The Sacred Cipher (17 page)

Sitting up suddenly, Rodriguez got their attention. “Well, one thing we can be pretty
sure of is that the Penny family and, therefore, Elgar and Schwartzman would have
known about Spurgeon, the most renowned Christian preacher in England. And that Spurgeon
would likely have heard of Elgar, who was extremely popular the last decade of the
nineteenth century. They were famous contemporaries in a close-knit society. Spurgeon
probably knew all about the Dorabella Cipher since it was the rage of England. You
know, I—”

Rodriguez suddenly jumped out of his chair, holding fast to his brandy.

“Doc,” he said with an infectious urgency, “where’s your computer?”

Johnson half turned and pointed to a corner, “It’s over there, behind—”

Rodriguez was already flinging open a pair of three-paneled oak doors, revealing a
well-equipped media center.

“Quick, your password,” Rodriguez flipped over his shoulder as he fired up the computer.

“First you’ll get my password, then you’ll get my bank account,” said Johnson. “I
don’t—”

“Yo, Doc, c’mon all ready,” Rodriguez complained. “I’ve got an idea, and you’re just
slowing things down.”

“Rosetta Setter,” Johnson spelled out, “but you could be more civil.”

“Yeah, yeah, maybe some other time,” said Rodriguez, hunched over the keys. “But not
. . .” The printer punched out a page.

Rodriguez stood up, gazing down at the paper in his hand. “Holy Christmas,” Rodriguez
said, turning to his partners. “Will you look at this? Holy Christmas! It’s the Dorabella
Cipher. It’s three lines.”

“Of course it is,” said Johnson, dismissing it with a backhanded flip of his hand,
“but the lines are horizontal. That can’t help us.”

“You’re right,” said Rodriguez, a tone of triumph in his voice, “until you turn it
on its side—like this. Then,” he said, holding the sheet in front of their faces,
“then, the lines are vertical, aren’t they?”

“Yes, but—” Bohannon started, but Rodriguez cut him off.

“Look, it’s logical to conclude that Spurgeon, Elgar, the Penny family—they were all
in the same social strata, all churchmen, all in the public eye, and with homes less
than one hundred miles apart. It’s logical to conclude that they not only knew
of
each other, but certainly could have known each other. Doc, Schwartzman didn’t know
the key, Schwartzman was the key. He was the link, the common denominator between
Spurgeon, Elgar, and the Penny family. Schwartzman was social, outgoing, a climber
in society. What did Spurgeon’s letter say of Schwartzman?
‘An able ally for your vital pursuit.’
There’s no one else Klopsch could have contacted who would have provided the connection
between Spurgeon, Elgar, and the Penny family. Schwartzman brought them together.
He was the key.”

By now, Rodriguez was pacing back and forth in front of the large bookcases, from
windows to fireplace and back again, his left hand wrapped in the thick, black hair
curling behind his ear, while the other three stood, propped against chair or table,
taking in his train of thought. “Spurgeon didn’t know squat about Demotic, wouldn’t
have mattered anyway. So, how did he know what was in the message? But . . . but .
. . Elgar was perhaps the preeminent cryptographer of his time. Would it not have
been logical for Spurgeon to have at least shared this strange document with Elgar,
a man who named his first major orchestral work
The Enigma Variations?
Spurgeon had an ancient document that was absolutely baffling, more so if he had
shown it to any linguists, who would have been as stumped as he was. Who else would
he turn to?”

Rodriguez took a breath but kept pacing. Into the quiet, Bohannon slipped an unsettling
question. “But Joe, even if Spurgeon did show it to Elgar, what good would that do?
The scroll was written eight hundred years before Spurgeon and Elgar lived. Even if
Abiathar used Demotic as a code and not a language, what good would the Dorabella
Cipher be to us now, trying to unlock this scroll? They were written eight hundred
years apart.”

“You are making one critical, but erroneous, assumption,” said Johnson, crossing the
floor to Rodriguez and requesting the sheet of paper. “You’re assuming the eight hundred
years separating the two documents negates any possible connection.”

Johnson turned to Rizzo and Bohannon and, with Rodriguez in his wake, stepped over
to an elaborate side table bearing a Tiffany lamp. Johnson opened a drawer in the
table, withdrew another sheet of paper, and held them both under the light.

“Imagine, for a moment,” said Johnson, “that Elgar composed the Dorabella Cipher
after
he saw Spurgeon’s scroll. What if this Dorabella Cipher is a result of Elgar’s introduction
to, or involvement with, Spurgeon’s scroll? What if,” Johnson said with a note of
awe, “Elgar helped Spurgeon crack the code of the scroll, and then used the scroll’s
code as the basis for writing the Dorabella Cipher?

“Here, look at these two sheets of paper. On the left is the Demotic alphabet. On
the right, the Dorabella Cipher. What do you see?” asked Johnson.

Looking over Johnson’s shoulder, Bohannon nearly fainted, his blood rushed so abruptly
to his head. The first Demotic letter looked like two lowercase c’s, turned backward.
The second letter was one lower-case
c
—the exact same building blocks Elgar had used in creating the Dorabella Cipher.

Quiet reverence thickly filled the room. Bohannon felt a lump in his throat, an incalculable
hope in his heart, and a reluctance to break the spell.

“YAAAHHHOOOOO!” Rizzo split the silence at the top of his lungs. Looking like a crazed
leprechaun who had just discovered his pot of gold, Rizzo began leaping and dancing
about the room with an uninhibited abandon. The golden palm trees, swaying and leaping
in time to the wacky plaid shorts, precipitated a sudden burst of common hysteria.

Johnson grabbed the brandy bottle, took a deep swig, passed it on, and joyously joined
Rizzo in his wild gyrations. Soon, hidden behind the sedate walls of the Upper West
Side, all four of these reserved professionals were whooping and hollering; leaping
and dancing around the elegant confines of Johnson’s study.

“If my aunt walks in now,” said Johnson, catching his breath, “I’ll be disowned.”

“YAAAHHHOOOOO!” screamed Rizzo, and the four of them launched again, crazy men in
a lunatic asylum who knew they had just discovered the key to freedom.

Tomorrow, they would discover what the key unlocked.

Midafternoon the next day, Friday, the four men climbed the ladder that now led to
the scaffold and gathered in Klopsch’s office. Rodriguez rolled out the cushioned,
protective covering and turned on the strong, overhead lamps while Bohannon entered
the combination and opened the huge safe. It had been a pretty simple decision to
leave the scroll in the safekeeping of Klopsch’s office and the massive vault. If
it had been safe there for one hundred years, it would likely be safe there for a
few more weeks.

Bohannon could see the anticipation in Johnson’s eyes as he was about to get his first
look at the scroll container and the complete scroll. Bohannon felt like a presenter
at the Academy Awards, about to disclose the Oscar winner. Resting the mezuzah on
the table, atop the protective covers, Bohannon grasped the metal rod in his left
hand and, maintaining a gentle pressure, began unrolling the scroll from the container.
Within moments, the entire scroll rested before them. Quickly, they laid upon the
scroll the enlarged copies they had made of the Dorabella Cipher. Like a medical team
entering into a challenging surgery, the four men approached the table and began scanning
scroll and cipher, cipher and scroll, looking for any sign of connection.

Eight hours later, all four of them were on the floor, their backs leaning against
the walls of the office, their eyes dulled, their enthusiasm dampened. They had applied
alphabetic sequences, musical scales, mathematical formulas, even chaos theory, but
nothing had resulted in a better understanding of the scroll. Their hope, however,
had not faded. The Dorabella Cipher, when turned on its side to make the lines vertical,
made for fascinating comparison to the Spurgeon scroll. The most obvious comparison
was that the lines were nearly identical in length when the symbols or characters
were enlarged to approximately the same size. Unfortunately, it was hard to tell if
the number of individual characters in each line was the same. Elgar’s cipher was
frustrating on many levels, but one was that it appeared to be impossible to determine
if each combination of miniature arches was an individual character or, as in many
languages or codes, some characters were connected or linked together to become one
character.

“I know it’s there,” Dr. Johnson said almost to himself, rubbing a hand over his weary
eyes. “I know it’s there. What are we missing?”

“You know,” Bohannon said, thinking back on all the times he had lost his keys, or
his wallet, or his watch (it was a common occurrence), “the answer is probably very
simple. We’re the ones who are making it difficult. What would be a simple way for
Elgar to connect his cipher to the scroll? What could link this ancient Egyptian language
to Elgar’s little squiggle-pictures? The answer is probably so obvious as to be ludicrous.”

“Or so bloody obvious that I should kick myself!”

Johnson jumped to his feet and crossed to the computer. Pounding on the keyboard,
Johnson continued his soliloquy, mumbling to himself, “How could you be so stupid?
What a dolt. What are you waiting for: somebody to smack you over the head with the
obvious? Some scholar . . . some scientist.” Shaking his head back and forth, Johnson
finally pulled up what he was looking for, and the printer cranked up to speed. He
turned around with a chagrined look upon his face. “You’re not going to believe this,”
he said, reaching down for the printed page. “So stupid. I can’t believe I’m so stupid!”

He crossed to the table, put down the sheet of paper, and stared silently for a long
moment.

“There it is,” said Johnson, the sound of resignation in his voice. “There it is.”

Johnson turned away from the table, leaned against the wall in his custom-tailored
suit, and stretched his lean body, releasing a long sigh.

With a wary eye on the doc, Bohannon crossed to the table and looked down at the scroll.
Sitting between the Dorabella Cipher and several columns of the scroll was a much
enlarged photograph showing lines of symbols. Rizzo crawled onto a chair beside Bohannon;
Rodriguez pulled up behind them. “What is this?” asked Bohannon. “It doesn’t look
like anything we have here.”

Detaching himself from the wall, Johnson returned to the table. “Come on, now, think
of all the history lessons you’ve received in the past week or so. What is this?”

Each man looked at the photo, searching for clues. But they barely had time to register
what they were seeing.

“It’s the Rosetta Stone,” said Rizzo, becoming more agitated with each word. “That’s
the Egyptian hieroglyph next to the Greek. I can’t tell what part of the stone it’s
from, but this is the Rosetta Stone. I’d bet my BBs on it.”

Everybody started talking at once, asking questions, seeking answers. Johnson raised
his hand for quiet.

“Tom, you provided the final clue when you mentioned comparing the Egyptian language
to Elgar’s scribbles. I should have thought of it a long time ago. There was only
one way for Spurgeon and Elgar to discern the message on this scroll. First, they
had to identify the Demotic language. Then, they had to identify that the message
was not to be found in the Demotic language, but in a code using Demotic symbols.
The only source of Demotic available to Spurgeon and Elgar would have been the Rosetta
Stone, in the British Museum. This is how they deciphered the scroll . . . Greek,
hieroglyphs, and Demotic. The Rosetta Stone gave them the solution to the code. They
compared Greek to hieroglyphs to Demotic in this scroll, and it revealed the pattern
in which the scroll had been written, the structure of the cipher. That structure,
when compared to the Rosetta Stone, would have given them the scroll’s message in
Greek, and with the Greek, they would have been able to decipher the scroll. Then
Elgar used the scroll’s same structure to construct his famous Dorabella Cipher. Granted,
none of us are Elgar. But all we need to do now is find the pattern. And that shouldn’t
be too difficult since Elgar has already completed all the hard work.”

They were immediately back around the table, continuing with the surgery, confident
in their ability to save the patient.

Bohannon had never appreciated ethnic comments about the Irish and drinking, but he
liked his beer. Beer ran as plentiful as water in his home. From his late teens onward,
that first long, cold drink was something he always savored.

Even while attending Penn State, when money was tighter than a warped door, Bohannon
had been sure to pinch as many pennies as necessary just so that he could visit the
My-Oh-My on College Avenue. At the My, the hot dogs were cooked in beer, the sauerkraut
was cooked in sherry, and the hot dog buns were individually steamed for each order.
They were so hot, soft, and tasty that the dogs were often done in three bites, leaving
a desire for more.