The Source - Michael Cordy [22]
'Then you must earn it.'
11
Back in his quarters, Torino plugged the drive into his laptop. As he examined the contents, he felt little remorse for what had happened to Lauren Kelly and her husband. He had offered her the chance to collaborate and she had declined. Though he had not intended Bazin to harm the couple, it was vital that he learn what Lauren Kelly knew. Perversely, what had happened might even prove beneficial to the Church. With the woman silenced, it would be easier to protect the discovery outlined in the Voynich – assuming she had completed the translation. His greater concern was the Holy Father and others in the Curia. Until he had evidence, they would never condone what he was doing, especially his unholy alliance with Bazin.
On screen, the computer files documented most of the successes and failures on Lauren Kelly's tortuous path to decoding the Voynich. He read how, with Elizabeth Quinn's help, she had quickly discounted a complex polyalphabetic cipher and used her impressive breadth of linguistic knowledge to deduce that the text was a posterior synthetic language based on two existing languages. Torino had learnt this much from her talk at Yale but now he had the details.
Voynichese was apparently a hybrid of highly structured Latin and Mandarin Chinese, in which characters didn't just represent letters but whole words and phrases. The relevant letters of the Latin alphabet and the key Chinese symbols had then been transliterated into the unique characters used in the Voynich text, further disguising the blended language. Apart from this transliteration, however, the translated part of the manuscript contained no cipher. The use of Chinese tallied with Torino's research on Father Orlando Falcon. A favourite of Ignatius Loyola, Falcon had been sent on one of the first missions to China as a young Jesuit in the late 1540s.
Torino already knew from the Inquisition Archives that the author had possessed a phenomenal intellect; it was one of the reasons the Church had taken his claims so seriously, and why he had been punished so severely. Torino was equally impressed, however, by the depth of Dr Kelly's scholarship, and the counterintuitive way in which she had burrowed into the author's brilliant mind to unlock his story.
Or most of it.
Scanning the files, Torino found her verbatim translation of the Voynich story. It was even more vivid and terrifying than the synopsis had been – but it didn't include the remaining astrological section. And there was no mention of Father Orlando's radix or 'source'. In one of her earlier files Kelly had written:
From what I've learnt, I believe the final astrological section may contain a series of compass bearings, geographical landmarks and star signs. My creeping suspicion is that the more I discover the more I'll be forced to revise my assumptions about the document and its mysteries . . .
What had she meant by that? Had she decided that the story was not an allegory but a chronicle of what its author had actually discovered? If so, had she since unravelled the final astrological section – and the map it might contain? It was tantalizingly inconclusive.
Cursing Bazin for failing to complete his task, he searched the rest of the files, but found no clear evidence that Lauren Kelly had yet deciphered the final section. Perhaps it was in the files that Bazin had been unable to download before he was interrupted. If so, Torino must claim it for the Church.
But how?
He wanted to rush out and order Bazin back to check the rest of her computer. But the Kelly house was now a crime scene and possibly under surveillance. As the Superior General of the Jesuits, he couldn't afford to be incriminated. He would have to be patient and bide his time until the right moment presented itself. He didn't feel patient, though. He felt as if a clock was ticking, counting down the seconds until his beloved Church either fulfilled its rightful destiny as God's sole ministry on Earth, or disappeared, dismissed as an obsolete relic.
12
Three weeks later
Death had