Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

After the team exited the plane 30,000 feet above northwestern Iran, the stealth transport had headed for Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey. The plane was refueled and refitted for the eventual extraction of the team. Parker found an unused office near the airstrip, and as he listened in on the team’s radio transmissions, he went to work on the riddle of the Voynich manuscript.

He reviewed Sasha’s notes more thoroughly, and he discovered that his initial perusal had only scratched the surface. Sasha Therion had been thinking about the Voynich problem for a long time, and she had recorded her musings in a personal journal. Parker scrolled through the entries, going back to the day that she had been contacted by Scott Klein and told of Cipher element’s discovery in Ramadi:



There is a new lead on the Voynich manuscript. A page has been found among documents captured from an insurgent cell in Iraq, and preliminary findings indicate a connection between the manuscript and plague research. While it is a tenuous connection, it supports my hypothesis that VM contains information that might offer insight into the origin of life.



Parker couldn’t recall Sasha mentioning any such hypothesis. He did a search of the journal, and found an entry from nearly two years earlier.



I am so weary of them all. Just when I think I have figured out the secret of what makes them tick, they do something completely unexpected. The human variable confounds me. I don’t even want to leave home anymore.

I am going to take that government job. Now that I think about it, I don’t even know why I hesitated. It’s perfect. The Voynich manuscript. It’s always fascinated me, but I never would have imagined that I could actually get paid to solve it.



He was surprised to learn that her CIA contract had been primarily for the purpose of cracking the Voynich code. He had always assumed that it was just one of many projects she consulted on. Based on that new information, he realized that deciphering the Voynich manuscript had become Sasha’s entire reason for living. He skimmed through the subsequent entries until he found something more substantial.



The pictures must be the key to understanding VM. It cannot simply be, as many think, a book of herbal lore. The paintings show plants that do not exist, or rather, plants that we have never seen before. Those plants must have existed when the book was written; how else can the level of precision and detail be explained?

I am convinced that Bacon is the author of the book, though perhaps he did not work alone. I’m also convinced that the VM contains a record of his experiments. What kind of experiments? Did he conduct some kind of primitive genetic manipulations? That would account for the mysterious plants. Perhaps he created them in his laboratory.



“Bacon” had to be Roger Bacon, a 13th century Franciscan friar who was often credited as the father of scientific investigations. His published writings included detailed reports of his experiments with lenses, acoustics, botany and even a primitive form of gunpowder. One popular theory held that Bacon was the author of the Voynich manuscript, and indeed many of the illustrations in the manuscript were similar to known examples of his work.



Yet, I have to believe there is more to it than that. Methods of cross-pollinating and plant grafting were widely known in his day. He would not have felt the need to hide his research using such a complex cipher if that was all it was. No, I believe he must have uncovered something even more profound, something that could have made him liable for a charge of heresy.

What could that possibly be? I can think of only one thing. If the plants shown in the VM are not the result of genetic manipulation, and they do not exist in the natural world, I see only one logical conclusion: they were created. Bacon discovered the alchemists’ secret, the Elixir, the Philosopher’s Stone. Nothing short of the discovery of the secret of creating life from inorganic matter could account for his compulsion to conceal the knowledge in a code that seems, quite literally, unbreakable.



The Elixir of Life? Parker had missed that reference during his earlier reading. It was difficult to believe that the ever-pragmatic cryptanalyst’s quest to decode the Voynich manuscript was anything but an academic exercise; this idea seemed so fanciful, and yet, he could not disagree with her simple logic. The complexity of the Voynich code demanded that its contents be of exceptional value.

Subsequent entries in Sasha’s journal variously restated that hypothesis, but evidently her insights had not been sufficient to crack the code. He skipped forward to the most recent entry—made less than an hour before the disastrous raid and failed rescue attempt in Myanmar. Parker read it again, this time from this new perspective.



I cannot allow myself to think about what has happened. It is beyond my comprehension. The human variable confounds me yet again. If only I could find the solution that would allow me to subtract that unknown and balance the equation.