pair of khaki pants from the closet, and cranked the handles on the shower, knowing it would take a couple of minutes for the water to reach a comfortable temperature. The plumbing of the old house had been a continual source of annoyance and was next on their list of items to be redone – they’d been holding off on it because they wanted to be gone when the floors and walls were gutted to replace the ancient pipes. As with most projects in Italy, what should take two weeks would inevitably take two months, so one had to get used to it and become resigned to the reality of the pace of the country.

  Steven stepped under the stream of tepid water and quickly and efficiently rinsed himself clean. He heard the sound of a car moving up the drive as he exited and hurriedly dried off, ran a comb through his hair, and pulled on the shirt and slacks. He was still tucking in his shirt when the front knocker sounded the early arrival of his guest.

  Steven opened the door and greeted the old man, who stood outside the entryway clutching a battered metal toolbox to his chest. Behind him was a new Peugeot sedan with a lanky driver leaning against the front fender, a cigarette dangling from his lips as he scanned a newspaper he’d brought for diversion.

  Steven welcomed the dealer into his study and moved the accumulated books from his large rectangular table, making space to examine the ancient man’s trove. The old man carefully placed the box on one edge of the workspace and opened the top before removing five parchments, each lovingly ensconced in a clear plastic sheath for protection. Steven studied each hand-crafted treasure in turn. All were obviously genuine and very old. The first was a Greek document from approximately 800 A.D., and the following four were from the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. All the documents were written in cyphers, which was why Steven was interested – his collection was exclusively encrypted parchments from the seventeenth century and earlier, with a preponderance of work originating from Italy and England.

  Steven spent a half hour discussing the various parchments with the dealer, all of which had been in his family’s custody for several centuries. The initial asking price was multiples higher than what Steven had calculated the true value to be, which was not unexpected. He invited the wizened dealer into the dining room to partake of some vintage port, and they sipped the seventy-year-old wine with approval as they negotiated back and forth. Eventually, they arrived at a price both could live with – considerably more than Steven had hoped, but still within reason. Delighted that he’d struck a bargain so quickly, he ducked back into his study and wrote a check for the dealer, who exchanged the toolbox of parchments for the payment.

  Their business concluded, Steven bade the old gentleman farewell and walked him to his car, where the driver was still standing in the same position as when they entered the house – the only giveaway of the passage of time, the seven cigarette stubs collected around his feet. Steven and the dealer said their goodbyes by the side of the vehicle, which were cut short by the jangling of the phone in the kitchen. Steven waved at them and sprinted back to the house, but the phone had gone silent by the time he reached it.

  That was sort of how his whole day had gone – he felt like he’d been running a few minutes late since he’d woken with Antonia an hour past their usual time. He returned to his study and surveyed the parchments, ruminating over which one he would begin to decrypt first. The phone started ringing again. This time he made it into the kitchen by the fourth ring and snatched the handset from the cradle of the heavy mid-Seventies base station.

  Outside, the olive trees stirred in the careless breeze as the day’s warm light faded. The flocculent clouds drifted lazily across the mackerel sky as the sun made way for the encroaching night. It was an idyllic dusk in the valley, a thing of tour book photos, travel brochures and chocolate boxes.

  Inside the house, the telephone handset clattered to the floor, and an otherworldly moan echoed around the rustic stone walls; an animal sound of raw, tortured pain.

  CHAPTER 3

  Present Day, Palm Desert, California

  Winston Twain glumly regarded the phone on his desk, which was nearly completely blanketed with papers, reference books, and two laptops. He groaned out loud and then noisily slurped at a cup of Earl Grey tea before he resumed studying a letter addressed to him by Dr. Steven Cross. He appraised the concise script with approval and nodded to himself. He’d just gotten around to studying a note Cross had sent him about a working theory on the Voynich Manuscript: an obscure document from the Middle Ages written entirely in an indecipherable code – a code that Twain had dedicated himself to trying to decrypt for the past thirty years.

  The study’s screen door moved slightly as a light wind hummed through the room. Twain wheeled around and looked out at the desert night as the door once again settled into place. Twain had lived all over the world, but swore by the Coachella Valley and the surrounding desert, only a two hour drive from Los Angeles. The sun had long since set over the mountains that jutted eleven thousand feet into the sky, and Twain was burning the midnight oil, as was his custom. It was the perfect time of year in Palm Springs – late May – when the temperature rarely deviated from ninety-three degrees at the height of day, dropping into the sixties at night. He preferred the tranquility of night for contemplation and rarely slept more than five hours now that he was of a certain age, which afforded him ample time for his projects as the rest of California slept.

  Twain wheeled his chair around and, again, considered his desk and the materials of a lifetime scattered across the top of it. Most of the area was occupied by a high-resolution copy of his fascination – the Voynich Manuscript – which, in loosely strewn unbound form, covered every inch of a work surface in desperate need of reorganization.

  Lost and rediscovered through the centuries, the Voynich was a seemingly innocuous hand-printed and illustrated series of chapters – quires – written in a cypher that had rebuffed the efforts of the best minds in the cryptology field. While it was, at a cursory glance, apparently devoted to equal parts herbalism and astronomy, the actual text remained a mystery. The odd-looking volume was entirely written in an unknown language using unfamiliar symbols. Page after page, quire after quire.

  Early 20th century theories had speculated that it was gibberish, an elaborate hoax, but later analysis confirmed that the character repetition and sequencing was too symmetrical to be a hoax language. The oddly-formed calligraphy and seemingly fantastical illustrations had confounded the best efforts of the best in the field, maddeningly keeping its secrets through the ages.

  The original of the Voynich had long been on display at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University and was, in fact, the most popular document in the collection. It continued to be a subject of rabid fascination for many cryptologists, as it had been ever since it had been made public by Polish-born antique book dealer, Wilfred Voynich, in 1912. As with several of his colleagues, deciphering the Voynich had become a lifelong obsession for Twain; its pull was just as strong as when he was a young officer returning from the Korean War. His specialty had been code-breaking for the military, so it was almost inevitable that he would be drawn to the most notorious riddle in cryptography. But what had begun as a conviction that he’d be able to crack it in a matter of months gradually became a multi-decade odyssey of twists and false starts. He’d grown sadly accustomed to illusive progress transforming into dead-ends, with any forward movement ultimately resulting in him being slammed into a brick wall, no closer to a solution than at first.

  Cross had formulated an interesting theory – one that Twain himself had considered before discarding as non-disprovable, and therefore us
eless as the basis of a scientific hypothesis, but he wanted to understand how an amateur like Cross had arrived at such a complicated and innovative conclusion. The level of reasoning required to reach it was significantly more advanced than anything he’d come across in recent memory. It had impressed him by virtue of its brash brilliance.

  Ah, well, Twain thought. This Dr. Steven Cross was not even part of the formal cryptology community – he wasn’t a member of any of the professional organizations, and he’d never published; the call had been made primarily as a courtesy on Twain’s part – because he was in a good mood. A good mood indeed because today, after what he’d just acquired, the world would soon be turned on its head.

  The Voynich Manuscript had never been closer to being deciphered – by him, Winston Twain – since its creation.

  A noise made Twain turn – the back door to his garden study had swung open.

  “Hello, who’s there?” Twain called out. “Natalie, is that you?”

  Silence.

  “Hello?”

  He peered down the dark hall to the back porch and was about to dismiss his premonition when he detected motion at the edge of his awareness. Twain’s eyes widened in horror as a hulking figure stepped from behind an antique armoire.

  “Good morning, Professor Twain,” the huge, hirsute man named Sia Amieri said, in a hoarse, heavily-accented whisper that was almost inaudible. “We need to talk.”

  Twain’s pupils dilated to the size of pinheads.

  He swallowed with difficulty – he knew what a visit from the menacing giant meant, and he understood instantly that this was going to be the last day of his life.