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Day Six, morning

Office of the Translator, Shrine of the Book Israel Museum

“You’re late,” Sabbie said. She looked up casually, then returned to sorting papers on the great desk. From the look of the place, she’d been there for hours.

Gil stared at her in surprise. The last time he had seen her, she was headed for the Ladies’ Room at the restaurant in New York, never to return again.

Sabbie smiled at his confusion.

“Just kidding about you being late. You’re right on time. Good morning,” she added with uncharacteristic bonhomie.

Gil smiled back with relief. Apparently, his concern that she had changed her mind about working with him had been way off target. Good thing. No matter how bitchy she had been in the restaurant, he hadn’t been able to stop imagining what it would be like to savor every inch of her.

Best of all, since he was already at the Museum, and since they were not about to send him home for just looking, Gil allowed himself a good long and unashamed look at the object of several of the most erotic dreams of his life.

She wore loose men’s khaki slacks with macramé suspenders and a man’s big white shirt that made her look small and surprisingly feminine. The pattern of lace from her bra was visible through the cotton fabric of the shirt, and beneath the lace, the hint of café-au-lait–colored nipples beckoned him to come and explore. Gil caught his breath and struggled to keep control.

As if reading his mind, Sabbie suddenly became all business again.

“Come to my office,” she said.

Gil followed, surrendering his thoughts to the movement of her perfectly rounded bottom.

She closed the door. Still standing, she faced him and began.

“First, a few ground rules. All work is to be done in this office only. All translation and decoding will take place here. No discussion, not even a casual comment, will be exchanged in any other room.”

“The lighting sucks,” Gil said sharply. If she had her demands, he had his.

“I’ll see if we can have another lamp brought in but it may have to do.”

“Why can’t we work on that big table in the main office?”

“Because I said so, that’s why.”

Gil folded his arms and shook his head. If she wanted to treat him like a child, he might as well act like one.

“Look,” Sabbie began, “when I state something unequivocally I have a very good reason for doing so. Anyone who knows anything about current technology knows that no place is safe. Open up your pc and anyone within a couple of hundred feet can access all your records via your wireless connection. Make a call on your cell phone and that info is up for sale within minutes. Even your personal phonecard is fair game at any airport.”

“Well, I would assume you don’t exactly have identity thieves running around one of the most prestigious museums in the world,” Gil said with an intentional smirk.

“Identity theft would be the least of our worries. When you’re in this building, you’re always on, Jack.”

“Gil,” he corrected, broadening the sneer.

“Whatever. Appropriate steps have been taken to protect this office. Let’s get to work.”

Well, this is lovely. By the end of the day, we should be eating each other’s carcasses.

She settled down in the seat facing Gil and handed him several pages of translation. “The translation of the diary was relatively simple. I tried as much as possible to keep to the original word count and order in case that was important.”

Gil nodded his approval. Not bad. That bit of detail could spell the difference between finding a pattern and missing it completely.

She sat forward. “Now, here’s the deal,” Sabbie continued. “These pages appear to be an accounting of the sales and deliveries of tapestries made by the monks at Weymouth Monastery. On the surface, it’s pretty straight-forward.”

“But…” Gil prompted.

“But I don’t think that’s what it is at all,” she said, half to herself. “The sentences are logical and correct in their grammar but the words convey little more than medieval gossip. To make matters worse, the ramblings about the people of the town are interspersed with dates and numbers and the whole thing is put into an accounting format. I don’t understand why whoever wrote this would do that.”

“Do what?” Gil asked.

“Why he would put long nonsensical sentences onto accounting pages,” she said with obvious frustration. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

“So what’s the problem?” Gil asked calmly. He was hoping to push her until something snapped, until she could give him the connection she didn’t even know that she knew. He was hoping, as well, to avoid the likelihood of her breaking a chair over his head.

“The problem is,” Sabbie continued, “if we don’t find anything in this section that mentions another scroll, something—anything—about a mate to The Cave 3 Scroll, we might as well just give up.”

“And….” Gil prompted again.

“I really wish you wouldn’t do that, it’s incredibly irritating. Anyway, although I know there’s something in here, I just can’t figure it out.”

“What makes you think there’s something in here?” Gil asked.

“I don’t know, I just do.”

“How do you know?”

“I told you. I don’t know how I know it’s there! I just do!” Sabbie bellowed.

She was clearly at the end of her patience, exactly where Gil wanted her. George always said that if you wanted to get someone’s attention, first you had to shoot them in the leg. Well, finding any hidden message in the diary might well depend on Sabbie’s intuition, and this little control freak wasn’t going to trust her instincts unless she was pushed—hard.

“So, somehow you just know it,” Gil said sarcastically.

She looked like she was going to haul off and slam him.

“Works for me,” he said with a sudden smile. “That’s exactly what forensics depends on. That and some terrific technology. When you get that feeling, when you just know there’s something hidden just beyond where you can see it, you’re almost always right.”

“And when you’re wrong?” she asked.

“Then you’ve screwed up. But, more often than not, you’re right.”

Sabbie didn’t look convinced. Gil knew what she was thinking. A fifty-fifty chance of finding a hidden message in the diary was better than nothing, but not as good as a hundred percent.

Careful, my sweet. That’s what makes gamblers into addicts.

“Okay, show me what you got,” Gil said.

She handed him the printouts. They were fuzzy and too light, barely readable. They looked like second-generation copies of scanned pages that had been posted on the Internet or put through the dishwasher.

“I need something better to work from.”

She reminded him that he already had her translations. Besides, she said, since he didn’t understand Latin anyway, it didn’t seem essential that he work from pristine pages.

“I look for patterns,” he explained. “Even in other languages. So I need the original to look at, too.”

She was immovable. This was all they had. He would have to depend on her.

“Why can’t we work directly from the diary?”

“Not possible,” she answered and indicated that the matter for discussion was closed.

“Okay, we’ll do it your way,” he said with a shrug, “but it’s going to take a lot longer. Let’s try doing it by ear instead. Read it to me.”

At first, the translated sentences made no sense at all. Then, after a few minutes, something seemed to call to him from beyond the words, like a melody he couldn’t quite make out. If he could just …

Gil placed his hands on either side of his head. The ride was about to start. “Read it again,” he said excitedly. “The same first few sentences. Read them over and over. Keep going.”

26^th day of January 1097 in the year of our Lord

1–18 1 4 19 I am here with Elias. A poor simple monk living outside Caston within the great city walls of Halcourt near Weymouth Monastery.

27^th day of January 1097 in the year of our Lord

5–8 3 1 79 He knows I put lies in this tale and wrongs to ink.

25^th day of February 1097 in the year of our Lord

4–12 3 6 9 He angers for I have no fear that one day all shall come to be lost.

3^rd day of March 1097 in the year of our Lord

14-2 13 26 7 He rages should I never again fail to try and do so.

For over an hour she reread the same word salad, until they both knew it by heart, backward and forward. She was starting to lose faith, and it showed.

“This is getting us nowhere,” she began. “Why don’t you try decoding it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know, substitute letters or whatever you do. Come on, I shouldn’t have to tell you!”

“I told you I don’t do codes,” he said simply. “I look for patterns. Or changes in patterns. Look, if you’re married, a change in patterns tells you that your spouse has been cheating on you. If you’re a bank president, it clues you to the fact that your employee has been embezzling money. If you’re a cybersleuth, it alerts you to a predator trying to lure a child into an abusive relationship. Even terrorists are easy to spot if you know what patterns to look for.”

This diary held a hidden pattern. He could hear it. Loud and clear. It was something he couldn’t explain. He wanted to tell her that you don’t find it by telling your brain where to go, you let it take you. That was the thrill of it. You just went along for the ride and you never knew where you were going to end up. And the pattern was here, calling him like sirens used to call to the sailors of old. The same sailors, Gil reminded himself, who ended up crashing to their death against the rocks.

Bad analogy. Get back to work.

Something was clicking. The words echoed in his mind.

“Read it once more. Quick!”

Without protest, she began again.

“Okay, now slowly,” he said, scrambling for a pen and paper.

Sabbie recited the first few entries.

“Again,” he shouted. “Faster. Faster.”

She read it twice more.

“Son of a bitch. I think we got it!” he announced triumphantly. “Son of a bitch! And it was so damn simple.”