Shatterproof (24 page)

Jake turned back to the group and said, “Get comfy, everyone. This is a long story.

“Mom always had a lot of different projects going,” Jake said. “But for years, no matter what else she was working on, she always went back to the Voynich. She used to talk to me about it.”

“Huh,” Atticus said. “She never told me about it.”

Jake was silent for a moment. “When she first got into it, you were really little,” he said. “And then — well, it was sort of our thing. Like, special, between the two of us.” Pause. “I think she was trying to make sure I knew it didn’t matter that she wasn’t my birth mom. . . .”

His voice trailed off.

Astrid had been his stepmother. His own mother —
his dad’s first wife — had passed away when Jake was only a year old. His dad had remarried two years later; Astrid was the only mom he had ever really known.

It had been more than a year since her death. The pain was duller now, but it was still there, and he was pretty sure it always would be.

“Okay,” Atticus said. “That’s cool.”

Jake nodded gratefully at his brother, then took the laptop from Dan.

“So, the Voynich,” Jake said. “It’s a whole book — I can’t remember exactly, but it’s over two hundred pages long. And it’s really old.”

“How old?” Amy asked.

“They weren’t sure, for a long time,” Jake said. “This bookseller named Voynich — that’s where it got its name — he found it in an old monastery in Italy. In 1912, I think. And he bought it from the monks. Ever since then, there have been all these theories. Some people thought it was from the thirteenth century, or it was from the eighteenth, or it was modern, a forgery. Then a few years ago, the Beinecke had it carbon-dated. Both the pages and the ink are fifteenth century, which proves —”

“That it isn’t a forgery,” Dan said.

“No, not exactly,” Jake said. “What it proves is that it’s a medieval document. I mean, a really determined forger could get really old vellum and really old ink, but they’re pretty sure that’s not what happened.”

“So what kind of document is it?” Amy asked. “What does it say?”

Jake snorted. “That,” he said, “is the problem.”

Jake went on to explain that the Voynich was
written in an unknown language — one never seen before.

“And nobody’s been able to figure it out,” he said.

He started clicking on the laptop. “Yale gets so many requests to see the manuscript that they couldn’t keep up with all of them,” he said. “So they finally digitized the whole thing, and now anyone who wants to study it can look at the pages online.”

A few clicks, and he had a digital image of one of the pages from the Voynich.

“Look,” he said. He turned the screen around so they could all see it.

“Is it in code?” Dan asked. “It looks like something you could figure out. I mean, not
you
you, but somebody.”

“That’s what everybody thinks when they first see it,” Jake said. “But hundreds of people have tried — maybe thousands. Even the government got into it. You know the guys who broke the Japanese and German codes during World War II? They worked on it for
years
and got nothing.”

“Wow,” Amy said. “That’s amazing.”

Jake glanced at her quickly. She was looking at the screen, not at him, and there didn’t seem to be any edge to her voice.

Girls. The oldest mystery in the universe. Amy was acting like their kiss had never happened.
It wasn’t just me,
Jake thought.
She definitely kissed me back.

“What are the pictures of?” Dan asked.

“Three kinds of illustrations,” Jake answered.
Click
— “Botanical drawings” —
click click
— “astronomical charts” —
click click
— “and these weird ones. Mom always called them the plumbing pictures.”

“Hello!” Dan said.

The “plumbing pictures” showed water flowing through pipes, basins, and aqueducts. In almost all of them, there were naked women swimming.

Atticus nudged Dan and they both giggled.

“Oh, please,” Amy said. Jake could see that she was a little embarrassed. She changed the subject. “What about the botanical drawings? Wouldn’t they give a clue to where the book was written, or what it’s about?”

“You’d think so,” Jake said. “But the plants aren’t from real life. I mean, they think they’ve identified a couple of them, but even those have parts that aren’t real.”

Jake sighed. “All kinds of people have tried to figure it out. Historians, of course, like Mom. But also botanists, astronomers, linguists, mathematicians, philosophers, theologians —”

“Plumbers?” Dan said with a snicker.

Jake grinned. “Some scholars have spent their whole lives working on it,” he said. “And you wouldn’t believe the theories they come up with.”

“Like what?” Atticus asked.

“Aliens,” Jake said. “And angels. That’s just two of them.”

“You can’t be serious,” Amy said.

“I’m not, but
they
are,” Jake said. “And even some of the more credible theories are pretty out-there. Like, it’s an old form of Ukrainian, but you’re only supposed to read every fifth letter.”

Dan had sobered up now that the subject was not naked women. “What about the seventy-four?” he asked. “Do you think that means we’re supposed to steal page seventy-four?”

“Or maybe, the first seventy-four pages?” Amy guessed.

“But that’s not the most important question, not really,” Atticus said. “The question is, why do the Vespers want it? If they can’t read it, it’s no use to them.”

Jake frowned, thinking hard. “I get what you’re saying,” he said slowly. “If the Vespers are smart enough to read the Voynich, we’re
really
in trouble.”

They had been making decent progress from the airport through the borough of Queens, in taxi mode: mad spurts of shouldering through traffic alternating with a sulky crawl. Now, as they drove onto the Whitestone Bridge, the driver whistled through his teeth. “Look like trouble here,” he said.

A police car was parked across the lanes. An officer stood facing them, arm up, palm flat, in the classic “halt” stance. The taxi stopped, and within seconds, the bridge entrance behind them became a giant parking lot packed with cars.

Beyond the cop, the last of the cars that had been allowed through disappeared from sight. The bridge’s roadway was now completely clear.

“What’s going on?” Dan asked from the back.

“There’s a motorcycle —” Amy said. “No, wait, it’s like a motorcade, sort of.”

Three SUVs with motorcycles front and rear were coming toward them on the wrong side of the road.
Celebrity?
Amy thought.
Or maybe some politician.

As if he could hear her thoughts, Dan said, “Must be somebody pretty important to stop a whole bridge’s worth of traffic.”

Then he gasped, and the heads of the other three swiveled to stare at him.

It was as if all four of them had the same thought at the same moment.

Who had that kind of power?

The Vespers!

“Move!” Amy said urgently.

They scrambled out of the car. The taxi driver began yelling at them.

“Hey! Where you going? You say Connettytuck, I taking you there!” He got out, too, and grabbed Dan’s arm.

“My backpack!” Dan said. “The trunk, open the trunk!”

He twisted out of the driver’s grasp, leaned inside the open door, and groped around for the trunk release. He hit the buttons for the warning lights and the gas cap before he found the right one, the driver scolding him in a language he didn’t understand.

“Dan, leave it!” Amy said. “We have to get out of here!” But Dan ran to the back of the taxi and grabbed the pack.

The motorcycle pulled over. The lead SUV made a U-turn and stopped near the police car. The driver-side door opened.

“RUN!” Amy yelled. “If we get separated, meet up at Yale!”

She glanced around wildly. They were on a bridge, with only two choices: forward or back. And forward was toward the SUVs.

Which meant they had
no
choice. Two minus one equals zero: Vesper math.

Amy turned and started running back the way they had come.