The Sacred Cipher (11 page)

Johnson rose from the sofa and firmly grasped Bohannon’s hand with his. “Thank you.
You have lifted a weight that I’ve been carrying far too long.”

Knowing grimaces gave notice of each man’s disappointments, their clasped hands communicating
a message of their own. “Don’t thank me too much,” said Bohannon. “You may not be
as gracious when you see what I’ve brought you.”

Emitting a sigh, Johnson gestured for Bohannon to sit with him again. “Well, I am
certainly quite curious about the purpose of your visit, what it is that could have
coerced you to come searching for me.”

“First, and I know this may sound ludicrous right now, but first, I need to ask for
your word of honor that you will reveal to no one what I am about to share with you.
I need to have certainty in your promise to keep this information confidential. Otherwise,
we should just end our conversation here.”

Johnson’s eyes had narrowed slightly, his face taking on a pinched look. Once again,
Bohannon could see distrust in Johnson’s face. He allowed the silence to hang in the
air and waited for Johnson to process what had to be an unexpected request.

“You have my word, Tom. I will protect anything we say and do here today. It will
be held in strictest confidence.”

“Thank you,” he said. “And I don’t know if I’ll be able to address you except as Dr.
Johnson.” Reaching into the inside pocket of his jacket, Bohannon pulled out the same
folded sheet of paper they had shared with Sammy Rizzo and handed it to the scholar.
“Dr. Johnson, do you know what this is?”

Warily, Johnson unfolded the paper while keeping his eyes fixed on Bohannon. As he
switched his attention to the sheet in front of him, Johnson rapidly skimmed the symbols
on the paper. Arrested, he sat forward on the sofa and carefully examined the columns
of symbols. He shot a quick, questioning glance in Bohannon’s direction, then got
to his feet and crossed to the drafting table, Bohannon on his heels.

Sitting on only half of a high, wooden chair, Johnson leaned into the table. With
deft, trained movements, he inserted the sheet of paper into one of the holders, an
adjustable, flat surface with clips to hold stamps in place, while with his other
hand he switched on the powerful lamp and pulled the magnifying glass into position.
For several silent minutes, Johnson poured over the columns of symbols before him.
He turned the page upside down. He held it up to the light and inspected the symbols
from the back of the page.

At one point, Johnson got up from his perch and, without a word, walked over to the
windows looking out over 35th Street. He stood there for a few moments, gazing into
the sunshine, then, as silently, returned to the table and began running his fingers
up and down each row of symbols.

“You haven’t brought all of it to me, have you?” he asked without turning around.

“Well, I—”

“Never mind,” Johnson interrupted. “The more important question is, where did you
get this?”

“For now, let me just say that it was recently found.”

Johnson half turned to face Bohannon, a sly smirk on his face. “Still not ready to
bet the ranch, eh? Very well, I understand. So tell me, what do you want from me?”

Momentarily stunned, Bohannon just looked at Johnson. He had expected, if they could
settle their feud, that he would hand Dr. Johnson the sheet of paper and the scholar
would immediately explain to him not only what the symbols in this Demotic language
said, but also what the document meant, some clue to Spurgeon’s fear and Klopsch’s
safekeeping of the scroll.

“Well, I’d like to know if you could tell us what these symbols say, what it all means.”

“Us, eh?” said Johnson. “Don’t worry, I won’t ask yet.” Twisting the chair away from
the table, he fixed Bohannon in his questioning glare. “Do you know what this is?”

Bohannon nodded. “To an extent. We’re pretty sure the language is Demotic. Beyond
that, we’re lost.”

Johnson rocked back and forth in the chair. “Not only is it Demotic, but even this
portion, which is clearly part of some larger document, even this portion would be
one of the largest single discoveries of Demotic writing outside the Rosetta Stone.
This is historic, remarkable, an astonishing discovery.

“At the same time, I need to disappoint you,” he said somberly. “I can’t promise you
that we will ever know what these symbols mean. Demotic is extinct as a language and
almost impossible to decipher. I’m intrigued, but I’m not very hopeful. Scholars have
been struggling to understand and decipher Demotic for centuries. It’s one of the
biggest unsolved puzzles in linguistics. Do you know that, depending on the reason
for writing, the same Demotic symbols would have different meanings? Did you know
that the pattern of inscribing Demotic varied from place to place? That it was essentially
a spoken language? A scribe would try to express the language in symbols only when
it was absolutely necessary. So as the speech patterns of Egypt changed over a thousand
years, the written language of Demotic also changed. It is a remarkably complex problem;
therefore one which has enthralled and frustrated scholars. And today, you walk into
my office with what may be one of the largest single examples of Demotic that has
ever been discovered . . . ever!”

Johnson tilted his head to the right with a wry, twisted smile on his face. “And all
you would like is for me to tell you what it means? Well, I am flattered by your faith
in me, but I must disappoint once again. Your faith, I fear, is misguided. I don’t
know if there is a man living who will ever understand what is written here or in
the other parts of this document which must also exist.

“Why don’t you tell me where, how you discovered this?” Johnson asked, reaching his
hand out and resting it on Bohannon’s shoulder. “Perhaps it will help us. And I say
us
because, wherever this is going, I’ll be going with you.”

Tom looked at Dr. Johnson and knew he had to make a decision: either trust this man
with all the information and enlist his help, or walk out of the Collector’s Club
and hope to find another way.

“Let’s sit down,” Bohannon said.

No one had ever dared to call him Dick. It would be like saying to the Pope, “Yo,
pal.” So incongruous as to be impossible. No, as an adult, he was always Dr. Richard
Johnson. Only his most intimate collaborators, those who had known and worked with
him for years, felt the freedom to call him “Doc.”

Comparing the symbols that Bohannon had left with him to those on a computer printout
he generated, Johnson found himself daydreaming about the so-called treasure hunts
he would undertake as a boy or the absurdly serious “research” he would enslave himself
to as an undergrad. Times when young Richie Johnson would see himself as more adult
than his maturity should allow. Like everyone else, though, Johnson possessed that
unique place in his consciousness where his growing and his aging had stopped. Something
about the human condition made most people oblivious when they stood in front of a
mirror. Regardless of the receding hairline, expanding waistline, preponderance of
wrinkle lines, and the abduction of color from the hair, they retained an unsubstantiated
self-image that they were the same as they had been twenty, thirty, or forty years
ago. So it was that the young Richie Johnson struggled into the night, trying to understand
those symbols.

As Bohannon had finished the story of the scroll’s discovery and Sammy Rizzo’s identification
of the Demotic language, Johnson’s mind had tripped back to Saturday afternoon serials
in the movie theaters and his first self-absorbed studies of hieroglyphs. Once again,
that unmistakable excitement enveloped his being, that giddy expectation of another
treasure hunt. As the adrenalin pumped through his system, he was transformed and
transported to his youth.

Johnson felt like a sorcerer about to open a magic box. “Are you sure you want to
know what’s in here?” he asked Bohannon.

In the ensuing pause, Johnson could discern wheels turning. “Absolutely,” Bohannon
affirmed.

“Okay, I’ll start working on this part right away, but I will need to see the whole
scroll as soon as possible. I don’t know what’s going on here, but my instincts are
telling me that I’ll have to consider the entire document to begin to understand it.
I’ll contact you as soon as I think I’ve got something worthwhile to share,” Johnson
said, turning the page over and over again in his hands. He turned and began walking
back to the table. “Come back tomorrow, if you can.”

Bohannon must have left, but the young man in Richard Johnson’s brain never noticed.
His world was now wrapped up in these columns of beautifully sculpted images. He had
been a scholar almost all of his life, chasing the unknown or the inscrutable. He
was blessed with an intelligence that immediately brought him both notoriety and social
isolation, an exchange with which Johnson was more than satisfied. Permitted, no,
encouraged, to indulge his passion, Johnson soon gained a level of fame among the
scientific community that was rare and religiously guarded. Johnson had lived in the
rarefied neighborhood at the pinnacle of academia for so long that many with less
talent and more desire held him in more-than-human but less-than-divine reverence.
When the eyes of his mind considered himself, Johnson saw only the twenty-eight-year-old
Richie, humbly testing the limits of his understanding.

But for all his intellectual power and prowess, Dr. Johnson often discovered that
he was simply a frustrated sixty-eight-year-old man with an unfulfilled pursuit. In
addition to secrets and treasures, Johnson had also spent his life in pursuit of meaning
and purpose. Sadly, despite his earnest attempts, Johnson found no peace in atheism,
Eastern mysticism, or New Age mumbo-jumbo. With all his knowledge, he was still a
man seeking truth.

The thought exploded into his mind so dramatically Johnson almost fell off his chair
at the drafting table.

“Wait a minute,” he said out loud. “Wait a minute!”

Johnson stepped quickly to the coat rack behind the door, fetched his cell phone from
the inside pocket of his suit coat, and punched in the numbers Bohannon had given
him. Wait . . . Wait . . . Wait . . . “Tom, listen, this is Dr. Johnson. Sorry to
disturb you, but these groupings of symbols, how many are there? Seven? Seven groupings
and each grouping has three vertical columns of symbols, correct? And are all the
columns the same length? Good. Thank you, that helps me quite a bit. No . . . no .
. . there’s nothing to report this quickly. An idea just popped into my head, and
I wanted to see if it was worth pursuing. Thank you. I’ll see you tomorrow? Good.
Certainly, 1:00
PM
would be fine. Yes, good night, Tom.”

Closing the phone and stuffing it in his pocket, Johnson looked at the sheet of paper
now taped to the table in front of him. “Twenty-one columns in seven groupings, eh?
Well,” Johnson announced to the empty room, a wide smile splitting his face, “you
certainly are very clever, aren’t you?” Looking again at the sheet of paper, he continued
speaking into the empty room. “But there is one thing I now have in my favor, don’t
I? This is a message, isn’t it? And messages are meant to be read and understood.
So now I know that there’s a way in . . . even into this crazy language. There’s a
way in,” he said, sitting back down at the table and speaking directly to the images.
“Come on, you know the magic words . . .
Open sesame
. . .” he said with mock seriousness. “Come on, open, says me. Open says me. Open,
show me your secrets.”

Sometime early Saturday morning, he woke up, his head, arms, and shoulders resting
on the drafting table, the rest of him perched in the chair. He tried to stretch and
sit up in the chair—and regretted every attempted movement.
Oh heavens, Dick
, Johnson said to his achingly stiff body and the pain that permeated the top half
of his torso,
we just can’t do this anymore
.

By the time Bohannon and Joe Rodriguez arrived that afternoon, Johnson was back at
the drafting table, showered and shaved, the aches of the morning massaged out of
his joints, meticulously appointed in the finest English pinstripe. Introductions
out of the way, Johnson jumped right to the point.

“You’ve brought the document with you?” he asked.

Bohannon and Rodriguez shot surprised looks at each other. “Well, no,” said Bohannon.
“We were concerned about bringing it out. It’s in a safe place right now, and we didn’t
want to move it.”