Maelstrom (14 page)

There was little chance of ambiguity in this system–but it was bad cipher practice, the kind of regularity that instantly reveals the existence of a book cipher even to an amateur cryptanalyst. If the hidden message had been in plain language, the cipher could have been largely solved without even knowing which book was the key.

The message was not in plain language. When, after a few seconds of concentration and page flipping, Sparta had deciphered the last group, 102749, the entire message of 102 letters read thus:

 

aukcfkucaqnsrtgaldxqzlhofaiktbhobodkupkcdutsekavtvrbkqholskcdltpaudzdlybekybjtalqorvqmxhjzhudyfesiqzef.

 

Sparta was not surprised. In fact, this is what she had expected. Blake’s invitation to play hide-and-seek had enjoined her to “play fair.” The Playfair cipher was one of the most famous in history.

Even if a cryptanalyst knew that a message was enciphered in Playfair, the text was exceedingly difficult to decipher without the key. But Sparta already had the key. The key to Blake’s every move in this game of hideand-seek was their shared experience of SPARTA.

With this key she mentally constructed a Playfair alphabet square:

 

S P A R T

 

B C D E F

 

G H IJ K L

 

M N O Q U

 

V W X Y Z

She broke the string of book-cipher letters into pairs and swiftly performed the transformation. The first pair in the cipher was
au.
The line in the square that contained A intersected with the column containing U: the letter at the intersection was T. The line containing U intersected with the column containing A: the letter at the intersection was O. The first pair of letters in Blake’s message was TO.

Pairs of cipher letters in the same line of the square were exchanged for the letters to their left. Pairs of cipher letters in the same column were exchanged for the letters above them. Soon Sparta had Blake’s prepared plain text: TO HE LE NF RO MP AR IS IF YO UF IN DT HI SF IN DM EI NT HE FO RT RE SX SZ SE EK IN GT HE FI RS TO FX FI VE RE VE LA TI ON SY OU WI LX LN EX ED AG UY DE.

With the extra letters eliminated, the message read, TO HELEN FROM PARIS IF YOU FIND THIS FIND ME IN THE FORTRESS SEEKING THE FIRST OF FIVE REVELATIONS YOU WILL NEED A GUYDE. *

*The Playfair cipher system is explained in the appendix.

She laughed with delight. Blake was indeed leading her on a merry chase, and this time the clues were a little less obvious. She slipped
Frames of Mind
back into its protective envelope and replaced it on the shelf. She curled up in Blake’s big red leather armchair and stared out the window at the falling rain, and the perpetually moving leaves and the shadows pooling in the branches of the elm, while she pondered the riddle.

TO HELEN FROM PARIS. Why Helen instead of Ellen? Because Helen of Troy was from Sparta–and Paris was her lover.

Where was this FORTRESS in which she was supposed to find him? Surely not Troy itself, the mound of Hissarlik on the Asian shore of the Dardanelles; two centuries after Heinrich Schliemann had devastated the ruins of ancient Troy, leaving what he found exposed to the elements, the towers of Ilium had melted to a featureless pile of mud. In this they shared the fate of almost every ancient site that eager archaeologists had laid bare in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The myth of Troy had nothing to do with it. Blake was not referring to himself as Paris, he was
in
Paris.

The Bastille having been torn down, the fortress of Paris, begun in the late 12th century, must be the Louvre. Blake was at the Louvre, SEEKING THE FIRST OF FIVE REVELATIONS. Sparta had heard of people seeking revelations, or enlightenment, or whatever, but it seemed odd to seek five of them. And in order?

Her eye sought out the antique Bibles that rested on a bottom shelf of Blake’s bookcase. In a moment she was out of the chair and had one of the weighty books open, turning the pages until she had found the Book of Revelation, chapter five, verse one. In the translation she had selected, the Jerusalem Bible, the verse read, “I saw that in the right hand of the One sitting on the throne there was a scroll that had writing on back and front and was sealed with seven seals.” A footnote explained that the scroll was “a roll of papyrus in which God’s hitherto secret decrees are written.” It seemed doubtful that Blake was on the trail of God’s secret decrees, but he might well be looking for a papyrus in the Louvre’s vast collection of Egyptian antiquities.

But if Blake was in Paris, working in the Louvre’s Egyptian collection, why would she NEED A GUYDE to find him? Why was GUYDE misspelled?

Perhaps somewhere in the process of switching one letter for another, tediously counting tiny letters in a big book, writing down all those numbers, Blake had made a mistake. But the Playfair system rendered an accidental substitution unlikely in this case, for in the alphabetical square based on the keyword SPARTA, the letter Y and the letter I are not in the same row or in the same column: moreover, one lies above and one lies below the other member of the plaintext pair, the letter U. Thus they could not have been mistaken for each other under any of the rules of transformation, which change the pair UY to
qz
, as found by Sparta, but would have changed the pair UI to
lo.

So either Blake was being cute and fake-medieval, or he was telling her something. She knew she would not be able to push the last bit of the jigsaw puzzle into place just by sitting here and armchairing it. Sparta jumped up. She spent three minutes insuring that everything in Blake’s apartment was exactly where she’d found it, then picked up her duffel, reset the alarms, and went out the door, hurrying to catch the next magneplane to Paris.

She had no way of knowing that she was already a week too late.

 

A week before Sparta left London, Blake spent the night in a Paris closet. . . .

Dawn seeped under the closet door in a thin gray plane of light. Through the thin wood panel Blake heard footsteps, a grumbled curse. He yawned and shook his head vigorously. He’d been awake for two hours, and before that he’d dozed fitfully among the mops and brooms. He was hungry and sleepy and stiff. He wished he had a cup of espresso, rank and black.

He was also nervous. He’d half-hoped Ellen would show up and extricate him from this fix, but it looked like he was going to have to go through with it.

He opened the door and backed carefully out of the closet, carrying a bucket of varnish remover and a fistful of rags and brushes. His long blue dustcoat was covered with paint smears. With his head down, fiddling with his grip on his thinner can, he fell in with the other painters and carpenters on their way down to the repository.

It was a Monday morning; the Louvre was closed to all but scholars, workers, and staff.

 

“Bon matin, Monsieur Guy,”
someone said to him.

“Matin,”
he grumbled. He didn’t look at the man. Presumably he was the foreman with whom things had been “arranged,” the man who’d been bribed–or blackmailed, or terrorized–not to notice the extra man on his crew.

The workers went down the broad sandstone stairs. There were five men and women ahead of him, all dressed as he was in blue smocks. A security guard followed, a gray-haired gentleman in an old-fashioned black uniform that was shiny with age. They walked down an echoing basement hall, three of them continuing toward rooms where stacks of stored paintings gathered dust, Blake and the others turning into a long, lowceiling room, fitted with ancient incandescent light bulbs that burned yellow on the low current. Rows of heavy wooden cabinets stood in the center of the room. Fading lithographs of Egyptian ruins hung on the dingy walls.
After a few minutes of grumbling and stalling, the workers set about their task of removing three centuries of blackened varnish from the woodwork. Blake let his companions work their way away from him, toward the distant dark corners of the file room. The foreman ignored him.

An hour went by this way, and Blake fell further and further behind. No one really cared about the work; no one really thought it necessary. The government had provided authorization, and some bureaucrat had seen to it that the funds kept flowing, even into the deepest crypts of the Louvre.

The others were concentrating their effort at the end of the room, and Blake was down on the floor, halfhidden by the rows of massive oak cabinets. Blake looked up from the dirty baseboard. The bored security guard was somewhere in the hall.

Blake crept down an aisle between the cabinets. He found the drawer Lequeu had suggested, second from the top. He pulled it open. There, lying on cotton batting in crumbling cardboard trays, without other protection, lay a dozen scrolls of papyrus. Working as swiftly and as carefully as he could, he unrolled each of them far enough to determine if they matched the reproduction he had committed to memory.

None did. He closed that drawer and tried the next. He worked his way through the entire cabinet without success.

Blake peered nervously over the top of the cabinet. His fellow workers were still blithely ignoring him. He ducked down again, and pondered whether to try the cabinet to the right or the one to the left. Or had Lequeu gotten the wrong aisle entirely? It was like wondering what to do with a wrong phone number–probably only one digit was wrong, but which one?

For no good reason, Blake picked the cabinet to the left and started with the same drawer. Pinned to the cotton beside one of the scrolls, third from the left, was a faded notation in steel-point script, identifying its provenance:
“près de Heliopolis, 1799.”
Blake’s hopes revived.

In 1801 the English army, after a three-year blockade, had at last landed troops on the coast of Egypt and forced the surrender of Napoleon’s forces. The Man of Destiny himself had long departed, leaving among the old ruins the ruins of his dream of a new Egyptian empire under the flag of the French Revolution. He also left behind the magnificent Institut d’Egypte, its ranks of scholars, and its magnificent collection of antiquities, gathered in the course of three years of intense acquisition in the valley of the Nile. By the terms of the surrender the English took the lot, including the crown jewel, the as yet undeciphered Rosetta Stone.

The French tried to keep the Stone by claiming that it was the personal property of their commander, General Menou, and not subject to the terms of surrender, but the English would have none of it. The Rosetta Stone and much other booty was shipped off to the British Museum, where it still resides, “a glorious trophy of British arms,” as the British commander phrased it.

Yet there were bits of carved and painted stone and a lot of fragmented old scrolls the British magnanimously allowed the French to keep. The fate of these cast-off treasures was also to be removed from the land where they had been made, some to be exhibited in that hoard of glorious trophies, the Louvre, some to languish in basement drawers, accessible only to determined scholars and to termites.

Blake carefully unrolled the brittle scroll, and immediately knew he had found what he’d come for. The scroll would not have recommended itself to a casual researcher. There were geometric sketches on it, but it was not a geometry text. There were references to Re, the god of the sun, but it was not a religious text. There were fragments of what surely were traveller’s tales, but it was not a work of geography. The scroll was full of lacunae, and the surviving text was a puzzle.

Only a member of the
prophetae
would have recognized it for what it was. Blake was no professional mathematician or astronomer, but his visual and spatial intelligences were highly developed. Following Catherine’s hint, he had spent private hours studying maps of the night sky, and he had deduced that the pyramid outlined in this scroll, if constructed during the era when the papyrus had been painted, would have pointed to a constellation in the southern hemisphere of the sky, not far above the horizon, a region which the Egyptians could only have seen in late summer.

Blake plucked the papyrus from its bed of cotton, opened his smock and lifted his thin pullover, and slid the scroll into the custom-sewn canvas sack that hung like a shoulder holster under his left armpit. He buttoned his smock, then slid the drawer closed. He crept back to his work.

At ten o’clock the workers took a break. Blake went to the toilet, which was down the hall, its door visible from the door of the papyrus room. The guard paid him no attention. Blake kept walking past the W.C. and turned and walked quietly up the stairs.

He walked past the closet in which he’d spent the night. He walked up another flight of stairs, across parqueted floors, past brooding sphinxes and stone sarcophagi, past painted limestone statues of scribes like the one whose black-inked brush had painted the scroll that rested against his side.

He walked into the palace’s tall-windowed galleries and cast a glance over his shoulder, up the grand staircase, at Nike–the real stone Nike spreading her stone wings, striding forward upon a fiberglass cast of the stone trireme beak that resided where she herself should have resided, on Samothrace.

The black iron grille that barred the tall doors bore the laurel-wreathed imperial “N,” but it had been placed there by a later, more bourgeois Napoleon. A mustached guard who could have been the brother of the one in the basement was talking into his commlink: trouble
en famille.

“Open up, will you? I’ve got to get something from my ’ped.”

The guard looked at him in irritation and went on talking while he keyed open the iron gate. The main doors already stood open on this humid summer morning. Blake walked through them and paused. He turned and stared at the guard, perplexed. It really wasn’t supposed to have been this easy–why, he could just walk right out of here and nobody would ever know that anything was missing!

Which may have sat well with Lequeu and the rest of the Athanasians, but it was not part of Blake’s plan. For a moment he stood still. Then he shouted at the guard, who was still on the commlink:
“Toi! Stupide!”
The guard turned angrily. Blake let him get a good look and then shot him in the neck with a dart from the miniature tranquilizer gun that was strapped to his right wrist.