Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

What she did know for certain was that eight of the keys contained exact matches to the Voynich script, and that was somewhere to start. She went back to an adjacent office just outside the containment area, shedding her environment suit. Rainer was there and began looking over her shoulder, but he otherwise let her work undisturbed.

Her laptop contained a complete version of the Voynich manuscript in digital form, along with a program that allowed her to plug in values for the distinctive characters of the mysterious alphabet. She highlighted the eight that were marked on the device. Without any context, they offered absolutely no insight.

It can’t be a code machine, she decided. If it was, other examples of the code would have shown up. So what did that leave?

What else has levers like that? Buttons? Keys…

“A piano has keys!”

Rainer threw an inquisitive glance her way.

“It’s a musical instrument,” she said, and she knew with absolute certainty that she was right. The wooden body was similar to a drum or a stringed instrument, hollow with thin curved panels to amplify the sounds. The tubes inside were like the pipes of an organ or a pan flute.

The Voynich manuscript was a book of music. The mysterious characters that had challenged code breakers for nearly a century were not enciphered letters, but musical notes; each symbol corresponded to a specific tone, a sound frequency.

Sasha didn’t have a deep aesthetic appreciation for music, but she did recognize its perfection as a mathematical language. If the code was an expression, not of individual letters but of sounds, then there would be a pattern to it.

There wasn’t enough of the device left to even approximate what specific notes each lever would have created, but the simple knowledge of the artifact’s purpose was enough to get her started.

She turned to Rainer. “Do you have a broadband Internet connection here? I need access to the Cray at Langley.”

He shook his head. “That’s not going to happen.”

She blinked at him in disbelief. “You want this cracked, don’t you?”

Rainer shrugged indifferently. “I can allow you supervised Internet access, but there’s no way in hell I’m letting you interface with the CIA.”

For a moment, Sasha couldn’t comprehend the reason for this, but then she remembered that she wasn’t here by choice. The Cray would have allowed her to employ a brute force attack, trying every permutation of the code, a grueling task that would have taken a lifetime using conventional methods, but would require only a few hours or days at the most, for the supercomputer. Denial of access to the agency’s resources meant that she would have to do this the old-fashioned way.

The idea was not without some appeal to her.

The subroutines weren’t discriminatory; the computer would treat every permutation as having equal potential, whereas a human cryptanalyst knew how to winnow out the obvious false trails.

But there were still too many variables.

She glanced through the window at the artifact—the instrument. If it had been a piano or a flute—something familiar—she would know the expected range of possible sounds, but there was nothing familiar about this device. She knew only its country of origin…

She turned to Rainer again. “This was found in China? Yunnan Province?”

“That’s what I was told.”

That didn’t make any sense. There was nothing in the manuscript that even hinted at a Far Eastern origin; everything—the artwork, the style and the distribution of the text, even the parchment on which it was written—pointed to Europe as the place where the manuscript had been created.

“I need to know more about where this was found.”

Rainer stared at her thoughtfully for a moment, and then he produced a cell phone. He dialed it and after a moment, he spoke. “She has some questions about the find.”

He nodded in response to an unheard reply, then set the phone on the desktop, pushing a button to activate speaker mode.

The voice of Rainer’s employer—Sasha couldn’t recall if she’d been told his name—sounded tinny as it issued from the mobile device. “What do you wish to know, Ms. Therion?”

“You said it was in a crypt? Whose crypt? Was there anything else there? Has it been dated?”

“We think it was the tomb of a Chinese prefect named Guo Kan. Several of the artifacts appear to be war trophies from his campaigns with the Mongol Empire.”

“Mongol?” Sasha tried to recall what she knew of the Mongolian era. “That would have been…12th century?”

“A bit later than that. Historical records say that he died in 1277, during the reign of Kublai Khan.”

Kublai Khan. History had never held much interest for her, but that was a name she knew well. Kublai Khan had ruled most of Asia during the late 13th and early 14th centuries, but he was perhaps best known for being the exotic ruler described in The Travels of Marco Polo.