The Navigator - Cussler Clive - Страница 24

The material was an unexciting recitation of growing seasons, fertilizer and harvest times, with a few recipes scattered among the pages. One sheet of parchment was marked with Xs and wavy lines and several words of script in an unknown language. On the bottom of the packet was a thick cardboard sheet perforated with dozens of small rectangular holes.

The assistant librarian was passing by the writer’s table with a load of books. He waved her over.

“Find something of interest in that last box?” she said.

“I don’t know how interesting it is, but it’s certainly old.”

Angela examined the hidebound box, and then she went through the pages from top to bottom. The handwriting looked familiar. She went to the stacks and came back with a book on the American Revolution. She opened the volume to a photo of the Declaration of Independence and held one of the papers next to the page. The similarity of the flowing, tightly written script on both samples was remarkable.

“Notice anything?” Angela said.

“The handwriting is practically identical,” Stocker said.

“It should be. Both these documents were written by the same person.”

“Jefferson? It can’t be.”

“Why not? Jefferson was a gentleman farmer, a scientist, and a meticulous keeper of records. Look here, in the corner of the title page. Those tiny letters are TJ.”

“This is great! There isn’t much here that would interest the average reader, but the fact that a Jefferson document on artichokes ended up with all this other stuff is worth at least a couple of paragraphs.”

Angela wrinkled her brow. “It must have landed here by mistake.”

“How could someone misfile original Jeffersonian material?”

“The society has an incredible filing system. But we’ve got eight million manuscripts and more than three hundred thousand volumes and bound periodicals. My guess is that someone saw the title, didn’t notice who had written the treatise, and tossed it in with the other agricultural material.”

He handed over the diagram. “This was in the file. It looks like a garden that was laid out by a drunk.”

The assistant librarian glanced at the diagram, then picked up the perforated cardboard and held it to the light. An idea occurred to her. “Let me know when you’re through. I’ll want to make sure that it goes back in with the other Jefferson material.”

She returned to her desk. As she worked, she glanced impatiently from time to time at the writer’s table. It was near closing when he stood and stretched and slid the laptop into its bag. She hurried over.

“Sorry for the mess,” he said.

“Not a problem. I’ll take care of everything,” she said.

She waited for the other patrons to leave and took the Jefferson file over to her desk. Under the light of her desk lamp, she placed the cardboard on top of the first page of writing. Individual letters showed through the small rectangles.

Angela was a crossword buff and had read a number of books on codes and ciphers. She was sure that what she held in her hand was a cipher grille. The grille would be placed over a blank sheet of paper. The message would be written in the holes by letter. Innocent-looking sentences would be built around the letters. The person on the receiving end would place an identical grille over the message and the words would pop out.

She tried the grille on a number of pages, but all she got was gibberish. She suspected that there was another level of encryption that was far beyond her amateur skill to decipher. She turned her attention to the parchment with the wavy lines and Xs. She stared at the words accompanying the strange markings and then called up a lexicon site on her computer. She sometimes went to the research site as a cheat to find obscure words that were used in the crossword puzzles.

Angela typed the words from the parchment onto the site’s search function and hit the ENTER key. There was no immediate translation, but the site referred her to its ancient-language section. She requested a translation once more and this time the program responded with an answer that both startled and puzzled her.

She ran off a printout and copied it, along with the Jefferson material. Leaving the copies in her drawer, she gathered up the original files and walked down the hallway to her supervisor’s office.

Angela’s boss was a middle-aged professional named Helen Woolsey. She looked up from her desk and smiled when she saw her younger protegee.

“Working late?” she said.

“Not exactly. I came across something unusual and thought you might be interested.” She handed the packet over.

As the librarian examined the papers, Angela explained her theory about its authorship.

The librarian let out a low whistle. “It gives me a thrill just to touch something that Jefferson held in his hand. This is an incredible find.”

“I think it is,” Angela said. “I’m just guessing that Jefferson encoded a message in those papers. Jefferson was an accomplished cryptographer. Some of the systems he devised were used decades after he died.”

“Obviously, it was sensitive material he didn’t want made public.”

“There’s more,” Angela said. She handed over the printout from the language website.

The librarian studied the sheet for a moment. “Is this website reliable?” she said.

“I’ve always found it to be,” Angela said.

The librarian tapped the Jefferson packet with her long fingernail. “Does your writer friend know the significance of this material?”

“He knows the Jefferson connection,” Angela said. “But he thinks it’s what it seems to be, a manual on how to grow artichokes.”

The librarian shook her head. “This isn’t the first time Jefferson’s papers have gone astray. He lost some ethnological material having to do with the American Indians, and many of the documents he willed to various institutions simply vanished. Did you come up with even a suggestion of what’s in here?”

“Not a clue. This needs a code-breaking computer and a cryptologist who knows how to use it. I have a friend at the National Security Agency who may be able to help.”

“Wonderful,” the librarian said. “But before we contact him I’d better run this by the society’s board of directors. We’ll keep this discovery between the two of us for the time being. This could mean a lot to the society if it’s authentic, but we don’t want to be embarrassed if it turns out to be a fake.”

Angela agreed with the need for secrecy, but she suspected that her boss wanted the opportunity to take full credit if the material proved to be an historical blockbuster. The librarian wasn’t the only one who harbored ambitions. Angela didn’t want to be an assistant for the rest of her life.

She nodded in agreement. “I will do everything I can to honor Mr. Jefferson’s apparent wish for discretion.”

“Very good,” the librarian said. She opened a desk drawer, slid the file in, and shut the drawer. “This goes under lock and key until I can talk to the board. If this is a go, I’ll see you’re recognized for the find, of course.”

Of course. You’ll hog the limelight unless it’s a fraud, then you’ll blame me.

Angela’s smile disguised her seditious thoughts. She stood and said, “Thank you, Ms. Woolsey.”

The librarian smiled and went back to her papers. The discussion was over. As Angela said good night and closed the door behind her, the librarian opened the drawer and removed the Jefferson file. She consulted her address book for a phone number.

She felt a thrill of excitement as she punched out the number. It was the first time that she had used it. She had been given the number by a member of the board of directors, since deceased, who had recognized her cold ambition and asked if she would like to take over a job he was no longer able to handle because of his failing health. She would work for an eccentric individual with a fascination for certain subjects. She had only to keep her eyes and ears open for discussion of these topics, at which time she would be required to make a phone call.