Nolan nodded. ‘-that the late Professor Wolff may have been one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century.’
‘Last time I checked the calendar, it was the twenty-first century, big guy.’
‘Maybe so, but if Kelsey and Sandstrom are correct, had Wolff not been murdered, the twenty-first century, technologically speaking, might have started thirty years ago.’
Grin let out a long, slow whistle.
‘Is there much left of these notebooks?’
‘Actually, the books are in surprisingly good shape. The experts tell me that the books were all well-made cloth hardcovers with reasonably high quality paper. The tunnel segment they were buried in protected them like a time capsule. There was very little damage to any of the notebooks.’
‘I don’t remember reading anything about notebooks being found with the body.’
‘The police are keeping that quiet because we don’t know what’s in the notebooks yet. They expect us to keep quiet as well. You’ll see why in a minute.’
Grin navigated through the Preservation Lab’s file tree, eventually locating the folder icon named Wolff Codex. When Grin selected the icon, a window appeared requesting an access password.
‘Well?’ Grin said impatiently as he looked to Nolan for assistance.
‘I picked something I thought you could remember: MTEV two nine oh two eight.’
Grin turned and smiled. ‘The number of feet Mount Everest is above sea level. I’m touched. You remembered my fondness for mountain climbing.’
Grin keyed in the password and was granted access to the file. The Wolff Codex folder split into six subfolders labeled VOL1 through VOL6.
‘Click on volume one. I doubt there’s anything in the other folders yet.’
As Grin selected it, VOL1 split into dozens of graphic image files. Each file bore the name of the page whose digitally recorded image it contained. VOL1 contained image files PAGE001 through PAGE016.
‘Pick page one,’ Nolan said.
Grin selected the PAGE001 icon, and his monitor filled with the scanned image of the first page from Wolff’s oldest notebook.
‘What am I looking at here?’
‘This is volume one, page one of the Wolff Codex.’
‘What language is this written in?’ Grin asked.
‘None that I can understand. Zoom in on a block of text.’
Grin selected a section of text from the upper left corner of the page. The enhanced image darkened the characters, amplifying Wolff’s bold, confident strokes.
‘That look like any code you’ve ever seen?’
‘It’s definitely not your basic letter-swap encryption, that’s for damn sure. There’s no obvious order, but you’d expect that in a serious piece of coding. Is the base language English?’
‘Don’t know. Wolff was a native German who spoke several European languages as well as English. He’d only been in the States for the last two years of his life.’
‘It might be Enigma.’
‘Enigma?’
‘Yeah, the code used by Germany during the Second World War.’
‘I guess it’s possible.’
‘They didn’t happen to find a coding machine with these notebooks, did they? It would look like a typewriter in a wooden box.’
‘No, but check out the file called ENDPAPER.’
Grin selected the file. When it appeared, Grin’s eyebrows shot up.
‘Whoa, that is some serious, heavy-duty math, my friend.’
‘Well out of my league,’ Nolan admitted. ‘I found this algorithm in the front of all six notebooks. My guess is that it’s the cipher Wolff used to encrypt the notebooks.’
‘Hmm. Didn’t happen to see a key for this thing anywhere, did you?’
‘No.’
‘Too bad. Well, I guess I can try to feed this to Stan and Ollie and see what they come up with. Once I figure out how this algorithm works, I can apply some brute force to cracking it.’
27
Moscow, Russia
‘Oksanna, have you found out anything more about Wolff?’ Orlov asked as he seated himself on the couch, facing Zoshchenko and Leskov.
‘Very little, actually, other than to confirm some elements of Wolff’s background. He was born and raised in Dresden, the fourth child of an engineer. He attended university in Berlin and, during the war, completed his doctorate under the guidance of Werner Heisenberg. I was unable to locate a copy of his thesis; it was presumably lost during the fall of Berlin. Wolff and several other physicists fled Berlin before the Red Army arrived, hiding in a rural area that was eventually occupied by the Western Allies. As a junior scientist, he was detained only briefly by the Allies and eventually emigrated to America. According to the Gestapo background checks, Wolff was a quiet, introverted young man whose instructors felt showed great promise. Evidently, Heisenberg was so impressed with his young protege that he used whatever influence he had to protect Wolff from serving in the army. As Dmitri reported on Wednesday, Wolff lived quietly in America until he was killed.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Just an interesting note. Following the war, several of the German scientists who’d been liberated by the Red Army and became guests of the state were interviewed regarding the German atomic-weapons research. The German effort to build an atomic bomb never really started, because Heisenberg convinced Hitler that even if it were remotely possible to build such a device, research and development would drain billions of deutsche marks away from the war effort, and by the time the first bomb was completed, the war would be over.’
‘What does this have to do with Wolff?’ Leskov demanded to know. ‘He was just Heisenberg’s lackey at the time.’
‘Heisenberg’s recommendations to the Reich were based on what he considered to be irrefutable scientific facts – facts borne out by rigorous manual calculations.’ Zoshchenko’s tone was snide and superior. ‘It was all in the numbers, and those numbers were meticulously ground out by Heisenberg’s so-called lackey, Wolff.’
‘ Spasiba, Oksanna,’ Orlov chided, politely ending her lecture before she riled Leskov even more.
Zoshchenko bristled but said nothing further. Orlov knew that she and Leskov barely tolerated each other, and did so only because Orlov demanded it. She despised Leskov as a hulking Neanderthal – an unfortunate necessity of Victor Orlov’s business. Conversely, Leskov viewed her as an arrogant, self-centered intellectual bitch who could easily be replaced by any of the high-priced whores servicing Moscow executives.
‘Dmitri, what do you have to report?’ Orlov asked, looking to get the meeting back on track.
‘The notebooks found with Johann Wolff have been taken to a laboratory on the campus of the University of Michigan for analysis and preservation. Our electronics team has infiltrated the university’s computer network and located information, what they call image files, linked to these notebooks. The files are secured, but they believe they can hack their way in. They have also monitored someone outside the laboratory accessing some of these files, someone named Grin from MARC. We are working to identify this individual.’
‘Have you discovered what is in Wolff’s notebooks?’
‘No, and neither have they.’
‘What do you mean?’ Zoshchenko was confused. ‘If they are interested in these books, then it must be Wolff’s research.’
‘I have no doubt that that is exactly what it is, but apparently the notebooks are somehow encrypted. Wolff
