Though Warner wasted an extra half hour on the kid, trying every trick in the book, #224 refused to utter one more word.
* * * * *
Two hours later and three rooms down from the one being used by Warner, United Nations Investigator Edward Hawke was interviewing a middle-aged northern European woman who had been tagged as #237. He, too, had been conducting his interviews with little success. He had, however, managed to register that seventeen of his interviewees had shown all the symptoms of being on some kind of sedative drug, possibly phenobarbitone. In fact, nearly all the people he had attempted to speak with had displayed an alarmingly placid and subdued nature. Some did not speak through choice, but most had seemed as though they simply could not be bothered.
Hawke opened his file and removed a photograph of a young girl. She was smiling, her mousy brown hair flowing down her shoulders as she turned and posed for the camera. It had been for the final semester’s yearbook. One of the few photographs that Lara had not minded, because it was her name that would go underneath it. Not her father’s.
“Did this girl ever come to your settlement?” Hawke asked.
Nothing.
“Did you ever see this girl? Did anybody mention that this girl was flying home or that they might need to try and stop her?”
Still nothing.
Hawke became desperate. “Do you even know who this girl is?” he said, rolling his eyes as though wasting his time.
The woman’s refocused her eyes. She had not even been looking but now, seeing the celluloid image her eyes had widened in recognition and then she had looked guiltily away, her head bowed. It was not a look of guilt rooted in a knowledge of what might have happened to the girl, more a look of penitent servitude. As though the girl was special and she did not even deem herself worthy to look at her image.
“I’ll ask you one more time,” Hawke said. “Do you know who this girl is?”
Then she had spoken. Almost under her breath, the woman had uttered just three words. They had been in Italian - ‘Madre del Dio’ - but Hawke was fluent:
“Mother of God.”
he shall be free at home
Deuteronomy 24:5
With a gentle whine that built toward a deafening thunder, the sixteen-meter diameter rotors of the S-76 Air Ambulance steadily began to blur. Jack and Warner watched as the dust at the sides of the runway began to lift and swirl, illuminated by the mid-morning sun.
“How are you feeling?” Warner asked.
Jack looked toward the helicopter and breathed deeply, his chest expanding with his fears and his lungs using their full force to expel them from his body. “Relieved,” he said.
“Lara would have been very proud of what you’ve done.”
Would she? Jack thought. Perhaps if he had done more for his only child whilst she was alive then she might have been proud. Right now he felt as though he had done little more than even the score. It was as though he had needed to rescue Daniel just to put right all that he had previously done wrong. All he had done in reality was redress the balance.
But at least he had been offered, and had taken, that all-important second chance. He watched the tiny stretcher-like crib being loaded and strapped into place by the nurse who would travel with them, and knew that there was only one way to truly make things right. He must not make the same mistakes again.
Once Daniel was secured the two men turned to face the maelstrom and shielded their eyes as they started walking toward the helicopter, their bodies stooped low.
“Jack,” a voice shouted and he turned. Behind them, General Kerr was hurrying out from the main building and carrying a small cardboard box. It was the plain brown innocuous kind used for single reams of paper.
“I thought you might want this,” he said, patting Jack on the shoulder with a wry smile as the strong wind cut into his face.
Jack accepted the box and tentatively lifted the lid. Inside was a leather-bound volume with Hebrew letters branded into its face. “I understand it’s some kind of payment for the information which led us here,” Kerr explained. “We found it in the same room as your boy, mounted on the wall in a protective case. I’m pretty sure it’s the one you were after.”
“Isn’t this evidence?” Jack asked.
“I doubt it,” Kerr replied, pursing his wide smile, “its just a bible. A very old bible, apparently, but I don’t think we’ll miss it on the inventory. It might explain why your man would want to trade it, though. They reckon it could be old enough to be worth thousands.”
Jack looked at Kerr with a strange expression, wondering why a man like Simon, whose taste in clothes demonstrated no shortage of wealth, would be so desperate to receive an old bible whose worth was measured in thousands rather than millions.
“Thanks,” he said and the General smiled.
“Hey... and you look after that little boy, do you hear?”
Jack nodded and for the first time since they had met, the General saw a relaxed look in his eyes. They shook hands warmly and Kerr watched as Jack followed Warner into the helicopter. A member of the ground crew pulled the door closed behind them, secured the heavy latch and banged hard on the panelling. A few seconds later the retractable tricycle gear lifted from the tarmac. The Ambulance rose upwards toward the sun, the roaring sound diminishing almost as quickly as it had begun.
Jack Bernstein was going home.
And Daniel, Lara’s child, was finally going with him.
the words of a book
that is sealed
Isaiah 29:11
The island of Cyprus became a distant beige and green speck in an ocean of blue as the F.B.I. Lear jet lifted from the tarmac into the clear skies above Nicosia airport. The second of the on-board executive suites had hurriedly been converted into a makeshift observational suite within which fully trained staff would keep a close eye on the child throughout the flight. All three had insisted that Jack return to his seat for a few hours so that he could get some sleep. The child, they informed him repeatedly, was in good hands.
When he did finally return he had watched Warner snoring gently in his chair and had made a vain attempt to join him, wherever he was, but it was no use. Whilst the burden of responsibility he had felt for many weeks had been lifted, the pain long-suffered under its weight still lingered. It would be a long time before it vanished completely. He felt strange, almost hollow, as though the quest to bring Lara’s child home had been filling some kind of void within his senses. It was hard to believe that it was finally at an end; that there was nothing more that he could do.
He lifted the innocuous brown cardboard box from the fixed chrome shelving which ran to his right and opened it up to see the book once more, Simon’s desire for which had started the entire chain of events. Slightly smaller than A4, the bible was beautifully ornate and had been extremely well preserved. Whilst the opinion of a Cypriot expert on the base had been that it could even prove to be in excess of a thousand years old, the high sheen of the leather and crisp lines of the gilt edging still offered the illusion that it had been crafted only recently.
He placed the volume across his knees and opened it up. The pages were yellowed, but naturally so. Those who had toiled laboriously to hand copy the Hebrew script did not have the bleaching facilities taken for granted by the paper mills of today. It was probably that lack of bleaching agents, however, that had kept those same pages looking as fresh as the day they had been written. He skimmed swiftly through them all. His knowledge of Ancient Hebrew was still limited, but he could recognise enough to understand that this was indeed a copy of the Old Testament, every chapter from Genesis to Malachi shining out from the page in the neat lines of a determinedly steady hand. An auctioneer, displaying the book to the public and inviting bids, might even refer to the standard of workmanship as ‘exquisite’.
He turned back to the opening page, on which had been drawn a detailed sketch illustrating God’s wrath at the betrayal of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Whil
st He looked down with displeasure curled into every hand-drawn sinew in his face, his two subjects looked embarrassed and scared. The anger in the message was clear; God was all powerful, he watched his subjects and these were His words which were to be followed. They must be understood if there was to any hope of salvation for mankind.
He turned to the following page; the opening chapter of Genesis, and stared at the first lines of Ancient Hebrew copy reading right to left. Chapter One, Verse One. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep : and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters...’
He skipped page after page, reading the small segments he could understand but taking little interest. He was on edge, his mind active and needing something to do, no matter how banal.
Then, on page six, he saw something...
He had already turned the heavy paper and was glancing blindly at page seven when the feeling came. A gentle drip that became a wave, washing over his mind and making him feel uneasy. He tried to ignore it, but it would not go away and he turned back. Page six was special. No, he thought, not special… but strangely familiar. Although he had only ever read selected passages of the Old Testament in the original Hebrew before, something about this page triggered a memory. A dark, distant memory that felt heavy in his stomach and tight in his throat. It was something he had not expected to feel, though in many ways it should have been...
Though he had not been looking for it, a pattern had sought him out and pulled him in. And the more of it he saw, the more he understood.
Running downward through the text, beginning at Genesis 49:1, was a contiguous string of Hebrew letters; an Equidistant Letter Sequence. He should have known that it would be there, because it was the same kind of hidden code that Simon had used to draw him to the church in London:
Almost disbelievingly, Jack read the words aloud; the hidden message; “Holocaust of Israel.”
He looked upward and along the full length of the cabin, his eyes lost in thought.
“Jesus,” he said to himself.
Warner stirred and opened his eyes, glancing over to his travelling companion with a look of genuine concern. The leather in the chair squeaked unceremoniously as he turned. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
Jack’s eyes returned to the page. His words were distant. “There’s a code.”
“Sorry?”
“In this Bible,” Jack explained. “There’s a hidden code. Letter sequences that make phrases.”
Warner saw the open book on his knee and watched as Jack pointed them out. Surprisingly, he smiled and nodded as though he understood. “The Bible Code,” he offered. “It’s been on TV and everything. Don’t worry about it, it’s fairly common knowledge these days.”
Jack turned to face him with a look of interrogation. “You mean, people know about this?”
Warner pulled his chair back into the upright position, blinked against the cabin lights and straightened his coat. “Sure they do,” he said, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “My wife, Ellie; she’s hooked by it. Got the books and everything.” He saw that Jack was casting him a strange glance. “She hates the fact that my philosophy is that there’s nothing in this world that can’t be explained. Always trying to prove me wrong.” He laughed.
“And has she?” Jack asked. “Proved you wrong I mean?”
“Plenty, but I don’t let on,” Warner smiled confidently. “About twenty years ago some Jewish guy in Prague by the name of... Weissmansomething, I think they called him... had noticed that if, at the beginning of Genesis when written in the original Hebrew, he skipped fifty letters, then another fifty, then another, it spelled out the word ‘Torah’; Hebrew for ‘law’.” As he spoke Jack checked the passage. Warner was right, the word was there, fifty apart as claimed. “What’s more, this guy saw the same word appearing at the beginning of Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Many people had scorned the idea but, as he pointed out, the proof was there. The word really did appear.”
Jack nodded, his eyes refusing to leave the page. “So why wasn’t this on the news? In the papers?” he asked.
“It was, if you catch the last five minutes or read the tiny paragraph on page twenty-eight.” Warner said. “But it seemed that the more phrases that were uncovered, the less people wanted to believe. Some tried to claim that he had fixed his results, that he had somehow tampered with the original text so that the hidden meanings might be forced. But nobody, according to Ellie, has ever disproved his findings.”
Jack checked the opening chapters to Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy and saw the same E.L.S. The main copy read as it should, but the words had been carefully chosen so as to spell out the word ‘TORAH’ when read fifty letters apart.
“So what did he find when he decoded it all?” Jack asked.
Warner smiled. “He didn’t. He couldn’t. Firstly because he kept hitting irregularities; one letter missing in a string and that kind of thing, and secondly because the Bible is so long and the code is so complex that even with a computer it would have taken him somewhere in the region of three hundred years or so to solve. He did find some pretty weird stuff, though. ‘Atomic holocaust... it will strike them, destroy, annihilate.... Kennedy... to die... Dallas... Oswald... Marksman... Name of assassin who will assassinate....’ that kind of thing. All historic events, and all embedded into the greatest story ever told. Thousands of years before those events happened. Spooky, eh?”
“And still nobody would believe him?” Jack asked.
“A few did,” Warner offered, “but not many. You see, it was mainly Jewish people who checked it out because it was mainly Jewish people that could understand the Ancient Hebrew. And, no offence to you guys, but none were too keen to question the Word of God, if you know what I mean. Maybe some were scared. Not so much of God, but of discovering that every event in their lives had been in some way pre-ordained. Nobody really wants to know the future. They think they do, but they don’t. Not really.”
As he spoke, Jack was still scanning the pages, marking sections with his fingers. And then, hidden within Deuteronomy, he found something which appeared to offer confirmation of Warner’s words:
Crossing the area where the conventional text read ‘sealed before God’, Jack could see the embedded message; the signature of God: ‘bible code.’
“But what we have here is probably an original,” he said cryptically.
Warner looked unsure. “How do you mean?”
“You said it yourself; this Weissman guy kept hitting anomalies. Letters missing and so forth. That could have been because the original text had been altered at some point. Either by a mistake in a handwritten copy or, worse still, deliberately.”
“You mean to hide the code?” Warner asked.
“To make it unbreakable. But then, perhaps the reason this book is so important is not because it’s so old. Because it’s so old that the text is untouched. This might be the only copy from which the full code might ever be deciphered. That was why Simon wanted me to steal it from the cult for him.”
“How can you be sure?” Warner asked.
“Because Simon lured me to the church with a code. An E.L.S. that was embedded within Ancient Hebrew symbols. He used that kind of code because that’s the only kind of code he knows. I think that’s what he’s trying to do. Solve the big one.”
Warner looked straight ahead for a moment, thinking. “And then what?”
“My guess he thinks that he’ll possess the ultimate enlightenment,” Jack said, feeling the pain of Lara’s voice as she spoke to him in her final message. He could not believe that he had thrown off her words like a burning coat, dismissing them as little more than the ramblings of a brainwashed child. “The answers to all existence contained within the word of God. Everything that was, is and will ever be. A plan, a path for everyone to follow that would lead them toward the eternal life which He had promised the righteo
us.”
Warner exhaled. “I don’t like the sound of it,” he said. “Because Ellie’s theory on the whole idea is that if the code really does detail events from the past then, similarly, it must also detail events from the future. Nobody has uncovered any yet, but then she argues that nobody has really known exactly what they were looking for, have they? If it’s true, though, then that book is a dangerous thing to have, and an even more dangerous thing to hand over to somebody else. Even if your Simon friend only managed to solve a few things about what is to follow then in my view it becomes a weapon.”
“There has to be a primer,” Jack said as though in another place, his eyes still scanning the pages.
Warner looked blank. “A what?”
“You know? A primer, a hook. A key which tells you how to solve the puzzle. You can’t have a code without one. Find the primer and the rest is easy. Everything just falls into place...”
He looked through more pages, his eyes literally reading between the lines but stopped suddenly when he caught sight of Daniel Chapter 12, Verse 4. Where the conventional text read; ‘to shut up the words and seal the book until the end;’ one word crossed straight through it. The one word that he had never thought he would see embedded within a two thousand year old book:
The word seemed to leap out from the page and reverberate through Jack’s mind as though God himself was pointing it out. As though He had embedded the word for Jack alone to find. If he had never believed in fate before, then he did now. Perhaps even this moment in time, glancing through the book and seeing the word he needed to see, had been preordained. He had never dreamed that one word could be such a powerful omen. But it was.
Because that one word was ‘Computer.’
Jack suddenly realised that not only was he holding the power of Simon’s Holy Grail in his hands, but that he also possessed the power to decode it first. His company manufactured the most powerful computer systems in the world, capable of running billions of algorithms per second. An ordinary man, or perhaps even a scholarly man, might search for fifty years and never find the primer.
Codex Page 42