The Florentine Cypher: Kate Benedict Paranormal Mystery #3 (The Kate Benedict Series)

by Carrie Bedford

  We gave him our numbers, which he keyed into his phone. “Thank you, signorine. Be cautious and stay in Venice until you hear from me. When you do leave, you must take a train. The car has been impounded. And trust no one. Not until I tell you all is safe. It should only be a matter of hours.”

  “Then can we return to Florence?” I asked. “Will it be okay for Claire to go home?”

  “Let’s move one step at a time,” he said.

  Claire stood up and gripped the back of her chair, her fingers white against the black metal. Slipping the strap of her handbag over her shoulder, she turned away and strode off. I followed, with a backward glance to see Falcone still sitting in the sunshine. I didn’t know what to make of him. Detective Lake could check him out perhaps. I would call him as soon as we found a secure place to hang out for a few hours.

  We moved fast through the crowds, leaving the Piazza San Marco without a specific destination in mind.

  “Perhaps we should go to the British Consulate,” I suggested. “We’d be safe there for a while.”

  “Good idea.” Claire stopped walking and took out her phone. After a minute of searching, she frowned. “But it’s over in Mestre on the mainland. And that means taking a train.”

  “Then we’ll do our best here,” I said. “We’ll stay with the crowds until we hear from Falcone.”

  “If we hear from him.”

  “There is that,” I agreed. “I want to make some more calls, try to find out more about him. Perhaps we should find a place to sit down.”

  But Claire started walking again, so I followed. We crossed an arched footbridge and then another, traversing the Castello quarter until I had no idea where we were. At one point, Claire and I were separated when a group of tourists pushed in between us. But Claire’s red hair and her height made her easily visible, and I quickly caught up with her. Passing a shop that sold T-shirts and hats, I had an idea. I picked up a black cap from a rack, handed a few euros to the vendor and gave the cap to Claire.

  “Wear this,” I said. “Your hair is too easy to spot.”

  “And a stupid hat with Venezia written on it isn’t?” But she twisted her hair into a neat coil and secured it under the cap.

  I nodded my approval. “Better.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  We continued walking west towards the San Polo district, which would bring us closer to the main train station. But when I recognized a statue of a man on a horse that we’d passed earlier, I realized we were going in circles.

  “We have to stop.” Claire bent over to remove one of her cute Italian leather flats. “I’ve got a blister.”

  Grateful for a rest, I leaned against a stucco wall that was warm from the sun. Falcone was on my mind.

  “I want to make a call to Detective Lake,” I said. “He can check into Falcone and find out more about him. And we need somewhere to rest.”

  “I didn’t like that Falcone. He thinks Ethan killed Ben Shepherd, for God’s sake. Do you think he’s really a policeman? He seemed to know a lot about these Custodian people. Maybe he’s one of them.” Claire grimaced when she rubbed her foot. “This really hurts, and I’m so tired I can hardly stand up.”

  “Wait here.” I ducked into a small, dimly lit bar on the corner of the calle. “We’re looking for a cheap place to stay,” I told the barman. “Do you know of anything close by?”

  I’d said ‘cheap,’ but what I was hoping for was anonymous. The kind of place where the proprietor would take cash and not bother to register our stay with the police, which was the law in Italy.

  “Certo,” the barman replied. “My brother-in-law runs the Villa Julia. He’ll look after you.” He gave me the directions, assuring me it was less than five minutes away.

  Ten minutes later we turned on to a narrow street flanked by a greasy canal on one side and a row of peeling stucco buildings on the other. A rusted sign over a brown door told us we’d reached our destination. When I rang the bell, the door clicked open and we stepped inside. Claire grabbed my arm. “We can’t stay here,” she said. “It’s…” She didn’t finish the sentence.

  I understood her reservations. The tiny lobby smelled of cooking, but not in a good way. More like rancid fat and old cabbage. Still, the place was what we needed. It would do for a few hours. We could freshen up, recharge our phones and wait to hear from Falcone. It was no palace but it’d be safe.

  I glanced over at a group of suntanned young men who’d gathered in a small common area next to the reception desk. They sprawled on a sad-looking couch, chatting about the cricket game they were watching on a tiny black and white television. Their accents sounded Australian and they all looked at Claire, two of them elbowing each other with big silly grins on their faces. She ignored them, keeping her chin up and her eyes on the desk where the taciturn landlord took cash for a one-night stay and didn’t ask for identification. I slid a few notes across the desk and collected the key.

  The landlord directed us to a room at the top of the house, reached by three flights of creaking wooden stairs. The room was small, furnished with two single beds covered with faded floral bedspreads, a wobbly table and two unmatched chairs. The house must have been grand once, with high arched ceilings and wooden casement windows. Now, the paint on the walls was flaking off and the floor tiles were cracked.

  “Home sweet home,” said Claire, wrinkling her nose when she peeked into the adjacent bathroom.

  I gazed out of the window. The view was of rooftops and a few balconies with laundry strung across them. It seemed a long way down to the narrow canal below.

  Claire’s phone rang and she answered, turning away to face the wall while she talked. It was impossible not to listen though. I gathered it was the boyfriend and that he seemed to be insisting on coming to fetch her. After a short conversation and a few murmured words, she ended the call and headed towards the bathroom.

  “Can I use your phone?” I asked before she closed the door. I’d just taken mine out of my bag and realized it was dead. I should have paid more attention to it. My charger had been in the stolen duffle bag, and Dad didn’t even have a mobile, let alone a smartphone like mine, so didn’t have a charger I could use.

  Taking Claire’s brief nod as a yes, I found Detective Lake’s card in my bag and made a call to him. But I only reached his voicemail, so I left a message, asking him to call me back as soon as he could.

  When Claire came back, she perched on the edge of one of the beds. “Cleaner than you’d think,” she said, lifting the cover to inspect the sheets underneath. “I might take a nap.”

  “So, what do we make of Falcone’s mysterious contact who wants the key so badly?” I asked.

  “I’d like to think Falcone’s telling the truth,” she said. “If someone is holding Ethan and we can secure his release in return for the key…” She trailed off. “But I don’t know. I wouldn’t trust Falcone with Ethan’s life, that’s for sure.”

  “I agree.” I took off my jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. “Even if Falcone’s really a cop, he didn’t seem to believe that Ethan is an innocent victim in all this. And Lake actively suspects Ethan of murder. I have a feeling we’re on our own as far as protecting him goes. So I think we need to take another look at the list and your dad’s notebook. If we can unravel the puzzle of the key, we might uncover something that leads us to Ethan. The more we can do for ourselves, the better.”

  “Right,” said Claire. She got up from the bed and took a seat opposite me. “I’ll help you.”

  I took the books and the pouch out of my bag and laid them on the scarred tabletop. She picked up the paperback by Alberti. “So this is a translation of the original leather-bound book that was stolen. Dad must have bought it, but why?”

  I’d been thinking about that ever since finding the paperback in Simon’s study. “I think the original has to be important in some way. It must be more than just a container for the key and the missing list of artworks. At least, that’s what your father
must have been thinking, and he’d been working on it for some time. How was your dad’s Italian?”

  “Non-existent.”

  “Right, so he needed the English version.” I pointed at the book. “Why don’t you tell me what you know about Alberti, so I don’t have to read it all?”

  She nodded. “Let’s see. Leon Battista Alberti. Born in 1406 in Genova and died in 1472. He was regarded as the model Renaissance man— a writer, architect, linguist and mathematician. He was also the father of modern cryptography.”

  “Cryptography? As in secret codes and all that?”

  “Yes. He was a pioneer in the field of cyphers and invented the first polyalphabetic cypher, which was considered unbreakable in its time.”

  I was impressed. “Smart chap.”

  “Absolutely. And, as I said, he was good at a lot of other things too. He wrote a number of books, in addition to the Della Pittura.” She picked up the paperback “He dedicated the prologue to Brunelleschi, the architect of the great dome of the Florence cathedral. I don’t remember the exact words…” She flipped pages. “Here it is. Alberti describes the dome as ‘such a large structure, rising above the skies, ample to cover with its shadow all the Tuscan people.’ ”

  “So,” I said. “These papers were hidden in a copy of Alberti’s book. And Alberti invented a cypher. If I had to take a bet, that’s our connection. Do you know anything about cyphers?”

  “Not a thing. Codes and mathematics are not my forte.” We both stared at the paperback in silence until Claire finally spoke again. “If there is a code, what’s it supposed to tell us? Falcone hinted at a place like a safe or a strongbox holding something of value. Perhaps the code reveals its location?”

  “Or maybe a combination number for a safe?”

  “Do you think Ethan worked it out? The code?” Claire asked. “Has he gone into hiding because he knows something he shouldn’t?”

  For a second, I let myself consider that possibility. If Ethan was hiding, then at least he was safe. But I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t get a message to us somehow if that were the case. I shrugged. Claire’s face crumpled. “How can we hope to work out the significance of the book and the key if Ethan wasn’t able to? Or my dad? He had this book for months and we don’t know how much he worked out, if anything at all. We’ve only got hours. This is a complete waste of time.” She started crying, tears dripping down her cheeks, hiccupping as she tried to hold back the sobs. I needed to distract her, get her back on track. “Tell me more about Alberti’s cypher,” I said.

  She dabbed at her eyes. “Okay, let me think… Alberti invented a system of metal disks, one static and one mobile, to enable the creation of cyphers based on letter substitution. Later modifications used tables to create the cyphers rather than the disks. Easier to carry around, although it is said that the disks were used even as late as the American Civil War.”

  “I get it. Say you wanted to encode my name, Kate. Using an easy substitution code, you’d shift the alphabet a number of letters, let’s say three, so that the K would become an N, A would be D and so on.”

  “That’s right. But obviously that’s too easy to decode using frequency analysis—”

  “Because the letter ‘e’ for example, turns up more often than any other letter in the English alphabet.”

  “Exactly. So Alberti created this thing called a polyalphabetic cypher where you need a keyword to create and then decode the cypher text. Over time, the codes became more and more sophisticated. Alberti’s principle was used as the basis of the Enigma machine during World War II.” Claire rested her chin on her hands. “And that’s it. That’s as much as I know. It doesn’t help, does it?”

  “We need access to a computer,” I said. “We could do some research on code breaking.”

  “I don’t think going to an internet cafe is a good idea.”

  She was right. Falcone had been adamant that we stay out of sight for a while. “We can use the 3G service on your mobile to do some web-surfing,” I suggested. “Or Leo might know about some of this stuff. And if he doesn’t, he can look it up. I promised to call him anyway.”

  Claire handed me her phone. “Call Leo. I don’t even know what we’d search for, to be honest.”

  I added the code for the UK before putting in Leo’s mobile number.

  “Leo Benedict.”

  I never thought two words could sound so good. I had to swallow a lump in my throat before I could say anything. “Leo, it’s me.”

  “Good God, Kate! Where are you? I’ve been ringing you since yesterday afternoon.”

  “I’m sorry. My phone is out of power.”

  “I heard some bright spark invented this thingy called a charger,” he said. “Anyway, what’s going on?”

  I brought him up to date as briefly as I could. When I told him about the call from Detective Lake, he exploded. “He thinks Ethan killed someone? That’s bloody ridiculous. Ethan wouldn’t hurt a fly, literally.”

  “I know, I know. For now we want to work out what Claire’s father’s notes mean. Maybe there’ll be a clue, something that will connect us to Ethan. Claire’s desperate to find him.”

  “Of course,” Leo said. “What do you need?”

  “We need information on decoding a cypher.”

  There was a very long pause, and I imagined the phone signals stopping dead on their journey from Venice to Oxford.

  “What kind of cypher?” he asked eventually.

  I explained about Alberti. “In addition to the key, which was hidden in the book, we think there’s a cypher that perhaps conceals a message, like a location or maybe a passcode that would open a safe.”

  “There are three components to a cypher,” Leo said. “The plaintext, which is the message you want to encode; the keyword; and the cypher text, which is the encoded text. Are you still with me?”

  “Doing my best. How do you know all this stuff?”

  “I’ve taught a couple of cryptography classes. It all comes down to mathematics, really.”

  Of course Leo would say that. In his world, everything revolved about mathematics. “But we don’t have the keyword,” I said. “And I don’t think we have the cypher text either.” I looked at Claire, who shrugged.

  “Listen, why don’t you come home to England and we’ll work on this together,” Leo said. “Bring Claire.”

  “I’d like to do that. We’ll talk about it.” I glanced at her. Her cheeks were pale, the bruise standing out purple and blue. Her aura was definitely moving faster too, a diaphanous halo swirling over her head.

  “So will breaking this code help find Ethan?” Leo asked. “And uncover whoever killed his assistant?”

  “Either or both. Maybe. I don’t know, honestly. It could all be a completely wild goose chase. But we have to try, because we have no other leads.”

  “Well, you’re not going to get far without the keyword, sorry. Do you have any clues at all as to what it could be?”

  Three beeps sounded in my ear and I looked at the screen, which told me it was down to two percent power. “Damn. We’re about to get cut off. I’ll ring you again soon. Love you, Leo.”

  I gave the defunct mobile back to Claire who glared at it. “I don’t have my charger with me,” she said. “We’ll have to buy one quickly, or Falcone won’t be able to reach us.”

  I didn’t want to go outside. Our room, however cramped and shabby, had started to feel like a cozy sanctuary. “Those men might still be looking for us,” I said. “Or the police, if Falcone hasn’t managed to convince them yet to cancel the alert.” And maybe he never would, I thought. I still had serious doubts about him and his motives.

  “I have an idea.” Claire took her purse out of her bag and extracted some euro notes. “Do you have any cash?” she asked.

  I checked my purse. “Five euros. I spent most of what I had on vaporetto tickets and this room.”

  She took the money and headed towards the door. “Wait here. I’ll be back.”


  The door had closed behind her by the time I realized she was leaving. I ran to the door and yanked it open, hearing her shoes clicking on the stone staircase. About to run after her, I realized I didn’t have the room key. By the time I found it underneath the books on the table, she was on her way back up.

  “You didn’t go outside did you?” I asked when she entered the room.

  “By myself?” She rolled her eyes. “I went down to ask one of the Australians to do some shopping for me. He should be here soon. For goodness sake, Kate, stop fretting.”

  I was beginning to realize that Claire didn’t truly grasp the extent of the danger we were in. I toyed with the idea of telling her about the aura, but I predicted the conversation would be counter-productive. My revelations about other auras in the past had elicited a range of reactions, from outright mirth to disbelief and fury. I was quite sure Claire wouldn’t believe me. In spite of what we’d been through together in the last twenty-four hours, there was still a distance between us. She didn’t seem to have much faith in me or my motives for staying with her and, if I started talking about auras, I guessed that she’d be deeply skeptical of any suggestions I made going forward. Now wasn’t the right time. Maybe it never would be. All I could do was stay with her and protect her to the best of my ability. And protect myself while I was at it, on the chance I had an invisible aura rotating furiously over my own head.

  “So now what?” Claire asked, following me to the wobbly table where I sat, jiggling my chair to test how stable it was. Not very, I decided.

  “Leo asked if we had any clues at all that would help to work out what this code could be. Let’s review everything we’ve got.” I picked up the paperback book, took out the two yellowing pages and laid them down carefully on the table. Then I lined Simon’s notebook up next to them.