Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

The answer lies in the VM. I am sure of it. If I can decipher the VM, maybe I can work backward and find a solution for the human variable.

I think I understand the connection between the urghan and the manuscript. Guo Kan led the Mongol armies that sacked Baghdad. He also traveled with Nasir al-Tusi. Now it all makes sense. It was not Bacon that wrote the VM, but al-Tusi, an Islamic scholar. I should have made that connection sooner. After all, ‘elixir’ is an Arabic word; it translates as ‘the effective recipe.’ Effective could be understood in the causative sense; not just a healing substance, but something that can bring life out of lifelessness.

Al-Tusi must have discovered the secret of the elixir and created the code to keep it safe. Perhaps, in his writings, I will find the key to deciphering the book. Perhaps he even kept a copy of the plans for the urghan with the documents he rescued from Baghdad and took back to Persia. It might be there at Maragheh.

I still do not understand the connection between the plague and the book, but I am no longer willing to dismiss it as a coincidence. Guo Kan had the urghan; did he use it to decode the book? Perhaps he tried to make the elixir, but accidently unleashed something else—an elixir of anti-life? Or maybe it was no accident.

When I have deciphered the book, I will know for sure.



Parker realized that he had been holding his breath.

Sasha’s long effort to understand the Voynich manuscript was nothing less than a quest to divine the secret of life. It had become her sole purpose for living.

In a rush of understanding, Daniel Parker realized that his own purpose was to help her succeed.

“Damn you, Jack,” he muttered under his breath. “You’d better bring her back in one piece.”

As if in response to his utterance, a voice blared from the radio: “King, there’s a vehicle approaching. You’re about to have company.”





THIRTY-EIGHT


Maragheh, Iran



Sasha felt as though her head was about to implode.

The variables had multiplied beyond her ability to enumerate them. They were coalescing in her consciousness, becoming a veritable black hole of chaos and uncertainty that consumed her thoughts. Her sleep had been erratic; there were huge gaps of time in her memory; dark periods where she must have slept deeply, but she felt exhausted and physically ill. Her techniques for tuning out the world—working through prime numbers, performing complex mathematical operations in her head—seemed beyond her ability now. She barely understood where she was; even the simplest of sensory inputs were scrambled in a fog of confusion.

She sat in the back of a large vehicle, an SUV of some kind. There were five other men there. Four of them had been on the plane; Chinese men, whose tailored suits did not quite conceal their true identity as thugs working for the triad. They had told her their names, but that information had already vanished beyond the event horizon. The fifth man had been picked up shortly after their arrival. He was different; he cowered fearfully in his seat, nursing superficial wounds that oozed blood. Sasha sensed that he was not there of his own volition.

A prisoner. Like me.

The realization slipped away, engulfed by the blackness of chaos.

Some time later—perhaps just a few minutes, perhaps days or weeks—she became aware of someone tugging at her arm. The SUV had stopped, and all of its passengers, save for her, had already disembarked. She allowed herself to be coaxed from her seat, but as soon as she was standing on the rough ground outside, she felt her legs go weak. She tried to lean against a fender, but the man holding her arm did not permit this; he drew her toward the front end of the vehicle.

She gradually came to understand that it was nighttime. The headlights of the SUV were illuminating a rather plain looking metal door set into a much larger white structure. The man—the prisoner—was propelled forward, and one of their captors barked a rough order. The prisoner fumbled with a ring of keys, and after a few moments, he succeeded in unlocking the door, after which they all filed in. Sasha and her minder brought up the rear.

Flashlights came out, but their beams revealed little about the interior of the white structure. Sasha wasn’t paying any attention. This new experience only compounded her sense of dislocation; the dark tumor of uncertainty throbbed in her head, consuming even her desire to know what was happening.

The group descended a flight of carved stone steps, and they halted at last in a room that might have been the office at a construction site. One of the men barked something, and then repeated himself, but Sasha paid no heed until she felt someone shaking her arm violently. Through a monumental effort of will, she fixed her gaze on the man who had been speaking.

“Tell him what you want.” The man spoke in a harsh, clipped manner, possibly a result of his relative unfamiliarity with English but more probably because he was a man of violence, used to getting his way with bellicose displays of aggression.