The Doomsday Code

them in here right now, and a couple of businessmen on the far side. Maddy looked out of the blue tinted window down on to Times Square.

‘We have to follow the trail,’ she said eventually. ‘If Cabot seems keen to take you to meet King John — ’

‘He’s not king yet,’ Adam pointed out.

Maddy shrugged and continued. ‘Then I suggest you go along with it for now. Because … this — because something’s going on back there. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to get us back there and talking to this Cabot guy. The Pandora message — ’

‘Maddy?’ Sal looked up from her plate. ‘Why is Pandora so important to you?’

Well? You going to tell them? That old dilemma again. ‘Be safe and tell no one’ — that’s what the scribbled note had said. Be safe … tell no one. Surely, though, Sal and Liam could know. Surely it wouldn’t be dangerous to share this with them?

Liam’s eyes were on her now. ‘Maddy? What is it?’

But Adam Lewis was really just a stranger, perhaps only a hapless victim caught up in this thing. The less he knew, the better.

‘Adam, would you please excuse us for a few minutes?’

He looked hurt, but then finally nodded. ‘All right, I’ll … uhh … go and settle the bill.’

She watched him cross the deserted restaurant before she turned to the others, her voice lowered. ‘I’ve been keeping something from you. I’m sorry.’

‘What?’

‘Liam, you remember our trip to San Francisco, 1906, to get some new clone foetuses?’

‘Aye.’

‘In the safety deposit box was a handwritten message. It was a note addressed to me.’ She took a deep breath, still not entirely sure she should be doing this. ‘It was handwritten, scribbled really — like whoever wrote it was in a real hurry.’

Sal fidgeted impatiently. ‘Maddy, just tell us!’

‘OK, OK,’ she said. ‘Well, it was this: Maddy, look out for “Pandora”, we’re running out of time. Be safe and tell no one.’

Liam and Sal exchanged glances. Bob frowned, Becks cocked her head in consideration.

‘It’s a warning,’ said Maddy. ‘I didn’t — I really didn’t give it much thought while we were sorting out the dinosaur business. And, you know, I guess I was just trying to push it aside. Trying not to think about it. But then — ’ She looked up at Adam waiting for the waiter to process his American Express card. ‘But then our friend over there decoded that message.’

‘It makes a little more sense to me now,’ said Liam. ‘You being so keen for us to go back and take a look- see.’

‘I’m sorry — ’ she shook her head — ‘so sorry I didn’t share it with you both earlier. But … it said tell no one. I didn’t know what to — ’

‘It’s OK,’ said Sal. ‘We know now. That makes it OK.’

‘Aye,’ said Liam. He pressed his lips, a half smile. ‘No more secrets?’

She shook her head and sighed. ‘Having that one was bad enough.’

Adam Lewis was finishing his business by the till and getting ready to come back.

‘So the message is just between us, OK? This is agency business.’

The others nodded.

Adam approached their table tentatively. ‘Safe for me to come back now?’

Maddy nodded and smiled. ‘All done. I think we should make a move. Lots of things to do.’

CHAPTER 25

2001, New York

Liam nodded with approval at the thermal underwear.

‘I got them from a sportswear shop,’ said Sal. ‘That should keep you warm under your other stuff.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, stuffing them into the plastic bag.

‘I took the labels off again,’ she added. ‘But all the same … you should keep the thermals hidden. It’s modern material.’

‘Right.’

Maddy joined them around the long kitchen table. ‘So, I’m sending you guys back to a couple of minutes in time after we brought you back, to avoid a tachyon clash.’ She shared a look with Liam. ‘Not making that mistake again,’ she uttered out of the side of her mouth.

‘OK.’ She turned to Adam. ‘Adam … you want to tell Liam and these two about your idea?’ She flicked a finger at Bob and Becks standing like two sentinels at the end of the table … in their underwear.

Adam nodded. ‘There’s a way, we figured, that you can stay in touch — ’

‘But Maddy said we can’t use the Voynich,’ said Liam.

‘No, not using that. There’s a graveyard at Kirklees that dates back to the beginnings of the priory. I’ve actually been there myself and picked through it all. Loads of broken masonry slabs lost underneath brambles and nettles and what have you. If you look, you’ll find them there. Anyway, I took a number of photographs of several of them. One, in particular, was part of a simple gravestone for a man called Robert Haskette, with 1192 as the year he died. So he’ll be dead now, of course.’ He frowned. ‘Well, when I say now I mean … you know, the point at which you — ’

Liam tutted and waved. ‘Don’t worry, I get tripped up by the now-then sort of thing too.’

Adam continued. ‘He’ll be dead and his gravestone there already and freshly carved … hopefully. You just need to look for it.’

Becks raised a finger. ‘Question.’

‘Yes?’ Adam’s eyes flickered up her athletic body. Then he found himself looking over her shoulder shamefaced, cheeks colouring. ‘Uh … what is it, err … Becks?’

‘You do not intend for us to communicate openly? This will present a contamination risk.’

‘No, no, of course not. This would need to be encoded. Ideally a code that looks inconspicuous and not out of place on a piece of masonry. Almost like decoration.’

‘Do you have such a code?’ asked Becks.

‘Indeed. Yes — well, it’s not mine, but it can be adapted slightly. You got any paper?’

Sal quickly skittered over to the computer desk and returned with a pad of paper and a pen.

‘Thanks. OK, this is the Masonic cipher. They call it the pigpen cipher.’ He sketched some criss-cross patterns of lines and dots on the paper and then filled them in with letters of the alphabet.

‘Now what you do is, for each letter in your message you use the part of the pattern that the letter is within. I’ll give you an example.’

He scribbled a coded message. Liam craned his neck forward to get a closer look. It meant nothing to him, and, as Adam had said, it did just look like a rather uninteresting pattern.

‘Now, see … if we take, for example, the letter X. Do you see where it sits in the cipher? Which part of this pattern is it sitting in? The part of the large diagonal cross with dots in — the left-hand quadrant — see?’ The others nodded. ‘Now look at that coded message: the first character matches that bit of the pigpen grid, the part that contains the letter X. So the first letter of the encoded message is X. Anyone figure out what the second letter would be?’

Sal answered first. ‘It’s an M?’