There was a loud whine and a deep rumble as the ramp began moving, and then a metallic thump, completely cut off the howling of the wind.
At first, he didn’t see anyone except the crewmen, and a wave of panic crashed over him. He tried to ask them for an update, but the words wouldn’t come out. One of the men said something, a reassuring comment that barely registered through the lingering fog of the experience, and then King was wrapped in a heavy blanket. There were other blankets strewn about the floor of the hold, and after a few more seconds, he realized that nestled within each of the shapeless heaps was one of his companions.
He did a quick count. Five altogether.
They’d made it.
He huddled his arms around his torso, pulling the blanket tight, and savored the warm feeling of relief that came with that realization.
Eventually, they emerged from their cocoons, imbibed hot beverages supplied by the flight crew and displayed fits of outrage at the nightmare they had just gone through—some of it was directed at King, and not all of it was playful. King kept his distance, focusing his attention on Sasha, who seemed practically comatose; he wondered if she actually understood that she had been rescued.
When the plane touched down at Incirlik Air Base half an hour later, and the team members roused themselves and prepared to disembark. Rook loudly announced that the first thing he was going to do was kiss the tarmac. Sasha just sat in her seat, staring blankly ahead, as if she was waiting for further instructions. King gently grasped her arm and coaxed her to rise.
As they descended the ramp, a van rolled up and Daniel Parker jump out to greet them. King felt a moment of apprehension at the sight of his old friend. He had been so focused on the mission in Maragheh that he had completely forgotten about their earlier tense exchange.
But if Parker was nursing a grudge at having been cut out of the mission into Iran, he gave no indication. In fact, he barely seemed to notice King at all. He raced up the ramp and homed in on Sasha like a moth to a flame, his earnest face concealing none of his eagerness. He managed to stop himself before crashing into her…or hugging her.
“Sasha!” he said, unable to contain his excitement. “I did it… Well, you did. Your program and al-Tusi’s writings.”
She regarded him like he was crazy. “What are you saying?”
“The Voynich manuscript! You solved it!”
For the first time since meeting her several days earlier, King saw something like life in Sasha’s eyes.
FORTY-FOUR
Incirlik Air Base, Turkey
King had the distinct impression of being a third wheel. On a unicycle.
Parker had always been an open book emotionally. He wanted to be alone with Sasha; King could read that in his friend’s face as clearly as he could discern that Parker was mostly over any resentment at having been sidelined.
It had been the right decision, but King knew that one of the burdens of leadership was that you couldn’t make everyone happy.
As far as Parker’s crush on Sasha was concerned, King would have happily stepped aside to let his friend try out his best moves, though he didn’t think Parker stood much of a chance with her. Where Sasha had earlier appeared indifferent to that kind of attention, she now seemed to occupy an entirely different plane of reality where Daniel Parker did not even exist. There was only one thing that mattered to her now: the Voynich manuscript.
King was also very interested in learning what the mysterious document had to say, though for a much different reason.
He considered the mission in Iran to have been only partly successful. Yes, they had rescued Sasha and retrieved the key to deciphering the manuscript, but one goal had eluded him, perhaps the most important objective, at least on a personal level. Kevin Rainer was still at large.
King didn’t think his former CO cared much about the contents of the book. Rainer’s motives were purely mercenary, but King felt sure that Rainer’s big paycheck was connected to the matter of deciphering the Voynich manuscript. Understanding exactly why the man wanted it might give King the edge he needed to accomplish that one remaining mission objective.
While the rest of the team had gone off in search of food, beer, hot showers and a place to crash, King had accompanied Parker and Sasha to the office where a digital version of the book, with its secrets revealed at last, was displayed on the screen of her laptop computer.
Parker quickly recounted how he had used the information from al-Tusi’s treatise along with Sasha’s own deciphering software to crack the code. Sasha nodded, as if the explanation validated a cherished belief, but then dismissively turned her attention to the computer.
King glanced over her shoulder and read a few lines. Deciphered or not, the book was still incomprehensible to him.
“What’s it say?” he asked Parker.
Without taking his eyes off Sasha, Parker said, “Let me give you some background first. The book was actually written by two men: al-Tusi and Roger Bacon.”
“Bacon, I know that name from somewhere.” King could almost hear Rook making a crack, probably in his best approximation of Homer Simpson, so he quickly added: “Some people think he was the guy who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays, right?”
“No, that was Sir Francis Bacon. Although the two men had very similar interests, they lived about four centuries apart. Roger Bacon was a Franciscan friar who lived in the thirteenth century. It’s long been thought that Bacon might have been the author of the Voynich manuscript; now we know it for certain.
“In 1247, Bacon was living in Paris, lecturing at the University, when he made an unusual discovery. He was conducting experiments with ground quartz lenses and realized that in addition to their other properties, the crystal could be made to vibrate at different frequencies—musical frequencies, like the way a soprano can make a wine glass vibrate and shatter. Even stranger, he discovered that when they were aligned with each other and facing in a specific direction, the effect was much stronger. He repeated his experiments in different places throughout Paris. When he compared the results, he realized that the crystals were pointing him toward something.”
“What?”
Parker shook his head. “Bacon didn’t know, but he decided to share his findings with another scientist; one of the most learned men in the world at that point in history.”
“Nasir al-Tusi.”
“Bingo. Of course, al-Tusi was a Muslim and theoretically an enemy, so they had to correspond in secret, using coded messages. Al-Tusi recreated Bacon’s experiments from Mosul, where he was living at the time, and based on the results, they were able to triangulate a possible source for the effect, a place they called ‘the Prime.’”
“Where was it?” King asked.
“They didn’t record the exact location, but it was somewhere in southern France. The maps of the day weren’t very precise, and they were relying on the crystal devices to guide them. Al-Tusi journeyed west, in disguise of course, and they met at the source to conduct further experiments.” Parker took a deep breath, as if gathering his courage to broach the next topic. “That was when things got really weird. Bacon began to notice strange plants, like nothing he’d ever seen before, and he had quite literally written the book on botany. Eventually, he realized that there was a connection between the appearance of the plants and the timing of the experiments with the crystal devices. He tried different frequencies, and he was able to produce different varieties of plants, as well as lichens, mosses, fungi—all of them different than anything he or al-Tusi had ever seen before. There was only one explanation that made any sense; somehow, the plants were being spontaneously generated.”
“Wait…what?”
“Life from lifelessness,” Sasha said, not looking away. “They found the source; the Elixir of Life.”
“I guess you could call it that,” Parker said. “It wasn’t a magical power like the Philosopher’s Stone, but a combination of being in the right place and triggering the right frequency.”
King shook his head in confusion. “Back up. Life from lifelessness? What does that mean?”
“One thing science has never been able to adequately explain, is where life came from. All life on Earth—every single living thing down to the tiniest microbe—comes from a living parent organism. If the theory of evolution is true, then all life probably traces back to one single organism—an amoeba or something—that got the process started, but no one can explain how that happened. Scientists have been able to create conditions where amino acids and protein molecules will naturally occur, but they’ve never been able to make the final leap—to bring them to life.”
“You’re saying that Bacon and al-Tusi found a way to do that? With…what? Crystals and music? Sounds pretty New Age to me.”
Parker however nodded enthusiastically. “It’s not so farfetched. There have been all kinds of studies to show that music can influence plant health. It happens at a molecular level. The crystals weren’t even important. It was the music, or rather the specific harmonic frequencies that produced the effect. Al-Tusi built his pipe organ so that they could pin down exactly which musical notes did what.”
“Is it possible that their experiments were just creating some kind of funky mutations in the plants that were already there?”
“Maybe. Even that would be a pretty significant discovery for the time, but they tried to control for all the variables, and they were convinced that they were actually giving life to inanimate matter.”
“Okay, let’s say I believe all that. What’s Rainer’s angle?” King turned his gaze to Sasha. “You were with him. Did you get a sense of what he wants from all of this?”
Sasha’s eyes remained riveted on the screen, as if the information there was far more interesting than anything King had to say. She clicked to the next page, her eyes moving back and forth as she read.
“Black Death,” she said finally. “The plague. Guo Kan, the Chinese general who fought with Mongols, got his hands on an al-Tusi’s urghan. His experiments with it created the organism responsible for the Black Death outbreak in the fourteenth century.”
“That’s exactly why Bacon and al-Tusi encoded the manuscript,” Parker added. “It’s a how-to manual for creating new kinds of life. They were afraid of what might happen if it fell into the wrong hands.”
“I thought that could happen only at that one special place, the prime location.”
Parker shrugged. “The effect is most pronounced at the source. They weren’t able to replicate their experiments when they left the area. But maybe there are other places on Earth with the same properties. Or maybe it just takes longer to see results; the Black Death didn’t show up until several decades after Guo’s death.”
King pondered this possibility for a moment then switched gears. “Does the book say what’s so special about this ‘Prime’ place?”
“Bacon speculated that it might be some kind of confluence of Earth energy. He had only a vague understanding of what that meant, but we know there are invisible rivers of geo-magnetic energy called Telluric currents that run through the whole planet. Crystals—like the ones he was using—align themselves magnetically. Maybe that provided the extra boost needed to start life.”
Sasha shook her head. “The Prime is important because it is the original source. Every living thing on Earth is mathematically connected to it.”
There was a hint of mania in her voice, and King knew he had to tread carefully. He had no idea what she was talking about, but Parker was nodding. At least it makes sense to someone, he thought. “So, bottom line, if the wrong person goes to this Prime place and plays the wrong song, all hell breaks loose, and that’s a bad thing. Do Rainer and company know all this?”
Sasha appeared to consider for a moment. “I don’t think so. That wasn’t the direction they were going. But they understand that the urghan is the key to deciphering the manuscript.”
King’s hand moved to his pocket where he’d stashed al-Tusi’s parchment. It was the only one of its kind, aside from the digital copy he’d sent to Parker.
The Voynich manuscript…the Prime location…the origin of life on Earth—none of that was really important. What mattered was that Rainer needed the information on that parchment, and King knew the rogue Delta operator would move Heaven and Earth to get it.
When he came for it, King and Chess Team would be waiting.
FORTY-FIVE
King was wrong in one respect. Parker had been glad to have him in the room, because it had given him someone to talk to. Sasha didn’t seem the least bit interested in conversation. After King left, Parker watched her reading and tried in vain to come up with a way to break the awkward silence. He was surprised when she spoke up.
“You figured this out?”
He shook his head quickly. “No, you did all the work. I just plugged in the variables from what al-Tusi wrote.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything.” Something like a smile twitched across her face, and she nodded toward the door through which King had just passed. “Do you think he understood any of it?”
“Jack’s a smart guy. But truthfully? It’s a lot to swallow. The source of life? It seems a little farfetched.”
“You’re right.” She looked at the screen thoughtfully. She was silent for a long time. “I want to go there,” she said finally. “To the Prime. I want to see it for myself; to know if it’s true.”
Parker stifled an urge to laugh. She was serious. “I think Jack has a different set of priorities.”
She crossed her arms, looking almost petulant. “Your team was supposed to be helping me, remember?”
“Sasha, we solved it. Isn’t that enough?” He already knew the answer. The quest to understand the Voynich manuscript had come to define her life, and now, with the ultimate goal in sight, he was telling her to back off. He sighed. “You said that all life is mathematically connected to the Prime. What did you mean by that?”
“Why do you ask?”
“If I’m going to sell Jack on the idea of finding the Prime, I’m going to need a more persuasive reason than just to satisfy your curiosity.”
It must have been the right thing to say, because when she looked at him, there wasn’t a trace of irritation in her expression. “Life is a mathematical process. Each of us is the product of countless permutations that began with the Prime event.
“Think about your own life as a mathematical expression. You are the product of DNA from your two parents. And they are each the product of two. We are each the result of millions of such computations, and our DNA contains all those factors.”
He nodded to indicate that he understood, but he still didn’t see what she was driving at.
“But at some point, the process flips. The branches of the family tree start coming together and the number of factors reduces down to primes.”
“Adam and Eve.”
She inclined her head. “Figuratively speaking. Somewhere in history, all humans share a common ancestor, or, put another way, a prime factor. Of course, the prime factor for humans is just one point on a much larger continuum, but that too can be mathematically reduced to a prime factor—the Prime factor.”
“Okay, I get that. Everything starts with something, chicken and egg. But that’s not what you meant by a connection, is it?”
She pursed her lips. “Life is more than just the mathematical distribution of genetic material. There’s something else involved that we still don’t understand; some component or catalyst that got the whole thing started. It’s in every living thing; it’s what separates living cells from organic matter and a living human from a dead corpse. And the really remarkable thing is that this life-force—whatever you want to call it—is the same now as it was at the beginning.”
“You mean it’s the same kind of energy, right?”
She shook her head. “The same energy, undiluted and indivisible.”
“How is that possible?”
“It’s like using o
ne candle to light another. The original candle might die out, but as long as you keep lighting candles, it’s the same original flame you started with. It goes on forever.” She turned her head. “Are you familiar with quantum entanglement?”
“Two particles interact, then separate but remain connected, no matter how far apart they are.”
“Everything in the universe is entangled because all the matter in the universe originated with a single event, the Big Bang. But living things are quantum entangled in a very specific way, linked to the Prime event. Every living thing on Earth is connected, through time and space by quantum entanglement, to the Prime. It’s like we’re all plugged into it by an invisible extension cord. Do you see now why finding and protecting the Prime source is so important?”
Parker certainly did. “I’ll take this to Jack. I’ll make him understand.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“If he doesn’t, then I guess we’ll have to go with Plan B.”
FORTY-SIX
Langley, Virginia
The phone on Domenick Boucher’s desk started ringing as soon as he stepped into his office, almost as if the caller somehow knew that he had arrived to start his workday.
That couldn’t be a coincidence.
Like everyone else in the civilized world, Boucher had begun to think of his desk phone as a relic from another age. He hardly ever used it. He was so accustomed to using his encrypted digital phone that he preferred to make calls with it, even when in his office, and anyone who might want to contact him directly, would almost certainly know that and have used his cellular number.
With a frown, he picked it up and cautiously said: “Hello?”
“Good morning, Director Boucher,” said an electronically distorted voice. “This is Deep Blue.”
Prime Page 23