by James Becker
By the end of her search, she had only really discovered that such objects were unknown in the medieval period, apparently being relatively recent innovations, and she had found no mention at all of any safes that included anything like the antitheft mechanism she had just experienced firsthand. It looked as if what she had was unique, and that could make it an important and potentially expensive object. Or it could simply be an ancient curio, of no value whatsoever, and she had no way of telling which.
That seemed to be a dead end, though obviously she would have to spend longer investigating it, perhaps talking to experts in a museum, or people from an auction house that specialized in early mechanical objects. But that was something for the future. What she needed more urgently was help from someone who knew about ciphers, somebody who could show her how to begin decoding the text on the parchment.
Hopefully her extensive customer database would help her track somebody down. Because she tended to acquire books on a wide variety of subjects, she had a comprehensive mailing list of people who were in the market for specialized volumes. At the last count, that database had contained over three thousand names, and at least two or three of those people, she was quite sure, had put down markers with her for volumes dealing with codes and ciphers, though so far, if her memory served her correctly, she hadn’t acquired or purchased any books dealing with this subject.
She closed down her browser window and clicked on her customer database. It included a basic search facility, which she opened. She typed “cipher” in the correct field and pressed the ENTER key. Less than a second later, three results appeared on the screen in front of her.
She looked at the three names but was fairly sure she’d never met any of them in person, though that was unimportant, then accessed each short file in turn. The information she kept on each customer was fairly limited—name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, purchase history, and preferred method of payment, and not all those fields were completed in every case—plus a subject listing, which was where she performed most of her searches when new books arrived in the shop, and a larger section in which she recorded whatever else she knew about her customer. Or rather her customer’s wishes with regard to books.
Robin opened the first customer record and flipped straight to this last part. The information she read had most likely been taken verbatim from an e-mail sent to her by the customer, and just stated that the man was looking for any books relating to either the activities of Bletchley Park, the highly secret British code-breaking establishment that operated during the Second World War, some aspects of which were still classified even in the twenty-first century, as well as books written in English about German encryption techniques with particular reference to the Enigma encoding machine. That seemed specific enough. She doubted very much if that man would have the slightest knowledge of or interest in medieval ciphers. She shrugged and opened the second record.
That immediately looked a lot more promising. That customer had told her, again in an e-mail, that he was looking for books dealing with the history of ciphers, and particularly those used in the early days, basically pre-Roman and onward. He was also searching for books on two entirely unrelated subjects and had, Robin noticed, not only bought several books on both topics from her in the past but also had a kind of standing order with her for volumes of one particular kind. Books dealing with that subject were extremely rare, but at the same time of no literary merit whatsoever and little monetary value, and only rarely survived the centuries, but there had been two in the Stevens collection.
Robin copied his e-mail address and then moved on to check the third record that had matched her search criteria. But she immediately rejected that customer as a possible source of help, as his main focus was on the importance of secret communications as they related to government, politics, and international relations in the twentieth century. Things like the Zimmermann Telegram.
She created a new e-mail, pasting in the address she’d just copied, but before she wrote anything except the salutation she stood up and walked over to the box containing the books she was keeping and rooted through it for a couple of minutes before she found what she was looking for. She pulled out two slim volumes and nodded in satisfaction as she read the titles. She hadn’t wanted to just ask for the man’s help in a cold call, as it were, but these two books exactly matched one of the other two categories in which he had expressed an interest. So she could legitimately contact him to ask if he would be interested in buying them, and then bring up the matter of the enciphered text almost as an aside. That would be far more subtle, she decided.
She quickly composed the e-mail, listing the titles, dates of printing, and condition of the two books now lying on the desk in front of her, and the prices she was asking for each of them. She took a small but sophisticated digital camera out of her desk drawer, placed the first book in a clear area on her cluttered desk, and took a picture of it, then repeated the process with the second volume. She took the data card out of the camera, slid it into the card reader slot on the side of her laptop, and copied the pictures into the e-mail and then added the photographs and details of the books to her database as well.
Then she added the final paragraph to her message, informing the recipient that an ancient manuscript had come into her possession, that the text on it was possibly medieval and appeared to be enciphered, and because of his obvious interest in ancient ciphers, would he have any idea how to decode it? She carefully typed out the first dozen words of the text, then signed the e-mail “Robin Jessop” and pressed the SEND key. Then all she could do was wait for his response, if the man bothered getting back to her at all, of course.
She had two other things she wanted to do before she got back to her regular work. She again put on her cotton gloves, picked up the sheet of parchment and took it across to the small multifunction laser printer that stood on a table beside her desk, and scanned the images of it into her laptop. For good measure she made a couple of copies of the text written on both sides as well, each requiring two sheets of paper because the parchment was both an irregular shape and significantly longer than A4. Then she rolled up the manuscript and slid it back into the book safe, before placing the object inside her safe. She still had no idea if either the object itself or the parchment had any value whatsoever, but she wasn’t going to take any chances.
Robin walked downstairs, went in through the back door of the shop, and made sure that Betty was coping, which she was, there having been only five customers through the front door of the shop that day, two of them only buying cakes and coffee. Then she went back up to her study to continue preparing the catalogue that she would send out with her next MailShot to her established customer base, work she had been doing before the cardboard boxes of books had arrived from William Stevens.
Much of her business was done by mail, most of it by people responding to her printed catalogue, sent out once every quarter, or to the electronic listings she posted on her Web site, but her direct approaches to customers when she acquired particular books were also very productive. She believed her buyers felt somehow special when she sent them a personal e-mail with details of new books that matched their search criteria, and in most cases sales quickly resulted from these electronic solicitations.
The books she had acquired from William Stevens would, she was quite sure, be of interest to at least a handful of her regular customers, and as soon as she had taken pictures of the new volumes and prepared accurate descriptions, she would send personal e-mails to all those she thought might be interested in buying them.
With any luck, she might be able to recoup at least half of the money she had spent in buying the collection of books within a couple of weeks, and that would obviously be good news for her cash flow. In the meantime, she put the book safe, its brutal antitheft device, and its curious contents out of her mind.
6
Helston, Cornwall
&n
bsp; Because David Mallory was on a number of mailing lists, he picked up between fifty and sixty new e-mail messages every day. The vast majority of these, including the inevitable invitations from people in Nigeria desperate to share a multimillion-dollar fortune they had just stumbled across, and blatantly obvious phishing e-mails urging him to supply his bank account details as quickly as possible to some hopeful cybercriminal who was pretending to work in the security department of a High Street bank he’d never had an account with, he discarded without even opening. Messages sent by members of the various genealogy sites he always looked at, just in case there was anything of interest, and obviously he read anything sent by friends or members of his family, and most of these he replied to.
He’d got into the habit of processing his messages in the evening, when he’d driven home from wherever he had been working—assuming he’d been on-site somewhere that day—or when he logged off from some company intranet if he’d been working on from home. And the other thing he did at about the same time was take a cruise around the genealogy sites and look at some of the latest posts on the various blogs, just in case anybody had come up with some useful information or found any new sources of data.
That evening, when he’d put down his briefcase in the hall, made himself a cup of coffee—he invariably drank instant because he wasn’t interested in fannying about with percolators and the like—he walked into the bedroom at the back of his house that he used as a study, put down his laptop, and switched it on. He’d only made the jump from a personal desktop machine to a high-specification laptop when he started his genealogy research, because the advantages of being able to carry not just a few notes but the entire corpus of his work around with him on a single machine were overwhelming. So he’d splashed out and bought the best he could find. The machine had a big screen, two hard drives of one terabyte each, an additional solid-state drive for his operating system and application software, a quad-core processor, and sixteen gigabytes of RAM. It was, in computing terms at that time, about as state-of-the-art as you could get.
He started downloading his e-mails but didn’t look at them, and instead went straight to one of the blogs that was on his list of favorites. He scanned quickly through the list of posts, glancing at the subject matter of each one, then clicked on the link to the next blog and repeated the process. Several posts were interesting, but none of them provided any information he didn’t already know, just really serving as confirmation of data he’d already established.
His messages had finished downloading a few minutes earlier, so he shifted his attention from his browser to his e-mail client and began weeding out those which were of no interest to him, filing those that he thought he would need to keep and replying to all those that warranted it. About halfway down the list, he came across one that stood out. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard from that particular man, and he’d established a cordial business relationship with him, albeit completely one-sided. Mallory was a customer; the man was a supplier.
He read the message with interest, looking at the photographs and the details of the two volumes that the bookseller had supplied. He connected his printer and spat out a copy of the message, then took it over to the bookcase where he kept his research material and scanned the shelves, checking to see if he had already got copies of either volume. He hadn’t, he realized, so he would definitely buy the two on offer.
It was only then, as he walked back to his desk, that he looked at the last paragraph of the e-mail message. His steps slowed and he came to a dead stop, his eyes fixed on the sheet of paper he was holding.
“Interesting,” he muttered as he sat down again.
One word in the message stood out for him, and that largely determined what he did next. He took a sheet of paper and wrote the letters of the alphabet on it, then wrote the reversed alphabet underneath. Then he glanced back at the information in the e-mail and began writing the sequence of letters printed in it. When he finished, he sat back with a frown, because what he’d expected to achieve simply hadn’t happened. He had to be missing something. Either that or his guess was wrong.
Another thought struck him, and he looked back at what he’d done and then jotted down a completely different sequence of letters. That also didn’t produce anything that seemed to make sense, so he wrote out a number of other lines of letters, checking his interpretation of each one as he did so. When he read the result of one of them, a smile crossed his face. That actually seemed to work.
He looked back at the e-mail and wrote a short message in reply. Then he smiled again, deleted what he’d written, jotted down a few more letters on the piece of paper, worked out the ciphertext, and sent a five-word reply: “Latin. ZGYZHS OVUG HSRUG VOVEVM.” It would be interesting to see what response that produced.
Then he looked again at the e-mail, at the signature block at the bottom. The contact details included both a business and a mobile number, and before he dialed he glanced at his watch. It was almost seven, too late to expect an answer on an office telephone, but not too late to call the mobile.
He decided he would revert to a more old-fashioned form of communication and telephone the man. More personal and much more immediate. So he dialed, and almost immediately a woman answered.
“Can I speak to your husband, please?” Mallory began.
There was a pause that went on a couple of beats too long, and he was just about to speak again when the woman replied.
“I don’t seem to have one of them,” she said, “so you’ve probably got the wrong number.”
“This is the number that was on an e-mail I was sent today,” Mallory insisted. “I’m trying to reach Robin Jessop. He has a couple of books I’d like to buy.”
“Ah. Robin is not exclusively a man’s name, Mr. Mallory. I’m Robin Jessop, and I was a woman the last time I checked.”
This time Mallory paused.
“How’d you know my name?” he asked.
“I’m not psychic and it’s not rocket science,” Robin replied. “I only sent out one e-mail today, which listed two books for sale so—though we’ve never spoken before—it more or less had to be you. Normally you just send me an e-mail when I’ve offered you a book you want, so is there any particular reason why you’ve called me? After office hours, I mean. I don’t think anyone else is going to be queuing to snap up a couple of collections of parish records.”
Mallory was slightly nonplussed by the unexpected turn the conversation had taken.
“No, you’re probably right there,” he said. “I’m doing a lot of genealogical research, and it’s amazing what information you can sometimes find in parish records. That’s why I’ve bought every book you’ve offered me on the subject, and that will include the two you’ve just told me about, by the way. But no, that wasn’t why I was calling you. Have you checked your e-mail this evening?”
There was another short pause before Robin replied, a faint hint of suspicion in her voice, “Not for an hour or so, no. Should I have done, Mr. Mallory?”
“Please, call me David. It’s just that I think I’ve solved your little puzzle, the one you sent me in your e-mail, and I’ve sent you an e-mail in reply. But I thought I’d call as well, just to tell you I’d cracked it.”
“You have? That’s brilliant, Mr.—er—David. You solved it?”
“Well, I think I have. You only listed six words, and I have made sense of those.”
“It was obviously a cipher of some sort,” Robin said. “I got that far myself. What was it?”
“Atbash,” Mallory said. “With—”
“No, you’re wrong. I tried Atbash and it doesn’t work.”
“It does,” Mallory insisted, “but what I was going to add is that you need to apply a shift. With regular Atbash, you just write the alphabet backward under the normal alphabet, so A becomes Z and so on. Whoever encoded those six words applied an extra wrinkle that I’v
e never seen on an Atbash cipher before, though I have heard of it being done. They started the reversed alphabet under the letter P, so that became A in the Atbash cipher, and O became B, finishing up with Q enciphered as Z. It’s basically a left shift of eleven places.”
“You know about ciphers?” Robin asked, sounding clearly interested. “You’re not a spy or anything, are you?”
Mallory laughed. “No, much more mundane than that, I’m afraid. I work with computers for a living, but I’ve always been really interested in encryption systems, and the good old Atbash is pretty much the earliest we know of. I’ve got a marker out with you for any books you get about ciphers.”
“I know,” Robin said. “That was why I sent you that message, because you were the only person I’ve ever had any contact with who seemed interested in the subject. Where are you, apart from standing by the phone, I mean?” she added, after a couple of seconds. “Which part of the country?”
“Way out in the wilds,” Mallory replied. “I work in Helston in Cornwall, and I live just outside the town. And you’re somewhere in Devon, aren’t you?”
“Yes, not quite as far out as you. I’m in Dartmouth, down on the south coast.” She paused for a moment, ideas spinning through her brain. “Look,” she went on, making a suggestion she hoped she wouldn’t regret, “I’ve got a bit of a mystery on my hands, and I think I’m going to need some help in solving it. And what I particularly think I need is somebody who understands codes and ciphers. I’d be happy to pay you for your time. If you have the time, that is.”