Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

They hastened out of the library chamber and back to the dome’s entrance. Knight and Rook were waiting for them at the SUV—a Toyota Hilux Surf—and without any discussion, they piled inside. Bishop settled into the driver’s seat and started the engine, while King, in the front passenger seat, busied himself with establishing a satellite data-link. The others crowded into the rear, with Knight and Rook taking the door seats.

By the time they reached the edge of the open area surrounding the ruins, King had started uploading of the images of the al-Tusi document to Parker. Now, if they didn’t make it out, the secret to decoding the Voynich manuscript would survive. Nevertheless, he was cautiously optimistic about their prospects. It would take a while for the police to arrive, and hopefully by then, they’d be long gone, en route to the remote pick-up location several miles west of Maragheh.

His good feeling lasted about a minute, the length of time it took for Bishop to navigate through the maze of exterior ruins and around old foundations to the paved road south of the dome. There, in the small parking lot, waited another vehicle identical to their own. Several men with Asian features stood vigilantly around its exterior, and as Bishop drove past them without slowing, they all began moving, shouting and gesturing animatedly at the departing SUV.

King felt a knot of dread in his stomach. “Miss Therion, how many men were in that cultural delegation?”

Sasha seemed blissfully unaware. “About a dozen. Why?”

King sighed and shook his head. “One of these days, everything is actually going to go according to plan; I truly believe that. Bishop…drive like hell.”





FORTY


Incirlik Air Base, Turkey



Parker felt a wave of relief at the news of Sasha’s rescue, but that did little to dull the sting of having been cut out of the operation. He couldn’t begin to imagine the hell she’d gone through, and the fact that he wasn’t there to comfort her only compounded his bitterness.

The computer chirped an alert, signaling that a download was in progress. He waited until the transfer was complete and then opened the file. There it was; Nasir al-Tusi’s instructions on how to build the device that would decode the Voynich manuscript.

He scrolled over the text, cutting and pasting it into a translation matrix, and in a matter of only a few seconds, he was able to read the Persian scholar’s words in English. He skimmed the introductory paragraphs and focused on the specifications for the urghan. Sasha had already constructed a virtual replica of the exterior body—the wooden sounding chamber that would amplify the musical tones—and the bellows system that supplied air to the pipes. All that was missing was the pipes themselves. Al-Tusi had fashioned them out of wood, and provided extensive information about the size, thickness, and shape of the pipes. The units of measurement were unfamiliar to Parker, but as he read on, he saw that even that detail was unimportant. The last section of the roll contained information on how to verify that the urghan was tuned correctly; each character of Voynich script corresponded to a specific note on the Persian harmonic scale.

Almost trembling with excitement, he began inputting the values into Sasha’s program for the virtual urghan. With each addition, the program transferred the information into the deciphering subroutine, seeking out every instance where the Voynich character occurred, and replacing it with an alphanumeric character based on the musical scale, but Parker did not check it until the last value had been entered.

He had hoped that the manuscript’s secrets would simply pour off the pages, but the book did not give up its treasure so readily. The output was an incomprehensible jumble of letters and numbers. He tried different variations on the musical scale, but each time the result was the same.

That wasn’t a surprise really; all he had done was employ a common substitution cipher, and that approach had been tried innumerable times. There was an added layer to the Voynich code.

He returned to the al-Tusi document and read it again. Aside from the appearance of the unique script, there was nothing to explicitly link the urghan to the manuscript. The explanatory paragraphs focused mostly on the mathematical properties of music. Then he noticed the final paragraph.

“When once you have fashioned the organ, the music of the book may be understood with the indivisible numbers, each one in turn and one for each number, in the language of civilized men but according to the fashion of the infidel.”

Parker gaped at the words on the screen. The ‘book’ could only be the Voynich manuscript, but what did the rest mean? The numbers part seemed straightforward enough; assign each musical note—as represented by the Voynich script—a number and then employ an alphabetic substitution.

Language of civilized men? To al-Tusi, the civilized world was the world of Islam, and the common language of Islam, even in Persia, was Arabic. That made sense, and offered one possible explanation for why the manuscript had resisted all previous decoding efforts. But something about that explanation nagged at him.