Natalie’s demeanor became guarded. “He didn’t like to speculate. Over the years, he considered and then rejected several possibilities, but in the end I’m not sure he really had a favorite. I do know that he believed it wasn’t a fraud, as some earlier ‘scholars’ of it posited,” she concluded.
Steven was impressed with her grasp of the document’s intricacies. There were few people in the world he could discuss the Voynich with who had any idea what he was talking about ten seconds into the conversation.
“What about speculation that the whole thing was concocted by Edward Kelley?” Steven countered.
“To fool John Dee, or Emperor Rudolf? Not a chance. The text doesn’t in any way resemble a random character set or an invented language. The likelihood is close to zero. No, it may be a mystery, but it isn’t a hoax,” Natalie pronounced with certainty.
Steven considered her comment.
“I happen to agree, by the way. As do the majority of the cryptology community,” Steven said.
They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching Florence’s outskirts glide by and the countryside south of it appear outside their darkened windows.
“Aren’t you concerned that whoever is tracking you might have discovered the villa you’re staying at?” Steven asked, changing the subject.
“Not a chance. I got it from a last minute rental pool on the internet and paid for it with a wire from an untraceable bank account in Austria. It’s as clean as anything in the world gets,” Natalie assured him.
“What about your flight from the States? That has to show up somewhere.”
He knew a few things about the precautions one had to take in order to stay below the radar, and they were not only difficult to master, but most amateurs blew it by hoping that the data was so massive it could never be sifted to reveal their moves. Hope was a lousy strategy, he’d learned.
“Not if you have several passports and identities,” she explained, as if addressing a schoolboy.
Steven had no pithy rejoinder. She was right. He just never imagined she might have multiple IDs. He made a mental note not to underestimate her – between her grasp of the Voynich, and her obvious fluency with the nuances of anonymous international travel and payment methods, she’d just demonstrated she knew more about those arcane topics than all but a tiny fraction of the population.
He stole a glance at her, sitting next to him, absently looking through the car window as they got onto the highway leading south. All that, and wrapped in an edgy, knockout, suede-clad package.
Steven had the sensation that he was already in whatever this was to a point way over his head. But the contents of Natalie’s satchel, as well as the woman herself, ensured he’d have to keep pushing forward to see where the road led. At least for a while longer.
The villa was a typical higher-end rental owned by a British couple who used it July and August and leased it out during the ten months they weren’t there. Four bedrooms in two stories, it came fully stocked and with maid service every three days. Located near San Casciano, it was ten miles from Florence, but could have been on a different planet, with none of the bustle or crowds of the larger city. As they pulled down the long, manicured drive, Steven was reminded of his and Antonia’s place in Greve, a scant few miles southwest of them. He forced the tide of memories back into the mental cell he’d built for them – it would do no good to go down a road of wistful regret when there were more pressing matters to attend to.
Studying the house and seeing no other vehicles, Natalie spoke to Frederick, after placing her hand on Steven’s to stop him from getting out of the car. Steven noted that her skin was warm, and that her nails were short, with black nail polish.
“Frederick, would you please take a look inside and ensure we haven’t been disturbed? I’d hate to think we could have been tracked, but…”
“Give me a second. I’ll call you if it’s all clear. If I don’t call within two minutes, get out of here,” Frederick said, leaving the car’s engine running.
Natalie exited the back seat and assumed the vacant position behind the steering wheel. Steven realized she was taking the situation much more seriously than he would have. Then again, his father hadn’t just been murdered, and a large part of him didn’t know what to make of Natalie’s story. Much of it sounded like a paranoid adventure cooked up by a bored rich girl; an invention to make the everyday seem more vital and dangerous. Seeing how careful both she and Frederick were being, he decided to reserve judgment before dismissing their concerns as frivolous.
“You never mentioned why your father involved you in all this. Did you work with him?” Steven asked, filling up the uncomfortable silence with chatter, the warmth of her hand still tingling on his.
“I was the only one he trusted. He led a solitary life, and other than a few close friends, I’m the only one he had. My mom passed away eleven years ago. I was a large part of his support system.”
“Did you live with him?” Steven inquired.
“No.”
There was no further explanation. Steven figured she was drawing a line beyond which she didn’t want to go. He made a mental note not to delve into her personal life.
Her cell warbled. She listened for a moment, then hung up.
“All’s well. Let’s go inside. Are you hungry? The place is loaded with every kind of delicacy you can imagine,” Natalie offered.
“No, I’m good. Maybe in a few hours.” He hesitated. “Why don’t you tell me a little more about this threat while I look over the Scroll? I’m still fuzzy on parts of it…”
“Come on in and I’ll break it down for you,” she responded over her shoulder as she made her way to the front door.
Steven followed dutifully after her, admiring the view.
The interior of the villa was the usual rustic Tuscan finish so popular in the area, all terracotta flooring and exposed wooden beams on the ceiling. Natalie moved into the dining area and opened the satchel, extracting the cylinder and carefully removing the Scroll before spreading the pages on the dining table.
“Do you have a magnifying glass?” he asked. “And can we get some more light in here? Maybe a desktop lamp, or worst case, a flashlight?” He looked around the room. “Oh, and do you have a computer with internet access? I’ll need it for research.”
Natalie nodded and pointed at a laptop that was on the kitchen bar counter. Steven walked over and was soon online, typing rapidly. He pulled up a site and was reading intently when Natalie returned after a few minutes with a hinged desk lamp and a rectangular magnifying glass. She plugged in the lamp, watched it flicker to life, and turned on the overhead lights for good measure. Steven noticed she didn’t open the curtains on the dining room window. She apparently valued her privacy, especially while sorting through stolen parchments. Which reminded him.
“So, who exactly stole these for your father? Maybe that’s a good place to pick up the story…” he started, as he closed the web browser and moved to the dining table and the quire.
“
Liberate
. My father had someone
liberate
the Scroll from where it was being kept by those to which it no more belonged than to me. Let me just start at the beginning and you’ll realize why I’m so cautious about everything,” Natalie protested.
“Why don’t you? I hope you don’t mind if I interrupt you occasionally with a question or three,” Steven countered.
“No problem. All right. First, you have to understand that my father would have never, ever engaged in the theft of anything. Liberating an article of historical significance from a group which had itself liberated the item in order to come into possession of it is a different matter. The lost quire was removed from the Voynich centuries ago, only a few years after the document was created. It was stolen and locked away from prying eyes by a faction of the Catholic Church,” Natalie explained.
“Ah, yes, the mystery sect. You know, it’s strange, because I’ve never heard of this ‘Order of the Holy Relic’ even though I’m more than passingly familiar with every medieval secret society that ever existed,” Steven protested.
“Nobody has heard of it. That’s its whole objective. It’s a top secret splinter faction with tremendous resources, supported at the highest level of the Church – the first director of the group, who is always known as the ‘Sentinel’, was handpicked by Pope Nicholas V after he’d crushed a plot to displace him from the Papacy. After Constantinople fell to the Turks, he created the Order and dedicated a stipend to its ongoing operations,” Natalie continued.
“That would be around 1453 or 54. Fair enough. Although how do you know this?” Steven probed.
She looked at him with thinly-veiled annoyance. “As I already explained, Morbius Frank co-opted a member of the Order and put him in touch with my father. He filled in the group’s history, or as much as he knew of it. Almost everything about the Order is shrouded in mystery, even to members. Besides its origins, my father discovered that its charter was to keep the Scroll in its possession, hidden forever.”
“Now out of its possession, technically speaking,” Steven observed. Natalie glared at him. He ignored it and continued. “You’re telling me that this parchment will not only drive Morbius Frank’s minions to hunt us down, but will also bring the full weight of the wealthiest organization in the world to bear in order to recover it?”
“Exactly.”
“If you’re right about even half of this, you’ll never be safe as long as you have the Scroll. Am I missing anything?” Steven asked.
Natalie walked around the table and stood next to Steven, studying the pages intently.
“Where are you going to start?” she asked.
He considered the question.
“I think the first thing we need to do after I have a chance to examine it thoroughly is to make copies and store the original someplace safe. It’s not a good idea to be handling vellum that’s almost six hundred years old. It will degrade in no time – the chemicals from our skin and the atmosphere will start eating away at it. We shouldn’t really be handling it at all, and ideally it should be stored in a humidity and temperature-controlled unit,” Steven explained.
“I know all that. I already made copies of the Scroll – super high-resolution color copies, which I printed out and also have on disk. But I wanted you to see the actual pages, in case there’s something the copies didn’t pick up, or there’s some telltale only the originals show.”
Natalie’s father had probably given her all the same admonishments about handling the originals, so he let that one lie.
“Good. Then I’ll just need some time to look these over. There’s something about the grouping and illustrations that I find strange, but I can’t put my finger on it. Give me some time and maybe it’ll come to me,” he said.
“You’re here for the duration, so take as long as you like, Dr. Cross.”
“Steven. Please, Natalie, call me Steven. But I’m not sure what you mean by the duration…”
She stared at him like he was an idiot. “Steven, I thought this was clear. You’re not safe. Frank’s people, the Order, and anyone helping them will be looking not only for me, but also for you. The visit to your office was just the start. Whether it’s fair or not, or even makes sense or not, you’re in danger because your name was on that letter, and there’s nothing you can say or do that will change that. I’m sorry, but the way I see it is we’re going to be spending a lot of time with each other,
for the duration
, until we either solve the puzzle and can figure a way out of this mess, or they find us and put an end to it all.” Natalie didn’t need to expound on what she meant by putting an end to it all. Her implication was clear.
Steven hadn’t fully considered the ramifications of their predicament, but he did so now. If, and that was a big if, she was correct about a shadowy sect hunting for them both, not to mention a billionaire’s murderous henchmen, they were in an impossible situation.
He rubbed his chin. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but aside from your say-so, do you have any proof that what you’ve said is true? I’m not questioning your veracity, so don’t take it the wrong way, but is there anything else you haven’t told me that might be more solid than rumors of a secret group and speculation about your father’s death?”
Natalie sighed, clearly exasperated. “You’re looking at a section of the Voynich that’s been hidden for hundreds of years. My father was dead seventy-two hours after taking possession of it, and his partner’s enforcement thugs have been overturning every rock they can find to locate me – I’ve gotten multiple warnings on that front from my contact network. You’ve just been visited by two gentlemen who were extremely interested in your whereabouts. Precisely what more do you need to know?” she asked.
“We don’t know for sure what that was about…” Steven protested, but she grabbed his arm to quiet him.
“There are two possible explanations. First is that I’m crazy, and this is all an elaborate hallucination of mine, and we’re in no danger of anything worse than dying of boredom while you study the rarest document in the world. The alternative is that I’m telling the truth, and it’s as bad as or worse than I’m saying, in which case it’s going to require every bit of luck and skill we can muster to be alive tomorrow. I think you need to decide which it is, because right now you’re wasting time on an issue I thought was decided,” Natalie fumed.
She was right. It was A or B. Either way, it would do no harm to examine the Scroll thoroughly – at worst, he was trapped in a Tuscan villa with a stunning
femme fatale
who favored Catwoman suits and had the most amazing eyes he’d ever seen…who might also be kind of crazy. Actually, that wasn’t the worst case scenario, but he didn’t want to think about the second possibility just yet.
“I’ll admit you’re persuasive, Natalie. Let me get to work on these and see if I can spot anything that would be a giveaway or a clue. But as you know, the Voynich’s kept its secrets for a long time. I’m not sure how much I can do in a day,” Steven parried.
“Better get busy, then. This is our only shot, on the off-chance that I’m not as nutty as a Christmas fruitcake,” she said, and then beamed a thousand kilowatt smile at him before turning and leaving him to his work.