by Alex Scarrow
‘Sure.’
‘And something to eat?’
Maddy looked at her watch. The day had almost gone. It was Monday mid-afternoon and most of the cafes and restaurants they’d been to were usually quiet at this time. ‘Sure, why not? You better get changed, though. You look like a bunch of Krishnas.’
2001, New York
‘So, what this fella Cabot suggested is he’d take us down to meet this John fella.’
Adam lowered his fork so fast it dinked noisily on his salad plate. ‘John? John Lackland? Wicked King John?’
Liam nodded. ‘Aye, that’s the fella.’
‘My God!’ he gasped. ‘That’s — I wish I …’ He turned to Maddy. ‘I should go. I should go back with him and the two, uh …’ Liam looked at Bob and Becks sitting side by side opposite and slurping on a bowl of chicken soup each.
‘Big Ape and Psycho Girl?’ said Maddy.
He shrank guiltily before them, but nodded.
‘Sorry, no. I’ve no idea how many agency protocols I’ve already broken allowing you to sit in on this mission. I’m not sending you back in time as well.’
‘But I know this history like the back of my hand. I’ve read — ’
‘Sorry, no. I can’t take any more chances with you. God knows what Foster’d say if he knew what was going on!’
‘Foster?’
‘I’ll explain later.’ She turned to Liam. ‘So, this is what the message was about, then, do you think? “Seek Cabot at Kirklees.” Someone used the Voynich — ’ she glanced at Adam — ‘and used Adam to get that particular message through to us. And this is why … so that you could retrieve the Holy Grail …’
‘Pandora?’ added Sal.
‘Pandora … Holy Grail, same thing,’ said Maddy dismissively. ‘So you can retrieve this document, scroll, book — whatever exactly it is — from this behooded robber guy. Who, you suspect, might be a support unit from another TimeRiders team?’
Liam nodded. ‘That’s about the size of it.’
Sal steepled her fingers beneath her chin. ‘What if the Grail was meant to be lost? I mean, that’s why it’s such a big legend, right? Because it vanished?’
‘You mean just let it go?’ replied Liam. ‘Let it remain lost?’
‘Yes. Look around you … history hasn’t been changed that much, apart from the cruddy-looking DiCaprio movie based on Adam’s story. Maybe we should just let this one go?’
Liam took a bite of his burger. ‘Mr Cabot called it the Word of God. Sounds pretty important to me. And anyway, if King Richard comes back and finds that it’s been nicked because his little brother John couldn’t keep order back home in England, couldn’t keep it safe, Cabot says he’ll kill him.’
‘Hmmm, I guess. There’s another thing,’ said Maddy. ‘If there’s a support unit running amok back there, then that really is a contamination risk. We can’t sit this one out, Sal.’ She turned to Adam. ‘You’re the history expert, what’s going on with King Richard? What’s the situation in 1194?’
‘King Richard’s crusade ended in failure in 1192,’ said Adam. ‘He had an inadequate army to take and hold Jerusalem. Knowing that Saladin would be able to take back the city with ease, he realized an attempt to attack the city was futile, so he agrees a truce with Saladin and the crusader army disbands and returns home in dribs and drabs. Richard himself returns to England by ship, but bad weather means it ends up shipwrecked on Malta and he has to return on foot. But he’s unlucky as his route home across Europe takes him through the land of some duke with a grudge and he’s kidnapped. He’s held for about eighteen months, I think, while some ransom money is stumped up. So, in 1194, he’s just been released, or about to be, he’s due to arrive home in a really bad mood, because his crusade has been one big mess, and he’s coming home to an England bankrupt and on the verge of rebellion.’
‘Right, so he’s not a happy bunny, then,’ said Maddy.
‘But he got what he went for,’ said Liam. ‘The Grail.’
‘And then lost it again. Lost it in England for which he’ll blame his brother.’
‘If he does kill his brother,’ said Adam, ‘that would change things a lot. No John, means no King John … and that could mean no Magna Carta.’
The others looked at him, with faces that said And?
‘Oh, come on! The Magna Carta is the basis of English law! It’s what defines England.’ He looked at Maddy. ‘And perhaps what defines America too.’
‘Oh God! You’re right!’ It would be a significant enough change to cause a wave, to alter all this. She looked around at the restaurant — an expensive one, Adam’s choice since he’d offered to pay for lunch on his gold American Express. It was quiet except for the clack of dishes coming through swing doors into the kitchen. Just them in here right now, and a couple of businessmen on the far side. Maddy looked out of the blue tinted window down on to Times Square.
‘We have to follow the trail,’ she said eventually. ‘If Cabot seems keen to take you to meet King John — ’
‘He’s not king yet,’ Adam pointed out.
Maddy shrugged and continued. ‘Then I suggest you go along with it for now. Because … this — because something’s going on back there. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to get us back there and talking to this Cabot guy. The Pandora message — ’
‘Maddy?’ Sal looked up from her plate. ‘Why is Pandora so important to you?’
Well? You going to tell them? That old dilemma again. ‘Be safe and tell no one’ — that’s what the scribbled note had said. Be safe … tell no one. Surely, though, Sal and Liam could know. Surely it wouldn’t be dangerous to share this with them?
Liam’s eyes were on her now. ‘Maddy? What is it?’
But Adam Lewis was really just a stranger, perhaps only a hapless victim caught up in this thing. The less he knew, the better.
‘Adam, would you please excuse us for a few minutes?’
He looked hurt, but then finally nodded. ‘All right, I’ll … uhh … go and settle the bill.’
She watched him cross the deserted restaurant before she turned to the others, her voice lowered. ‘I’ve been keeping something from you. I’m sorry.’
‘What?’
‘Liam, you remember our trip to San Francisco, 1906, to get some new clone foetuses?’
‘Aye.’
‘In the safety deposit box was a handwritten message. It was a note addressed to me.’ She took a deep breath, still not entirely sure she should be doing this. ‘It was handwritten, scribbled really — like whoever wrote it was in a real hurry.’
Sal fidgeted impatiently. ‘Maddy, just tell us!’
‘OK, OK,’ she said. ‘Well, it was this: Maddy, look out for “Pandora”, we’re running out of time. Be safe and tell no one.’
Liam and Sal exchanged glances. Bob frowned, Becks cocked her head in consideration.
‘It’s a warning,’ said Maddy. ‘I didn’t — I really didn’t give it much thought while we were sorting out the dinosaur business. And, you know, I guess I was just trying to push it aside. Trying not to think about it. But then — ’ She looked up at Adam waiting for the waiter to process his American Express card. ‘But then our friend over there decoded that message.’
‘It makes a little more sense to me now,’ said Liam. ‘You being so keen for us to go back and take a look-see.’
‘I’m sorry — ’ she shook her head — ‘so sorry I didn’t share it with you both earlier. But … it said tell no one. I didn’t know what to — ’
‘It’s OK,’ said Sal. ‘We know now. That makes it OK.’
‘Aye,’ said Liam. He pressed his lips, a half smile. ‘No more secrets?’
She shook her head and sighed. ‘Having that one was bad enough.’
Adam Lewis was finishing his business by the till and getting ready to come back.
‘So the message is just between us, OK? This is agency business.’
The others nodded.
Adam ap
proached their table tentatively. ‘Safe for me to come back now?’
Maddy nodded and smiled. ‘All done. I think we should make a move. Lots of things to do.’
CHAPTER 25
2001, New York
Liam nodded with approval at the thermal underwear.
‘I got them from a sportswear shop,’ said Sal. ‘That should keep you warm under your other stuff.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, stuffing them into the plastic bag.
‘I took the labels off again,’ she added. ‘But all the same … you should keep the thermals hidden. It’s modern material.’
‘Right.’
Maddy joined them around the long kitchen table. ‘So, I’m sending you guys back to a couple of minutes in time after we brought you back, to avoid a tachyon clash.’ She shared a look with Liam. ‘Not making that mistake again,’ she uttered out of the side of her mouth.
‘OK.’ She turned to Adam. ‘Adam … you want to tell Liam and these two about your idea?’ She flicked a finger at Bob and Becks standing like two sentinels at the end of the table … in their underwear.
Adam nodded. ‘There’s a way, we figured, that you can stay in touch — ’
‘But Maddy said we can’t use the Voynich,’ said Liam.
‘No, not using that. There’s a graveyard at Kirklees that dates back to the beginnings of the priory. I’ve actually been there myself and picked through it all. Loads of broken masonry slabs lost underneath brambles and nettles and what have you. If you look, you’ll find them there. Anyway, I took a number of photographs of several of them. One, in particular, was part of a simple gravestone for a man called Robert Haskette, with 1192 as the year he died. So he’ll be dead now, of course.’ He frowned. ‘Well, when I say now I mean … you know, the point at which you — ’
Liam tutted and waved. ‘Don’t worry, I get tripped up by the now-then sort of thing too.’
Adam continued. ‘He’ll be dead and his gravestone there already and freshly carved … hopefully. You just need to look for it.’
Becks raised a finger. ‘Question.’
‘Yes?’ Adam’s eyes flickered up her athletic body. Then he found himself looking over her shoulder shamefaced, cheeks colouring. ‘Uh … what is it, err … Becks?’
‘You do not intend for us to communicate openly? This will present a contamination risk.’
‘No, no, of course not. This would need to be encoded. Ideally a code that looks inconspicuous and not out of place on a piece of masonry. Almost like decoration.’
‘Do you have such a code?’ asked Becks.
‘Indeed. Yes — well, it’s not mine, but it can be adapted slightly. You got any paper?’
Sal quickly skittered over to the computer desk and returned with a pad of paper and a pen.
‘Thanks. OK, this is the Masonic cipher. They call it the pigpen cipher.’ He sketched some criss-cross patterns of lines and dots on the paper and then filled them in with letters of the alphabet.
‘Now what you do is, for each letter in your message you use the part of the pattern that the letter is within. I’ll give you an example.’
He scribbled a coded message. Liam craned his neck forward to get a closer look. It meant nothing to him, and, as Adam had said, it did just look like a rather uninteresting pattern.
‘Now, see … if we take, for example, the letter X. Do you see where it sits in the cipher? Which part of this pattern is it sitting in? The part of the large diagonal cross with dots in — the left-hand quadrant — see?’ The others nodded. ‘Now look at that coded message: the first character matches that bit of the pigpen grid, the part that contains the letter X. So the first letter of the encoded message is X. Anyone figure out what the second letter would be?’
Sal answered first. ‘It’s an M?’
‘Yup. You got it. Go on — see if you can do the rest.’
Sal grabbed a pen off the desk and with a grin quickly and easily extracted the encoded message.
‘There you go,’ said Adam. ‘Easy as easy peas.’
Liam held a finger up. ‘But, err … this is a Freemason code, isn’t it? Won’t that mean any Freemason who stumbles across our gravestone will be able to translate our message as well?’
‘Yup, which is why we need to adapt it slightly. If I jumble the order of the letters now, like this …’ Adam drew the pattern again, but this time filled in the letters in a random order.
‘Now, provided you keep your messages very short so that no frequency analysis techniques can be used, then it’s almost impossible to break unless you throw some serious computer power at it.’
‘Frequency analysis techniques?’
Adam was about to explain that to Liam, but Maddy cut in. ‘Perhaps later.’ She picked up the sheet of paper and held it up for Bob and Becks to study closely. ‘You guys can remember this layout?’
‘Affirmative,’ said Bob, leaning forward. ‘I now have a stored digital image.’
‘Affirmative,’ echoed Becks.
‘Good. So … that’s how you’re going to talk to us.’ She tucked the paper into the hip pocket of her jeans for safekeeping. ‘And you’ll need to let us know when and where to open a portal. We’ll do the usual thing and plan a day-later one, week-later, a fortnight-later and of course one just before the six-month critical mission window.’
‘What’s critical about six months?’ asked Adam.
‘Bob’s and Becks’s heads blow up.’
‘Whuh? Did you just say …?’
‘It’s a safety measure, to ensure the computer tech doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.’ Maddy wrinkled her nose. ‘More sort of a fizzle than a bang, really. The circuits fry.’
‘Oh, right.’
She resumed her briefing. ‘So those are the window times, Liam, but … since we don’t really have a clear mission plan, I’m guessing this is all going to boil down to you telling us where and when you want to be picked up. Are you OK with that?’
Liam nodded. ‘Aye. And you’ve got these photographs, you say?’
Adam nodded. ‘Yes. Not on me.’ He turned to Maddy. ‘Back at my apartment. On my hard drive. I’ll need to go get it.’
She pursed her lips. ‘Sal or me will have to go with you to get it, then.’
‘What if the gravestone isn’t there?’ said Sal.
‘It should be,’ said Adam.
Maddy puffed her cheeks. ‘Hmmmm, well, look — if it isn’t, for whatever reason, then you come back on the first of the scheduled windows, I guess. Just play it safe. Don’t go wandering off to see King John until you know you can talk to us.’
‘Recommendation: first mission task should be to locate the gravestone and send a test message,’ said Bob.
‘That’s quite right,’ replied Maddy. ‘Very sensible, Bob.’
She looked around at everyone. ‘So … I think that’s it.’ She smiled. ‘This is a hunt for something we have no idea what it is, or where it is — other than some nasty guy with a hood stole it and ran off into the woods. So it’s the usual half-baked, no-idea-what-we’re-doing thing again. Business as usual, I guess.’
She dismissed them all with a self-conscious shall we? As Liam turned to follow Bob and Becks across the archway and up the ladder she reached out for Liam and squeezed his shoulder.
‘Liam?’
‘Yuh?’
She glanced at the plume of silver hair at his temple and the first faint hint of an age line around his eyes.
‘Liam, I’m glad I told you — and Sal — the truth. It was eating me up sitting on it.’
He hunched his shoulders. ‘A load shared is a load halved. That’s what me Auntie Doe used to say.’
‘You stay safe … again, OK?’
He grinned. ‘With Punch and Judy, I’ll be fine, so.’
He turned to go, but she held on. ‘Liam, this is an important one, you know? I’ve got a real feeling this — I dunno … that this is going to open doors. We find out about Pandora and we’re going
to find out more about who we’re working for,’ she said quietly.
‘It’s a certain Mr Waldstein, isn’t it?’
She shrugged. ‘So Foster once told us. I do wonder.’
‘Now there’s an idea.’
‘What?’
‘Foster. Maybe you should ask the ol’ fella about Pandora while we’re gone.’
‘I was sort of thinking of doing that,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I guess now I’ve told you guys, telling him won’t hurt, right?’
He cocked his head. ‘I trust him.’
She smiled at Liam, realizing that in his cheeky cock-eyed grin she could see the ghost of Foster’s gaunt face. ‘Yeah, me too.’
The archway echoed with the splash of water as Bob dropped into the displacement tube.
CHAPTER 26
1194, Kirklees Priory, Yorkshire
They found the graveyard towards the rear of the priory, a sombre space occupied by only a half dozen stones and a dozen wooden crosses on which hungry beetle-black crows perched, studying the frosted white ground for signs of a meal.
A recent grave marked only by a long hump of turned soil and a simple wooden cross indicated the most recently deceased person to be buried in this place was not considered worthy of a piece of inscribed masonry.
In the pale grey light they hunkered down beside each grave in turn and noted the names. Eventually, to Liam’s relief, they found Haskette’s grave beside a small oak sapling that had pushed hopefully upwards for sunlight and rustled gently in the bitter cold breeze. The grave was marked by a three-foot-high block of pale granite, the name and year of death chiselled roughly, clearly not by a trained artisan but presumably by one of the Cistercian monks.
‘Recommendation: we should inscribe no more than the symbol for an “L” to indicate you have located the stone,’ said Bob. Liam nodded. He was right — best to carve no more than was absolutely necessary. ‘Uh … did anyone think to bring a chisel?’