The Voynich Cypher

by Russell Blake

Sophie had considered asking for a big raise, but in the current financial climate, that wouldn’t fly. Steven was already paying her at the top of her pay scale and had been overly generous in subsidizing her health insurance to include her mom. That amounted to thousands of dollars per year he was shelling out due to sympathy over her situation, which she appreciated. But in the end, if her problem wasn’t solved, it would ruin her. It was an unfortunate situation all around. She had to do something, and do it quick, or she’d wind up drowning in a financial ocean that had the capacity to devastate both Sophie and her ailing mother.

  She hated the choices she was going to have to make, but in the end it was family first. When all was said and done, it was about survival. And Sophie had someone depending upon her.

  Stabbing at the monitor button, she shut down the screen in preparation to leave for the night. Glancing at the chips, she shrugged to herself and poured the remainder into her mouth before balling up the bag and tossing it into the trash. Waste not, want not. Sophie grabbed her small purse and moved to the front entrance, fishing her keys out so she could lock up. It was going to be another lonely night on the couch with Mom, watching pirated movies. Not quite the life she’d aspired to, but it was out of her hands.

  CHAPTER 14

  Colonel Gabriel Synthe lit his twenty-fourth cigarette of the day from the glowing ember of his twenty-third and blew a cloud of rancid smoke at the ceiling of his home office. He coughed a rasping exclamation, but didn’t hesitate from drawing another deep puff into his lungs to quell the spasm. He figured that he was probably on borrowed time, so what was the point of quitting now?

  He contemplated the phone conversation he’d had a few minutes earlier and considered not making the call he knew by rights he really should. He just didn’t see much point, and naturally was resistant to reporting to the insufferable fool he’d been saddled with. Still, it would probably wind up harming more than helping if he sidestepped it, so he reluctantly dialed the number and listened as it rang.

  “Any progress?” Diego Luca asked, by way of opening.

  “Of a kind, I suppose. I just got word that Twain’s daughter has been located.”

  “That’s wonderful news!”

  “Maybe not. She’s hooked up with a third party, who we’re trying to get more information about. And there’s a further complication. Someone tried to follow them, and it didn’t go well,” Synthe rasped, noisily exhaling another cloud of smoke.

  “Start at the beginning. Where is she?”

  “Florence. Italy.”

  “What the hell is she doing there?” Luca demanded.

  “That’s a great question. For now, it’s an unknown. But we’re working on it.”

  “Working on it. I see. And who is the mystery third party?” Luca asked.

  “He’s a local entrepreneur, a Dr. Steven Cross. But the first checks into his identity are odd.”

  “In what way?”

  “He didn’t exist until five years ago. Before that, there’s no data on him. It’s like he came out of nowhere,” Synthe reported, stubbing out the cigarette in an old terracotta flowerpot he used as an ashtray.

  “Italian records are notoriously unreliable. Probably a quarter of all the people in Italy don’t have history. It’s not like the U.S. or the rest of the European Union. Things in Italy are more, you know, old-fashioned.”

  “Great. Well, here’s what we know. He owns a small software company. He’s got money. Lots of it. His wife, Antonia, died in a car accident a few years ago, and he inherited a bundle. He’s forty-five, healthy – there are no medical records to speak of – and he has no debt. Leases a flat, and that’s it. Nothing else,” Synthe said disgustedly. He felt the cigarette pack on his desk and shook his head – he was down to the last cigarette.

  “Hmm. A question mark,” Luca said. “All right. What’s this about someone following her? And what did you mean by it not going well?”

  “Someone, presumably after the same thing we are, entered a construction site after they did, but didn’t get a chance to leave. When we picked up the girl’s trail yesterday, I dispatched a small team to see what they could find. We were able to trace her from a bank account she must think is anonymous, which it would be, under ordinary circumstances but we have reach in a lot of unusual areas. Suffice to say, money always leaves a trail. Always.”

  “Why not just scoop her up?” Luca asked.

  “Because we don’t know whether she’s got the item. Nor do we know what her game is. All we know is she’s vacationing in Italy and has a friend. That’s not a lot to go on. If we move on her at the wrong time, we’re done. We lose the chance she could lead us to the…to our objective.”

  “I understand. But what happened to the follower?”

  “Either she, or her friend, knocked the man unconscious. We don’t think he, or any of his associates, know where she is.” Synthe chose his next words very carefully. “This morning, there was a police report that someone had broken into Steven Cross’s home. A burglary, they say.”

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t us. But that tells me that whoever is doing the surveillance might have known about her friend earlier than yesterday. It’s troubling – we seem to be playing catch-up to a group that’s one step ahead of us. We need to change that,” Synthe concluded, his information exhausted.

  Luca could hear Synthe lighting a cigarette. Filthy habit for a degenerate atheist. It figured.

  “Is there anything else?” Luca asked.

  “We’re doing research on Cross, and we’ll be following the followers now that we know they’re on the board. But at present there are many unknowns. That’s not good. As you know.”

  Synthe spent another few minutes discussing logistics before terminating the call. Luca was a conniver, he decided, and the man was growing emboldened by his mandate to work with him – the tone of their interactions was increasingly becoming one of Synthe playing the role of subordinate to Luca’s insufferable position as his superior.

  The only really interesting news was that Cross and the girl appeared to be on the run, and Synthe knew where they were using as their home base. That single bit of information could well wind up being a critical piece – and at present it was the only real break they’d gotten.

  He leaned back in his executive chair and stared at the paint flaking off his ceiling from the constant stream of toxins being blown there, day after day. It, like his soul, was rotting away, largely due to his own actions. He smirked humorlessly to himself as he considered the metaphor.

  Nothing, he knew, lasted forever.

  Natalie had been unfazed by Steven’s account of how he’d knocked the man who’d been following them unconscious. She had studied the air pistol and stun gun with only mild curiosity. As someone who had been on the receiving end of attempted assaults before, Steven found the response unusual. She should have been shaken by such a close brush with violence, and yet she’d continued to exude that unabashed tranquility – a quiet confidence that betrayed no anxiety. She was either extremely tough, or a sociopath, he reasoned. Even he, who had been in the military for several years and had been in numerous deadly situations, was shaken by the implications of surveillance and a near miss on a kidnapping attempt. Natalie looked like she’d just woken up from a night’s restful sleep, refreshed and ready to go to the gym. He’d never seen anything like it.

  Frederick kept scanning the mirrors, and several times made abrupt turns into small streets then doubled-back, checking for any followers. He was clearly very good at what he did, causing Steven to wonder again exactly what his full job description was.

  “We’ll get out a few miles from the villa and get a taxi. We don’t want the car anywhere near the villa anymore. Frederick will get new wheels for us by tomorrow morning. Won’t you, Frederick?” Natalie smiled at the driver, and their eyes locked in the rearview mirror. He nodded.

  “So, you think those were Morbius Frank’s men?” Steven pressed.

>   “Yes, or the Order. In the end it’s probably the same. Whoever it was, we have to expect the worst. If you don’t have any pressing reason to stick around Florence, we should make tracks out of the area tomorrow. I’d say tonight, but that isn’t practical until we have a different a car. Now that they know I’m here, with you, it isn’t safe in Florence for either of us.” She paused.

  Steven didn’t say anything. Natalie took a closer look at the stun gun.

  “This is Iranian. Not one you usually see. First one I’ve ever come across up close,” Natalie observed.

  “You know the different types of stun guns that well?”

  “Let’s just say that at one point in my life it was of interest to me.” If Natalie was trying to create additional mystery surrounding her, it was working. “It’s different than civilian models. These are for the military and secret police.”

  “Forgive my ignorance, but what’s the difference?”

  “Civilian devices are designed to incapacitate. They give a zap and then stop unless the button’s pressed again. These are built to not only incapacitate, but to continue delivering a series of charges to keep the target down for a long time.” She waved it around casually. “Or to torture.”

  “Torture.”

  “In some countries, the police torture in order to get suspected perpetrators to cooperate – they find it far more useful than civilized techniques. Devices like these are built for that application.”

  “Seems like you know an awful lot about them. What did you say you did for a living, Natalie?” Steven asked, only half joking.

  “I didn’t.” She leaned forward to Frederick. “Drop us at that little restaurant we passed yesterday that I said looked cute, okay? We’ll cab to the house from there.”

  Frederick nodded, never stopping his perusal of the mirrors on an automatic circuit – rear, right, left; rear, right, left. Steven was getting dizzy following it. Then again, if he’d been treating this more seriously he would have spotted the surveillance at his apartment. He was usually good that way, and it annoyed him that he’d dropped his guard and gotten lackadaisical. There had been a time not so long ago when he was so finely-tuned he would have had internal alarms going off the second someone had scrutinized him; just as when Natalie had begun her shadowing.

  He resolved to get back into the old habits.

  Being rusty could cost him his life, if Natalie was right.

  And it looked at this point like she was.

  At four-forty a.m., the computers stopped processing and went silent, their decryption job finally completed. Sophie’s whirred for a few additional minutes as it committed the results to a new folder, then closed down the program, automatically putting itself into sleep mode.

  The parchment was decrypted, awaiting human eyes to interpret the data.

  CHAPTER 15

  Steven woke to the sound of a rooster crowing nearby and for a few seconds was disoriented. Then the whole adventure came rushing back to him. He was in a rented villa, being hunted by shady miscreants intent on torturing him, while in the company of a modern Mata Hari with a mysterious past and beautiful eyes.

  His phone indicated it was seven in the morning. He sighed, and then focused on meditating: a practice that was second nature to him. Steven felt the immediacy of his surroundings fade away, and soon he was in a void, absent any thought or mental images. After twenty minutes he felt a stirring and returned to conscious awareness, slowly coming back into the world, his nerves alive and again processing sensation.

  Swinging his legs off the bed, he debated going for a morning run, but decided that it probably wasn’t the day for it. They had a lot to do, not the least of which was getting away from Florence as soon as possible. Steven peered through a gap in the curtains at the driveway and saw a silver Audi sedan parked in front of the house. Frederick had been busy last night.

  Steven shuffled to the bathroom and showered, reflecting on the prior evening as the hot needles of water invigorated his skin. Natalie had proposed having dinner at the restaurant, and they’d lingered over an excellent bottle of Cabernet once their pasta entrées were through. She’d opened up a little, offering glimpses of her past, tantalizing slivers of an at-times rebellious and unconventional adulthood. Natalie had hinted at a background in law enforcement, although she was reluctant to go into detail. But that explained her comfort with weapons and her lack of agitation over their brush with violence.

  He fingered the bullet scar on his leg, recalling how long it had been since he’d had to contend with being hunted. Antonia and he had nearly been killed when they’d first landed in Italy, in the small hill town of Todi. That seemed a lifetime ago, but it had only been six years.

  Steven snapped back to the present and shut off the water. There was no point in throwing himself a pity party. Antonia was gone, and with her his interest in women. Until now. He had to admit that there was something about Natalie that had gotten to him. Not just the obvious visceral appeal, although that was potent. No, it was more the combination of her looks and her personality. Some elusive quality that was difficult to pinpoint, yet powerful.

  She was as unlike Antonia as she could be. American, tattoos, goth look, accustomed to rough situations. And wildly smart, he remembered from their discussion of the Voynich. It was quite a cocktail, and Steven would need to keep on his toes to prevent being lulled into comfortable relaxation. He still wasn’t sure whose side she was on, although he was leaning more towards betting she was on his since the attack. But the truth was that she was on her own, and part of his job over the next few days would be to figure out where he fit in that scheme.

  He toweled off and donned some fresh clothes, inspecting himself in the mirror. Not too bad – looked at least five years younger than he was, on a good day. Things could have been worse, he supposed. Steven repacked his shaving kit into the duffel and zipped it closed.

  His phone rang. He glanced at the screen to discover it was from the office. Gwen’s voice chirped at him when he answered.

  “Your results are in on that task you had Sophie run. You want me to e-mail it to your account?” Gwen asked.

  “Yes, please. How long did it take to finish?”

  “Let me ask. I got in a bit late today, and everyone was here before I made it.”

  Steven heard her move the phone away from her mouth and call out. She was back on in a few seconds.

  “Just before five this morning.”

  “Wow. That was quicker than I expected,” Steven said.

  “Sophie co-opted everyone’s computers, so it was a distributed effort,” Gwen explained.

  “Ahh. Thanks, Gwen. And listen. If anyone else stops in looking for me, I’ve decided to extend my holiday indefinitely.”

  Gwen paused. “Well now. You must be having a ball,” she remarked dryly, stressing the final syllable.

  “It’s not like that. I can’t really explain because I don’t know much more, but it isn’t what you think,” Steven finished lamely.

  “No. Well, I’m sorry to hear that. She looked like such a sweet young innocent thing. Really about the age of a daughter, if you’d gotten started young.”

  Gwen was obviously not happy with the new arrival. She’d always been protective of Steven, but this was the first time he’d detected jealousy.

  “I’ll continue to think of her as a daughter, Gwen. Thanks for that reminder,” Steven assured her.

  “You can always have her call you ‘Daddy’ or ‘Papa’ to keep you centered,” Gwen offered. “Well, then, I’ll be e-mailing your findings to you now. Was there anything else you needed…Papa?” Gwen finished sweetly.

  “That should do it. I’ll check in later.”

  What the hell was that all about? Just when he thought he had enough trouble, something new surfaced. Now Gwen was getting territorial about Natalie? There was nothing going on there. And nothing between Gwen and Steven, either. It was all a big zero.

  Could Gwen have somehow detected
that Steven’s interest in Natalie wasn’t purely altruistic? It seemed like she knew things before Steven did. It would have been more efficient if Gwen had just sent him a list of what he was going to do every day. That would have been more useful than veiled innuendo.

  Steven put his duffel onto the bed and moved to the bedroom door. He smelled the distinctive odor of strong coffee and…eggs. His mouth started watering on the way down the stairs, and he realized he was no better than a dog this morning. He was starving. Gwen’s mocking voice echoed in his head. Yes, old boy, you’re a dog, all right – ‘Papa’.

  He smiled at his internal dialogue as he swung into the dining area. Natalie looked up from her position at the table, her hands cradling a cup of steaming brew.

  “You’re certainly in a bright mood this morning. Nice to see – you had a good night, I take it,” she commented, noticing Steven’s grin. He stifled it and grabbed a cup of coffee.

  “A little rest can do wonders.” He took a cautious sip. “The results are done. The office is sending them to me,” he informed her, suddenly all business.

  “That’s awesome. Let’s get you online and cranking. You in the mood for some eggs? OJ?” Natalie offered.

  “That would be great. I’m famished for some reason. Scrambled is good.” He moved to where the laptop was sitting and quickly logged into his account. “I’ve got the code. This will take a while to download. It’s a big file,” he explained. Natalie shifted to behind the breakfast bar and began preparing eggs. Steven looked up at her. As if reading his mind, Natalie paused.

  “Don’t get used to his. I usually don’t do breakfast. And windows are definitely out of the picture.”

  “What? I didn’t say anything. I was just admiring your…multi-faceted talents,” Steven teased.

  Natalie ignored him. “Three eggs do the trick?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she cracked three and whipped them into a froth before pouring them into the hot skillet. Steven chose to remain silent, tapping his fingers impatiently while the file downloaded over the slow wireless connection.