The Alchemist

He’d smiled fondly at the look of complete childlike relaxation on her sleeping face. He’d wanted so badly to take her in his arms, kiss her, make a fuss of her, bring her breakfast in bed. Stay together, live happily.

But none of that was possible. It was like a dream that hovered out of reach. His destiny lay another way. He remembered what Luc Simon had said. Men like us are like lone wolves. We want to love our women, but we only hurt them.

He’d blown her a last kiss, and then forced himself to leave.

And now he had to turn his mind back to his quest. Fairfax was waiting for him. Ruth was waiting for him.

He walked back to the boarding-house by the beach. In his room, he sat on the bed, picked up the phone and dialled a number.

‘So I’m officially off the hook?’

Simon laughed. ‘You were never really officially on it, Ben. I only wanted you in for questioning.’

‘You had a funny way of showing it, Luc.’

‘But the unofficial answer is yes, you’re free to go,’ said Simon. ‘You kept your side of the bargain, and I’ll keep mine. Marc Dubois is back with his family. Gladius Domini is being investigated and half their people are in custody under murder, abduction and a whole shitload of other charges. So I’m willing to forget certain matters as far as you’re concerned, if you understand me.’

‘I understand you. Thanks, Luc.’

‘Don’t thank me, just don’t cause any more trouble for me. Make me happy and tell me you’re leaving France today.’

‘Soon, soon,’ Ben assured him.

‘Seriously, Ben. Enjoy what’s left of the weather, go to a movie, see the sights. Be a tourist for a change. If I hear you’ve been up to anything, I’ll be on you like a ton of bricks, my friend.’

Simon put the phone down, smiling to himself. Despite everything, he couldn’t help feeling a certain liking for Ben Hope.

The office door swung open behind him, and he turned to see a balding, ginger-haired detective walk in. ‘Hello, Sergeant Moran.’

‘Good morning, sir. I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were still here.’

‘Just leaving,’ Simon said, looking at his watch. ‘Was there something you wanted, Sergeant?’

‘Just wanted to pull a file, sir.’ Moran went over to the filing cabinet and slid out a drawer, thumbing through the cardboard dividers.

‘Well, anyway, I’m off.’ Simon picked up his briefcase, gave Moran a friendly slap on the shoulder, and headed for the lobby.

Moran watched him disappear down the corridor. He pushed the filing drawer shut, quietly closed the door and picked up the phone. Dialled a number. A female voice answered from Reception.

‘Can you tell me the last call made to this phone?’ he asked. He scribbled down the number. Then he hung up. He dialled the number he’d scribbled.

A different woman’s voice answered. ‘Sorry, I must have the wrong number,’ he said after a pause, and hung up.

He dialled a third time. The voice that replied this time was a rasping whisper.

‘This is Moran,’ the detective said. ‘I have that information for you. The target is at the Auberge Marina in Palavas-les-Flots.’

Sitting at his desk in the boarding-house, Ben sipped his coffee, rubbed his eyes, and started combing through all his notes. ‘Right, Hope’, he muttered to himself. ‘Let’s get on. What do we have so far?’

The unavoidable answer was, he didn’t have an awful lot. A few disconnected scraps of information, a whole load of unanswered questions, and he was out of leads. He just didn’t know enough. He was worn out from lack of sleep, mentally drained from endless days of running, planning, and trying to balance all the elements of the equation in his head. And now, whenever he tried to focus, all he could see was Roberta’s face in front of him. Her hair, her eyes. The way she moved. The way she laughed, the way she cried. He couldn’t shut her out, couldn’t fill the void he was feeling now that she wasn’t there any more.

He was almost out of cigarettes again. He took out his flask and gave it a shake. Still some left. He started unscrewing the top. No. He put the unopened flask down on the table and pushed it away from him.

He was still bothered by those seemingly random and meaningless clusters of alternating numbers and letters that appeared on nine of the notebook’s pages. Wearily grabbing up a pen, he combed through the notebook and wrote the strange numbers and letters down in the order in which they appeared.

i. N 18

ii. U 11 R

iii. 9 E 11 E

iv. 22 V 18 A 22 V 18 A

v. 22 R 15 O

vi. 22 R

vii. 13 A 18 E 23 A

viii. 20 R 15

ix. N 26 O 12 I 17 R 15

Written in normal script, they looked even more like a code than they did in the notebook. What did they mean? He knew enough about cryptography to know that a code like this required a key to crack it. The key often used by spies and intelligence agents was a line chosen at random out of a book. The first twenty-six letters of the line could be matched up to the letters of the alphabet, or to numbers, or both. These could run forwards or backwards against the key line, giving different variants on the code and throwing up completely different readings. If you knew what book, what page and what line to use, it was a simple matter to decipher the coded message.

But if you didn’t know, it was completely unbreakable. And Ben had no way of knowing. Fulcanelli could have chosen absolutely anything, from any book or text, as the key line for these sequences. He could have used any of the languages he knew, French, Italian, English, Latin, or a translation from or into any of them.

He sat for a while, desperately thinking over the possibilities. The proverbial needle in the haystack was an easy challenge by comparison. He cast his mind back and suddenly remembered the recording that Anna had played them of her session with Klaus Rheinfeld. Rheinfeld had been muttering similar sequences of alternating numbers and letters. Ben had written them down.

He searched through his pockets and found the little pad. Rheinfeld had been repeating the same sequence of letters and numbers over and over. N-6; E-4; I-26; A-11; E-15. But these didn’t appear anywhere in the notebook. Did that mean Rheinfeld had been working the code out for himself? Ben remembered Anna describing how he’d obsessively counted on his fingers while he repeated the figures. He’d also counted on his fingers while repeating that other phrase…what was it again? Something in Latin, some alchemical saying. Ben screwed his tired eyes shut, trying to recall.

The phrase was somewhere in Rheinfeld’s notebook. He flicked through the grimy pages and found the ink drawing of the alchemist standing watching his bubbling preparation. There it was inscribed on the side of the cauldron. IGNE NATURA RENOVATUR INTEGRA. By fire nature is renewed whole.

If Rheinfeld was counting on his fingers while chanting the phrase…did that mean…Ben counted the letters of the Latin phrase. Twenty-six. Twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Was this the key line for the code?

He wrote the phrase out on a piece of paper. Above and beneath the words he ran the letters of the alphabet and the numbers 1-26. It looked too simple, but he’d try it anyway. He quickly discovered that while the numbers in the code could only equate to one letter, because of the repeated letters in the phrase the coded letters could have a variety of meanings. Using this key he decoded the first two words of the hidden message, N 18 / U 11 R:

The horizontal letters should have been able to form into some kind of recognizable word, drawing on the vertical columns of alternatives thrown up by the code. But it was nonsensical. Try again, it was too obvious anyway. He reversed the numbers 1-26 so that they ran backwards against the key line, and decoded the first two words again.

Now it was looking as though he’d got this all wrong. The key line was probably something completely