The Memorist

Chapter 16

Cyberspace

Saturday April 26^th-12:25 p.m.

The screen saver was an infinite universe of navy blue dotted with stars swirling in a slow-moving circle. Only the e-mail icon was static. And that was worrying. According to the plan, the information should have arrived by now, winging its way through the fiber optics and-finally, the expected icon popped up. A double click of the mouse and the e-mail opened. A quick perusal. Just a banal description of a family vacation. No reason to read it in detail. Instead, it was cut and pasted into a decoding program, and forty-five seconds later the narrative about a week at the beach morphed into a letter written by Herr Beethoven to Antonie Brentano.

A first read.

A second.

The words tantalized but were inconclusive. Was that sentence true? What did this one mean? Beethoven named Stephan von Breuning and the Archbishop Rudolf and said he’d given them clues, but what clues? Was the gaming box itself a clue? This was a treasure map. It needed to be read again. More slowly this time. Starting with the salutation that in itself was a great find. A newly discovered letter written by Beethoven to the woman who many historians believed was his one true love would be worth hundreds of thousands of euros. Perhaps a million. But the monetary value was insignificant compared to the information it contained because ultimately this was about power and faith. About possibility and impossibility. It was about legends and myths and conjecture and hypothesis come to life. And it was about a flute that might prove to be a forerunner to a device using alpha and theta harmonics created in the 1970s by Robert Allan Monroe. What if there was an instrument that produced binaural beats that really could help people access past life memories? What would that mean?

All in time. All in time. All in time. Now he needed to read through the words again and work on a mystery that had eluded mankind for so many hundreds, no, thousands of years.