The Secret Prophecy

by Herbie Brennan

  “I know a place where we can hide out until we’ve done what we have to do. I have to cut all communications with Section now that there’s been a breach—standard security procedure. They’ll make contact again when they’ve investigated; but that could be weeks, maybe as much as a month. Meanwhile, there’s absolutely no way the Knights will be able to find us. That’s the good news.”

  “What’s the bad news?” Em asked.

  “Until Section makes contact again,” Victor said, “we no longer have any help or backup. We’re entirely on our own.”

  Chapter 31

  Victor let them in through the back door of a terraced house in the poorer quarter of town. The place looked nondescript, with minimal—cheap—furnishings and worn linoleum on the floor. It had that slightly damp smell places get when they haven’t been lived in for a while. “A poor place, but mine own,” Victor murmured. He pulled down a blind on the window set in the back door, then turned the key to lock it.

  “Where are we?” Em asked.

  “Hopefully in a safer safe house,” Victor told him. “Doesn’t even have anything to do with Section 7. I bought it four years ago under an assumed name, told nobody, just in case. Now . . . I suggest you look the place over, find out where things are, settle in, gather your strength after all the excitement. We have a busy night.” He gave Charlotte a piercing look. “That’s to say, Em and I have a busy night. You’re staying here and keeping your head down.”

  “Yes, of course, Victor,” said Charlotte meekly.

  Em felt weird walking onto the university grounds. He knew every inch of the place, of course, probably better than its students, most of whom attended for four or five years at most. Thing was, it felt as if he’d been on the run for months, so coming back was scary, like listening to the creaks as you walked across thin ice. But what Victor had said proved right. Even at this late hour there were people about—students, staff, faculty—and nobody paid them the slightest attention.

  Victor himself, true to his word, looked like a stockbroker up from London for the evening. His beard was tightly, neatly trimmed, his shoes were highly polished, and he really was wearing a three-piece pin-striped suit in a very sober shade of blue. Not one person in ten thousand would have guessed that the personal tailoring concealed a handgun (that couldn’t be detected by airport security) and, although Em hadn’t actually seen them, lock-picking tools.

  They entered the main building side by side. “Is the office far?” Victor asked casually. He might as well have been inquiring about the weather. His whole demeanor oozed a confidence Em was working hard to match.

  “Not far,” Em grunted. The number of people about had begun to worry him now. It might mean no one questioned them while they kept moving, but once they reached the office itself—the darkened, closed-up, door-locked office—it would surely be a different matter. They could hardly just hang about outside, not without looking suspicious however well Victor was dressed. And what happened when he started work with his lock picks? Em had no idea how long it took to pick a lock, but he imagined it must be at least ten minutes. How did you disguise what you were doing for all that time? The first person to wander past would spot what was going on at once.

  But even before they turned into the corridor that housed the offices he noticed there were fewer others in their vicinity, and in the corridor itself there were none. It was something he should have anticipated. There might be activity on campus twenty-four hours a day, but not concentrated around the empty offices.

  “Which door?” Victor asked. Just the barest hint of tightness had crept into his voice.

  “Second right,” Em said tersely.

  Without breaking stride, Victor extracted a small leather pouch from an inside pocket. On a quick glance, it could have passed for his wallet. “When we reach the door, I want you to stop, kneel down, and pretend to tie your shoelace. But keep an eye to the corridor and tell me at once if there’s anybody approaching. When I pick the lock, we both go inside. You show me the places where the camera is most likely to be—this cupboard you mentioned, desk drawer, wherever: all you need do is point. Then you come back out and hang around in the corridor. Cough if anybody appears, and I’ll stand quiet until they’ve passed. Got that?”

  “What am I supposed to be doing in the corridor? If somebody comes?”

  “Nothing. You’re supposed to be looking like innocence personified. Whistle. Stare up at the ceiling. Tie your rotten shoelace again if you have to. Or walk off if need be—you can always come back. God’s sake, Em, you’re an intelligent boy. Improvise. Once I have the camera I’ll join you, and we’re out of here. Okay?”

  Em took a deep breath. “Okay,” he repeated.

  They reached the door. “Whoops,” Em said, sliding into character. He dropped to one knee and began to fiddle with his shoelace.

  Victor stopped and turned toward the door. “Come on,” he said quietly.

  Em glanced up to see him politely holding the door open. “How did you do that?” he gasped. What he meant was, how did you do that so quickly?

  “Standard lock,” Victor said, as if that explained something. “Don’t hang about. I want us inside.”

  They entered the office together, and Victor switched on the overhead light. “What are you doing?” Em demanded in sudden panic.

  “What do you want me to do: use a flashlight?”

  That was exactly what Em had expected him to do. “Yes. People can see we’re in here.” There were two windows between the office and the corridor. Both were of frosted glass, but with the overhead light on you could still see shapes inside.

  “People could see that light as well. Which looks more suspicious: a darkened office with somebody fumbling about by flashlight or a well-lit office with somebody inside obviously going about their legitimate business—otherwise they wouldn’t have the light on?”

  “Oh,” Em said.

  “Show me where to look, then get out,” Victor said.

  Em pointed wordlessly to the cupboard, the filing cabinet, and then, after a moment’s thought, to his father’s desk. Both the cupboard and filing cabinet locked. As far as Em remembered, the drawers in the desk did not.

  “Okay, lookout duty. Off you go,” Victor told him. “Remember—cough and I go into my masterful disguise as a university executive working late.”

  Em slipped through the door and closed it quietly behind him. There was no one in the corridor. He stood, feeling nervous and stupid, not knowing what to do with himself. He was worried about what he would say if anyone asked him what he was doing here. The corridor was still empty, but in his head he was standing under the full glare of an enormous spotlight, carrying a notice: SHOULD NOT BE HERE!

  Em dropped on one knee, undid his shoelace, and began—slowly—to do it up again, taking care to allow the knot to slip out so he could pretend to tie it again. After a moment he realized a drawback of his position. To make the action look natural, he was facing along the corridor, with the result that he could only see people coming from one direction. But it was only a small drawback, because he was confident he would hear anyone who approached from behind. He fiddled with his lace, allowed it to flop open, fiddled with his lace again. Maybe the camera wasn’t there at all. Maybe his father had left it somewhere other than his office. Maybe he’d had the use of a locker, or loaned it to a friend. Maybe—

  “Playing cat’s cradle with your shoelace?”

  Em started so violently he almost toppled over. He swung around in panic to find Charlotte looking down on him, grinning broadly.

  “What the hell are you doing here!?” he gasped. “Victor said you weren’t to come!”

  “Like I was going to pay attention to that.”

  “How did you find us?”

  “I’ve been to your father’s old office before. With Daddy. Is Victor inside?”

  “No!” Em glanced through the frosted window at the figure plainly moving inside. “Yes. Listen, you can’t stay h
ere . . .”

  “I thought I might help.”

  “Well, you can’t. Victor will kill you if he finds you here.”

  “You think so?”

  “Know so!” Em exclaimed fiercely.

  “Soon find out,” Charlotte said, still grinning. “It looks like he’s finished inside.”

  The office door opened, and Victor slid through it. If he was surprised to see Charlotte, he didn’t show it. “Thought you’d never stay behind,” he muttered. “Right, let’s get out of here before we’re spotted.”

  Em asked, “Did you find the camera?”

  Victor’s face broke into a smile as he pulled the camera from his pocket and waved it under Em’s nose.

  Chapter 32

  The living room in Victor’s personal safe house was little larger than a postage stamp, poorly lit, badly decorated, and uncomfortably furnished. Em sat in a lumpy two-seater sofa at one side of a miserable coffee table while Victor occupied an armchair of sorts at the other.

  “How do you work this bloody thing?” Victor demanded, pressing buttons on the camera apparently at random. “It’s not at all like mine.”

  “Let me try,” Em offered.

  Victor ignored him and continued to work on his buttons until frustration got the better of him and he pushed the camera across the table. “Here, you try. See if you can find the holiday pics.”

  Em gave him a look, then turned his attention to the camera. He hit what he thought had to be the right icon and was rewarded by the little screen flaring into life with a photograph. He found himself looking at the happy little family grouping gathered in the Irish sunshine for their outdoor breakfast that first morning of their holiday. For a moment, all he could do was stare, feeling the catch in his breath, the knot in his stomach. Then he swallowed and said quietly, “Got it. Want to come around and look?”

  “You’ve found the holiday pictures?” Victor was already out of his chair and heading around the coffee table. Charlotte slid beside Em on the other side.

  “Yip.” He waited until Victor was settled beside him. “That’s us at the cottage.” He pressed the FORWARD button, and the photograph slid stylishly to one side to reveal an out-of-focus picture of a mountain split by a bar on the left-hand side. “Mum must have tried to take that from the car. I don’t know where it is.” He thumbed the button again, and the screen transformed to a shot of a Labrador flopped sleepily in the doorway of a country pub. “We had lunch there a couple of times.” Then the main street of Kenmare . . . then a view of a lake in a valley that might have been taken from a helicopter but was actually shot from high up on a mountain road . . . then forests on the Ring of Kerry . . . then boats in a harbor . . . The final one was a picture of the ferry in Rosslare, its decks rain-swept by a sudden squall.

  Em looked up at Victor and frowned. “That’s it. That’s all the holiday pictures I remember us taking.” He glanced back at the camera screen again. The icon on the bottom right was a filled triangle. If there were no pictures left, the triangle would be empty. “Wait a minute.” Em pressed the button again.

  The photograph was in sharp focus, with no sign of shaking, as if the camera had been attached to a tripod when it was taken. It showed a wooden table, but not one Em remembered from the holiday. On the tabletop was a vase of wilting flowers. Beside them was an assortment of objects: a cup and saucer, a scrap of paper, an open fountain pen with its cap set neatly beside its nib, a small china ornament of a sleeping cat, an open notebook, and a box of matches. It looked for all the world like the cartoon for a still life painting arranged by an artist with neither taste nor talent.

  It was the scrap of paper that drew Em’s eyes like a magnet. Charlotte spotted it at much the same time, for she reached across to point and murmur “Look at that!” Even on the tiny screen what was drawn on the paper was evident. It was the same symbol Em had seen in the clinic where his mother was a prisoner, the same symbol Victor had shown him on the back of the one-dollar bill: the eye within the triangle used as a sign by the Knights of Themis.

  Victor bent over to take a closer look. “This is what he wanted you to see,” he said with certainty. “This is the message your father sent you.”

  Em stared at the scrappily planned still life in bewilderment. “I don’t get it.”

  “Neither do I,” Victor admitted. “Not yet.” He stood up. “Does this camera have a standard computer connection?”

  “I think so.”

  Victor made for the door. “We need to take a closer look at that picture.”

  Victor’s laptop was one of the new MacBooks. A bar crawled swiftly across the screen as Victor downloaded the entire camera content. In a moment, the whole of his laptop screen was filled with Kenmare’s main street. Victor tapped a key, and they were looking at the mystery still life. The eye in the triangle stared back at them balefully.

  “He’s written in the notebook,” Charlotte said at once.

  Em followed her gaze. On the tiny camera screen, the open notebook had displayed what looked like an empty page with faint ruled lines. Now, on the laptop, it was evident that each line supported a message in the tiniest example of Professor Goverton’s cramped, neat handwriting Em had ever seen. Even with the larger screen, it was impossible to read what it said. “Can you zoom in?”

  Victor was already tapping keys. “Think so.”

  The screen zoomed, blurred, then cleared to pin-sharp focus. At the top were the words CURRENT READING, followed by the professor’s translation of the lost Nostradamus prophecy. The remainder of the notebook page was filled with what looked like a random series of numbers, which meant nothing to Em at all. He scanned the first line:

  12 6 9 8 3 6 57 1 2 10 4 7 13 34 6 (53 15 3-4) 197 2 9

  “I don’t understand,” Em said. “Do you?”

  “Secret message?” Charlotte suggested.

  Frowning, Victor said, “Obviously a secret message—Em’s eyes only. Looks like a cipher of some sort.” He hesitated. “Or possibly a code.”

  “Aren’t they the same thing?” Em asked.

  Victor shook his head. “A cipher substitutes something for each letter of the alphabet. A code substitutes something for every word of the secret message. This is almost bound to be a cipher.”

  Em felt as if he was trapped by Victor’s gaze. The iPod had been engraved with a message. The one about good listening. Maybe there was more engraving on it somewhere else; they hadn’t really searched. Or maybe if he listened to every song, one of them would be interrupted by his father saying, The key to your cipher is A equals three. Em swallowed. “Maybe there was something else on the iPod.”

  “Yes,” Victor said slowly. “I was wondering about that myself. But the iPod’s gone missing, almost certainly into the hands of the Knights. So our friends on the other side could easily have the key.” He shrugged suddenly. “But so far we’re the only ones who have the message, which puts us ahead.”

  Em didn’t see how. “If they can’t decipher the message without the message and we can’t decipher the message without the key, that puts us about even, I’d say.”

  “Not quite,” Victor said. “If we just had the key, there’s no way on God’s sweet earth we could guess the message. But since we have the message, there’s a chance I might be able to crack it without the key.”

  “You could do that?” Em asked. He was beginning to think his luck had taken a real upturn the day he met Victor.

  “Probably. Ciphers were part of my basic training. But the real question isn’t whether I can do it; it’s whether I can do it in a reasonable time. My guess is, we don’t have a month or two to work on this one.”

  “It could take a month?” Charlotte put in.

  Victor sniffed. “It could take a year. Depends on how complicated Em’s father made the cipher. I’m hoping he didn’t use a computer to create it. That could really slow us down.”

  Em felt just the smallest swelling of relief. “Dad was a Luddite,” he said. “The
re’s no way he would have used a computer.”

  “That could be a help,” Victor said. He turned back to the laptop and pulled a notebook and ballpoint from his pocket. “Okay, the first thing to find out is whether or not this actually is a cipher. After that we can worry about what it means.”

  “How do you do that?” Em asked curiously. “Find out whether it really is a cipher?

  “Frequency analysis,” Victor said without raising his head from the screen. “On average, every letter of the alphabet appears with a given frequency in any piece of text. E is the most frequent—turns up nearly thirteen percent of the time. T is the next most frequent, then A, then O, then I. Your father seems to be substituting numbers for letters in this cipher, so if I find a number that appears more often than any other, it’s likely to stand for E. After that I look for T, then maybe A and work out their actual frequency in relation to the whole message. If the percentages stack up, that means we’re definitely dealing with a cipher.”

  “Won’t that let you decipher the message?” Charlotte asked at once.

  “Possibly. Depends on how sophisticated Em’s father was in setting it up. For the moment I want to confirm that we’re dealing with a cipher. Now, do you think you could manage to shut up for five minutes and let me get to work?”

  In fact it took him nearly ten, and Em knew they were in trouble from the depth of his frown. Eventually he threw down his ballpoint. “It’s not a cipher,” he announced.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m bloody sure!” Victor responded angrily. “He must have created a code. Which means he must have sent you the key in advance.”

  “In the iPod?” Em asked.

  Victor nodded. “Probably.”

  “In which case—” Em began.

  “We’re dead,” Victor finished for him. “I’m not saying codes can’t be broken, but without the key it’s going to take far longer than I think we have available. Especially since I can’t send it to our experts in the Section. But there’s no way I’m going to risk that.” He knuckled his eyes tiredly.