speed-dialled and Gail answered on the second ring. 'It's me,' he said, into the phone. 'I promised you'd be the first to know.' Staring at Underwood, he dropped the torn file on the man's head. 'I'm resigning,' he said.
'Wait!' said Kovacs, leaping to his feet. 'That isn't necessary.'
Loosening his tie, Ross put the phone and palmtop back into his jacket, then picked up his laptop and walked to the door. As he opened it, he turned back. 'It is necessary,' he said. 'For me.' Then he closed the door and walked away.
3
A few miles from the Xplore offices, the guest of honour was leaving the McNally Auditorium on the Lincoln Campus of Fordham University, the Jesuit university of New York. The priest had stayed as long as he had needed to at the conference and was satisfied that he had discharged his duties. Now he was impatient to get away. After thanking his hosts and dismissing his entourage he walked so fast to his official limousine that his limp was barely noticeable.
In the back seat, concealed behind tinted glass, he checked his watch. He had plenty of time before his return flight to Rome tonight. 'Yale University,' he told the driver. 'The Beinecke.'
As the car drove north towards Henry Hudson Parkway, he turned his mind to what had occupied him since he had arrived in America a few days before. He opened his attache case and began to study the photocopy of a 450-year-old trial document that his office had discovered in the Inquisition files of the Vatican's secretum secretorum, the archive of the Church's most sensitive secrets. As he read the hand-written Latin, one of five languages he spoke fluently, his mind whirled with the threats and opportunities it presented.
If what he had heard was true.
An hour and a half later, the limousine pulled up outside Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, one of the largest buildings in the world devoted entirely to rare books. A white oblong structure covered with translucent marble 'windows', which resembled the indentations on a golf ball, it contrasted sharply with Yale's more traditional buildings. The priest, however, ignored the unusual architecture as he climbed the steps.
They were expecting him at the front desk and a senior researcher escorted him to the main hall.
'It's not very busy,' said the priest.
'No.' A flush of excitement suffused the researcher's face. 'But it will be this evening. We're expecting quite a turnout for the open seminars. One of the talks promises to be dynamite.' He pointed to a Plexiglas box, displayed prominently on a plinth in the centre of the hall. It was empty. 'All this week the book's been displayed here, but we've arranged for you to study it in one of the reading rooms for half an hour. If you need more access, digital copies of the pages can be studied on the Internet, on one of the terminals over there.' The man led him to a small, subtly lit room and handed him a pair of white gloves. 'You may only touch it when you're wearing these.'
The priest approached the reading table. 'Thank you.'
The researcher cleared his throat. 'The Voynich is one of my specialist areas. What can I tell you about it?'
'Nothing.' As the priest put on the white gloves, he doubted there was anything the man could tell him that he didn't know already. 'I just need some time alone – to see it in the flesh, as it were.'
'Right.' The man hovered, then moved to the door. 'I'll leave you to it, then. Call me if you want anything.'
But the priest was no longer listening. He was staring, transfixed, at the book. The yellowing document looked unremarkable. Only when his gloved hands slowly turned the pages did its mystery become apparent. They were filled with unrecognizable text, and decorated with crude colour illustrations of bizarre plants that resembled known flora but were actually like nothing on Earth. Other pictures included naked women with unnaturally rounded bellies floating in green liquid.
The illustrations were no more sophisticated than a child's, but that didn't detract from their power. The Beinecke Library's catalogue entry lay beside the book: 'Almost every page contains botanical and scientific drawings, many full-page, of a provincial but lively character, in ink washes and various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue and red. Based on the subject matter of the drawings, the contents of the manuscript fall into six sections.'
'Botany' contained drawings of 113 unidentified plant species, accompanied by text. The astronomical, or astrological, section had twenty-five astral diagrams. 'Biology' included drawings of small-scale female nudes, most with bulging abdomens and exaggerated hips, immersed or emerging from fluid, interconnecting tubes or capsules. The pages dealing with pharmaceuticals contained drawings of more than a hundred herbs, while the remaining two sections were composed of continuous text and an illustrated folding page.
The world had been fascinated by it since 1912, when the book dealer Wilfrid Voynich had come across the 134-page volume at the Villa Mondragone, a Jesuit college in Frascati, Italy. A letter dated 1666 had been tucked inside it; the rector of the University of Prague had asked a well-known scholar to attempt to decipher the text. According to the letter, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II of Bohemia had bought it for six hundred gold ducats.
A faded signature on the first page of the manuscript read 'Jacobus de Tepenec'. Records showed that Jacobus Horcicky had been born into a poor family and raised by Jesuits to become a wealthy chemist at Rudolf 's court. In 1608 he had been granted the noble name 'de Tepenec' for having saved the emperor's life. His role in the manuscript's history, however, was less clear. Some believed that Rudolf had given it to him to decipher, others that when the emperor abdicated in 1611, and died a year later, the manuscript had come into Horcicky's possession 'by default'. Whatever had happened, the manuscript had found its way somehow to the Jesuit college where Voynich rediscovered it. Many claimed it had come originally from Italy, where it had been stolen from one of the Jesuit libraries and sold to Emperor Rudolf, and that agents of the Catholic Church had eventually reclaimed it, then allowed it to fall into obscurity once more.
The manuscript's illustrations were bizarre but it was the text that had most intrigued Voynich and the countless others who had tried in vain to decipher it. The symbols were teasingly familiar, often resembling roman letters, Arabic numerals and Latin abbreviations. Elaborate gallows-shaped characters decorated many beginnings of lines, while an enigmatic swirl, like '9', could be found at the end of many words.
When Voynich had brought the manuscript to the United States he had invited cryptographers to examine it, but to no avail. In 1961 H. P. Krause, a New York antiquarian book dealer, had bought it, and in 1969 he donated it to Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In the 1960s and 1970s the National Security Agency had put their best cryptanalysts to work on it, but even they failed.
In the last ten years, researchers employing a battery of statistical methods, including entropy and spectral analysis, discovered that Voynichese – as the language of the text became known – displayed statistical properties consistent with natural languages, which suggested that it was unlikely to be the random writings of a madman or fraud. They also discovered that the text read from left to right and employed between twenty-three and thirty individual symbols, of which the entire manuscript contained around 234,000, which amounted to about 40,000 words, with a vocabulary of perhaps 8,200. Most words were six characters long and showed less variation than those of English, Latin and other Indo-European languages. But still no one was any closer to knowing what the manuscript said, who had written it, or why.
Until now. Apparently.
There was a discreet knock at the door. His half-hour was up. He lingered a moment longer, mesmerized, sensing that the book was about to change his life for ever, and that God was guiding him. He removed the gloves, and allowed his bare fingers to brush the manuscript.
When the door opened and the researcher entered, the priest thanked him, stole one last look at the Voynich, then went back to the lobby.
He paused by a poster announcing that evening's open seminar: 'Solving the Riddle'. Billed as the highlight of Voynich Week, there would be three presentations. A British mathematician from Cambridge University and a
