Alex Scarrow - The Doomsday Code

‘This,’ he began, moving a leathery old finger along the first lines of text, ‘this I believe ’tis a form of Irish Gaelic.’ His finger traced the words, his lips moving in silence for a while.

‘I tell ye, ’tis hard to read, but … I think this first line is a prayer of silence. Be thy true a servant , or perchance that reads … to help ?’ Cabot growled with frustration. ‘ Seek ye notin … matters of truth of … or ’tis some other meaning. Take not matters of light … Achh! My Gaelic is too poor to read this.’

‘What do you think that’s supposed to mean?’ asked Sal. ‘Matters of truth?’

Maddy shrugged. ‘Just a bunch of weird voodoo crock.’ She looked at Cabot. ‘Is there some hidden meaning in there that we’re supposed to get? Like … is it cryptic or something?’

He shook his head. ‘’Tis as close as I can understand it. The rest is beyond me.’

They stared at the swirls and strokes of letters, a meaningless jumble of accented and contorted Latin letters.

‘Maybe it’s not actually meant to mean anything,’ said Adam. The others looked at him. ‘Maybe it’s not the words themselves that are the clue, but how they’re written? Cabot?’

The old man shrugged. He studied it in silence for a while. ‘My knowledge is poor, ye understand? ’Tis been a long while …’ He hesitated a moment.

‘What?’ asked Maddy. ‘What is it?’

He shook his head. ‘’Tis poorly written. This man, Treyarch, was clearly no scribe.’

‘What do you mean?’

Cabot pointed to one of the words in the sentence he’d loosely translated. ‘This letter is wrong. ’Tis written upside down.’

Adam hunched closer to it, his nose almost touching the yellowed parchment. ‘I wonder …’ he whispered to himself.

‘Wonder what? Adam?’

He looked up at them. ‘You got a decent digital camera?’

‘I’ve got my iPhone,’ replied Maddy.

‘What’s that?’

Of course , she smiled. 2001 … they’re still a twinkle in the eye of some Apple designer.

‘It’s just my cell, it’s got a built-in camera.’ She went over to the computer desk and returned with it a moment later.

‘Get a decent image of all of the text between these corner markers,’ said Adam.

She climbed up on to one of the armchairs to get a good bird’s-eye view of the scroll, then snapped several images. ‘What now?’

‘Photoshop,’ said Adam, pointing back towards the bank of computer monitors.

A minute later and Maddy had downloaded the four images she’d taken of the Confession on to one of the computers and they were looking at them within the image-editing software. Cabot’s eyes were comically round with wonder as he stared at the dozen glowing monitors.

‘So,’ said Adam, clicking on a dropdown menu. ‘I’m going to lighten these images up a little.’ He selected the clearest of the four images, and tweaked its brightness. The rich yellow of the parchment became a lighter vanilla, and the black ink became a deep blue.

‘Thing is,’ continued Adam, ‘when using a grille, you place it down on the blank parchment with the windows already cut out, and then you write each letter of your message on the little windows of parchment you can see. Then, when you’re done, you let the ink dry first before removing the grille, so you don’t smudge it. That would give the game away, right? Only certain letters being smudged?’

The others nodded. Made sense.

‘So, what you have then is a page of isolated letters … you write the rest of some meaningless or innocent-sounding message that incorporates those letters.’

He clicked on a menu and pulled another dropdown of editing options. ‘But quite often, in between these two stages, you might be writing with a different pot of ink.’

‘It’s the same colour,’ said Maddy, pointing at the image on-screen. ‘It’s black … well, dark blue now you’ve lightened it.’

‘Every pot of ink is slightly different. You made your own ink back then.’

Cabot nodded. ‘This is right.’

‘It’s home-made ink, not factory made. Every time you make it, it’s ever so slightly different. To our eyes, yes, it’s all black ink, but in Photoshop, just one variation of the RGB value …’

‘RGB?’

‘Red, Green, Blue — essentially, tone … hue,’ said Adam, ‘and we can separate it out. Exaggerate it enough to see.’ Adam zoomed in close on the writing, then selected another menu option producing a slide bar. The mouse cursor dragged the slide marker and moved it slowly along the horizontal bar. The image started shifting tone, the paper easing from vanilla to amber to pink. And the ink sliding from a deep blue to a deep green to a deep ochre.

‘Oh my God,’ whispered Maddy.

The upside-down letter that Cabot had identified was a slightly yellower ochre than the rest.

‘Zoom out,’ she said quickly. Adam did so, pulling out until the whole of the captured section of text was on the screen. Among the page, several hundred characters stood out distinctly from the rest — as distinct as minstrels at a banquet.

1194, Nottingham

John struggled with great difficulty to keep the trembling to a minimum. He knew his nervous tic must be showing: that slight jerk of his head now and then, the impulsive stroking of his chin. No way of hiding that. But the rest of him was hidden beneath flowing robes. Richard would know he was terrified of him, but the other barons, earls and dukes were only going to see him from afar.

His sheriff, the very strange Liam of Connor, and his even stranger squire, Bob, walked with him along the dusty track leading out through the gates of Nottingham towards the small burgundy-coloured tent erected on its own in the middle of no man’s land.

He waits in there.

Beyond the tent, Richard’s army stood in battle lines, a row of six gigantic catapults behind earthworks, ready to bombard the walls of the city. An endless sea of glinting helmets and chain mail, pikes and pennants watching silently as they approached.

‘Relax, Sire,’ whispered his sheriff. ‘Remember, you have in your possession … the thing that this is all about. Right?’

John’s head nodded quickly. A good man, this sheriff. He offered Liam a faint flickering smile as they came to a halt outside the tent’s portico. Two soldiers were standing guard outside.

‘Only him,’ one of them growled insolently. No reference to John’s titles, no honorifics.

John gently tapped the sheriff and his large one-armed man to indicate they should stay where they were and stepped forward towards the tent’s entrance.

He pushed aside a drape of heavy velvet and entered the cool dim interior of the tent.

He saw a small wooden table with a flagon and two cups on it, two collapsible campaign chairs of oak and leather and Richard sprawled casually in one of them.

‘So, my little brother, you dared to come out to see me yourself, instead of sending a lackey.’

John nodded. ‘Y-yes.’ He hated the strangled warbling in his voice. He sounded like a woman beside the deep masculine growl of Richard’s drawl.

Richard snorted laughter. ‘You better sit before you collapse.’

John obediently settled into the other of the two chairs.

Richard sat forward, the chair creaking under the weight of the man in his chain mail and armour plating. ‘I’m ready for a fight, little brother. Are you?’

‘I — yes — I’m …’

Richard laughed again. ‘Ha! You little runt. You couldn’t fight your way off a nursemaid’s teat!’ He picked up the flagon and poured some watered-down wine into his cup. ‘But I am not here to punish you this day.’ He emptied the cup with one swig, spilling wine down his thick blond beard.