The Doomsday Code

‘Look very closely,’ said Becks, pointing to a faint pen-stroke amid the pattern. The slightest hint of a minute cruciform easily lost amid the confusion of elaborate ink swirls. She pointed to another of the four. Again, the hint of a cross in a different location within the pattern. And then the other two. ‘The cross appears only in these four blocks of pattern.’

He looked at her. ‘So?’

Her brows knotted momentarily, perhaps a flickering learned gesture of impatience. ‘Each cross could indicate a corner.’

He looked back down at the parchment. She was, of course, right. ‘Four corners …?’

‘Four corners of a box.’

He looked back down again.

She continued. ‘I calculate with reasonable probability that this is an instruction on how to build a cardan grille to decode the Grail. The corners of the template would line up with the four crosses.’ She pointed at the handwritten text that would be framed by all four markers. ‘And some of the letters of the text within the template area should be identifiable as “window candidates”.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You would mark where the letter was on the template, and cut out a small square of the template around it, thus creating a window.’

‘Ahh! I see,’ Liam grinned. ‘And you cut out all these little windows, and then you lay out this template on the rolled-out Grail and …’

‘Correct.’ She nodded. ‘Making sure you line the template up with similar corner markers. And the letters you see through the windows that you have cut out, spell the hidden message.’

‘That’s — that’s genius, that is! You could be right!’ He got up off his haunches and started to look around for something they could use. ‘We could make our own grille right here! Right now!’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘We can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘We do not know which letters are the window candidates.’

Liam’s excitement vanished with a sigh. He’d assumed she’d already identified which were the ones.

‘On several occasions this document switches from Old English to another language. As you can see, it does so within the area marked out by the crosses.’ She pointed out the change of language to him. ‘I do not have this language file in my database. We have to presume there would be clues within this text to identify which letters are the window candidates.’

Liam scratched at his chin. ‘Would Bob know this language?’

‘No. We had the same files downloaded before the mission.’

Liam looked at it; he recognized some of the letters from the alphabet, but there were others that were totally alien to him. ‘Well … this is no good.’ He slumped back down again on the cold stone floor.

‘Suggestion.’

‘What?’

She began to roll the Treyarch Confession up carefully. Finally, gathered up, it disappeared again under the folds of her long dress.

‘Oh, hang on,’ said Liam, realizing what she was thinking.

‘You can’t take it to Kirklees, Becks! We’re surrounded by Richard’s army. It could end up falling into Richard’s hands.’

Becks reached for the candle flickering on the floor between them. ‘Then the alternative is that we burn both documents. Before Nottingham falls to King Richard. What is your decision, Liam O’Connor?’

CHAPTER 69

1194, Nottingham

Becks managed to pick her way through the picket lines of soldiers. Not too difficult. The few men on guard duty were too busy discussing how they were going to spend their share of the spoils once Nottingham had fallen. Rumour was, King Richard was going to turn a blind eye to any looting or pillaging in the immediate aftermath, just as if this was a siege taking place in the corner of some foreign country.

Towards the rear of the camp she found the assembled carts of the baggage train and, tethered nearby in a temporarily erected corral, the horses. She picked one, untied it, led it quietly out and was cantering away up the track towards the nearby forests before the mead-soaked old boy dozing instead of watching over the animals registered they’d become restless and that one of them had in fact gone missing.

The canter became a carefree gallop along the dirt track leading up to the brow of the hill overlooking Nottingham. She took the north-east route through the forest, partially following Liam’s directions, partially relying on the precise coordinates in her head.

Liam had warned her to be wary of bandits, but the forest presented no threats to her; the shabby band of villains Liam had mentioned, Locke’s people, had either disbanded and gone home or disappeared deeper into the woods in an attempt to evade any punitive raids Richard might decide to unleash.

Through several hours of night she covered winding miles of nothing more than the hissing of trees stirred by a lively breeze and hooting birds until finally, just as her silicon mind indicated she would, she caught sight of the dark and low form of the outbuildings of the priory.

Sebastien Cabot was awake in an instant. His soldier’s instinct to reach for the dagger hidden under his straw mattress kicked in, only to be stopped by the lightning-quick grasp of a firm hand round his wrist.

From the slither of moonlight stealing through the narrow window into his bare room he could see just the dark outline of someone leaning over him. ‘Who — who is …?’ he blustered, his voice still thick with sleep.

‘This is Lady Rebecca,’ she whispered.

Cabot struggled to sit up. The wooden frame beneath his mattress creaked. ‘Good grief! What are ye doing here? The other monks — ’

Her hand smothered his mouth and pushed his head down heavily against the mattress with a soft thud. ‘Be quiet and listen!’ Her hand remained clamped over his lips until he finally nodded. She lifted her hand and he sucked in a much-needed breath.

‘I have obtained the Grail document,’ she said without any preamble.

‘WHAT? MY GO-!’ His voice bounced off the stone walls of his room.

Her hand clamped his mouth firmly again. Above the back of her slender hand and the bulbous end of his florid pockmarked nose, she noted the wide rolling whites of his eyes. For a moment she considered how expressive human eyes could be; just those alone seemed to be able to communicate a whole language of emotions. Cabot, for example, right now appeared to be communicating an emotion akin to profound shock. She made a note to try rolling her eyes like that sometime.

‘I also have the Treyarch Confession,’ she added, her hand remaining over his mouth as he grunted and struggled. ‘I will need your assistance in translating a section of the Treyarch Confession.’ She waited a few moments for that request to settle in and for Cabot to stop making that muffled mewling noise beneath her firmly clamped palm. When she was sure he wasn’t going to blurt out loudly again, she slowly lifted her hand. ‘Will you assist?’

Cabot gasped for air again, sucking in breath through his mouth. After a few seconds he managed to talk in a hoarse whisper. ‘Ye … ye have them both?’

She nodded.

‘Here? Right here with ye?’

‘Yes. Will you assist me?’

‘Good Lord! I–I …’ Cabot struggled to frame an answer. Becks once more hushed him, this time with a finger pressed against his whisker-lined lips.

‘We will discuss this further in your graveyard,’ she said. ‘Put clothes on now. I will see you there in five minutes.’ She let go of his wrist and got up. ‘And bring a candle.’