The Secret Prophecy

by Herbie Brennan

  “Maybe he didn’t send the key in the iPod,” Charlotte suggested.

  Victor looked at her. “Go on.”

  “Maybe the clue’s in the camera.”

  “We went through all the pictures in the camera.”

  “No you didn’t,” Charlotte told him. “You went through the holiday file, because that’s what he told Em to do. ‘Remember our last family holiday . . .’ But you didn’t go through pictures in any other file.”

  “You’re right,” Victor muttered. He pushed the camera toward Em. “Have a look. You work it better than I can.”

  Em shook his head. “You’ve downloaded everything onto your laptop. If there’s anything else, it’ll be on there already.”

  Victor nodded, then pushed his finger across the trackpad and began to tap keys.

  Em leaned across to watch. There were two more files of photographs apart from the holiday pictures they’d already examined. One seemed to be more holiday shots, although not one featuring people. On the third one Em suddenly realized what he was looking at. “That’s the Nostradamus Museum,” he said excitedly. “Dad must have taken these on one of his French trips to research his book.”

  “Okay,” Victor said, “let’s examine each one of these carefully. If there’s a Nostradamus connection, it might well be where he hid the key.”

  That made sense to Em, but even though they examined every picture in the file minutely, there was nothing that would help them with the message. Victor brought up the second file, only to discover that it was a series of old woodcuts. He paged through them slowly, but none showed any sign of additions or tampering. “I think those may have been for a presentation to his history students,” Em said.

  Victor turned away from the computer. “We’re missing something,” he said. “We need to put ourselves into your father’s head. He has a vital message he needs to communicate to you; but he can’t afford to have it read by the wrong people, so he hides it carefully away and writes it in code. But at the same time he has to make sure you read it, so the code has to be easy for you to crack. Which means either you already have the key and don’t know it. Or . . .” He frowned thoughtfully. “. . . or the key is contained in the message itself! That could be it.” He brought up the notebook page again and pushed the laptop toward Em. “Have another look at those numbers and see if any of them rings a bell. A birthday or some significant date—that sort of thing.

  Em stared at the figures, then shook his head. “No.”

  “Come on!” Victor exclaimed impatiently. “Really try. There has to be something in there.”

  Em looked again. The figures remained figures, just a series of numbers without logic or pattern. “I wonder what ‘current reading’ means?” he said.

  Victor blinked. “What?”

  “He wrote ‘current reading’ at the top,” Em said. “I just wondered what that meant.”

  “It’s a book code,” Charlotte said suddenly.

  “Presumably it’s a reference to some book he was—” Victor stopped, his mouth open. “What did you just say?”

  “It’s a book code,” Charlotte repeated. “I saw something about them in a movie once.”

  Victor stared at her for a long moment, then abruptly thumped himself on the forehead. “My God, how could I have been so stupid? Of course! I must be going senile.”

  “You know how he made up the code?” Em frowned as he looked from one to the other.

  “Of course I do!” Victor said. “Well, I do now, thanks to Charlotte. So obvious. A book code takes time to set up, but once you’ve done it, it’s absolutely unbreakable without the key. But you can pass on the key very easily. If it’s somebody you know, you can even pass it in such a way that it would mean nothing to anybody who intercepted it.”

  “So are you going to keep me in suspense?” Em asked him. “Or is one of you going to tell me what a book code is?”

  Victor grinned. “Simple. I want to send you a secret message that nobody else could possibly decode. So the first thing we do is agree between us on the book that will be the key. It’s quite a good idea to pick something fairly big, like the Bible or the complete works of Shakespeare; but the actual book doesn’t matter so long as we both have a copy. I then compose my message using words taken from the book we agreed on. But instead of sending you the message itself, I send you the exact location of where each word appears in the book. Page number, followed by line number, followed by position in the line—word number three or four or whatever. All you do to reconstruct the message is follow my instructions using your own copy of the book.”

  “What happens if somebody else has a copy of the book? Couldn’t they just look up the words as well?”

  Victor gave him a withering look. “They don’t know which book we agreed on, do they?”

  Em hesitated. “But Dad and I didn’t agree on any book,” he protested. “We never talked about sending messages in code.”

  “Maybe not, but he sent you the clue right along with the message. ‘Current reading.’ We know he must have composed the message sometime after he got ill. All you have to do is remember what you were reading around that time. Maybe something you were set to study at school: Dickens or Chaucer or something. Something he would have noticed you reading at the time.” He leaned forward eagerly. “Can you remember?”

  Em remembered all right; and it wasn’t Dickens or Chaucer. He felt his face begin to flush. “It was Harry Potter.”

  Chapter 33

  “Which one?” Victor asked. “Haven’t read them myself, but I understand there’s more than one.”

  “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” Em’s flush receded. Victor clearly didn’t think there was anything much wrong with reading Harry Potter. “I missed it first time around.”

  “Big book?”

  Em nodded. “More than six hundred pages.”

  “Perfect for a book code. Six hundred pages is a lot of words. Couple of hundred thousand by my reckoning. Well, well, well . . .” He grinned broadly at Em. “Don’t suppose you have a copy with you?”

  Em shook his head. “No way.”

  “Doesn’t matter. There’s a bookshop around the corner; I can slip out and buy one. Hardback or paperback?”

  “They’re both the same, aren’t they?”

  “Same text, but you sometimes get a variation in layout or type size. Can lead to different page numbers. Even a page or two difference is a nightmare when you’re decoding. I’d rather we were all singing from the same hymn-sheet.”

  “It was the hardback,” Em told him. “Mum bought me a copy.”

  Okay,” Victor said, “I’ll see if I can find us the hardback.”

  Em and Charlotte were paging through the holiday photographs on the laptop again when they heard Victor’s key in the lock. Moments later Victor appeared in the living room waving a fat hardback with a skinny dragon on the jacket. “Got it!” he exclaimed triumphantly.

  Em felt a tingle of excitement intermixed with a distinct undertone of fear. If Victor was right about the code—and Em didn’t doubt for an instant that he was right—they would soon know what Em’s father had been trying to tell him so secretly. That was dangerous knowledge. It would almost certainly call for dangerous action. “What do we do now?”

  “We get to work on the code. Should be quick and easy if we go at it together.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Em asked. The fear racked up another notch, but he hid it successfully.

  “You can do the book bit since you’re the Potter fan. I’ll call out the page numbers and so on from the picture on the computer. You find the word and call it out to me. Charlotte will write it down. We’ll soon know what your father was trying to tell us.”

  It was an innocent enough phrase, but it got to Em a little. Dad wasn’t trying to tell us anything—he was trying to tell me. He pushed the reaction down. It was stupid. Victor only meant that they were in this whole mess together; and, frankly, Em was glad of it. H
e knew with absolute certainty that he would never have gotten this far without Victor’s help. Or Charlotte’s. Actually, without their help, he would probably be a prisoner of the Knights by now. “Okay,” he said, and held out his hand to take the book.

  “Right,” Victor said briskly as he leaned over the laptop, “turn to page twelve.”

  Em opened the book.

  “Got it? Now count down to line six. You there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now the ninth word on that line . . . ?”

  Em counted, using his forefinger to keep his place. “My,” he said. “‘There is a little more in the bottle, my Lord.’ Ninth word is my.”

  Charlotte wrote it down as Victor consulted his laptop again. “Turn back to page eight,” he instructed. “Sixth word in line three.”

  Em found the page and scanned the line. “Oh,” he said.

  Victor looked up quickly. “What’s the problem?”

  “There’s a hyphenated thing here. ‘Grown-up.’ Does that count as one word or two?”

  “Count it as one,” Victor told him decisively.

  “Then the sixth word is ‘son.’”

  Charlotte wrote that down as well. “‘My son’—good start. He wants to send a message to his son, so he begins it ‘My son.’ I think we’re on the right track, Em. Couple more words should tell us whether the message really makes sense. Okay, find page fifty-seven.”

  Em flipped quickly through the book. “Got it.”

  “First line, second word?”

  “‘The.’”

  “Back to page ten, line four, seventh word.”

  “‘Riddle.’”

  “Page thirteen, line thirty-four, sixth word?”

  Em missed his line count and had to start again, but eventually he said, “‘Disguise.’ The word is ‘disguise.’”

  Charlotte scrawled disguise in his notebook. “Something tricky now. He’s put four sets of numbers in parentheses, and there’s a hyphen in front of the last one. Haven’t seen that in a book code before.”

  “What’s it mean?” Em asked.

  “Not sure,” Victor admitted, “but I’m going to assume the first three number sets refer to page, line, and word position like the others. Look up page fifty-three, line fifteen, word three. We’ll worry about the hyphen four later.”

  Em did as he was told. “The word is ‘sneer.’” He looked up when Victor failed to respond and repeated, “The word is ‘sneer.’” To Charlotte he added, “Are you writing this down?”

  Charlotte nodded. “Yes.”

  “I’m thinking,” Victor told him. “The message isn’t making a lot of sense after ‘My son.’” He frowned. “‘The riddle disguise sneer.’ Just random words. Yet ‘my son’ seems spot-on.”

  Charlotte leaned over to look at the screen. “Why did he put it in brackets?”

  “I was wondering that myself. And why hyphen four at the end?”

  “Maybe it’s not a hyphen,” Em suggested.

  “What else would it be?”

  Em shrugged helplessly.

  “Maybe it’s a minus sign?” Charlotte said brightly.

  Victor stared at the screen. “By God, you’re right, Charlotte. That’s exactly what it is. ‘Sneer’ minus four. Take away four letters from ‘sneer’ and what do you get?”

  “Depends which you take away. If you take away the first four, you’re left with r. If you take the last, you have s,” Em told him

  “Last would be my guess, because s makes sense. Listen to this: ‘My son, the riddle disguise’ . . . then s in parentheses, which means it’s not really a part of the message, just something he added in to make the rest of it read properly. Trust an academic to come up with something like that. So what we’ve got is a prophecy and a secret message about the prophecy. ‘My son, the riddle disguises’ . . . the riddle being the prophecy.”

  “The riddle disguises what?” Em asked.

  “That’s what we’re about to find out,” Victor said with another wide grin.

  It took them longer than Em expected to decode the remainder of the message. His father had clearly lost patience leafing through Harry Potter and created several words using his minus-four principle to spell out every letter. It was a habit that slowed the decoding process down considerably. But they got there eventually.

  “That’s it,” Victor said, pushing away the laptop.

  “What’s it say?” Em asked. He’d been so focused on the individual words that the overall sense of the message hadn’t reached him.

  Charlotte read aloud from her notebook: “‘My son, the riddle disguises a planned vaccination program for Death Flu. Supplies contaminated. New lethal pandemic within six months provides solution to the population problem. Documented proof from Bederbeck Foundation three one point two eight seven oh six minus one one ten point nine oh two five one nine. Obtain proof at toe of blind man. Release to press.’” She hesitated for a moment, then added, “‘Your father.’”

  “He put that into the code? ‘Your father’?”

  Charlotte nodded. “Yes.”

  Em wiped one eye quickly with the back of his hand. It was a bizarre farewell. He swallowed the lump in his throat and forced himself to say briskly, “I’m not sure I understand what he means, Victor.” Some of the message made no sense at all. Who was the blind man? What was the Bederbeck Foundation? And why was there a whole string of numbers spelled out in words?

  “I think I do,” Victor told him confidently. “You have to put this in context. Actually, you have to start with the secret prophecy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Victor must have memorized the prophecy, for he quoted it without having to check anywhere. “‘In the days of the threatened plague . . .’ Your father seems to have interpreted that as this so-called Death Flu the media has been making such a fuss about. Don’t know if you’ve heard about it. Started with vultures in Africa, and they’re worried that it might turn into a pandemic. Not that it would matter since it doesn’t seem to be a particularly dangerous strain, but people are panicking because it’s called Death Flu.”

  “So Death Flu is the threatened plague?” Charlotte asked.

  “I believe Em’s father thought so. But there’s a lot more. You have ‘When children shall be pierced with slender lance.’ You could see a ‘slender lance’ as the needle the doctor uses to give you your shot. So when you get vaccinated, you’re ‘pierced with a slender lance.’ The World Health Organization has pinpointed children as the highest risk group and recommended mass vaccination of all youngsters under the age of sixteen to prevent the disease from spreading. That’s why they’re concentrating on the under sixteens—not yet at the age of consent—but the vaccine will be made available to all age groups, of course; and the fear factor will ensure widespread uptake.”

  Em remembered Tom’s remark about having Charlotte vaccinated and the comment that Em himself should have a vaccination too. If he hadn’t got caught up in one crisis after another and the shots had been available, he was certain he would have been vaccinated by now . . . and with contaminated vaccine, according to his father. He gave a low whistle. “And Nostradamus managed to predict all this five hundred years ago?”

  Victor shrugged. “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. The point is, your father thought he did. Or maybe he was investigating several possible meanings for the prophecy when he stumbled on something very nasty. The really creepy thing is that there are hints of this in the prophecy as well: ‘A new world rises from the suffering of the old . . . and all mankind shall forever bear the yoke of slavery.’”

  “I’m not sure I follow that. . . .”

  “Remember what I told you about the Knights of Themis?”

  Em nodded.

  “They talk about a ‘new world order’ to describe the slave states they want to set up.” Victor shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t know whether Nostradamus predicted this or not; it might all be pure coincidence. But it started your fath
er on an investigation. He was a very, very clever man, and I think he turned up something certain people didn’t want him to know.”

  “You’re telling me he found out about the Knights?”

  “I’m telling you he found out about a Knights of Themis plot. Whether he knew who was behind it, I don’t know, although I suspect he might have from one part of the message.” Victor turned to face him directly. “Here’s how I read it. One of the Knights’ most cherished aims is a drastic reduction in world population. By any means. I know for a fact they’ve encouraged wars in the past just so hundreds of thousands—millions—of people could be wiped out. But the problem from their viewpoint is that wars won’t hack it anymore. World population is now so high that even a few million dead hardly dents the statistics. So they’re always looking for new ways to reduce it.”

  “And you think my dad found out about one of them?”

  Victor had a hot, excited look in his eyes and hardly seemed to hear the question. “If you were one of the Knights, Em, how would this sound to you? You pick a new strain of flu—the virus mutates a lot so there’s a new strain nearly every winter. You pick one of these and give it a really scary name: bird flu or swine flu or, better yet, Death Flu. Then you get your tame experts to say it might turn into a pandemic, and you make sure the media plays this up. Remember, the Knights have huge influence on the media. They actually own some of our most important newspapers; and they have control of several other news outlets, including some TV networks. Next thing is Themis politicians or politicians in their pay are encouraged to call for something to be done. A lot of them might even believe something needs to be done because they don’t know the whole story, and they may well believe the medical experts and the newspapers. With everybody making such a fuss, the government agrees to underwrite a large-scale vaccination program—maybe even make it compulsory.”

  Charlotte said a little stiffly, “I thought you said it was the World Health Organization that recommended vaccination?”

  “You think the Knights have no influence on the World Health Organization?”