Almost trembling with excitement, he began inputting the values into Sasha’s program for the virtual urghan. With each addition, the program transferred the information into the deciphering subroutine, seeking out every instance where the Voynich character occurred, and replacing it with an alphanumeric character based on the musical scale, but Parker did not check it until the last value had been entered.
He had hoped that the manuscript’s secrets would simply pour off the pages, but the book did not give up its treasure so readily. The output was an incomprehensible jumble of letters and numbers. He tried different variations on the musical scale, but each time the result was the same.
That wasn’t a surprise really; all he had done was employ a common substitution cipher, and that approach had been tried innumerable times. There was an added layer to the Voynich code.
He returned to the al-Tusi document and read it again. Aside from the appearance of the unique script, there was nothing to explicitly link the urghan to the manuscript. The explanatory paragraphs focused mostly on the mathematical properties of music. Then he noticed the final paragraph.
“When once you have fashioned the organ, the music of the book may be understood with the indivisible numbers, each one in turn and one for each number, in the language of civilized men but according to the fashion of the infidel.”
Parker gaped at the words on the screen. The ‘book’ could only be the Voynich manuscript, but what did the rest mean? The numbers part seemed straightforward enough; assign each musical note—as represented by the Voynich script—a number and then employ an alphabetic substitution.
Language of civilized men? To al-Tusi, the civilized world was the world of Islam, and the common language of Islam, even in Persia, was Arabic. That made sense, and offered one possible explanation for why the manuscript had resisted all previous decoding efforts. But something about that explanation nagged at him.
Of course!
Arabic, like many Middle Eastern languages, was written from right to left. The Voynich manuscript however was clearly written in the manner of the Western world, from left to right. That was what al-Tusi meant by “in the fashion of the infidel.” The original text had been composed in Arabic, but then written backward, in the Western style, to confuse the uninitiated reader.
But the difference in language and composition style did not sufficiently explain the mystery. Read forward or backward, the text output from the manuscript remained without any sort of recognizable pattern.
He read the clue again. Indivisible numbers. The only whole numbers that could not be divided were the primes. Each one in turn. Could that be it?
A standard substitution cipher assigned a value for each letter of the alphabet: A=1, B=2 and so forth. With a cipher wheel, you could change the starting point: A=4, B=5 and on until you started the numbers over so that X=1, Y=2 and Z=3, but even this substitution could be easily defeated by looking at the frequency of certain oft-used letters. There were other ways to tweak the system, such as by using a keyword variation, but frequency analysis remained the Achilles heel of any substitution cipher. However, one way to render the cipher nearly unbreakable was to change the substitution pattern with every letter, rotating the cipher wheel a prescribed number of places with each letter. That way, letters and numbers would not correspond with any regularity.
Had al-Tusi done that, using prime numbers to adjust the cipher pattern with each new letter?
Parker plugged the new parameters into the decipherment subroutine and let it run. He tried to keep his expectations in check, and braced himself for yet another disappointment. When the screen finally displayed the results, he was stunned to discover that he was able to do something that nobody had done in over seven hundred years.
He was reading the Voynich manuscript.
FORTY-ONE
Maragheh, Iran
Bishop stomped the accelerator but had to brake just as quickly, when a sharp hairpin turn loomed ahead.
“You do realize,” he said in a low voice that was not altogether unlike the sound of rocks grinding together, “that just because I was born in Iran, it doesn’t mean I know my way around.”
Before King could respond, Deep Blue’s voice came over the net. “Bishop, I’m tracking you on GPS. I’ll guide you to the rendezvous point.”
“Well that’s handy,” Rook said.
“The road continues straight for about a quarter-mile, then there’s another sharp turn to the left.”
The play of light on the embankment behind them betrayed the fact that the second SUV was moving; they weren’t going to be able to just slip away. Bishop floored the gas pedal again, racing down the straight stretch, but before he got to the turn, a pair of headlights dawned in the rearview mirror.
King glanced back. “Knight, see if you can’t shoot out their radiator.”
Knight answered with a nod, and depressed the button to roll his window down as he twisted around in his seat. But as he started to lean out, something smacked into the rear window, shattering it. There were several more loud noises, the hammer-strike sound of bullets striking the rear of their stolen SUV. Knight pulled back without firing, and everyone ducked low, but Rook immediately popped back up, and aimed through the opening where the window had been. The sound-suppressed weapon made hardly any sound; the only indication that he was firing was the sudden storm of hot brass shell-casings that started pelting the other passengers.
The headlights started swerving back and forth as the other driver tried to evade the incoming fire, but then Bishop reached the turn, and for a moment, the pursuing vehicle was again lost from view.
King listened in as Deep Blue advised Bishop about the road ahead. There was another short straight stretch, followed by a hard right, but beyond that the road was straight for almost half-a-mile. King saw city lights ahead on the right; in less than a minute, they would be driving through an Iranian suburb.
“Let’s take ‘em on,” suggested Rook. “We’ve got the firepower.”
Queen chimed in as well. “I agree.”
King felt like saying. Great. When this is a democracy, I’ll be sure to count your votes. But instead, he just shook his head. “Negative. We can’t risk getting pinned down here. Shoot back if you can, but we’re not stopping.”
The headlights reappeared behind them, just as they came alongside the residential area. If the police were not already on their way, they would be as soon as the people in those shops and houses heard the sound of shots from the triad soldiers’ guns…or as soon as they started catching stray bullets.
“Bishop! Hard right now!” The electronic voice of Deep Blue crackled strangely, as if the software used to mask his identity wasn’t sure how to interpret his urgency.
There was a broad paved boulevard running almost parallel to the narrow access road on which they now drove, but neither Bishop nor King saw any sign of the turn Deep Blue was telling them to take.
“Turn,” Deep Blue repeated, even more stridently. “Right turn.”
With unexpected suddenness, the road ended and merged onto the main thoroughfare…going the wrong way.
Bishop realized his mistake a moment too late. He stomped on the brake and hauled the wheel hard to the right, but it was an impossible angle, and the stolen SUV had too much momentum. The brakes locked, and there was a tortured scream of metal and rubber as the Toyota went into a spin.
The next few seconds were a blur of movement, but when King’s disorientation passed, he became aware of honking horns and the headlights of traffic on the main road swerving around the now stationary SUV. He also saw a pair of headlights coming from a different direction, and he realized they were the lights of the pursuing Hilux Surf, still on the access road, but about to reach the intersection. The vehicle carrying the team had spun around too many times to count, but had come to rest facing back the way they’d come.
“Bishop! Go!”
The big man, thankfully, didn’t ask him to specify a
direction, but cranked the wheel hard to the left and stomped on the accelerator.
Nothing happened.
The spin out had caused the engine to stall.
Bishop frantically threw the shift selector into neutral and jiggled the keys until the whining noise of the starter sounded, but the engine refused to turn over. He tried again, once more with no success.
“It’s flooded!” Rook shouted from the back seat.
King didn’t think it was possible to flood a modern fuel-injected engine, but Bishop didn’t challenge the diagnosis. Instead, he pressed the accelerator to the floor and held it there as he tried the starter once more.
The engine roared to life with a plume of blue smoke, and the smell of burning petroleum wafted into the interior through the shattered rear window, momentarily overpowering the pervasive sulfur odor of gunpowder. Bishop threw the SUV into gear and they lurched into motion, joining the flow of traffic heading west, at almost the same instant that the vehicle carrying the Chinese thugs reached the intersection.
Their pursuers had to slow to make the turn, but the spin-out and stall had cost Chess Team several seconds of their lead. The pursuing headlights continued to get closer until Bishop was able to build up a head of steam.
King couldn’t see the speedometer, but it felt like Bishop was doing close to seventy miles an hour. He swept around the other vehicles on the road like they were standing still, weaving in and out, and sometimes creating his own lane with a blaring horn. Unfortunately, the pursuing vehicle didn’t have to contend with the same obstacles, because Bishop was clearing a trail for them, and so despite his best efforts, the gap continued to close. Two hundred meters…a hundred…fifty.
The triad thugs hadn’t fired at them again, and King thought he knew why; they wanted Sasha back—alive and preferably unharmed. But if the pursuing vehicle got much closer, the gunmen inside would be able to shoot out their tires and bring the chase to an abrupt end.
“Rook. If they get any closer, use those cannons of yours to take them out.”
Rook grinned as he drew his Desert Eagle pistols, and then leaned over the back of his seat and took aim. Before he could fire though, the SUV swerved left, out of his field of view, and made a move to overtake them.
Without prompting, Knight aimed his XM8 out the window and tried to hit the Surf’s front tires. He squeezed off a few shots, but the moving target eluded him, and his rounds just sparked off the vehicle’s chassis or burrowed harmlessly into the pavement.
Now the Surf was beside them, only a few yards away and nearly even with them. Knight gave up trying to hit the tires and instead aimed at the windshield, which he could now see was already fractured with a spider web pattern from earlier impacts.
Something was happening on the far side of the vehicle, but because his attention was fixed on the picture in his gun sight, Knight didn’t see what the others did: a figure had crawled out of the rear driver’s side window and was clambering onto the roof of the SUV. Queen saw it and so did Rook. The latter leaned over his fellow passengers and tried to aim his Desert Eagle up at the man on the roof, but before he could fire, two things happened almost simultaneously: Knight fired a burst from his carbine that shattered the front passenger window and filled the interior of the chasing vehicle with lead, and the figure on the roof coiled like a spring and then jumped.
The pursuing SUV abruptly veered right, evidently out of control, and ground against the side of the team’s vehicle. Just as quickly, it rebounded and careened to the left, going off the pavement to smash into the exterior of a building. The members of Chess Team barely noticed the demise of their pursuers however; their attention was consumed by the crunch of something heavy landing on the roof of their vehicle.
“We’ve got a stowaway!” Rook shouted.
Bishop reacted immediately by tapping the brakes. Everyone inside was hurled forward by the sudden deceleration, and King expected to see their unwanted passenger thrown from his perch like a stone from a catapult, but that didn’t happen. Instead, something crashed down on the windshield right in front of Bishop, but somehow, impossibly, it refused to be dislodged.
King stared at the outline of their attacker, splayed out on the other side of the glass, arms and legs stretched out, feet digging into the narrow seam between the hood and the windshield, and he understood how the man, seemingly in defiance of the laws of physics, had managed to hang on.
Man was perhaps the wrong word.
The thing clinging to the front of the SUV was human in the literal sense, but one look told King that this was no ordinary foot soldier of the Chinese mob. The head and unkempt hair were that of a Burmese youth, perhaps in his mid-twenties, but the arms and legs were grotesquely muscled, straining at the fabric of the man’s clothes. The torso was malformed, as if he had been taken apart and reassembled by someone who had only the vaguest grasp of human anatomy.
This was one of the monstrosities they had fought in Myanmar—a frankenstein—but unlike those, this one seemed to be a new-and-improved model.
The thing dropped its head low and peered into the interior of the SUV, swiveling its gaze back and forth, searching for something.
It was looking for Sasha.
It found her.
The thing released one of its clutching hands, drew back, and punched through the windshield. The blow would have broken a normal person’s hand, but this creature was in no way normal. The fist smashed out the upper corner of the glass, folding it over like a dog-eared page in a book. Just as quickly, it grasped the exposed metal of the Surf’s roof in both hands and then braced its feet against the hood as if getting ready to lift something.
That something was the SUV’s roof. With a torturous shriek, the metal skin of the Toyota began peeling back like the lid of a sardine can.
King brought his XM8 up and let lead fly. The already compromised windshield fractured into a web of cracks, and beyond it, the bullets tore into the monstrosity’s chest. Blood, erupting from the exit wounds and blown back by the wind, sprayed across the windshield, but the thing barely flinched from the wounds. Driven by rage and augmented by a stew of chemical enhancements, it shrugged off the lethal wounds like they were mosquito bites, and commenced giving the Surf a ragged sunroof.
Rook stabbed one of his Desert Eagles in the direction of the thing’s exposed head, but even as he pulled the trigger, unleashing a thunderclap of noise in the semi-enclosed space, the creature moved. It ducked out of the way, and then with a gymnast’s agility, vaulted from the hood, up and over the opening to land behind the gap, impacting the roof with such force that the vehicle bounced on its suspension.
For a moment, King thought the frankenstein had been thrown clear, but a moment later the shredding of the car resumed. He twisted around, trying to get a shot at the thing, but it stayed out of view, using the curl of torn metal like a shield. King knew the 5.56-millimeter ammunition from the XM8 would pass through the thin sheet like it was tissue paper, but so far the high-velocity rounds hadn’t done much to slow the monster down.
“Rook, blast that fucker!”
Rook didn’t wait for a clear shot. He aimed the Desert Eagle at a spot roughly in the center of the roof and fired into the headliner. The entire chassis rang like a bell as the .50 caliber round punched an enormous hole in the roof. Rook adjusted his aim to a point twelve inches behind the hole and fired again. He didn’t need to hit a vital organ; a bullet from the Desert Eagle could rip off limbs.
The tearing stopped.
Suddenly Knight’s window was filled with the creature’s head and shoulders. Blood streamed from dozens of wounds, but the thing was relentless. It had swung down from the roof and was now reaching into the Surf, stretching its fingers out to snare Sasha’s arm.
Knight was pinned against his seat by the monster’s bulk. Rook threw both arms around Sasha, trying to pull her back, but the prodigiously strong creature effortlessly dragged him along. Queen was the only thing between the frank
enstein and its prey; she threw an uppercut that snapped the thing’s head back. The monster gave a low growl and shook its head, shrugging the punch off as effortlessly as the bullets, but in that brief instant, Queen did something that no one expected. She reached under the shredded fabric of the monster’s shirt, closed her fingers around the tubes that curled like external veins between its head and chest, and pulled. The tubes came free like clumps of hair, with scraps of bloody flesh clinging to the ends.
The frankenstein’s limbs went rigid for a moment, like it was being electrocuted, but whatever Queen had done, it was still not enough to permanently stop the beast. With an agonized howl, it resumed pulling Sasha across the interior.
Queen kept raining blows into the thing’s face, pummeling it unmercifully, but the monster did not relent. It drew its human prize closer, pinning Queen’s arms down and crushing her against the already immobilized Knight.
King twisted around and tried to find something to shoot at, but in the tangle of bodies, there was no way to separate friend from foe. Instead, he reversed his hold on the carbine and slammed the butt of the weapon into the monster’s head. There was a sickening crunch of bones breaking, but the creature refused to die.
Bishop stomped on the accelerator again, and as the Surf lurched forward, he swerved to the left. Locked in a mortal struggle, the other passengers were barely aware of the maneuver. None of them saw the delivery truck in the lane beside them.
The side panel of the truck was like a solid wall outside the windows of the SUV as the two vehicles scraped together with a hideous grinding noise, and then suddenly the Surf shot forward again, breaking free of the momentary effects of friction.
Rook and Sasha fell back as the creature’s efforts abruptly ended. The frankenstein—or rather what was left of him, head and shoulders—toppled forward into the SUV and landed in Knight’s lap. The monster’s lower torso and legs had been crushed and sheared away by the collision with the delivery truck.
Prime Page 21