The Alchemist

57

Palavas-les-Flots, Southern France, three days later

Autumn was setting in now. The busy season was coming to an end for the seaside resort, and the only tourists still out there bathing in the sea were Brits and Germans. Ben sat on the beach and gazed out at the blue horizon. He was thinking of Roberta. By now she should be heading back home to safety.

He’d left early after their night of love. You shouldn’t have let that happen, he thought. It wasn’t fair on her. He felt terrible that he’d admitted his feelings to her, all the while planning to slip away at first light while she was asleep.

At dawn he’d sat at the kitchen table and written to her. It wasn’t much of a letter and he wished he could have said more, but it would only have made his leaving more painful for both of them. Beside the note, he’d left her enough money to get her safely and quickly back home to America. He’d grabbed his things and been about to head straight out of the door.

But he couldn’t just walk away. He wanted to see her one last time, and he tiptoed back up the creaking stairs, careful not to wake her. He’d stood for a moment or two, watching her sleeping soundly. Her body was rising and falling slowly under the sheet, her hair spread out across the pillow. Very gently, he pulled a curl away from her eye. He’d smiled fondly at the look of complete childlike relaxation on her sleeping face. He’d wanted so badly to take her in his arms, kiss her, make a fuss of her, bring her breakfast in bed. Stay together, live happily.

But none of that was possible. It was like a dream that hovered out of reach. His destiny lay another way. He remembered what Luc Simon had said. Men like us are like lone wolves. We want to love our women, but we only hurt them.

He’d blown her a last kiss, and then forced himself to leave.

And now he had to turn his mind back to his quest. Fairfax was waiting for him. Ruth was waiting for him.

He walked back to the boarding-house by the beach. In his room, he sat on the bed, picked up the phone and dialled a number.

‘So I’m officially off the hook?’

Simon laughed. ‘You were never really officially on it, Ben. I only wanted you in for questioning.’

‘You had a funny way of showing it, Luc.’

‘But the unofficial answer is yes, you’re free to go,’ said Simon. ‘You kept your side of the bargain, and I’ll keep mine. Marc Dubois is back with his family. Gladius Domini is being investigated and half their people are in custody under murder, abduction and a whole shitload of other charges. So I’m willing to forget certain matters as far as you’re concerned, if you understand me.’

‘I understand you. Thanks, Luc.’

‘Don’t thank me, just don’t cause any more trouble for me. Make me happy and tell me you’re leaving France today.’

‘Soon, soon,’ Ben assured him.

‘Seriously, Ben. Enjoy what’s left of the weather, go to a movie, see the sights. Be a tourist for a change. If I hear you’ve been up to anything, I’ll be on you like a ton of bricks, my friend.’

Simon put the phone down, smiling to himself. Despite everything, he couldn’t help feeling a certain liking for Ben Hope.

The office door swung open behind him, and he turned to see a balding, ginger-haired detective walk in. ‘Hello, Sergeant Moran.’

‘Good morning, sir. I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were still here.’

‘Just leaving,’ Simon said, looking at his watch. ‘Was there something you wanted, Sergeant?’

‘Just wanted to pull a file, sir.’ Moran went over to the filing cabinet and slid out a drawer, thumbing through the cardboard dividers.

‘Well, anyway, I’m off.’ Simon picked up his briefcase, gave Moran a friendly slap on the shoulder, and headed for the lobby.

Moran watched him disappear down the corridor. He pushed the filing drawer shut, quietly closed the door and picked up the phone. Dialled a number. A female voice answered from Reception.

‘Can you tell me the last call made to this phone?’ he asked. He scribbled down the number. Then he hung up. He dialled the number he’d scribbled.

A different woman’s voice answered. ‘Sorry, I must have the wrong number,’ he said after a pause, and hung up.

He dialled a third time. The voice that replied this time was a rasping whisper.

‘This is Moran,’ the detective said. ‘I have that information for you. The target is at the Auberge Marina in Palavas-les-Flots.’

Sitting at his desk in the boarding-house, Ben sipped his coffee, rubbed his eyes, and started combing through all his notes. ‘Right, Hope’, he muttered to himself. ‘Let’s get on. What do we have so far?’

The unavoidable answer was, he didn’t have an awful lot. A few disconnected scraps of information, a whole load of unanswered questions, and he was out of leads. He just didn’t know enough. He was worn out from lack of sleep, mentally drained from endless days of running, planning, and trying to balance all the elements of the equation in his head. And now, whenever he tried to focus, all he could see was Roberta’s face in front of him. Her hair, her eyes. The way she moved. The way she laughed, the way she cried. He couldn’t shut her out, couldn’t fill the void he was feeling now that she wasn’t there any more.

He was almost out of cigarettes again. He took out his flask and gave it a shake. Still some left. He started unscrewing the top. No. He put the unopened flask down on the table and pushed it away from him.

He was still bothered by those seemingly random and meaningless clusters of alternating numbers and letters that appeared on nine of the notebook’s pages. Wearily grabbing up a pen, he combed through the notebook and wrote the strange numbers and letters down in the order in which they appeared.

i. N 18

ii. U 11 R

iii. 9 E 11 E

iv. 22 V 18 A 22 V 18 A

v. 22 R 15 O

vi. 22 R

vii. 13 A 18 E 23 A

viii. 20 R 15

ix. N 26 O 12 I 17 R 15

Written in normal script, they looked even more like a code than they did in the notebook. What did they mean? He knew enough about cryptography to know that a code like this required a key to crack it. The key often used by spies and intelligence agents was a line chosen at random out of a book. The first twenty-six letters of the line could be matched up to the letters of the alphabet, or to numbers, or both. These could run forwards or backwards against the key line, giving different variants on the code and throwing up completely different readings. If you knew what book, what page and what line to use, it was a simple matter to decipher the coded message.

But if you didn’t know, it was completely unbreakable. And Ben had no way of knowing. Fulcanelli could have chosen absolutely anything, from any book or text, as the key line for these sequences. He could have used any of the languages he knew, French, Italian, English, Latin, or a translation from or into any of them.

He sat for a while, desperately thinking over the possibilities. The proverbial needle in the haystack was an easy challenge by comparison. He cast his mind back and suddenly remembered the recording that Anna had played them of her session with Klaus Rheinfeld. Rheinfeld had been muttering similar sequences of alternating numbers and letters. Ben had written them down.

He searched through his pockets and found the little pad. Rheinfeld had been repeating the same sequence of letters and numbers over and over. N-6; E-4; I-26; A-11; E-15. But these didn’t appear anywhere in the notebook. Did that mean Rheinfeld had been working the code out for himself? Ben remembered Anna describing how he’d obsessively counted on his fingers while he repeated the figures. He’d also counted on his fingers while repeating that other phrase…what was it again? Something in Latin, some alchemical saying. Ben screwed his tired eyes shut, trying to recall.

The phrase was somewhere in Rheinfeld’s notebook. He flicked through the grimy pages and found the ink drawing of the alchemist standing watching his bubbling preparation. There it was inscribed on the side of the cauldron. IGNE NATURA RENOVATUR INTEGRA. By fire nature is renewed whole.

If Rheinfeld was counting on his fingers while chanting the phrase…did that mean…Ben counted the letters of the Latin phrase. Twenty-six. Twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Was this the key line for the code?

He wrote the phrase out on a piece of paper. Above and beneath the words he ran the letters of the alphabet and the numbers 1-26. It looked too simple, but he’d try it anyway. He quickly discovered that while the numbers in the code could only equate to one letter, because of the repeated letters in the phrase the coded letters could have a variety of meanings. Using this key he decoded the first two words of the hidden message, N 18 / U 11 R:

The horizontal letters should have been able to form into some kind of recognizable word, drawing on the vertical columns of alternatives thrown up by the code. But it was nonsensical. Try again, it was too obvious anyway. He reversed the numbers 1-26 so that they ran backwards against the key line, and decoded the first two words again.

Now it was looking as though he’d got this all wrong. The key line was probably something completely different.

‘God, I hate puzzles,’ he muttered to himself. Chewing on his pen, he gazed back at the notebook for inspiration. His eye settled on the picture of the alchemist with his cauldron. Beneath the cauldron was the fire. Beneath the fire was the inscription ANBO.

Then it hit him. Of course, stupid. ANBO was the coded form of IGNE, Latin for fire. If ANBO was IGNE, then it meant that the alphabet had been lined up against alternating letters of the key line. When it reached the end it simply started again at the beginning, filling in the gaps.

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

I G N E N A T U R A R E N O V A T U R I N T E G R A

A N B O C P D Q E R F S G T H U I V J W K X L Y M Z

Set against the numbers running backwards from 1-26, this gave a totally different key to work with. ‘OK,’ he muttered, ‘here we go, one more time.’ N18 U11R, the code read. Based on his new key, N could be B or C or G or K; 18 could only be E. Moving on to the second word, U could be Q or V; 11 could only be U; and R could be any of E, F, J or M.

He stared fixedly at his scribbles, starting to feel a little snow-blind. But then his heart gave a jump. Wait a minute. A shape was forming. Out of the available letters he could spell out two distinct words. CE QUE. THAT WHICH. He wrote the key out more neatly.

And now the hidden message began to reveal itself quickly as he used the key to unlock the code, picking out the words from the available letters.

i. N 18: – CE

ii. U 11 R – QUE

iii. 9 E 11 E – VOUS

iv. 22 V 18 A 22 V 18 A – CHERCHEZ

v. 22 R 15 O – CEST

vi. 22 R – LE

vii. 13 A 18 E 23 A – TRESOR

viii. 20 R 15 – DES

ix. N 26 O 12 I 17 R 15 – CATHARES

WHAT YOU ARE SEARCHING FOR IS

THE TREASURE OF THE CATHARS

The excitement of his discovery gave Ben a new surge of energy. He flipped through the notebook pages, looking for more messages that could cast further light on what he’d found. At the bottom of the page where he’d found the coded word TRESOR was a block of three more encrypted words.

22E 18T 22 E 18I 26 T12 U20 A18

22E 18T 22E 18 I-26-T12 U20 A18. The pattern was looking familiar now-but when he applied his key to crack the message, his heart sank.

There was no way to create meaning out of it. COEICSEW A IHVDRE?

All right, you old bastard, you can’t throw me off that easily. Beginning to understand the mischievous tricks Fulcanelli seemed to enjoy playing, he reversed the key, now running the numbers forwards along the key line and the alternating alphabet backwards. This threw up a very different reading.

Running across the line and scavenging odd letters from the vertical columns, he was suddenly able to form intelligible words in French.

CHERCHEZ A…

SEARCH AT…

Only the last word baffled him. It could have been any of RHEDIE, WHEDIE, WHEDAE, RHEDAE, or a number of weirder alternatives such as CHJKE which obviously made no sense at all.

He scratched his head. Search at… Judging by the context, the mysterious third word had to be a place name: search at somewhere. He looked up all the possible alternatives on his map, but he couldn’t find any. Suddenly remembering that there was a selection of local guide books for sale downstairs in the hallway of the boarding house, he raced down the stairs, bought one from the landlady which covered the whole of the Languedoc, and ran back to his room already flipping through the index. But none of the names existed there either.

‘Fuck!’ He hurled the book across the room. It burst open in mid-air with a flap of pages, crashed into the wall and bounced back into a vase of flowers on the mantelpiece. The vase toppled and smashed. ‘Fuck!’ he shouted more loudly.

Then a thought came to him that made his anger drop away, instantly forgotten. What about the codes that Rheinfeld had been repeating to himself in the recording? Would those give him an answer? He tore open the pad again and worked out the five letters. He almost laughed when he saw the result.

KLAUS

So Rheinfeld had cracked it, the poor bastard. Ben wondered whether the German had been driven over the edge of madness by the frustration of not knowing the rest. He was beginning to understand exactly how the man had felt.

As he mopped up the spilt water and picked up the limp flowers and broken pieces of porcelain, cursing under his breath, something else suddenly occurred to him. What an idiot-of course. He dropped everything and ran over to rummage in his bag. Inside it he found the fake medieval map, depicting the old Languedoc, which had been hanging on Anna’s wall.

He unrolled the ornately drawn script and spread it across the table.

When he found the place, he checked its location against the modern map. There was no doubt about it. The ancient name for the medieval village of Rennes-le-Château, not twenty miles from St-Jean, was Rhédae. He banged his fist on the table. CHERCHEZ A RHEDAE suddenly had a new and very real meaning: SEARCH AT RENNES-LE-CHÂTEAU.

And, according to his guidebook, Rennes-le-Château was the site that legend associated most strongly with the lost treasure of the Cathars.