The Scrolls of Velia

by John McWilliams

  “Is it possible for us to get the medical records of these people?” I asked.

  “Unfortunately no. After my last meeting with Eddie, the Ravens—no longer content to wait for him to die of cancer—ran him off the road and into a lake. Fortunately, Eddie was prescient enough to leave the Eureka notebook with me, but I’m pretty certain he had the medical records with him when he was killed. I tried to access the originals, of course, but they were gone. Not long after that, the last two New Eureka Group members died. Their records went missing as well.

  “So, obtaining these skulls became my obsession. I put the Eureka notebook, along with my research notes and certain travel necessities, in that coffin and buried it for safekeeping. And it was a good thing I did, because just before I got caught, the Ravens ransacked my house. My guess is that when they found the skulls, they decided it would be easier to just have me arrested for grave robbing rather than to go through the hassle of staging my accidental death.”

  Adella paused. “Well, you pretty much know the rest.”

  For a long moment Mary and I sat there, considering everything Adella had just told us.

  Then Mary turned to me. “What about your father? He’s a senator. We could show this evidence to him. He could do something, right?”

  “I had hoped to get it into the hands of someone at your father’s level,” Adella said, “so a more comprehensive investigation could be launched. The fact is, this evidence is circumstantial.”

  “It’s definitely circumstantial,” I said. “I mean, all it proves is that these people might have died of exposure to a common radioactive source. It doesn’t prove who did it. It doesn’t prove how it was done. It doesn’t even prove that it was done on purpose—if you think about it.”

  “But what does your gut tell you?” Mary asked. “Do you still think Adella’s just a grave robber?”

  “No. I believe she’s telling the truth.”

  I held up my phone for the others to see. On the screen was a page with a picture of a much younger Adella shaking hands with Dr. Edmund Eriksson.

  “That was nearly twenty years ago,” Adella said, squinting at the phone.

  “That’s Adella and Eddie,” I explained to Mary. “He’s congratulating her on winning the Fields Medal—basically the Nobel Prize of Mathematics.”

  “And look,” Mary said, examining the picture closely. “There’s a zodiac sign in the painting behind them. Actually, there’s three. There’s Aries and Taurus, and there’s Pisces.”

  “Is there some point you’re trying to make?” Adella said.

  “No—it’s just that those signs are telling me that I need to look more carefully at our situation. You’re a Libra, right?”

  “I am.”

  “I knew you had to be an air sign.” Mary dug into her daypack and pulled out a deck of tarot cards.

  “Oh, brother,” I said. “Here we go…”

  “Henry, you’re an Aries, so try to keep an open mind, would you?”

  I wasn’t sure how she knew my sign, but I certainly wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of asking.

  Mary set four cards face up on the table. She picked one up—a woman on a throne. “The High Priestess,” she said. “We must follow our intuitions.”

  “My intuition tells me this is nonsense,” I muttered.

  “Henry, you and I are now part of this,” Mary said, “so we have to help Adella bring Raven Entelechy to justice. The Tower card suggests, however, that evidence-hunting is the wrong course of action.” She pointed to the Chariot card. “Whatever we do will require a great deal of effort. But”—she picked up the Sun card—”we definitely can achieve our goals.”

  She studied the cards. “If we set evidence-hunting aside, what’s left? Certainly not rediscovering the Eureka Formula on our own. Adella’s smarter than pretty much anyone we know, and she hasn’t figured out the math yet, so…” She placed her hands over the cards as if absorbing their energy. “We must crack the cipher.”

  “Because the cards tell us to?” I said.

  “Henry,” Mary said, “what’s more likely to happen: us rediscovering the Eureka Formula, or us cracking the cipher?”

  “The cipher, but—”

  “Okay, so, since cracking the cipher gives us the Eureka Formula, all we have to do is go public with it and that puts Raven Entelechy out of business, right? The cipher solves everything.”

  “Except the murders,” Adella said.

  “Well, not directly, but who cares? Raven Entelechy gets destroyed and the world gets the formula. I think even your dead friends would be happy with that outcome.”

  “You certainly are an interesting child,” Adella said. “I’ve been so focused on avenging my friends’ deaths and trying to work out the math on my own, I really hadn’t thought much about the cipher.” She looked at the skulls. “Henry, what do you think?”

  “Well, you and I both know how the legal system works. Even if we had a videotape of these guys committing those murders, it’d take years to prosecute them, and we’d probably never get at the real players anyway. From what you’ve told us, Raven Entelechy simply has too much money.” I looked at Mary. “So I guess you’re right: the cipher’s our best bet. Although I don’t believe for a second those tarot cards had anything to do with it.”

  • • •

  A short time later, I went into the bathroom to splash water on my face. “Nice work,” I said to the man in the mirror. All I had wanted to do was spend a little time with Mary. Now I was teamed up with her and the Skull Lady in a pact to bring down a murderous secret cult. I tried to think of alternatives. But everything I could think of ended up with Adella in the hospital, and Mary and me under arrest.

  I looked at the water running down the drain. Assuming it’s real, the Eureka Formula could change the world.

  I shut off the faucet—and heard a man’s voice in the outer room. Nothing about his tone sounded friendly. Without thinking, I quickly opened the bathroom door.

  Two men in black suits were standing in the motel room’s doorway, the sun a blinding haze behind them. The man in front aimed his gun at me.

  I had always been told—especially being a senator’s son—that in the case of a home invasion or an abduction, you should make your move early.

  I charged.

  The men looked utterly confused; I’m sure they had no intention of shooting us here. I slammed my shoulder into the closest man’s chest, driving both him and the other man out the door, across the sidewalk, and onto the hood of an idling station wagon. The woman behind the wheel threw the car into reverse, and the three of us fell to the ground. The man on the bottom gasped as I slammed the top man’s hand against the pavement in an attempt to relieve him of his gun.

  Then Mary stepped in—literally. She stomped on the man’s wrist.

  “Freeze,” she said, picking up the weapon, a scary determination in her eyes.

  “Easy there,” I said. “Why don’t you let Adella have the gun?”

  “I know how to shoot a gun, Henry.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  A police siren wailed at the McDonald’s across the street.

  Mary looked up. “Oh, crap.”

  I got to my feet, not wanting to be mistaken as the aggressor here. Our would-be assailants immediately staggered to their feet and made a run for it.

  Mary hid the gun behind her back as the cop car skidded to a halt in front of us. “Those two men just tried to rob us!” she said.

  “Are you folks all right?” the cop at the wheel asked, his eyes never leaving Mary.

  “We’re fine,” Mary said. “But they’re getting away.”

  “We’ll get ’em, ma’am. Just stay put.” The cops sped off.

  By now the two black-suited men had made it to their car and were burning rubber out of the Motel 6’s parking lot, heading south. We stood there and watched until both cars were out of sight.

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s g
et the hell out of here.”

  I unloaded the gun and tossed it into a dumpster, Mary wiped down the room, and Adella gathered the skulls. Minutes later, we were on the highway, heading north.

  Chapter 3

  “Of course they were Ravens,” Mary said as we roared into the outside lane on Route 73. “Jeez, Henry, they had us at gunpoint, and they ran from the cops.”

  I looked in the rearview mirror at Adella.

  “They were definitely Ravens,” she said.

  “What did they say before I came out of the bathroom?”

  “They told us to pack our stuff and to go with them,” Mary said. “What made you attack them like that?”

  “Instinct.”

  “Henry, where are you taking us?” Adella asked.

  “Unless anyone has any objections,” I said, “I thought we’d head up to my father’s cabin in Andover. There’s no one there, and it’s safe—it has a really elaborate security system.”

  “No objection here,” Adella said.

  “Me neither,” Mary agreed.

  My father’s “cabin” was in actuality a Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece—an expansive stone and glass structure overlooking a picturesque lake in the mountains. My mother had taken to referring to the senator’s extravagant bachelor’s pad as simply “The Cabin.” Somehow the name stuck.

  “Mary, do you need to call home?” Adella asked. “Will anyone be looking for you?”

  “I should probably let my uncle know I won’t be around for a few days. I’ll send him a text.”

  “Henry?” Adella asked.

  “No. I’m good.”

  • • •

  We arrived at Hunter’s Park in Andover just before noon. I showed the guard at the gate my ID, and he let us through. A mile and a half later, I pulled Mary’s Mustang into The Cabin’s basement-level garage and we took the inside stairway up to the house. I deactivated the alarm and opened the door.

  “Holy crap,” Mary exclaimed. “This place is gorgeous.”

  “I believe that’s just the kind of reaction my father was going for when he bought the place.”

  We stepped into a huge modern kitchen. The south wall of the house was entirely glass, providing a view of a teak deck, the lake, and the mountains beyond. Mary and Adella bounced around the kitchen, and looked out through the sliding glass doors, while I took my laptop out of my backpack and set it up on the coffee table in the living room.

  “I know I said Eddie and I didn’t really take a crack at the encryption,” Adella said, retrieving the Eureka notebook from her go-bag, “but we did take a little bit of a look at it.”

  “But you didn’t really want to decrypt it,” Mary said.

  “We didn’t?”

  “No, you wanted to discover the formula the hard way—by doing the math.”

  “Well…” Adella thought about that. “There might be some truth to that.”

  “Don’t worry,” Mary said. “With Henry’s and my help, this cipher doesn’t stand a chance. I mean, how hard could it be? All the Eureka Group wanted to do was fool a bunch of Nazis.”

  “Yeah, the Nazis,” I said. “The guys who came up with the Enigma machine that took a genius like Alan Turing to figure out.”

  “Here.” Adella handed me the Eureka notebook. “You might want to read the section before the cipher. Maybe you’ll see something I didn’t.”

  While I read, Mary got out her tarot cards, dealt several out onto the table, and then picked one up. It was a golden-haired angel blowing a trumpet. Across the bottom was written the word Judgment.

  “When I was little,” she said, “my friends and I used to send coded messages by switching the letters around. But we didn’t do it because we didn’t want the boys to figure it out. We did it because it was fun.”

  “Thanks for that little trip down memory lane,” I muttered, still reading the notebook.

  “Mary,” Adella said, “what are you getting at?”

  “We shouldn’t jump to conclusions.” Mary pointed at the Judgment card. “We’re thinking the code is hard. But maybe the Eureka Group didn’t create this encryption just to hide the formula from the Nazis. Maybe they did it because it was fun.”

  “Fun?” I said.

  “Sure. You just said the Nazis probably could have figured this out. The Eureka Group would have known that, right? So why’d they do it? Probably to make it a little hard, but mostly because that’s what their hero, Edgar Allen Poe, would have done. Adella, you’re the one who said the cipher was, in a way, Poe’s idea.”

  “Yes, yes, I see what you’re saying—an homage to Poe.” Adella stood and walked over to the glass wall. She turned and raised an index finger. “I was certain the code had to be a complex polyalphabetic cipher, but what if you’re right? What if it’s a simple substitution cipher?” She thought a moment. “Poe even wrote a kind of ‘how-to’ manual on simple ciphers in ‘The Gold-Bug.’”

  “See?” Mary said. “Now we’re getting somewhere. What’s a gold bug?”

  “‘The Gold-Bug,’” Adella said. “It’s a short story by Poe in which this man, William Legrand, who lives on Sullivan’s Island off of South Carolina, finds a treasure map in the form of a cipher, which, he believes, leads to Captain Kidd’s treasure. Anyway, Legrand finds the treasure, and at some point near the end of the story, he explains how he decoded the cipher. First he determined the language of the cipher, which was English—as is ours, I would imagine, since the Eureka notebook is in English. Then he looked for the most frequently used letters in the English language and compared them with the most frequently used letters in the cipher. From there, he looked at the placement of vowels and started assembling words—a process which revealed the placement of the least frequently used letters.”

  “That sounds simple enough,” I said.

  “So who wants to transcribe the cipher from the notebook to the computer?” Adella asked.

  Mary’s hand shot up.

  “All right, Mary. You type. Henry, maybe you could make us some coffee? And I’ll just close my eyes for about fifteen minutes. I can’t believe you two aren’t tired.”

  “I’ve never needed much sleep,” I said.

  “Me neither.” Mary shrugged. “I can go for days if I have to.”

  “Well, let’s see how you’re doing in twenty years.” Adella lay down on the couch.

  • • •

  For the next six hours we worked on the code. Adella and I had watched Mary transcribe the thirty-three hundred characters, of which, as far as we could tell, she didn’t miss a single one. Mary had then moved to the couch to read “The Gold-Bug” on her phone, leaving Adella and I to work on the code.

  “Still gibberish,” Adella said.

  “It’s got to be a key-based algorithm,” I said. “Maybe there’s a key hidden in ‘The Gold-Bug.’” I looked up at Mary, who was hovering over my shoulder.

  “Nope,” she said. “I think you’ve got it.”

  “Got what?”

  She pointed at one of the lines in the decoded text.

  dsslnfsiurenaseurekaliesatasdurpsewrkndfsdpiewnslasdfni

  “That looks an awful lot like gibberish to me,” I said.

  “Look,” Mary said, taking control of the mouse and tapping on the space bar.

  dsslnfsiurenas eureka lies at asdurpsewrkndfsdpiewnslasdfni

  “See?” she said. “It says, ‘Eureka lies at…’”

  Adella and I stared at the screen for a moment, then got out of the way to let Mary take over.

  It turns out that Adella and I had assumed the cipher would be more complicated than it was. Not only had we expected to find something more mathematical in nature, it hadn’t occurred to either of us that nearly ninety-eight percent of the message would be utter nonsense. In fact, out of the sixty rows of text, only a block of thirteen of them contained any real words at all. We had actually figured out the cipher on the first pass. We just hadn’t realized it.

  The thirteen rows encryp
ted:

  †))0*1)6?(8*5)8?(875068)5;5)†?(.)8](7*†1)†.68]*)05)†1*6

  ]8(7,*†‡9)50†7(‡?45)†07*15)†5)†17*5)6†:2010):87))†1†16(

  58†16*0]?410)4056?0805),†07*3‡?]8?‡4(‡,†050)?00)†410)0]

  50)†7107]06]84(0)†0‡?5*†07;488*†‡1;48(‡5†0†)*05):*†1,*8

  5)†1,7*‡]68‡(4‡65†145†‡)?4(8.05)70†4†6?4]8(‡,75†)6?4(43

  †)141431)†‡6,8(,*†5,†7*15,)†‡6,(8.]‡6,(8‡]6,†5709†)091:

  )†1684(]6‡1;48†85†56?†4.1‡64,?64.?4*†8†?4‡)?4*†089†0‡.6

  5)†61?‡4]84(?87,]†*652?6†5416‡)5*15†?4(6.8],‡†96:3†¶*41

  )†1,6*)†.‡19)‡†1,6]84(6]8*†62]8†6?56)†?45)6†?45)†6?4314

  786809†09946,64?6‡?4‡6*]6;46*;4895*)6‡*‡)†4‡6,8‡]6,*(84

  $)†13798(*1†09‡6.)4†.‡1,)‡†91?]48.?1†**†1)†71)†1*†3,70‡

  63]8‡†*6,*†7*5)†790,*?6096†?41‡6,5)†7*‡6,.‡)5†6,1)†1)]]

  ‡6????†4)†970*57,†6‡1;48*634;,42?5?)†417*?6‡45†6.?5.)07

  The thirteen rows decrypted:

  dsslnfsiurenas eureka lies at asdurpsewrkndfsdpiewnslasdfni

  werkjndomsaldkrouhasdlknfasdasdfknasidyblflsyekssdfdfir

  aedfinlwuhflshlaiulelasjdlkngouweuohrojdlalsullsdhflslw

  alsdkflkwliwehrlsdlouandlk the end of the road ldsnlasyndfjne

  asdfjknowieorhoiadfhadosuhreplaskldhdiuhwerojkadsiuhrhg

  dsfhfhgfsdoijerjndajdknfajsdoijrepwoijreowijdaklmdslmfy

  sdfiehrwi of the dead aiudhpfoihjuihpuhndeduhosuhndlemdlopi

  asdifuohwehruekjwdniabuidahfiosanfaduhripewjodmiygdvnhf

  sdfjinsdpofmsodfjiwehriwendibwediuaisduhasiduhasdiuhgfh

  keielmdlmmhijihuiouhoin within the mansion osdhoijeowijnreh

  qsdfgkmernfdlmoipshdpofjsodmfuwhepufdnndfsdkfsdfndgjklo

  igweodnijndknasdkmljnuilmiduhfoijasdknoijposadijfsdfsww