Hugo climbed in and immediately shifted his attention to the woman, and when it was established the man with her was her brother, he joked the champagne was for her. They chatted for a while then Odile uncrossed her legs and announced they’d have to be off.
‘The answer is yes,’ Luc said to her. ‘I’d welcome your help at the campsite. Cave work is going to be very restricted but there’s lots to do here. Come anytime. Pierre, the guy who showed you in, will set you up.’
This time her parting smile to Hugo was unambiguous. Luc felt the kind of humming sometimes experienced around a high-voltage line.
‘If I’d known she’d be here I would have come yesterday,’ Hugo said. He looked around the cramped caravan. ‘This is where the famous Luc Simard, co-discoverer of Ruac Cave, is staying? Not exactly Versailles. Where am I sleeping?’
Luc pointed to the spare bunk at the far end that was piled high with Luc’s laundry. ‘There. Have some brandy and don’t you dare complain.’
Zvi Alon button-holed Jeremy in the kitchen where the student had gone to brew a cup of tea.
The bald man blurted out, ‘Luc gave me permission to visit the cave on my own for a short while. Let me have the key.’
Jeremy was thoroughly intimidated by Alon and his tough reputation. His bony knees were practically knocking. ‘Of course, professor. Do you want me to go with you to unlock it? It’s tricky going down in the dark.’
Alon held out his hand. ‘I’ll be fine. When I was your age I was commanding a tank in the Sinai.’
Luc started filling Hugo in on the first day’s activities but as he was speaking, he sensed his friend was restless. Suddenly Luc stopped talking and demanded, ‘What is it?’
‘How come you’re not asking me about the manuscript?’
‘Has there been progress?’
‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of a Caesar cipher?’
Luc impatiently shook his head.
‘Well, it’s a pathetically easy code that Julius Caesar used for secret messages. It practically requires your foe to be illiterate since it’s so easy to break, just a shift of say three letters to the right or left. Most of his enemies couldn’t have even read the plain Latin so it worked fine for him. Over time code breakers and code writers competed for rather more sophisticated methods.’
Luc was red-faced with testiness.
‘Okay, okay, well according to my guy from Brussels, one of the Voynich geniuses, our manuscript was coded with something called the Vigenere cipher which by itself is pretty remarkable since it wasn’t thought to be invented until the sixteenth century. It looks like our Barthomieu or a colleague was a few hundred years ahead of his time. I won’t bore you with the details but it’s a far more complicated variant of the Caesar cipher with an additional requirement of requiring secret key words for deciphering.’
‘If you don’t cut to the chase, I’m going to kill you with my bare hands,’ Luc shouted.
‘This morning, before I left Paris, my Belgian geek told me he was close to cracking a few pages. He thinks there are probably at least three sections, each with its own key word. He was crunching numbers, or whatever it is that computer people crunch, and he told me he’d email me when he had something definitive. Is there someplace I can check my mail?’
Luc practically grabbed him by his jacket. ‘The office. Let’s go.’
As they passed the camp fire, Luc pointed at a woman and said to Hugo, ‘By the way, that’s Sara.’
Immediately he wished he’d kept quiet because Hugo sprinted towards her and introduced himself as one of Luc’s oldest friends not to mention the co-discoverer of the cave.
‘I’ve heard of you,’ she sparkled. ‘I can’t believe we never met back when, you know, Luc and I…’
‘And I’ve heard of you too!’ Hugo exclaimed. ‘So lovely, so intelligent. Luc, come over here!’
Luc approached, shaking his head in anticipation of what was coming. ‘Don’t be making trouble, Hugo.’
‘Trouble? Me? It’s just that, well, Sara, I’ll be blunt. I met a lady tonight and I’d like to ask her out but a double-date might be less of a challenge for her. How about you and Luc joining us sometime this week? I’m only here for a couple of days.’
‘Christ, Hugo,’ Luc groaned.
‘I’d love to,’ Sara said, taking Luc aback but making Hugo smile knowingly.
‘Then it’s settled. All I need to do is ask this lady and we’re set. Luc will tell you what I think about the countryside. This should make it more palatable.’
Luc switched on the office lights. The floor of the sturdy little building was vibrating along with the rumbling generator. He logged onto the web and let Hugo enter his own email portal.
The dapper man puffed out his chest and proudly announced he had twenty new messages, several from female friends, then spotted the important one. ‘Ah, it’s our code breaker!’
He opened the email. ‘Fantastic! He says he’s got six pages done. The secret keyword for the section was NIVARD, whatever that means. He’s sent the deciphered passages as an attachment and says he’ll start working on the next section soon.’
‘What does it say?’ Luc demanded.
‘Hang on, let me open it. I don’t think he even read it. He’s only interested in the code, not the text! Besides he says it’s in Latin, which for our Belgian friend is just one more cipher, a boring one.’
Hugo scanned the document getting a feel for the language.
With Luc standing over his shoulder he slowly started to read on the fly. He soon cast off the dispassionate tone of a translator. The language was too volatile and Hugo began to ardently channel the old monk’s words. I am certain to meet a horrible and painful death. Unlike a martyr who dies for his beliefs and piety, I will die for the knowledge I possess. There has been blood and there will be more. To lose a friend is not an easy thing. To lose a brother is terrible. To lose a brother who has also been a friend for nigh on two hundred years is unbearable. I buried your bones, dear Nivard. Who will bury mine? I am not a saint, O Lord, but a pitiful soul who loved his knowledge far too dearly. Did it crowd out my love for You? I pray not, but it is for you my God to judge. For my sins I will pay in blood. I cannot confess to my Abbot for he is dead. Until they come for me I will write my confession. I will conceal its meaning in a cipher devised by Brother Jean, a scholar and a gentle soul who I miss terribly. The knowledge contained in my confession is not meant for every man and when I am gone it will disappear. If it is ever found again, it is because Christ has seen fit to make it manifest for reasons known only to Him. I am a scribe and book binder. Should the Lord give me time to finish it, I will bind the book and I will dedicate it to Saint Bernard. If the book is burned so be it. If it is torn asunder so be it. If it is found by another man in its intended hiding place and the words untangled, then I say to that man may God have mercy upon your soul, for the price you will pay will be great.
Hugo stopped to blink and wet his lips.
‘Is there more?’ Luc asked.
‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘There’s more.’
‘Then for God’s sake, keep going.’
Alon drove his rental car the way he did everything in life: pugnaciously. He accelerated hard, braked hard and navigated the short distance from the camp in over-revved lurches. A gravel parking lot had been established near the top of the cliff and when he got there he braked aggressively, his tyres spraying up pebbles. Clouds blurred the edges of the crescent moon and the night sky had tendrils of black, like the veins on the back of one’s hand. The temporary guard shelter that had been erected before the gates were installed was long gone. The CCTV images and telemetry data from the cave entrance and chambers now fed directly to the camp office.
He locked the car and zipped his bomber jacket to his throat. Convections of chilly air rolled over the valley. He felt around in his pocket for the key to the gate of the cave. It was large and heavy, a satisfying implement, almost medieval. He would have preferred complete authenticity, a flickering oil-fed lamp, but the small flashlight in his hand would have to do. He aimed it at the path and headed towards the cliff ladder.
He was eager to spend half an hour on his own, wandering the passages in the minimal light. He’d apologise to Luc in the morning in his own way, plead temporary insanity, but he had to do this. Luc would officially disapprove but the incident would pass, he was sure. The cave was calling out to him. He needed to have a private conversation with it. He’d write about the night. It would shape his thinking, maybe even shake some long-held, stubborn beliefs.
