curator, and if playing the doddering old cuckold wasn't exactly a vice, marrying a woman younger than your daughter was.
The secretary brought in on a silver tray a small crystal glass filled with amber liquid. Peale took it, sipped fastidiously. 'Graham's '61 tawny. Nectar of the gods.'
Corvus waited, maintaining a pleasantly neutral expression on his face.
Peale set down the glass. 'I won't beat around the bush, Iain. As you know,
you're up for tenure again. The department begins deliberations the first of next month. We all know the drill.'
'Naturally.'
'This second time around is it, as you know. The department makes a recommendation to me. Technically, I have the final say, although in my ten-year stint as president of the museum I haven't once gone against a departmental tenure decision and I don't intend to change. I don't know which way the department's going to fall on your case. I haven't spoken to them about it and I don't intend to. But I am going to give you some advice.'
'Advice from you, Cushman, is always welcome.'
'We're a museum. We're researchers. We're lucky we're not at a university, burdened with teaching a gaggle of undergraduates. We can devote ourselves one hundred percent to research and publishing. So there's no excuse for a weak publication record.'
He paused, one eyebrow rising slightly as if to signal the subtlety of his point, which as usual was about as subtle as a blunderbuss.
Peale picked up a piece of paper. 'I have here your list of publications. You've been here nine years, and I count eleven papers. Roughly one per year.'
'What counts is quality, not quantity.'
'I'm not in your field, I'm an entomologist, so forgive me if I can't comment on the quality. I've no doubt they're good papers. No one has ever questioned the quality of your work and we all know it was just bad luck that the expedition to Sinkiang didn't pan out. But eleven? We have curators here who publish eleven papers a. year.'
'Anyone can knock out a paper. Publication for the sake of publication. I prefer to wait until I have something to say.'
'Come now, Iain, you know that's not true. Yes, I admit there is some of that publish-or-perish stuff going on here. But we're the Museum of Natural History and most of what we do is world-class. I'm getting off the point. A year has gone by without you publishing anything. The reason I called you in here is because I assume you're working on something important.'
The eyebrows went up, indicating it was a question.
Corvus shifted his legs. He could feel the muscles around his mouth straining from the effort to smile. The humiliation was almost unbearable. 'As it happens I am working on an important project.'
'May I ask what?' Right now it's at a somewhat delicate juncture, but within a week or two I'll
be able to bring it to you and the tenure committee-in confidence, of course. It should answer most satisfactorily.'
Peale gazed at him a moment, then smiled. 'That's splendid, Iain. The point is, I think you're a fine addition to the museum, and of course your distinguished name, associated as it is with your illustrious father, is also important to us. I'm asking these questions only in the spirit of giving counsel. We take it to heart when a curator fails to make tenure; we look on it more as a failure on our part.' Peale rose with a broad smile, extended his hand. 'Good luck.'
Corvus left the office and walked back down the long, fifth-floor corridor. He was so full of silent rage he could hardly breathe. But he kept his smile, nodding left and right, murmuring greetings to colleagues who were on their way out of the museum at the close of day, the herd heading back to their split-level ranches in faceless American suburbs in Connecticut and New Jersey and Long Island.
17
THE WHITEWASHED ROOM behind the sacristy of Christ in the Desert
Monastery contained only four things: a hard wooden stool, a rough table, a crucifix, and an Apple PowerBook G4 laptop computer with a printer, running on DC solar power. Wyman Ford sat before the computer, tingling with anticipation. He had just finished downloading two cryptanalysis programs and was about to unleash them on the code he had laboriously typed in from the dead man's notebook. Already he knew that this was no simple code; it had not yielded to any of his usual tricks.
It was something truly special.
He lifted his finger and brought it down smartly: the first program was off and running.
It wasn't exactly a decryption program, but rather pattern analysis software that looked at the code and made a determination, based on number patterns, as to what class of code it belonged to-substitution or transposition, placode or encicode, nomenclator or polyalphabetic. He had determined it wasn't a public-key code based on factoring large primes. But beyond that, he'd struck out.
It was only a matter of five minutes for the program to return a beep, indicating the first analysis was complete. Ford was startled when the conclusion popped up:
UNABLE TO DETERMINE CODE TYPE
He scrolled down through the pattern results, numerical frequency tables, probability assignments. This was no random grouping of numbers-the program had picked out all kinds of patterns and departures from randomness. It
proved the numbers contained information. But what information, and how encoded?
Far from being discouraged, Ford felt a shivery thrill. The more sophisticated the code, the more interesting the message. He ran the next program in the module, a frequency analysis on single digits, number pairs, and triplets, matching it against frequency tables of common languages. But that too was a failure: it showed no correlation between the numbers and the English language or with any other common language.
Ford glanced at his watch. He'd missed Terce. He'd been at it now for five hours straight.
Damn.
He went back to the computer screen. The fact that each number had eight jjgits-a byte-implied a computer-based code. Yet it was written with pencil in a grubby notebook, apparently in the middle of nowhere, with no computer access nearby. On top of that he had already tried translating the eight-digit numbers to binary, hexadecimal, and ASCII, and ran those through the decryption programs, still with no success.
This was getting fun.
Ford paused, picked up the notebook, flipped it open, ruffled through the pages. It was old, the leather cover abraded and worn, and there was sand between the well-thumbed pages. It smelled faintly of woodsmoke. The numbers were written with a sharpened pencil, clean and crisp, in neat rows and columns, forming a kind of grid. The evenness of the writing led him to believe that the journal had been written all at the same time. And in the entire sixty pages of numbers there wasn't a single erasure or mistake. Without a doubt the numbers had been copied.
He shut it and turned it over. There was a stain on the back cover, a smear that was still slightly tacky, and he realized with a start that it was blood. He shivered and quickly put the book down. The blood suddenly reminded him that this was not a game, that a man had been murdered, and that the journal very likely contained directions to a fortune.
Wyman Ford wondered just what he was getting himself into.
He suddenly felt a presence behind him and turned. It was the abbot, hands clasped behind his back, a faint smile on his face, his lively black eyes fixed on him. 'We missed you, Brother Wyman.'
Wyman rose. 'I'm sorry, Father.'
The abbot's gaze shifted to the numbers on the screen. 'What you're doing must be important.'
Wyman said nothing. He wasn't sure it was important in the way the abbot meant. He felt ashamed. This was just the kind of obsessive work habit that had gotten him into trouble in real life, this compulsive focusing on a problem to the exclusion of all else. After Julie's death, he had never been able to forgive himself for all those times he worked late instead of talking to her, eating dinner with her, making love to her.
He could feel the kindly pressure of the abbot's eyes on him, but he couldn't raise his own to meet them.
