The Voynich Cypher

by Russell Blake

  Once parked, they strolled the streets until they came across a bustling restaurant exuding heavenly aromas. They were escorted to a table in a discreet corner by an officious hostess, and before long had chosen a decent bottle of chianti at an exorbitant price, which they savored as they browsed the enormous menu. After some back and forth with the waiter they ordered gnocchi in a truffle reduction to start, and then Natalie chose the baked fish and he got seafood pasta. The pace of service was relaxed, and the meal was the perfect accompaniment to a remarkable day for them both. Yet even as they sipped their wine and ate, Steven was preoccupied by the tablet, as well as the ramifications of his sudden entanglement with Natalie. She sensed his preoccupation, and once their plates were removed, called him on it.

  “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.

  “Okay, Mister Mysterious. What’s your story? Really? I’d sleep with you to get you to tell me, but it’s a little late for that…” Natalie rubbed his shoulder muscles, and he closed his eyes.

  “I had the Russian and Italian mobs hunting me for exposing one of their money laundering operations. It started off as something benign, but pretty soon everyone around me was getting killed and I had to run. New identity, new start, and even then, it took years for me to rest easy. I took a bullet at one point, and so did my wife. It was a terrible time, but in the end I was able to create a new existence. Antonia, my spouse, wound up selling her magazine in order to disappear, and I walked away from my entire life with five minutes’ notice. It can be done, but it’s not easy,” Steven explained.

  “She gave up everything to be with you? Sounds like true love,” Natalie said, no trace of mockery in her voice.

  “It was. Then the accident took her from me, and I’ve spent almost three years sleepwalking.” He left out the ‘until now’ he’d been contemplating. “What about you? What’s your story? Besides the FBI?”

  “Where do I start? What do you want to know?”

  “Just the important stuff. Save the minutiae for later,” he said, opening his eyes and leaning his head back to look up at her face.

  Her hands lifted from his shoulders and she walked to the kitchen, where she pulled one of the bottles of wine from the rack by the refrigerator and popped the cork, after finding the corkscrew in the drawer below. She rooted through the cabinets and found a couple of wine glasses, then poured them both generous helpings before moving to the couch, beckoning with his glass for him to join her there. Steven complied. The work for the evening was over. He took a sip of the wine and was pleasantly surprised.

  “Pretty good,” he said.

  “It is, isn’t it?” Natalie leaned against him. “Hmm…the story of me? Let’s see. Only child. My father was the center of my universe, and the smartest, best man ever made. I was a straight A student through high school and college, valedictorian and head of the gymnastics team, and always the good girl trying to please him, impress him. I know he was shocked when I joined the FBI, but he never chastised me or questioned the decision, although I know he was worried about me all the time and didn’t understand why I wanted to do it. I think the happiest day in his life was when I quit.”

  “A couple of years ago.”

  “Correct. I’d had an ass-full of conformity and being conservative by that point, so the pendulum swung the other direction, and I guess you could say I rebelled in a big way. I wound up working in a no-brainer job near my father, waiting tables in a bar, dating a tattoo artist, just living for the moment with no real direction. Everyone should try it once in their life,” she said, sipping some wine. “I dumped the boyfriend after a year and started helping my father with his affairs, which had us in contact almost every day. I eventually made peace with the idea I didn’t need to earn his approval and got way happier. Then he got involved with Morbius Frank. You know the rest.”

  “Not really. Why are you so convinced that Frank did your father in?” Steven asked. That had always been a niggling detail he’d been curious about.

  “My father was a stereotype in some ways – the absent-minded professor. But since he hooked up with Frank, he got very withdrawn and sullen and began insisting I make copies of all his work. I’d ask why, and he would say that you never knew when lightning would strike. In the end, he was actively frightened of something, and I intuited it was Frank. I insisted on being part of his scheme, if only as a silent partner, so someone besides my father would know all the details. He never said it, but I know he struggled with his conscience towards the end. As he got closer to attaining his dream, which was to decrypt the Voynich, it’s like it ate away at him. In the last week, once he had possession of the Scroll, after the first forty-eight hours, he insisted I take it and put it somewhere nobody could find it. He was worried, and it wasn’t about the weather.” She took another swallow of wine. “He taped some of his conversations with Frank and let me hear them, and I can tell you the guy is creepy. I had five kills while an agent, which is high, but also a reflection of the work I was doing with the mob, and I can tell you I’ve seen creepy. Serial killers, psychos, you name it, but just hearing the man’s voice sent shivers up my spine.”

  “Okay, but being creepy is different than being a killer,” Steven observed.

  “When my father gave me the Scroll, he said that if anything happened to him, to expect the worst and to get out immediately. He wouldn’t have said that lightly. He’d gone from sure of himself, to frightened. Over Easter, he’d had too much to drink, and he told me that Frank was evil – that was the word he used. This was not a man accustomed to hyperbole. He thought his partner was evil, but he’d gone too far to back out. In the end, though, I think it’s the real reason he decided that Frank should never get his hands on the Scroll.”

  “At this point, it’s moot. We know someone’s willing to kill. That’s been demonstrated,” Steven confirmed, finishing his glass.

  Natalie took it from him and went into the kitchen to refill both of their glasses with the remainder of the bottle.

  She returned to the couch and handed him his wine. Steven took a big sip, and then asked another question that had been nagging at him. “Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems like you know a lot more about your father’s dealings with Frank and their getting their hands on the Scroll than you’d know from your father warning you that Frank was a bad man. What am I not getting?” he asked.

  “I was instrumental in planning the liberation of the Scroll from the Abbey. My father didn’t have the operational know-how, so he turned to me, hoping that I might have a contact who could carry off the caper without screwing it up. He figured that given my history, I’d know where to look for a specialty contractor to deal with it. He gave me all the details and had me handle the logistics. And he was right. I didn’t let him down. I knew probably the only person in the world who could pull this off without opening their big mouth or blowing it.” Natalie downed half her wine in a gulp.

  “I did it myself.”

  CHAPTER 29

  “You stole the Scroll?”

  “Liberated. I liberated the Scroll, which no more belonged to the Order than it did to anyone else. But yes, it was me,” Natalie replied with a shrug.

  Steven studied her with disbelief. What other surprises was she hiding?

  “That’s how you know so much about it…”

  “Yes. I helped my father once he’d been given Frank’s contact within the Order. I never talked to the man myself, but we got a lot of background information. The Scroll was written in 1450 or so. What nobody knows is that the entire Voynich was created as an elaborate shell around the hidden text in quire 18. But the secret predates the Voynich. After studying everything Frank provided him, my father believed that the Voynich was a copy of an original document, which he thought was written by Roger Bacon in the 1200s. As you know, Bacon is considered to be one of the fathers of the scientific method, but he was also a deeply devout friar who actually spent time at the Abbey. Small world.”

  Natalie finished her second glass of wine and placed it on the coffee table. “Anyway, during Bacon’s reading of the many forbidden and ancient documents that came his way due to his reputation and network of contacts, he discovered a secret that was so sacrilegious that he not only feared for his own life, but also for the continued existence of his order. Back then the Church greeted most new information with death sentences and persecution.”

  Steven nodded. “Maybe that’s why Bacon’s name is associated with the Voynich so often. At one point I came to the conclusion that he was the likeliest one who could have written it, in spite of the impossibility, given that h
e died a century before it was created. It’s always been a paradox, and it’s that niggling detail that caused me to discard the hypothesis,” Steven said. “But why create a copy?”

  “The original was in terrible shape after being hidden by those loyal to Bacon for over a hundred years – medieval castles and abbeys weren’t the most hospitable places for manuscript storage, long term.”

  “No, I’d imagine not, given the moisture, and rats, and everything else.”

  “Exactly. Apparently, one acolyte devoted ten years of his life to creating the current document, from 1440 to 1450, so the secret wouldn’t be lost. According to Frank’s research, that monk was Christian Rosenkreuz, who later became legendary as the purported founder of the Rosicrucian Order – although in that group’s legend he’s a doctor rather than a monk and lived a hundred fifty years later,” Natalie explained.

  “Rosenkreuz was a monk?”

  “My father believed that one of the reasons the legend about him started was based in fact, although twisted by history and inventive followers – Rosenkreuz was rumored to know secrets of vast importance, forbidden knowledge, and that got twisted into the Rosicrucian legend after he died. If he was a follower of Bacon and knew the secret, then he would have indeed had forbidden understanding – only not the kind that later got associated with him,” Natalie said.

  Steven considered this revelation – the saga had just gotten more interesting. He’d decrypted several documents from the seventeenth century that had been coded Rosicrucian communiqués.

  Natalie scrunched closer to Steven. “In a way, Bacon did write the Voynich, but not with his own hand – at least, not this iteration, which is all that survives. The original was destroyed by Rosenkreuz once he was done and replaced by what is now the Voynich. Only there was a problem. Two, actually. The first was that he needed to preserve the mechanism for decoding it. In a medium that couldn’t be destroyed by time and couldn’t be discovered by those who weren’t part of the loyal few. That must be where the tablet and the parchment came in. He needed to send instructions to others of his brethren in England and Italy and France, on how to find the decryption tablet, but he couldn’t do it in a way that might be discovered,” Natalie continued.