The Sacred Cipher Read online

  “Beth, no interruptions, please. I want to give Mr. Bohannon my full attention.”

  Surprisingly, Johnson’s office reflected none of the Victorian opulence on view elsewhere in the building. There was the obligatory oak wainscoting, hardwood floor covered by an Oriental rug, and requisite bookcases. But the space was missing much of what Bohannon had expected, those obvious symbols of wealth and power. Johnson’s wooden desk was rather small, and there were no massive, matching pieces. Nor was there a “wall of fame,” those ubiquitous collections of degrees, awards, and photos of the famous that give so many in the corporate world the veneer of importance. No, in Johnson’s office, the most prominent item was what looked like a sizable draftsman’s table over which hovered a powerful lamp and a thick magnifying glass. Bins and drawers stuck out from both sides. Tiny, elaborate mechanisms for securing stamps also hovered on curved arms, waiting to be pulled into focus.

  “Please be seated,” Johnson gestured toward a leather chair, and instead of taking a position of dominance by sitting behind his desk, he lowered himself into a well-worn leather sofa across from Bohannon. “I must say, you are the last person I dreamed would be sitting in this office,” Johnson said, his words dripping with acid as his body sank deeply into the soft cushions in the corner. “To what do I owe this . . . pleasure?” His unflinching stare burned a hole in Bohannon’s brain.

  Dr. Richard Johnson, educated at Oxford, trained by the British Museum, famous among scientists for his revolutionary studies on Egyptian history, was about as far from the frumpy, poorly dressed academic stereotype as you could find. Johnson was tall, lean, crowned by a thick, silvery gray mane swept back from his considerable forehead and curling around his ears and shirt collar. His suit was finely tailored and looked very expensive, as did his colorful silk tie and gleaming leather shoes. He sat across from Bohannon, appearing relaxed and at ease. But his gaze remained alert, riveted on his past adversary.

  Bohannon believed that he had only one chance to make this work. So he took the leap.

  “Dr. Johnson,” he said, shifting forward in his chair, “I wouldn’t be sitting here if I had any other option. For most of the last fifteen years I’ve hated your guts. To be honest, I still do. And you don’t have any reason to listen to me or to listen to the request I have.”

  Johnson began to rise. “Well then, Mr. Bohannon—”

  “But if you don’t listen, you will regret it for the rest of your life.”

  Bohannon watched Johnson waver, halfway between sitting and standing. A red flush had risen from his neck and now engulfed his face, his eyes on fire. Resembling a cobra raising its head and spreading its crown before striking, Johnson unfolded himself to his full height, pushed back his shoulders, and glared down. Bohannon felt as if he were lunch.

  “You, sir,” Dr. Johnson spat at Bohannon, “you murdered my friend. Just as surely as if you slit his throat, you murdered a man I had known and revered for twenty years. You orphaned his children. You, sir, are a vicious lie-monger and truth-twister, with no regard for decent human beings . . . and I despise you. That, sir, is the only reason you have been received here. And you can die in that chair for all I care.”

  There was a twitch in the muscle under his left eye. Bohannon slowly elevated himself to Johnson’s height, meeting the enemy face-to-face. Unconsciously, he began to size up Johnson, calculating how he was going to beat him into submission. Consciously, he engaged words as his weapon.

  “You despise me? You quack . . . what an infantile fool you are.” Bohannon took one step toward Johnson and was gratified by the fear that flashed across Johnson’s countenance.

  “You nearly destroyed me, my family, and my career defending a man who was a liar and a swindler. You engaged in the most vicious public attack I ever experienced. And once your revered friend, Swinton, was proven to be a liar and a cheat, you proved yourself a coward by retreating behind ivy walls without a decent apology.”

  Inadvertently, Bohannon took another step forward, sparking a reaction from Johnson, who stepped back. Bohannon noticed Johnson vainly sweeping his hand behind him, trying to find the telephone handset.

  “I don’t regret anything I wrote about Randall Swinton. I do regret that he was killed. He was your friend, and you defended him. I can understand loyalty, but I can’t understand character assassination and blind defense of a liar who took advantage of everyone with whom he came in contact. He took advantage of you, too. He took advantage of your faith in him. He allowed you to stick your neck way out, even when he knew he had been exposed and had no defense. Is that the friend you’re talking about?”

  Bohannon felt his anger deflate.

  “So, no, I don’t regret anything I wrote.” He took a deep breath and flexed his right hand, easing the fist. “But I do regret that so many people were hurt. I believe where we differed so passionately was in who should bear the responsibility for that pain.”

  Johnson, both fear and loathing now removed from his face, stood his ground, his eyes never leaving Bohannon’s.

  “But Randall Swinton and the feud we engaged in are not the reasons I’m here today,” Bohannon continued. He turned his back on Johnson, stepped to the chair, and wearily lowered himself into its embrace. “Maybe, some other day, if you really want to continue this fight—if you still feel compelled to defend a man who abused your good faith—then we can go back and revisit that time. I did what I had to do, what I was trained to do. Swinton deserved to be caught and convicted, judged, not murdered. You? I can’t judge you. Only you can judge yourself, judge your motives. But I can’t judge you.”

  Bohannon took a deep breath. The next move was Johnson’s. He could sit down, or he could pick up the phone and call the muscle with the gun at the front door.

  More ashen, less confident, Johnson edged himself back to the sofa. He fell into the well-worn leather like a wet sack of sand.

  Johnson folded his hands together, stared at his knuckles. “There were times I wanted to kill you, have somebody kill you.” The voice was dark, a far distance from where they sat. “And there were times when I thought I could have killed Randall myself.”

  Surprisingly to Bohannon, he began to feel sorry for this man, publicly betrayed by a friend he had trusted.

  Johnson’s eyes didn’t move from his knuckles. “I wanted you to be wrong. God, how I wanted you to be wrong. Randall kept assuring me these were vicious lies. Even after his bogus sales had been revealed, he was passionate about his innocence and certain of your ‘collusion,’ he called it, with these scalawags who were determined to swindle him and send him to jail. You were the basest of scoundrels, Mr. Bohannon, so easy to hate.”

  Both of them jumped when the phone rang. Bohannon was trying to coax his heart from his throat as Johnson reached for the handset. “Yes? . . . yes, Beth,” Johnson said, looking across at Bohannon. “I’m fine. Yes, you may go home. Thank you . . . yes, I’ll see you in the morning. Good night.”

  Stillness settled.

  Finally, Johnson pushed himself up from the corner of the sofa to its edge. “I appreciate your courage in coming here. And I even appreciate your candor about what was, at that time, a very passionate topic for both of us. You were doing your job; I can accept that. And Randall was a crook. I can accept that, too. But he had also been a close, personal friend for many years,” Johnson said, sitting back again, wearily draping one leg over the other. “He was wounded, and I was wounded for him. Once you and I collided, I was not about to back down. Pride, I’m afraid.”

  Once again, Johnson’s twisted hands absorbed his attention.

  “Still, my friendship with Randall gave me no license to butcher your reputation or, more accurately, to attempt to butcher your reputation in public. It was wrong of me to descend into the realm of such vindictive persecution. And for that, I ask your forgiveness.”

  Momentarily, a silence separated them, a divide neither one of them could cross. Then Bohannon finished building the bridge th
at Johnson had just started.

  “I forgive you,” Bohannon said, standing and reaching out his right hand.

  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.