Trifariam, The Lost Codex (2012) (37 page)

Mary had turned on her laptop and was waiting for James to tell her to look for some piece of information on the internet. She got up and sat down next to him. “Why don’t you try the password reminder? You know Richard very well and it might give you some kind of hint.”

“Nobody ever uses that system,” he said as he dragged the cursor over to the square icon to the right of the rectangular box for typing the password. He didn’t hold out much hope as he double-clicked on it.

Mary’s eyes shone with joy, while James couldn’t believe what he saw. He considered Richard to be a very intelligent person, so the thought of him leaving clues so that third parties could find out his password was absolutely ridiculous. James preferred to group all his accounts together under the same password, one which was incredibly difficult to guess but so easy to remember that he would never need such a thing as a password reminder.

A Windows text box flashed up in front of them with the following lines:

“What do you think those numbers mean?”

“Richard isn’t just a frequent attendee of boring conferences about extinct languages, or an expert in paleography; he’s also an exceptional mathematician. He loves everything related to series and sequences as well as finding the possible relationships between them.”

Mary looked disheartened; math had never been her strong point.

“If you look closely, the first two lines represent two integer sequences with the next number is missing in both cases. Obviously they must feature in the password. Mary, type in the first four numbers from each sequence into an internet search engine. With a bit of luck, they are well-known sequences and we just don’t know it.”

She quickly tapped in the two sequences. On both occasions however, the numbers were interpreted as part of a phone number, so the only thing to appear was the names of various companies whose numbers comprised some of the digits she had typed in.

“What does the number after the parentheses mean?”

“I think the number we’re looking for is found by taking the fifth number from the sequence and then applying the corresponding mathematical operation.”

“And what if Richard put those numbers there to throw us off the scent, and one of them is actually the password? Maybe if we follow a certain pattern, we could put them in some kind of order so that - ”

“No! That’s impossible. I know Richard inside out, and his fascination for mathematical puzzles is as well-known as his love for ancient languages.” James gently stroked his three-day stubble as he walked around in circles in what little space he had in the room. “Look at the first sequence. What do you think the next number is?”

Mary hesitantly started to run through mathematical calculations in her head. With some difficulty, she could manage to explain the first two numbers and occasionally the third, but never the fourth. “What if each part of the sequence is the result of the square sum of the previous two numbers?”

James grinned in disbelief. It looked as if it could apply to the first three numbers, assuming that the series was supposed to begin with the number 1. “1
²
+ 2
²
= 5, 5
²
+ 2
²
= 29, 29
²
+ 5
²
=…”

“866,” replied Mary, disappointed. “Three short.”

Suddenly, the sound of the elevator stopping on their floor made their hearts beat faster. Mary crept towards the door and carefully looked around the corridor through the spyhole. At first she couldn’t see who had gotten out of the elevator because her field of vision was obscured, but she could make out a man’s footsteps coming towards them. “I think someone’s coming.”

James didn’t know how to react. Although his heart implored him to stay right there and demand some explanations, his head told him to go and hide quickly. After scanning the room, he headed for the closet but Mary insisted on hiding under the bed. Now was not the time to argue. The steps were coming increasingly close so he paid heed to them and left a space wide enough for Mary to enter without problems.

When he had one last glance through the spyhole, he saw a well-built man of around three hundred pounds trying to open the door to the room opposite, using his brawn more than his brain. He slowly exhaled all the air from his lungs and rapped gently on the headboard of the bed. “You can come out. It was the obese tourist from across the hall.”

Time passed by quickly. They had already spent half an hour and still hadn’t managed to solve even the first sequence. Several sheets of paper covered with various mathematical formulae were scattered over the bed, tentative suggestions for a hypothetical solution. However, they had all been discarded for one reason or another.

We were getting close with the square numbers, we should carry on down that route,
thought James.

Mary had been lying face down on the bed for a few minutes now, completely silent, constantly staring at a piece of paper which sat on the pillow and which had written on it the sequence in rather large numbers. Her head was starting to get heavy and her neck was stiff. She was ready to tear the paper up into thousands of pieces when James burst into a smile of satisfaction and those magic words came from his lips.

“I’ve got it! I know what the next number is!”

Mary jumped off the bed and eyed the paper James was clutching in his hands. The whole page was filled with practically indecipherable alphanumeric scrawl. Beneath it was a formula which had been underlined over and over again:
n*(n+1)-1

“We were thinking it was a difficult sequence to solve, but really it’s one of the simplest there is. Each number in the list is the result of multiplying the previous number by the one which follows in natural numerical order, before subtracting one unit.” Mary looked at him proudly as he continued with his explanation. “Using the formula, we could easily work out which number comes after 29. It would be (29*30)-1, which makes 869. Therefore the number that is missing between the parentheses in the first sequence is 756029, the result of multiplying 869 by 870 and subtracting one. If we take away 340704 from that number, it gives us 415325, which is the first number we’re looking for.”

“Amazing. Math isn’t my strong point. Even if I’d spent all day working on it, I’d never have got the right answer. Is the second sequence the same?”

“Not exactly, but it is similar. It is solved in the same way, but in this case you have to subtract two.” Mary couldn’t help but smile and kept on listening. “115938 is the number which fills the parentheses in the second sequence, and clearly it is the result of multiplying 340 by 341 and subtracting 2. If we add 6994 to this number, we get 122932 which is the second secret number.”

“You’re a genius,” declared Mary, who hadn’t wasted a second in typing them into the laptop.

James’ mood dipped when he saw how Mary’s face went from showing unbridled joy to being as white as a sheet. She had realized that neither of the numbers, nor any of the different combinations formed with them, was the sought-after password.

“Richard might be a bastard but he isn’t stupid. Obviously the two numbers aren’t the password, but we should be able to work it out when we put them together with the third clue.”

Mary looked at the laptop screen again - she had forgotten that there was a third message.
Before humanity puts an end to it, it will put an end to us,
she pondered as she repeated the words over and over. “It could be a type of animal which is at risk of becoming extinct because the human race is senselessly killing it.”

“Umm, but… what animal could turn against mankind to the point of destruction? No, I think Richard is referring to the whole planet here. Do you remember what he told us about the repercussions that solar flares and supervolcanoes could have for the Earth? It’s clear that man’s careless activity on the planet over the last few years is causing catastrophic damage. Scientists think that if we continue the way we have been doing, Earth will end up rebelling and destroying us all.”

“So we have the numbers 415325 and 122932, as well as a riddle to which the solution is ‘Earth’. What would the initials
N.E.
stand for?”

“They seem to be the initials from somebody’s name, probably the person to whom that quotation is attributed. Type it into a search engine and see what comes up.”

Mary did as she was told but she shook her head when nothing was found.

“And what if the riddle is telling us where we have to put in the numbers from the sequences in order to find out the password?”

James bit his lower lip, something he did often when he was thinking. “But how can two digits from a possible six tell us where to search? Although… I don’t think…”

“Tell me! We have to try everything and we don’t have much time!”

“It’s probably nothing, but… do you have Google Earth installed on your laptop?”

Mary raised an eyebrow and frowned before she nodded. She had often used it to virtually visit the cities where she was going to work and thus have a preconceived idea of what they would be like.

The program opened on the computer screen and, as was always the case, the image of the Earth with space and stars behind occupied the right half of the screen.

On the left was a drop-down menu with recently visited places and a series of configuration options.

“I was thinking that the numbers could possibly represent the latitude and longitude coordinates of some point on the planet. Each number is made up of six digits, so that the first two could be the degrees, the next two the minutes and the last two the seconds. Plus, the initials
N.E.
might represent ‘north’ and ‘east’ respectively.”

James hovered the cursor over
search box
and typed in the following series: 41 53’ 25”N 12 29’ 32”E. He clicked the search button and crossed his fingers, mentally willing it to work. The program started automatically. It was as if an extremely powerful satellite was crossing the Atlantic, before stopping in Europe or, more precisely, Italy. All of a sudden, and at unusual speed, it started to zoom in through the thick layer of cloud and heading for the center of the country. The image was extremely blurred at first, but over time it became clearer and clearer until the great city of Rome had filled the screen.

The two of them looked at the screen without blinking. The coordinates entered by James appeared just over the most well-known landmark of Ancient Rome: the Coliseum.

“We have to admit, Richard is some genius,” declared Mary. “It would never have occurred to me to hide a password in such an overelaborate yet splendid way.”

Now it worked. After typing in the word
Coliseum
, the laptop screen went black momentarily before turning back on, with the operating system starting up correctly. They were inside his computer.

E
ither he has a supercomputer, or this thing switched on faster than normal,
thought James without saying a word.

Mary looked at him hesitantly, but she seemed to be able to read his mind.

“The computer was in sleep mode. Richard left some applications open, maybe we can find something.”

They both looked at the taskbar, just to the right of the Windows “Start” button. Richard had left several windows open on purpose, probably so he could look through them later. There were five in total.

The first two were webpages which contained rather concise information about the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, illustrated by photographs. They seemed to have been created by tourists who had been left so in awe after their visit to Teotihuacan that they wanted to share their memories and experiences with more people. However, these pages didn’t merely spout historical information about the Teotihuacan civilization, but went more in-depth in an attempt to create an aura of mystery around the culture.

The third window was a text document which contained detailed information about the land on which the city was built: its possible points of entry and exit, both on foot and by car, the woodland which surrounded it, comprehensive details on nearby towns and their inhabitants and, finally, the precise number of open-air terraces in the area along with their location.

“The son of a bitch is planning something,” said James, his teeth grinding in rage.

The fourth window surprised Mary even more than James. It was a webpage which had been discontinued due to its content, according to a text across the top of the page. It displayed what appeared to be very truthful information about freemasonry. It covered a range of topics: its origins, internal hierarchy, political and religious beliefs, ambitions and even possible members.

A sentence underlined in red made them think. It read:

THE FREEMASONS ALREADY CONTROL THE HIGHEST POSITIONS OF POWER

Mary clicked to enlarge the last window. When it came into, their hearts began pounding in their chests. All was not lost. It was the homepage of an e-mail provider and although Richard had logged off, a line of text filled them with sudden and overwhelming optimism. It was an e-mail address with an empty box below for the password.

“I’m sure Anthony would have been able to help us right now, but those bastards… Do you know any way of accessing his account?”

Mary cleared her throat and after a few seconds’ hesitation, she took out her old cellphone from her pocket. Then she spoke to James in a friendly voice. “I have a friend who is a computer expert. For years he worked for a company dedicated to researching and developing antivirus software. From what he told me, he didn’t agree with company policy because it was they themselves who developed the virus and the antivirus, so he resigned.”

“What? I don’t get it.”

“It was because they created the virus and unleashed it on the web. When millions of computers were infected, they released a sophisticated program onto the market which would provide a solution. That’s how the vast majority of those companies operate nowadays. Now he works for a powerful multinational developing software and webpages for businesses, and he heads the security department. His role is to develop the security strategies needed to protect them from untimely visitors. Perhaps he can help us.”