The Doomsday Code

CHAPTER 50

1194, Beaumont Palace, Oxford

Becks looked at the first grey light of dawn stealing in through the tall slitted windows. She calculated that she had another forty-seven minutes until the sun breached the horizon and the city of Oxford began to stir to life.

John, of course, was going to be asleep for another couple of hours at least. She’d worked out the average time that he emerged from his chambers and started bawling for breakfast. It was usually eleven minutes past nine. Although, last night, she’d made sure he’d consumed several flagons of wine which meant perhaps another hour before he stirred.

It would take her precisely twenty-seven minutes to make her way back out of the deserted halls and cloisters of Beaumont Palace, occupied by a skeleton crew of soldiers and servants, and jog the mile back to the walls of Oxford city.

The city’s walls were poorly maintained, and the missing blocks of masonry and cracks in the mortar made it possible to be scaled. She’d get back into the castle itself climbing the rear bailey wall.

Twenty-seven minutes from now she would be back in her chambers, pretending to be asleep.

She continued studying the wooden shelves of scrolls and leather-bound volumes of illuminated manuscripts in Beaumont’s royal library. She pulled them off the dusty shelves one at a time, scanning sample pages of each in an attempt to identify the correct document.

She’d examined seven hundred and twenty-six candidate documents over the last five hours of night. Her hard drive stored their digital images and her processor was working overtime to translate the elaborate swirls of handwriting into recognizable text characters. None of the texts she’d scanned and translated so far had produced anything useful. There’d been endless essays on royal protocol and volumes of romantic poetry but nothing she could classify as vaguely relevant. She had opted for a very simple search algorithm — any text that scored high on a hit-list of terms sorted into relevance by order:

Search Terms:

Treyarch (100 % relevance)

Pandora (100 % relevance)

Confession (83 % relevance)

Templar (79.4 % relevance)

Grail (79.3 % relevance)

Jerusalem (56.5 % relevance)

Code (23 % relevance)

So far twelve of the documents had contained three of the seven words. Thirty-two had contained two or more terms and a hundred and five had contained one or more. ‘Confession’ was the highest-scoring search term so far. It seemed a lot of people from this time felt the pressing need to confess something.

She continued robotically pulling out manuscripts amid showers of dust motes, opening them and grabbing snapshot images. But, somewhere inside her head, a part of her AI that wasn’t overloaded with running character-recognition software was wondering whether this approach was going to deliver any useful results.

She paused, a heavy leather-bound volume held in mid-air, dust cascading down in front of her. Her mind was making a quick assessment of the situation, of the amount of time she had left, and of the thousands of scrolls and volumes she’d yet to scan.

Her eyes followed a small tuft of fluff; the small downy feather of some bird that must have found its way in through one of the slit windows. She watched it gracefully seesaw down to the stone floor and then settle. She was about to resume scanning the leather-bound manuscript in her hand when the feather gently stirred. It spun on the spot for a moment before flitting lightly across the floor.

Curious at the sudden movement, she suspended the maths going on in her head and squatted down to look at the feather. She reached out, picked it up and put it back on the floor where it had settled a moment ago.

It was still for a moment, then it twitched, spun … then once again slid across the floor, in a short stop-start motion away from the wall beside her.

She looked at the wall. Like the rest of the walls in the library it was decorated with oakwood panels.

[Identify: Wall. Wood. Oak. Purpose: decorative]

She ran her fingers down the grained surface, all the way down to the floor, and there, from a gap between the panel and floor — no more than half an inch — she felt a cool draught on the tips of her fingers. She tapped the wood panel with her knuckles. The knock echoed around the cavernous library.

[Assessment: Primary sonic response. 1.3 MHz frequency. Delay 0.56 milliseconds]

She cocked her head and tapped again, certain this time that it meant there was a significant space behind the panel. She pulled her fist back and rammed it forward. It disappeared through a splintered hole with a crack that reverberated around the library. She pulled her fist back out and stared through the hole she’d created. Beyond, she could see a small room, little more than an alcove, lit by the faintest grey light at dawn coming through a tiny slitted window.

She saw what looked like a wooden lectern with a thick tallow candle on one side and, in front of it, a bench with a dust-covered cushion on it. A private reading space of some sort.

She was about to destroy the rest of the panel with a few well-aimed kicks and punches, but found that it swung out on hidden hinges with a soft creak.

She stepped into the small alcove beyond, and now saw, sitting on the lectern, a roll of parchment wrapped around a simple wooden spindle. She unfurled it slowly, hearing the brittle parchment crackling.

Spread across the yellowing page, a spider-crawl of fading ink in lines that sloped and rose untidily. Her forehead creased absentmindedly as she struggled to make sense of the looped letters and errant spelling of a man, quite clearly beginning to lose his mind …

This, the confession of Gerard Treyarch, wryten in the yeare of our Lorde, 1137 …