CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
For almost 100 years, experts and amateur researchers have tried to solve the riddle of a handwritten book, referred to as the “Voynich manuscript,” composed in an unknown script. The numerous theories about this remarkable document are contradictory and range from plausible to adventurous.
—Klaus Schmeh, Skeptical Inquirer Volume 35.1
Roman punched off his mobile, stared blankly down at his hands. The lost quire found, by a nobody, at the British Museum? How could this be? How could it be possible?
And she knew it was twin talk? She was going on a hunt for the twins who could read the Voynich?
He remembered the gut fear he’d felt when the Voynich had been stolen last year from Beinecke at Yale. Even though the manuscript had been digitized and released into the world, someone had wanted the original badly enough to break into the Beinecke and steal it. And that meant someone believed there was something in the original pages no one had seen? No, that was ridiculous. Then why was it stolen? Why hadn’t it appeared on the black market? He was always listening, but he’d never heard even a whisper something could be hidden in the original Voynich pages. If he had, he’d have stolen the bloody manuscript himself. She’d said the pages had to be reunited? He felt a frisson of alarm, of uncertainty.
First things first. Roman sat down at his desk, a massive slab of driftwood, and pressed a button. An LED-crystal computer screen slid upward out of a hidden, built-in frame. He pulled the keyboard and mouse from his center drawer and went to the British Museum’s website. He saw they’d wasted no time. He pressed the link and watched the press conference twice, the second time pausing every few minutes. She was a Voynich expert, she admitted she couldn’t read it all, but she believed it was written in twin talk.
How could she have possibly figured her way to that? And only certain, unique twins could read it? And she was going to find the twins who could? Isabella Marin was lying, not everything she said, but enough. Why?
“I have found the key.” It was this missing ? It was written so a reader could figure it out? That was nonsense; she was absolutely lying. She finished with her plea to return the stolen manuscript so the pages would be reunited.
Reuniting the pages, that shook him to his core. How could she possibly know that? Had she truly found the missing pages by accident, or had that been a lie, too? Had she had them all along?
He’d been looking for the missing pages for years.
What game was she playing?
He read her bio on the British Museum website. She was from Florida, her B.S. in computer science from Yale, M.S. in science of information security from Yale, a Rhodes Scholar, she’d achieved her doctorate in cryptography at Oxford, and was now doing a supplemental year of research on ancient coded manuscripts at the British Museum, developing a new methodology to translate the texts. She’d been awarded several prestigious internships before this new position—translating runes on newly discovered sarsens in Sweden, interesting, but who cared? She loved to travel, blah, blah, blah. So she was smart, knew computers, and an American—the bio gave him nothing more.
He scrolled further and stopped cold at a photo, dated last year, of Isabella Marin accepting the Best Paper Award from the International Association for Cryptologic Research.
She was accepting the very award Roman himself had been awarded several years before, and that meant she was indeed an expert in cryptology. But it wasn’t the award that stunned him, it was something in her face. Yes, she was dark, beautiful, exotic—like the women from his homeland—but there was something more to her. What was going on here?
Roman walked to the large window in his office that looked over the Thames to the London Eye making its slow circle, and Parliament, shadowed in the darkening afternoon clouds. He thumbed an LSD tablet onto his tongue, waited a moment, then unboxed a disposable cell phone, added his encryption software, and made a call to the British Museum, a number he knew by heart. A pleasant female voice answered on the second ring. Never the first, always the second. Roman envisioned her there, long legs tucked under the desk, crossed at the ankle, her clear plastic umbrella sitting in the stand to her right and a cooling cup of tea on the desk in front of her.
“Dr. Wynn-Jones’s office, how may I help you?”
He slid seamlessly into his alter ego, his voice changed, became slightly higher, his speech more pedantic. “Hello, Phyllis. It’s Dr. Laurence Bruce. I need to speak to Persy, please.”
“Oh, hello, Dr. Bruce,” she said, her voice now infinitely warmer. “I—we’ve missed seeing you. How have you been? Both Dr. Wynn-Jones and I loved your piece in Anthropology Today last month—what a discovery. Hold for a moment, I’ll get him.”
Seconds later, Persy came on with a hearty, “Laurence! It’s been too long. How are you, my boy? Still ticking along on those John Dee diaries you discovered? Read your piece in AT, by the way. Phyllis couldn’t stop talking about it.”
“Thank you for the kind words. I am quite well. I hear you’ve had a bit of excitement today. Why didn’t you share with the rest of the class?”
“Oh-ho, you know how it goes. Close to the vest, make a big splash, get some extra funding. A real coup for the museum to have discovered a piece of the Voynich, especially after the original manuscript went missing last year. But you know all that already. The truth is, I wanted my brilliant young colleague to have a chance to shine. Tough to believe anyone could find those missing Voynich pages, but she did. Yes, yes, I’ll admit she tossed a bit of mysticism in there, what with the loose pages needing to be reunited with the manuscript, but it made for good drama.
“And yes, before you ask, they’ve been fully authenticated, by Hoag, that windbag, or we wouldn’t have announced otherwise. You need to watch the video of the announcement, you’ll find out everything. You’re actually the tenth call I’ve fielded in the past hour. My goodness, we even had a member of Parliament—I’m sure you’ve heard of her, Melinda St. Germaine, a former student of mine at Oxford—she and an FBI agent came in to see the pages this afternoon.”
Roman’s pulse jumped. An FBI agent? Could it be Drummond? No, that posturing nob was dead someone where on A14, his partner with him. But why hadn’t he heard yet from Radu? Not important at the moment—he kept his voice cool, disinterested.
“The FBI? It didn’t take them long to show up. I suppose after they bungled the case last year, when the Voynich was stolen, they need to make a good show of it. I wonder how they found out about the discovery beforehand.”
“Oh, this was nothing official. He and Melinda happened to be in the lobby when we called the press conference. Capital fellow, art history buff, here on vacation, ah, might be some interest there between him and Melinda. He was quite excited, quite excited indeed.”
“What was his name?”
“I’ll tell you, Laurence, I’ve heard so many names today I can’t keep them all straight. I do remember his name was the same as one of those sprawling big oil cities in Texas, but the day’s gotten away from me, so many things, so many calls. Exciting times, Laurence, exciting times.”
Roman stored this information away for later. He dropped his voice, made it low, conspiratorial. “I’d love to see the pages, Persy.”
“Of course, of course, and we’d love to have you. I’m sorry we weren’t able to arrange a private exhibit before the announcement, Laurence, truly I am. As I said, I wanted to give Dr. Marin a big splash, let her shine. And did she ever—shine, that is. All the reporters were eating out of her hand. When would you like to come by?”
“I’m already in London. I can’t spend all my time working. Came up to see the retrospective on”—he tapped the keyboard of his tablet and picked an exhibit at random—“Giacometti. At the Tate.”
“Oh, I had no idea you had an attraction to that modern trash I find so appalling and depressing. Ah, well, it’s something I’m sure I’ll never understand nor appreciate.”
This startled a real laugh out of Roman. “Man can’t sustain himself on antiquities alone, Persy. We must look ahead, as well as behind. I can be by in an hour.”
Persy said with a small laugh, “You know Phyllis will be ready for you.”