Prime

by Jeremy Robinson

  Subsequent entries in Sasha’s journal variously restated that hypothesis, but evidently her insights had not been sufficient to crack the code. He skipped forward to the most recent entry—made less than an hour before the disastrous raid and failed rescue attempt in Myanmar. Parker read it again, this time from this new perspective.

  I cannot allow myself to think about what has happened. It is beyond my comprehension. The human variable confounds me yet again. If only I could find the solution that would allow me to subtract that unknown and balance the equation.

  The answer lies in the VM. I am sure of it. If I can decipher the VM, maybe I can work backward and find a solution for the human variable.

  I think I understand the connection between the urghan and the manuscript. Guo Kan led the Mongol armies that sacked Baghdad. He also traveled with Nasir al-Tusi. Now it all makes sense. It was not Bacon that wrote the VM, but al-Tusi, an Islamic scholar. I should have made that connection sooner. After all, ‘elixir’ is an Arabic word; it translates as ‘the effective recipe.’ Effective could be understood in the causative sense; not just a healing substance, but something that can bring life out of lifelessness.

  Al-Tusi must have discovered the secret of the elixir and created the code to keep it safe. Perhaps, in his writings, I will find the key to deciphering the book. Perhaps he even kept a copy of the plans for the urghan with the documents he rescued from Baghdad and took back to Persia. It might be there at Maragheh.

  I still do not understand the connection between the plague and the book, but I am no longer willing to dismiss it as a coincidence. Guo Kan had the urghan; did he use it to decode the book? Perhaps he tried to make the elixir, but accidently unleashed something else—an elixir of anti-life? Or maybe it was no accident.

  When I have deciphered the book, I will know for sure.

  Parker realized that he had been holding his breath.

  Sasha’s long effort to understand the Voynich manuscript was nothing less than a quest to divine the secret of life. It had become her sole purpose for living.

  In a rush of understanding, Daniel Parker realized that his own purpose was to help her succeed.

  “Damn you, Jack,” he muttered under his breath. “You’d better bring her back in one piece.”

  As if in response to his utterance, a voice blared from the radio: “King, there’s a vehicle approaching. You’re about to have company.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Maragheh, Iran

  Sasha felt as though her head was about to implode.

  The variables had multiplied beyond her ability to enumerate them. They were coalescing in her consciousness, becoming a veritable black hole of chaos and uncertainty that consumed her thoughts. Her sleep had been erratic; there were huge gaps of time in her memory; dark periods where she must have slept deeply, but she felt exhausted and physically ill. Her techniques for tuning out the world—working through prime numbers, performing complex mathematical operations in her head—seemed beyond her ability now. She barely understood where she was; even the simplest of sensory inputs were scrambled in a fog of confusion.

  She sat in the back of a large vehicle, an SUV of some kind. There were five other men there. Four of them had been on the plane; Chinese men, whose tailored suits did not quite conceal their true identity as thugs working for the triad. They had told her their names, but that information had already vanished beyond the event horizon. The fifth man had been picked up shortly after their arrival. He was different; he cowered fearfully in his seat, nursing superficial wounds that oozed blood. Sasha sensed that he was not there of his own volition.

  A prisoner. Like me.

  The realization slipped away, engulfed by the blackness of chaos.

  Some time later—perhaps just a few minutes, perhaps days or weeks—she became aware of someone tugging at her arm. The SUV had stopped, and all of its passengers, save for her, had already disembarked. She allowed herself to be coaxed from her seat, but as soon as she was standing on the rough ground outside, she felt her legs go weak. She tried to lean against a fender, but the man holding her arm did not permit this; he drew her toward the front end of the vehicle.

  She gradually came to understand that it was nighttime. The headlights of the SUV were illuminating a rather plain looking metal door set into a much larger white structure. The man—the prisoner—was propelled forward, and one of their captors barked a rough order. The prisoner fumbled with a ring of keys, and after a few moments, he succeeded in unlocking the door, after which they all filed in. Sasha and her minder brought up the rear.

  Flashlights came out, but their beams revealed little about the interior of the white structure. Sasha wasn’t paying any attention. This new experience only compounded her sense of dislocation; the dark tumor of uncertainty throbbed in her head, consuming even her desire to know what was happening.

  The group descended a flight of carved stone steps, and they halted at last in a room that might have been the office at a construction site. One of the men barked something, and then repeated himself, but Sasha paid no heed until she felt someone shaking her arm violently. Through a monumental effort of will, she fixed her gaze on the man who had been speaking.

  “Tell him what you want.” The man spoke in a harsh, clipped manner, possibly a result of his relative unfamiliarity with English but more probably because he was a man of violence, used to getting his way with bellicose displays of aggression.

  “What, I—?” Sasha shook her head. What was he talking about?

  “We bring you here to Maragheh, like you ask. You say you need writings.” He gestured forcefully at the prisoner. “Tell him which papers you need.”

  Maragheh. That was important, and she struggled to remember why. “Al-Tusi,” she murmured. “In Nasir al-Tusi’s writings, is there anything that describes how to construct an urghan?”

  The prisoner, a middle-aged man with a full head of gray hair and a bushy beard, looked at her blankly for a moment, and he seemed on the verge of answering in the negative, but a menacing growl from one of the other Chinese men gave him pause.

  “An urghan, you say?” He bent over a table and began flipping through a ring binder.

  This simple act of compliance was a lifeline to Sasha in the midst of the whirlpool. Maragheh. Al-Tusi. The urghan.

  These were not variables. They were the constants that anchored her to the world; they were known quantities and values that, while not yet completely understood, were fixed properties.

  The manuscript.

  Yes.

  The Voynich manuscript was the ultimate constant. The knowledge locked within its mysterious cipher text would not change once she decoded it. It would be the same tomorrow as it was when al-Tusi had first written it down. But she would change.

  The book was the irreducible prime factor that would enable her finally to balance the equation of her life…of the very nature of human existence. She believed this to be true with every fiber of her being.

  I need to be here…right now…in this moment.

  She willed herself back from the swelling tide of chaos and straightened, at long last taking in her surroundings. She knew that she was in the ruins of the Maragheh Observatory, which now rested inside a protective geodesic bubble that preserved its ancient stones and the scrolls and codices from the ravages of the elements. The man—the prisoner—was an Iranian, and probably one of the archaeologists or caretakers of the facility. Her Chinese captors had rightly deduced that they would not be able to simply walk into Maragheh and find what they needed lying out on a table. Sasha wondered if she would even recognize the document when it was finally procured.

  “This must be it,” the prisoner announced, tapping a page. “A treatise on the mathematical nature of harmonies. Al-Tusi’s authorship is suspected, but not proven. It appears nowhere else, and it is not mentioned in any other writings of the time.”

  “Get it,” ordered the leader.

  The man moved into the maz
e of shelves, followed closely by one of the Chinese men, and then he returned a moment later with a copper tube. The lead captor snatched it from his hands and handed it to Sasha.

  “You must wear gloves,” admonished the Iranian, but before he could explain why, a savage blow to the gut put him on his knees, hunched over and moaning in pain.

  Sasha witnessed the violence with detachment; her attention had already become focused on opening the case and teasing out the roll of parchment inside. The outermost curl, which had received the most exposure to the environment, felt stiff and cracked a little at the edges when she began to unfurl it, but above that, the vellum had, for the most part, remained supple. She carefully unrolled the document and spread it out on a tabletop.

  It was immediately evident that she would not be able to read it; the careful and elegant script looked to her untrained eye like Arabic, but the accompanying illustrations filled her with hope. This was, unquestionably, a set of instructions for building the device that had been recovered from Guo’s crypt. One illustration even showed the levers, marked with Voynich characters, and each one was connected by a line to the pipes of varying length contained in the body of the urghan. Though she could not grasp the specific musical tones that the pipes were intended to produce, Sasha could already see the mathematical progression that al-Tusi had employed. Given enough time, she might be able to work it out in her head, but she felt certain that, if afforded access to a computer and supplied with translation tools, she could build a virtual replica of the device, and with it, at long last, she could decode the Voynich manuscript.

  “This is it,” she breathed.

  The lead captor did not appear to appreciate the gravity of her discovery, but he understood well enough that they had accomplished their objective. He dipped a hand into the folds of his jacket and produced a pistol, which he promptly trained on the other captive.

  The Iranian’s eyes grew wide, and he threw his hands up in a supplicating gesture. “No. Please. I did what you asked.”

  The Chinese man glanced at Sasha again. “You need him for anything else?”

  Sasha blinked, not fully comprehending the question. The man might be able to help her translate the document, but there were other ways to accomplish that. What she really needed was a computer; her computer. “I don’t think so.”

  That was answer enough for the Chinese man. He adjusted the barrel of the pistol so it was trained between the captive’s eyes…

  And then he abruptly pitched backward onto the ground. Before any of his cohorts could react, they too went down, pistols and flashlights clattering to the floor, the latter describing wild and random arcs of illumination before coming to rest.

  Sasha stood motionless, unable to fathom what had just happened. She picked up the flashlight she had been using to inspect the document and swept it around the library. Her beam found a large figure, dressed in desert camouflage and heavily laden with military gear, emerging from behind one of the shelves. His face was partially obscured by a night vision device, and at the touch of her flashlight beam, he raised a hand to shade his eyes. Sasha saw that he held a gun in the other hand; wisps of smoke were issuing from its long barrel.

  “Miss Therion!” The voice, a man’s voice, came from another direction, and she turned to see two more similarly dressed figures moving toward her from a different part of the room. “It’s Jack Sigler. Are you all right?”

  Sigler?

  She remembered him. One of the Delta commandos who had accompanied her in Iraq, and had tried to rescue her in Myanmar.

  Her head started to pound with the effort of processing what had just happened. More variables. More chaos.

  But this time, she was able to resist the pull of the vortex. She now had the key to unlocking the manuscript, and with it, the secret of the Elixir.

  The solution was within her grasp. Soon, she would have the means to balance the equation, and at last, wipe away all the uncertainty.

  THIRTY-NINE

  King heard a voice, a low whisper. It was the Iranian man, the hostage they had saved from a triad bullet, cowering on the floor, mumbling incoherently… No, not mumbling…talking into a cellular phone.

  “Bishop!”

  Bishop darted forward and smacked the phone from the man’s hand, sending it flying across the room to shatter against a wall. He brandished the barrel of his carbine, thrusting it toward the man’s face. “Who did you call?” he barked, and then he repeated the question in Farsi.

  The fearful hostage muttered something in the same tongue and then continued pleading.

  “What did he say, Bish?” asked Queen.

  “He called the police. They’re probably on their way.”

  “Damn.” King continued forward until he was standing in front of Sasha. His gaze fell on the unrolled parchment. “It that it? Is that what you were looking for?”

  She nodded.

  King let his carbine hang from its sling and took out his digital camera. He snapped several photographs of the document before rolling it up and stuffing it into a pocket. “We need to get out of here, now.” He keyed his mic. “Rook, Knight, sitrep.”

  Both men succinctly reported that everything was clear outside the dome.

  “Deep Blue, this is King. It looks like we’re going to be needing that extraction soon.”

  The electronic voice responded immediately as if anticipating the request. “Understood. The bird left the ground five minutes ago. ETA to the rendezvous point is twenty mikes.”

  “Roger, out.” He turned to the Sasha again. “Where’s Rainer?”

  She gave him a blank stare, as if unaware that he was addressing her, but then she snapped out of it. “He didn’t come. He thought the Iranians would be suspicious of a Westerner.”

  King felt only a flicker of disappointment. Taking down Rainer would have been the icing on the cake, but rescuing Sasha and recovering the information to decode the Voynich manuscript was nothing to sneeze at. He gestured to the bodies on the floor. “Who are they?”

  “Triad foot soldiers,” muttered Queen.

  Sasha nodded. “Posing as a Chinese cultural delegation.”

  That made sense. Iran and China had a cozy relationship, with the latter buying most of the former’s oil exports, keeping the regime flush with cash in spite of the sanctions imposed by Western nations. King hoped Queen’s assessment was correct and that they hadn’t just killed actual Chinese diplomats; one international incident was more than enough.

  “Queen, stay with her. Bishop, check these guys for a set of keys. We’re gonna borrow their ride.”

  Bishop jerked a thumb at the Iranian hostage. “What about him?”

  King regarded the frightened man. “Let’s hope that when the police get here, he remembers to tell them that we’re the good guys.”

  They hastened out of the library chamber and back to the dome’s entrance. Knight and Rook were waiting for them at the SUV—a Toyota Hilux Surf—and without any discussion, they piled inside. Bishop settled into the driver’s seat and started the engine, while King, in the front passenger seat, busied himself with establishing a satellite data-link. The others crowded into the rear, with Knight and Rook taking the door seats.

  By the time they reached the edge of the open area surrounding the ruins, King had started uploading of the images of the al-Tusi document to Parker. Now, if they didn’t make it out, the secret to decoding the Voynich manuscript would survive. Nevertheless, he was cautiously optimistic about their prospects. It would take a while for the police to arrive, and hopefully by then, they’d be long gone, en route to the remote pick-up location several miles west of Maragheh.

  His good feeling lasted about a minute, the length of time it took for Bishop to navigate through the maze of exterior ruins and around old foundations to the paved road south of the dome. There, in the small parking lot, waited another vehicle identical to their own. Several men with Asian features stood vigilantly around its exterior, and as Bisho
p drove past them without slowing, they all began moving, shouting and gesturing animatedly at the departing SUV.

  King felt a knot of dread in his stomach. “Miss Therion, how many men were in that cultural delegation?”

  Sasha seemed blissfully unaware. “About a dozen. Why?”

  King sighed and shook his head. “One of these days, everything is actually going to go according to plan; I truly believe that. Bishop…drive like hell.”

  FORTY

  Incirlik Air Base, Turkey

  Parker felt a wave of relief at the news of Sasha’s rescue, but that did little to dull the sting of having been cut out of the operation. He couldn’t begin to imagine the hell she’d gone through, and the fact that he wasn’t there to comfort her only compounded his bitterness.

  The computer chirped an alert, signaling that a download was in progress. He waited until the transfer was complete and then opened the file. There it was; Nasir al-Tusi’s instructions on how to build the device that would decode the Voynich manuscript.

  He scrolled over the text, cutting and pasting it into a translation matrix, and in a matter of only a few seconds, he was able to read the Persian scholar’s words in English. He skimmed the introductory paragraphs and focused on the specifications for the urghan. Sasha had already constructed a virtual replica of the exterior body—the wooden sounding chamber that would amplify the musical tones—and the bellows system that supplied air to the pipes. All that was missing was the pipes themselves. Al-Tusi had fashioned them out of wood, and provided extensive information about the size, thickness, and shape of the pipes. The units of measurement were unfamiliar to Parker, but as he read on, he saw that even that detail was unimportant. The last section of the roll contained information on how to verify that the urghan was tuned correctly; each character of Voynich script corresponded to a specific note on the Persian harmonic scale.