Was Semper Vigilans Accipite Armaturam Dei the message? Was it a keyword cipher Tyndale used to encrypt his correspondence? Was this the mystery La Cobra and El Tigre had tried to unlock or was there something more to this book?
Enough questions to keep Zack Cole busy for a good long while.
Just the way he liked it.
Epilogue
May 9, 2012, 2:00 a.m.
Williamsburg, New York
In his own soft, warm bed Zack could rest a little easier. He hadn’t slept much in the past week. Well, now that he thought about it, he hadn’t slept at all.
After delivering the Bible to Father Giovanni in Chicago, Zack had stayed an additional three days, working with the father to learn everything they could about the rare text.
Who had owned the book? How did it get to Guatemala? How long had it been at Father Ferguson’s church?
With the help of Sister Grace, they were able to trace its history to the mid-nineteenth-century when an unknown benefactor donated it to the church. That’s where the documentation ended.
Sometimes that’s how these types of discoveries went—you solve one mystery and you’re left with more questions than answers.
But the Bible was safe and it would make a great exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Biblical Antiquities. What Zack needed now was some sleep, a shower, and a good meal that didn’t have rice or beans in it. But he’d settle for sleep first.
He forced out a yawn and was asleep seconds after his head hit the pillow.
Less than ten minutes later, Zack’s cell phone rang, waking him from a deep sleep.
Groggily, he opened his eyes and grabbed his phone. Who could be calling at this hour? His mind raced with growing urgency to get into gear.
He turned on the bedside table lamp and answered the phone.
“Did I wake you?” a deep voice asked.
“Father Giovanni? It’s two a.m. I was just catching up on some sleep.”
“You’ll want to be awake for this.”
His bleary eyes started to focus. “Is everything okay?”
“Everything is fine. Better than fine . . . everything is great.”
He could hear the excitement in the father’s voice. “What’s so great that it couldn’t wait until morning?” he asked.
“I’m sorry for calling so late. I just got off the phone with the British Library.”
“They’re just now getting back to you? It’s been three days.” Zack was finally awake and sitting on the edge of the bed. “Does their copy have manicules in the margins?”
“It does and on the same folios as our copy and pointing to the same lines.”
“That is great news. Thanks for calling.”
“Wait! I haven’t told you the best part yet.”
“There’s more?”
“You know I love saving the best for last.”
“Did they figure out what Semper Vigilans Accipite Armaturam Dei means?”
“Better.”
Zack could sense the father smiling through the phone. “Well, what is it?”
“How much do you know about the history of the British Library?”
“I know the library of the British Museum was established in the mid-1700s,” Zack answered, “and in 1973 the British Library was established as a separate organization. But what’s that have to do with—”
“I’m getting to that.” The father interrupted. Zack could hear Father Giovanni flipping through pages of notes. “Did you know in 1757, King George II presented the museum with nearly two thousand manuscripts that had previously belonged to his predecessors?”
“Yes. It was called the Royal Library.”
“That’s correct. Did you also know four hundred of those manuscripts belonged to King Henry VIII?”
Zack leaned forward, his hands twisting together. “I did not know that part.”
“I spoke with Dr. Peter Younghusband, curator of the British and Early Printed Collections, and he said King Henry’s manuscripts contained an ‘unusual’ collection of handwritten documents.”
Zack stood and paced the room. This is getting interesting. “Unusual in what way?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
“Care to take a guess?”
“Coded messages?”
“Exactly!”
“But why haven’t I ever heard of these documents?”
“The Library originally thought they may have been messages sent to King Henry from his spies. Another theory involved King Henry’s first wife Catherine of Aragon. She had learned the art of cryptography and used to write in ciphers. Either way, no one had been able to break the code and they were basically forgotten. They’ve been sitting on some shelf at the Historical Manuscripts Commission since the late 1800s.”
Zack took a moment to let this sink in. “How did Dr. Younghusband know about them?”
“He worked at The National Archives when it merged with the Historical Manuscripts Commission in 2003. He was in charge of their sixteenth through nineteenth-century archives. When he heard about the message we discovered in the Tyndale Bible and our theory, he acted on a hunch. Dr. Younghusband and his team are starting to piece together a new theory. He now believes they are messages sent to and from Tyndale and intercepted by the King’s spies and bounty hunters.”
Goosebumps traveled across Zack body. This is what he loved about biblical archaeology . . . pieces of history—like these messages—that you don’t read about in any school book. The secrets buried by the sands of time. The world was bursting with them, and they were just begging to be found, their stories pleading to be told. “Please tell me, they were able to decipher the text,” he asked, unable to bear another moment.
“They’re off to a good start. Our original assumption seems correct. Semper Vigilans Accipite Armaturam Dei is a keyword used in a complex form of a polyalphabetic substitution cipher.”
“Like a Vigenère cipher?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, that explains why nobody ever deciphered the messages. The Vigenère cipher was thought to be unbreakable up until the mid-1800s.”
“Dr. Younghusband believes this is how Tyndale communicated with his supporters and how he was able to elude King Henry’s men for more than ten years.”
“How sure is he that these messages are to and from Tyndale?”
“He’s positive. One of the last messages is a warning to Tyndale about Henry Phillips’ betrayal.”
“Tyndale’s friend that turned him in to the authorities?”
“Correct. It’s a warning Tyndale obviously never received.”
“Wow! This is incredible news,” Zack said. “But we still don’t know why La Víbora thought the Bible had some magical power.”
“No, but this discovery does shed a whole new light on Tyndale’s life and wouldn’t have been possible without you.”
“Without us.” Zack corrected the father. He thought of those who had lost their lives, either helping him or trying to stop him. “Don’t forget Father Ferguson’s contribution. He discovered the Bible . . . and the title page. He deserves the real credit.”
“Of course, of course. We should give thanks to the Lord, and say a prayer for everyone who had anything to do with its safe return.”
“Amen to that.”
“Get some rest, Zack. I’ll keep you posted on Dr. Younghusband’s findings.”
“Thank you, Father, but I don’t think I’ll be getting much rest with this news.”
The father chuckled and hung up.
Zack got back into bed. Next to him, in the dim light of the one lamp on his bedside table, several leather-bound journals waited for his attention. His grandfather had always written with a strong hand, and a kind of prose that made the pages of his archaeological entries easy and entertaining to read.
There had been something in them that had captured his attention, just before the whole ordeal in Guatemala had come his way. Something about the Norse Greenlanders and an ancient legen
d his grandfather had chased for a time.
His eyes drooped, and sleep finally came.
Tomorrow would be soon enough for more adventures.
* * *
Thank you for reading The Tyndale Code! Want to know as soon as my next book is available? Sign up for my new release newsletter.
Ready for Zack’s next adventure? Grab your copy of The Codex today or turn the page for a short excerpt.
The Codex Excerpt
An ancient legend . . . A bizarre weather phenomenon . . . A forgotten civilization . . . Some things are better left undiscovered.
When an extreme weather condition causes parts of the Greenland ice sheet to melt, archaeologist Zack Cole is determined to join the race of professionals and amateur alike, to find uncovered history and treasure.
He’s got the knowledge. He’s got the money. He’s even got the equipment. Now about those permits . . .
Zack turns to his old friend, Father Salvatore Giovanni, curator of the Chicago Museum of Biblical Antiquities to back his expedition. He says yes, with one condition . . . Researcher, Sydney Langtry is coming with him to protect the museum’s interests.
Plunged together into an icy world of death and darkness, Zack and Sydney make a discovery that will rock the Biblical and archaeological community. But will they make it out alive to share their discovery?
Continue reading and find out . . .
Chapter 1
July 2012
Chicago, Illinois
“I’m telling you, Father, we’ll never have another opportunity like this!”
Zack Cole sat on the edge of a stuffed leather chair across from Father Salvatore Giovanni, curator of the Chicago Museum of Biblical Antiquities.
The father sat behind his large rectangular desk and regarded Zack with calm, clinical interest. At sixty-two years old the father was twice Zack’s age and carried himself with an air of someone with a lifetime of experience under his belt. The Jesuit priest’s colleagues knew him as Sal, but Zack never felt comfortable addressing the older man by his given name and still chose to address him by his title.
“Let me get this right,” Father Giovanni said, in a tone of voice that tried not to be sarcastic. “You want me to finance an expedition to Greenland on a hunch and a whim?”
“Well Father,” Zack tried to decide how best to put it, “not you personally. I’d like the museum to finance an archaeological expedition to Greenland. This is a once in a lifetime chance.”
Zack was the chief technology officer of a small Internet startup company. That was his official day job. The job he reported to the IRS. His real passion was archaeology. Thanks to a substantial inheritance he’d received when his parents passed away and a few subsequent Internet investments, Zack didn’t need to work for a living. His money worked for him, and he could do pretty much what he pleased. Yet all the money in the world wouldn’t open some diplomatic doors. Some countries only allowed institutions to apply for archaeological research permits. And Greenland was one of those countries.
Zack hated bureaucratic red tape and preferred to do things under the radar. But going without an institution’s backing wasn’t always the wisest choice. So that was where his friend, Father Giovanni, came in. He and Zack were the types of friends who could turn to each other when one of them needed a favor. Father Giovanni had been a colleague of Zack’s grandfather, Archie Cole, a well-known archaeologist. He was also one of the few people Zack trusted in the Biblical antiquities business.
Right now, Father Giovanni sat staring at Zack, his fingers drumming the top of his desk. The color of the dark wooden desk matched the dark paneling in the room, the richly grained bookcases, and all the other furniture. This office was a dark space, meant for academics. Father Giovanni fit right in. He was an academic, not an adventurer. For adventures, he depended on people like Zack.
Finally, he stopped tapping his fingers and began opening the drawers of his desk one at a time, looking for something, and taking his sweet time about it. From the last drawer on the bottom left side, Father Giovanni took out a stack of old academic journals. Zack recognized a few of the titles, and there were even a few that Father Giovanni had published in.
The father opened the top journal and leafed through it, coming to the end of it in a drawn-out fashion, and then opened the next one and started over, leafing page by page.
As he sat there waiting, Zack glanced around the room. There were a lot of pieces in here that didn’t make it out to the public exhibits. There was a framed letter from John Quincy Adams to his son on the teachings of the Bible, an assortment of Roman coins from the second and third centuries, and other odds and ends. The father’s desk was just as cluttered as his office, with file folders and paperwork and photo frames . . .
Zack’s gaze wandered over the desk until something caught his eye. He leaned in closer and picked up a silver picture frame peering at one of the faces within with a rising interest. “Who’s this?” he asked.
Father Giovanni looked up from his search through the articles. “That is my niece, Sydney. She works in the research department here. You wouldn’t know her.”
“I didn’t know you had a niece.” Zack squinted at the picture. The woman in it had her arms wrapped around Father Giovanni. She was a little shorter than him, and her green eyes offset her chocolate brown hair, which was cut in a neat, short bob. Her face was dotted with freckles that made her look even younger than she probably was. “She’s . . .” Zack restrained himself from saying something inappropriate. “Cute.”
“If you don’t mind,” Father Giovanni cleared his throat and took the photo frame out of Zack’s hands, replacing it on the desk facing away from Zack.
“Just curious, Father.”
“Don’t be.”
Zack sat back in his seat and waited as Father Giovanni acted like he hadn’t been at all worried about Zack staring at his niece.
“Here it is,” the father finally said, pointing to an article on a page in the middle of one of the journals. “This is an article about Knud Rasmussen, a Danish polar explorer. You may have heard of him. He spent his life exploring Greenland. Know what he found there? A large amount of nothing.”
“I know that, Father. I read his book, Across Arctic America. He did some great work, but that was back in the 1920s, before the entire surface of Greenland’s ice sheet had turned to slush.”
When Zack had heard the news, he couldn’t believe it. A week ago NASA revealed that ninety-seven percent of the ice sheets surface had melted—an event that only happens once every one hundred years.
Part of the ice sheet that had covered Greenland for as long as anyone could remember was gone. In a world plagued by above-average temperatures and global warming, this was still unusual—the ice had melted away in a matter of just a few days. In coastal areas miles of ice—gone. And underneath it, virgin territory.
“You know it melted away once before back in the late 1800s, don’t you?” Father Giovanni reminded him.
“Not like this. Not to this extent. And not on the east coast.”
“What makes you so sure you’ll even find anything?”
“My grandfather didn’t plan expeditions on whims. You know that. If he thought something was there I’ll find it. All I know is we need to be first, or whatever is there will go to someone else.”
That caught Father Giovanni’s attention. For a man in his position, letting someone else get anywhere first was a bad thing. “Do I need to remind you that you’re really just a software engineer? You are not Indiana Jones. That part went to Harrison Ford.”
“Do I need to remind you of the years of training I had working with your friend, my grandfather?” Zack said. “And since his passing, the reputation I’ve built for myself as a covert artifact recovery specialist? I recovered that complete Tyndale Bible just last month. You’re still doubting what I can do?”
Father Giovanni leaned back in his seat. “No. I suppose not.” He tapped a finger a
gainst his desktop for a few moments before raising both of his eyebrows and shrugging. “Okay, fine. Tell me I won’t regret this.”
“You won’t.”
“Tell me you won’t cause an international incident that will bring shame upon the museum and my reputation.”
“I won’t.”
“Tell me what you’ll need.”
“Just like the last time—just the upfront stuff. You know me, Father.”
“Yes, I do know you. I remember the last time, Zack. I know how this works. I hope you remember how this works as well . . . If you come back empty-handed from your little fishing expedition, I’ll expect you to pay the museum back every cent we put into it. And that includes bail money and or bribes.”
“You got a deal.” Zack stood and stuck his hand out. Father Giovanni did the same, and the men shook on it.
“There’s one more thing,” the father said.
“Of course there is. Isn’t there always?”
That made Father Giovanni chuckle, at least. “This time around I’m taking out a little insurance policy. If you are going on the museum’s dollar, you’re going with someone who will represent the museum’s interests.”
“That’s never been the deal before . . .”
“It’s the deal this time.”
Zack immediately shook his head. “Father, I work alone. You know that. I can’t work with some grad student intern tagging along . . .”
“I’m not sending a grad student. She’s a researcher—an archaeologist—just like you.”
“Father, it could be dangerous . . .”
“How dangerous can Greenland be? Your Indiana Jones complex is big enough to take care of two people, isn’t it?”
“I do not have a—” He stopped. She? “Okay, listen. My point is that I work alone. I’m a team of one, always have been. It’s the only way I know.”
“That way is going to trip you up someday. You need to learn to trust, Zack—in God and in others.”
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