The Voynich Cypher

CHAPTER 3

Winston Twain glumly regarded the phone on his desk, which was nearly completely blanketed with papers, reference books, and two laptops. He groaned out loud and then noisily slurped at a cup of Earl Grey tea before he resumed studying a letter addressed to him by Dr. Steven Cross. He appraised the concise script with approval and nodded to himself. He’d just gotten around to studying a note Cross had sent him about a working theory on the Voynich Manuscript: an obscure document from the Middle Ages written entirely in an indecipherable code — a code that Twain had dedicated himself to trying to decrypt for the past thirty years.

The study’s screen door moved slightly as a light wind hummed through the room. Twain wheeled around and looked out at the desert night as the door once again settled into place. Twain had lived all over the world, but swore by the Coachella Valley and the surrounding desert, only a two hour drive from Los Angeles. The sun had long since set over the mountains that jutted eleven thousand feet into the sky, and Twain was burning the midnight oil, as was his custom. It was the perfect time of year in Palm Springs — late May — when the temperature rarely deviated from ninety-three degrees at the height of day, dropping into the sixties at night. He preferred the tranquility of night for contemplation and rarely slept more than five hours now that he was of a certain age, which afforded him ample time for his projects as the rest of California slept.

Twain wheeled his chair around and, again, considered his desk and the materials of a lifetime scattered across the top of it. Most of the area was occupied by a high-resolution copy of his fascination — the Voynich Manuscript — which, in loosely strewn unbound form, covered every inch of a work surface in desperate need of reorganization.

Lost and rediscovered through the centuries, the Voynich was a seemingly innocuous hand-printed and illustrated series of chapters — quires — written in a cypher that had rebuffed the efforts of the best minds in the cryptology field. While it was, at a cursory glance, apparently devoted to equal parts herbalism and astronomy, the actual text remained a mystery. The odd-looking volume was entirely written in an unknown language using unfamiliar symbols. Page after page, quire after quire.

Early 20th century theories had speculated that it was gibberish, an elaborate hoax, but later analysis confirmed that the character repetition and sequencing was too symmetrical to be a hoax language. The oddly-formed calligraphy and seemingly fantastical illustrations had confounded the best efforts of the best in the field, maddeningly keeping its secrets through the ages.

The original of the Voynich had long been on display at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University and was, in fact, the most popular document in the collection. It continued to be a subject of rabid fascination for many cryptologists, as it had been ever since it had been made public by Polish-born antique book dealer, Wilfred Voynich, in 1912. As with several of his colleagues, deciphering the Voynich had become a lifelong obsession for Twain; its pull was just as strong as when he was a young officer returning from the Korean War. His specialty had been code-breaking for the military, so it was almost inevitable that he would be drawn to the most notorious riddle in cryptography. But what had begun as a conviction that he’d be able to crack it in a matter of months gradually became a multi-decade odyssey of twists and false starts. He’d grown sadly accustomed to illusive progress transforming into dead-ends, with any forward movement ultimately resulting in him being slammed into a brick wall, no closer to a solution than at first.

Cross had formulated an interesting theory — one that Twain himself had considered before discarding as non-disprovable, and therefore useless as the basis of a scientific hypothesis, but he wanted to understand how an amateur like Cross had arrived at such a complicated and innovative conclusion. The level of reasoning required to reach it was significantly more advanced than anything he’d come across in recent memory. It had impressed him by virtue of its brash brilliance.

Ah, well, Twain thought. This Dr. Steven Cross was not even part of the formal cryptology community — he wasn’t a member of any of the professional organizations, and he’d never published; the call had been made primarily as a courtesy on Twain’s part — because he was in a good mood. A good mood indeed because today, after what he’d just acquired, the world would soon be turned on its head.

The Voynich Manuscript had never been closer to being deciphered — by him, Winston Twain — since its creation.

A noise made Twain turn — the back door to his garden study had swung open.

“Hello, who’s there?” Twain called out. “Natalie, is that you?”

Silence.

“Hello?”

He peered down the dark hall to the back porch and was about to dismiss his premonition when he detected motion at the edge of his awareness. Twain’s eyes widened in horror as a hulking figure stepped from behind an antique armoire.

“Good morning, Professor Twain,” the huge, hirsute man named Sia Amieri said, in a hoarse, heavily-accented whisper that was almost inaudible. “We need to talk.”

Twain’s pupils dilated to the size of pinheads.

He swallowed with difficulty — he knew what a visit from the menacing giant meant, and he understood instantly that this was going to be the last day of his life.