The Sacred Cipher Page 8

  “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.

  8

  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.”

  His ire piqued, Johnson narrowed his eyes in an accusation.

  “But we did bring a copy of the entire scroll,” Bohannon said quickly. “And a copy of the letter that was with the scroll.”

  These amateurs will likely drive me to drink, but for the moment, they are correct about safekeeping. “Here,” Johnson said aloud, stepping to the drafting table, “let’s see what you have brought me.”

  Rodriguez moved closer to the table and rolled out what looked like half a piece of poster paper. On it were displayed the seven groups of Demotic symbols. “These first two groupings are what we brought you yesterday, but this is the whole thing. I know there is always something lost in making copies, but I have a colleague at the library who is knowledgeable about languages and also meticulous in detail. He spent many hours transcribing what we found on the scroll. Even though these images are larger than the symbols found on the scroll, he believes this rendering is quite accurate.”

  Rodriguez turned to look at Johnson. “And here’s a printed copy of the letter that Spurgeon wrote to Klopsch. Now you know everything that we know.”

  “Except,” Johnson said archly, “who this colleague is.”

  Bohannon cut in. “Dr. Johnson, you seemed quite excited on the phone last night, about the twenty-one columns in seven groupings, like it triggered something in your memory. What does the seven mean to you?”

  Johnson stretched his body, ran his two hands through the fullness of his silver hair, then clasped his fingers at the back of his head. He leaned back against the table.

  “Gentlemen, Demotic, in all its bizarre nature, is a language that is always written on the horizontal axis, right to left. There is no known example of Demotic written on a vertical axis. So, in its uniqueness, this is unique. On the Rosetta Stone, there were several recurring constructions of Demotic symbols that indicated specific connections, or phrases, to the language. None of those phrases are in evidence on the paper you left with me yesterday, and I doubt we will find any of them now that I have the entire scroll.

  “Other than Chinese and other Asian languages, no other language is written vertically, certainly not a Middle Eastern language. So whoever constructed this document constructed it vertically for a purpose.

  “And,” said Johnson, pointing to the drafting table, “those seven groups of columns were also constructed for a purpose. Three vertical lines of symbols in seven columns, there’s a reason for it. That’s why I’m convinced this is a message that was meant to be read and understood. The recipient would have known how to access the message, despite the language used. So we know there must be a way in, a way to understand what the message contains.

  “Now, seven is the number of completeness. There are seven days of creation, seven colors in the rainbow, seven virtues, seven deadly sins, and seven basic notes in the Western music scale. In the Hebrew tradition and in the Bible, there were seven covenants between God and man, seven years of abundance followed by seven years of famine, and the Menorah, the Jewish candlestick used in the temple, holds seven candles. And, every seven years, every cell within our bodies is replaced and renewed.”

  “Yeah,” said Rodriguez, “and there are seven holes in every man’s head.”

  Trying hard not to laugh, Bohannon added, “Yeah, and Snow White had seven dwarfs. She really had her hands full with those clowns.”

  The middle finger of Johnson’s right hand was tapping a staccato beat on the end of the table, his chin pushed up into a scowl.

  “Is this humorous to you?” Johnson asked dryly. “Perhaps we should adjourn so you can watch some silly TV sitcoms?”

  “Oh, come on, Dr. Johnson,” Rodriguez said with an edge. “No harm, no foul, right? Don’t stop now.”

  “All right. Three is just as symbolically important as seven. Three is the number of trilogy—body, mind, and spirit; or father-mother-child; or past-present-future. It is also the number of the three dimensions, or for the process of thought: the thinker, the thought, and the thing. It is also the number for the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The fact that these symbols are constructed in these vertical rows of three and seven must be significant, otherwise there’s no purpose for constructing the scroll in this manner. So, here’s what I’m thinking at the moment.”

  Johnson returned to the drafting table, standing to the side and using his finger as a pointer. “You see this symbol,” he said to Bohannon and Rodriguez, pointing to a symbol that looked like a cane or a small hockey stick on a diagonal pitch. “This is one of the seven symbols the University of Chicago has determined in its Dictionary of Demotic that are universally the same in all Demotic writing. That was one of the keys we received from the Rosetta Stone. Even though the written Demotic language was so very unpredictable, there were at least seven symbols, seven we have been able to identify, that are consistent and never change. And that gives us a point at which to start. See, this is another, this another, this another,” Johnson said as he pointed to different symbols.

  “The odd thing about this document is that even those symbols that we have been able to identify as constants are not used in the same manner as they are used in other Demotic documents I’ve seen, or on the Rosetta Stone. This symbol, for instance,” he said, pointing again to the hockey stick. “This symbol is F and it means at its most basic to fly. And this symbol over here, the three vertical lines, that is Y and it means sea. In the Egyptian form of Demotic on the Rosetta Stone, fly is always followed by the sea . . . always. It is a phrase construction that is mostly translated as
the light bearer or the bringer of good news. On these sheets, F, to fly, is never followed by the symbol for sea. The symbol for fly is all over these pages, but the symbol for sea never completes it, not once.”

  Johnson turned from the table to the two men, who were his rapt students. “So, gentlemen, what does this one piece of evidence tell you?”

  Silence sat in the room like a third visitor, one that Johnson was quite comfortable allowing to remain. Suddenly, Rodriguez looked up from his hands.

  “It means the language is not the message,” Rodriguez said confidently. “It means the structure is the message.”

  Johnson, always a bit too pompous for his own good, was astonished at the exact logic and quick wit exhibited by this tall, Hispanic librarian.

  “Well, Mr. Rodriguez,” Johnson said with true respect in his voice, “very impressive indeed. You are absolutely correct, sir. This message is not written in Demotic, it is written in a symbolic cipher using Demotic. It may require some knowledge of Demotic to unravel its truth, but our problem is not in the translation of Demotic . . . it is in the translation of this cipher. Gentlemen, I think it’s fair to say we’re closer to home.”

  “All right!” Bohannon whooped, punching his brother-in-law on the shoulder, “I knew you would come in handy one day.”

  “Closer to home,” said Johnson warily, “but still a long way to go. Whoever crafted this message was diabolically clever. If someone else, someone without a grounding in Demotic, had found this scroll, they could have spent fruitless months trying to translate these symbols. This use of Demotic is not only a dead-end rabbit trail,” he said triumphantly, “but it is also a security device, a firewall, if you will. The author used Demotic not to pass along information but to hide information. We may have passed the first portal, but my instinct tells me there are more portals to come.”

  With a start, Johnson spun on his heel and took one long step to stand hovering over the two men who, up to that point, had been sitting comfortably in the leather chairs, enjoying Johnson’s performance. “Wait a minute . . . wait a minute . . . Tom, where’s the copy of that letter that accompanied the scroll?”

  Bohannon reached into the soft-sided, black computer bag he had brought along and pulled out a manila folder. He extracted a sheet of paper and handed it to Johnson.

  Expectation arm-wrestled with uncertainty as Johnson read the letter aloud. “You may place your absolute trust and confidence in Dr. Schwartzman of Trinity, a true friend of Christ and an able ally for your vital pursuit. Wire me with any revelations. May our Lord and Saviour hold you in His most faithful hands. Charles.”

  “It appears our English friend Dr. Spurgeon was also a man of portals and security devices,” Johnson said. “An able ally for your vital pursuit, eh? Spurgeon was telling Klopsch where to turn, where to get the information he needed to break the code of the scroll. He knew Klopsch didn’t understand Demotic, nobody did. But Spurgeon was sending Klopsch to someone who must have had some ability to understand the construction, the vertical columns and the meaning of the three and the seven. Dr. Schwartzman of Trinity—who is this person? That is our next task, who is this Schwartzman and what can he tell us, even when he’s likely been dead for more than a hundred years?”

  9

  An overdue personnel evaluation rested on his cluttered desk, but this morning—more than any other Monday—Bohannon’s mind wandered at every opportunity. His head rested in his hands, his elbows propped against the desktop, his eyes closed. The challenges of running a residential recovery program for homeless and addicted men—a facility that provided over a quarter-million meals each year to the hungry of New York City—were far from his conscious mind.

  What in the world am I doing? Tom wouldn’t admit it to Annie, but his near-death experience on Lafayette Street planted some serious questions in his mind. What was this scroll they’d found in Klopsch’s office? What did it mean? Why was Spurgeon so concerned for Klopsch’s safety? And—the question that had been eating at him for days—was it mere coincidence that he was confronted by two guys wearing the same amulet, one of whom nearly killed him with a runaway truck? If not, did it have any connection to their recent discovery?

  But each time his thoughts wandered over these questions, something even more profound lurked in the shadows of his mind. What was this all about? And more importantly, Why me?

  He didn’t want to scare Annie with his concerns. Maybe he was just imagining things. And he was leery of his own judgment. Chasing down the meaning of the scroll awakened all the adrenaline rush of Bohannon’s career as an investigative reporter. He loved this kind of chase—the thrill of pursuing the unknown. He was certainly no neutral observer. So he turned to God for guidance.

  Bohannon had walked away from his family’s faith in his college years, decrying what he perceived as its hypocrisy but actually just wanting to serve his own rebellion. Two years before he met Annie, he ran into a guy, the father of one of his “loves,” who talked to him about faith, about the truth of the Bible. For two years, Bohannon had read the Bible like an explorer with half a treasure map, absorbing the obvious, searching for the hidden. After he and Annie married, he wasn’t ready to abandon his heathen living; it was too much fun. Annie, not long out of that place herself, gave him time and walked along with him.

  Many who have become Christians later in life can point to that one moment when they surrendered to the idea of a Creator and his eternal plan. Bohannon had no such epiphany. He just realized one day that he believed what he was reading—this whole, crazy, seemingly confusing story of God’s love and redemption. Not much changed except that, over time, he became less heathen and more like Christ: kind, forgiving, gentle, hopeful. Certainly not perfect—he was Irish, after all—but better from the depth of his soul.

  So he and Annie pursued their faith, pursued their God, while they pursued their lives. They came not only to believe in God’s providence but to experience it. And to believe that there was a purpose, there was a plan, for each of them.

  Needing answers, Tom Bohannon went to God and sought his plan. What Bohannon heard—that intimate sense of receiving an answer, direction—distressed and confused him even more. He had a job for which he was responsible. A family to care for. A daughter attending Fordham and tuition to pay. And each time, God kept telling Bohannon, This is my plan for you. I have called you to this time.

  God’s voice, or my voice? That was always Bohannon’s tripping point. God’s direction, or my own wishful thinking . . . how will I ever know for sure? God, how can I know for sure?

  “Here’s the monthly financial statement.”

  Bohannon nearly fell out of his chair.

  Stew Manthey held the package just out of Bohannon’s reach, forcing Bohannon to look up as he collected himself. Stew, his mentor and colleague for ten years, was CFO of the mission. He was also a man of wisdom and discernment. This morning, Manthey wore a look of concern along with his pale brown tie.

  “Are you okay?” Manthey asked.

  Tom stretched and took the packet from Manthey’s hand, avoiding his eyes. “I’m fine. How did we do this month?”

  “Revenue was good,” said Manthey, sitting in one of the chairs that flanked Bohannon’s desk. “The repairs to the street outreach truck were unexpected, but other expenses were down. So it was a good month. Marcus and the board will be happy.”

  “Good,” said Bohannon, tossing the packet on top of an overflowing in-box. He tried to turn his attention back to the performance evaluation, but Stew wasn’t moving. Reluctantly, Bohannon looked up.

  “Stew?”

  Manthey got out of his chair, closed the office door, then returned to his seat and faced Bohannon.

  “Tom, what’s going on? What’s wrong? The last week or so, you just haven’t been yourself. Ever since the accident, you’ve been withdrawn, distant. You’ve been out a lot, and when you are here, most of the time you’re only here in body. I’m worried about you.”
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  Stew Manthey was a few months short of retirement, his full, grizzled gray beard a testimony to his hastening transition to gentleman golfer. More than friends, more than coworkers, they had prayed together for this ministry to the homeless and addicted men God placed in their care. Like his wife, Annie, there was little Bohannon could hide from Stew Manthey. He needed to tell somebody.

  Twenty minutes later, the sound of singing voices drifted up from the mission chapel below as the morning service began in earnest.

  “Wow, that’s quite a story,” Manthey said, massaging the space between his eyebrows. “What are you going to do, now?”

  Bohannon wearily shook his head. “I don’t know. I wish I did, but I don’t know what to do. What do you think, Stew?” Bohannon grimaced at the pleading in his voice.

  “I think you’ve done the right thing. You’ve asked God what he would have you do. And it appears you’ve received an answer.” Manthey paused, apparently weighing his response. “Now, I think you have to go tell Marcus and the board what you’ve found and that you’d like to pursue the meaning of the scroll. See what they say. If God wants you to pursue this, I think Marcus will give you his blessing.”

  Bohannon’s hand was already reaching for the phone.

  10

  Rizzo liked his office. It contained everything he needed to fulfill his responsibilities as assistant manager of research and authentication. More importantly, he was away from the big kahunas up on the library’s main office floor. His space was peaceful, comfortable . . . and private. Now it was crowded.

  Rizzo was working on his computer in the curve of the horseshoe desk, while Richard Johnson was to his left, engrossed in the screen of Rizzo’s second computer. Bohannon had his laptop at the small, round meeting table, and Joe was at the whiteboard. Each one had taken a different track of Dr. Schwartzman’s life and was pursuing anything that might connect the man to the scroll.