The Sacred Cipher (53 page)

“Holy cow,” said Rodriguez. He was pointing to a symbol at the far end of the inscription.
“That’s our guy, right . . . that’s Abiathar?”

Johnson grabbed the survey book and his pencil. “Would you please bring the scroll
over here, next to the stellae?”

Rodriguez watched intently as Doc, shifting his gaze back and forth from one list
of symbols to the other, began furiously writing on the page. Ten minutes later, he
stopped, but from the look on his face, Rodriguez knew he wasn’t finished.

“What is it, Doc?” Bohannon asked. “You look as if someone just threw you a curveball.”

Johnson ran his hand through his hair, turning his silver locks into a dusty gray,
but cleaning his hand. “I’m confused,” Johnson admitted. “I thought I had the message.
I do have the message. I can check it against the Aramaic. But then, near the end,
it changes . . . and just stops.” He was shaking his head back and forth. “I don’t
understand.”

Joe put his hand on Doc’s shoulder. “What is it? What do you have so far?”

“Well, from what I can tell so far, the message on the stellae is a letter from Meborak
of Egypt to Abiathar. Writing in 1093, Meborak is instructing Abiathar on how they
are going to oppose the usurper David Ben Daniel. You remember how Kallie told us
about him? Ben Daniel had swindled his way to the title of Exhillarch of Egypt. Meborak
and Abiathar led the opposition and deposed him.”

“And Meborak wrote this letter in Demotic?” asked Rodriguez.

Johnson had been very still since he had translated the letter. Now, sitting with
his back to the bench, the survey book in his lap, Bohannon and Rodriguez propped
on the bench on either side of him, his voice had none of the excitement that Bohannon
expected.

“No, Joe, he wrote the letter in Aramaic. Very straightforward. Very simple,” Johnson
said, his voice barely a whisper.

“Then why have the other two languages? What are they for?”

“It’s for making a code.” A pause. “These two men were leading the opposition against
the most powerful Jewish ruler of their time. If Ben Daniel discovered their conspiracy,
he probably would have them executed. Any communication between them would be inherently
dangerous, so Meborak gave Abiathar a master cipher, a way to translate any message
into a secret code. Meborak used Demotic symbols, an ancient, extinct Egyptian language
that Abiathar would never understand. To Abiathar, Demotic was just a list of symbols.
All Abiathar had to do was take the Demotic symbols and convert them to Aramaic in
order to understand the communication. He would do the same thing in reverse for any
communication he sent to Meborak. Mix-’em-up; shake-’em-up; and you’ve got yourself
a riddle for the ages.”

“So that’s how Abiathar wrote the scroll,” Bohannon exclaimed, the revelation breaking
through his weariness. “Meborak sent him the code from Egypt six years earlier, showed
him how to take his Aramaic and convert it into Demotic symbols. Pretty slick. Meborak
gave Abiathar the key for secret communication using a Demotic cipher.”

Bohannon had his arm draped over the top of the stone stellae. He and Rodriguez had
rerolled the scroll for the time being, trying to keep it clean in the dust-laden
air. His finger traced the shape of one symbol, over and over.

“You know, Doc, there is an even more intriguing question raised by this stellae,”
said Bohannon, inspecting the face of the stone from above. “How do you mail a rock?”

“Yeah!” said Joe, punching Bohannon in the shoulder. “Why a rock? Why aren’t we looking
at another scroll?”

Bohannon looked to Johnson for an answer.

“The stellae is here for us. It was meant to be discovered,” Johnson said with finality.
“Although he could have sent the stellae, it’s more likely Meborak would have originally
sent the message on a scroll. It certainly would have been easier to transport. But
a scroll, even in a mezuzah like the one we have, would be more fragile, more likely
to be damaged or destroyed. No, I think it quite reasonable to assess that Abiathar,
or one of his artisans, transcribed Meborak’s message onto this stellae with the express
intention that it would survive the test of time and serve as the final clue to the
location of the hidden Temple.”

Doc had a smile on his face that would light up Broadway.

“Then, what’s the clue?” asked Bohannon.

The lights dimmed.

“Yes. That is my dilemma,” Johnson muttered, turning away from Bohannon to look once
again at the stone. “I can’t find the clue. The last part of the message makes no
sense. For some reason, it appears they changed the code. What is on the stellae does
not match what is on our scroll. I don’t know if I can decipher it.”

A heavy weight began to settle on Bohannon’s chest. He closed his eyes. No matter
how he tried, a withering sense of dread and discouragement began to suck the life
out of his bones.
God, no
, Bohannon pleaded in his mind,
not after we’ve come this far. What have I done to deserve this?

His elbows were on his knees, his head in his hands. He felt as if he would fall flat
on his face. He didn’t know what to say; he didn’t know what to pray. He didn’t know
what to do.

God, please, we need your help
, Bohannon prayed silently.
The Bible says you will never leave us or forsake us. But I sure feel forsaken right
now. How can you do this to us? Bring us to this point and just leave us here? Have
I disappointed you that much?

“I’m not disappointed with you at all. You have been faithful. Look at the scroll.”

Bohannon looked up to see who had been speaking to him. Joe was in the middle of the
room, pacing. Doc had his head down, working at something in the survey book.

“What did you say, Doc?” Bohannon asked.

Johnson looked up from his doodling. “I’m sorry?”

“Didn’t you just say something?”

“I’m sorry, Tom,” said Johnson, shaking his head. “I was looking again at this message,
looking for some evidence of a clue. I didn’t say anything.”

Bohannon’s eyes refused to leave Johnson’s face. He was expecting a different response.
Could Johnson be playing some sort of prank? Could he be that heartless?

“Tom,” Johnson said with true concern, “what’s wrong?”

As if shaking off the hand of judgment, Bohannon snapped to his feet. “Joe, let’s
look at that scroll again.” Bohannon grabbed the mezuzah and brought it over in front
of the stellae. “C’mon, the answer has got to be here somewhere, either in the scroll
or in the stellae.”

Bohannon held the mezuzah while Rodriguez gently unrolled the scroll in front of the
stellae. Smaller than the scroll, holding three languages instead of just one, the
stone tablet had only three vertical columns of Demotic instead of the twenty-one
on the scroll. “Doc, how did you figure out the message so far, since there are only
three columns of Demotic on this stone?” Bohannon asked.

Johnson picked himself off the floor and knelt in front of the bench.

“None of the three columns on the stone matched exactly to columns on the scroll.
But it was easy to translate because I had the Aramaic to compare it with until I
got here.”

Johnson’s eraser pointed to the last few symbols on the stone.

“Hey, that’s the sled,” said Joe. “I remember that symbol from the scroll. It looks
like a sled all ready to go downhill on the snow.”

“It’s the letter
Q
,” said Johnson. “But do you see that symbol just above it? Well, that’s where the
Aramaic and the Greek stop. There are no corresponding Aramaic or Greek letters for
those last few Demotic symbols, nothing we can use to determine which of the possible
thousands of meanings are intended here. I don’t understand. Why did he get this far
and not finish the message?”

The three of them sat staring at the dumb, stone tablet, trying to will the three
inanimate symbols to release their hidden meaning. There was
Q
, the sled. Below, and just to the right, off center, was a symbol that looked like
a lightning bolt, or an italic “s.” Below that, again slightly offset to the right,
was a symbol that looked like a small arch, or a lower case “n.”

“Doc, what are the other two symbols?” asked Rodriguez.

“The second one, the one that looks a little bit like an ‘s,’ that’s the Demotic letter
C
. And the last one, the arch, is the Demotic letter
H.”

“Hey, Doc,” said Bohannon, looking at the twenty-one columns of Demotic on the scroll.
“We have the same letters on our scroll as the ones on the stellae, right? And we
figured out what they meant against Elgar’s cipher, right?

And back in New York, you told us about those two symbols that always went together,
but didn’t go together on our scroll, right? And all of us believed we would need
the scroll one more time to find a final clue, right?”

Bohannon stopped and looked up.

“Right,” both men echoed.

“Well, let’s take the last three letters of the stellae and match them up against
the same letters on the scroll, write down how those same letters were translated
on the scroll, and see what we can figure out from the translations that we know.
Hey, Abiathar brought us this far, he’s not going to forsake us now.”

Bohannon almost laughed at himself because of his curious use of words. But, like
the others, he was almost immediately caught up in a fever of anticipation.

Johnson was back on the floor with the survey book in his lap and the translation
of the scroll message tucked under the survey book’s flyleaf, scribbling wildly with
Rodriguez and Bohannon peeking over his shoulders.

“The arch,
H
,” said Johnson, not looking up from the pages in front of him, “Abiathar uses it
for representing the Temple. In Aramaic, I remember the same letter was often translated
to mean ‘heaven,’ a room that entered into a holy place. That makes sense.”

“There’s the sled a couple of times,” said Rodriguez. “What is that referring to,
that first one?”

“The most excellent of rulers,”
said Johnson. “It was Abiathar’s way of referring to Meborak in the scroll. But meanings
change when you change the construction of Demotic. That’s what makes it so infuriating.
Look, that
C
, in the scroll it’s translated as
great
when Abiathar was writing about the great cavern. But I know that this letter
C
is the most commonly used Demotic letter. The last time I looked, it had more than
160 pages of definitions in the Chicago dictionary.”

Johnson started taking the possible definitions and began moving them around, substituting
one, then another possible meaning. “This could take forever,” he mumbled.

“No, Doc,” said Bohannon, grabbing his shoulder. “Look, neither of these guys is going
to be playing games with us at this point, not after all they went through. They’re
going to want the Temple to be found if anybody got this far. This has got to be straightforward.
It has to be a simple meaning.

“These last few letters are telling us something about the Temple,” he continued,
picking up steam. “It’s telling us about the holy place, right? You said it: that’s
why the stellae is here, to give us the final clue. Well, it’s right there. Put the
three letters together, the three translations we have from the scroll.
The great and exalted holy place of heaven
. The last three letters are describing the Temple. The Temple is here, it’s got to
be here, right around us.”

“I know, Tom,” said Johnson, “but where, here?”

The question startled Bohannon out of his euphoria.

“Excuse me, guys,” interjected Rodriguez. “But why aren’t those letters written straight
up and down like all the rest? Why are they going off at an angle?”

Johnson jumped to his feet, turning to take in his two compatriots. He was beaming,
grinning from ear to ear.

“You know, Joe, you are brilliant, absolutely brilliant. It’s direction, Joe. Once
again, you have given me direction. The letters are written off center because, amazingly,
they are giving us a direction. Northwest.”

Reflexively, Bohannon and Rodriguez swiveled their heads to the northwest corner.
“Why is there so much rubble in the northwest corner, when there is relatively little
in the rest of the room?” asked Johnson. “Unless . . .

“Unless someone collapsed the room on purpose,” enthused Bohannon, “to seal off what’s
on the other side.”

“And to hide the way,” added Johnson. “Behind that wall. It’s behind that wall.”

Rodriguez was already asleep, curled up in his sleeping bag. They spent hours, like
crazed men in gold lust, tearing a hole in the wall at the northwest corner of the
room. First they shoveled out mounds of debris, trying to reach the floor, hoping
for an easier way in than breaking through the huge blocks of solid limestone. Just
above floor level, they found a place where two limestone blocks had been removed
from the wall. But the resultant opening had ultimately been sealed with a form of
plaster. Luckily, it was sealed more than one thousand years before and was beginning
to crumble. An hour of determined digging in shifts, and the sealed portal yielded
a small hole in its center. By the time they completely cleared the portal, they were
physically and mentally exhausted. There was no more they could do. Whether it was
day or night, they needed rest.