Robert Browne - The Paradise Prophecy

“You make it sound so inviting.”

“It’s better than no invitation at all, isn’t it?”

He thought about it and sighed. “All right. I give.”

“Good,” she said. “I have something I want to show you.”

The coffee was so thick and strong that Batty nearly gagged the moment it touched his tongue. He wasn’t close to being sober yet, but he knew he needed to snap out of this and pay attention to what Callahan was saying.

“I went through Ozan’s client list,” she told him. “He had over six hundred active accounts, and the auction house is doing brisk business. In the last two months alone, they’ve shipped seven hundred and twenty-seven packages, all over the world.”

“So the database is a bust. What about the iPad?”

“That’s what I want to show you.” She picked up Ozan’s iPad from the table and touched the home button, bringing the screen to life. “His e-mail app is connected to two different mailboxes. Work and personal, both attached to the same server, run by an Internet provider here in Istanbul.” She touched the screen and called up the browser. “But when I started exploring, I found a Web page in his cache. An anonymous mail service, running in the cloud.”

“The cloud?”

“Out there on the Internet. Like Google apps or Skytap, where everything is centralized.”

“So what does that mean?”

“In itself, not much. But when I found it, I had to ask myself, why would Ozan need a separate Webmail account, especially an anonymous one? Was he subscribing to porn sites and trying to cover his tracks? That doesn’t seem likely.”

Batty suddenly understood. “He was corresponding with the other guardians.”

Callahan nodded. “Not often, but when I hacked into his account, I found four separate recipients, all of whom were sent messages by Ozan the day before he died. He’d already dumped them into his trash folder, but he hadn’t bothered to empty it-a mistake amateurs always make. They assume that once a message is deleted, it’s deleted.”

“So who were the recipients?”

Callahan huffed. “I wish it were that easy. But they’re all anonymous Web accounts, too.”

“So it’s a dead end.”

“Not really. I managed to hack into the accounts, run an IP trace and found they’d last been accessed from four different Internet cafes. Sao Paulo, D.C., London and Chiang Mai, Thailand.”

“We already know the recipient in Sao Paulo.”

Another nod. “But Gabriela hadn’t accessed the account since before she went on her last tour, so she never got the message.”

“What is the message?”

“That’s where I ran into a little snag. It’s nothing but spam. ‘Viagra at Internet Prices,’ blah, blah, blah. The kind of stuff most people delete, which, of course, is the point. It’s actually pretty ingenious.”

She touched the iPad’s screen, then handed it to Batty, and sure enough, the message she’d retrieved was a long, solid paragraph of a poorly written advertising come-on. Get one of these in your inbox and you immediately hit the kill button. But he knew there was more to it than that.

“It isn’t spam,” he said. “It’s a hidden message.”

“Right. I started thinking about what you told me in Ozan’s library. About Trithemius-and this little puppy . . .” She patted the copy of Steganographia on the table beside her. “But if you look at the stuff on Ozan’s notepad, you can clearly see that he was about as good at steganography as he was at e-mail security. So he took the easy route and used a shortcut to code his messages.”

Batty glanced at the screen full of spam. “What kind of shortcut?”

“I checked his browser cache again and found a Web site that allows you to enter a phrase into a text box, then encodes it to look like this. I figure the guardians on the other end are using the same Web site to decipher it.”

“So much for ancient tradition. I assume you decoded it, too?”

She nodded and touched the screen again, showing him the result:

Someone watching. Stay alert.

Batty studied the message grimly. “He obviously wasn’t being paranoid. He was a sensitive, so he knew what was coming. Must’ve felt it.”

“And, unfortunately, Gabriela was so wrapped up in her tour she never bothered to read the warning.”

“I’m not sure how much difference it would’ve made. What about the D.C. and London accounts?”

“Both read and deleted,” Callahan said. She touched the screen again. “But that wasn’t the only spam Ozan sent. I found another exchange in his trash file-with the recipient from Thailand, dated a couple weeks earlier. I decoded it, but it’s still pretty cryptic.”

She showed him the results. First Ozan’s message:

Tell me about C Gigas, 7 pages.

Followed by the Thailand recipient’s reply:

Don’t make the same mistake the poet made.

You may lose more than your eyes.

Batty felt his heart accelerate.

“I tried Googling this C. Gigas guy,” Callahan said, “but all I got was a page on Pacific oysters. And I don’t think Ozan and his buddy were discussing seafood.”

“Or a person. They’re talking about the Codex Gigas.”

“Which is?”

“Another book.”

“What-are these people obsessed?”

“Apparently so,” Batty said. “But what surprises me is that it’s Ozan asking the question. He has one of the most extensive collections on the occult I’ve ever seen, so it seems to me he’d already know all about the Gigas.”

“That makes at least two of you. You mind filling me in?”

“It’s also called the Devil’s Bible,” Batty told her. “It was written in the thirteenth century, supposedly in one night. With the help of Satan.”

“Wonderful.”

“It’s about the size of a small packing trunk, and at one time it was considered one of the wonders of the world. This thing has survived fire and the Thirty Years’ War. And right now it’s housed in a library in Sweden.” He looked at the e-mail again. “But like I said, Ozan would already know all that. His interest was in the seven missing pages.”

“The what?”

“There are seven pages missing from the Gigas. Nobody knows how or when they disappeared, but there’s been all kinds of speculation about what’s on them, from a message from Satan to the secrets of God and the universe. And that’s probably what Ozan was after.” He tapped the iPad screen. “But it’s the response that has me puzzled.”

“Why?”

“Because it mentions the poet. ‘Don’t make the same mistake the poet made. You may lose more than your eyes.’ I think we both know who he’s talking about.”

“John Milton.”

“Exactly. He went blind nearly a decade before he wrote Paradise Lost . But this reply is couched as a warning to Ozan-don’t make the same mistake-as if Milton did something to cause his blindness.”

“So let me get this straight,” Callahan said. “On one hand we have these seven missing pages, on the other hand we have two guardians searching for secret messages, and smack in the middle of it all we’ve got a blind fucking poet.”

“There’s obviously a connection there. We just need to figure out what it is.”

Callahan got to her feet, stretched. “Well, maybe we’ll get lucky when we talk to the monk.”

Batty looked at her. “Monk?”

“I cross-referenced those e-mails with Ozan’s client database,” she said. “I got about a hundred different hits for D.C. and London, but only one for Chiang Mai. Three months ago he sent a package to a Christian monastery there. To a monk called Brother Philip. I’ve already chartered a flight.”