‘She would have been highly trained in covert operations, codes and cyphers,’ William added. ‘Maybe she was the influence that encouraged your father to join the secret service.’
‘Unbelievable,’ Ella said shaking her head. ‘I’d never have known this.’
‘SoE agents were a very special breed,’ Paddy explained. ‘Real tough nuts, but bright with it and experts at keeping secrets. Few talked about their experiences after the war. Many took their stories to the grave.’
‘After Elizabeth fell pregnant she was taken out of danger and spent the rest of the war working behind the scenes at one of the SOE bases in England,’ Sarah concluded.
‘My mother said my grandfather had been killed by the Nazis,’ Ella said. ‘Maybe he was SOE too?’
‘Or could have been Free French,’ Paddy added.
‘Sorry, I haven’t found anything about him,’ Sarah said.
‘Well, at least it may explain the code on Elizabeth’s gravestone,’ William said. The others looked at him with intrigue. ‘I take it none of you noticed?’
‘Noticed what?’ said Paddy.
‘Look at the headstone,’ William prompted. ‘Sarah, just flick through the rest of the pictures please.’
Sarah clicked through the images William had taken, but they were met with blank faces and frowns.
‘The pattern around the rim?’
‘What of it?’ this was from Paddy.
William despaired. ‘It’s a code called pigpen, an old Masonic substitution code.’ The blank faces remained. No one knew what he was talking about. He stood up and walked over to the projection and pointed to the symbols. ‘These are symbols not pretty artwork. See the shapes? There’s a square, there’s a U, an L and a V-shape. See how they are repeated at various different ninety-degree angles? Some have dots next to them, some haven’t.’
Paddy mumbled and nodded that he got it, but William knew he hadn’t. Sarah and Ella frowned at him, unconvinced.
‘Just trust me, it’s a hidden message,’ he shook his head and sat back in his seat.
‘So what does it say?’ asked Paddy.
‘No idea, but I know just the man who can crack it.’
*
At William’s request, Sarah took Ella for a drink in the Greenfly while he and Paddy went to the lab and paid Ollie a visit. As well as having a crack at breaking the code, there was something more sensitive William wanted to air with the pair. Airing his concerns was a risk, but he saw no alternative.
The lab was quiet, most of the techies had left for the day; but fortunately Ollie was still sat at his desk glued to the four wide-screen computer monitors that surrounded him.
‘William, great to see you,’ Ollie said jumping up to greet him. He merely nodded his acknowledgement of Paddy. Paddy did likewise.
‘I’ve been making good progress on the network of phones,’ he announced. ‘Conveniently for me, they communicate with an Internet phone application, Skype. I’ve followed every link and traced the IP addresses of the phones and computers that were used.’
‘So I’ve heard, well done.’ William slapped Ollie on the back. ‘Great job.’
‘Thanks,’ Ollie beamed. ‘I also looked into that Web site you mentioned, the one with the symbol. Unfortunately it has drawn a blank, anonymous hosting in China. But I can confirm that the code behind it is designed to track everyone who visits it. You were right. It logs the IP address, country, ISP and even the browser type. Essentially it creates a fingerprint of every visitor. It also drops a tracking Trojan onto unprotected PC’s.’
‘I have a couple of favours to ask,’ William said. ‘I need a ladies service watch, something in gold if you have it.’
‘No problem,’ replied Ollie. ‘And the other?’
William produced a printed photo of the gravestone. ‘What do you make of this?’ he asked.
Ollie frowned as he scrutinised the photo. After a minute he nodded to himself, looked up and grinned. ‘Pigpen! All around the rim. An old cypher often found on the graves of nineteenth-century Freemasons.’
‘Well done. Can you crack it?’
‘Of course,’ Ollie chortled seemingly insulted by the question. ‘It’s only a substitution cypher. Kids play.’
From his printer, Ollie took a blank piece of paper and drew a large open ended grid on it with two horizontal and two vertical lines. The grid resembled a blank knots and crosses game. Next to the grid he drew a large X. Then, in each of the nine square sections of the noughts and crosses grid, he wrote two letters of the alphabet in sequence beginning with A and B. The last two letters in the grid, the seventeenth and eighteenth, were Q and R. The remaining eight letters of the alphabet were written into the large X in the same way, two per section. He then penned a dot above the second letter in each section of each grid. Paddy watched him work with interest.
‘In Pigpen code each of those shapes represents a letter,’ Ollie explained. ‘But the letters can be placed on the grid in any order, literally millions of combinations. A keyword was often used to scramble the alphabet, although the word couldn’t have any repeated letters in it. If the keyword was the word happy, it would be written H-A-P-Y in the grid. The rest of the alphabet would then follow in the normal sequence, but skipping the H, A, P, and Y, which had already been used.’
Paddy looked lost.
‘But we don’t know the key, assuming there is one,’ William pointed out.
‘Not a problem,’ Ollie went on. ‘Simple substitution cyphers are easily broken with frequency analysis.’
‘And that is?’ asked Paddy.
‘In the English language the most common letter is E, followed by T then A,’ Ollie explained. ‘There are common letter pairs too or bigrams like ST, NG, TH, and QU. And there are even common words, like the and and. If the coded text is long enough these patterns will become apparent and the correct letters can be guessed.’
‘How long will that take?’ Paddy asked. The limit of his attention span had already been seriously breached.
‘Not long. A while back I wrote a substitution cypher cracking program that will do it in seconds,’ Ollie said looking sheepish. ‘I was bored.’
Paddy and William exchanged a glance. Paddy rolled his eyes back and murmured something that sounded like ‘geek’. Ollie ignored him and sat to down to work.
‘First, I need to transcribe the code on the headstone into the corresponding letters using my grid,’ Ollie said. He matched each symbol on the gravestone with the corresponding shape on his grid and wrote down the letter it was paired with. The resulting text was a nonsensical jumble of letters just as he had expected. Then on his computer he opened up the cypher cracking program and typed in the jumble of letters in the order he found them. He clicked on the mouse and started the program running.
‘Where did you find the gravestone?’ he asked.
‘At a church in a village called Everton in Bedfordshire,’ William replied.
Ollie frowned and looked up. ‘That rings a bell for some reason. Got it! There was an SOE airbase there during the war.’
William and Paddy looked at each other, Ollie hadn’t been updated on the SOE connection.
‘The old runway is still there and the staging hut which is now a memorial to the SOE men and women who gave their lives,’ he went on as he typed away on the keyboard. ‘They’re in the middle of a working farm. I visited it a few years ago, a colleague laid a wreath from GCHQ. There were some brave people in that outfit.’
‘Elizabeth was one of them,’ William said. ‘She was Ella Moore’s grandmother.’
‘Bingo!’ Ollie said. His program had stopped running and displayed a coloured graph on screen.
‘It’s cracked it already?’ Paddy asked.
‘Well, it’s found the probability of what each letter might be,’ Ollie corrected. Tapping away on the keyboard he tried out the different letter combinations that the program suggested. Within a couple of minutes he had found the right one. Quic
kly, he scribbled something down on the piece of paper he’d used to write the grids. He handed it to William and beamed.
‘The key was Francisperyvl. Whatever that means. And the message, well, that really has me intrigued now. What’s going on guys?’
William took the paper from Ollie and read the message out. ‘He hid it from Medici in the crypt, this Atlantean treasure. Pascal Mark X.’
*
Sat at the bar in the Greenfly, Ella and Sarah had been getting to know one another over a drink. Similar in many ways, they had quickly formed a rapport. Sarah had shared a few of her experiences in F-Branch, some of which had left Ella agog. The two girls were laughing when William joined them with a large Scotch. They quietened down, Ella smiled at him warmly.
‘I have a present for you,’ William said to Ella. He took out the gold service watch Ollie had given him and held it out to her.
‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,’ she said.
William took her slim wrist and gently fastened the watch on it. Dainty and elegant, the watch suited her.
‘Thanks,’ she said with a frown. ‘But why?’
‘It’s both an active and a passive radio tracking device. In case you get . . . lost.’
Ella’s smile faded. ‘You want to track me?’
‘Only in an emergency,’ William reassured. Gently, he took hold of her wrist again. ‘If you’re in trouble, just press firmly here.’ He slid her finger to the winding dial. ‘It will send an initial coded signal to a satellite and then one brief pulse every ten minutes for the first hour. After that it sends one signal roughly every hour or so. The time period is randomised to make it harder for anyone scanning the airwaves to detect. But as soon as it’s activated we will come and find you.’
Ella was unsure how to respond. ‘Very considerate of you,’ was all she could muster.
‘The battery lasts for several days once activated, but the tracking helicopter can scan for it even when it’s not transmitting,’ Sarah pointed out. ‘That’s the passive side. When it receives the correct search signal from the chopper we can then home in on it. It needs to be in range though, about a twenty mile radius from the air.’
‘But don’t worry, you won’t need it,’ William assured.
‘Then why did you give it to me? Don’t make promises you can’t keep, William,’ Ella said solemnly. ‘Excuse me for a moment, nature calls.’ Ella left her stool and headed for the ladies room.
‘They’ve found a body,’ Sarah explained quietly when Ella was out of earshot. ‘A police dog located it under the floor boards of Ella’s flat.’
‘Have they ID’d it?’ William asked.
‘Tanya Collins, a student at Cambridge. One of Ella’s friends I would guess.’ Sarah’s eyes narrowed. ‘She’d been raped, beaten and strangled.’
‘Bastard.’ William closed his eyes and rubbed his temples, it had been a long day. ‘Do me a favour and don’t say anything to Ella. She’s been through enough.’
‘I won’t.’ Sarah looked into William’s deep blue eyes. ‘It’s strange though, don’t you think? Why would he do that?’
‘Strange?’ William shook his head. ‘He’s a killer, he likes it.’
‘Exactly, but he’s a professional killer. Yet he made no attempt to hide any of the evidence properly. He’s taken a huge risk in doing what he did with that girl. Why?’
‘Because he’s evil.’
‘There’s something not right here, William. I can feel it.’
‘You’re telling me.’
‘And the IMS still hasn’t been updated. Albert said he wants something conclusive before we tell the world.’
William rolled his eyes.
‘It’s just not right, William. The IMS is there for a reason. Our friends and allies need to know about this, they may know something.’
‘Do me favour, Sarah, talk to Paddy about your concerns tomorrow.’
Sarah nodded. They both stopped talking and turned to Ella when she returned.
‘What are you two talking about?’ she asked, suspicious of their sudden silence.
From his pocket, William took out a piece of paper and unfolded it on the bar. ‘The transcription of your grandmother’s code,’ he explained. ‘Our techies cracked it.’
‘Atlantean treasure!’ Ella’s eyes lit up when she read the text.
‘Do you think that’s what the Biblos Aletheia is, an artefact from Atlantis?’ William asked. ‘That would explain why it’s so valuable.’
‘And why someone is willing to kill for it,’ Sarah added. ‘It must be priceless.’
Ella laughed and shook her head. ‘I’m afraid Atlantis is only a myth,’ she replied. ‘It was a story invented by Plato to describe how wealthy societies that became corrupt, lose their way and are eventually punished by the gods. It’s actually now thought that Plato’s Atlantis story was influenced by the huge volcanic eruption that destroyed the Mediterranean island of Thera four-thousand years ago.’
‘But is that a relatively recent theory?’
‘Yes, fairly. Why?’
‘Your grandmother wouldn’t have been aware of it,’ William said. He took a swig of his whisky. ‘Anyway, what the hell has all this got to do with a virus? Are we missing something here, Sarah?’
Confused, Ella looked from William to Sarah and back again. ‘What virus? And what was that about a professor?’
‘Some of that information is classified, I’m afraid,’ Sarah began.
William raised his hand and said, ‘It’s okay, Sarah. She deserves to know the full picture.’
Sarah shrugged her shoulders. ‘On your head be it,’ she said. She checked the time. ‘Sorry, but I need to go home now.’ She finished the remains of her drink and pushed the manila folder that was on the bar towards William. ‘Read that before you call it a night, it might make things a little clearer.’ She stood, said her goodbyes and left.
‘So, what’s the full picture then?’ Ella said eagerly to William. There was a gleam in her eye, she realised that she was actually enjoying herself.
‘A few days ago we were tipped off by a virology professor that a secret society was trying to create a virus as a weapon,’ William explained. ‘But he was killed by the same people who are after you. The same people who murdered your father.’
‘Oh my God,’ Ella gasped.
‘But we’ve no idea who they are, or what they want. Other than that they want you, the painting and this book.’
‘That’s reassuring,’ she said sarcastically.
William looked down at the manila folder. ‘We should read this, then call it a night. One for the road?’ he asked.
Ella nodded.
‘Grab that table over there, I’ll bring the drinks over,’ he said and handed her the folder.
While William ordered, Ella took a seat at a table. Absentmindedly, she flicked open the front cover of the folder. A picture on the first page caught her by surprise; it was her father’s mugshot. He looked tired and unhappy, defeated. Her first thoughts were that she could see herself in him, the eyes were familiar. But he had a beaten, disappointed look about him. Saddened, she peeled the pages over and began to skim-read the transcript of the police interview.
William placed the drinks on the table and sat down. ‘Everything okay?’ he asked when he saw an odd look on her face, a mixture of surprise and disbelief.
‘Read this,’ she said turning the folder around and sliding it to him. ‘It’s certainly . . . bizarre.’
After skimming through the transcript, William closed the folder and sat back. He picked up his glass and swirled the yellow liquid around before taking a drink. Ella watched him, trying to read his thoughts.
‘Interesting,’ he said coolly.
‘Interesting?’ she mocked and laughed humourlessly. ‘Come on, it explains everything.’ Her eyes were wide with excitement.
‘Not quite everything.’
Ella was about to say more, but William raised his hand and stopped h
er. He took his phone out and dialled.
‘Ollie,’ he said. ‘Are you still in the lab? Good. We’re coming down.’ He ended the call and downed the remains of his drink.
‘And?’ Ella said narrowing her eyes.
‘Come on. We’ve work to do.’
*
The lab was empty save for Ollie who was sat at his desk glued to his screens. He slurped from a large paper coffee cup. When he heard the two enter he swivelled around in his chair.
‘William,’ he said. When he noticed Ella he stood up to greet her. ‘And you must be Ella, I’ve heard so much about you.’
Pulling up two seats, William and Ella sat down at Ollie’s desk. William passed the manila folder to him. Ollie took it and began to flick through it.
‘It’s the police interview with James Davidson immediately after his arrest,’ William explained. ‘He claimed that the manuscript he stole was written in 1517 by the Inquisition, the notes of an interrogation of a merchant who was suspected of belonging to a secret society: the Knights Templar.’
‘The Templars?’ Ollie’s eyes lit up. The Knights of the Temple had long been a fascination of his. ‘But the Church had wiped them out by 1517. Their brutal attack began on Friday, October 13, 1307. The original Friday the thirteenth.’
William nodded, he was familiar with the story. ‘The notes reveal that, under merciless torture, their suspect informed them of another secret organisation. One so old that it went as far back as the time of ancient Egypt. A sacred artefact was mentioned, a book. He called it the Biblos Aletheia. The Inquisition set out to destroy both the book and the secret society.’
‘But they failed?’ Ollie enquired.
‘Looks like it. A couple of months after that interview, James was murdered,’ William added. ‘And it looks like a policeman may have deliberately botched the investigation.’
The Secret of Hades' Eden Page 20