The Alexandria Link

EIGHT

OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND

9:00 AM

GEORGE HADDAD STOOD WITH THE CROWD AND LISTENED TO the experts, knowing they were wrong. The event was nothing more than a way to garner media attention for both the Thomas Bainbridge Museum and the little-praised cryptanalysts of Bletchley Park. True, those anonymous men and women had labored in total secrecy during the Second World War, eventually deciphering the German Enigma code and hastening an end to the war. But unfortunately their story wasn’t fully told until most of them were either dead or too old to care. Haddad could understand their frustration. He, too, was old, nearing eighty, and an academician. He, too, once labored in secrecy.

He, too, had discovered a great revelation.

He wasn’t even known any longer as George Haddad. In fact, he’d used too many aliases to remember them all. Five years he’d been gone to ground and not a word from anyone. In one respect, that was good. In another, the silence racked his nerves. Thank God only one man knew he was alive, and he trusted that person implicitly.

In fact, he’d be dead but for him.

Coming out today was taking a chance. But he wanted to hear what these so-called experts had to say. He’d read about the program in The Times and had to admire the British. They had a flair for media events-the scene set with the precision of a Hollywood movie. Lots of smiling faces and suits, plenty of cameras and recorders. So he made a point of staying behind their lenses. Which was easy since the focus of everyone’s attention was the monument.

Eight stood scattered across the estate gardens, all erected in 1784 by the then earl, Thomas Bainbridge. Haddad knew the family history. The Bainbridges first bought the property, hidden in a fold of Oxfordshire and surrounded by beech woods, in 1624, erecting an enormous Jacobean mansion in the center of six hundred acres. More Bainbridges managed to retain ownership until 1848, when the Crown acquired the title through a tax sale and Queen Victoria opened the house and grounds as a museum. Ever since, visitors came to see the period furniture and sneak a glimpse of what it was like to live in luxury centuries ago. Its library had come to be regarded as one of the best anywhere on eighteenth-century furnishings. But in recent years most visited for the monument, since Bainbridge Hall possessed a puzzle, and twenty-first-century tourists loved secrets.

He stared at the white marble arbor.

The top, he knew, was Les Bergers d’Arcadie II, The Shepherds of Arcadia II, an unimportant work painted by Nicolas Poussin in 1640, the reverse image of his previous work The Shepherds of Arcadia. The pastoral scene depicted a woman watching as three shepherds gathered around a stone tomb, pointing at engraved letters. ET IN ARCADIA EGO. Haddad knew the translation. And in Arcadia I. An enigmatic inscription that made little sense. Beneath that image loomed another challenge. Random letters chiseled in a pattern.

D O.V.O.S.V.A.V.V. M

Haddad knew that new agers and conspiratorialists had labored over that combination for years, ever since they’d been rediscovered a decade before by a Guardian reporter visiting the museum.

“To all of you here today,” a tall and portly man was saying into microphones, “we here at Bainbridge Hall welcome you. Perhaps now we will know the significance of whatever message Thomas Bainbridge left behind in this monument more than two hundred years ago.”

Haddad knew the speaker to be the museum’s curator. Two people flanked the administrator-a man and a woman, both elderly. He’d seen their pictures in The Sunday Times. Both were former Bletchley Park cryptanalysts, commissioned to weigh the possibilities and decipher whatever code the monument supposedly contained. And the general consensus seemed to be that the monument was a code.

What else could it be? many had asked.

He listened as the curator explained how an announcement had been published concerning the monument, and 130 solutions had been offered by a variety of cryptographers, theologians, linguists, and historians.

“Some were quite bizarre,” the curator said, “involving UFOs, the Holy Grail, and Nostradamus. Of course, these particular solutions came with little or no supporting evidence, so they were quickly discounted. A few of the entrants thought the letters an anagram, but the words they assembled made little sense.”

Which Haddad could well understand.

“One promising solution came from a former American military code breaker. He drew up eighty-two decryption matrices and ultimately extracted the letters SEJ from the sequencing. Reversed, this is JES. Applying a complex flag grid, he extracted Jesus H defy. Our Bletchley Park consultants thought this a message that denied the divine nature of Christ. This solution is a reach, to say the least, but intriguing.”

Haddad smiled at such nonsense. Thomas Bainbridge had been a devoutly religious man. He would not have denied Christ.

The elderly lady beside the curator stepped to the podium. She was silver-haired and wore a powder-blue suit.

“This monument presented a great opportunity for us,” she said in a melodious tone. “When I and others worked at Bletchley, we faced many challenges from the German codes. They were difficult. But if the human mind can conceive a code, it can also decipher it. The letters here are more complex. Personal. Which makes their interpretation difficult. Those of us retained to study all one hundred thirty possible solutions to this puzzle could not come to a clear consensus. Like the public, we were divided. But one possible meaning did make sense.” She turned and motioned to the monument behind her. “I think this is a love note.”

She paused, seemingly allowing her words to take hold.

“OVOSVAVV stands for ”Optimae Uxoris Optimae Sororis Viduus Amantis-simus Vovit Virtutibus.“ Roughly, this means, ”a devoted widower dedicated to the best of wives and the best of sisters.“ This is not a perfect translation. Sororis in classical Latin can mean ”of companions’ as well as “of sisters.” And vir, husband, would be better than viduus, widower. But the meaning is clear.“

One of the reporters asked about the D and M that bookended the main clump of eight letters.

“Quite simple,” she said. “Dis Manibus. A Roman inscription. ”To the gods of the Underworld, hail.“ It’s akin to our Rest in Peace. You’ll find those letters on most Roman tombstones.”

She seemed quite pleased with herself. Haddad wanted to pose a few pertinent inquiries that would burst her intellectual bubble, but he said nothing. He simply watched as the two Bletchley Park veterans were photographed before the monument with one of the German Enigma machines, borrowed for the occasion. Lots of smiles, questions, and laudatory comments.

Thomas Bainbridge was indeed a brilliant man. Unfortunately Bainbridge had never been able to communicate his thoughts effectively, so his brilliance languished and ultimately vanished unappreciated. To the eighteenth- century mind, he seemed a fanatic. But to Haddad he seemed a prophet. Bainbridge did know something. And the curious monument standing before him, the reverse image of an obscure painting and an odd assortment of ten letters, had been erected for a reason.

One Haddad knew.

Not a love note, nor a code, nor a message.

Something altogether different.

A map.