by James Becker
“The loo’s that door there, if you want it,” she said, “and my office is the one where the door’s open. I’ll put the kettle on, but the coffee’s only instant,” she warned.
“That’s fine with me,” Mallory said, heading for the lavatory. “Frankly I can’t tell the difference.”
Five minutes later, they were sitting on opposite sides of the desk, two mugs of coffee steaming but largely forgotten beside them as they stared at the black leather book safe and its two rows of protruding spikes. Both of them were wearing white cotton gloves at Robin’s insistence, just in case her suspicion about the spikes originally being poisoned was correct. The pair she’d found for Mallory was the biggest she had, but they were still an extremely tight fit.
He held his hand horizontally over one of the rows of spikes, comparing the thickness of his palm to their length, and whistled softly.
“My hand is a lot bigger than yours,” he said, “but I think that if I’d been holding the book safe when it was triggered, those spikes would have gone straight through my palm and come out the other side. They must be nearly two inches long.”
“According to my ruler, they measure just over one inch and three quarters.”
Mallory nodded, then bent to look even more closely at the two separate mechanisms that were built into the relic: the catches that held the lid closed and the triggering mechanism that was designed to fire the spikes. Then he stared at the slim hole cut into the side of the book safe opposite to the spine, where lengths of paper had been attached to look like the pages of a book.
“That opening,” he said after a few moments, “doesn’t look to me like it was intended to accept any kind of key that I’ve ever seen. But that shape is very familiar to me.”
“It is? What is it?”
“It looks like the top of a sheath for a sword, or maybe a dagger. It’s like a flattened oval, thicker in the middle and then tapering on both sides to where the sharpened edges of the blade would be. And there’s something else as well.”
He reached over to the pen rest on the edge of Robin’s desk and picked up a pencil. He used its sharpened end to point to two small raised areas in the metal on the inside of the book safe, one above and the other below the center of the flattened oval.
“I don’t know how much you know about stabbing weapons,” he said, “but the blades of most knives and swords intended for stabbing rather than hacking include a grooved channel that’s commonly known as the blood gutter, though it should properly be called a fuller, after the blacksmithing tool used to make it. Most people think it’s intended to allow a blade to be pulled out of a body more easily, but actually it allows the weight of the blade to be reduced without affecting its strength. I think those two bits of metal were probably intended to fit inside the fullers on a double-edged blade. A particular blade, I mean, so the keyhole, that narrow oval slot, has been designed to prevent the wrong knife blade from being inserted. If that isn’t the case, then I’ve got no idea why they’re there.”
“You’re right,” Robin said. “What you say does make sense. And I suppose the mere fact that the ‘key,’ if you like, was a dagger—a weapon that most men in medieval times wore around their waist every day as a matter of course, just as a part of their normal dress—would have added another layer of protection for the book safe. One dagger, I assume, looks very much like any other dagger, and somebody trying to crack the secret of the book safe wouldn’t have any idea there was anything special about one particular weapon. They’d have been able to hide the key in plain sight, if you like.”
Mallory was still bending forward over the desk, closely examining the mechanism inside the object.
“I think I see how this works now,” he said.
He gestured again with the point of the pencil. “Look here, on both sides of the slot where the blade of the dagger would be inserted. There are two metal bars, one on each side. As the correct blade was slid inside, its edges would have pressed against these two bars, which are hinged. If you move them outward, then the opposite ends would have fitted into these two slots, here”—he pointed at two rectangular cutouts on the pair of metal levers that were attached to the rows of spikes—“and that would have locked the mechanism and prevented it from being triggered. It’s really quite sophisticated. Whoever made this had both time and talent, and was also pretty good at metalwork.”
Mallory put both hands inside the book safe, rested his thumbs against one of the bars carrying the spikes, and his fingers around the one on the opposite side, and then squeezed them together. The springs were strong, but so were his fingers, and in a few moments his efforts were rewarded by a distinct double click as he reset the booby trap.
“Pardon me for asking,” Robin said, “but why have you just done that?”
“For safety,” Mallory replied. “If you’re right about the age and the history of that thing, the booby trap wasn’t triggered for several hundred years, and in all that time the spikes stayed safely inside the book safe. Leaving them sticking out like that is pretty much an invitation for somebody to hurt themselves, so I think it’s actually safer if the trap is reset. I don’t suppose you’ll be sticking a screwdriver in it again.”
Robin thought about that for a moment and then nodded.
“You’re probably right,” she agreed, “and it’ll certainly be easier to store it in my safe like that.”
Mallory stretched out his hand to the rolled parchment, but Robin stopped him.
“Don’t touch it,” she snapped, and Mallory drew his hand back as if he’d been burned.
“I can’t do much if you won’t let me see the manuscript,” he said, sounding hurt.
“Sorry. It’s just that it’s very fragile and you need experience to know how to handle something like that.”
“I’m not an idiot. I’ve been studying old documents in churches and libraries for the last year or so, tracing my family history. I do know something about this.”
Robin shook her head.
“Sorry again,” she said. “I didn’t know that. Most people don’t have a clue about the damage you can do to old parchment just by touching it with your bare fingers.”
Mallory silently lifted his gloved hands in front of her face, and she nodded.
“I’ll need to get some professional advice myself on how best to preserve it,” she said.
“So I presume you’ve copied it?” he asked, sounding only slightly mollified.
“I’ve copied it and scanned it as well. That was pretty much the first thing I did after I got over the shock of the booby trap triggering.”
She lifted the parchment carefully, using a couple of pencils, lowered it into the book safe, and then closed the lid, pressing it down until the catch clicked to lock it. Then she carried it over to the safe from which she had removed it a few minutes earlier, put it inside, and locked the door.
“Do you think it’s valuable?” Mallory asked. “That book safe, I mean.”
“I really don’t know. When I realized what it was, I assumed it was just a curio, and there are people who collect that kind of thing—medieval instruments and weapons and so on—but I really have no idea if this has a significant value or not.” She laughed shortly. “The reason I’m keeping it in the safe is so that I don’t stab myself with it and nor does anybody else who comes up here, like Betty.”
“Betty?”
“The lady who runs the shop for me. I’ll introduce you later. I can just see her wandering up here to ask me something and pricking the end of her finger on one of those spikes. But now that we’ve looked at it more closely, I’m beginning to think that it might well be valuable, simply because I’ve never seen anything like it before. I’ve done some searches on the Internet, and although book safes aren’t unknown, I can’t find any mention of medieval ones, and I couldn’t find any that contained any kind of built-in ant
itheft device. Often in those days, important books included a lock of some sort to prevent them from being opened, but they were still just books, not safes, so I suppose it could even be unique. I’m still convinced it’s medieval, and it’s in pretty good condition, and rarity, condition, and age are all ticks in the right boxes as far as serious collectors are concerned.”
Mallory nodded. “It’s an impressive piece of kit and if you want my opinion—and I suppose that’s the reason I’m here right now—without even taking a look at the parchment, I can tell you that whatever it is and says is important. Or at least it was important when it was put inside that relic, which isn’t quite the same thing. Nobody would go to this kind of trouble, to have an object like that made, unless the contents were crucial to them in some way. So I guess the next step is to take a look at the text on the parchment and try and find out what it says.”
Robin sat down in the swivel chair and pulled open one of the drawers. She took two sheets of paper out of the drawer and slid them across toward Mallory.
“You’ll recognize the first few words because those were the ones I sent you,” she said.
Mallory nodded, opened his computer case, and took out a sheet of paper on which he’d written the alphabet and the left-shifted Atbash cipher.
“This should be easy enough,” he said.
But Robin shook her head decisively. “Not necessarily. After we talked and I read your e-mail, I wrote out the cipher as well, but when I tried it on another section of text, all that happened was I turned gibberish into a different kind of gibberish, but certainly not into Latin or any other language that I recognized.”
“Did you, now?” Mallory said, looking down thoughtfully at the photocopy on the paper in front of him. “Well, I think that’s good, because I like a challenge. It sounds as if whoever wrote this might have used more than one encryption technique, and that’s interesting in itself, because again it suggests that whatever this text says it is—or at least it was when it was written—extremely important to somebody.”
Mallory looked at the photocopy again, then shook his head.
“It’s not that easy to read even in the original,” he pointed out. “In some places I can’t really see where one word begins or ends.”
“A lot of medieval documents were like that,” Robin replied. “Paper was a fairly rare and expensive commodity, so the words were crammed together and the whole width of the paper was used. And of course parchment was a lot more expensive than paper.”
“Well, we need to get this right, without any mistakes, just in case this reveals the location of the lost treasure of King John or something like that.”
“Not very likely,” Robin said, with a smile. “So, what do you suggest?”
“I know it will take a lot longer, but I think the first thing we should do is transcribe the whole of the original text onto a computer, letter by letter. That way we’ll be able to identify any ambiguous letters and play around with the spacing if we aren’t sure where one word ends and the next begins. Then we can print it out because it’ll be easier to write the deciphered Latin text underneath, and an English translation under that, in the old-fashioned way, using paper and ink.”
“Okay. It’ll take a while, but that’s not a bad idea. I’m more used to looking at this kind of material than you are, so let me suggest that I read out the letters from the photocopy, while you type them.”
Mallory nodded.
“That works for me,” he said.
He opened his computer bag again, took out his laptop, and switched it on. He started up his word processing program and created a new file named “parchment.docx,” then waited with his hands poised above the keyboard.
Robin removed her spectacles and placed them on her desk, then picked up a pencil.
“You can read without glasses?” Mallory asked.
She nodded. “Yes. They’re plain glass, not prescription lenses, more a kind of disguise. I find I get taken a lot more seriously if I wear glasses than if I don’t. I know I’m not blond, but I’ve more or less seen the word bimbo forming in the minds of some men—people like my first bank manager here in Dartmouth, for example—when I’ve been trying to discuss business with them. So now I tend to wear them most of the time when I’m out and about, but actually my vision’s pretty near perfect.”
Mallory considered her for a moment.
“I get the feeling there’s an awful lot about you that I don’t know yet,” he said.
“You have no idea,” Robin replied, “but I would remind you that you’re the one who won’t talk about that scar on your cheek.”
“Touché. Maybe later. Right, let’s get started.”
Robin began reading out the individual letters that formed the text of the medieval parchment, drawing a neat diagonal line through each one as she did so. Where the letter was in any way ambiguous—sometimes the letter O, for example, could look like a Q, or C resemble a G—she drew a circle around the letter and told Mallory to put both the possible letters in brackets for the decryption that would follow.
She also told him to put a space after every letter that appeared to be the last one in a particular word. She was fairly sure she wasn’t always getting everything right, because Mallory’s earlier comment had been accurate: in a few places the words seemed to run one into the next without any break that she could see, and the quill or whatever had been used to write the text had had a thick point, so the letters themselves were heavy and difficult to interpret. To complicate it still further, in some areas the ink had faded significantly, and the letters were even more difficult to read in consequence.
But they quickly settled into a routine as the parchment began to yield its secrets, or at least the encrypted text, in its entirety.
11
Via di Sant’ Alessio, Aventine Hill, Rome, Italy
“It’s not the first time this has happened,” Toscanelli responded. “Are you quite certain about it?”
Vitale nodded. “We’ve never before had such a precise result from any of our surveillance mechanisms. This time we are positive that the relic has at last been discovered again after having been lost for so many centuries.”
“Please convince me,” Toscanelli said.
“The term was entered into a search engine in Britain. In fact, the user carried out quite a number of searches, most of them including the one expression we are almost certain would be used, the Latin Ipse Dixit—”
“The master’s words,” Toscanelli interjected.
“Exactly, but some of the searches, especially the later ones, also included words like manuscript and medieval, so it seems almost certain that the person who initiated those searches is in possession of the relic. We’ve printed all the search terms entered from that one location.”
Vitale picked up one of the sheets of paper from the desk in front of him and passed it across.
Toscanelli glanced at it with professional interest.
“They got the title right,” he said. “As far as we know, the relic bore the name Ipse Dixit, and that’s not likely to be a mistake. So that looks like a confirmation that they have somehow found it. We need to move fast.”
“Faster than you think. We want this sorted within hours, not days. We simply can’t afford under any circumstances for the text to be decrypted, not after all the years we’ve been looking for it.”
Toscanelli nodded.
“Where do I need to go?” he asked, “and how big a team am I taking?”
“The target is a man named Robin Jessop and he’s in southwest England in a town named Dartmouth. There will be six of you in total, and the other five have already been briefed and are on their way to Ciampino Airport, where there’s a private jet waiting for you. You will use your real name, and you alone will be responsible for communicating with this office. All your equipment, including weapons and th
e documentation you’ll need, will be on the aircraft when you get there. As always, none of you are to take any personal identification with you whatsoever. This has to be a completely deniable operation. Under no circumstances are the British authorities to find out what is happening, and the usual rules will apply in the event of any of your team being compromised or apprehended.”
Toscanelli nodded. “They are to be silenced, permanently, before they can be interrogated.”
“Exactly. Ensure that they all know that before the operation commences. In this case, you should meet no problems. The man is a bookseller in a small coastal town in England. He will not be armed, and may well be elderly—so far, our systems have not been able to determine that. Once you have retrieved the relic, any and all evidence that he may have already deduced about it is to be either recovered and brought back here or destroyed. Fire is probably the preferred method, as it will conceal almost everything.”
Vitale handed over a black-colored folder. “All the information we have is in here. The whole sequence of events, the search terms used, and of course all the address details for this man Jessop.”
Toscanelli nodded again. The operation sounded simple and straightforward, and he only had one final question to which he thought he probably already knew the answer. But for the benefit of the recorders that he knew would be running in the background in the office, he needed to hear the instruction. “And Jessop himself? What about him?”
“He is to be eliminated. If possible, make it look like an accident. If not, use any method that seems expedient and effective. But it is essential that he is dead before you leave the scene.”
12
Dartmouth, Devon
It took the pair of them well over an hour to transcribe the entire text of the parchment into the computer, a long, boring, and tiresome operation.
When they’d finally finished, Mallory copied the file onto a memory stick and gave it to Robin, who transferred the file onto her own laptop and printed two copies of the transcribed text on her laser. Then she handed back the memory stick, stood up from her chair, and stretched.