The Doomsday Code

He picked his way through weeds and brambles that scratched at his bare ankles below the coarse hem of his robe. By the scudding light of the moon he spotted the dark outline of Lady Rebecca standing perfectly still beside a gravestone.

‘My lady?’ he called softly.

‘Here,’ she replied.

He joined her. ‘Ye … Last I heard, ye were in Oxford.’

‘John has relocated to Nottingham. King Richard has come north with an army.’

‘Yes … yes, the county is full of this news. But — the Grail? How did ye find — where was — ?’

‘The Grail was recovered from the bandit known as “Hood” earlier today,’ she replied quickly, as if answering the question was valuable time wasted.

‘How did they manage to find him?’

‘That is unimportant. The Grail document can only be decoded with the correct cardan grille,’ she said, reaching into the folds of her dark robe.

She saw the whites of Cabot’s wide and round eyes again. ‘Ye have it?’ he asked. ‘Don’t tell me ye have stolen it from King Richard?’

She ignored his question and calmly pulled out the Treyarch. ‘This document is written in Latin and Norman French,’ she began, ‘but there is one passage written in a language I have no data on. Your assistance is required to identify the language.’

She carefully started to unroll the parchment. ‘You may light your candle now if there is inadequate light for you to see.’

Cabot shook his head impatiently. ‘’Tis not necessary. The moon is enough. Please … continue.’

She resumed, turning the wooden spindle and spreading out the long curled sheet of parchment on the ground. By the moon’s wan light the pale parchment seemed to almost glow, the dark spider-lines of ink across it every bit as clear and legible as they needed to be.

‘The unidentifiable language is located here,’ said Becks, pointing to a passage three-quarters of the way down the scroll. She put rocks out along the edge of the parchment to stop it curling up again and then leaned back so that her shadow didn’t fall across it.

Cabot squatted down and inspected the writing closely. ‘This here,’ he said, running his fingers along the curls of writing, ‘’tis a form of Gaelic, I believe.’

‘You know this language?’

He grimaced. ‘I know some words of it. And there are many forms of this language. I could perhaps translate this for ye if I had some time — and a library of other Gaelic works to compare to.’

She cocked her head and her eyebrows locked in concentration for a moment. After a minute of silent consideration she nodded slowly. A decision silently made. ‘The contamination risk is acceptable for the moment,’ she uttered.

‘What is that, my lady?’

Again she ignored him. ‘You will come with me, please,’ she said.

‘Where to?’

She got to her feet and began foraging among the tall weeds around the gravestone until she finally found what she was after: a long lumber nail. She crouched down in front of the gravestone and began scratching deep lines into the stone.

‘What are ye doing?’

‘Communicating.’

She carried on in silence, nothing but the sound of scraping and scratching and stone grit tumbling to the ground. ‘I am requesting an immediate portal.’

‘What is this? What are ye up to?’ asked Cabot once again.

She turned to look up at him impatiently. ‘You are coming with me.’

‘Coming with ye? Where to?’

‘The future.’

CHAPTER 70

2001, New York

Sal looked at them both. ‘Jahulla! That was one,’ she said. ‘Another one. Did you feel it?’ The other two looked at each other. Maddy quickly got up from the table and went over towards the bank of computer monitors.

She sat down at the desk and downloaded the image again from the still-connected drive outside. As it flickered open on the screen, Sal leaned over and traced a finger along the faint new lines on the photograph. ‘There’s another message on your gravestone.’

Adam scribbled down the pigpen glyphs on to a pad of paper.

The girls watched him impatiently as he checked each symbol against the table he’d drawn up on the page of writing paper earlier. ‘Well?’

‘Just hang on!’ His eyes narrowed as he double-checked some of the symbols on the new row that had appeared on his photograph. There were faint lines there, lines that might not have been part of the original carving, and lines lost to nearly a millennium of weathering. He looked down at the page of letters he’d deciphered and realized there were mistakes in there.

‘First word is extraction,’ said Sal.

Maddy nodded. ‘The rest is a time-stamp. Twelve numbers, the first four a time, the last eight a date.’

Sal grabbed a pen and quickly scribbled the nearly-words as numbers: 0445 13061194.

Maddy checked her numbers against what Adam had decoded. ‘Yes … yes, OK. Quarter to five in the morning, 13th June 1194. Right?’ She looked at the webcam. ‘You get that, Bob?’

› Affirmative. I have been listening. Date stamp: 04:45, 13 June 1194.

‘There’re no geo-coordinates, though,’ said Maddy.

‘Same coordinates as last time, then,’ said Sal.

Maddy tapped a pen against her lips. ‘Yeah. You get that, Bob?’

› Affirmative. Same geo-placement coordinates.

She leaned back in her chair and glanced round Adam at the rack of equipment beside the empty perspex tube. The charge display showed a full line of green LEDs. ‘All right, we’ve got enough juice on the board to open it up, Bob.’

› Affirmative. Activating density probe.

1194, Kirklees Priory, Yorkshire

Cabot looked around the field. Although the sun had yet to climb into view, the peach-stained sky was light now, a sky that would soon be a deep blue and cloudless — another hot summer’s day.

‘Why, pray, are we standing in this field?’

Becks raised a finger. ‘Just a moment.’

Cabot looked around at the softly stirring ears of barley. They rustled and whispered among themselves as they waited in silence for … for what? Lady Rebecca had said ‘the future’.

Days yet to be.

To visit one of those … it was a concept he could barely get his mind around. A day simply is. And then after the day has ended, it merely was, complete with whatever one remembered of the day in question. To walk into what was yet to be …

He shook his head at the impossibility of it. Perhaps this lady and her friends were afflicted by some madness. He’d come across holy men in Jerusalem who made claim of things just as impossible and nonsensical as this.