The Alchemist

different.

‘God, I hate puzzles,’ he muttered to himself. Chewing on his pen, he gazed back at the notebook for inspiration. His eye settled on the picture of the alchemist with his cauldron. Beneath the cauldron was the fire. Beneath the fire was the inscription ANBO.

Then it hit him. Of course, stupid. ANBO was the coded form of IGNE, Latin for fire. If ANBO was IGNE, then it meant that the alphabet had been lined up against alternating letters of the key line. When it reached the end it simply started again at the beginning, filling in the gaps.

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

I G N E N A T U R A R E N O V A T U R I N T E G R A

A N B O C P D Q E R F S G T H U I V J W K X L Y M Z

Set against the numbers running backwards from 1-26, this gave a totally different key to work with. ‘OK,’ he muttered, ‘here we go, one more time.’ N18 U11R, the code read. Based on his new key, N could be B or C or G or K; 18 could only be E. Moving on to the second word, U could be Q or V; 11 could only be U; and R could be any of E, F, J or M.

He stared fixedly at his scribbles, starting to feel a little snow-blind. But then his heart gave a jump. Wait a minute. A shape was forming. Out of the available letters he could spell out two distinct words. CE QUE. THAT WHICH. He wrote the key out more neatly.

And now the hidden message began to reveal itself quickly as he used the key to unlock the code, picking out the words from the available letters.

i. N 18: – CE

ii. U 11 R – QUE

iii. 9 E 11 E – VOUS

iv. 22 V 18 A 22 V 18 A – CHERCHEZ

v. 22 R 15 O – CEST

vi. 22 R – LE

vii. 13 A 18 E 23 A – TRESOR

viii. 20 R 15 – DES

ix. N 26 O 12 I 17 R 15 – CATHARES

WHAT YOU ARE SEARCHING FOR IS

THE TREASURE OF THE CATHARS

The excitement of his discovery gave Ben a new surge of energy. He flipped through the notebook pages, looking for more messages that could cast further light on what he’d found. At the bottom of the page where he’d found the coded word TRESOR was a block of three more encrypted words.

22E 18T 22 E 18I 26 T12 U20 A18

22E 18T 22E 18 I-26-T12 U20 A18. The pattern was looking familiar now-but when he applied his key to crack the message, his heart sank.

There was no way to create meaning out of it. COEICSEW A IHVDRE?

All right, you old bastard, you can’t throw me off that easily. Beginning to understand the mischievous tricks Fulcanelli seemed to enjoy playing, he reversed the key, now running the numbers forwards along the key line and the alternating alphabet backwards. This threw up a very different reading.

Running across the line and scavenging odd letters from the vertical columns, he was suddenly able to form intelligible words in French.

CHERCHEZ A…

SEARCH AT…

Only the last word baffled him. It could have been any of RHEDIE, WHEDIE, WHEDAE, RHEDAE, or a number of weirder alternatives such as CHJKE which obviously made no sense at all.

He scratched his head. Search at… Judging by the context, the mysterious third word had to be a place name: search at somewhere. He looked up all the possible alternatives on his map, but he couldn’t find any. Suddenly remembering that there was a selection of local guide books for sale downstairs in the hallway of the boarding house, he raced down the stairs, bought one from the landlady which covered the whole of the Languedoc, and ran back to his room already flipping through the index. But none of the names existed there either.

‘Fuck!’ He hurled the book across the room. It burst open in mid-air with a flap of pages, crashed into the wall and bounced back into a vase of flowers on the mantelpiece. The vase toppled and smashed. ‘Fuck!’ he shouted more loudly.

Then a thought came to him that made his anger drop away, instantly forgotten. What about the codes that Rheinfeld had been repeating to himself in the recording? Would those give him an answer? He tore open the pad again and worked out the five letters. He almost laughed when he saw the result.

KLAUS

So Rheinfeld had cracked it, the poor bastard. Ben wondered whether the German had been driven over the edge of madness by the frustration of not knowing the rest. He was beginning to understand exactly how the man had felt.

As he mopped up the spilt water and picked up the limp flowers and broken pieces of porcelain, cursing under his breath, something else suddenly occurred to him. What an idiot-of course. He dropped everything and ran over to rummage in his bag. Inside it he found the fake medieval map, depicting the old Languedoc, which had been hanging on Anna’s wall.

He unrolled the ornately drawn script and spread it across the table.

When he found the place, he checked its location against the modern map. There was no doubt about it. The ancient name for the medieval village of Rennes-le-Chateau, not twenty miles from St-Jean, was Rhedae. He banged his fist on the table. CHERCHEZ A RHEDAE suddenly had a new and very real meaning: SEARCH AT RENNES-LE-CHATEAU.

And, according to his guidebook, Rennes-le-Chateau was the site that legend associated most strongly with the lost treasure of the Cathars.

58

As he drove through the rugged countryside along the D118 heading towards Rennes-le-Chateau, Ben was thinking about what he’d read about the place in his new guidebook. It was a name he’d vaguely recalled from some half-watched television documentary, but he hadn’t realized that the once sleepy medieval hamlet was now one of southern France ’s most sensational tourist attractions. His guidebook read: ‘an important centre for seekers of holy treasure and magical phenomena. Whether or not you believe in the occult, kabbalistic ideas, UFOs or crop circles, there is no denying the strange mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau’

The enigma of Rennes-le-Chateau rested on the story of a man called Berenger Sauniere. He’d been the humble village priest who, in 1891 during a renovation of the old church, was said to have discovered four parchments sealed inside wooden tubes. The parchments were dated between 1244 and the 1780s, and, so the story went, had led Father Sauniere to find a great secret.