The Seven Stars Read online

  Moretti nodded. ‘But presumably, if you increased the size of the grid you could have the same letter represented in multiple different ways.’

  ‘Exactly. Which brings us back to the copper sheet,’ said Flora. ‘It has a grid which is twenty three by twenty three, giving you over five hundred ways of representing the twenty three letters in the Latin alphabet. If you use Greek, then you’ve got twenty four letters and Coptic has thirty two.’

  ‘But that’s fantastic,’ he said, eyes wide with excitement. ‘If what we’ve found is in code, then the sheet could be the key.’

  ‘It could, but before we get carried away, even a cipher using a big grid backed up with an additional text key can be cracked. Charles Babbage was doing it in the mid-nineteenth century.’

  ‘So why has nobody deciphered it?’ he asked

  ‘Probably because there are multiple layers of encryption or it has a very long text key like the Beale Ciphers use.’

  ‘But you think these copper sheets can help?’

  ‘They could. Especially if trying to be too clever has stopped us seeing the obvious.’

  He looked at her with his head cocked to one side and a half smile on his lips. ‘Obvious to you maybe. And do you really think you can solve something that no one else has been able to crack?’

  ‘No promises, Francesco, but I’ve got a couple of ideas. If you can let me have copies of the scans from all the copper sheets and a copy of the encoded text, I’ll let you know within the hour.’

  Moretti made a gesture of surrender. ‘OK, you’re on. I’ll get you set up with an office and a PC but I’ll bet you fifty euros you don’t find anything.’

  ‘I haven’t got fifty euros,’ said Flora with a laugh. ‘And besides, I wouldn’t want to take your money.’

  Chapter Three

  The Ionian Sea, September AD 62

  For a moment the Cygnus hung motionless before pitching into the trough of the next wave. For thirty hours they had been trying to make way against the combined effects of the current and a violent Euroquilo, blowing from the north-east and pushing them ever closer to the lee shore of Sicily.

  Below decks it was pitch dark. The cooking stove, a fire hazard in seas like these, had been extinguished. The few remaining oil lamps that hadn’t been jolted from their mountings and smashed on the deck had long ago burned out. The air was foul with the reek of unwashed bodies, fear, vomit and the stench from the overturned lavatory bucket. Ninety six passengers and crew were all consumed by the same thought and the young Judean was not alone in praying to his god for salvation. To his right he could hear prayers being said in Greek, to his left, others sought the mercy of Lord Neptune in Latin, offering to make extravagant sacrifices should the supplicant come safe home. The ship rolled once more and the noisome slurry received a top-up as seawater cascaded down the companionway, swilling the jumbled collection of flotsam towards where he was sitting. He pulled his knees up to his chest in a futile attempt to avoid another drenching by the revolting cocktail. This time it splashed against the sides of the rough wooden platform on which he sat, perched on a drenched linen palliasse, shivering and soaked. In the darkness, he heard the man to his right being sick again and felt the warmth of the vomit as it hit his leg. He had to get out into the fresh air.

  Swaying and cursing, he lurched towards the glimmer of light coming from above. At the bottom of the steep wooden steps he stumbled as the ship pitched forwards and broached hard left. He grasped for the rope that he knew ran either side of the steps but found only thin air and crashed face-first into the ankle-deep slurry. From somewhere above came the sound of splintering wood. He’d heard a similar sound about an hour ago but this was louder: as one who understood nothing of ships, even he knew it wasn’t a good sign. Anything, even being wrecked, must be better than this he thought, pulling himself to his feet and bracing himself against the lower rungs.

  Pushing open the hatchway, he crawled and half fell onto the heaving deck. Night was over and from ahead, the first grey streaks of dawn lit the eastern sky. Astern lay the jagged teeth of the rocky shoreline. Despite the efforts of the crew, the ship was making no way against the storm – they’d lowered the mainsail long ago to prevent it being shredded by the wind, and with only a shallow keel and just the supparum, the small triangular topsail rigged above the yard, the only realistic thing for them to do was to keep the ship’s head up into wind and hope the storm would blow itself out before it drove them ashore. He stood, clutching the mast and looked, mesmerised, as the coastline grew closer and more distinct with each passing moment. Timing his rushes, he made his way aft towards the stern-castle and the helmsman’s post where the crew were clustered around one of the steering oars. He let go his hold and, profiting from a brief moment when the deck wasn’t perpendicular, slithered across to join them. He spotted the helmsman, a man with whom he’d struck up a friendship. He was known as “Gubs” the standard nickname for a ship’s gubernator. ‘Come for a ringside seat then, Josephus?’ he yelled, his voice only just audible above the wind screaming through the rigging.

  ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

  ‘You could try praying.’

  ‘No, I meant to help with the ship.’

  ‘That’s what I mean, lad. The clavus has broken.’

  ‘Is that bad?’

  Gubs ducked as a wall of green water broke over the bow and rushed along the deck at them. ‘If it wasn’t bad I wouldn’t be asking you to pray. The clavus controls the steering oars, so it’s a toss-up whether we go beam-on and capsize or whether we stay afloat long enough to be driven on to the rocks.’

  ‘And there’s nothing I can do?’

  ‘Learn to swim.’

  ‘I know how to swim but in that sea? None of us would last five minutes.’

  ‘Well, you won’t have long to wait. Look.’ He pointed towards the thin black line of coast. The rain had stopped and as the ship crested another wave, Josephus saw the flickering pinprick of light on the horizon.

  ‘What is it?’

  Gubs shielded his eyes against the flying spray. ‘It’s the pharos at Syracuse.’

  Josephus moved closer so he could shout into the man’s ear. ‘Is there any chance we can make harbour there?’

  ‘None,’ he yelled back. ‘We’re already too far south and we’ll be on the Siren’s Daughters soon.’ Josephus looked at him blankly. ‘They’re a group of rocks and shoals and we’re no more than twenty stadia from hitting them.’

  ‘What can we do?’

  ‘I told you. Get ready to swim,’ shouted Gubs. ‘And watch out for Lamia.’

  ‘I don’t believe those fairy stories,’ Josephus shouted back.

  ‘It’s not a fairy story, she’s a bloody great fish and I’ve seen her with her snout out of the water – twenty feet long with horrible, dead black eyes, a big triangular fin and a mouth full of daggers. Jumped clean out of the water with a full-grown seal in her mouth she did. Seen her take dolphins and tuna too off the coast of Malta. If we go down, Lamia won’t be far away. She never is when there’s a wreck.’ Gubs peered into the distance once more. ‘There, look!’

  ‘Not Lamia?’ Even Josephus, who held the Jewish disdain for what he saw as barbarian superstitions, was beginning to have doubts. Weather this bad had to be supernatural.

  ‘No,’ Gubs shouted in his ear. ‘See that line of white?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s the sea breaking over the Siren’s Daughters.’

  ‘Can’t we go round them?’

  ‘If we can get steerage I think I can get our course close enough up to the wind to get round to the north. Stand aside and we’ll have a try.’

  Josephus moved away to shelter behind the cabin leaving Gubs swearing at his green-faced and terrified seamen as they tried to jury-rig a system to give them at least some control over the ship’s massive steering oars. He crouched down out of the wind which howled through the rigging as though the entire barbarian pantheon
of monsters was mocking their fate. The clouds parted and the grey early-morning monochrome was replaced by low, raking light, showing the sea boiling over the flat rocks which stretched like a wall behind them. He watched, transfixed, unable to take his eyes off the seething cauldron into which the wind was driving their ship. At over one hundred feet long, when viewed at her moorings, the Cygnus had seemed vast, impregnable, a force of nature, but now it was being tossed like a cork, a plaything for the angry elements.

  A shiver ran the length of the vessel as it grazed against the outliers of the Siren’s Daughters and Josephus watched in horrified fascination as weed-encrusted rocks seemed to grasp at the hull as they drifted past, almost touching distance from where he crouched. Any hopes of divine intervention were now long past: the God of the Children of Israel was either angry or too preoccupied to bother with the plight of the handful of Jews on board.

  The end, when it came, was not what he’d been expecting: the Cygnus checked in the water and with a shudder, came to a halt. Is that it? He wondered. Maybe the stout wooden planking that had looked so solid from the quayside would show that Roman shipwrights were more than a match for anything the seas could do, but another sound, more worrying than the grinding and splintering, jolted him back to reality. Audible, even over the roaring of the seas, came a high-pitched keening, a Babel of screaming, prayers and imprecations: the hull had been breached and the ship was taking on water. Below decks, people were clawing at each other, screaming, gouging and trampling – parents fighting to be ahead of their children, husbands and wives careless of everything save the will to live; those who had already drowned now stepping stones for the living. Josephus peered round the side of the deck-house and watched, horrified, as by ones and by small groups, the survivors tried to run away from their fate by clustering at the bow of the ship which was already beginning to rise as the vessel settled by the stern.

  A swell floated the ship off one rock but the next collision turned it broadside onto the sea. With a shudder, its port side was forced against a flat shoal, and now, exposed to a beam sea, it lurched to leeward and the mast gave way, snapping the rigging and pulling its mountings clear out of the deck. A small group of survivors who had just emerged blinking into the daylight from the hatch were caught up in the tangle of rope and timber and swept over the side, their heads bobbing for a moment above the waves before disappearing. Josephus braced himself against the rail and looked down into the water, now barely feet below him, wondering whether it was better to get it over with and choose his moment of dying or to cling to what remained of the ship. Nature took the decision for him as a massive wave smashed through the deck-house, splintering the door and carrying the roof away.

  Then everything went green and he tumbled forward, pulled down by invisible hands and so disorientated that he couldn’t even tell in which direction the surface lay.

  Chapter Four

  Manhattan, the East Side

  ‘My sources tell me you’re good and you have the overseas connections we require.’ The diction was Old South, the slow, precise speech of a man sure of his position and confident of his impact on others. Like his shorter colleague who sat next to him with his hands folded in his lap, he was dressed in a suit and tie and from his neatly-cut grey hair down to the immaculately polished black lace-ups, everything about Andrew Irvine said attention to detail.

  The door opened and the two men rose to meet the newcomer, a tall man in his early forties. Raymond shook Irvine’s hand, his black skin contrasting with the snowy white hand in his. He looked Irvine straight in the eye waiting for him to look away or to betray the slightest hint of emotion. Raymond had learned from experience: the ones who looked away too soon were the ones you don’t trust, the ones who’ll screw you over in a heartbeat. Irvine’s gaze never flickered and, with a slow-spreading smile, Raymond gestured for him to sit down. He then shook hands with Irvine’s colleague – shifty, a mouth that smiled but eyes that didn’t: eyes that looked away too soon. Interesting, he mused. Neither of the visitors had given their names. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ said Raymond, ‘you’ve come to the right place, but let’s get some the rest of the introductions out of the way first, shall we? Hey, Luzzo,’ he shouted. ‘Get your ass in here.’

  The short, skinny Italian-American deserted his listening post at the other side of the door, shoved the 9mm pistol back into his waistband. and poked his head into the room. Luzzo’s protruding ears and low hairline set above closely-grouped features gave him the air of an inquisitive chimpanzee. ‘Yeah, what is it?’ The accent was pure Brooklyn.

  Raymond noticed an almost imperceptible flicker of disgust cross Irvine’s face at Luzzo’s appearance: the man was fallible after all. He turned to face Luzzo. ‘I’m sure our guests aren’t carrying concealed weapons, nor, I hope, are they wearing a wire but hey, in God We Trust, everyone else pays cash. Isn’t that right, gentlemen?’ he said, turning once more to the two visitors, expecting at least a smile.

  ‘We put our trust in the good Lord, that much is true, sir,’ came the frigid reply. It was the first time the smaller man had spoken apart from the pleasantries of greeting and Raymond was impressed by the way he made “sir” sound almost genuine.

  They submitted without demur to Luzzo’s fast but thorough search. ‘Clean,’ he said.

  ‘I never doubted it for a moment,’ said Raymond.

  Irvine fixed him with a cold, blue, Presbyterian stare that left even Raymond feeling uncomfortable. ‘We trust in the good Lord – we are men of integrity.’

  ‘Well then you’ve come to the right place,’ said Raymond. ‘As for the good Lord, I don’t bother him and he don’t bother me over-much, and as regards integrity, I think we may be able to help you there because mine is flexible in the face of the right amount of cash.’

  The two Southern Gentlemen exchanged glances. ‘As I told you on the phone Mr…sorry, I didn’t catch your last name –’

  ‘Raymond, just call me Raymond.’

  ‘As I told you, Raymond,’ Irvine continued. ‘The people I represent cannot pay the sums you’re asking and we’d appreciate an opportunity to explain why we think a lower offer is appropriate.’

  Raymond glanced at Luzzo who replied with a slow shake of the head. ‘It’s high risk,’ said Luzzo. ‘My contacts, the people who source what you’re looking for: hey, even talking to those guys I’m sticking my neck out. That price is cut to the bone –’

  ‘And to show our good faith,’ cut in Raymond, ‘We’ve even put up some of our own money already. But if you can’t honour a fair price then I regret to say we have nothing more to discuss other than to inform you that when you come back to us – and you will, because no one else is capable of meeting your requirements – then you’ll find the discount on offer right now will have gone. I can assure you, we’re the only game in town.’

  ‘Do you mind if my colleague and I go someplace to talk about this?’ asked Irvine.

  ‘You can stay right here,’ said Raymond. ‘We’ll go grab a smoke. Take your time, gentlemen, and if you need to use the phone, please go right ahead. Nine for an outside line.’

  Closing the door and leaving them alone, Luzzo and Raymond perched on the desk in reception, each drawing deeply for his nicotine hit. ‘What d’you think?’ asked Luzzo, blowing a cloud of blue smoke into the cool breeze that streamed from the air-conditioning.

  ‘If they’re serious they’ve got no choice.’

  ‘You reckon they’re serious?’

  ‘Sure I do,’ said Raymond. ‘They’re amateurs, but they’ve obviously got good backers. They’re just trying to nickel-dime us, that’s all.’ After about five minutes, the door swung open and a face peered out. ‘Do we have a decision, gentlemen?’ asked Raymond.

  ‘Yes, sir, we do,’ said Irvine. ‘We’ve spoken to our client and he’s willing to proceed at the price you mentioned with twenty-five percent of the money up-front.’

  Raymond smiled and shook his head. ‘Come now. Let�
��s keep amour propre out of this, shall we? Fifty percent up-front are the terms we agreed, take it or leave it.’ With a glance to his left, he stood up and Luzzo, taking his cue, did the same. ‘I’ll bid you a good day, gentlemen, and I wish you a safe and pleasant trip back to Alabama. My colleague will show you out.’

  The four shook hands and Raymond was left alone, chuckling to himself at the spectacle of church-going southern white boys trying to hustle him.

  ***

  Pompeii

  Later that afternoon Moretti returned to the lab and joined Flora in her temporary office. He looked over her shoulder at the screen of her laptop. ‘When do I get my fifty euros?’ he asked with a good-natured smile.

  ‘Interesting question,’ she replied. ‘I’m not sure who’s won the bet.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He could see straight away that Flora was feeling extremely pleased with herself. ‘Well, I haven’t had any luck with the texts your people found on the dig site,’ she said. ‘But thanks to the grid on your copper sheets I think I’m getting somewhere with a couple of the Devil’s Codex fragments.’

  ‘You’re kidding. Let me see.’ Moretti was wide-eyed with excitement.

  ‘There you go,’ she said, tapping the screen with her pencil and looking up at him, still with a look of triumph on her face.

  His face fell. ‘But that’s still a meaningless jumble of letters.’

  ‘No it’s not. Look.’ Flora tabbed to a new window showing a scan of what looked like a partially-completed jigsaw. ‘This is one of the fragments that Donald dismissed as a fake when it was found at Oxyrhynchus in the early eighties.’