Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

It had been the right decision, but King knew that one of the burdens of leadership was that you couldn’t make everyone happy.

As far as Parker’s crush on Sasha was concerned, King would have happily stepped aside to let his friend try out his best moves, though he didn’t think Parker stood much of a chance with her. Where Sasha had earlier appeared indifferent to that kind of attention, she now seemed to occupy an entirely different plane of reality where Daniel Parker did not even exist. There was only one thing that mattered to her now: the Voynich manuscript.

King was also very interested in learning what the mysterious document had to say, though for a much different reason.

He considered the mission in Iran to have been only partly successful. Yes, they had rescued Sasha and retrieved the key to deciphering the manuscript, but one goal had eluded him, perhaps the most important objective, at least on a personal level. Kevin Rainer was still at large.

King didn’t think his former CO cared much about the contents of the book. Rainer’s motives were purely mercenary, but King felt sure that Rainer’s big paycheck was connected to the matter of deciphering the Voynich manuscript. Understanding exactly why the man wanted it might give King the edge he needed to accomplish that one remaining mission objective.

While the rest of the team had gone off in search of food, beer, hot showers and a place to crash, King had accompanied Parker and Sasha to the office where a digital version of the book, with its secrets revealed at last, was displayed on the screen of her laptop computer.

Parker quickly recounted how he had used the information from al-Tusi’s treatise along with Sasha’s own deciphering software to crack the code. Sasha nodded, as if the explanation validated a cherished belief, but then dismissively turned her attention to the computer.

King glanced over her shoulder and read a few lines. Deciphered or not, the book was still incomprehensible to him.

“What’s it say?” he asked Parker.

Without taking his eyes off Sasha, Parker said, “Let me give you some background first. The book was actually written by two men: al-Tusi and Roger Bacon.”

“Bacon, I know that name from somewhere.” King could almost hear Rook making a crack, probably in his best approximation of Homer Simpson, so he quickly added: “Some people think he was the guy who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays, right?”

“No, that was Sir Francis Bacon. Although the two men had very similar interests, they lived about four centuries apart. Roger Bacon was a Franciscan friar who lived in the thirteenth century. It’s long been thought that Bacon might have been the author of the Voynich manuscript; now we know it for certain.

“In 1247, Bacon was living in Paris, lecturing at the University, when he made an unusual discovery. He was conducting experiments with ground quartz lenses and realized that in addition to their other properties, the crystal could be made to vibrate at different frequencies—musical frequencies, like the way a soprano can make a wine glass vibrate and shatter. Even stranger, he discovered that when they were aligned with each other and facing in a specific direction, the effect was much stronger. He repeated his experiments in different places throughout Paris. When he compared the results, he realized that the crystals were pointing him toward something.”

“What?”

Parker shook his head. “Bacon didn’t know, but he decided to share his findings with another scientist; one of the most learned men in the world at that point in history.”

“Nasir al-Tusi.”

“Bingo. Of course, al-Tusi was a Muslim and theoretically an enemy, so they had to correspond in secret, using coded messages. Al-Tusi recreated Bacon’s experiments from Mosul, where he was living at the time, and based on the results, they were able to triangulate a possible source for the effect, a place they called ‘the Prime.’”

“Where was it?” King asked.

“They didn’t record the exact location, but it was somewhere in southern France. The maps of the day weren’t very precise, and they were relying on the crystal devices to guide them. Al-Tusi journeyed west, in disguise of course, and they met at the source to conduct further experiments.” Parker took a deep breath, as if gathering his courage to broach the next topic. “That was when things got really weird. Bacon began to notice strange plants, like nothing he’d ever seen before, and he had quite literally written the book on botany. Eventually, he realized that there was a connection between the appearance of the plants and the timing of the experiments with the crystal devices. He tried different frequencies, and he was able to produce different varieties of plants, as well as lichens, mosses, fungi—all of them different than anything he or al-Tusi had ever seen before. There was only one explanation that made any sense; somehow, the plants were being spontaneously generated.”

“Wait…what?”